Lots of talk about which search engine to use; surprisingly little talk about extensions.

Block or Highlight Search Engine Results is my personal recommendation. Whichever SE you use, when you see a result that’s AI slop or a garbage website like Forbes, just add bullshit.com to the filter, set to hide, and you’ll never see that trash in a search result ever again.

Be diligent about it for a good week or so, and your search result quality will absolutely explode, whether your using Google, DDG, or several others.

/shrug. No insight on the effectiveness of the design; that’s just what’s in use now.

Lol wut. Surgeons bitch when they’re wearing so much as a headlamp. A bulky-ass VR headset will never be a thing in the operating room beyond the odd techy doctor who’s in a VR infatuation phase.

The Davinci surgical robot has a VR headset kinda built into it so surgeons can see in 3D when they’re doing robotic assisted surgeries, but that’s not something they wear : it’s a little station they sit at and just lean forward into, no straps or weight or anything.

Just play WoW on a private server and stop supporting Blizzard’s anti-user business model.

That was both hilarious and painful.

And I don’t mean to always hate on it - the tech is useful in some contexts, I just can’t stand that we call it ‘intelligence’.

Probably because that’s the common expectation due to calling it “AI”. We’re well past the point of putting the lid back on that can of worms, but we really should have saved that label for… y’know… intelligence, that’s artificial. People think we’ve made an early version of Halo’s Cortana or Star Trek’s Data, and not just a spellchecker on steroids.

The day we make actual AI is going to be a really confusing one for humanity.

the xFire suit was around 20 years ago, so you may be older than you want to admit.

There comes a point where it kinda just blurs together. I’m old enough that when people ask how old I am, I have to stop and think what year it is, and do some quick head math to figure out the answer.

Sorry, that was a LONG fuckin day. On call, and we had a couple addon surgeries go late.

Anyway, this one:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hohser/

I need to be more diligent about actually using it, if your search gives garbage in even like the first 5 hits, add those to your filter and it’ll start to add up fast. This extension has only been on my radar for a few months, and it’s already made a big difference - I’m in nursing school right now, and trying to look up info on the shit our profs are lecturing on invariably yields like 10 websites that are just cheaty test question databases that don’t actually help you learn jack shit; and there’s so much of that garbage that it makes finding actual info a challenge. Screening that bullshit out alone has been great!

10/10

There’s an extension that filters out websites from every engine. So like when you see Quora or other other digital garbage in your result, block it once and you’ll never see another Quora article again.

Idr the name of the extension - I’ll check when I get home and follow up.

Discord is banned in Turkiye.

Considering the nature of these programs, I think the most important thing to hone in on is: what’s popular in Turkiye? Features and functionality don’t mean squat if no one’s around to enjoy them.

…tad off topic, but this thread is making me miss xFire. That shit was better 10 years ago (maybe more like 15? idk, I’m old) than Discord was at its peak. …litigated out of existence by Yahoo’s frivolous weaponization of our legal system. This is why we can’t have nice things.

Edit - Fuck you, Yahoo.

I grew up in a rightwing household, and unquestioningly drank the koolaid until my late teens. The right’s bullshit eventually became impossible to ignore, so I dove right into the ‘both sides!’ trap and rode the Libertarian train for a while.

It became really easy to articulate what I didn’t like about the right; describing what was bad about the left was just echoes of Fox bitching about things like them voting on emotion instead of logic… but no real examples.

Around my mid-twenties I finally realized ^that was projection; then 2016 happened and holy shit they’re running Trump and Hillary?? Easily the two most hated candidates in my lifetime… against Gary Johnson - an admittedly goofy personality but likeable and most importantly not crazy, THIS IS THE LP’S TIME TO SHINE! …yeah they got 3% of the vote. We won’t ever see better conditions for a 3rd victory, so, pipedream shattered.

Guess I’ll have to just pick a lesser evil, so let’s see what we have to work with…

• there’s the red team. Burn through our fossil resources with reckless abandon. War, war, war, and more war. Shave social services down to nothing so we can claim ‘fiscal responsibility’ which is good I guess (hey! eyes down here, we’re done talking about the war part), a blatant integration of religion and politics, and they want to make life as miserable as possible for my gay/colored/female/nonchristian friends. Fuck, that’s pretty bad…

• Alright, next we have the blue team, which is the opposite of all those things, at the exceedingly high cost of… getting cockblocked by the red team when they try to implement those things… and… well there was that time Bill lied about getting a blowjob- outrageous! Surely the red team does a better job of keeping it in their pants… *checks* …uhh, nope! Fuck, I’m starting to become aware of my own cognitive dissonance and it feels like absolute shit.

So I start voting one issue at a time, crunching both options against eachother and choosing the one that’s best for the US. That way there’s no bias and I won’t be part of this tribal bullshit plagueing our politics… Weird, when I ignore affiliation and vote on policy alone, my ballot becomes solid blue. What are the odds of that?! Next election, solid blue again. And again.

My desire to be ‘independent’ on label alone is pretty much gone at this point, and I’m being more and more vocal about supporting leftwing policies. Family isn’t a fan, but they hit me with the shit OP is poking fun at - I only shifted blue because I’m poor! Once I make more money, just you wait and see, I’ll come crawling right back.

Now, I’m not rich or anything, but I’m (finally!) not living paycheck to paycheck. During all ^that I wandered into the military which gave me access to all kinds of socialized resources which have enabled me to get where I’m at now and have made a pretty significant improvement on my life. The thing that pisses me off about those socialized services is WHY THE FUCK DOESN’T EVERYONE HAVE THIS?! So wearing camo for 4 years for some reason got me this VIP tour of what we should should be doing for everyone.

I was a late bloomer, I got there. I haven’t missed a single election since 2016, big or small. Solid blue. I’ve gotten to the point where I’ll even look up the voter registration of candidates for nonpolitical positions like judges, and red is a deal breaker.

The better off I become, the more blue I get. The notion of red-shift with income is trash.

*abdomen bursts open and thousands of hatchlings scatter in every direction*

…and a swan-dive into fascism is preferable to that because…?

Our political model is janky as fuck. I don’t need to explain the pitfalls of a two-party system to you - I already know you fucking hate it or you wouldn’t be eyeing a 3rd in the first place. I hate it too. But a two party system is what we have, which means you have three options:

• Red (fascism)

• Blue (not fascism)

• Let the other voters choose Red or Blue for you (abstain or vote 3rd).

Which of those options will do the best job of accomplishing YOUR goals?

What even are your goals? 3rd party as POTUS? You gotta lay the groundwork first. 2016 was the perfect stage for a 3rd party victory within our current model: we had an absolutely hated candidate running on both of the big two; a voterbase just as sick of the status quo as they are now; a Libertarian with a genuinely likable personality, some solid policy stances, and who managed to shift the “crazy” that Libertarians were reputed for to an honestly charming variety of “quirky”, and a surprisingly steady stream of coverage by the media. We will never see better conditions for a 3rd victory in our current model.

So how did the Libertarians do with that perfect storm? 3%. They got fucking 3% of the vote. How do those conditions compare to today’s? Red is running that same hated sack of shit Trump; but Blue couldn’t find a candidate hated as much as Hillary if they tried to - to the contrary, Harris is churning up optimism like I’ve never seen before. The die-hard Reds and Blues aren’t going to change their votes over that, but the folks in the middle are going to be far less inclined to vote 3rd than they were in 2016. 3rds have gotten pretty much zero media attention this time around. They literally do not stand a chance to beat even 2016’s 3%, let alone enough to actually win.

Your only way to the top is to change the political model into one that’s more favorable to you; and the easiest way to do that is to keep not-fascism in power long enough to get the general population pissed off enough about not having ranked choice that it starts making its way into bigger and bigger elections. Your next-easiest path to victory is insurrection… that most likely both fail and get yourself killed, so please don’t do that. Your least-easy path to victory is to allow fascism to take root, as that will push the model even further away from your reach: if that happens it’s game over for everyone except the fascists.

If you see a different option that’ll lead to a 3rd victory in our current model, I’m all ears; but if not, you still need to set the stage with favorable conditions, to include preventing the stage from being burned to the ground.

The Dems will preserve a political model that’s at least malleable. 3rds will need to work together to push ranked choice more and more into voters’ field of view.

Republicans will swan-dive into fascism, in which case 3rds (and everyone else) are fucked.

Dems aren’t going to help 3rds directly, but any one who wants the possibility of a 3rd party victory later is committing political suicide by failing to vote blue as a means of buying time. Voting 3rd when that 3rd has no potential for victory is self-destructive.

AI (or at least the algorithm shit we’re calling ‘AI’ that isn’t intelligence, artificial or otherwise) getting a robot body is just installing a program onto a computer with moving parts. …not really anything new or exciting about this.

For me personally? I mean shit like this. Love it ^_^

For you, I have no idea what kind of music you’re into, but there are a ton of options for instrumental.

Memes are brain sneezes.

Now, how can I fix this infamous autotune trend?

Instrumental-only music?

What law is being broken here?

He stepped onto the rich people’s turf. We plebs are supposed to stay in our thatch huts beyond their line of sight.

Straight to jail.

It isn’t. But there are situations where that isn’t an option, like being on a work or government computer where downloading firefox or installing an extension will get you fired. When that’s the case, YouTube+Bing is a “good enough”/“better than nothing” option.