I take a selfie when I get the haircut I like and show them the picture next time. Nice and easy.

inb4 in 8 years time “Greensky a.k.a. Trust Me Guys This is THE New Twitter Forever” gains a million new users in the last 3 days.

Isn’t this basically Firefox’s version of the third party cookie block that Chrome rolled out a few months ago? Or am I missing something here?

I mean, it’s good news either way but I just want to know if this is somehow different or better.

The problem is that not everyone looks for that human-to-human emotional connection in art. For some, it’s just a part of a much bigger whole.

For example, if you’re an indie game dev with a small budget and no artistic skills, you may not be that scrupulous about getting an AI to generate some sprites or 3D models for you, if the alternative is to commission the art assets with money you don’t have.

Similar idea applies to companies building a website. Why pay for a licence to download some stock images or design assets if you can just get a GenAI to pump out hundreds for you that are very convincing (and probably even better) for a couple bucks?

Realises devs have always joked about their jobs just being about copy-pasting solutions from StackOverflow 80% of the time

Oh God…

I’m not saying a traumatic childhood is a good reason to dismiss someone’s crimes as an adult. Whether you had the best life as a kid or not, hate crimes must be punished all the same.

Our responsibility as a society in all of this should be to give these people the support and education they need before they find it in these cults of hate. This is where we’re failing big time.

What is exactly the bullshit part about what I said? That a bad childhood usually leads to a fucked up adulthood? Because it does. Of course, everyone copes with trauma or a tough childhood differently, and some people do move on to lead surprisingly well adjusted grown-up lives. But for the ones that don’t, having a poor childhood experience is a very common factor.

It took me 2 mins to find this research paper to evidence what I’m saying: https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-016-2906-3

I could probably find a few dozen more if I spent more time looking.

Being an unloved —or worse, abused— child is quite often the root cause of a vast number of affective and personality disorders people develop later on as an adult.

Someone said to me once “Relax! Nothing is under control.”

Worry about what you can control —which is very little, especially when facing a world crisis like climate change— and accept what you can’t.

The people who should be fixing this mess are not you or I. It’s the big corporations and the Governments that should regulate them through robust, uncompromising climate policies. Vote for Governments with honest, solid climate agendas.

Other than that, contributions from individuals like you and I are but a drop in the boiling ocean of global warming. By all means, keep doing what you’re doing. It certainly doesn’t hurt to lead a more sustainable lifestyle but don’t feel bad if you don’t do everything you’re supposed to do. Don’t let the real culprits here gaslight you into thinking otherwise.

Again, if you’re worried more about your mental health than the problem itself at this stage, it’s ok to feel that way. Many of us do. But the best advice I can give you is to just accept there’s nothing you can really do about the situation. Whatever happens, happens. Easier said than done, I know, but once you “learn” to accept this fact, your anxiety will drop right down.

Try this engine

https://search.marginalia.nu/

Or a SearXNG instance

https://search.disroot.org/search

You may also be interested in the Indie Web movement. This site is a great resource for it, with yet more links to indie sites and blogs.

Finally, not quite what you asked but here’s a freebie, in case you didn’t know about it:

https://wiby.me/

It’s an old web search engine. It only indexes pages from the 00s and earlier.

Not even that, the author just uses WINE.

Look up the Firefox Containers extension.

This makes sense. HOWEVER. That’s not really what’s happening here now, is it?

I find it mildly upsetting, to say the least, that if Ted Bundy or <insert serial killer> had decided to run for president for shitz and gigglez, they could’ve totally done it.

I love it when real news report headlines sound like an article from The Onion.

ML/LLMs applied sensibly is definitely not snake oil.

Peddling ML/LLMs as AI and saying it will be the biggest paradigm shift ever seen is definitely snake oil and a lot of people just looking to capitalise on the latest fad, just like blockchain, “Big Data” or the metaverse.

Tech companies were struggling to raise funds in the bearish market that followed the pandemic tech boom. They were desperately looking for something big and shiny to use to persuade investors into loosening their wallets, and they’ve struck gold with “AI” because it sounds so cool and it can “basically do anything”, including replacing loads of staff with bots. Investors are being very easily bamboozled by this. Of course FOMO plays a big role here too.

I think “AI” is close to its peak of inflated expectations on the Gartner hype cycle curve below and it will take a while for people to wake up to the realisation that the “Bright AI-fuelled Future” they had been sold is nothing more than a thin wrapper around a ChatGPT API with a pretty bow on top.

I’m not disputing that certain super foods are just marketing but I would also say that almost no food is healthy when consumed in excess.

“Regular consumption of coconut oil may raise cholesterol levels and is high in saturated fats”. How regular are we talking about? Every day? Every week? What amount of oil? A few ml or 3L? And what kind of cholesterol are we talking about here? The good one or the bad one?

Coconut oil may well be a nutritious, healthy oil when eaten sensibly, just like eating nuts is very good for you but you don’t want to eat too much at once because they are very high in calories.

Voyager. I tried a few others but Voyager has a very slick UI and all the features I want.

The guy who started Bluesky was the same Twitter co-founder who push for Twitter to sell out. Thanks but no thanks. I’ll stick with Mastodon. It’s getting real comfy in there now.

I rely on Google Search far less now than I used to for this reason. People had already gotten Google SEO down to a science and were poisoning search results very effectively. This AI-generated bullshit is taking it to a whole new level.

I’ve decided to use alternative search engines like DDG, SearXNG, etc. hoping their indexing criteria will be different enough current SEO techniques won’t affect them as much… For now.

XD