Lvxferre [he/him]

Info on how to disable AI anti-features from Firefox here and here.

I’m getting real tired of this shit. It isn’t just Firefox, or large token models; every fucking little thing nowadays has anti-features, that go against why I want that thing, that I need to work around, that makes every simple task a bloody chore.

That bloody browser is the cherry of the cake for me. I already avoid Chromium and similar Google trash as much as possible, as I know Google vultures the shit out of your personal info; now every bloody time Firefox updates I need to check two computers, two phones, and a few household electronics for potential shit to disable. Do I need to sell my soul to Satan to make things simpler again? Oh wait, souls don’t exist so I’m out of luck.

Yes, I’m aware, there’s LibreWolf. But that’s like makeup hiding your black eye, since it’s a “soft” fork of Firefox. And it doesn’t change that bitter taste on your mouth, that you can’t even browse the internet in peace any more.

Those are great to add to beans or chickpeas.

For example, feijoada relies on those and pig ears for thickness, while other ingredients (like sausages, jerk, bacon, smoked pork ribs, etc.) get added for the meat and flavour.

Give up all hope (of seeing the recipe), you who enter (the site)!

This is like a network of small problems: the advertisement model being awful, ads paying almost nothing per view, overabundance of cooking sites, Google’s monopoly on search, search engine optimisation, Google forcing you to feed its AI to show your site in search results, AI models and their intrinsic shortcomings (such as not understanding what they output)…

Cooking sites were the first victims because of how heavily they rely on SEO shit, and how people hate it. But others will eventually go the same way.

Now I regret following it with only two points, instead of three. LLMs love listing threes.

I typically used the em dash only when writing professionally, but because of this AI thing I’m doing it in general, just to see how it turns out. (So far it’s a good way to sniff out assumers.)

In the specific case of clanker vocab leaking into the general population, that’s no big deal. Bots are “trained” towards bland, unoffensive, neutral words and expressions; stuff like “indeed”, “push the boundaries of”, “delve”, “navigate the complexities of $topic”. Mostly overly verbose discourse markers.

However when speaking in general grounds you’re of course correct, since the choice of words does change the meaning. For example, a “please” within a request might not change the core meaning, but it still adds meaning - because it conveys “I believe to be necessary to show you respect”.

And AI sucks at that. If you interpret its output as a human-made summary, it shows everything you shouldn’t do — such as conflating what’s written with its assumptions over what’s written, or missing the core of the text for the sake of random excerpts (that might imply the opposite of what the author wrote).

But, more importantly: people are getting used to babble, that what others say has no meaning. They will not throw it into an AI to summarise it, and when they do it, they won’t understand the AI output.

I don’t see a big deal given

1. What matters the most is not the words within an utterance, but the discourse conveyed by that utterance. [Translation: how you say it matters less than what you say.]
2. Word usage is prone to trends. Not just slang. Easy come, easy go.

What I am concerned however is that those chatbots babble a bloody lot. And people might be willing to accept babble a bit more, due to exposure lowering their standards. And they kind of give up looking for meaning on what others say.

Point still stands; the same “customers” of Vanguard and Fidelity own a huge chunk of both Google and Microsoft.

Both are owned by the same corporations (Vanguard, BlackRock, Fidelity, State Street, Geode…), who’ll win either way. Until the bubble bursts, that is.

On an individual level, Librewolf is a good idea, because it has saner privacy defaults than Firefox; and its devs are rather good at gutting out the crap.

However, on a collective level, the problem still remains: we have exactly two options, Chromium and Firefox (note LibreWolf is a custom version of Firefox). One is from GAFAM cancer, another is from a GAFAM vassal that keeps doing dumb stuff, since it’s nothing but contained opposition.

Mozilla is a mythical beast. It has many heads, but no brain. As such its actions and movement are unpredictable, erratic, and… dumb.

Replacing volunteer work with a bot does not make bloody sense dammit. You’ll actually pay for the bot, and the output is worse. The Japanese localisation community already called it quits, and others will follow. And every bloody thing is unnecessarily complex, from Mozilla’s structure to what it makes, even if there’s a single piece of its software people care about — Firefox. And Firefox only survives because its redeeming quality is negative, “Firefox is not Chromium”, without that negative quality Mozilla would be extinct already.

nyaa.si has a bunch. Just be careful to not download the manga instead. (Both are under the same section, “Literature”.)

Slay the Spire: yes. All four rules are there, specially in spirit. It’s also a deck-building game but that’s fine, a game can belong to 2+ genres at the same time.

I’m not sure on Balatro. I didn’t play it, so… maybe?

There are a thousand definitions and mine is just one among many, I’m aware. This is not a “right vs. wrong” matter, it’s how you cut things out.

For me, a roguelike has four rules:

1. Permadeath—can’t reuse dead chars for new playthrus.
2. Procedural generation—lots of the game get changed from one to another playthru.
3. Turn-based—game time is split into turns, and there’s no RL time limit on how long each turn takes.
4. Simple elements—each action, event, item, stat etc. is by itself simple. Complexity appears through their interaction.

People aware of other definitions (like the Berlin Interpretation) will notice my #4 is not “grid-based”. I think the grid is just a consequence of keeping individual elements simple, in this case movement.

Those rules are not random. They create gameplay where there are limits on how better your character can get; but you, as the player, are consistently getting better. Not by having better reflexes, not by dumb memorisation, but by understanding the game better, and thinking deeper on how its elements interact.

I personally don’t consider games missing any of those elements a “roguelike”. Like The Binding of Isaac; don’t get me wrong, it’s a great game (I love it); but since it’s missing #3 (combat is real-timed) and #4 (complex movement and attack patterns, not just for you but your enemies), it relies way more on your reflexes and senses than a roguelike would.

Some might be tempted to use the label “roguelite” for games having at least few of those features, but not all of them. Like… well, Isaac—it does feature permadeath and procedural generation, right? Frankly, I think the definition isn’t useful, and it’s bound to include things completely different from each other. It’s like saying carrots and limes are both “orange-like” (carrots due to colour, limes because they’re citrus); instead of letting those games shine as their own things, you’re dumping them into a “failed to be a roguelike” category.

This is almost a textbook example of the broken window fallacy.

“Microsoft”, who? Certainly not Suleyman, Davuluri, or Nadella.

Even if you’re in the camp that understands memes like “6 7” have more significance than they’re given credit for,

I think 6-7 is a shibboleth. It doesn’t say much on its own, except which group you belong to.

Substance, as ever, remains a relative notion. Nyan Cat perhaps didn’t have the substance of an Andy Warhol image

I’d argue the Nyan cat is more substantial than what Andy Warhol came up with.

If you want a great reset you’ll need a new internet that is outright hostile to corporate interests. No corposlop being produced there, no derailing old memes to sell you junk.

Nah, quoting Stormfront is not a bug. Quoting well-sourced facts retrieved from Wikipedia is.

I’m mindblown at him being mindblown.

Oh wait, I’m not. Because I know those CEOs are completely detached from reality, and take users for dumb cattle ready to be herded.

Funny but insightful comment from the link:

“Never get high on your own stuff. A lesson this guy doesn’t seem to have learned…”

Fediverse, please enlighten me - is Windows a drug? …on a more serious note, “don’t overestimate the desirability of what you’re trying to sell” is sensible advice.