sga

TL;DR - why do we need so many terms? can we all not use just a simplified pronoun system (as explained below, or if someone else comes up with something better), and can we stop adding a sexual preferences as a part of gender, as that is something too personal in my opinion?

I primarily want to understand how it relates to a person's identity.

Before starting, let me partially introduce myself. I am a male, and If I get my terms correctly, I am possibly Aero Ace. I am (possibly) coming of a privilige that my percieved gender identity is same as that of what I accept myself to be. Also, I have not read any literature or watched much content about this stuff. I am not asking anything about why would someone have a "different gender". I just want to understand how it relates to you as a being.

And before going ahead, I am not sure gender is the best word or not. If it is not, please correct me. And I am sorry in advance in case I say stupid or bizzare or straght wrong stuff. Please forgive me if possible.

Also I am quite ramble-y, so reading and understanding what I write may be hard, or non-sensical, so pardon me for that too.

My first question is, why do we have so many terms? I know the answer is somewhat obvious, that everyone has there own preferences, and it may not align with someone else, so to identify themselves, they would get a different label. (kinda like names, if everyone had same names, it would cause confusion) But I also want to ask, Is using a label not somewhat alienating?

Try to understand my perspective, I have almost never mentioned my gender to anyone. Possibly it is because my "attire" says it. Or maybe it is because I am not a very social person, or the fact that I have never had a "personal" conversation with some other person. My general conversational idea is how it goes with siblings - slightly informal, a lot of stupid slander, and jokey stuff, and the actual stuff. If someone comes to me, and mentions there gender, I kinda do not know how to process it. because as I understand, 1 part of gender ideentity is what "orientation" (sorry if it is a bad way to put it, but I want to mean how they dress, or how they want to adressed as) and another is sexual preferences. I understand that If I know there gender, I can atleast address them as they prefer (also I do not know how to do it in general. I am an old school guy, I use they/them/their for people older than me (as a form of honorification), with small children (it is somewhat amusing, and also children like it when they get respeect) and whenever I do not know what gender a person is, or how does that gender prefered to be addressed). But this gave me the thought, that why do we not use the same pronouns for everyone (for example they/them), or maybe 2 pairs, one for formal, one informal, or 1 more pair, for singular and plural. Why do pronouns have to depend on gender?

The second part is sexual prefernces. I do not know much about sex or sexual preferences. I am a young adult, and have not had to know about this for any person that I have met yet. I have never had the interest to know about this for someone, neither have I retained this information. I understand that if you are looking out for partner/s, then you would have to share this, so we would have to use some words for it. But why do we have to keep this as a part of gender. As in, why would I want to share this information with my governments (who do census), or for my visa applications. Should this not just be something personal?

I understand that one reason to have some words for it is inclusivity. If, for example, we want some group to better assimilate with society, and we want to do some "positive discrimination" (I do not know if this is appropriate wording or not, what I mean is for example, reservations, or some other kind of actions to integrate some people in society), then we would need some terms to make rules with. And that makes sense, but then again I feel that revealing your preferences is a bit too revealing. Am I overblowing this? I also understand that completely ditching the sexual part from gender might not be possible today. It would probably require a more accepting society. For example, in most places, gay marriage is still illegal. I do not know why laws have to have laws defining marriage (it may have something to do with subsidies going for marriages, or definitions of families/spouse being used by insurance companies or any other banking system, where your spouse also gets certain benefits/rights), or gay adoption is illegal, but can we not make something like - any reasonable person/s can adopt anyone (where reasonable part is just to maybe seculde criminals, or people with prior histories of child related offences, or if they are not financially stable - but all this is very separate discussion)

If a person tells me their gender, how should I react/respond to it? Is my current line of actions appropriate (just address them with their preferd pronouns, and if I do not know that, use they/them; completely ignore the sexual part of it)

Another thing that I want to ask is, why do some groups use different acronyms? I remeber hearing about this the first time, and the word used was LGBT. Then I heard LGBTQ, then LGBTQIA+, and today I heard LGBTQ2. I presume that since more people are getting aware, and they are trying to express themselves, they need some newer words, and hence the acronym would keep on evolving, if so, is it not a endless exercise? Am I being insensitive If I use one over other (for quite some time, I have been sticking with lgbtqia+, in hope that + means extensions, as in, others, so hopefully it is less excluding than others, but if that is not the case, please correct me.)

edit - moved my summary to the top as tl;dr

Most people either use google as their search engine, or one of the "privacy friendly ones" (ddg, qwant, brave, startpage, ...), or use self hosted or publicly available metasearch engines, like searxng, or whoogle, etc.

This websites lists out websites which have their own indexes, and which depend on big providers.

Why YSK?

It is good for your privacy to not use a big provider like google, which now prefers to serve you ai generated ssummaries, which are based on a few giant websites, and this is not good for a open web.

I am also a person who almost always uses "(insert query) reddit" to get better results, because I mostly do not want SEO spam, and reddit results used to be human generated content. Now even that is hit and miss. Also, reddit made a deal with google, so for newer results from reddit, you can only get them from google.

Then we have the "privacy friendly ones" which most of the time are wrappers for other bigger indexes, for example ddg famously uses bing, brave "suppliments" (read this suppliments as almost always) it's results from google, startpage is basically a google frontend, etc. Brave, qwant, and few others also claim to have their own indexes, but they are small and not rich as google and bing. Also, wwhen you think about it - what is their business model - how do they get money for the search apis - most either serve adds or have some form of tracking. Also, bing has "kinda" closed it's search api (not really clear about this), so many of these privacy friendly options will have to either switch to google, or only serve using their indexes.

Meta-search engines kinda seem like better options, as you can run searxng on your own machine, or use the public ones, but it still has problems. You are still bringing the big providers traffic, which makes their advertisement clients happier and prefer them over smaller search engines. If you use a public instance, then it is good for your privacy, but the public instance would now generate a lot traffic, and often get banned or rate limited, and hence you can not rely on them. If you use your personal instances (I did this for a long time), you will still be tracked as your IP is still visible. You avoid their annoying ui and popups but still are tracked.

So what should you use?

You can only decide this. I would prefer something which has a reasonable business model - if they do advertisement, that should ideally be non tracking. Ideally their client and server code should be foss (so you can verify their claims), or have paid plans or apis if you do not want ads.

For example, Kagi has only paid plans, but I do not prefer or use them, because they are expensive (5 dollars for 300 searches per month or something similar. I am from one of third world countries, and 5 dollars is a lot. plus 300 searches seem less to me) but that is subjective, and your privacy has a price, so this is not neccessarily a objectively bad thing. But their code is closed source, and they do not completely use their own indexes.

I have also used Mullvad's Leta search engine for about a month, and they are now effectively frontends for brave search or google (you can choose). Their business plan initially was that Leta was only available to their VPN clients, and VPN subscription would supplement the search cost. Now they have it available for free, so I do not really understand their business plan (maybe the number of clients they have is large enough, and number of leta users is small, that they can afford to run leta for loss, and maybe as possible advertisement for mullvad. Mullvad to me is a good privacy centric company. I am not their client, but they seem to be trust worthy. You can try them, but you would still support some big provider.

You can also try the independent search providers listed in the article. They are often small, serve bad (subjectively speaking; your taste regarding search engines is also heavily tuned to google like results because of years of exposure to it) results, but using them also supports open web (you would often find that these smaller providers do not have good indexes for big websites, and sometimes it is intentional, sometimes it is a byproduct of them being careful, or the websites banning/rate limiting then).

I have now started trying stract, and will try others too. You should also consider trying some independent search engines.

In my personal case - I have a offline setup where I have large sections of wikipedia and a few other websites (like programning language docs, or my favorite manga wiki, will be adding much of stack overflow soon) available offline, and I use my custon launcher to search through them (faster then searching them online). I bookmark a lot of sites (~ 2000) and do this to stop searching the same stuff over and over again. This has reduced at least 30-40% of all my searches. But I still need a search engine for anything I do not have currently, or stuff I do not/ can not get. I am trying stract, because it is open source, they seen to have some fine plans for business in future (non tracking, current search term related ads or subscription service ; currenlty they are running on previous funding from nlnet); search results are acceptable (not good, but servicable); and finally - it is written in RUST (I an a rust fan). I am not affiliated with the project, but just spreading a good word because I just found them, and could not find much online.

PS: I am not used to writing much, and not a good typist. Please forgive the brevity. Feel free to correct me, both on spellings and content

Most people either use google as their search engine, or one of the "privacy friendly ones" (ddg, qwant, brave, startpage, ...), or use self hosted or publicly available metasearch engines, like searxng, or whoogle, etc.

This websites lists out websites which have their own indexes, and which depend on big providers.

Why YSK?

It is good for your privacy to not use a big provider like google, which now prefers to serve you ai generated ssummaries, which are based on a few giant websites, and this is not good for a open web.

I am also a person who almost always uses "(insert query) reddit" to get better results, because I mostly do not want SEO spam, and reddit results used to be human generated content. Now even that is hit and miss. Also, reddit made a deal with google, so for newer results from reddit, you can only get them from google.

Then we have the "privacy friendly ones" which most of the time are wrappers for other bigger indexes, for example ddg famously uses bing, brave "suppliments" (read this suppliments as almost always) it's results from google, startpage is basically a google frontend, etc. Brave, qwant, and few others also claim to have their own indexes, but they are small and not rich as google and bing. Also, wwhen you think about it - what is their business model - how do they get money for the search apis - most either serve ads or have some form of tracking. Also, bing has "kinda" closed it's search api (not really clear about this), so many of these privacy friendly options will have to either switch to google, or only serve using their indexes.

Meta-search engines kinda seem like better options, as you can run searxng on your own machine, or use the public ones, but it still has problems. You are still bringing the big providers traffic, which makes their advertisement clients happier and prefer them over smaller search engines. If you use a public instance, then it is good for your privacy, but the public instance would now generate a lot traffic, and often get banned or rate limited, and hence you can not rely on them. If you use your personal instances (I did this for a long time), you will still be tracked as your IP is still visible. You avoid their annoying ui and popups but still are tracked.

So what should you use?

You can only decide this. I would prefer something which has a reasonable business model - if they do advertisement, that should ideally be non tracking. Ideally their client and server code should be foss (so you can verify their claims), or have paid plans or apis if you do not want ads.

For example, Kagi has only paid plans, but I do not prefer or use them, because they are expensive (5 dollars for 300 searches per month or something similar. I am from one of third world countries, and 5 dollars is a lot. plus 300 searches seem less to me) but that is subjective, and your privacy has a price, so this is not neccessarily a objectively bad thing. But their code is closed source, and they do not completely use their own indexes.

I have also used Mullvad's Leta search engine for about a month, and they are now effectively frontends for brave search or google (you can choose). Their business plan initially was that Leta was only available to their VPN clients, and VPN subscription would supplement the search cost. Now they have it available for free, so I do not really understand their business plan (maybe the number of clients they have is large enough, and number of leta users is small, that they can afford to run leta for loss, and maybe as possible advertisement for mullvad. Mullvad to me is a good privacy centric company. I am not their client, but they seem to be trust worthy. You can try them, but you would still support some big provider.

You can also try the independent search providers listed in the article. They are often small, serve bad (subjectively speaking; your taste regarding search engines is also heavily tuned to google like results because of years of exposure to it) results, but using them also supports open web (you would often find that these smaller providers do not have good indexes for big websites, and sometimes it is intentional, sometimes it is a byproduct of them being careful, or the websites banning/rate limiting then).

I have now started trying stract, and will try others too. You should also consider trying some independent search engines.

In my personal case - I have a offline setup where I have large sections of wikipedia and a few other websites (like programning language docs, or my favorite manga wiki, will be adding much of stack overflow soon) available offline, and I use my custon launcher to search through them (faster then searching them online). I bookmark a lot of sites (~ 2000) and do this to stop searching the same stuff over and over again. This has reduced at least 30-40% of all my searches. But I still need a search engine for anything I do not have currently, or stuff I do not/ can not get. I am trying stract, because it is open source, they seen to have some fine plans for business in future (non tracking, current search term related ads or subscription service ; currenlty they are running on previous funding from nlnet); search results are acceptable (not good, but servicable); and finally - it is written in RUST (I an a rust fan). I am not affiliated with the project, but just spreading a good word because I just found them, and could not find much online.

PS: I am not used to writing much, and not a good typist. Please forgive the brevity. Feel free to correct me, both on spellings and content

For me, fitgirl installer does not work with wow64 (where you do not have to install 32 bit libraries). I had earlier also tried with wine-wow64 package from chaotic aur repo, and it did not used to work back then, and now arch linux has made the default wine package wow64 version. This has benefits (smaller package size, you can disable mulitlib repo, etc), but now installer does not work. It gets stuck as soon as any decompression is about to begin. And to me not much is clear. My guess is the freearc compression that fitgirl uses, its decompressor does nto work in wow64. Has anyone else tried for whom it works? Maybe I have to add a separate dll for this and create a override. Fitgirl faq does not mention it (probably since wow64 is still relatively new).

If this is not a right community for this, then sorry, I do not know of a better one. (wine team would not handle requests related to pirated installers, fitgirl or related communities in general do not do linux much, and of them, only a small fraction would be using wow64)

For testing purposes, You can grab almost any installer, I went and sorted by size (smallest first) and got it, and it does not work. (I am not going to provide link here for somewhat obvious reasons)

lemm.ee instance is shutting down of 30th june, so we would have to migrate to some other instance. form more information, please check !meta@lemm.ee

For more context look at the following posts

Look up what "Uplifting" means - https://lemmy.world/post/30071584

also I made a post some time back - https://lemmy.world/post/28597945

For voting - I will not use the post upvotes and downvotes as the vote, and instead, vote on the comments which are highlighted (spoken as moderator, in case your ui does not show them differently, just sort the comments by oldest).

This will essentially remove the votes of people who did not bother reading this line (I have no problem with someone being busy, and one may not have time to read) but someone who just reads titles and moves on is not really even caring about what community a post came from, and may just treat it is a post from news community. This is inspired somewhat by someones comment of thee first linked post, where they said they upvoted stuff but did not pay attention to what community they belonged to (I am not hating on them, actually it is great of them to admit what they did, which in itself is not wrong).

Ask anything you would consider too vague or too stupid. It is not supposed to be very refined or thought through, it can as well be a string of random symbols, just tell us how to read them. Consider it a very serious questions community, where questions most definitely are not serious, or the other way round. WE APPRECIATE ABSURDISM. WE APPRECIATE CREATIVITY. WE THRIVE ON ANSWERING GENUINE CURIOSITY!

These could be questions which you think a 5 year or 10 year old would ask, but you are not 5/10 year old and you don't have anybody to ask.

Rules:

• Standard Netiquette reference - TL;DR - just be civil

• Lemmy Instance Guidelines - TL;DR - just be civil

• Post format is simple - it should be a question. You can add additional context to your delight, for example, what do you expect the answer to be, or how do you think one should try to answer it. Questions can be any any language (preferably english) but do what you like, just tag the post appropriately (you can select language while creating post). NSFW is fine as well, but please tag appropriately.

• Stupid in a general sense - Ideally questions should not be stupid because they use fancy words. For example, if someone asks - why do we not use ferritic steels in cold temperatures? This question is stupid to all metaallurgy people because almost all of them know of ductile to brittle transition. But how many of us are metallurgists? (or have taken some crystal structure courses). They can be niche, we are not against questions that only some of us understand, but if you think the questions are too specific, give us additional context. WE ARE WELL SERVING SERVERS!

• Academic Integrity - try to answer questions just the best way you can. if you think a alphabet is good, just do it, if you think.

• New Rules maybe added in future - to which all of you also agree to while creating any post. YOU MUST OBEY A CONTRACT INDEFINITELY. BY POSTING/COMMENTING, YOU ARE CONSIDERED TO BE AGREEING THIS CONTRACT. IF YOU FAIL TO UPHOLD TO THE CONTRACT, YOU SHALL SACRIFICE YOUR FIRST BORN CHILD OR BEAR THE CONSEQUENCES OF ENRAGING THE GODS WHO SHALL PUT A CURSE OPEN THOU (or the subsequent ones in case you already sacrificed one, we are accepting in that sense, we would not be cursing your lineage/subsequent lives and stuff. If you do not have kids, then have them. The kid should be born or Feb 29 of any year, and must be 32 years and 42 days old at the time of sacrifice. Please do remember to contact us for the birthday parties, we can bring the best food and entertainment (rated the 17th best party organiser, by my friends list of - best birthday organisers who were born on 29th feb). Also, most of the blessed servants of god (read moderators) are very kind, and can "pardon" your crimes, for appropriate gifts).

(Cross posting from !stupid_questions@lemmings.world https://lemmings.world/post/25535229)

A brand new sentence is a sentence which we consider to have never been spoken or written, or thought of (at least the ones which are not recorded). And just swapping a noun with another noun (for example a name of a place or person) while may techinically be considered new sentence, it is not really matching the spirit of brand new sentence.

for the linguists, can you try to come up with a better estimate (better than just coming up (all the words)^(to the power average sentence length)). Maybe by using the description of using different forms of verbs (like we consider in NLP) (verbs which take DP, CP), then adding standard adjectives and finish with remaining grammar (sorry if I am getting it all wrong, it has been a while since I took my intro to linguistics class). Also, consider a morpheme less form. This exercise is for a more realistic guess.

A brand new sentence is a sentence which we consider to have never been spoken or written, or thought of (at least the ones which are not recorded). And just swapping a noun with another noun (for example a name of a place or person) while may techinically be considered new sentence, it is not really matching the spirit of brand new sentence.

for the linguists, can you try to come up with a better estimate (better than just coming up (all the words)^(to the power average sentence length)). Maybe by using the description of using different forms of verbs (like we consider in NLP) (verbs which take DP, CP), then adding standard adjectives and finish with remaining grammar (sorry if I am getting it all wrong, it has been a while since I took my intro to linguistics class). Also, consider a morpheme less form. This exercise is for a more realistic guess.

Ask anything you would consider too vague or too stupid. It is not supposed to be very refined or thought through, it can as well be a string of random symbols, just tell us how to read them. Consider it a very serious questions community, where questions most definitely are not serious, or the other way round. WE APPRECIATE ABSURDISM. WE APPRECIATE CREATIVITY. WE THRIVE ON ANSWERING GENUINE CURIOSITY!

These could be questions which you think a 5 year or 10 year old would ask, but you are not 5/10 year old and you don't have anybody to ask.

Rules:

• Standard Netiquette reference - TL;DR - just be civil

• Lemmy Instance Guidelines - TL;DR - just be civil

• Post format is simple - it should be a question. You can add additional context to your delight, for example, what do you expect the answer to be, or how do you think one should try to answer it. Questions can be any any language (preferably english) but do what you like, just tag the post appropriately (you can select language while creating post). NSFW is fine as well, but please tag appropriately.

• Stupid in a general sense - Ideally questions should not be stupid because they use fancy words. For example, if someone asks - why do we not use ferritic steels in cold temperatures? This question is stupid to all metaallurgy people because almost all of them know of ductile to brittle transition. But how many of us are metallurgists? (or have taken some crystal structure courses). They can be niche, we are not against questions that only some of us understand, but if you think the questions are too specific, give us additional context. WE ARE WELL SERVING SERVERS!

• Academic Integrity - try to answer questions just the best way you can. if you think a alphabet is good, just do it, if you think.

• New Rules maybe added in future - to which all of you also agree to while creating any post. YOU MUST OBEY A CONTRACT INDEFINITELY. BY POSTING/COMMENTING, YOU ARE CONSIDERED TO BE AGREEING THIS CONTRACT. IF YOU FAIL TO UPHOLD TO THE CONTRACT, YOU SHALL SACRIFICE YOUR FIRST BORN CHILD OR BEAR THE CONSEQUENCES OF ENRAGING THE GODS WHO SHALL PUT A CURSE OPEN THOU (or the subsequent ones in case you already sacrificed one, we are accepting in that sense, we would not be cursing your lineage/subsequent lives and stuff. If you do not have kids, then have them. The kid should be born or Feb 29 of any year, and must be 32 years and 42 days old at the time of sacrifice. Please do remember to contact us for the birthday parties, we can bring the best food and entertainment (rated the 17th best party organiser, by my friends list of - best birthday organisers who were born on 29th feb). Also, most of the blessed servants of god (read moderators) are very kind, and can "pardon" your crimes, for appropriate gifts).

Answer Questions never been answered before (probably because they have never been asked)

Before beginning, I know this is not apprpriate question, and there may be better places to ask these questions. I also know that I as a mod am kinda abusing my powers 9not pinning the post, but still breaking the 1 important rule - to post a uplifting news, and this post is neither upliftiing nor a news. I also do not know how it is decided in other communities, I am a relatively new mod, so I do not know how to act in certain situations. But by the powers that have been vested to me by the gods (previous mods), I want to ask a lot of questions.

Also for the time being, lets say the world has 2 major groups, martians, and venusians, there are other minority groups too, but if funded govts can not bother to listen to them, how can i, a under paid corrupt mod do that. (/s just in case people do not get it).

What I am basically asking is, is please help me make a 'constitution' (for the galactic rulings, obviously) on how should I (or maybe others if they choose to accept it) moderate, certain galaxy.

More seriously, please help discuss democratically, what should be the rules. To you questions may seem to have obvious answers, they did to me too, but what was not obvious, that different people have different obvious things (mind blown /s). And you all will get a chance to be "immortalized" by getting your name in the constitution drafting committee.

• What deserves a deletion of content (a comment or a post)?

-> my current understanding -> anything that breaks obvious rules. Lets say a martian, non sarcastically says - all venusianns are morons, illeterate wild animals who do not deserve to live. I would consider this as hate speech, and delete it. If someone posts something nsfw, but does not mark it appropriately, i should delete it. But what if someone posts something stupid - lets say someone thinks venusians have seven legs, when they actually have 4, and say, i want all 7 legged venusians to die. What should i do - should i upvote it, considering it is a attempt at humor, and support them, or delete it since they are still killing "hypothetical" venusians, or ignore them (that is what i have been doing right now for some reports)

• what deserves a ban?

-> similar to prior, so not explaining any further. Sometime back, i had a discussion with another mod, that we should have a strike system - something like, post hate speech 3 times, or something alike, then we ban, because you were given ample chances to figure out that you are doing something wrong (there comments would still be deleted, they would still get the downvote beating, just not a instant ban)

these questions were general, and not community specific, but following are

there are going to be lots of situations, to which you have to vote yes or no, is it uplifting or not (you are welcome to write 20 para replies too, but atleast 1 letter is required, something like 1 y, 2 n)

1. a female dog gave birth to ten little cubs

2a) cure to cancer has been found, and the researchers have patented it, and selling it for 1 million usd (for each patient) (and i know there is no 1 single cure to cancer, consider a hypothetical situation)

2b) cure to cancer has been found, and they make it free for all

3a) linux market share grows by 5 times, used by 30% of desktop users

3b) microsoft windows is now open source

3c) apple makes all their hardware designs open

Also, for the following part - any resemblence to reality is purely coincedental and unintended, i do not even live in mars or venus to know much about their politics. 4) (this question requires context) - We all know about the martian leader, he is currently leading everyone, some martians love him, others are ok with him, but he absolutely hates all venusians, and does not even acknowledge existence of saturnians, and calls them confused folk (because saturnians wear rings on them). He lies, he robs, he takes away the very last saved bite you keep while eating the food (the best bite™).

4a) the martian leader is defeated in a peaceful manner

4b) the martian leader has been taken down in a millitary coup

4c1) people march to martian leaders door, and he leaves under pressure

4c2) people march to martian leaders door, and he leaves after a bit of riot (a "few" people become "martyrs")

4d) the martian leader today opened amusement park

4e) the martian leader finds cure to cancer, and makes it free

4f1) martian leader is sad because his house has been a lot less "dusty" lately (he loves sand, because it coarse, rough, and gets everywhere)

4f2) martian leader is sad because his house has been a lot more "dusty" lately (he hates sand, because it coarse, rough, and gets everywhere)

4g) he is sad because his dog died

4f) he is sad because his business is making less profits.

I will not reveal my answers here, not to bias you people, but i would leave my general strategy in the spoilers section below