pseudoberries random thoughts about life, hacking and open source

Introducing: Ask random!

Remember Ask Jeeves, the old human-friendly search engine? Well, it's successor is finally here: Ask random! It's THE leader in random decision making!

Got a tough decision to make? Just ask random! It's 101% random, guaranteed!

• Unsure about whether to hire that guy? Ask random!
• The red or the blue tie? Ask random!
• Need a name for your daughter or son? Ask random!
• Can't find your trousers? Ask random!

You won't regret! Ask now!

Fighting internet idiocy

Tired of stupid comments on your blog? Check out StupidFilter! Its aim is to programmatically detect stupidity, protecting you from the overwhelming amount of internet idiocy. It's currently in alpha but my short tests of their demo seems to indicate that it works!

From their FAQ:

How are you going to manage to recognize stupidity programmatically?

Pretty much the same way you can programmatically recognize spam, we'll look for things that characterize stupidity and assign particular tokens different weights based on how often they occur in hand-picked examples of idiotic comments. For more information, see Naive Bayes Classifiers and CRM114.

You just got to love their attitude (also from their FAQ):

Isn't filtering stupidity elitist?

Yes. Yes, it is. That's sort of the whole point.