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)

  • steventhedev@lemmy.world
    504·
    10 months ago

    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.

    • centof@lemm.eeEnglish
      24·
      10 months ago

      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.

    • PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world
      5·
      10 months ago

      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.

    • stackPeek@lemmy.world
      5·
      10 months ago

      As an information, you can always rely on the wikipedia page for those sites to find the up-to-date domain, so you can avoid it at all cost!!

    • the_stat_man@lemmy.world
      1·
      10 months ago

      Whoever set up these sites should be ashamed of themselves. How dare they make critical knowledge that can improve humanity freely available?

    • plactagonic@sopuli.xyz
      1·
      10 months ago

      Our teacher show us exactly how to access scihub, libgen and sites like this just for us to “avoid them”.

    • minyakcurry@monyet.cc
      1·
      10 months ago

      I struggle to find recent publications on SciHub, y’know, to report them to the hardworking journals that tirelessly implemented paywalls.

      Any ideas how I can find papers that are within the past 6 months?

      • steventhedev@lemmy.world
        71·
        10 months ago

        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.

    • Evkob@lemmy.ca
      1·
      10 months ago

      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.

  • axefaire@lemmy.world
    10·
    10 months ago

    My public library card works with Overdrive, so I use that to download ebooks and audiobooks

    • StereoTrespasser@lemmy.world
      1·
      10 months ago

      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.

  • jxk@sh.itjust.works
    9·
    10 months ago

    https://www.openstreetmap.org/ – geography

    https://www.orchidroots.com/ – official orchid names, and pictures

    and the sister projects of Wikipedia, in particular:

    https://en.wiktionary.org/ – dictionary

    https://en.wikisource.org/ – old books (also in other languages)

    https://en.wikivoyage.org/ – touristic information

    https://species.wikimedia.org/ – species

    You said “beyond Wikipedia”, but I will also mention that Wikipedia in other languages is an excellent resource to learn a language.

  • padge@lemmy.zipEnglish
    5·
    10 months ago

    I don’t think I would have graduated college without Khan Academy. For coding, MDN, Geeks4Geeks and W3Schools are also great.

  • centof@lemm.eeEnglish
    4·
    10 months ago

    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.

  • sturlabragason@lemmy.world
    84·
    10 months ago

    I like to use GPT4 as a tutor.

    It needs to be told to be factual and quote it’s sources, but man is it awesome to have it explain complex things in ways that I can easily grasp them.

    This is not to be confused with GPT3.5 which is like a toy, while GPT4 is a tool.

    Microsoft Copilot now has free GPT4 (I have not tested that version all that well): copilot.microsoft.com