💾 Archived View for midnight.pub › replies › 8783 captured on 2024-08-25 at 05:41:22. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2024-08-18)
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It's been a long while since I last used search engines. It was even before the dawn of LLMs that the results thrown by search engines wouldn't work for me anymore, their content being watered-down and always aimed at complete noobs, the layout infested with ads, pop-ups, and burdened by megabytes of javascript -or god knows what- causing them to take solid minutes to load, only to immediately block the site with an overlay asking you to accept all cookies, subscribe to their newsletter, remove adblockers, whatever; it's like they thought it was a "good practice" to get in the way of the viewer as obtrusively as possible.
It is so that I haven't really been a witness to the pages written by AI all over the place, but I figued that would be the case. Long ago I turned to books, and while books are a less direct way to learn about a subject (you have to find good book that fits your needs, you have to browse it or read through it, and ultimately the information in the book will not replace practice!), it has shielded me from having to expose myself to this shitty state of affairs. Of course by books I mean pdfs I download on libgen and z-lib.
I also saw a post somewhere sometime disavowing search engines, suggesting instead that we learn about interesting sites by "word of mouth", which is what I've been doing. Instead of looking up something on a search engine, I travel the network of sites that I already know of in search for recommendations of sites for the things that I need. In the most desperate case I could look for a discord server on the topic, join it, and directly ask for resources there. For stuff that requires more visual aid, I usually go to youtube. I recently went in looking for videos on how to go harpoon fishing. In any event, I safely circumvent the need to use a search engine to look up stuff, a practice that hasn't returned any useful results for a long time, anyway.
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I suggest you find yourself as many local, hardy species that you *see* are resistance to hail and plague. Look around, there ought to be plenty. I thankfully don't get any hail over here, quite the contrary, the sun can be too harsh. So I get the most hardy plants that do well on their own here, and let them occupy all the spaces. I can then use them to protect other plants that may be less resistant to the environment.
Don't lose hope!