relevant_xkcd VS Yacy

TL;DR--an automatic xkcd recommendation bot. [1]

"Relevant xkcd" is a meme that's been a part of online communities for as soon as the comic had gained notoriety on online communities. [2] I wanted to build a bot to see how true that was. I've got a lot of the hard parts completed, sitting in my TODO box for quite some time and would love to pair up with a collaborator to get it across the finish line.

The idea is an automatic xkcd recommendation bot that takes advantage of the latest and greatest in NLP advances (a fine-tuned hugging face model). [3] I've already got the training data (reddit comments that mention "relevant xkcd") and each individual xkcd's notes from the xkcd wiki. [4, 5]

Feel free to reach out to me via email (in my bio).

[1] https://github.com/adithyabsk/relevant_xkcd

[2] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/subcultures/xkcd

[3] https://huggingface.co/models

[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/bigquery/comments/3cej2b/17_billion...

[5] https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

It turns out you can make it all the way to become president of Harvard [1] while ignoring this rule so it is questionable whether it is as set in stone as you make it out to be, at least in certain disciplines.

In a way these models are a perfect mirror of the current academic climate. They plagiarise without remorse, they follow the latest identity-politics diktat to a point and make up 'facts' when needed to reach a desired narrative. Google Gemini is the latest example [2] of where this leads.

Given that it is plausible that models like these will soon be used in educational settings this is a recipe for disaster. The same goes for the trend to replace search engine results with 'interpreted' results in which LLMs take up the same role as Winston in 1984: Winston works in the Ministry of Truth where he alters historical records to fit the needs of the Party.

It is time for a decentralised distributed search engine which limits itself to pure search, something like YaCy [3]. Something to replace Winstonian search engines like Google and Bing (et al.).

[1] https://www.campusreform.org/article/claudine-gay-is-a-dei-h...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39465255

[3] https://yacy.net/

> Now I just need some kind of open source search engine to run on it ...

Here you go: https://yacy.net

I remember https://yacy.net/ but the big problem of this project was java and had not implementations in others languages. I mean it as imagine torrent was only in perl.

Admarus is similar as Yacy but aims to be distributed where Yacy is federated. Both are made for the web

You should check out https://yacy.net: a global, P2P web search engine, where each peer can build and share its own index, etc.

I also have an instance of Yacy installed, which I use to index the entire system, giving me my own private, internal search engine.