m-i-l (u/m-i-l) - Readit News

m-i-l commented on A word processor from 1990s for Atari ST/TOS is still supported by enthusiasts tempus-word.de/en/index... · Posted by u/muzzy19

nosianu · 24 days ago

I used Application System Heidelberg's Script II on an Atari 1040STFM with 72 Hz SM 124 black/white monitor and an Epson LQ 550 24 pin printer. That was some superb publishing system for the time (1991), for a low budget.

1 MB RAM, 1.44 MB floppy drive

SM 124: 640x400 pixels, monochrome

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_ST https://www.atarimuseum.de/1040st.htm

The software used a special driver to get better than standard quality from the then most common 24 pin printers (laser printers where much expensive) by kind of double-printing, I forgot the details. It looked really good though.

https://www.planetemu.net/screenshots/Atari%20ST%20-%20Appli...

https://stcarchiv.de/tos/1990/11/script-2 (German)

"Script" was the cheap version of their better product "Signum".

https://www.application-systems.de/signum/screenshots.html

https://www.atariuptodate.de/img/signum.png

m-i-l · 24 days ago

> "The software used a special driver to get better than standard quality from the then most common 24 pin printers (laser printers where much expensive) by kind of double-printing, I forgot the details. It looked really good though."

In opening up a few ancient files to answer another question about formatting, I found some long forgotten notes on how to make my Epson LQ400 24 pin printer work at 360dpi rather 180dpi, which may have been the same for you: First you had to install it as a NEC 24-pin 360dpi printer rather than 180dpi printer. Then, because it used fonts of half the size, you needed to switch fonts. So I had two fonts disks, one with 180dpi installed fonts and one with 360dpi fonts, and used the ASSIGN.SYS file to switch between them. It also seems to have taken twice as long to print out at 360dpi, and used twice as much printer ribbon:-)

m-i-l commented on A word processor from 1990s for Atari ST/TOS is still supported by enthusiasts tempus-word.de/en/index... · Posted by u/muzzy19

klondike_klive · 24 days ago

That is genuinely remarkable! Even indentation?

m-i-l · 24 days ago

Yes. Just opened some files to check. There was one including a table which I thought at first was a little wonky, but then I realised the column that looked off had currency where I'd right aligned on the decimal point, so even that seems to have been preserved!

m-i-l commented on A word processor from 1990s for Atari ST/TOS is still supported by enthusiasts tempus-word.de/en/index... · Posted by u/muzzy19

m-i-l · 24 days ago

I used ST Writer which came bundled with my ST. I still have all my ST Writer files (last modified in 1993!), and quite impressively they open just fine in LibreOffice with formatting and everything preserved (unlike some later .doc files I have).

m-i-l commented on Ask HN: Share your personal website · Posted by u/susam

m-i-l · 2 months ago

https://michael-lewis.com/

Also relevant here: https://searchmysite.net/ - a search engine for personal websites.

m-i-l commented on Ask HN: Is building for the web even worth it now? · Posted by u/spaceman_2020

onion2k · 4 months ago

I just find it hard to engage with anything AI-made, no matter how good

I don't think this is true for many people.

The best example is the movie industry. Hollywood was using AI (in the form of convolutional neural networks mostly) a decade ago to produce CGI effects for film. The younger versions of the actors in Captain America: Civil War (2016) was basically done with AI. No one outside of movie effects and CGI nerds really cared. They just enjoyed the film because the AI was done well.

When AI is done really well you can't tell. It's similar to good design. If something is designed well you don't notice. You only ever see bad design. Same for AI, you only see it when it's bad.

(Someone will now reply to say they thought the effects in Captain America were terrible, obviously. :) )

m-i-l · 4 months ago

I think this is missing the point - it is a bit like saying "you only ever notice bad fraud, if the fraud is well done you never notice it" - the point is what it is, not whether you notice it or not. With AI in films at the moment there are still people behind, and reviewing, the AI output, so it is just another creative tool, which is fine. However, if someone were to generate an entire 90 minute film and put it online without even having the decency to spend 90 minutes of their own time watching it themselves first, that would not be fine. But that is happening with AI slop on the internet now. Whether it is any good or not is not the point - the point is that it is disrespectful of people's time and attention.

m-i-l commented on Search My Site – open-source search engine for personal and independent websites searchmysite.net... · Posted by u/OuterVale

1dom · a year ago

I like this, thank you! I just lost an hour of time to the exact sort of random but considered personal websites that I think made the Web great in the first place.

m-i-l · a year ago

Thanks for the great feedback:-) This is what searchmysite.net is attempting to do - help make "surfing the web" a fun leisure activity once more. It is good to see more people seem to get that point now. When it was on HN nearly 3 years ago[0], many people saw a search box and thought it must be a Google replacement, but were disappointed to find it wasn't. And I guess now more than ever it is useful to have a way of finding content on the web which has been made by humans rather than AI.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31395231

m-i-l commented on Search My Site – open-source search engine for personal and independent websites searchmysite.net... · Posted by u/OuterVale

1dom · a year ago

Best of both worlds:

> No results found for "digiatl". Did you mean to search for "digital" instead?

m-i-l · a year ago

At a big corporate, we had an Apache Solr based search which had some reasonably clever lemmatization and stats analysis and spell check config to suggest alternative searches if not many results were found for the original query, but one day someone reported an unfortunate edge case which caused a bit of a panic - if you searched "annual report” it returned "did you mean anal report?" (we were in the finance sector rather than medical sector, but there were a lot more documents in the corpus containing words like analysts, analysis, analytics etc). Anyway, the point is yes, it is great to have that sort of functionality, but it does come at a cost, and a small project like this might prefer to keep it simple.

m-i-l commented on Search My Site – open-source search engine for personal and independent websites searchmysite.net... · Posted by u/OuterVale

Sophira · a year ago

According to the site, the funding comes from its "Search as a Service" feature[0], where anybody can pay them in order to have a search service focused on their site (which does not have to be in the public index and thus doesn't have to be personal/independent).

So, in the sense that the funding (aims to) comes from larger companies, you are correct. It's not VC, but it does seem like it could end up relying on payments from large companies, making it potentially vulnerable.

[0] https://searchmysite.net/pages/about/#search-as-a-service

m-i-l · a year ago

That's right. Most search engines are funded by advertising, where there is the clear conflict of interest[0], not to mention incentive for spam etc. Alternative models include a subscription fee (which I don't think would work for a small niche search like this) and donations (which may or may not be sustainable). Looking through some of the support forums for the big search engines, I'm pretty sure that enough site owners would pay a fee for support to pay the running costs for a large search engine, although for a smaller search engine like this there needs to be something more than just support, hence the search as a service features.

[0] "Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers", to quote Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page in their "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" paper from 1998.

m-i-l commented on Search My Site – open-source search engine for personal and independent websites searchmysite.net... · Posted by u/OuterVale

ThinkBeat · a year ago

I am a bit confused. Solr is the search engine.

An LLM model is loaded. What does the LLM model add to the solution?

m-i-l · a year ago

The LLM was for an experiment in retrieval augmented generation, i.e. "a chat with your website" style interface, using Apache Solr as the vector store. Results (on a small self-hosted LLM to keep costs manageable) weren't good enough for the functionality to be fully rolled out, so the LLM has been disabled and is likely to be fully removed.

m-i-l commented on Search My Site – open-source search engine for personal and independent websites searchmysite.net... · Posted by u/OuterVale

kreelman · a year ago

Thanks for putting this together. I wonder, is Postgres a bit of a large DB if it's just a personal website search tool? I'll have to give it a go. We need more tools like this.

m-i-l · a year ago

Postgres is just used for the site admin, i.e. keeping track of submissions, review status, subscriptions etc. The actual search index is in Apache Solr. In theory you could use Solr to store all the admin data, but it is generally not recommended to use a Solr style document store to master data. I guess something more lightweight like SQLite could be used, but it is intended to be deployed on servers and Postgres isn't too resource intensive.