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  • Reddit's search engine is notoriously awful, if I wanted to find something on Reddit I would Google it with site:reddit.com in the query, that gets great results.

    As for Tik Tok, isn't that a short video site? Its very popular and clearly good at what it does, but how can I search it for a Wikipedia article, or a rotten tomatoes review of a film I'm interested in, or bus timetables, or opening times for a local store, or helpful coding solutions, or wiring diagrams for circuits, or converting values or translating text, or any of the many, many more things I use Google for every day.

    On a personal note, while I've sold my soul to one or two major western corporations, I'm never going to willingly provide the Chinese government with any more information about me than it may already have. Certainly not about to start directly informing them of my searching or video watching habits.

    Nor will I ever support their genocides and many other human rights violations and evil cruelties if I can avoid it. Tik Tok isn't just some hip new app that's cool to use, it's an evil fascist government's tool for surveillance and control.

    Crazy thing is, I'm not even a conspiracy nut, I'm just citing a well known fact, and yet people keep using it anyway because they just don't care :-(

    • ……..genocides? That requires a fuckassload of elaboration. To my knowledge, which is an unfortunate amount, the modern Chinese state hasn’t engaged in anything which could be labled a genocide. The US state, however, is currently sanctioning (a lighter form but still a form/method of genocide) multiple nations for no reasons they can explain properly. Cuba being chief among them. Support of Israel and Saudi Arabia (and others) is also supporting genocide (of the Palestinians and the Yemenis respectively).

      China on the other hand, in the last couple decades, has been “accused” of “cultural genocide” an important word to note is cultural… they then made changes to the tactics of imprisoning Uyghurs, which is debatable how much/how bad it was to begin with, and basically all the stuff anyone could complain about in that respect has either been disproven or corrected. The US has absolutely no moral ground to stand on here though considering the historic and ongoing treatment of black and indigenous peoples in the US which are treated insanely far worse than anything ever accused of China in regards to the Uyghurs, which again, they stopped doing the spying and arresting/harassment shit once people complained. That’s kind of the difference between the US and China… China usually stops doing shitty shit when people call them out on it (if it was ever even shitty or real to begin with- many stories the US state dept tries to push (remember that balloon thing? Lmao) are straight up lies based on Sinophobia).

      It’s incredibly odd to criticize China, admit western nations have and are fucking you harder, but then still rail against China so hard. My advice: change what you can change. That means change the laws and the actions of the western government you live under. Once that is done THEN you can perhaps criticize foreign governments. Further advice: do so on things they’ve actually done, not made up or super exaggerated projections from the western state departments/media (same thing).

  • But reddit's search sucks!

    • I type my question in Google with reddit at the end. Then my lovely Firefox extension redirects me to the web archive version.

  • It's sad that search is in the state its in these days. It's harder to find useful or in-depth information. The first results are always someone who has used SEO to get to the top of the results to sell their product or just other garbage. If you really wanted to find people's opinions on things, adding site:reddit.com/r/whatevertopic to your search really was the best way.

    • I've been finding ChatGPT increasingly useful lately, both because ChatGPT is useful and because Google search feels like it's been in decline.

      I'm not a coder. At all. I probably have slightly better understanding than the average non-coder, but looking at code tends to make my eyes glaze over. I'm typically good with the logic of what I want to happen, but the syntax and simply knowing what functions are available are things I really struggle with.

      A few days ago, I decided I wanted to make a somewhat simple script. I spent several hours trying things, googling for solutions to the problems I encountered, and ultimately I got nowhere. Yesterday, I decided I should give ChatGPT a go. Not only did I get ChatGPT to write the entire script for me, with me just giving it prompts on what I wanted it to do, but it managed to explain pretty much everything it was doing - with answers tailored to my exact code. When things didn't work, it could speculate on why it might not have worked, and try alternative solutions.

      It was a fairly collaborative process. There were points where I could see things that ChatGPT hadn't caught, like certain lines of code that had become unnecessary after iterating, or that variables hadn't been defined properly, and I could point then out and it'd fix them.

      Using ChatGPT isn't entirely the same as googling for information, but I think you have to take a fairly similar approach with how you use both. Your language has to be precise and clear, you need to have an understanding of what output you want, and how to tailor your input to achieve that output. And you need to understand how to use the output it gives you - sometimes it'll be wrong, or only partial. Sometimes it'll require further steps to get the final result you're looking for.

      • Yeah ive heard that ChatGPT and the like are actually pretty good options for some things. Maybe i'll try them out some more. Thanks for the insight.

36 comments