RUN TCP IP

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.

“Many tech companies are pushing their employees to use AI tools and increase their productivity, but it seems that this initiative has begun to backfire.

Microsoft has been reportedly pushing its people to switch to its own Copilot CLI rather than Claude Code because it wants to use an internal tool rather than a third-party one.

However, sources say the primary reason is that the cost of using Claude Code has been steadily increasing as more people use the AI tool.”

“other companies are also pulling back on AI usage. While it’s true that the cost of training AI models is falling, making AI tokens more affordable, people have started using more tokens in their day-to-day tasks.

This is particularly true for agentic AI, which can use a thousand times more tokens compared to querying an LLM, depending on the number of steps needed to accomplish your instructions.

For example, OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger claimed that his team spent more than $1.3 million in token costs in just a single month. Because of this, it’s now apparent that using AI is more expensive than hiring people, especially since it offers only limited productivity gains at the moment.”

“Decreasing token costs, paired with increased usage, reminds us of the Jevons Paradox, in which increased efficiency has led to more people using a particular tool or technology.

There are many examples of this throughout history — the introduction of efficient steam engines during the Industrial Revolution led more firms to deploy these tools to increase productivity.

This is also evident in the airline industry: as planes became more fuel-efficient, lower ticket prices led to higher demand, and air travel demand is now on track to double by 2050, according to IATA.”

This seems true with AI companies as well, with “Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang famously said that its engineers should use AI tokens worth at least half their annual salary each year to be fully productive”

ask and ye shall receive: When I write in Japanese I usually also throw it in google translate to double check that I'm not using the wrong kanji by mistake, and two years ago it gave me very dry and literal translations.

I was doing it today and noticed it had a pretty strong voice added to the output

For reference, to give a dry translation I would put: Lately I'm into in Hanafuda. Nobody seems to know anything about it here, so they probably wouldn't understand my brilliant jokes. I guess you guys will never be able to understand "Mister November and the Scary Cave".

I have a fluent friend who is able to check my work for me and give me tips on hitting the correct tone (I was going for a comically casual feeling), so I'm confident that I'm expressing the feeling I'm intending. While Google is also hitting the same emotion, I really don't like knowing that it's assigning tone in the first place.

To check if it was editorializing based on informal grammatical choices, I formal'd up the writing to be more polite and remove any non-standard vocabulary.

What do you mean I'm just using the browser versi-

And then he gave me kind of a blank look and said "Okay, that is. Very good to know."

that shit has to be done by wednesday. it's almost april 15.

do not panic, you got this. this is just to help make sure you got this by wednesday. wednesday, april 15. you got this.

also google your state + "state return free file" and the state's tax dept website probably has a list of services that will e-file your federal AND state returns for free if you meet the income restrictions.

(you probably do.)

fuck turbotax. there are better, still easy options not trying to nickle and dime your broke ass for this nonsense out there, and you can probably use a few of them to file fed AND state for free.

by wednesday.

wednesday, april 15. 2026.

It's free and buys you another 6 months to file.

The counter-argument: Not having UBI is in the interests of those in power who want to do anything to the people they are in power over in order to remain in power.

NetChoice is offering a much clearer, more practical, and better option for internet safety here! They are an organization suing age verification bills! (their Wikipedia page) (A mention of the on the age verification Wikipedia) It’s important we show that we do want internet safety and show what the real solutions are as well as why age verification and censorship is not and never will be the solution. Remember the ACLU and EFF and FFTF all oppose these bad internet bills too!

(Twitter post link)

The link in the image in the post from NetChoice

https://netchoice.org/netchoices-digital-safety-shield-for-america/

All the frugality in the world won't save you if you're not being paid a living wage. It's a hard truth and a reminder of what we're really fighting for.

So many content creators in the personal finance space share advice for comfortably middle class and above people to eliminate unnecessary spending. And I get why! It's because people who have unnecessary spending to eliminate have money to spend on personal finance products and services!

I Can Eat Glass was a linguistic project documented on the early Web by then-Harvard student Ethan Mollick. The objective was to provide speakers with translations of the phrase "I can eat glass, it does not hurt me" from a wide variety of languages; the phrase was chosen because of its unorthodox nature. Mollick's original page disappeared in or about June 2004.

The Bored Button - "Press the Bored Button and be bored no more."

The Useless Web

Cloudhiker - "Discover the most interesting, weird and awesome websites of the Internet" (not really a rebrand, it's a different person running it but they have the same intention in mind)

Astronaut.io - "These videos come from YouTube. They were uploaded in the last week and have titles like DSC 1234 and IMG 4321. They have almost zero previous views. They are unnamed, unedited, and unseen (by anyone but you)."