The bangs are the addictive feature for me. You start by typing !w lemmy in the URL bar, with DDG already configured as the default search engine, and DDG will directly serve the search result for this term from Wikipedia. There are hundreds of them like !yt for YouTube or !gm for Google Maps, and the acronyms are intuitive. https://duckduckgo.com/bangs

I've been using it for a couple of year now and I only double check Google maybe 1% of the time. And most of those times, I also can't find what I am looking for on Google. I also can't go back after getting used to the ! commands.

They are socially conservative, but they have been fairly consistent at asking people not to kill each other for the past decades.

I would think software is even easier to catch up because you don't need as much physical investment and experimenting is way cheaper, especially with LLM helping to learn now. I think DeepSeek is an example.
Innovation is difficult, but simply catching up with all the public research and open source solutions, not as much.

/remindme 3 years
They will most likely catch up like they are doing for electric for electric cars now.

Ecosia and Qwant are building an EU based index. Maybe then they will become actually independent alternatives to American giants. It will take a while.

There's better integration with all sorts of other sources of truth beyond the LLM training, which makes it seem smarter.

Humans are good at using religions to do damage. You can find terrible things from Hinduism and Buddhism too, for example.

I went to Tokyo Gay Pride. First of all it is called Rainbow Pride, because maybe Gay is to risky. Secondly, it was weirdly full of corporate sponsored group marching and you could not enter the march if you had not registered with some group in advance. But that's better than nothing I guess.

It's cool seeing body parts being (occasionally) less taboo in non Abrahamic cultures.

Is there any other useful edtech than the FOSS app Anki?

AI could make sense one day if it comes with UBI to compensate its social impact and if it optimizes enough processes to compensate for its ecological footprint. We are far* from this and there's nowhere enough political pressure to make it happen.