• Marxism-Fennekinism@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    I feel like most people nowadays are just typing math calculations into their search engine. Which obviously also has massive privacy implications.

    • Urist@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 year ago

      Once upon a time I wrote an IRC chat bot for my friends and I that could do calculations and convert units (metric -> imperial) with a command.

      My friends were impressed that I included units like furloughs, leagues and bushels.

      My chatbot was just googling their request and returning the result (which, handily, was done by the google engine itself and was very easy to extract with Beautiful Soup in python). This was 15+ years ago.

      This doesn’t really have anything to do with your reply, just a fun memory I guess

    • rickyrigatoni@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Yeah. If a search engine knows you didn’t know 5x(30/47)^2 they might be able to derive your SSN from that information.

    • Baŝto@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 year ago

      There are many fun ways of calculating stuff.

      echo $((5+8)) or abusing REPL mode of python3 or node.

      My colleagues once made fun of me using galculator with a tiling wm:

      • Marxism-Fennekinism@lemmy.ml
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        11 months ago

        Call me a plebian but I still open up Python when I want to do calculations in the command line because I don’t know how to in Bash.