I feel like if KDE really wanted to build hardware specifically for KDE then they would and SHOULD bring in Qt Developers (The QT Company) onboard for the best optimizations of the desktop environment....
I may or may not be super knowledgeable on the subject have the KDE Slimbook team considered going full with ARM chips instead of the x86_64 processors?
I keep reading how ARM is more "efficient" and lower power consumption altogether. I also noticed that some Windows-laptop devices are shipping with ARM as well. (Windows on ARM not being new if you have been following Microsoft closely)
Arm is mostly more efficient, but the overall performance is not there apart from Apple silicon. You can get some laptops with qualcomm chips and they're weak - basically an underpowered netbook class. The competition is missing because of a deal between qualcomm and MS for Windows laptops (https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/23/22798231/microsoft-qualc...). So if you want to do something serious, there's very little choice.
Then there's the issue of running Linux on SoC where Qualcomm and others are not super keen on providing open support. M1 is going to get reverse engineered support for all the devices first because they offer hardware people actually want.
So, 8 core QC is beaten by a mid range 6 core Intel. Might be a reasonable choice if it actually ran Linux and various other things (bsd/vmware/etc) out of the box, but since it doesn't, it looks overpriced unless you prioritize windows and battery life or want a windows/arm machine for a specific purpose.
AKA, on the general market it doesn't look particularly competitive, even when compared with these amd 5700U's which also slightly best it and are frequently found in ~$600 laptops.
I don't think an H series i7 would be considered midrange (it has a 45W TDP, and will only really be seen in workstation/gaming laptops). The Qualcomm processor is not terribly impressive, but being on par with a 45W i7 is still very promising.
Out of curiosity Apple M1 Chips being ARM-based (I own a m1-powered laptop) I... honestly haven't really noticed any slow down while using ffmpeg but granted I don't do encoding/transcoding a whole lot and my usage of editors like Affinity Designer/Photos is pretty basic.
But on that note I feel like a budget laptop for the masses with ARM-chips would be quite the spot for many people include my father. he doesn't need any application just being able to use a browser. ( I guess, a more open, less shady Chromebook-like equivalent).
Well, I guess I just say this because my experience with the m1 chip has been way over the top to the point I haven't really noticed any slow down with docker/vscode/etc etc.
Apple seems to be a couple of generations ahead of every other ARM vendor. e.g. the Qualcomm SQ2 doesn’t seem to bad on paper but it’s several times slower than the m1 and barely competitive with the more power efficient AMD chips.
Wasn't NVidia making tablet-scale ARM chips (Tegra) for a while? It seems like they would know how to address this niche, but somehow it hasn't materialized.
I'm not really surprised at all this is still an ongoing issue. And by far I think people that work on the so called Human Interface Guidelines need to get off whatever ideology/belief they fed themselves for the desktop environment to finally, you know, grow for actual humans rather than their egos. At times it feels more like a cred, like when elementary OS was released I read so many comments on how Apple nailed the UI.
From the site:
>If you use GNOME and this is a revelation to you, it’s because you’re used to mediocrity. If you think your experience all this time was normal, you’re completely mistaken—and it’s not least because you’re using a specific desktop environment that’s available only on Free operating systems that account for only a fraction of a percent of desktop computer usage anyways.
I like the author just sarcastically points it out, because I remember reading years ago the same on both GNOME and elementary OS subreddits "it's because people are used to mediocrity". Or, you know, maybe people find it super helpful to being able to see the images without extra steps so they can choose whatever they want.
And then it all just spirals down into:
"Have you tried X/Y/Z?" no? Sucks for you buddy I guess you are stuck with mediocre people making design decisions. But as crud as I put it, I might not be wrong.
That said, I have completely given up on all the nonsense someone would have to follow to file a enhancement report and discuss it just to be stuck on discussion for 10 years. There's just no time and energy for that, and at the end people would just ditch the desktop environment because it's just too much of a hassle to use.
I'd lean that they are probably control freaks. But there's probably more to it than that and ultimately it seems it boils down to "I'm paying you to work thus it's my right to track your every movement"
Years ago I had a boss but set up security cameras. Normally, this is completely okay because you gotta secure the building you just never know who's gonna come in and rob the place or maybe track an incident (rape, violence, etc).
This boss of mine however went home or worked from home from time to time or sometimes he would go on a vacation and he would just connect to the video stream of the security cameras.
One day I was the only one in the building as I still had to finish my shift. He gaves me a call, he didn't say he was monitoring me of course but he seemed to know what I was doing and proceeded to ask the following question: is everything okay? how's the workload etc etc. Common questions, nothing out of the ordinary.
So it seemed he just called because I wasn't receiving a lot of support calls and sometimes I would just go get coffee he probably saw me standing a lot, maybe thought I was neglecting my job.
I can be incredibly outspoken at times. A lot of the things in the call just screamed "I'm monitoring you". When the call ended I was furious. There's nothing more damaging than not trusting your employees. It breaks trust and relationships. I've never in my professional life felt so insulted that I need someone to monitor me.
If you are this type of manager/supervisor: Kindly put, shame on you. I say kindly put because the words I want to say can't be conveyed here without getting moderated. Cease and rethink your strategy, we are professionals not kids or teenagers and doing this to teenagers remember you are growing professionals, nothing like giving them the ground to grow but if they find stuff like this you are destroying everything.
To workers that are aware I can only hope you find other jobs. It's stressful enough, no need to tolerate this behavior.
You're upset that your boss looked at you while you were working, and didn't have any complaints about the behavior that you thought looked suspicious?
That's amazing. I was just scratching my head about const when I read the article, "so what's the purpose if I can change the value... but I guess I can't re-assign the variable with a new value .... that's it?"
I still found the article incredibly informative, sadly as someone still stuck working on legacy apps it falls into "...in some near future I'll take advantage of JavaScript new stuff"
> That's amazing. I was just scratching my head about const when I read the article, "so what's the purpose if I can change the value... but I guess I can't re-assign the variable with a new value .... that's it?"
If the value is a primitive, you can't change it. If the value's a reference you also can't change that, but of course you can modify whatever that points to.
I believe so. I don't make a big issue out of it... but anything carrying the word const I expect it to be fully read-only with no "buts" in between throughout the whole execution of the program. I guess if they used "readonly" as C# it would make more sense?
> Building a new React app with create-react-app requires 4304 directories and 28678 files.
Finally, of course I don't consider myself the only person thinking about it but someone finally pointed the elephant in the room because it's been bugging me for a very long time, especially with anything related to NodeJS it feels like to actually get somewhere you need to pull hundreds if not thousands of tiny libraries dependencies. Once 1, 2, 50 of those tiny libraries becomes unmaintained and fall into a high risk vulnerability and there's no replacement that's it , you have to start taking care of it yourself. It could happen in any language, yes, but I feel it's more prone to happen in NodeJS given the nature of .... pulling hundreds of modules, even with Java/Maven you don't really pull that many libraries into your application unless it has some really wide scope in it.
I don't have any beef with NodeJS itself but the whole subject of having so much boilerplate code needed to get yourself started is a bit insane. I get that hardware has become more powerful and storage is cheap but... at which point is it no longer okay and becomes a burden to distribute said apps?
Nobody in the world is arguing against the fact that CRA is overkill for a Hello World application.
Luckily, that’s not it’s target space.
If you engineer frontend applications of even moderate complexity, you will eventually start to pull in tooling + dependencies + configuration to handle real world use cases. Eventually? You end up with a once-off, home-grown variant of... what CRA emits anyway.
There are some good threads (if we could call them that) on GH related to how LeftPad "broke the Internet" and the original stories about it from Kik are/were on Medium. Surfing through the related GH threads lead me to ZeroNet[1], which is fantastic P2P web alternative which works offline and updates in real-time. It also has a decentralized GitHub alternative which would mitigate situations like LeftPad.
I couldn't help but revise the code because it failed to even use minus-equals and is severely unoptimized.
Here is my rendition. Mind you, this is mainly for IE as ES6 has a String.padStart method. I would also use Array(n).fill() but again, IE does not support it, so manual string appending is the sacrifice to make..
module.exports = function(str, len, ch) {
if (ch === undefined || ch === '') ch = ' ';
str += "";
len -= str.length;
len /= ch.length;
var pre = "";
while (--len >= 0) pre += ch;
return pre + str;
}
How big is the JDK? How big is Spring? Would you include both when calculating the size of a simple Java app that prints "Hello World"? Probably not.
Remember that node_modules contains the entire world: it contains your compilers, transpilers, development server, development toolchain, and runtime libraries. All software is built on the shoulders of giants and Node's only mistake was making it plainly visible.
And that Hello World probably isn't isomorphic, which limits the ability of crawlers other than the most sophisticated to actually see the data. Want to make it crawlable? Add another 70,000+ dependencies.
I'm starting to see advertising and begging for work in the output of these builds. I'm scanning the console for errors and these things accidentally get my attention falsely.
Yes. I'm fine with Namecheap taking the domain down. Handing information like that just because they ask for it? That's a huge no. Let them proceed through the legal channels to get that information.
Facebook is suing Namecheap because Namecheap is not handing over the information just because Facebook asked them to. Facebook decided that the domain should be taken down and expected Namecheap to just do what Facebook said. Namecheap refused. That is why Facebook is suing them.
What Facebook should do is file a trademark dispute against the domain owner. Then a judge will look at the case, decide if Facebook has been wronged, and if so, the judge will ask Namecheap for the domain owner's information, at which point Namecheap would then be expected to (and not wrong for doing so) hand over the information to the judge. The court system will handle the rest. That is why we have these court systems. I know Facebook is confused and thinks they are above the government, but that is why it is good for Namecheap to remind them of that.
Traditionally site owners are either public or can be requested in a 7 day span by showing clear harm.
Otherwise the liability falls to Namecheap. Presumably Facebooks motivation for actually suing is to prevent name registrar's from protecting obvious scammers for profit.
Not sure how I feel about this, site owners who act in good faith clearly should be able to stay private. On the other hand, scammers can open sites much more quickly than they can be reasonably be sued. Most businesses try to keep scammers from obtaining similar domains, having to sue each time to take a page down could make this infeasible for smaller ones.
The court order is that a judge rules there has been trademark infringement and asks namecheap to take it down. If facebook would like to pursue suing for infringement then, they get another injunction with a court order, and the judge asks namecheap for the name associated with the infringement.
> We don’t want people to be deceived by these web addresses, so we’ve taken legal action.
I wonder if they reported the issue first unless it's all for show. I've reported phishing domains before and Namecheap is usually quick on taking them down if the domain belongs to that registrar. I think the last report within 24 hours they plugged it out. So makes me wonder what Facebook is on about with this.
Edit: ok, I missed the "despite their obligation to provide information about these infringing domain names, they declined to cooperate." seems Facebook wanted to go on a witch hunt.
Sadly.... this was my conclusion as well. I'd rather have an iPhone(which I do, an iPhone X) than actually get a Android device.
This is the case of going with the lesser evil.... and there's no way in my mind that Apple would be the greater evil than Google when it comes to tracking users and learning all their habits while using Android.
Apple is not perfect and I hate it for being so anti-consumer when it comes to repairing... and I'd love they would fully commit to a privacy-minded iOS if they have the guts to do it.
The real solution is regulation for privacy, so that stalking and tracking becomes illegal no matter who does it. Then, Android would become a viable choice for many.
Anti-trust regulations on Apple would also be very welcome, but irrelevant to the privacy problem.
It's been 2-3 years since I switched back to Firefox ever since I cut around 90% of Google out of my life, sadly I still can't find a good search engine where I don't spend more than 5 mins trying different keywords to get the results google gives me.
Out of all the browsers I like that Mozilla were the first to point the finger to the elephant in the room while Microsoft, Google, Opera just turned a blind eye on privacy, although I don't think anyone expects much from Google these days.
Firefox has once again became my default browser on all my devices after like 6-8 years since I last used it. I guess as far as privacy concerns goes, if you are looking for a company/browser that will continue working on protecting you from trackers by default that'd be Mozilla.
Random observations that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the topic: Firefox for windows is perfect. I actually think it's faster on Windows than on OSX for whatever reason. Playing videos, like using Netflix or Youtube is extremely sluggish on Firefox OSX, but is fine on Windows. I always end up using Safari if I want to watch a video on a higher resolution because the performance drags a lot on Firefox, especially it Netflix's overlay UI you can literally observe it's lagging behind but not in Safari.
In the past couple of years, search has reverted to late 90s levels of result quality. Google used to get you exactly what you wanted for close to 20 years. Now you have to cross reference several search engines to find something other than terrible blogspam and obvious advertisements disguised as reviews. Search seems primed for disruption again.
I appreciate DDG's privacy focus, but their results are often crap.
This is true. These days, Google does very poorly with the tail, and may not even index a lot of sites...definitely some older sites that are still up just drop out of the index, and cannot be found even with exact phrase searches.
If there was one open source project that I'd support would be an open search, but are there any serious, well funded efforts?
Try the semantic map of https://swisscows.ch/
While usually DDG is sufficient for my uses i'm noticing falling back more and more often to the swiss cows. This map thing really helps to separate that which is of interest to you, from unrelated things. Be it the same abbreviations used across different fields, names of persons or corporations across history, ...
I'd be very happy if DDG had that, since i'm so used to it.
But it doesn't.
I think https://www.qwant.com/ had something very simialar many years ago, but now it's gone, or i'm mistaking it for some other prototype/beta which had that.
They block certain results because of that, and there is no option to disable that. That's a big no to me. How do I know what results do they consider moral enough to show me?
I always use Safe Search when using Google. I've never watched porn and don't plan to start now, so I appreciate that I know my results from this site will be SFW.
They cite “family values” and have an illustration of a heteronormative family on the “morals” page. Does that mean they filter gay-related results? Gay marriage related results? Would you prefer them to filter it?
I have no idea if they do, but it’s foolish to even cause such questions and disambiguation with your brief (which you inevitably do when you do “morals”)
I was recently searching for information on how Slot Machines are programmed. I had questions about the OS that they run, the languages used to program them, information about the random number generators, etc.
There was a reddit post by someone in the industry that answered some of those questions. Unfortunately, it's quite old.
That makes me think, maybe I should write up a blog post about this as I find the answers I'm looking for. I'm certainly not an expert, but the information in search engines is lacking or I'm searching for the wrong things.
The most niche things I search for are typically career-related, so software questions. I'd guess more than 9 out of 10 queries, the result that I am looking for (i.e. the result that helps me) is on stackoverflow, github, or some apache mailing list.
A search engine just for software, that crawls a whitelisted set of platforms and provides more relevant results (github's search is very poor, for example) would be perfect. Google seems to be the "best" at this right now, so while I use DDG to search most of the time, when I'm working I end up routing most of my queries to Google.
Somewhat tangential, but the word "niche" made me think about this.
you should build this! building a search engine today is no doubt an uphill battle, but the move toward more specialized platforms feels inevitable as there gets to be more and more of the web to index, search, and discover.
I wonder how much of that is technology, and how much is actually inherent to the privacy.
Google collects your data to show you ads, but it also uses that to inform its search algorithm. Exactly how it does so is deliberately opaque, but it's no surprise that it knows that you probably mean the local restaurant rather than the one in Indiana by the same name -- and even that you mean that restaurant despite having mistyped it as the name of a different restaurant.
There is assuredly more to it than that, and it's not really a surprise that it can give you better search results if it knows who you are. Whether that's worth your privacy is up to you -- though many people don't really make that choice consciously.
So instead of returning a canonical list of the best results for a given subject, they use the copout that people want to see different things. IMHO this has led to problems like politicizing science to cover "both sides" when there is actually consensus. It's institutionalized ignorance.
I agree that search is primed for disruption though. The endgame for search is an artificial general intelligence (AGI) that acts as an oracle to answer any question put to it better than any human. Search is just a query over a very large search space, and is the basis for rational thought (or at least human memory). What we have today is more like a library of books where the user is forced to learn the categorization system and perform the librarian's job manually much of the time.
I've always thought that google had a conflicting business model - on the one hand search brings people in, but on the other it competes with ads. The better the search, the less useful the ads. Given this, google might be indirectly incentivized to only have search good enough to be better than competition, but not the best. Not saying they're actively doing that, but seems like something.
Recommending Cliqz that is owned by Hubert Burda, a global media conglomerate which couldn’t care less about your privacy, and where every player is sorely focused on getting a bite of Google’s cake, is also hypocrisy.
I mostly agree, although I think that isn't totally clear yet. I only mentioned Yandex because they're the most egregious example. They are significantly worse than Google in user privacy and general evilness, which I don't think you can clearly say about Cliqz, if only because they haven't mattered enough to have the chance to abuse real users.
> In the past couple of years, search has reverted to late 90s levels of result quality.
The problem is that despite google doing that (I wouldn't be as hard as you, but there was definitely a decrease in quality), they're still SO far ahead of everyone else ...
Just goes to show exactly how far ahead of the competition they were all that time.
Bad DDG results are a myth at this point. It was true a couple of years ago. But they’ve improved a lot and last few months I rarely use google as a fallback.
I've also seen DDG improve over the years but there are still cases where I can't find some obvious things I'm looking for. Unfortunately I can't provide an example. Sorry.
In that case I fallback to Google which is usually helpful even though I have the feeling that it's getting less good.
In the end, my default search engine is becoming Wikipedia... (Mostly kidding, of course, even though I rely to Wikipedia for an increasing number of searches.)
If you put the term in quotes, it disables the correcting of your term.
IMO, correction is a feature. I'm more likely to typo a search term (especially on mobile) than to actually be looking for something with a deliberate mispelling or strange set of letters/numbers.
I switched to DuckDuckgo a few months ago, and never looked back. The results used to be far inferior to Google's - but they seem to have caught up recently. If you haven't tried them out within the last couple of months, I strongly recommend that you give them a chance.
I switched to DuckDuckGo, made it maybe two weeks, and finally gave up and switched back to Google. Their search results are still vastly inferior to Google.
I'm still struggling. Out of principle I've set my default search engines (desktop/mobile) to DDG, but all too often I'm using the '!g' tag to get back to Google. Especially with programming-related queries I just don't get close to what I want in DDG. Google always seems to have the right information the first time. It's unfortunate, because I keep trying to use DDG as much as possible, but the quality just isn't there for me.
It may depend on your particular field of search. I have been using DDG for quite some time and pretty often I need to use !g due to the low quality of the results on DDG only to realize I'm presented with equally bad results from Google. It's possible that for my regular searches DDG is good enough, and the more targeted ones are just too difficult.
Startpage was acquired by targeted ad company System1 in December 2018 (but neither company announced the acquisition until November 2019, for some reason).
All true points, but I'd rather risk being tracked by a company that would be completely cratered even more than they've already been by being bought by Privacy One than just go straight to the devil himself, so I use the !s and just mentally treat it as if its a slightly better form of !g rather than before where startpage was all the benefits of Google search without most of the drawbacks.
I'm teaching Kleene's Recursion Theorem. This morning I tried "exercises for recursion theorem" in both. DDG's first page results were not useful, Google's were.
"ED survivor" is a tricky term to search for. Is "ed" an acronym or the name Ed? But still the first result gives you an instagram link about eating disorders and body dysphoria. Since you were trying to figure out what this term meant, I'm assuming you could figure this out from context.
I'll give you that the results aren't great[0] and that Google's results were __MUCH__ better here, but it did get you to the answer you wanted with the first link. Maybe we search different, but at least in my experience I don't frequently have results like this. Rarely do I reach for "!g" and usually when I do the searches are so niche that Google struggles too.
Excuse me? I didn't get an answer in the first link; there wasn't something pointing me towards the answer in any of the results on the first result page.
Incidentally, nowadays I'm using DDG much more than back then. I don't know whether the search results improved or whether I calibrated myself so that I know better how to phrase my searches. I'm still using many !g, but only maybe half of the time.
No? I don't have a list handy, and I’m not the QA department for DDG. The point is - and yes, this is somewhat subjective - I found the quality of the results inferior to Google, and grudgingly switched back after a few weeks of disappointment.
You're certainly not alone, but I've had such a wildly different experience. I switched to duckduckgo primarily because I preferred the search results. The privacy aspect was just a bonus.
The only time I ever find myself using the !g escape hatch is when I'm searching something brand new (e.g. a breaking news story). Duckduckgo has a recency filter but it seems to take them a few days to ingest the content.
Same here. I'm still using duckduckgo on my private devices (phone and home laptop), at work I'm using google. I suppose the reason this works for me is at work I need GOOD results, thus google search there. At home I just need a search now and again, so duckduckgo is good enough for this.
So, my private life stays my private life with duckduckgo. And at work — I don't really care what google does to my "js shortest path algorithm"-kind-of results history.
Same. I'm about 70% DDG and 30% Google right now. Honestly, with "!g", I'm okay with it. Even though I don't get 100% privacy, its better than 0% privacy.
I switched to DuckDuckGo a number of years ago and while yes, their results have become better there are times in my line of work where I've had to use !g search item as Google still seems have to have the best results sometimes.
Granted this is maybe once or twice in 3 - 4 months I end up using !g prefix.
Another helpful thing that can be done with Firefox is to add google.com to a container. One of the things google does that I really dislike is personalized search. Having a container specified for it lets me use the browser more naturally without having to open a private session.
Do you know if there's a way to get it to work with containers? Often, I'll use a container to remain logged in to a site and white list its cookies. It'd be good if non-container pages were in private mode by default.
> I still can't find a good search engine where I don't spend more than 5 mins trying different keywords to get the results google gives me.
I always hear this but myself have never had problems with DDG. I'm curious what you search for.(am I the odd one?) Image search is TERRIBLE, but web search I have no issues with. I actually like how DDG works with programming questions, how it gives the SO result on the side.
Whenever I try Google I never end up getting better results. But that may be because I've been off them for years and so they can't provide any advantage.
It's.... a bit hard to define my current workspace. I do software development but a lot of that development is on legacy applications using some obscure API, perhaps a super old version of a known open source project that nobody uses anymore, or simply dealing with an application written two decades ago in C and I have to know specific things.... and I'd have to say searching on Google is just handy when it comes to this.
It's not easy to describe I guess. For my normal "John Doe" usage I have no problems using DDG. But when it comes to work where I need to narrow it down the best I can I guess Google will always come to the rescue (but not always, haha.... nothing like dealing with undocumented libraries).
I wish it was just language-specific behaviors at least I know there's always plenty to search on but... it's a little bit of everything.
I find image search on Google to be terrible due to whatever it is that Pinterest is doing. It is awful trying to find something and repeatedly stumbling into their crapfest.
big fat disclaimer: I'm about to start working at a competitor to DDG
However I've found that DDG has a really hard time when you have minor typos in your query, or when it includes really common words
When I type in semi-remembered song lyrics into Google, I'm usually able to find the song. I haven't had the same luck with DDG (one example of semi-remembered lyrics I tried to look up was "streetlight reflect piss streets". DDG doesn't give anything useful. If you add the word "lyrics" to the query, it gives you a list of maybe a dozen songs about lights and even some songs about urine, but not the one I was looking for. Even without adding the word lyrics, Google's first result is an infobox saying "Fat Cats, Bigga Fish|Song by The Coup", with the full lyrics and some links to listen to it.
I also had a hard time trying to look up info on DDG regarding Google employee benefits. Maybe that's intentional :)
At one point, the top search result for "Google vision plan" was a link to google.fr/maps (DDG actually gives some useful results now, but it didn't when I looked previously)
Another interesting query to compare for me was "subaru outback gate OR garage opener"
DDG just gives links to Lowes, Home Depot, Walmart, and other places to buy garage door/gate openers. The first Google result is a video for how to teach a Subaru Outback how to open a gate/garage (which is what I actually wanted). Maybe I'm just used to the level of vagueness that lets Google give me useful results, which isn't explicit enough for DDG?
I've been using DDG as main search engine for 3 years, results for my queries are usually on par with Google in private mode, but if you're looking for results in any other language than English or non-tech stuff it falls behind big G
Searches in German (and probably other languages than English too) are pretty fucking horrible.
But on English searches it's my preferred search engine. It's definitely good enough in 98% of all cases and there's always !g if everything else breaks.
So I definitely accept the language limitation. Especially since I know what to expect. The privacy focus more than balances this out.
What I do is to use multiple search engines and specialize my searches.
I use "smart keywords" [1], which work similarly to DuckDuckGo's !bangs [2] and most of the time I noticed that I know what the source I want is — if I want a Wikipedia article, I search with "@w" in front, if I'm searching for a dictionary definition, I search with a "@define", if I want to search for a location I search with "@maps", if I want a StackOverflow answer I search with "@so", etc, etc.
I have bookmarks for such search engines, neatly being synchronized between my Firefox instances (works on mobile too) and I got quite used to them. I prefer my own bookmarks, b/c I can always add custom stuff and b/c I don't want an extra round trip to DDG anyway.
Also DuckDuckGo is fine for English results, I often find that searches yielding bad results on DDG will often lead bad results on Google too. When not finding what I'm looking for, sometimes I search on Google too ("@g"), in order to double check. But you won't catch me searching for very personal stuff on Google — e.g. I'll never search for health advice on Google and even if DDG's results are bad, it's either that versus nothing at all.
I'm also not super strict — we do use Gmail and Google Docs at work and that's fine, but I do prefer native clients for Gmail too and I prefer text files in my Dropbox for my own notes. I also pay for YouTube Premium, because otherwise my son is getting exposed to ads, plus I watch YouTube anyway and I'd rather have the ads-free experience on every device I own.
Right and the TL;DR of my reply is — if I spend 5 mins on DDG or other websites, then I would have spent 5 mins on Google too, because in my experience Google's search results have degraded too — due to spam, plus I noticed the results further degrading after I toggled off the search history in my profile, but that's another discussion.
I find some programming related things hard to find in DDG. Most recently anything related to Deno. I've found some other esoteric corners of programming that are only surfaced with Google.
If I want to search Wikipedia, I just directly search Wikipedia. I have a browser search bar shortcut “w ” for exactly that. So I type “w firefox” and it takes me to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox directly. Similarly for many other sites I use regularly.
Really there’s no point in asking a middle man to do that for you, whether they claim to track you or not.
On the contrary, my experience is that I prefer the Google results even when I want to search in a site that has an internal search engine, such as Wikipedia, StackOverflow and Reddit. Both the formatting and the quality of the results are better in Google.
I was responding to the DDG bangs (e.g. @w) usage. A custom search shortcut is strictly better by achieving the same effect without a middle man.
When I actually need to search Wikipedia, Reddit etc. I do use Google. I only use shortcuts when I know they will take me directly to relevant result(s), e.g. with many Wikipedia pages for well-known subjects.
Which is very helpful because with Google, in spite of some available settings, it's impossible to know what kind of custom/localized results being served.
In DDG, I turn it on (mine is Germany toggle as well) for finding restaurants and local support sites, and turn it off when I search anything programming related. Works well so far. I used the infamous "!g" rarely in the last few months.
I've found Startpage ( https://startpage.com ) to be a good compromise -- it delivers Google search results but proxies it through their servers for privacy / less-Google-tracking.
Another handy thing is that Duckduckgo has a flag for it so you can search DDG first then just add '!s ' in front of your search terms to have the search done in Startpage instead.
Also useful thing for iPhone is to set the default search engine for Safari to DDG instead of Google -- I can just type '!s' before my search terms to get Google results without the tracking.
Search is a privacy vulnerability anyhow; the better it is the more information about yourself you must have surrendered.
Before good search was available the use of bookmarks and bookmark sharing was far more widespread, and discovering new content was somewhat of a social experience.
Great point. The SearX documentation addresses your concern here [1] I run my own, for myself only (via WireGuard). Its easy to set one up, for example with Docker [2]. However, I recommend to try it out first. A list of public instances is available here [3]. These lists include Tor entries (if you require anonimity, don't enable JS and use e.g. Tor Browser!), and also mention where they are hosted (if on clearweb). You can try it out there. That being said, one which seems safe (because of the people behind it) is [4]. At least safe to test it.
Wouldn't running a private instance be the same as directly queryint google? Like, it queries through the same IP you use, and can build a profile just using that.
The sluggishness with video streaming in Firefox on macOS might be because Firefox supports VP9 so those services will use it to save bandwidth but macOS doesn't provide an API for hardware decoding of VP9 so it happens in software. Safari only supports h264 so that's what gets used and goes through hardware decoding. You can try extensions like h264ify on Firefox (and Chrome) to make it use h264 too.
Strongly agree with your random observations. Something about Firefox on Mac is just incredibly slow at even basic things like switching tabs. This is on a higher end 2019 15" Macbook Pro. Whereas on Windows 10 it feels just as fast as Chrome.
It is good on Debian flavors of Linux too. I think the issues with Mac OS X are well known and have been worked on for a long time. It used to be image rendering in the past, and it is now other problems with rendering (transparent windows).
Microsoft used to be very big in highlighting how much more privacy-minded they are. This was a massage pushed to policy makers across the world, and very significantly in Europe. This stopped 100% with the launch of Windows 10; I assume this is because of all the metrics it collects (often unknown to or explicitly against users' wishes).
The only option for privacy-minded search seems to be to use one of the bing wrappers, most notably duckduckgo.
Care to elaborate? Anonymity is part of privacy, which is part of security.
Security is a multi-perspective problem. Often, false dichotomies are drawn to convince people to give up their own security in order to benefit someone else's security - eg saying "privacy versus security" as if they're in opposition, being personally disassembled and molested at the airport, "national security" in general, etc.
