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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • this is straight up nonsense. we get into orbit just fine, ISS has been operating for decades. Going beyond that is only a matter of political will, not a limit of tech or engineering. In fact they are working on Artemis to go back to the moon right now, and Mars after that.

    and i actually disagree with the person above that we can go to mars right now. there are issues they need to figure out, but they are solvable problems. This isn’t like cold fusion that is 30 years away from being 30 years away.

    also boeing isn’t representative of the aerospace industry or even just NASA. They are mismanaged and negligent. they can’t even build airplanes, never mind spacecraft.





  • This would be a major issue, because DDG specifically claims it does not store any identifying information about you.

    https://duckduckgo.com/privacy

    I had a search saved from some months ago, went to check it for some references and got new hits involving local organizations that had nothing to do with the search. Opening up a private browser I see that the searches aren’t 100% matching up either.

    my guess is this is just variation in the search algorithms over time. excerpt from their privacy policy above which I think can explain most of the variability you mentioned:

    “For example, we may know that we got a lot of searches for “cute cat pictures” today, but we don’t know who actually performed those searches. That is, viewing search results on DuckDuckGo is anonymous. And we only save these anonymous search queries — completely disconnected from any unique identifiers like IP addresses — for just enough time to analyze anonymous trends like popular searches, so that we can better serve you. For local search results in particular, we’ve further engineered a solution to shield your precise location from us and our content providers that sends us a random location nearish to you, which we also never log to disk.”

    So they do use your geo IP and popular searches to weigh results which can change over time.


  • However, after seeing TV ads for DDG not that long ago I kind of lost what faith I had left in them. As a rule of thumb, I’ve never trusted products and services advertised on TV - TV advertising is expensive, and the business expects to make that expense back and then some from their customers.

    DDG doesn’t claim to be non-profit or anything. Their business model is based on revenue from advertising targeted solely from the search queries themselves, not from stored personal data.











  • I’m on mastodon, but the problem is none of the people I want to follow are (mostly sports press). for now I am relying on bots who just repost their stuff from twitter, and sometimes they go down for long periods of time. at this rate I’m not sure mastodon will ever take off for what I used twitter for.

    And threads is equally shitty, or worse than twitter. I begrudgingly signed up for an instagram account to try it, followed a few people, then my feed was crammed full of instagram catfish and sad ass middle aged dudes asking for dates. I get that they’re trying to hook you with algorithms, but in the process they’ve made the service literally unusable.