“Nude is artistic. Naked is defenseless.”

• Niven, Larry. “Cloak of Anarchy.” <u>Analog</u> Mar. 1972. 26 Mar 2026 <<a href=“https://web.archive.org/web/20060929192027/http://www.larryniven.org/stories/cloak_of_anarchy.shtml”>https://web.archive.org/web/20060929192027/http://www.larryniven.org/stories/cloak_of_anarchy.shtml</a>>.

Yeah, it’s a story set in San Diego, not San Francisco, but no science fiction fan will fail to make the connection. It’s all there: hippies, repurposed freeways, drones, anarchists, gangs.

I can see why it’s not implemented.

… but it WAS implemented in nautilus before nautilus was dumbed down!

What is an android-style application launcher?

I mean the “App Switcher” for want of a better term. Generally, you swipe up to get to it. I think it used to be called the “App Grid” or “App Tray” when there was a middle physical button (or emulated target) for it. These days, I use Nova Launcher because (Guess what!) I wanted to add icons for my own scripts and a few O/S entry points that aren’t strictly apps on their own. … so my involvement with Gnome and Android launchers is a little out of date. I’ve moved on.

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Is the GNOME app grid not a grid-view application launcher?

It’s pretty big to fit on one screen. It takes two MOUSE CLICKS to get to it. Is there a HOT KEY? Can you add icons for your own scripts? Gnome always had nautilus, but they wanted something completely different.

One-click to swap between the views I want

Yeahbutt the view you choose for a given folder does not persist from session to session. It used to… Nowadays, I use pcmanfm as a nautilus alternative, which features this retro feature. Persistence is important to me. I guess I can’t see why it isn’t to you…

I really want an Android-style (grid-view, spatial paradigm, or whatever) application launcher, but all I can find are so-called semantic launchers, which follow a series of key strokes. Well, nuts to that! Unless I write one with considerable personal effort, I am still stuck with a plethora of file managers of various types (orthodox and navigational), many of which are forks of older packages that try to subvert trends in user-interface design toward touch-friendly devices.

drops on a lotus leaf

Here’s a strategy for scoring your own search results.

“Keywords” are the seven words most commonly occurring on the page. If these seven words are seen to be repeated on the page to an unusual degree, then it is a good assumption that the page was designed by the author to appear high on search results.

Keyword density is a measure of “gloss.” Most people will read pages with high keyword density as unusually glossy. Keyword density is not necessarily related to how genuine the page content appears to be otherwise, but most people will look askance at a page that is too glossy.

It should come as no big surprise that the pages that appear high on search results have been designed that way. They are deliberately glossy with high keyword density. You may consider whether to skip reading them or even loading them in your browser. Chances are good that the glossy pages are mostly advertising.

Generally you will find interspersed in your results a handful of sites with low keyword density. These are likely from universities, government sites, and research institutions that have sources of revenue beyond advertising. You may consider whether to load these up and skim through them. Probably they will show a publication date, author, and list of references, which will move your research forward.

It can be noted that AI-generated sites often exhibit high keyword density. This is probably deliberate so that they garner advertising revenue. However, it may also be due to “bot 'splaining,” which is polly-paraphrasing a series of several (perhaps contradictory) articles.

Keyword density is not the only measure of gloss. There are others that have been developed to measure ratios between parts of speech. Unfortunately NONE OF THESE — including keyword density — distinguish sharply between pages that naturally convey genuine information and pages that have been designed to convey fluff for ulterior purposes. It is unlikely that combining measures of gloss will result in a tool that discriminates much better than keyword density by itself.

• Piskorski, Jakub, Marcin Sydow, and Weiss Weiss. “Exploring Linguistic Features for Web Spam Detection: A Preliminary Study.” Airweb '08: Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web. Ed. Carlos Castillo, Kumar Chellapilla, and Dennis Fetterly. New York: ACM, Apr. 2008. 25-28. ISBN:9781605581590. DOI:10.1145/1451983. 09 Nov. 2025 https://users.pja.edu.pl/~msyd/lingFeat08draft.pdf.

Nevertheless, you may wish to explore keyword density as a means to rank search results.

When I try to include a direct link to my python scripts, which do that, my responses and in fact the whole posted discussion are taken down. … something to do with self promotion of untested software I suppose. But you can find them in the Cheese Shop (See Wikipedia “Python Package Index.”) under clanker_score.

We don’t want to make this too easy for just anyone to censor all his search results. Rather, these scrips are meant as a learning tool. They demonstrate generally how rotten search results can be on one particular and not very compelling dimension. It should not be necessary to download and scan each and every page. You should be able to train yourself to ignore a priori results that include handfuls of pages from unauthoritative sites.