Did you know about [email protected] already? Ideally I prefer not splitting the community, unless you feel there’s an unsolvable problem with moderation or focus or something like that.

There’s also YaCy, which is a peer-to-peer search engine. You index whatever you want, and when you search, you connect to lots of other indices as well as your own.

I want to set up my own node at some point. My understanding is that the search results are hit and miss, but you have the power to improve things by building your own index of pages you want to search regularly. And this benefits everyone else too.

Since search indexing is so intensive, I think it’s the right technical solution if you want a truly open and independent alternative.

This looks cool! I don’t want to check another website each day though, I would love to have a Lemmy community with the main feed, similar to the hacker news communities.

The idealistic approach would be: all content freely available, and ask readers to donate if they value it, to fund continual production of more work. E.g. Democracy for Sale. Even better if it’s under a free content license.

The practical approach would be: make some content freely available, and put the rest behind a paywall. But the content should still be available in open formats like RSS, via a private feed. E.g. LWN, Stratechery.

Because they’re probably doing ok, and they don’t want to think about how much is out of their control, and how easily they could be in the same situation.

The idea that success is just down to hard work is comforting, because they think “if I just keep working hard then I’ll be ok”, and “I’m deserving of this lifestyle”. It also lets them not feel any guilt or spend time thinking about those less fortunate - they can simply say “well it must be their fault”.

I use taskwarrior for this. For example:

task add recur:monthly due:eom wait:due-3weeks clean mesh filter
task add recur:quarterly due:eoq wait:due-3weeks replace charcoal filter

There are quite a few web frontends to it too, although I haven’t tried these out so not sure which to recommend.

There were many crazy things, but the one that affected me the most was my RE teacher’s insistence that all non-Catholics would go to hell. My best friend’s dad, who was an atheist and a very kind person, had died a few days before and it made me really upset. My parents complained to the school about it.

I’d quit my job, buy a small house for my partner and I and give enough to my family that they wouldn’t have to worry about money again.

With the rest, I’d set up a trust that donates 1% per year in microgrants to free software maintainers who apply to it. Similar to NLnet, but with no strings attached beyond continuing to maintain the project.

Then, with all my free time, I’d also work on free software.

Will you be allowed to lie about the age? If yes, then it’s a pointless law. If no, then whoever is checking needs to have more control over your device than you do, DRM style. That’s gives them an entry point through which they can put whatever they want without you being able to control it.

I’m quite crazy:

• Marginalia with the no JavaScript filter, then with that filter turned off
  • Good for finding technical stuff, and sometimes recipes! I often find cool blogs this way.
• SearxNG via farside.link
  • Unfortunately (and understandably) many of these sites use Anubis now, so I have to turn on JavaScript, and thanks to Google’s ratelimits the results are either fantastic or not helpful at all
  • But, the public instances can work, so I try with 3 instances before moving on

Depending on the thing I’m searching for, I have search shortcuts set up. These shortcuts are really handy. It seems much easier to get good results on dedicated search engines for each task, than finding another general purpose search engine that’s as good:

• Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikidata
• Some other wikis
• Lemmy (of course!)
• Peertube and podcast indexes
• Websites of grocery shops near me

Finally, if all else has failed, I use Google (which still unfortunately happens at least a couple of times per day 🙁). Although, reading the posts now, I should switch this stage to DuckDuckGo instead.

I’d quite like to set up my own instance of SearxNG + YaCy at some point. It’d be nice to configure SearxNG to basically do all of these steps at once that I’m doing manually, prioritise my YaCy index, but use other engines to fill in the gaps, and then gradually fill in the gaps in my YaCy index.

Personally, I donate less to more projects. But, if you don’t have a strong opinion of what to donate to, you can get the best of both worlds by donating to NLnet.

They fund open source projects up and down the stack, from open source CPUs all the way up to applications like Lemmy, and everything in between. Some are quite speculative and others are tangible improvements to existing projects.

I used Language Transfer and Michel Thomas’ courses when starting to learn Italian and found them really helpful in getting a foothold into the language.

The Michel Thomas course was longer and went in more depth, but I preferred the vibe of language transfer. The Michel Thomas course seemed to be aimed at people looking to cheat on their wife on a business trip, because a lot of the conversation was about inviting women to get a drink :( Despite that, it was still useful.

Unlike the language apps, these courses did a good job of getting me to think in real-time. Despite only being able to express and understand basic things, they gave me confidence to try and say things. Even without much vocab, I was able to express myself in a simple way: “I like that red thing over there”, and I was able to pick up new words with “what does this part mean?” or “can you repeat?” etc. So far, it’s the best method I’ve found to bootstrap enough of the language to start talking and picking up the rest by osmosis.

Ooooo, someone’s getting worried!