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.
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.
But surely the journals provide some sort of service for the researchers, right? Like paying for experts to review their scientific claims, or fact checking their citations, or even basic grammatical proofreading, right? If the journals are earning so much from research, then conducting academic research must be a lucrative field with so many publishers competing to be the first ones to publish a paper.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For those hesitant to click through this, it's an interesting looking site trying to teach about cybersecurity stuff! Wouldn't have guessed that based on the name!
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 - Perspective Made Easy.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
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.
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.
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.