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)
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.
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.
I forgot about that one, thank you!
based comment right here
Oh that sounds horrible, thank you for letting me know where to avoid as I had no idea.
YSK: That publishers do not fund or incentivize academic research.
Authors of scientific papers do not receive money for publishing them (sometimes they have to pay). The peer reviewers work for free. The high prices of scientific journals simply turn into obscenely huge profit margins for the publishers. Publishers harm research by siphoning off money from research budgets and also by preventing better ways of sharing research. Their obscene profits depend on doing things a certain way.
Funny story: Traditionally, researchers have transferred the copyrights to their papers to the journal. When the internet had become a thing, authors made their own papers available directly for download. Publishers then went after the authors for sharing their own research.
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.
Our teacher show us exactly how to access scihub, libgen and sites like this just for us to “avoid them”.
Whoever set up these sites should be ashamed of themselves. How dare they make critical knowledge that can improve humanity freely available?