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"
]

The linked page has clips posted in a 2015 thread, along with links to the full détourned Aiura episodes most of the clips are from.

Fifteen are from Aiura, three are from The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, and one is from Eden of the East.

The how-to guide (although, being a decade later, there are probably now improved ways to do this)

Bonus: Inspired by those, a nukechan user made three Shrek 2 détournement clips:

• https://lefty.pictures/post/view/23419
• https://lefty.pictures/post/view/23420
• https://lefty.pictures/post/view/23421

PSA is a public service announcement, an awareness campaign.

It could be as simple as teaching everyone to walk on the same side of the footpath in each direction, to demonstrating how quickly a fire spreads and ways to prevent and react.

I'm asking this out of curiosity; I don't need to host anything that can't already be done in the West

Lots of countries have very relaxed or non-existent enforcement of torrent filesharing. That's not what I'm asking.

I'm asking about what place one could openly host every known commercial pop song and every Hollywood film without any worry about being shutdown or sued.

For a reference, according to a one-minute check of Wikipedia, the only countries which haven't ratified the Berne Convention or the TRIPS Agreement in any way are Eritrea, Kosovo, Palau and Palestine. While joining these agreements doesn't imply they're enforced, it gives an idea of how widely governments do agree to intellectual property rights.

~~how much would it cost to launch an independent server into orbit?~~

I'm going to have access to a 3D printer for a few days. I know two friends who've used them, but it's only been for art and figurines, or professional purposes.

Are there any other cases you can think of where a custom-printed item is better than the myriad of mass-produced plastic items?

What is something you can sense that few-if-any people you know can sense? Literal answers only.

We want to DIY some unique marker inspired artwork. The "DNA art" from companies online involves sending a DNA sample, and we have privacy concerns about that, and we'd rather not fork out thousands of dollars for DNA sequencing devices just for this. We can resort to a fingerprint for inspiration if there's nothing more interesting available and affordable to us, but we'd like to explore our options first.

The DNA sequence artworks they're talking about are ones like this, but it doesn't necessarily have to look anything like these:

Zohran Mamdani famously won the New York mayoral election, along with news of some other social democrat, and in at least one case socialist, politicians being elected to various levels of governance in the past weeks.

However, there will obviously be a broad range of reaction from the owning class (including but not limited to possible capital strikes). On top of that, since Mamdani ran as a Democrat, there is a very real threat of the Democratic Party establishment forcing Mamdani into compromise, for example, by state Dems threatening not to approve Mamdani's tax increases on the rich.

We've already seen some possible signs of Mamdani moderating stances on police and Zionism, and we've already seen other recent DSA politicians like AOC compromising, so this threat of Democratic Party pressure could be imminent if Mamdani (and the Dems) aren't held accountable by citizens and their power structures (including unions and other interest groups).

What power do citizens have to hold these social politicians to their word? How much power do existing structures like the DSA and worker unions have?

Most people reading this are probably very familiar with buying things between $0-1000 USD (such as everyday food and everyday clothing, perhaps weekly rent). Some of us will have experience buying more expensive items, like a car ($10,000s), or maybe even a house ($100,000s or even $1,000,000s). Some of you might want to object to those numbers I listed, they obviously will vary wildly in different markets, but I want to now ask about much more expensive things.

What is the cost of some items that few-if-any Lemmy users can afford? What can the absurdly rich buy that we can't? How much does it cost them?

You must give a money value with some evidence, no just knee-jerking and saying something vague like "elections" - instead find articles disclosing how much manipulation campaigns cost a political party.

(daily reminder that elections won't save us)

It would explain a lot.