Language designers are obligated to be linguists as well.
This is why I love Perl. Larry Wall has a linguistics background and created the only programming language where you can conjugate variables.
(I know it sounds like I'm making fun of perl here, and I am, but I also legitimately do love perl)
My main thought reading through this whole thing was like, "okay, in a world where the rationalists weren't closely tied to the neoreactionaries, and the effective altruists weren't known by the public mostly for whitewashing the image of a guy who stole a bunch of people's money, and libertarians and right-wingers were supported by the mainstream consensus, I guess David Gerard would be pretty bad for saying those things about them. Buuuut..."
Even with good data, it doesn't really work. Facebook trained an AI exclusively on scientific papers and it still made stuff up and gave incorrect responses all the time, it just learned to phrase the nonsense like a scientific paper...
ok but for real... it's not great for finding actual answers to queries, but I find like 800x more interesting results with search.marginalia.nu than any other search engine. It's the only search engine that I find actively fun to just browse around on recreationally.
If it's an improvement over current lemmy UI, I'll take it lol. It's not like standard-lemmy-ui is some old-Reddit-interface-style minimalist barebones thing, but the "new-reddit-ness" doesn't bother me too much personally.
The main reason I can't stand the actual new.reddit is because it collapses threads after like 2-3 replies, and then when you go back out of a sub-thread it has a tendency to lose your place. I'm assuming it's some kind of stupid growth hack on Reddit's part to prevent people from reading comments for too long (not enough ads in the comments section!)
So as long as this one doesn't have that stupid behavior, I'm fine with it lol