Formerly /u/Zagorath on the alien site.

  • 24 Posts
  • 478 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • that goes onto a separate device only for those purposes

    Or in a VM if you don’t have any spare devices available. VM escapes exist, but they’re a pretty rare and severe type of vulnerability that’s unlikely to be casually utilised by proctoring software.

    I’ve found out people have no problem logging into their Google or Microsoft account on public PCs. I brought the PDF on a CD

    With 2FA I probably wouldn’t have too much of a problem with doing this. Especially if I then change password afterwards.

    Another option would be to host it somewhere that you can remember the URL. If you don’t care for the privacy of the document itself, just using a URL shortener and Google Drive’s public sharing would work fine, or hosting at your own domain.

    Personally though, I’m glad that on the rare occasion I need to get something printed (I have my own black and white laser printer at home for 99% of my needs), my local company for that sort of thing lets you upload it from home and pick up.












  • This doesn’t have anything to do with sort ordering though, which is based on time and votes. Text search is just a filter on top of sorting.

    That doesn’t feel like how search should work. It should be ranking results that fit the search query better higher than ones that fit it less. Regardless of how the search is done, that should remain true. So if you’re using trigram matching, instead of a binary “does the comment contain 80% of the trigrams in the search query”, it should be “if it contains 100% of the trigrams from the search query, rank it higher than something with 90% match, which is higher than 80%.” Or maybe not that precisely, but something so that more relevant results appear above less relevant ones.

    Without doing something like that, it’s just…not very useful. Which is the observed behaviour of search on Lemmy right now which started this whole conversation.


  • Eh, I don’t think it’s that surprising. Getting a list of comments on a post vs getting them from a search term are very similar operations, so it doesn’t make too much sense for these to have different queries in the backend

    Sure, but one would have thought that the ordering in a search is fundamentally different from the ordering in other places. Because you want something that contains the words you’ve searched for near each other to appear ahead of a post that has those words scattered at random because it’s a 500 word essay. You want exact word matches prioritised ahead of entirely unrelated words that include the same characters. Like “enum” should turn up your comment, but rank a comment that contains the text “renumbers” much more lowly. A particularly smart search page might keep “enumerate” high while rejecting “renumbers”, though.

    Of course, it’s true that at least in the current latest release, Lemmy fails at all of this. I hope 1.0 is at least fixing some of it?