this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2023
959 points (91.6% liked)
No Stupid Questions
36055 readers
1113 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
It got so bad, I mainly use duckduckgo (95%) as of about two months ago
I don’t get why everyone espouses ddg but shits on bing when bing is the underlying source.
Because you're in a bubble of "big corporations bad". Not uncommon on the fediverse for obvious reasons.
It's a fairly reliable truth.
I don’t really subscribe to that mentality personally. Some are and some are not. Just like people.
That explains why my DDG searches have been less than helpful... it's just as unhelpful as Bing. I usually find myself trying other search engines, but run back to Google when I can't find anything relevant to the problem I'm trying to solve (most of my googling is tech help stuff).
Exactly.
As much as I’ve seen threads here on lemmy complaining about how terrible Google search is, Bing isn’t any better.
DDG is hit and miss for me, its my main SE but if i dont get results i want i switch to google. I have actually searched a website with almost the exact URL (when i wasnt sure about the end of the address) and it gave me zero results for that site, so it definately has its shortcomings.
And bing is fantastic, for video search... Porn.
I've been using SearXNG over Duckduckgo lately. It's a free (as in freedom) aggregator that searches all the engines. It's not perfect but you know 100% you are not being tracked.
The results are closer to a true old school search of the web. Sometimes it works better, sometimes not as well. It's best to pick a local instance that has quicker speeds since the main site can be a bit slower than local ones.
This distributed web stuff is really taking off. I like it!
After hearing it for a decade plus I still don’t know what “free as in freedom/free is in beer” actually means
Free beer, like you get a free beer at a party or event, it's no cost. Free software that costs nothing but is closed source.
Free as in freedom means the user has full access to the source code and is not subject to unknown code like in proprietary software.
Freedom as RMS sees it: https://lemmy.world/post/8134208
The phrase is "free as in SPEECH/beer", because it doesn't make sense to say "freedom" - especially since that has all sorts of other connotations, especially in the USA. Everyone should be able to understand that free speech doesn't mean a speech that you listen to at no cost to yourself. It means the ability to express yourself without censure. And beer... everyone understands that, and who doesn't love free beer?
I always get confused by this analogy because my mind goes to beer representing open source (the ingredients aren't secret, and you can brew it yourself if you want to). "Free Coca-cola" would work better, like you're not paying for it right now but only one company knows how to make it.
Free as in freedom means it doesn't infringe on privacy (or any other rights) and free as in beer means no financial cost.
It's open source. The line comes from the early days when people were still arguing over definitions and free vs. open source and GPL vs. BSD, when the concept was new enough to the general public so that they would confuse "free software" for "freeware": Closed-source software that doesn't cost any money. By now all that has died down (unless you're the FSF) and the acronym "FLOSS" was invented, which sidesteps the double meaning of "free" by adding on "libre". Really they should've gone for GLOSS: Gratis, libre, open, source software. If you have a choice in marketing between shiny and dentist, always go for shiny.
(And for the nitpickers yes searxng is AGPL which makes it libre, not just open).
Oh, and speaking of, haven't looked at it in a long while, there's yacy, a peer to peer search engine.
It's the default on all my devices, works just fine.
Another vote for DDG. I honestly didn't realize Google had gone to shit, because I haven't used them for anything in the last 5 years (which is wild for me to think about, because I used to be a huge Google fanboy in the G+/Hangouts/Google Now/Nexus era).
It doesn't allow keywords to be excluded from what I have been able to figure out, and some other minor issues that sometimes makes google easier and quicker to use. Most of the time that is a non-issue however.
when i need to search google i add !g at the beginning
It's funny how when I jumped to DDG a few years back, I felt like I was sacrificing the quality of results for better privacy.
These days you get the best of both.
I only use DDG for searching. I use Google for things like checking business hours or directions (you can use
!gto search google)https://duckduckgo.com/bangs
Sadly it doesn't work as well on non-English websites