this post was submitted on 05 May 2024
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Greentext

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This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.

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If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 66 points 6 months ago (3 children)

I don't even care if the results are good. I'm not about to use any part of RUnet.

[–] jeremyparker 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Honest question: why not? Facebook/Google/Microsoft are up to some disgusting shit, are their Russian counterparts significantly different?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 months ago

Privacy, for one thing. I don't use Google, Bing, Windows, or any Meta software*, and Yandex aren't much different.

Security, though, is another thing. I live in a NATO country, and I would imagine the Russian government are monitoring Yandex (and other RUnet services). Frankly, I think contributing any data to such a government would be against my interests.

There's also a lot of censorship on RUnet. Yeah, Google has that too, but Mojeek and Brave Search do not.

TL;DR: Google is data-hungry and supplies data to the NSA; Yandex is data-hungry and supplies data to the Kremlin; Mojeek and Brave Search are good; DDG and Startpage are the best for the average user.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

Yandex reverse image search often works considerably better than Google's.

And their translator too. I use it all the time for Latin. Google Translate was made mostly for Romance and Germanic languages, so it sucks at assigning the right case to Latin, and the word order is often a mess. Yandex was however made with Russian in mind, that is ~~syntactically~~ EDIT: grammatically* closer to Latin in those two aspects.

*case division is morphology in this case.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Oh you too are versed in the language of Romance?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Yes! Video related, that's me!

Serious now. It's just that I don't recall which Latin descendants Google supports, and I'm not going to check it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

I had 6 years of Latin in school and remember less than 1% of it. Talk about a waste of time. Bada bing bada boom shoulda learned Italian-English rather.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Sure. I'm not saying that Latin is useful for most people. It isn't; I don't expect most people to fuck around with Plautus, Cicero, Catullus etc. I'm saying that Yandex Translate is useful for me because of decent support for Latin, while Google offers better support for a handful of Latin descendants aka Romance languages (like Italian).

And it's mostly due to a coincidence - because the platform was made by Russian speakers and Russian happens to still keep a similar case system as Latin does.

(...anche parlo italiano, ma davvero per italiano non uso nessuno - se non so qualcosa uso dizionari. Dà meno lavoro.)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Fuhgeddaboudit

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Sounds a little suss. All the propaganda I see about Latin mentions its free word order.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Word order in Latin is only syntactically free. As in, if you change the word order, you aren't changing who did what. However, you're still changing the topic (whatever we were talking about) and comment (the new info that I'm adding in).

I'll give you an example:

  • Puer puellam amat - boy loves girl; but more like "the boy loves a girl".
  • Puellam puer amat - boy loves girl; but more like "a boy loves the girl".
  • Amat puer puellam - boy loves girl; but more like "speaking on love, the boy loves a girl" (hard to convey in English).

Note how I used articles to convey roughly the same meaning in English. That's because what Latin is doing with the word order is not too unlike what English does with articles. Sure, you can use "the boy", "a boy", or simply "boy", it won't change the basic meaning, but it's still not "random".

And guess which language happens to use a similar system? Russian. The only major difference is that by default (i.e. you aren't focusing on any element), Latin would put the verb at the end and Russian in the middle; but it's the same variability.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 months ago (2 children)

I can't use Yandex as it just makes me complete endless capchas

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago (1 children)
[–] jeremyparker 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Does that mean it should have its time wasted? Anti-robot bigotry is at an all time high and I, for one, think it's time for change.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Found another one.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

It’s a little less awful when you’re not on a VPN, but even if it had twice as many captchas, it’s reverse image search is so much better than Google’s and Bing’s how that it’d still be worth it.

Also consider Tineye.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 months ago

Russian search engine