this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2024
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From time to time I find a dive into the Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy useful for refreshing my memory on some ideas and concepts.

Also the MDN Learning Area is really useful for getting a handle on some web development details.

What others are you fond of, whether esoteric or exoteric*?

*one of my other favorites is any sort of thesaurus that provides antonyms, 'cause some antonyms just aren't as commonly used!

🀞 this federates properly this time (sorry if the old post eventually emerges, I initially posted this shortly after the Lemmy update kinda threw a wrench in things across instances)

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[–] steventhedev@lemmy.world 46 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (7 children)

Whatever you do, make sure that you learn legally and avoid those horrible sites that steal the hard work of researchers and prevent publishers from properly incentivizing academic research by allowing just anyone to download research for free. You know, horrible sites like LibGen, SciHub, or Anna's archive.

Totally disgusting sites that you should definitely avoid.

[–] centof@lemm.ee 24 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Do not go to sci-hub.se! Can you believe someone had the audacity to allow access to government funded research papers for free? Everyone knows that only elite institutions deserve the benefits of publicly funded projects.

Support your local capitalist by paying them for the content they rightfully stole.

[–] steventhedev@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago

I forgot about that one, thank you!

[–] Glitch777@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago

based comment right here

[–] Deceptichum@kbin.social 13 points 10 months ago

Oh that sounds horrible, thank you for letting me know where to avoid as I had no idea.

As a quick reminder to everyone: Researchers have to pay to get their papers published in scientific journals. They receive no money back from those journals. The journals are all double-dipping by charging both the author and the reader to use them. It isn’t stealing from researchers when researchers don’t get paid for your usage regardless.

In fact, one of the most ethical ways to get access to research papers is to go to journals, find the author(s) of the paper you want to read, and email them directly to politely ask for a copy. They’ll gladly send it to you for free, because they also hate the journal system that they’ve been forced into using.

[–] stackPeek@lemmy.world 5 points 10 months ago

As an information, you can always rely on the wikipedia page for those sites to find the up-to-date domain, so you can avoid it at all cost!!

[–] plactagonic@sopuli.xyz 1 points 10 months ago

Our teacher show us exactly how to access scihub, libgen and sites like this just for us to "avoid them".

[–] minyakcurry@monyet.cc 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I struggle to find recent publications on SciHub, y'know, to report them to the hardworking journals that tirelessly implemented paywalls.

Any ideas how I can find papers that are within the past 6 months?

[–] steventhedev@lemmy.world 6 points 10 months ago

Honestly - if it's a specific article, then just email the author. Unless they're a blowhard they'll usually be happy to shoot off a copy of the final PDF or at least a preprint. Doubly so if you're a grad student and say how excited you are about their research.

[–] the_stat_man@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago

Whoever set up these sites should be ashamed of themselves. How dare they make critical knowledge that can improve humanity freely available?

[–] RozhkiNozhki@lemmy.world 18 points 10 months ago

Khan Academy is full of awesomeness.

[–] kubica@kbin.social 16 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Sometimes I get curious and search the origin of words at https://www.etymonline.com/

[–] Evkob@lemmy.ca 1 points 10 months ago

I swear 3/4 of the times I use a search engine is just "[random word] etymology", learning the origin and evolution of words and language is so fascinating.

It's straying close to Wikipedia, but Wiktionary is a useful resource as well.

[–] ace_garp@lemmy.world 12 points 10 months ago

Here are some:

lifesciencedb.jp/bp3d ( human body parts in 3D )

plosone.org ( peer reviewed scientific journal )

gutenberg.net.au ( ebooks )

librivox.org ( audiobooks )

More general:

instructables.com ( DIY projects )

en.wikivoyage.org (travel guide)

foodista.com ( food recipes )

[–] axefaire@lemmy.world 10 points 10 months ago (1 children)

My public library card works with Overdrive, so I use that to download ebooks and audiobooks

[–] StereoTrespasser@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago

Seriously. Every time I see a post like this my first thought is to tell OP to go to the library. They will have a huge list of online resources that you can access for free with your card number.

[–] jxk@sh.itjust.works 9 points 10 months ago

https://www.openstreetmap.org/ – geography

https://www.orchidroots.com/ – official orchid names, and pictures

and the sister projects of Wikipedia, in particular:

https://en.wiktionary.org/ – dictionary

https://en.wikisource.org/ – old books (also in other languages)

https://en.wikivoyage.org/ – touristic information

https://species.wikimedia.org/ – species

You said "beyond Wikipedia", but I will also mention that Wikipedia in other languages is an excellent resource to learn a language.

[–] shinigamiookamiryuu@lemm.ee 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Warning: Do not go to TV Tropes unless you have a lot of time to burn, and enjoy having 97 nearly identical tabs open at the same time.

https://edu.gcfglobal.org/

I give this link to anyone I know who struggles with tech literacy, and I've learned some things myself from some of the more advanced lessons. And it's all free.

[–] droning_in_my_ears@lemmy.world 5 points 10 months ago

If you wanna read research there's scihub. There's also clinicaltrials.gov and retractionwatch.com.

[–] Ulvain@sh.itjust.works 5 points 10 months ago

The Khan Academy is absolutely phenomenal for Math

[–] padge@lemmy.zip 5 points 10 months ago

I don't think I would have graduated college without Khan Academy. For coding, MDN, Geeks4Geeks and W3Schools are also great.

[–] sour@kbin.social 5 points 10 months ago
[–] centof@lemm.ee 4 points 10 months ago

Poe.com is great for all manner of learning through a chatbot. It's got like a dozen different models that are great for answering natural human questions. You know like the one's you used to be able to answer through a web search without wading through pages of BS that don't actually answer the question. You might consider double checking it with a search engine or a different model to help cut out on any hallucinations it occasionally has.

It's also got some image generators to play around with, but they aren't really useful for learning.

[–] sturlabragason@lemmy.world 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

I like to use GPT4 as a tutor.

It needs to be told to be factual and quote it's sources, but man is it awesome to have it explain complex things in ways that I can easily grasp them.

This is not to be confused with GPT3.5 which is like a toy, while GPT4 is a tool.

Microsoft Copilot now has free GPT4 (I have not tested that version all that well): copilot.microsoft.com

[–] elbarto777@lemmy.world 0 points 10 months ago

Its* sources.

[–] guyrocket@kbin.social 4 points 10 months ago
[–] Drusas@kbin.social 3 points 10 months ago

sci-news.com

[–] stackPeek@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I'm a software engineer, for stuff that are related to library/programming languages, I usually try to look at the official documentation first. Some of the best documentation pages IMO are: SQLite, PostgreSQL, and Rust book. MDN is good too, like you said. Looking at the source code helps too, especially the test files. I currently write lots of Go (programming language) code, and IMO their test files are so good, and you can learn how some functions behave or how to use it.

Other than that, I actually starting to learn to draw too, and for that I, so far, use drawabox. I think it's a good starter for learning to draw--as it gives you the most fundemental stuff when drawing. (technically not online, rather a book, but just before opening this thread I found this resource for learning drawing perspective: https://ia801206.us.archive.org/34/items/PerspectiveMadeEasy/Norling%20-%20Perspective%20Made%20Easy.pdf)

I also wanted to start playing guitar, but haven't got the money to buy one, but from what I hear Justin Guitar is a good free online resource. Haven't used it though

[–] myslsl@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

People talk a lot about stackoverflow for figuring out bugs and miscellaneous coding questions but the whole stackexchange project has a lot of other very excellent websites.

[–] intensely_human@lemm.ee 2 points 10 months ago

ChatGPT is amazing. The fact that 20% of what is says is wrong just increases the adventure. Like that scene in that David Brin book where one alien race had tricked another alien race into misunderstanding science, and hence lose a key battle.