It’s because the backslash is a special character called an “escape” character. The same way you make italics by putting *asterisks* around something, you can use backslashes to tell the system to ignore other special characters and use them literally. In this case, the underscore, which if you had no backslash would cause the face to be italic, becomes “escaped” by the backslash so we see the underscores as normal. But then you don’t see the backslash.

So you need to “escape” the backslash itself. Put two backslashes, and you’ll see one. ¯\(ツ)/¯ ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

But then you’re no longer escaping the underscores. So now you’ve got one backslash, but the face is italic and you don’t see any underscores.

So instead, as a final step, add a third backslash. The first backslash escapes the second one, so we see the second one. Then the third escapes the underscore, so we see the underscore. (For a bit of extra security, you can optionally also escape the second underscore. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯

you brought up top month and I don’t see how you’d want that to work

The truth is I don’t want “top month”. What I really want is “best result, filtered by this month”. But unfortunately that doesn’t exist, and in the absence of that, I use “top month”.

I’ve been trying to keep [email protected] alive but it only has 356 members

omg I had no idea! I was doing that early on but I got tired of it and stopped checking. Looking forward to the new Jet Lag season!

Isn’t that Atlas?

I mean, based on the source, they’re still even on Twitter which is a lot more overtly fascist than WhatsApp. So…yeah…

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?

At least the search function is still better than Reddit’s

I actually don’t agree. This is one area where Reddit’s centralised nature is a benefit, because it makes it super easy for Google to index and return results. On-site search isn’t great on Reddit, but at least Googling for stuff from Reddit works really well.

https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/03-votes-and-ranking.html#sorting-comments

That’s a page that really shouldn’t be relevant, and it concerns me if it is, because the search page should not be working on the same ordering logic that comment pages or the front page use.

Anyway, I mainly only use the “top month” option as a proxy for what I really want, which is “filter by posts/comments in the last month”, usually because I’m searching for something I saw recently, and I have a rough idea of when it was posted.

Searching by “posts” on Lemmy is actually superior to searching on PieFed, though searching by “all” or “comments” on Lemmy is absolutely borken

Ah, that makes sense. I’ll try to pay attention to which I’m doing, because my most recent search used only comments, but was absolutely useless.

Here’s a search I did just now. Despite trying to restrict it to the last month (“Top Month”), none of the results on the first page are within the last month.

Here’s a search I did just now. Despite trying to restrict it to the last month (“Top Month”), none of the results on the first page are within the last month.

Out of interest, what is search like on Piefed? Lemmy’s is all but useless. Even filtering by “last week” will show me two year-old posts and comments, regularly that don’t actually include the word I’m looking for.

The article says “Mississippi and elsewhere”, so I assumed all sorts of bans were fair game for discussion.

As for your second point, I genuinely don’t really care all that much. Take my solution and require platform vendors provide a parental controls API and require websites and apps call it. From there, whether you legally required parents to set up parental controls, you strongly suggest they do it, or you just leave it there as an option doesn’t matter as much. Maybe different places can have different laws.

The important thing is that parents should at least be given the tools necessary to be able to do this.

Ne t’inquiete pas, je suis un dumb-ass la plupart de temps.

Je suis en train de apprendre aussi le français, la même que @[email protected].

all towels are blankets? Even hand towels?

Voudrai? Will like?

The fact that they haven’t gone for this approach that delivers age verification without disclosing ID, when it’s a common and well known pattern in IT services, very strongly suggests that age verification was never the goal.

I don’t agree. It certainly makes it possible that it isn’t the goal. But I genuinely believe that, at least here in Australia (where our recent age-gating law is not about porn, but about social media platforms, with an age limit of 16), the reason behind the laws being designed as they are is (1) optics: despite what those of us here say, keeping young children off of harmful social media algorithms is very politically popular and they wanted to pass a bill that banned it as quickly as they could. No time for serious discussion about methods. And (2) a complete lack of knowledge. Because they wanted the optics, they passed the bill extremely quickly and without a serious amount of consultation. And I don’t trust that even if they had done consultation, they would have known who is more reliable to listen to, the actual experts and privacy advocates, or the big AI companies with big money promising facial recognition will somehow solve this. Because politicians are, by and large, really fucking stupid at technology.

What is it they say? Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity?

“Kids shouldn’t be driving cars, it isn’t safe!” Yes, but somehow we have made it 100 years without requiring proof of age/license to start the car.

This is sort of my take. There’s a lot of fun to be had in discussing possible technical solutions to the problem. And technical solutions do exist. But they all have some sort of noteworthy downside, including relying on the government to build and maintain this signing server.

But the best solution, IMO, is much more low-tech. Parental controls. Mandate that all browsers and operating systems support a parental control API where apps and websites can request to know if a user is of age. Mandate that adult sites call this API. And put the onus on parents to actually set up parental controls on their children’s devices, with an appropriately strong password that the children cannot break into.

This can be improved even further to lock a single age verification to a single account. Instead of issuing you a generic signed cert, they use blinded signatures to sign a cert that you generate and encrypt, containing the domain name and your username. The govt never sees the site or your username, because it’s encrypted, and the site never sees the document you provided the govt with to prove your age. But you have a cert that can only be used by you to verify your account is of age.

There’s an alternative solution that would enable a person’s browser or device to verify their age based on a govt-signed cert with repeated hashes. This would have the benefit of the government not even knowing how many verifications you had done, because they only provide one cert per person (with longer renewals. The downside of this is that it requires some form of unique multiple-use identifier. In the sample question that’s fine because it’s a passport. IRL it could be something like an email address, or even just your own unique UUID.