TIMESTAMPS EXIST! USE THEM!

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.

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

if you've made replies on posts there is now a tab on your blog showing every post youve replied to and your reply.

if this is not what you want, either go to your blog and click comments and disable it from there or just go to your individual blogs setting pages. just change it from blue to grey if you dont want everyone to see your replies AND the post you're replying to

PLEASE BE ADVISED that it is set to disabled for blogs that have not made any replies but it will turn ON if you reply with that blog in the future.! i just tested it with my main, which was greyed out but it turned on the moment i left a test reply

At the 1985 Labour party meet, the motion to support LGBT rights as a party was passed due to a block vote from mining unions.

we're looking to create an AI policy, and when we were talking about this, my boss (older millennial) was genuinely shocked to hear that younger people do not (seem) to view AI positively (a la the recent commencement speakers being booed)

please rb for larger sample size!

Question 1/3

Thank you for helping with this data collection. Please rb for as big a sample as possible!

Dear Representative [Name],

I am writing to express my strong opposition to H.R. 8250 (The "Parents Decide Act"). As your constituent and a concerned citizen, I believe this bill introduces unprecedented risks to digital privacy and security.

Specifically, I am alarmed by:

SEC. 2(a)(1)(B): Requiring age verification to even use an operating system creates a mandatory "hardware lockout" that ends anonymous computing and forces users to hand over sensitive identification data to major corporations just to power on their devices.

SEC. 2(a)(3): Mandating that OS providers create a system for all app developers to access verification data is a massive security vulnerability. This effectively creates a centralized API of user identities accessible to thousands of third-party developers, many of whom may lack adequate data protection.

This bill does not protect children; it creates a centralized surveillance infrastructure at the OS level. I urge you to protect the privacy of your constituents and vote NO on H.R. 8250.

Sincerely,

[Your Name]

Given that, in the wake of this mandatory identification policy, my country seems to be moving to hand over its citizens biometric data, like fingerprints, Face ID files, and identification documents, over to the USA and to ICE to maintain the visa free travel (ESTA) we have, I strongly urge any US resident to send these emails, or make calls.

But if you can’t do that, the most powerful thing you can do is spread the word. Tell your friends, family, coworkers, anyone who can help.

My reach will likely be small, and so I don’t know if this will mean very much in the grand scheme of things, but I cannot stand to see this tracking happen to another population as it did to mine.

And if you think it won’t affect you, it will. All anonymity goes out the window when your accounts can be linked via your personal ID

Apparently, people who use AI to request that Wikipedia create a new article are finding their requests get auto-deleted...

Because they're generating the most statistically likely result for a Wikipedia article creation request...

Long ago everyone's clothes were made for them custom, and were either so unfitted that it didn't matter how you were shaped or they were created with built-in size adjusting elements so you could adapt them to your body as your body changed. (Lacing is great for this.)

Then we got into the era of ready-to-wear clothing, where you could walk into a shop and buy something. These were still being handmade probably on site (or in a workshop very nearby), and were created with the assumption that the purchaser would make any needed alterations to get the fit they desired. This was also in an era where it was expected that you would achieve the fashionable silhouette via shapewear and padding and tailoring - like, fat women in the Victorian era also wore shoulderpads and hip pads, because the fashionable thing was a particular set of proportions and it was not expected that people's bodies would meet those proportions unaltered.

Then we got into an era of mass-produced ready-to-wear clothing, where you'd have size sets of a particular pattern made into multiple sizes of that garment. This is where numbered sizing or the XS-XXL size runs start to show up. We start to lose the assumption of tailoring as a normal part of the process (and some clothes are not being designed for tailoring as an option), and also where we get into Foz's thing about clothing being made to fit one (1) woman.

Enter the fit model.

A fashion house/clothing manufacturer/designer ideally draws a design, then creates a pattern for the design, sews a sample (or more than one sample if they have a few ideas to test out), and then they bring in their fit model and have her try it on. The fit model's job can be as uninvolved as "standing there and letting people poke at the garment and pin it in various places" or as involved as "doing some aerobics and telling the designer how the garment functions." A fit model is not a runway model - the fit model needs to maintain a consistent set of measurements, but that set of measurements depends on what the designer has designated as their sample size. Women's fit models are frequently a size small, I'll admit that up front, but that's not universal. (The company where my wife works, which makes athletic wear, recently switched from a size small fit model to a size medium because they found that hewed more closely to their target market.)

Once the garment has been fitted to the model and all issues worked out with the pattern, the pattern will be graded to create the rest of the sizes in the set. This is where Foz's "scaling her up or down like a photo in MS paint" bit comes from, which is indeed what happens when you don't pay for a skilled patternmaker. There are grading rules assigned to the pattern to make it larger and/or smaller depending on the direction it needs to go, and if those grading rules have been applied correctly and customized as needed, the resulting pattern and garments should actually make sense for human bodies of a similar proportion to the original fit model.

...unless you want an extended size set beyond the XXL, because it's 100% correct that you can't keep grading up a Small pattern indefinitely - that's a surefire way to end up with clothing that has absolutely bewildering proportions. A designer that actually cares about providing extended sizing will, usually at that XXL break, create an entirely new pattern, sew up an entirely new sample, and hire a fat fit model to test those samples on. This is why you'll see straight sizing and plus sizing listed as separate categories on some clothing retail websites - they're different lines created from different sample sizes.

The company where my wife works has been putting a lot of effort into developing an extended size range, including shopping around for size set information from some of the big sizing companies to find one that works (some of them don't even offer extended sizing datasets!!!), testing out different plus-size dressforms, and auditioning a bunch of fat fit models. (I've seen the fat dressform they ended up with as their extended range sample size and I'm actually really impressed with it - like it even has a belly pooch! It looks like a person!) Then they had to made the designs, and sew the samples, and try them on the fit models, and then because they're an athletic wear company that cares about function they got wear testers to actually use the garments for their intended athletic purposes and report back about what worked and what didn't, and then take that wear testing into account and tweak the patterns, and and and...

All of this costs money, obviously, so what if you're cheap? Well, you might not offer any extended sizing at all, because keeping to one size set is a great way to lower your costs. What if you're even cheaper than that? Well, you don't technically need a fit model, right? You can buy a data set of sizing information from one of the big brokers and work directly from that, no need for pesky in-person fittings or feedback. You can make your patternmaker auto-apply grading rules to get your size set, and send that to the factory without bothering to tweak it or adjust it in any way. Then you can make garments that have minimal seam allowances, so it's almost impossible to alter them, out of the cheapest fabric possible, so they fall apart after three washes. It doesn't matter if they don't fit well because you're already moving onto the next thing, and the consumer get the cheap clothes they demand, and no one's happy.

[slaps down Uno card] THE PROBLEM IS CAPITALISM!!!

This also doesn't even get into the different fit proportions of different designers - like, I love Morningwitch's designs but their fit of choice is "boxy," aka garments with very little in the way of shaping. I do not enjoy wearing boxy garments, so I know if I buy a Morningwitch garment that I'll have to make alterations to it in order to get the fit I want. On the other size of the spectrum you have a place like Trashy Diva, which is deliberately going for a vintage Hollywood Starlet Va Va Voom type of fit, with things that are fitted through the bust and waist but flare out at the hips. Both of these shops have an extended size range, but their fit priorities could not be more different from each other!

Listen, the fashion industry has a lot of problems, I will not deny that, but the people on the garment side of things are not all locked in a vast conspiracy to make you feel bad about yourself when the clothes don't fit. It's a massive interlocking puzzle of market pressures and technical requirements and it's complicated by a consumer market that 1. has been trained to constantly expect new designs all the time and 2. has been trained to think they shouldn't have to pay more than $20 for anything ever. Clothes that have been fitted to a fit model are actually made to fit a person, and if you have similar proportions to that fit model you're golden. It costs more to have a fit model, though, and it is an annoying amount of work to try to find a company with a fit model that matches you, and we'd all be a lot happier if tailoring was an accepted, normal part of clothing purchases and our clothes were made with tailoring as an expectation.

not opening the comments

letting people be wrong

letting people be wrong about YOU

letting people have a bad impression of you (see above)

knowing when your input isn't needed

spotting bot comments

Things when bad: kids and children are involved!