www.marginalia.nu

You may be looking for one of the following things

🔗 Search Engine
🔗 Encyclopedia (not mobile-friendly!)
🔗 Website Explorer^improved
🔗 Similar Website Finder
🔗 Server Status

My name is Viktor. I’m a Swedish software engineer and hypertext enjoyer. Marginalia is a website I’ve built. It’s really almost a bunch of websites on a common theme. If you find yourself clicking a link and ending up on a page that looks completely different, that’s just how things are.

🌎 Marginalia Search on GitHub
🦤 @MarginaliaNu on Twitter
🦤 @marginalia@mastodon.social
📺 @ViktorLofgren on YouTube
✉️ kontakt@marginalia.nu on Email

Site Index

Recent Updates

2025-09-06 The CoPilot productivity paradox in log

I’ve been using the CoPilot plugin for IntelliJ on and off for the last few years, and while initially pretty enthusiastic, I’ve come to first disable it and then delete it altogether along with JetBrains’ local AI-completions, and generally felt this has been an improvement in productivity and a reduction of frustration. CoPilot is pretty good at taking things that are already pretty fast, such as monotonous code transformations like mapping an object to a SQL statement, and then making that even faster.

2025-08-28 Snark, Ironic Detachment, Authenticity in log

How you engage with the world changes how you experience the world, and how the world experiences you. A snarky and cynical approach, by its default assumption that things are shit, or if they are not yet shit will inevitably turn to; such an approach will give your world a malodorous brownish tint. Granted, snark gives you plausible deniability, a motte-and-bailey that protects you from direct criticism, encountering backlash you can always backpedal and say it was just a joke that you accidentally took a bit too far.

2025-08-16 Faster Index I/O with NVMe SSDs in log

The Marginalia Search index has been partially rewritten to perform much better, using new data structures designed to make better use of modern hardware. This post will cover the new design, and will also touch upon some of the unexpected and unintuitive performance characteristics of NVMe SSDs when it comes to read sizes. The index is already fairly large, but can sometimes feel smaller than it is, and paradoxically, query performance is a big part of why.

2025-06-17 Finding Dead Websites in log

As some of the work planned for Marginalia Search this year has been progressing a bit faster than anticipated, there was time to implement an unplanned change. This post details the implementation of a system for detecting when servers are online, to avoid serving dead links and improve data quality, and for detecting when websites have significant changes including ownership transfers and parking. Table Of Contents Feature Rationale Data Representation Live Data Event Data Change Detection Details Availability Detection Ownership Changes DNS Implementation Hurdles Scheduling Certificate Validation Conclusions Feature Rationale Availability detection is useful not just for filtering out dead links in the search results, but for informing the crawler that it should stop trying to reach a dead domain, as well as a host of other things.

2025-05-29 Profiling Websites in log

The most recent change to the search engine is a system that profiles websites based on their rendered DOM. The goal is identifying advertisements, trackers, nuisance popovers, and similar elements. The search engine already tries to do this, but isn’t very good at it because it’s only looking at static code. It turns out to be somewhat difficult to determine what a website that has non-trivial javascript will look like based its source code alone, as this would require us to among other things solve the halting problem.

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