If you can afford to spend 10 bucks a month for a search engine, Kagi is pretty sleek. No ads, you can block/prioritize websites, good bangs, convinient CSS field for easy modding.

It does AI stuff too, but it’s optional as the other non-standard search output fields.

I wonder if it creates more inhouse sysadmin jobs? When you buy a license from M$ you also get tech support. But if you have problems with open source, you gotta go get a computer person

Ublock with firefox. Wasn’t able to set up a filter for the popup, didn’t try very hard though.

Had a “youtube doesnt allow adblock” pop up yesterday, set up freetube. No login required, even has a subscription import tool. So far so great.

opt-in:

Can we take all your stuff?

1. Yes daddy
2. Remind me tomorrow

This isn’t really up to China, NK won’t listen because it’s not really up to them either. Most authoritarians would love to scale the repression down, but you can only do it while political and economic climate is right (without losing your power and your head)

If you signal to your citizens that they can speak more freely, the first thing out of their mouths will be Hey why did you do that fucked up thing?

Thus, you can “loosen the bolts” only when you are safe in your position of power and don’t mind a few concessions to the masses. “Yes we overstepped a few lines, but it was all the fault of this one bad man and also look at all this bread we have now!”

This is why authoritarian countries usually have “seasons”.

A single message now generates 20 different summaries and analyses, requiring a rack of GPUs and a diesel generator.

We’re so lucky that electricity is unlimited and free, otherwise it might’ve caused a serious problem.

Sure, if I want to pay per message/call. I could also hire a butler to do all my chores for me, alas I am not a Swedish royalty.

Central Asia, businesses here do not have websites. They put a listing on aggregators with a phone number and may be an instagram account.

The problem is not that I’m not using signal (I am), its that I also have to use telegram and\or whatsapp if I want to contact anyone without sending them an sms, or a pigeon.

So all this bloat still affects me, whether I “just use signal” or not.

I cant schedule an appointment at the vet with signal.