Interesting - here’s a news story about it (Guardian) ‘It was an accident’: the scientists who have turned humid air into renewable power

Scrolling back through the original news archives is pretty interesting http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/News/9211.html there’s a link at the bottom of each for “previous edition”.

Maybe they’re just chilling in Mark’s metaverse.

I didn’t notice that you were posting from Mastodon as I’m on Lemmy and your posts appear here just like any other Lemmy user - but the @fuser at the start of your messages is probably the tell, I think Mastodon defaults the username you’re replying to, whereas Lemmy doesn’t. It’s great that we can use different applications without some corporate gatekeeper capturing everybody’s personal info at the integration point to hawk to an advertising company.

Well, thanks again for the info - I’m trying it now and the results seem excellent, it took me to wikiwand, which I’d never used but it’s a front end for wikipedia - it’s quite nice. I’ve learned so much about alternative FOSS and great ad-free content by reading and posting here. I was never a great fan of reddit - liked to scroll but hardly ever posted there - I thought RPAN was the coolest thing they did - but Lemmy is great for conversation, despite the relatively small user base - I’m grateful that reddit’s nonsense drove so many helpful people here.

https://andisearch.com looks like it might be a better option - thank you so much for posting. I’m mostly using duck-duck-go which is tolerable but by this point we should have come up with a more useful way to index relevant information. Google would rather we see ads than any relevant content, which wasn’t the case when they first launched google in the late 1990s. Google was refreshing at the time because of its cleaner interface than yahoo and uncluttered results, amusingly enough - it’s a far cry from what it once was.

Right - that’s a good approach, however if you’re looking for a quick answer to an immediate question by searching using a common search engine, the garbage SEO pages are the most irritating, even with adblocking.

Yes, it is a nightmare. The insane volume of ads and clickbait injected into web pages is killing the internet as an information source. Most of the searchable stuff is unusable. Which explains why ChatGPT was so enthusiastically embraced - it’s really just synthesizing content into a readable form that doesn’t require navigating around a jungle of animated gifs and flashing ads. That’s also I think why Lemmy and Mastodon are so refreshing to use, and hopefully will stay that way - although money seems to find a way to ruin everything. Lemmy right now feels a lot like the internet used to be before the big money came along and ruined it with advertising and platform lock-ins.

assuming you are using a desktop os, e.g windows/linux, put an entry in /etc/hosts, e.g. 192.168.0.x yourname

then you can use yourname:xxxx

“Toot” is a silly word invented to make Mastodon seem like Twitter. However “tweet” is equally ridiculous.

We already have a word - “comment” - which is universally understood. Also has the added benefit of not being conceived by some Silicon Valley marketing genius.