Because:

1. I’m not a lazy, smooth-brained rube.
2. I’m not in the business of selling AI to lazy, smooth-brained rubes
3. I have no stake in the supply chain nor do I stand to profit from those selling AI to lazy, smooth-brained rubes.

Furthermore:

1. I don’t trust “AI”. If I’m going to have to fact check it anyway, might as well just do it myself and earn the damn knowledge.
2. AI does not work for me (or you). It works for the companies who are forcing it on you and sucking up your data.
3. The energy costs and water requirements are mindbogglingly staggering
4. I refuse to feed or ride any hype train
5. It’s creating scarcity of things that could be put to better use (energy, water, computer components, land, talent, you name it).
6. It’s not even AI. It’s just a dead-end bullshit generator

In my nearly half century on this planet and having dealt with many a drug dealer in my younger days, absolutely none of them have been this pushy 😆

“Does it piss you off when Google/whatever does [blank]? Yeah, me too. So I run my own versions to not have to deal with that crap. Would you like me to set you up an account on my stuff?”

Best I can offer is https://github.com/searxng/searxng

I run it at home and have configured it as the default search engine in all my browsers.

At best, it’s JARVIS from Iron Man 3 when he went all buggy and crashed Tony in the boondocks. lol

To me it is the ultimate gamble with one’s own thought autonomy, and an abandonment of truth in favor of false comfort.

So, like church? lol

No wonder there’s so much worrying overlap between religion and AI.

I’m about that same age but am so glad we’ve largely abandoned the “www” for websites.

On my personal project website, I have a custom listener setup to redirect people to “aarp.org” if they enter it with “www” instead of just the base domain. 😆

server {
    listen              443 ssl;
    http2		        on;
    server_name         www.mydomain.xyz;

    ssl_certificate     /etc/letsencrypt/live/mydomain.xyz/fullchain.pem;
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/mydomain.xyz/privkey.pem;
    ssl_dhparam         /etc/nginx/conf.d/tls/shared/dhparam.pem;
    ssl_protocols       TLSv1.2 TLSv1.3;
    ssl_session_cache   shared:SSL:10m;
    ssl_session_timeout 15m;
  
    ...
    
    location ~* {
      return 301 https://aarp.org/;
    }
}

The only one I didn’t hate was the jingle:

🎵 "F-R-E-E that spells "free"
credit report dot com, baby". 🎵

😆

Yeah, but they should take that pissing contest out of the UX.

I was an adult during that time, and I don’t recall it being anywhere near as annoying. Well, except the TV and radio adverts spelling at you like “…or visit our website at double-you double-you double-you dot Company dot com. Again, that’s double-you double-you double-you dot C-O-M-P-A-N-Y dot com.”

YMMV, but it didn’t get annoying until apps entered the picture and the only way to deal with certain companies was through their app. That, of if they did offer comparable capabilities on their website but kept a persistent banner pushing you toward their app.

I predate both of those events by multiple decades lol.

Printers were well established even on the Trash-80 I grew up with. The bloatware drivers aren’t really what I’m talking about. I suppose Clippy could be considered prior art to the whole “shoving AI in your face” but at the time I was a WordPerfect fanboy.

I learned a long time ago to never install manufacturer printer drivers. Or, at least, never install them from the provided Setup.exe.

They’ve always installed a bunch of bloatware (HP has always been the worst but other brands are just as bad).

If you look in the setup folder, there’s usually the raw drivers you can install from Device Manager. If the driver package is just a single .exe file, you can usually unpack it with 7zip and get at its inner contents.

If that fails, the system-included HP LaserJet 4200 PCL driver is about as close to a universal print driver as you can find lol.

Awesome! Yeah, spoilers aren’t standard markdown (AFIAK) and most apps just copied the way lemmy UI implemented them as custom containers.

At least in the default UI, it’s still not working right. It’s all treated as the title of the spoiler.

Most clients require it as :

:::spoiler Title that shows when collapsed
The rest of the text that should be hidden in the collapsed part.

More text that should be hidden.
:::

POV of:

Not sure what client you’re using, but the spoiler tag not being closed causes them to not work.

I challenge you to a race around the world. Go! [beat] Ha ha ha ha ha ha!

I think the point of 11h is to achieve that kind of range without directional antennas. Basically as a higher-bandwidth version of LoRa.

Yeah, that one took me a minute. I think “drip” or “slow drip”? I know “drip” used to be a term but was never one I associated with “screwball” or “crackpot”. Usually I’d heard “drip” to mean something closer to “dull” or “boring”.