NerdyNarratives

I have a PhD in Political Science (oh god oh fuck oh god oh fuck) He/him…ish

[anarchistmemedistro]

Palantir CEO Alex Karp recently rhapsodized that US air strikes on Venezuelan civilians would be good for business, if only it were legal.

[nerdynarratives]

Send him to The Hague

[elliespectacular]

Deeer

A YTP of a bowhunting instructional VHS. I picked up a copy of this tape at a flea market and was delighted to find that it had been digitized and uploaded to YouTube.

Initially I had some inexplicable technical headache with the project file and had to start the whole thing over, but I'm happy I could preserve what I'd started and produce a hefty 10+ minute video.

Full YTP with captions here!

Thanks <3

[teachagainstfascism]

This is a true masterpiece. It had everyone of all generations splitting their sides with laughter at the family gathering on memorial day weekend

[elliespectacular]

Deeer

A YTP of a bowhunting instructional VHS. I picked up a copy of this tape at a flea market and was delighted to find that it had been digitized and uploaded to YouTube.

Initially I had some inexplicable technical headache with the project file and had to start the whole thing over, but I'm happy I could preserve what I'd started and produce a hefty 10+ minute video.

Full YTP with captions here!

Thanks <3

[teachagainstfascism]

This is a true masterpiece. It had everyone of all generations splitting their sides with laughter at the family gathering on memorial day weekend

[deltaglint]

Prep for summer game fest

[nerdynarratives]

Had to execute a vision

[loreleywrites]

im always saying this

[ggcrono]

[uss-edsall]

At 1 PM on a Friday I get an email from my boss. I'm busy as hell so I don't check it immediately. Then I get a phone call from my boss, which has almost never happened before. I'm a white collar worker, a historian. There's never a 'historical emergency' requiring a phone call to kick me in the ass and get to work.

The request is so urgent my boss needs it by the end of the work week. Which, y'know, is 5 PM on a Friday. So I have four hours to do it.

It's a forwarded request. Somebody contacted a member of the donation team asking for help, "I need a map from the Vietnam War to use for a presentation." It's somebody she's trying to coax into giving a five figure donation to the museum.

The request was asked to the donation team member, who then emailed my boss, who then emailed and called me urgently.

This map required:

North and South Vietnam in it

All four areas that South Vietnam was divided into for military purposes ('Corps') clearly delineated

Four cities, all of them horrifically misspelled, and only identifiable because I know what battle the requester is asking about (it’s in III Corps on the border with Cambodia) (the requester danced around the battle but I’m knowledgeable enough to identify it)

Has Laos and Cambodia in it

Has the Ho Chi Minh Trail in it

So. I was mad about the 'you have literally four hours to find a map with a lot of requirements.'

I was then mad at myself about finding a copyright free map from Texas Tech University within half an hour, proving her right for asking me to do it.

Then, after I found a map that perfectly met the requirements, I was equally amazed, baffled, and horrified when I read further into the forwarded email chain.

The donation team team member they were speaking to used AI to generate a map.

The above put half of North Vietnam in South Vietnam, made the Ho Chi Minh Trail a country, made 60% of Cambodia part of South Vietnam, put the DMZ extremely high up in North Vietnam, completely disconnected the southern tip of Vietnam, misplaced all of the Corps zones, etc etc

At the very last second the donation team member had a moment of divine clarity, remembering there's three historians on payroll to ask for this kind of thing from. So she contacted my boss while saying, "I had fun with this, but I decided I should check for accuracy before I send it to the donor! I need a fact check by the end of the day, then I send it"

My boss, while not the most knowledgeable on the Vietnam War, does know her geography. She took one look, and knew it was so off she called me to tell me how urgent it is that I look at the email and respond

good fucking god, jesus tap dancing goddamn christ, I'm glad I was asked to look at it and then find a real map

[the-murmuration-project]

My fear has never been that AI would replace human intelligence. My fear has been that the people who Know Things and the people who Make The Decisions are almost never the same people.

We’re throwing real intelligence out on the street to starve while worshipping the shambling Frankenstein-ed corpse of knowledge puppeteered by those who see us as disposable assets.

[konohahater]

people might not believe me when i say this but it’s aftually ☝️a bit difficult to take care of 5 adult cats and 7 kittens.

[konohahater]

mature content🤨❓

[konohahater]

[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

[helenvaughans]

[helenvaughans]

the thing is that for all its supposed faults, i would take this brand of 90s utopian globalism over whatever the fuck we’ve been doing for the last 10 years in a heartbeat

[nerdynarratives]

When I was in grade school, in 4-5th grade social studies we did SO MUCH about countries of the world. We did presentations where every student had a country, and you had to watch attentively to your peers’ so you learned about other countries. We did portfolios about the continents, learned about map projections and the like.

I now have a PhD in international relations. The college students I teach often struggle with the type of intuition that us in the Y2K generation got in spades.

There’s been a backlash against “globalization” in the last couple of decades. In terms of economic policy, there is a whole ton of reason for this. But the *cultural* enthusiasm for embracing all of humanity has gone with it, and I really worry about USAmerican’s cultural knowledge. So much of this has been replaced by STEM (lol), and I think it is little wonder why our country’s leaders increasingly act like the rest of the world doesn’t exist.

[flork-of-cows-official]

clark reupload

edit: forgot the sweater comic

[reblogs-by-jinarra]

[gayluigi]

Can’t believe you forgot the Connecticut dog!!

[amethystsoda]

[worldheritagepostorganization]

World Heritage Post

[luftballons99]

hook line and sinker

[greelin]

fruitful endeavors…

[greelin]

[petzah394]

[stars-bean]

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) dir. John Hughes

[dotsunflowers]

[Image ID: Gifset of a scene from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. In it, Cameron lies in bed, covers pulled up to his chin, medicine bottles visible on the counter behind him. In the first gif, captions read: “(Talking to himself) I’m dying.” The second gif shows a black phone by his bed. Captions read, “(Phone rings).” In the third and fourth gifs, Cameron listens as Ferris speaks over the speaker phone. Ferris says, “You’re not dying. You just can’t think of anything good to do.” Cameron pouts and looks towards the phone. /end ID.]

[nerdynarratives]

🎵 when Cameron was in Egypt’s land 🎵

🎵 let my…Cameron…goooooooo 🎵

[zvaigzdelasas]

Eurovision 2027 competitors: Israel, Azerbaijan, Kosovo, Argentina, Germany, Israel

[nerdynarratives]

Graduating from grad school tomorrow, and I'm #314 in the line. The homestuck in me wants to detonate a nuclear bomb or something because this is the type of extremely absurd thing to happen after 7 years of PhD purgatory like AGGGGGGGGHGHGHGHGHG

[superhighschoolleveldespair]

insane 67-dollar phone at target

so im at target right now doing christmas shopping with my dad and?? there’s just this… 67 dollar phone? not even like 69.99 or something but 67?? nnone of the other phones are like this??

see you guys in ten years when EVERYTHING is 67 i guess LMAO

[superhighschoolleveldespair]

…

………..

[nerdynarratives]