Poor bulbasaur never gets any love.

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.

Would they do that? No idea. But could they? Yes, without a doubt. I don’t know that browser in particular, but if you’ve installed some software on your machine, that software can do anything any other software could do.

edit: this page (which seems like it might be from the developers of that browser) indicates it can monitor your screen and restrict your Internet access.

Did they require you to install any desktop software or browser extensions? Did they request permissions like camera access or screen recording? If the answer to all those questions is No, then I can’t think of any way they could possibly know what you were doing.

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?

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.

I feel like

find it condescending and insulting to have the reason for something explained to them, if [they already understand the reason]

can apply just as well to neuro-atypical people as to neurotypicals.

I don’t think this has to be too complicated though. Don’t explain the reason unless it’s super unobvious, or unless they ask for a reason. If they do ask for the reason, give it in full and without judgment.

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?

the subreddit’s spam queue

Oh that’s really interesting. Tbh I had forgotten that existed. As a moderator I never looked there. I would only ever look at modmail or at the modqueue. Partly because those are what Toolbox surfaces.

and arming oneself is actually justified.

Except that arming yourself overwhelmingly increases your chance of being the victim of gun violence, far more than the miniscule (and mostly fanciful) idea you might successfully use it to protect yourself.

There are a few possibilities.

Shadowbanning is a Reddit feature where you can see your comments, and mods of subreddits you post in can see them, but nobody else. Mods can manually approve it, but usually won’t (in part because they won’t usually even see it unless they happen to stumble across it: it’s not displayed anywhere for them to check). If anyone other than you tries to go to your profile, it will appear as though your account does not exist.

Automod is very popular. It can remove things based on keywords or phrases, based on the age of your account, or based on how much karma your account has. If automod removes something of yours, it is the same as if it was manually removed by a mod. It will be visible to you, but anyone else browsing the thread will just see “[removed]”. However, your account page will still be valid. The redesign might have changed things, but on classic reddit, comments removed by mods or automod will actually still be visible on your user profile, even to other users. There is the option for mods to reply letting you know something was removed and why, but with low karma limits they usually won’t do this, because part of the point is to kerb spam, and letting spammers know they’re not getting through defeats the purpose.

A third option, probably not happening here, is removal by Reddit’s Anti-Evil Operations. This is at least ostensibly manually-reviewed, so if your stuff is removed instantly it’s probably not this. Things removed in this way will not be visible to anyone, not even mods. I believe you’ll receive a message from the admins letting you know, but I’m not sure. AEO has a habit of making really bad calls, like removing obvious jokes or idioms that just happen to contain one or two words that, in isolation, could look like threats.

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.