2024 is done, here's what's been on the blog:

• It was an election year and one with captivating choices by SCOTUS.
• The Outer Web (née Web 1.1) got better and better. It doesn't cover the entire internet, but with an index of 250k predominantly good pages, it's a robust, lightweight way to link web contributors.
• Two playthroughs of BG3 dominated my Steam hours while Cattle and J getting their gameholes sorted meant there was plenty of Remnant II and PUBG. There was also a Helldivers 2 LAN WAN party. Dani and I played Stray and Katamari.
• I snuck in a few renovation and wrenching projects.
• Dani has reached a really fun age. She played soccer and we've done some travel.

And now for the most clicked-upon images and posts from the year...

1.Wandering

Here's another installment of web 1.1:

Because text walls are no fun, I've sprinkled some discovered imagery throughout this post.

I came across a reference to this lightweight indexing notification system supported by Bing and a few others. Coincidentally, Google has yet again moved much of my site from indexed to "discovered but not indexed". Lol.

I've seen the occasional alternative search engine post on HackerNews, they weren't impressive. The author of the above post has a living list of search engines, big and small. Right Dao, Infotiger, and Secret Search Engine were pretty good.

Another random post that popped up from my indexer:

The internet isn't always about brainy stuff though. Sometimes it is amusing or personal, like Sambas.

And then there's the comments section:

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2.Tune in

Tomorrow we'll hear oral arguments for Trump v. Anderson (the Colorado ballot one). It's been a great opportunity to learn some more US history and etymology - what is an 'officer', anyway?

There has been no shortage of amicus briefs submitted to the court, including a laughable one from Vivek that basically says, "This (conservative-initiated) lawsuit only happened because Biden is afraid he can't win re-election."

I wonder how much of tomorrow's proceedings will focus on the words 'officer' and 'support'.

From another amicus brief:

While the K&D LLC v. Trump Old Post Office and Federalist 69 talk is riveting, perhaps there's more to this than terminology.

The Prof Amar brief was a good read, though it was a bit short on details of the January 6th-like gathering for Lincoln's inauguration. It mainly focused on a variety of treasonous acts by the outgoing administration leading up to the Civil War.

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3.Resolution

SCOTUS handed down its ruling on Trump v. Anderson today; unanimously deciding that states cannot remove officers of the federal government based on the Fourteenth Amendment. I fear I'm doing way too much scotusposting these days but since I've been following this one I have to close the book on it.

The per curiam opinion more or less says that viewing the Fourteenth Amendment as anything except a transfer of power from states to the federal government is simply wrong.

Reading this reminded me of the ideological debate about how to teach grade school students the causes of the Civil War, namely if it was mostly about slavery or states' rights. While it would be no shock to see someone at a Texas PTA meeting describe the Civil War Amendments as a power grab by the federal government, I would expect SCOTUS to take a broader view of the things that ended slavery and enshrined equal protection of the law.

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4.A random walk

My previous post about indexing and connecting the subsurface internet focused on how the sausage was made so I'm finally following up with a demonstration.

My objective is to provide external links to (hopefully) good and related content on each of my posts but this works just as well when connecting arbitrary pages from the crawl corpus. In the style of the Dating Game...

Bachelors, what is driving a wedge into modern society?

Bachelors, if you were a long range missile, which would you be?

Bachelors, nobody likes to do SQL so just ramble I guess.

Another way to explore the web is via image links. With an index of somewhat-vetted links, I can generate a random (or topical) index of images, this one is random:

I didn't do much to prune the results - just a few logos (that slipped by my dimensions threshold) and some domains that needed to go on the blacklist.

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5.Moon of Vega

I wanted to (cross)play some Helldivers 2 with J. I already have it for Steam, he bought it for PS5 since Steamdeck compatibility is spotty.

When either of us clicked 'Accept' on our respective friend requests, nothing happened. What the heck?

Google gave me a whole bunch of AI-generated non-answers that started with describing Helldivers and proceeded to talk about the importance of co-op play. We've talked about this before, LLMs are sometimes pretty good via chatbot, they're atrocious when laundered through Google search and SEO.

Despite its 'enshittification', there's the old standby, "put 'Reddit' in your query". That gave me this post which recognizes that there is an issue and suggests workarounds.

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6.For Super Earth

My impressions of Helldivers 2 after ten levels of carnage.

Helldivers 1 was a top-down squad shooter released almost a decade ago that, like Risk of Rain, was promoted to 3D for its sequel. Gameplay was like this:

It was a great formula for an indie-ish game and is entirely worth playing if you like bullet hell/Smash TV-like shooters. Replay value came from unlockables (weapons/armor/specials), increased difficulty (new enemies), and the three enemy factions that are very different.

Helldivers 2 plays surprisingly similar to the first game considering the addition of a z axis. In fact, 1-4 from above still apply:

Like its predecessor, Helldivers 2 has equippable special attacks called 'strategems'. You select four of a few dozen unlockable strategems and a squad passive. Strategems include large weapon drops, air/orbital strikes, and deployable defenses.

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7.Starchart

My web 1.1 indexer has been chugging away, though not like 24/7 or anything.

I mentioned this previously: keeping out the bad web isn't easy. Commercial links are everywhere and even the honest cases need scrutiny, e.g. a tech blog linking to Apache docs or something. This is particularly bad for SEO-minded sites that want to create outbound links for rank.

On the subject of wheat and chaff, to paraphrase:

He's right, of course, I've often described this effort as linking the blogosphere, not the corposphere. Referring back to my original plan:

In the original design, each recommendation set would offer a handful of personal web links and a separate handful of mainstream links. I wasn't sure how to approach the latter other than: "The Atlantic, not Newsweek", "IGN, not Electronic Arts". I should come back to this quandary once I've fried some bigger fish.

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Related / internal