!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
Lots of quoting for specific phrases. Instead of searching like I used to using what I feel are relevant key words:
react table sortable
I now have to search for something like
“Best sortable table component for react”
This will lead me to some bullshit listicle that will then give me at least a few items to review, then I take the best one and start typing the components name vs and seeing what auto completes after vs
It’s all become a game and I hate it.
most University Libraries have "guides". Simply google " guide". eg Stanford Library engineering guide. Result like: [(https://guides.library.stanford.edu/aa)] From there use any free local library access you might have to get the details.
Thank you so much!
That’s not how links work in Markdown; some clients will include the )] at the end and break the link. Just use the plain URL https://guides.library.stanford.edu/aa or create a hyperlink using [this syntax](https://www.markdownguide.org/cheat-sheet/).
Thank you all for your answers!
I wanted to add one resource I found that has helped me find even more relevant search results:
A Lemmy Search Engine https://www.search-lemmy.com/
Oh, awesome! Thanks
I used to start with searching Reddit, though that has been of less help lately. Wikipedia is helpful for getting a baseline if I have no clue about a subject. Lately ChatGPT has been helpful there as well.
And then of course, all search engines still accept boolean searches but you kinda need to 1) know the syntax the engine uses and 2) have a rough idea of what you are looking for.
https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/syntax/
Sorry, no Google documentation was relevant.
When doing technical things, I find the best source to always be the provided documentation. For example, when using an external crate in Rust, docs.rs or when coding a Django Webapp the official Django documentation.
When starting out, these often contain examples or guides/tutorials.
When that does not help, it goes back to putting relevant keywords into the search engine and hoping for the best.
Note that this does not apply to Microsoft. Like, at all. :)
Wikipedia is pretty good for computer sciency stuff. I'll often use it as a reference for things like protocols or if I need a quick refresher for some algorithm.
For code I use chagpt for first pass questions. Then I try compiling it and see if gpt is telling the truth
I feel like this is a risky approach. LLMs are designed to spit out text that sounds good, that's all. If it hallucinates important info away, your compiler will not always tell you.
Yeah, I check stuff with stackoverflow and the documentation
For all of those topics, I use domain specific sites. So for research I'll look at arxiv or one of the sites that make research freely available. For programming, I'll search language mailing lists, documentation, and examples. Searching GitHub also isn't a bad idea, but watch out for license issues.
Be wary of using tools like got to summarize articles or outright answer questions. There's no guarantee it will be correct, and if you don't know the answer you won't know it's wrong.
I like to look for relevant books on archive.org, but they don't always have stuff for more obscure topics.