Search engine going downhill is mostly a side effect of AI enshitification getting in the way. Even google, which people keep saying is “dying”, works as well as before as long as you’re not using their default page which is filled with AI garbage and other automated content.

Also, Large AI models from large provider doing a fair bit of actually useful work would have to be confronted with other way to do said work. People burning tokens to edit PDF isn’t exactly that efficient compared to opening a god dawn editor.

Tiny violin company in shambles again, have a hard time facing demands.

There is a difference between using X amount of resource to provide an actual output that justify spending X amount of resource, and using X*1000 resources to provide zilch.

“Oh no, informing people allows them to decide for themselves, we can’t have that! I, sweeney whiney, must protect the world from informed decisions!”

• Tim Sweeney, wearing is burger king cardboard crown screaming in front of his mirror alone.

It’s really gone downhill. Like, in free fall.

Because the greed of corporations knows no limit. They sold you the (expensive) hardware, now they want to sell you the (specific, usually compatible but not really, and slightly buggy implementation) software. Can’t do that with open specifications.

Eh, that’s actually crafty :D

No, they won’t. They might try, mind you, but that’s not happening. I’ll sooner adapt to a piece of tape at the top of my screen than to this.

So, nothing broke, except the thing that broke. Gotcha.

Firefox, despite all the suspicions around Mozilla, still works well, is still user friendly, privacy friendly, and well maintained. You can either pick a fork that includes a few more things, or just go with vanilla Firefox and ublockorigin. This extension alone (which is highlighted as a recommended extension on the mozilla add-ons website), on its default settings, already sets you up for most ads and privacy hostile sites.

If you want to go further you can look into noscripts, but it’s already way more involved, because it will break some sites until you look into what to allow or not.

So, you agree there’s no good reasons to use it, thanks.

Yet another reason to switch to brave

There is no good reasons to use brave. It’s based on chromium, propped up by suspicious individuals, uses predatory marketing tactics and have an history of not caring very much for privacy in favor of hijacking and inserting referrals. And that’s only the most prominent issues. Their last stunt of willingly adding annoying features and offering people to pay to remove them should tell you all you need to know.

I’m extremely cautious around Mozilla (a bit aggressive, even), and don’t have much trust in them for the future of Firefox at this point. And yet, it’s only worries for the future; as it currently goes, there’s some major annoyances in Firefox, but they still give most/all the settings needed to have a privacy-enabled browser (at least enough for most users).

And, obviously, I’d rather take “it currently works well but I’m worried about a potentially bad thing in the future” over “it’s broken now and operated by crooks”.

Vance criticizing something tells me the thing in question is probably correct one way or another.

I’m not sure having games made for you would be better than having games you can play. There’s plenty of shit out there that’s not marketed towards me anymore, but I still enjoy it. And yes, it’s rarely AAA games. Even more enjoyable AND cheaper.

Asked for comments, they kept saying “Rest assured there is no death ray plans”

(/j)

Big woop. Over the last year or so, it moved from “can reliably set a timer” to having to yell at it, multiple times, crossing an unexpected amount of hurdles, to get it to maybe understand that you want to set a timer, and god forbids that you want it with a specific name and duration. Oh, and the icing on the cake : it worked perfectly when it was locally running on the phone, and started going downhill when they pulled the plug on that.

I wonder why people aren’t sold on such wonderful tech.

People refer to this as the “udm=14” trick. Edit your search engine settings/add one (Firefox made this harder than it needs to be) so that the url is https://www.google.com/search?udm=14&q=%25s, and it will always display the “web” page first, which have zero “automatic” content on it; only a list of sites. At least for now.

Or, use udm14.org, although it’s adding yet another site in the mix, which is unnecessary.

As long as this work. I’m using that, because it gives me actual, useful results most of the time, but there’s always a chance that google pulls the plug on that someday.

but at least you get the option to turn it off

That’s also an option with google, you know.