I just rebuilt my Win 11 Pro Workstation setup (yes, it is the version for stupidly high core and thread counts), and one of the first things I did was to violently eviscerate anything AI in the system. Right after gleefully ripping out all the telemetry and spyware.
Dammit. I’ve had an LG plasma for the last 15, and it looks like I’ll have to get that Sony well before I’m ready for it.
Why… why would hard drives be going up in price?? AI does not use spinning platters of rust, like, at all.
…The fuck?
Is Tim Sweeney legitimately outing himself as a pedophile? Does the Parasite Class really feel so comfortable and immune from consequences that they can openly advocate for pedophilia?
Sooo… he works multiple part-time jobs?
Weird how a forced technique of the ultra-poor is showing up here.
IME it is more devs and managers going wild on the “golly gee wiz” features that are meant to dazzle site visitors, rather than on actual content (or to obscure a lack of actual material content).
Sure, what you mentioned is a problem, and a serious one at that. But your issue arises more from marketers and bean counters and C-Suite execs than devs and managers.
And yet, developers still build sites that load 500kb of JS just to display 5kb of text.
We don’t need faster speeds, we need more reasonable and thoughtful site design. Most sites are ridiculously overengineered, and don’t need a lot of what has been stuffed into them.
I would love to see Europe ban/block the API endpoints that AI communicates over.
Then ban all Meta endpoints if/when meta moves AI communication onto the same endpoints as non-AI communication.
European laws are not perfect, but they at least make an effort to put the needs of the people ahead of corporations and the Parasite Class.
Markup pro tip: to have multiple separate lines appear as a single large block quote, insert the quote signifier (>) into the blank newlines between them as well.
so this
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despite the newlines.
I have been using the same web browser, in terms of ideology, codebase and heritage, since the release of NCSA Mosaic.
That was 32 years ago. And holy f**ck, that dates me.
Sure, I dabbled around with others. There was the original Opera, back when Netscape cratered and the only other real option was IE. Opera’s tab behaviours made me install Tab Mix Plus for FF, and I still find that extension to be the second-most critically important extension FF has, right after UBlock Origin.
And lately I took a shine to Vivaldi, but I have been weaning myself off of it once I realized that the Manifest v2 shutdown was unavoidable for it as well.
And the only reason why I even have Chromium is as a sandbox for any Google services I access and as a “naked” web browser for those websites who implement malware and spyware in the name of “website security”. Which, of course, also means a majority of websites that are “protected” by CloudFlare’s incredibly hostile anti-user practices.
And of course, I also run forks, such as Librewolf and others, also with the appropriate anti-malware and anti-spyware add-ins. It can be useful having multiple web browsers up at once.
But my main will always be Firefox.
I love how the Streisand Effect works. They just made this app the hottest thing out there.
Allowing men’s issues to even be addressed risks giving legitimacy to the fact that these issues even exist. And if they exist, men can no longer be that evil monolith that exists only to be torn down and used as the cause for whatever is wrong with the world.
After all, the zero-sum game must be properly reinforced with an appropriate evil that cannot be allowed to have any weaknesses or redeeming attributes.
A mirror of Anna’s Archive.
Information is meant to be free.
…And it’s bound to be stupidly expensive.
Wish I could afford 20 of them, but not without winning the Powerball.
Another tool is yWriter.
This isn’t a tool for everyone, because it is research-first focused.
What I mean by that is that it’s a little clunky because background/research data is meant to go into it first, and then you are supposed to lean on that content to write your book second.
So for a non-fiction book, you would add all the data and facts and references, for a fiction book you would put in all of the important characters and plot points and things that the characters interact with.
This is so you always have a body of references to work off of so you don’t introduce inconsistencies.
Some people might find this software useful because assembling and fleshing out the underlying data is loads of fun and/or how they prep. Others might need this feature just to keep track of everything that goes into their book, as they might not be able to keep track of things like character quirks very easily in their head.
YMMV.
And I self-host precisely because of the money I save using surplussed hardware. I have a symmetrical 1Gb SOHO fibre connection from my ISP, so I can host whatever the hell I want, I just need to stand it up. And a beefy older system with oodles of RAM is perfect for spinning up VMs of various platforms for various tasks. This saves me craploads of money over even a single VM on cloud platforms like Vultr. Plus, even if I were to support a “heavy” service sufficiently in demand to warrant its own iron, it still costs me less than a year’s worth of hosting to obtain a decent platform for that service to run on all by it’s lonesome.
My only cloud costs end up being those services which are distributed for redundancy and geographical distance, such as DNS and caching CDNs.
the key is to simply seed all of your content for as long as you have it in your collection.
Tell that to TheGeeks. If you aren’t actively uploading - not just sitting there sharing, but actively sending data to anyone else - you’ll eventually be warned, then banned.
Back when I was trying to use their site, they had only one system: strict 1 ratio on a time limit. If you couldn’t maintain a 1+ ratio, and achieve it within a very limited amount of time, it didn’t matter what you grabbed or how long you shared back out, you got banned. At the time they had no other way to get ratio other than sharing back out - no freeleech, nothing. Which meant if you were wanting any content more than 2-3 HOURS old, you were looking at a ratio shortfall because there was no way to make up that ratio you were losing by downloading that content. There were simply too few peers after you to overcome the masses of seeders ahead of you satisfying peers.
It was absolutely brutal, which is why I now refuse to deal with any sites with that rule (1+ ratio with time limit) even if they have other ways (freeleech, etc.) to mitigate it. Like, f**k those sites. I’ve been seeding some torrents for close to 15 years, I have no problem letting shit remain resident in my client. So sites like MyAnonamouse it’s going to have to remain.
If you are talking about sites that have a strict, non-negotiable seeding ratio requirement, it is impossible. Your only real long-term option is to write a script that will grab everything that gets uploaded on a 30-second cadence, and then aggressively super-seed that content back out. And this is regardless of what it is - this script runs 24/7, doing about 2,880 hits on the website a day for new content. Still, even with the script it will be difficult to have your overall ratio exceed more than about 1.5-2, and you may still get banned for individual seeds that never exceed 1 because no-one is very interested in them.
I have tried to use sites that have strict ratio minimums, and long-term success is impossible without an edge like the script I mentioned. It’s why I now work with sites - like myanonamouse - that have minimum seeding times for everything you grab, regardless if anyone else needs it. They tend to be far less stressful and user-hostile.
For the vast majority of flip phones currently available on the market, if they’re not running some version of KiaOS, they’re running stock Android - with all the Google spying that entails - under the hood.
No, that was just the first two steps. Just on the “rip shit out” category, I typically churn through at least three separate tools, usually in this order:
I mean, sure, Windows can take as little as a half hour to “install”. But on a personal rig (which also includes my own workflow software and personal data shoehorned back into place), I take another 24-48 hours to gleefully beat it into submission and install secondary programs that bypass the warts it has acquired over the years.
And as a benchmark, XP needed only about 6-8hrs of extra work to reach the same threshold of data migration, workflow software, and improved usability (I was an NT fanboy, IMO the primary improvement of XP over 2000 was the start menu).
If we add up the AI push, the spyware/telemetry explosion, the recent attempts to force the use of a Microsoft Account as the default login, and the massive bloating and instability of Windows in general, it’s slowly becoming time for even non-technical, everyday users to move to Linux.