I couldn't sleep last night so there's got to be a better title

Alice and Bob (and maybe even Charlie!) want to find common preferences. However, they're each ashamed of some of their preferences.

Each are only comfortable with another knowing a preference of theirs if that preference is shared by everyone at the table. They also don't want gossipy Mallory to run a third-party check for them - this has to be possible without trusting anyone or any program with access to the secret data of others. Assume Alice and Bob may be tempted to try and find each others' secret preferences.

For example:

• Alice likes Anime, Comedy, Fantasy, Romance, Thriller

• Bob likes Anime, Drama, Horror, Romance, Thriller

• Alice is worried Bob will judge their interest in Anime and Fantasy

• Bob is scared Alice will judge their interest in Romance

• But both are fine with the other knowing if they are both interested.

Both will discover a mutual interest in Anime and Romance, but Bob will never deduce Alice's secret interest in Fantasy.

I am interested in both same-room mechanical solutions (such as overlaying sheets of paper with non-preferences painted out, then shining a light through the stack) and online client-server solutions where the server cannot figure out each answer (such as being given an unlabelled ordered set to compare, where Alice and Bob each have the labels - like return {1,1,0,1,0,1,1} AND {1,0,1,0,1,1,1}).

My cousin, through work, has access to the search history of a Fortune 500 CEO and noticed it was full of exactly what you'd expect: searching a liquor store site for their most expensive wines, private jet bookings to small private islands, that sort of thing. Yeah, yeah, we all knew that! I'm not talking about luxury experiences and displays of power.

But what are the strange parts that regular people wouldn't guess?

For example, someone on reddit recently posted that their job is to duplicate a wealthy person's home items across multiple cities. Clone their house meticulously so their boss just travels with a phone. It's pragmatic but egregious.

A friend of a friend makes some useful equipment, and after ordering one of their items, I realized I have some concerns.

1. This is a tool that will be breathed through (like a short tube, just for regular air) and PLA microplastics are microplastics. I assume coating with a food-safe craft resin should minimize the risk of deterioration or leaching of any additives/dyes if the filament isn't food-safe. Let me know if that assumption has problems.

2. Ideally, the appearance would be midnight black and highly glossy, at least from a metre away. That said, I don't want to sand it because I don't have access to a workspace, I don't feel comfortable releasing microplastic debris into the air or water just for a small tool, I'm not contaminating my living space with it, and a respirator is an additional cost for a small, one-time project. Will glossy resin alone give a decently smooth appearance on top of unsanded 0.15mm?

see title

Whether it was explained differently, or a foundational bit of knowledge made it click, how did you finally understand?

No politics – I'm thinking along the lines of math/programming, language, crafts, etc.

I have a few spare glass bottles and want to explore what decoration I can make with them, without just painting outside them.

Preferably safe, in case of an accidental breakage or leak. Preferably indefinite shelf-life.

Some ideas:

• Density layering experiments ('rainbow in a jar', maybe suspending an upside-down toy boat in a dense clear liquid with a blue watery liquid on-top)
• Phosphorescent liquids to glow in the dark (pref with no UV lamp needed)
• The oil+water+antacid+food coloring lava lamp, but the effect is probably too short-lasting to have running for a few hours

Let's say, I sit down in a mall, open my laptop and connect to a secured mobile hotspot. Then I do it again next week after a reboot. What information would a nearby shop or a passive malicious hacker be able to find about my device? Does my device send out identifying information before joining, like a MAC address? Is this persistent, or randomized?

I intentionally haven't specified a distro, so if something only applies to some network managers, give some details.

Bonus points: what about Android phones?

I recently discovered the Banana Ball exhibition baseball games, and their custom ruleset, featuring limitations, crowd participation mechanics and special roles among other things.

This reminded me of (and it's an derivative game rather than an alternate ruleset) Three-Sided Football, which, among other things, is a Situationist, philosophical and sociological rabbit-hole.

I also recall dark chess, a chess variant with line-of-sight mechanics, to emulate the fog of war. There are thousands of chess variants stretching back a thousand years, this is just one of the first I learned of which really interested me.

Most of us are familiar with what (your local equivalent of) $10 USD is worth, or $100 or perhaps even $1,000,000.

But larger amounts soon become unrelatable. And with the huge wealth inequality at play, it's easy to come across stories where something worth hundreds of millions was wasted.

• How much money would it take, under our current systems, to solve various societal problems? (e.g. food shortages, infrastructure fixes, public health efforts, new transport)
• How much did the achievements of various organizations cost?
• What could individuals spend such money on? (luxuries, marketing)

And make sure to give evidence for your answers!

Yes, this instance is definitely the wrong place to ask, but maybe I'll be surprised.

I hate commercial ads. I consider them intolerable and violating. I'm far from alone in this perspective (see: famous Banksy quote, and subvertising + related cultures). It's one of the rawest forms of exploitative manipulation.

So surely you can understand my confusion whenever I see people just watching ads on their phone until they finish, or even watching ads on television until their show starts again. Come on, just do something else for 4 minutes (most channels run two 4 minute segments per half hour, that why your downloaded TV episodes are 22 minutes each instead of 30)

Is there a more meaningful answer than "laziness"?

I want to build a small site which acts as a broad, searchable FAQ for a certain topic.

Consider I have the FAQ:

What is the approximate mass of Earth?

It's 5.9722 × 10^24 kilograms, wow!

I want the user to have a chance at finding this FAQ by asking How heavy is our planet

Looking at this basically, the two similar questions have only one shared word, "is", which is an extremely common word. So using something really simple like word comparison or even stemming/lemmatization alone won't help.

On the very other end of the spectrum, a search engine's AI feature can interpret this effectively, rephrase the question and give a similar answer. So, what strategies are are in-between these two extremes?

1. A few people will be adding questions to the site regularly.

2. If possible, no external services, just self-hosting on an affordable server.

3. Simpler and lighter solutions are preferred.

Are any of the features in OpenSearch (ElasticSearch/Lucene fork) able to do this? Is it overkill?

Since the site will have new questions to match regularly, will a solution require the repeated, wasteful retraining of NLP models to to create weights? Or is training so efficient for small-scale text datasets that it's responsible and reasonable to do on a cheap low-end server?

edit: Just spitballing here, I could try a solution which does the bulk work at insert-time rather than runtime, by asking a general pre-trained language model to rephrase the question many different ways, or generate keywords, then use those responses to generate tags for a basic keyword search to match. This would avoid making a heavy search function or retraining any model on the server.

GPT-4o mini

Here’s a list of synonyms for the keywords in "What is the approximate mass of Earth?" formatted as an array of strings:

json

[
  "weight",
  "heaviness",
  "bulk",
  "load",
  "volume",
  "estimated",
  "rough",
  "approximal",
  "near",
  "close to",
  "planet Earth",
  "the globe",
  "the world",
  "Terra",
  "our planet"
]

Finding a wholesome community archive with tagging done well is a rare treat, so I think this place is worth a special mention.