The sample data shared in the article includes

"c": "ES", // Country code,

ES is usually used for Spain, so it looks like these tests were run from within the EU.

Man, I feel you on the affiliate link fluff. I actually ended up unsubscribing from the Popular Mechanics and Popular Science feeds because the signal to noise ratio was so bad.

The creator of Nunti provided a very good primer on the algorithm design here. Basically, you indicate to the app whether you like or dislike an article and then it does some keyword extraction in the background and tries to show you similar articles in the future. I suppose you might be able to dislike a bunch of the fluff and hope the filter picks up on it, but it isn’t really designed to support the kind of rules that would completely purge a certain type of content from your feed.

Most of the feeds I subscribe to came to me in one of two ways:

1. I enjoyed reading an article posted somewhere else (Lemmy, etc.) so I sought out the feed of that publisher.
2. Sometimes news outlets enter into agreements to republish each others articles. When they do this, the re-publisher will usually include a little blurb at the end giving credit to the original publisher. If a feed I’m already subscribed to has an article re-published from elsewhere then I click through and check out the original source to see if I want to follow them as well.

It can be as simple as just putting an app on your phone. I use feeder which is fine. Pretty bare bones, but in that way it’s easy to learn and use.

I’ve also been meaning to try out an app called Nunti, which I heard about a while ago from this Lemmy post. It claims to be an RSS reader with the added benefit of an (open source and fully local) algorithm to provide some light curation of your feed. It looks interesting, but I haven’t actually tried it out yet because I’m still deciding whether I want any algorithm curating my feed, even one as transparent as Nunti’s. It’s also only available through F-Droid right now, which is a bit of a barrier to entry.

I feel the same way about AI as I felt about the older generation of smartphone voice assistants. The error rate remains high enough that i would never trust it to do anything important without double checking its work. For most tasks, the effort that goes into checking and correcting the output is comparable to the effort I would have spent to just do it myself, so I just do it myself.

Oh no! It’s a _{1 2 3 4 5 6 …………………} ICOSAHEDRON!

Every episode seems to have one joke that really gets me. In this one it was Mariner stopping mid exclamation to make sure she correctly named the platonic solid that’s about to eat her.

If you were actually hoping to buy one but the rounded corners are a dealbreaker, then you may be interested to know that the DIY edition lets you mix and match the older display with the newer motherboards. Looks like opting for the older display even saves you $130 on the purchase price.

Searx is a search aggregator. It masks your identity from the search providers, but under the hood it’s still just a middle man for google/bing results. I don’t see how this helps if the results themselves are getting worse.

Are there any viable alternative sites you’re aware of?

I wish more people would subscribe to their VPN service. I know that there’s a lot of controversy about whether commercial VPNs actually provide any value, but I subscribe as a way to basically donate $60 a year to a good cause with the service as a nice bonus. It’s not the best VPN option, or the cheapest, but it’s pretty good and pretty cheap, and I’m happy to know the money is going to support a free and open web.

I agree that Mariner’s role in the episode was nothing but a running gag, but I have to point out what an exceptionally well written running gag it was, both in terms of her character and her character development over the course of the series.

Mariner’s behavior in this episode tells us two things about her. First, she’s the type of person who can get stabbed three times in a single day and (mostly) shrug it off. This isn’t really a surprise. She’s has always been both tough and resourceful, but she’s also impulsive and emotional which too often results in her messing things up. Not this time though, and that’s the second thing the episode tells us. Mariner is maturing. In past seasons a knife in her shoulder would have resulted in either a fight or a great deal of grandstanding about what a badass she is for not caring that she got stabbed, but not this time. This time Mariner knows that she’s only here to support her friend.

Mariner is the running gag in this episode because now, perhaps for the first time, she can handle being the running gag. She knows that this adventure is about Tendi, and she’s not going to derail it over a little thing like getting stabbed three times.

The SCP wiki is always a fun place to lose a couple of hours. Here’s how they describe themselves:

The SCP Wiki is a collaborative speculative fiction website about the SCP Foundation, a secretive organization that contains anomalous or supernatural items and entities away from the eyes of the public.

And here’s an example page about a moth with mind control powers