Embarassing and Revealing in Ways I Wish I Was Not

I have switched to using Startpage.com and vastly prefer it. for one thing, instead of displaying an "AI summary" at the top of the search results (unless you turn it off, yes I know), it displays the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article, with link, whenever it finds one that's relevant.

also a waaayyyyy better sense of design than duckduckgo

Search Engines

Infinity Search is an alternative search engine with a special focus on privacy

DuckDuckGo is a popular search engine for those who value their privacy and are put off by the thought of their every query being tracked and logged. Uses bangs, ![site] for in-page search (sells your data to microsoft and draws from fucking bing)

WolframAlpha is a privately owned search engine that allows you to “compute expert-level answers using Wolfram’s breakthrough algorithms, knowledgebase, and AI technology.” A data search engine.

Boardreader is a search engine for forums and message boards. It allows you to search forums and then filter down results by date and language.

Based in France, Qwant is a privacy-based search engine that won’t record your searches or use your personal details for advertising. Uses “&” as a bang search.

Another privacy-based search engine is Search Encrypt, which uses local encryption to ensure that users’ identifiable information cannot be tracked. Metasearch across multiple engines. 

Offering unbiased results from several sources, SearX is a metasearch engine that aims to present a free, decentralized view of the internet. Can be self-hosted. 

Gibiru’s tagline is “Unfiltered private search” and that’s exactly what it offers. Requires AnonymoX Firefox add-on for privacy. 

Disconnect allows you to conduct anonymous searches through a search engine of your choice.

Swisscows provides fully encrypted searches to protect your privacy and security. Built-in violence/porn filter cannot be overridden. 

MetaGer offers “Privacy Protected Search & Find” through its anonymised search. A plugin will allow it to be made a default.

Gigablast is a private search engine that indexes millions of websites and servers real-time information without tracking your data, keeping you hidden from marketers and spammers. Variety of filtration and refinement options for searching. 

Oscobo is a search engine that protects your privacy while you search the web. By not using any third-party tools or scripts, your data is protected from hacking and misuse. Has a Chrome extension to allow use in toolbar. 

https://search.marginalia.nu/ an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed. Use old-school searching rather than query-based for the best results. 

https://www.mojeek.com/ 

https://wiby.me/ - It’s goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites. 

https://4get.ca/ it works a lot like SearX, but honestly better. It doesn’t have its own index, but pulls from many others. I think it’s the best for research, since it allows you to search for answers from different indexes, is easy to configure, add free, and avoids censorship as much as it can.

https://www.searchenginemap.com/ for more on how search engines relate to each other.

https://yep.com/ is a crawler

https://www.etools.ch/ retrieves from Google, Mojeek, Bing, and Yandex, like Searx

https://www.dogpile.com/ 

https://searxng.org/ (next gen Searx)

https://luxxle.com/ - possibly conservative?

https://presearch.com/ - good for academic?

https://kagi.com/smallweb - free/randomised Kagi.

Other Searchers

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

Not only did this experiment prevent plagiarism, it also taught her students to become better writers and thinkers.

"No screens, online dictionaries, spellcheckers, or delete keys."

Concerning the AI papers she kept receiving: “What’s the point of me reading it if it’s already correct anyway, and you didn’t write it yourself? Could you produce it without your computer?”

From one of her students,

“ 'While writing the essay, I had to talk a lot more, socialize a lot more, which I guess was normal back then...it’s drastically different from how we interact within the classroom in modern times. People are always on a laptop, always on the phone.' Without a delete key and the ability to correct every mistake, he paused to think more intentionally about his writing."

"Most students found their pinkies weren’t strong enough to touch-type, so they typed more slowly, pecking at the keyboard with their index fingers."

Another student said,

" 'This thing I handed in had pencil marks all over it and definitely did not look clean or finished. But it’s part of the process of learning that you’re going to make mistakes'..."

All this in a college level foreign language class. I cannot imagine attempting to pass a language class using AI and then expect to somehow magically speak it! Why pay buckets of money to be taught something and then refuse to actually learn it?

Doing a final project in my stats class, we have to pick a subject and collect data on it. We need at least 100 data points, and I figured this blog is big enough that a poll on here could get to that pretty easily!

Doing my project on if it’s more likely to be born in certain months :]

1. borrowing misery from future

2. carrying grief of the past

TUMBLR ADS ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO AUTO-PLAY AUDIO! THAT IS A BUG AND YOU SHOULD REPORT IT!

"This ad is auto-playing audio" is literally on the drop down menu for reporting an ad. Tumblr isn't trying to implement this! Don't protest this "new policy", cause it's not one.

Report the broken ads.

This is all bugs or malicious advertising which is also against tumblers ad policy. You should report all ads which do this.

Technically it doesn’t need to be aerated, but anaerobic bacteria, which don’t need oxygen, produce much stinkier byproducts during this breakdown process, so most decent-sized urban wastewater treatment plants do aerate in order to spare the neighbors. Very simple rural wastewater plants may just pump the wastewater into a lagoon—an outdoor pond, usually with a liner of some kind—and just let whatever grows in there do so.

As the wastewater is breaking down, it separates into a layer of muck (sludge) and a layer of cleaner water. Large wastewater treatment plants have a series of stages with clearer and cleaner water emerging from each one. Small plants may have a series of lagoons or just one. The more stuff you have in your wastewater that’s not poop (say maybe you accept discharge from a local factory, or there’s a restaurant district with a lot of food waste in their greywater), the longer and harder it is to treat.

Discharge from wastewater treatment plants to natural water bodies is heavily regulated and monitored for quality. In the US, it’s regulated by the EPA, and they take it seriously. The finishing step involves testing your discharge to make sure it’s within your approved discharge limits. This is the only step where a chemical treatment is commonly added: a little chlorine, to kill off the last of your microbes. But some plants use constructed wetlands or sand filters instead. If they do apply chlorine, they also have to take it back out before releasing the water, so that they don’t upset the ecosystem the water will be released to.

(If you have wastewater that’s mostly human waste and a correctly sized plant, you shouldn’t technically need this step. The microbes should be slowly precipitating out of the water along with the sludge. But things like high volume, cold temperatures, and complex effluent can make those benchmarks hard to hit without a finishing step.)

MORE COOL STUFF ABOUT WASTEWATER:

DID YOU KNOW? Potassium, an important component in fertilizer, is actually mined out of the earth? Did you know potassium deposits are running low? DID YOU KNOW POTASSIUM IS A WASTEWATER BYPRODUCT!?

DID YOU KNOW? Some large plants can trap and clean methane from their wastewater and use it for power?

DID YOU KNOW? The precipitated sludge can be further treated and used for fertilizer? I particularly liked the plant that was using it to fertilize fast-growing trees for the paper trade.

DID YOU KNOW? Many wastewater plant operators have a protective—if sometimes frustrated—relationship with their microbes, which they call “the bugs”, and include not just bacteria but also other microorganisms like algae and daphnia. The bugs are the workhorses of the wastewater plant: if their ecosystem becomes imbalanced, everyone’s job gets harder. I doubt they’d appreciate this, but in my mind, wastewater treatment operators are microbe herders. Though I suppose thinking of them as bog technicians is also accurate.

Cats helped me figure it out.

They will never understand my life and the forces that drive me, any more than I will really understand theirs. Our experiences of reality will always be so fundamentally different.

there's having parents who can pay for your application to any college, and then there's having parents who can bribe your way into any college. there's owning your own home, and then there's owning 50 houses and getting rich off hoarding a vital resource. there's not fearing for your life whenever cops are around, and then there's being the cop and being allowed to murder anyone at any time.