• 1 Post
  • 11 Comments
Joined 4 days ago
Cake day: March 14th, 2025
  • Luc@lemmy.worldtoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•What are inexpensive staples in your country?
    3·
    2 days ago

    The cross-section between high volume and easy to make

    • Vegan replacement products? Easier to make than animals, but low volume so it’s more expensive than it needs to be (and often in a higher tax bracket, classified as candy or whatever)
    • Eggs? Needs healthy animals
    • Bananas are clones of each other. Might become an issue at some point, might not. Apples, too, but there’s many more variants
    • Maize, tomatoes, potatoes? Grown by the bazillion, cheap, afaik needn’t be clones of each other to get (something close enough to) the desired product
    • Rice? The pre-boiled stuff is afaik around the same price as the raw product, that’s how large the volumes are
  • Luc@lemmy.worldtoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•DAE feel like DuckDuckGo is now just as good as google for the vast majority of searches?
    7·
    2 days ago

    Eyeing the replies, does not one other person here get results constantly flooded with content farms? They’ve gotten significantly worse

    But then, I don’t use Google so maybe this is still better than Google Search?

    It started maybe three years ago, around the same time as LLMs became usable for this, but I’m pretty sure >50% are human-written still. Probably the LLM generates the structure (saves any time they’d have to spend coming up with plausible-sounding texts) and someone from a low-income country is contracted to make it look more legit

    Of course, queries for topics that have a Wikipedia page get Wikipedia first, recipes get tons of big-name recipe sites, products get stores. But when there’s no obvious market around a topic, 3~4 out of 5 results are content farms pretending to have useful information to show unwary visitors ads

    (As an alternative, I still have to try Kagi properly. It seemed on par with DDG when I did a few searches last year, but then their payment processor refused me trying to load my account, support was unhelpful, and I’ve gotten sidetracked since)

  • Luc@lemmy.worldtoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•How many days can I go consuming only soylent?
    1·
    2 days ago

    The fictional version of it is apparently named after soy and lent (the religious fasting thing, I guess), TIL. But the real-world version literally has meal replacement in the Wikipedia page title. Was looking for a reference from the creator stating their goal but Wikipedia said unreferenced (at the time that I wrote the Dutch translation in 2014) that it’s supposed to be nutritionally complete. The English page was shortened considerably since then, dunno why but this part is gone. That’s how it started and was marketed though, so that’s what makes it that by definition in my mind. If they’ve strayed from their raison d’être, idk what they are anymore