Some of you were curious. Text assistants and bots are booming, as shovelers seek the god oracle and magnum opus. Here’s the numbers for a naked robots.txt. Inferences, up to you.

1. Applebot/0.1 [20.1 MiB]
2. heritrix/3.4.0-20200304 [21.8 MiB]
3. YandexBot/3.0 [28 MiB]
4. GPTBot/1.0 [30.1 MiB]
5. IonCrawl [31.6 MiB]
6. CCBot/2.0 [40.6 MiB]
7. DataForSeoBot/1.0 [51.2 MiB]
8. SeznamBot/4.0 [58.6 MiB]
9. facebookexternalhit/1.1 [64.1 MiB]
10. Google-Read-Aloud [86 MiB]
11. PetalBot [91.3 MiB]
12. Barkrowler/0.9 [98.6 MiB]
13. SemrushBot/7~bl [141.1 MiB]
14. BLEXBot/1.0 [152 MiB]
15. AhrefsBot/7.0 [159.5 MiB]
16. MJ12bot/v1.4.8 [285.2 MiB]
17. bingbot/2.0 [373.4 MiB]
18. Googlebot/2.1 [535.2 MiB]
19. Bytespider [543 MiB]
20. DotBot/1.2 [806 MiB]
21. Amazonbot/0.1 [2.6 GiB]

Rule #1 of finding technical feeds; type ‘OPML’ into GitHub search. GitHub is like a social network for software engineers and I’m a conservationist of time.

Are you a safe kid? I’ve just had a memory of a past time in a library.

Two newer meta-ish search engines for encyclopedias (about 30+ wikis):

• https://encyclosearch.org/
• https://encycloreader.org/

On math, magic, and mathematical grimoires.. As I was “speedrun reading” about MathML days ago, I discovered an amazing digital library of mathematical functions. Boring, but why amazing? Take a look at this function and hover click on any of the variables to view the definition, and keep clicking on more variables for even more… definitions. That’s a legit library.

See, now all of us can roleplay as mages and mathematicians on the Internet.

Mathematical Markup Language (MathML)? I’ve thought about LaTeX/TeX strategies on the web for a bit ever since someone asked years ago about different approaches. I never got to poking around on my blog, but since then the masters have delivered unto us;

1. MathML (XML based web specification)
2. KaTeX
3. MathJax

In format conversion land we’ve been given; LaTeXML, make4ht, texmath, temml, and Pandoc.

I caught a glimpse of an interesting thing by chance. Meta Platforms aka Facebook hid the x from their login prompt on public pages–including government pages, then brought it back. ‘Twas on the desktop before mobile and perhaps (who knows) for a subset (as a test). A “login only public page” is for a near–distant future, set. Seriously though; developer documentation will become my final excuse to visit Facebook.

I came across a good article on finding video feed links from various (mostly western) sites. Odysee links have a funky format that are prefixed with https://odysee.com/$/rss + channel.

So this (channel):
https://odysee.com/@andkos.music:1

Becomes this (feed):
https://odysee.com/$/rss/@andkos.music:1

And… as a pretend expert :) started wondering: In the big bad messy real world (super serious business), how does one on such a decentralized (social) network thoroughly:

1. Block specific users from viewing
2. Block specific users from following
3. Block specific users from interacting
4. Delete previous local/remote content from specific users following
5. Delete previous local/remote interactions from specific users interacting

ActivityPub is an open/transparent protocol (amazing) but for adoption, the expectation/reality of many users online anywhere (even public networks) is favourable discoverability not discoverability itself… however contradictory/debatable. That’s probably easy/possible centralized but stupid hard/impossible decentralized.

The IndieWeb’s POSSE is a rather sophisticated syndication philosophy. Too bad I’ve got such a disdain for social media that I’d never explore it personally. It’s a good approach for working on other people’s stuff though: think Facebook’s (Meta) instant RSS articles (dies April 2023), podcast feeds, or any other (kinda) bi–directional site syndication mechanism.

The hypothetical outcomes/incentives of POSSE if it was done by everyone is an entertaining thought experiment.