The Hodgepodge

they/she - aroace Navigation My Art Blog Ask Box

[yansurnummu]

happy pride, those old wizards are trans!!

[kawuli]

random PSA, I know a lot of people use duckduckgo as a Google alternative search engine, but it always kind of annoyed me when I was using it because it felt like No Name Brand Google

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

also private, European based, least annoying search I've used lately (RIP old "don't be evil" Google)

[yomikoreadsbooks]

Keeping a list of Google alternatives just in case…

[saxifraga-x-urbium]

i have one of those, scraped from multiple different rec posts:

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.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free.https://cosine.club/ is an electronic music similarity search engine

[dduane]

If you don't want LinkTree putting your imagery into AI... get out now

Just canceled my account (not that I used it that much). But I won’t permit this. Via @unaminh.bsky.social:

IMPORTANT: For any artists/writers/etc etc, using Linktree to point people to their work, from 5 July, they'll be feeding all imagery you use on your landing page into DALL-E by OpenAI.

…Just so you know.

[gay-irl]

[judgejudyofficial]

yeah u freaks up north look and sound exactly like this when u pretend that us southern queers are perfectly complicit in our own eradication - for the heinous crime of not living in a liberal population center.

[hoshikostar]

[glitterygolem]

I keep this image on hand for whenever I see similar sentiments.

[puppygirllaika]

Could you personally navigate a cross-country road trip, door to door, without your electronics (phone/computer/tablet/etc)?

Yes

No

Voting ended onMay 29

[confessionsdiaz]

*through gritted teeth* the world is GOOD. people are kind. Humans are NOT inherently selfish. you will make it through this year. recovery is possible. people you don't know yet will love you. You are going to do things you can't even imagine right now. You are going to read a rlly good book. You are going to eat some rlly good food. You are going to experience joy again. Things can get better. Situations can change. You can choose to be kinder. The world can change for the better.

[nitashinori]

That post about death note being "everyone's first anime" (untrue statement) made me curious and now I want to gather data for science

Can you reblog this and tell me where are you from and what was your starter anime?

[pigswithwings]

but whatever i don't feel strongly about amatonormativity at all .

[pigswithwings]

i think it's bad that people of any age feel pressure to find a romantic partner. i think giggly "who's your crush" questions at age 9 are weird. i think young people getting into bad relationships because "it's what everyone does" is shit. i think that marriage should not be emphasised as the pinnacle of a relationship and frankly i think that marriage should not be expected at all from romantic relationships. i think that there needs to be more embracing of qprs and friendships and simply not getting a romantic partner. i think it's weird that half the time when you do something nice for someone people wonder if you're flirting. i think that people can and do care deeply about each other without needing to subscribe to the mainstream ideas of love. i think that there should be less of an emphasis on "love" in general. i think the idea of what is "romantic" versus "platonic" is different for everyone and therefore doesn't really have a use except to evoke vague ideas about social customs

[pigswithwings]

[schlarklezyaoi]

something they don’t tell you about being autistic is that every character you write WILL end up autistic/autistic-coded whether you like it or not

[schlarklezyaoi]

same goes for being aromantic/asexual. every character WILL come out at least a little aspec

[schlarklezyaoi]

if you reblog this and purposefully remove the second addition i Will block you.

[achillesinhighheels]

sorry i never replied. everyday is blending together and i'm losing sense of time

[pcos-and-endo-awareness]

If you haven’t heard, today PolyCystic Ovarian Syndrome has been renamed to Polyendocrine Metabolic Ovarian Syndrome. This change reflects that this is not a reproductive “problem” but a whole body disease.

[leahstuff]

For reference, from the WHO website:

(Text: PCOS affects an estimated 10-13% of reproductive-aged women. It is estimated that up to 70% of women with PCOS worldwide do not know they have this condition.)

[laziestgirlintown]

The Lancet link about shift to PMOS. Spread this to everyone who works in health care now. People with uteruses and ovaries are in agony - yes, the whole body suffers a crisis every fkn month - and health care should help

[drachenmagier]

This is a ton of fun to fiddle with. :D Q-tips are funny little paintbrushes. XD

[brarchives]

trícia by amara

[apsciencebylyn]

Floof Lump, if needed

(Hamataliwa grisea)

[itshype]

Quick question. When someone asks what age you were in a certain year do you give the age that you were before or after your birthday that year?

Do you give the younger or older of the two ages you were that year?

I give the younger (age before your birthday in a given calendar year)

I give the older (age after your birthday in a given calendar year)

Voting ended onMay 15

[themirokai]

Okay I’ve been complaining about my job a lot lately, but today one of our clients sent pictures she took on an evening walk past our job site on which she spotted a bald eagle, a heron, and a lovely little redwing blackbird. Unfortunately the location of this project could be recognizable (which would make me more doxxable than I already am on here) so I can’t post most of them at all and I had to severely crop this one but…

THIS is why I love this job. We make habitat for these guys. I got a little misty-eyed about it when I opened the email honestly.

[snowkissedmonsters]

Also on age verification: I have been on this website since 2011. Unless you think I started blogging at age 2, you KNOW I'm an adult.

[dreamerinsilico]

#the fact that 'can prove access to an online account at least 12 years old' or even 'account to be verified is itself fully 18 years old'#AREN'T accepted methods of age verification is such a telling sign of what the real purpose of age-gating laws is:#data harvesting and deanonymization and the buildout of state-controllable ways to restrict both content and internet access itself en masse (via @shinelikethunder )

⬆️