Funny story the other way around: the year is 2002 and I live in Laos. Bootlegs Everything Galore, all movies games music cost $1 or about. I discover a game, and then begins a quest to buy The Real Version because it's a small studio and I really like it all, the storytelling, the modding tools, the community... A quest that would end up in Bangkok looking like the proverbial insane foreigner looking for the most stupid way to spend his money.

I found it eventually, in a shop that didn't look any different among all its brothers in Pantip Plaza. Took me a while lol.

You can also ask it when is the cutoff date of their database - there is a gentleman's agreement between providers not to have ai involved in news / current politics in it's public chats.

I tried them on a topic I'm pretty proficient on, (a spaghetti recipe lol) and the answer was the most bland imaginable.

The way it is setup by DDG, the restrictions and blandness, shallowness of the replies give me peace of.mind when a 'natural language' query is the easiest one. And Claude wouldn't give me the DOB of that queen because it is Personal Info!

DDG has it's non-track version online since a bit now. Use the !ai bang to get to it

Also you have the choice of Claude insted of ChatGPT, and your queries aren't harvested for further ai training

In any case, it's a completely different tab, it's not mingled in general search results

"Merde". As in, the french word for "shit" - or, should we say, "horseshit". Why? Well because at the time of horse-drawn carriages, a successful play at the theatre would leave a lot of horseshit in front if the theatre from the many, many coaches awaiting their fares.

DRM-free ebooks. I make a point of buying them, of thanking the publisher... And not sharing it on the usual piracy channels.

You're right, tho maybe not why you'd think: in France, the FNSEA is the arm of the richest, biggest of industrial farming enterprises. When you see a "farmer" blocking your city with its brightly colored giant piece of machinery, wearing their customary blue overalls, you see someone owning thousands of hectares, plowing the ground dry through monoculture, and "protesting" (with the absolute support of the political system) regulations against the use of harmful chemicals, or against fellow "farmers" from cheaper labor countries having unfair competitive advantage through the EU free market. Or against legislation protecting the soil long-term.

And these "protests" tells the layman that next week, the price of bread will increase, again, without our elected elite being in the line of fire for it.

Because poor farmers, you know.

Source: friend is Organic farmer, owns 40ha, does everything by himself. Nothing the FNSEA does isn't harming the consumer, the fellow small farms, or the planet.

PSA: it stands for Read The FINE Manual

Now canonically switched to "read the friendly manual" which I find more patronizing

You don't need that: Proton will only surrender accounts/information to local authorities with the appropriate paperwork - and that's their selling point on privacy, swiss law being pretty protective of privacy ; in this case, a corpus of evidence has been submitted by a recognized foreign entity & considered valid for action in regard to swiss law.

That's what makes proton secure for journalists, political opponents and such: no swiss judge will enable any random dictator to get a dissident's info, it won't fly with swiss law. And if that escalates to bogus criminal charges, it is still up to a swiss judge to decide how and if to proceed.

You put your trust in Switzerland here, not in a nerdy business with an atom-smashing background.

Duh, we have high-speed rail in Morocco. It's called Al Boraq and is the best way to blast from Casablanca to Tangier.

And it is not overpriced like in France, where the tgv is more expensive than a taxi to the airport, your plane ticket, and then another taxi.

There are different ways, and the personal preference of the bassist / of their sound person matters. If they like their current amp (for their sound qualities), a lot of sound engineers will just put a microphone in front of it to pickup "their" acoustic sound ; if the amp itself is decent, it's going to feature a line output on the amp itself, that they can use to plug into the sound system and get the amp feed up to it. And, lastly, inserting a DI box between the instrument and the amp allows for a split output of one line towards the sound system and another towards the amp, so they can still hear "their" sound while the sound engineer has full control of how it will sound on the system (DI's are usually provided by the stage, rarely by the musician, and using them is a lot of time the choice of the engineer).

In a cool setup, sound engineers like to have both a microphone in front of the cabinet and from the amp output or a DI, allowing them to mix between both.

In a modern (bigger) system, the amp is entirely removed, replaced by a DI, or the cabinet is out backstage to avoid noise pollution on stage, and the musicians only hear themselves through the monitors.

Am I answering your question? No I'm not!

Talk to your friend. They may like their current amp to the death, they may very well know what they would like to buy next, or not.

Why not finding a pretext to go to a music shop and try several "just to have fun / just to have a look"? If an obvious preference arises, you just pop your credit card and Bob's their uncle!

Wrong. Drive a Miata and you get to fuck girls and boys, clearly a far superior car here.

According to their metrics anyway.

Finding stuff on Mastodon is more about hashtags. Eventually, by subscribing to #stuff you're interested in, you will discover accounts worth following. The Tusky app allows you to subscribe to hashtags like to an account. I don't follow people anymore, I follow topics!