ZeroCool

Ah, sorry, I guess I implied there's something nefarious going on with Startpage. But there isn't as far as I can tell. I just trust Mullvad more based on their track record. If you're happy using Startpage keep using it.

I've had good luck with searxng.site, but yeah, public instances aren't going to have the uptime and reliability of Google or DDG. Think of public instances as a test drive. You get a taste of what it can do but it's a much better ride when you self-host.

I just checked and it doesn't look like it (if you want to search for DDG bangs here's the link, just scroll down a bit.). But you could always just add Leta as a search engine in your browser preferences and set a keystroke for it. For example, type L into the URL bar then space and it'll use Leta for your query. (Note, I use Firefox, not sure if it's the same with Chromium based browsers).

For what it's worth, Mullvad recently opened up Leta to people without Mullvad VPN accounts. It's a google/brave search proxy so pretty much what Startpage claims to do, but I trust Mullvad to actually respect my privacy more than I do Startpage.

I haven't noticed any issues with the quality of DDG results, but if you feel the results are lackluster, you could try a metasearch engine like SearXNG. You can self-host it or use one of the many public instances maintained by the community. The main advantage, apart from the privacy focused aspect of the project, is that you can pull results from multiple search engines with a single query. It's highly customizable too. You can configure it exactly how you want.

Good. I'd prefer Mastodon get the influx of new users but anything is better than Twitter. My hope is that it may serve as a pit stop that gets less tech-inclined people acquainted with the concepts behind the fediverse before moving on to actual federated services. I've taken to calling Bluesky "Mastodon with training wheels." But that outlook is probably a bit optimistic. The majority will probably just stick with Bluesky.

Yes, and I explained why the phrase is worded the way it is because you clearly didn't understand.

You're too focused on the word "extraordinary" but all this adage is meant to convey is that claims require evidence. If you ignore the word "extraordinary" the point remains the same.

The phrase is popular among skeptics because we deal with a lot of paranormal claims. And paranormal claims are by definition, extraordinary.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, Trump says lots of things and contradicts them the very next day. We already went through four years of this stupid policy volatility during his first administration... Fuck. I'm so exhausted and it's only April of year 1.

True. Say what you will about prop comedy but Carrot Top didn't get famous because he was bad at it.

With that kind of naiveté it's remarkable he even has a business to lose, but sadly, I have no doubt he's every bit as stupid as he seems. I deal with a lot of very dumb small business owners in my own industry.