A huge blocklist of manually curated sites that contain AI generated imagery for uBlock Origin & uBlacklist. - laylavish/uBlockOrigin-HUGE-A
Install this blocklist using the instructions on the GitHub page. For Firefox, you will need to install uBlockOrigin for this. Google Chrome no longer allows the uBlockOrigin extension, so I'm assuming you're at least primarily a Firefox user - or about to be (see browser alternatives below).
For Google Chrome or mobile browsers, this will work with uBlacklist. See the GitHub page for full details on compatibility.
Remove AI Widgets:
If you go to your uBlockOrigin Filter lists page, you can select to filter out AI Widgets - this should completely remove the 'AI Mode' widget/button from your Google search page, in addition to the work done by the Huge AI Blocklist.
Using the uBlockOrigin Huge AI Blocklist filter has made my Google searches look like they used to, and gives me genuine search results.
Look at this. It's beautiful. It's informative. It's not a heap of burning trash bloated with fake information made up by a hallucinating chat bot.
We can go even further: return to the old school search results.
Now, the above results are great and should be free of generative AI junk, but some people would rather not see any of the summary widgets or 'people also ask' box at all. Fear not! You can remove all that by using the 'Web' mode in the Google search bar. Click the 'More' drop down menu and select 'Web'.
Huzzah! Incredible. It's like a functional search engine again.
You can make this the default Google search mode in Google Chrome using Method 1 from this page (https://allthings.how/how-to-turn-off-ai-mode-in-google-chrome/). Unfortunately, I don't know if there's a way to do this in Firefox too. This is why for the most part I still use DuckDuckGo (see below) as my default search engine, and only use Google to supplement my searches on the rare occasion I'm just missing something.
Remember, if you clear your cookies, your search engine preferences will reset, including any settings you enabled/disabled to avoid AI. This applies to DuckDuckGo as well; check your settings every time you clear your browser!
Extra filters (optional):
I've also added four filters (their order doesn't matter) to the My Filters page. Full disclosure: I'm not sure they still work, or may only work on Chrome, but I'm keeping them anyway, just in case.
From https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1i7kg83/comment/m8lllwr/: see which solution in the list works for you, it seems to be different for everybody.
From https://allthings.how/how-to-turn-off-ai-mode-in-google-chrome/:
www.google.com##.Beswgc
www.google.com##.olrp5b
www.google.com##.hdzaWe
Make sure you hit the apply changes button when you add filters.
Browser alternatives: escaping Google Chrome.
If you haven't jumped ship from Chrome yet, I'd recommend doing so. Sometimes Chrome outperforms Firefox for niche purposes or because a website doesn't bother to fully support non-Chrome browsers, but the days of Chrome being the superior browser are long gone — by about 10 years. If you're trying to escape Chromium browsers, beware that a lot of the popular Chrome alternatives are just Chrome in a different hat.
Firefox has been the most popular non-Chromium browser for years, and for good reason. However, the company running Mozilla Firefox has annoyed their users, me included, by refusing to take an anti- generative-ai stance, and even included AI features in the Mozilla Firefox browser. Most Firefox users specifically use it because they hate Google's enshittification and want a privacy-focused, clean browser that doesn't hog their RAM and CPU for no reason. So, you can imagine that Mozilla's attitude has pissed us all off recently. You can turn off the AI features in Firefox with the built-in settings, but the company has recently steered straight into the burning garbage heap by saying they want to make the browser based on AI.
Waterfox and LibreWolf:
There are really good alternatives based on Firefox (open-source) which are not affiliated with Mozilla (the company), if you don't like how it operates. Waterfox and LibreWolf are even more trimmed down and privacy-focused than Mozilla's Firefox, and don't use AI. Anti-ai statements: Waterfox and LibreWolf.
From this page: https://programming.dev/post/42546774
In short: LibreWolf is for those who want a “locked-down” fortress out of the box, while Waterfox is for those who want a privacy-conscious browser that still feels like a normal, convenient daily driver.
Choose LibreWolf if: You want the highest level of privacy without having to manually edit config files, and you don’t mind occasionally “fixing” a broken website or re-logging into accounts.
Choose Waterfox if: You want a privacy-respecting browser that supports Firefox Sync, has an Android counterpart, and handles streaming sites/logins without any extra friction (it supports WideWine out of the box, which lets you stream DRM protected content (netflix, hulu, disney, etc).
— [email protected]
I've heard good things about both of these browsers and will investigate them further to decide whether to personally switch from Mozilla Firefox.
DuckDuckGo:
I would also recommend installing the DuckDuckGo extension to your browsers and setting it to be your default search engine.
I've had DuckDuckGo installed on my browsers, Chrome or Firefox, for like 10 years now. It is a good search engine, it's unobtrusive, and blocks trackers, cookies, and does not save any data about you. I've also used it as my default mobile browser for years, along with Firefox mobile, which you can add the AI Blocklist to (see again the GitHub page). I haven't tried the DuckDuckGo desktop browser yet, but I imagine it works just fine like the mobile version. I think DuckDuckGo's browser is also Chromium-based, at least indirectly. I use Firefox with the DuckDuckGo extension so I can have a widely-supported, non-Chromium browser, but include all of DuckDuckGo's anti-tracking features.
Note: DuckDuckGo has included AI in its browser product, however you can opt-out of all AI features with the built-in settings and they will not push it on you like Google does. I hope they remove AI features entirely in the future, but for now I am comfortable with the barriers in place to keep AI out of my face. Firefox also has AI features like Chrome does, which you can turn off with the built-in settings.
There's also noai.duckduckgo search, an alternative version of its normal search engine which removes AI-generated images and turns off AI results/assists by default. Even though DuckDuckGo's inclusion of any AI features annoys me, its policy to make these features 100% optional builds trust with this browser/extension/search engine.
You can always use Google search if you need to, but with uBlockOrigin and the AI Blocklist filter added on, at least you shouldn't have AI-altered search results or the AI overview anymore.
Other browsers exist, probably:
There are certainly more non-Chromium alternatives out there, but Firefox, Waterfox, and LibreWolf are the top three recommended to me. That link to alternatives, plus this ComputerCity page are the best lists I could find in a brief search. If you google "non-Chromium browsers" you'll get a lot of mixed results which require a bit of digging to realise they're not really recommending you what you looked for at all.
I've heard about Ecosia over the years, and while I like the idea of a search engine that plants a tree for each query, I don't think that's actually what happens — at least, that's what they used to be reputed to do, but I believe that's an unsustainable business model which has likely changed. In 2026, Ecosia says it uses 100% of its profits for the planet and runs its search engine off clean energy. That's cool! It's still Chromium-based. And it also uses generative AI for chat bots, so I don't trust its principles on environmentalism. I need to do more reading on this to form a stronger opinion about it.
I hope this post has helped at least some of you have a better experience browsing the web and googling your questions.
The Huge AI Blocklist really has been an amazing tool to keep my internet life free and clear of a lot of generative AI rubbish. I'm not a tech expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I'm savvy enough to understand what genAI is and does, and that the more I learn about it, it's even worse than I thought. I truly hate it, and I hate the enshittification of all our experiences, even those as simple and innocent as googling "snow leopard" or "how to cook pasta" or "what is a phascogale" (go ahead and test your freshly-cleaned search engines out with that one hehe).
Started Jade City (FANTASTIC worldbuilding, probably best I've seen in terms of sheer gritty realism) and whilst my accountant ass sat kicking my feet happily during the chapter on Shae's audit I have had my eyes opened to the virtues of MBAs as fantasy authors. I need to find more of them immediately. I want them to tell me more about suspicious capital expenditures as a warning sign of political catastrophe.
hey so filming people without their consent is weird. you know that right? filming people you don't know and they aren't aware of what you're doing is creepy. posting strangers online is fucking weird. we're too comfortable with doing it now for shits and giggles, chasing some sort of viral hit instead of reckoning with the fact that you posted someone who did not consent to their body and face being publically used.
we're being pushed these Meta Glasses as if mass surveillance of strangers is fun and normal! it's weird!!! there are already reports that people are using these to film women without them knowing and sharing it to communities who get off on this shit. who else knows who people are filming. these glasses with cameras are not obvious and that is dangerous.
Okay but also this is legitimately dangerous. People hide from social media for very valid reasons. Domestic violence survivors, former trafficking victims, former cult members - all of these people rely on the ability to not be found again. Putting people's photos online absolutely endangers their lives. A cheap joke online is not worth the value of someone's life.
“The plates on this car are stolen,” Officer Ganshyn said. My face must’ve twisted in disbelief because he continued, saying they weren’t sure whether the car itself or just the plates were stolen. This made absolutely no sense. Car companies keep meticulous track of the fleets they loan out to the media. The vehicles all have special manufacturer or dealer plates that are logged every time one enters or exits. The officers eventually ran the Range Rover’s VIN, and it came back clean, but in their view, the plates were definitely stolen.
Before I could even process that, another officer dropped the big surprise: they’d actually been tracking me around town for days via Flock cameras. But they kept losing the trail, so when a camera alerted them that the Range Rover had been spotted turning into Kohl’s that morning, they quickly set up their ambush and waited for me and my wife to walk out of the store and get into the SUV.
[…]
One of the officers pulled out his phone, opened the Flock app, and showed me two photos: a wide shot of the Range Rover going through the intersection and a zoomed-in shot of the New Jersey license plate, which clearly reads 34 10 DTM and says VEHICLE MFR along the bottom. Critically, the number 10 is in a much smaller font than the rest of the tag, which is the non-standard structure New Jersey uses for manufacturer plates.
[…]
The New Jersey plates that were allegedly stolen from the LA dealer were 34 03 DTM, not 34 10 DTM. But when the police report was created and the plate was entered into Flock’s system, it was just recorded as 34 DTM. Just the five large characters, no little number in the middle. And Flock’s AI tech wasn’t registering that non-standard little number when it began picking up the Range Rover around town. It just saw 34 DTM in large type and started alerting the local police.
As we all stood there shaking our heads, including my wife, who was finally allowed to join me, I connected the final dot. A lot of vehicles in JLR’s media fleet have a New Jersey manufacturer plate with the same alphanumeric structure—34 ## DTM—and Officer Ganshyn observed that meant it was now a nationwide issue. Anywhere a police department has a partnership with Flock, any other JLR-owned car with the same plate structure is going to get flagged as stolen. In fact, four other 34 ## DTM cars were being tracked around Minnesota that week, according to Officer Ganshyn. I was just the first one to get nabbed. The only way to stop it would be for the LAPD to correct their initial report and update Flock’s system, which Jaguar Land Rover was now racing to make happen following the phone call.
Still, he warned me to drive straight home, park the Range Rover, and leave it there. If I were to cross into the neighboring town, I’d probably get flagged again and go through this entire ordeal again with a different set of officers. His parting words were ominous: “You’re lucky we’re in Plymouth. If you were in Minneapolis, they definitely would’ve come at you with guns drawn.”
hiccup is left-handed. by all means, this is a famous observation within the fandom! still, something i haven’t seen people discuss much is how significant it is for hiccup to be a vinstri (ᚢᛁᚾᛋᛏᚱᛁ, “left-handed man”) within his broader cultural and historical context. and what a good job the animated movies do with that!
it’s established within the HTTYD movies, and even the series such as RoB and RTTE, that hiccup is a lefty: he uses his left hand to write, sketch, and reach for objects, right? while it could be justified as it being simply an animation decision, i bet it was a conscious narrative decision to act as a constant reminder of his character’s otherness, if nothing else.
so it’s no surprise that when hiccup first meets toothless in the woods, he’s holding a dagger in his left hand. he’s stunned and amazed because he managed to get a night fury, and his first instinct is to point the blade right at him without much thought. this is his natural state: we always tend to use our dominant body parts, especially when we are surprised, etc etc
but as he approaches toothless, he starts to hold the blade with both of his hands, using his dominant left to steady his trembling right. right then and there, he’s trying to be what he thinks a “viking” should be. that’s how we start his monologue:
even though i find it hard to believe that the animators and writers had any critical concerns for historical accuracy (or even authenticity, arguably), primarily using medieval scandinavian/“viking” motifs more for aesthetics, there are, nonetheless, a couple of interesting points here that we can connect to history... sooooo hold my hand and fall with me into this rabbit hole i guess 👇 (i will continue this below just so this post isn’t too long on everyone’s dash)
anyway, old norse warrior traditions were deeply rooted in duties of honour, law and vengeance. this latter pillar was seen more as a duty and even had a special name, hefnd (ᚼᛁᚠᚾᛏ, “right of vengeance”). rather than a personal vendetta guided by one’s own morals, it was a solemn and binding obligation, one that was tied to one’s kin and tribe, and the memory of the slain. the sagas, our primary sources of knowledge on old norse history, are filled with accounts of men who made vows to avenge a father, brother, spouse or friend.
in the HTTYD universe, we can even consider that it’s one of the reasons why the berkians are so keen on exterminating the dragons: it is their right, for many of them have fallen to those beasts, as stoick himself puts it. therefore, it’s a continuous cycle of death and revenge justified by customary, borderline religious rites, mostly tied to odin worship (who was not always portrayed as a just god, mind, but this discussion is for another post, otherwise i would be filling this with academic jargon and footnotes).
what is most important here is to know that hefnd, by its societal and cultural construction, was expected, and we can see that in berk as well: dragon-slaying is what makes berkians be berkians to begin with. so, back to the toothless and hiccup’s first meeting scene...
can we really say that hiccup thought he was executing hefnd here? yes!
other than his speech format resembling a heitstrenging (ᚼᛁᛁᛏᛋᛏᚱᛁᚾᚴᛁᚾᚴ, “a vow of strength”), which was a promise made while a man stood before a beast (generally slain or about to be slayed) and swore to perform great deeds, generally including the killing of a specific foe, there’s another detail in hiccup’s speech*:
* (p.s breaking a vow of strength would, by custom, bring immense shame upon the man and his entire family.)
hiccup says, “then i’ll cut out your heart and take it to my father.” this isn’t just a tough-sounding line; it’s a direct reference to old norse heroic literature. the act of taking an enemy’s heart for revenge is a motif found within the epics of the old north, though it is a rare and extreme example of vengeance, not a customary practice.
the most famous and oft-cited instance of doesn’t come from the icelandic sagas, which tend to be more grounded in historical reality, but from the legendary material, specifically the tale of hervor in the hervarar saga ok heiðreks. in a particularly gruesome part, a character named hjálmar defeats the champion angantýr and the other berserkers, but is himself mortally wounded. the saga describes hjálmar asking his companion to cut out angantýr’s heart and to take it with them.
another and perhaps even more famous instance is found in the myths surrounding the hero sigurd the dragon slayer of the völsunga saga: in some versions, he takes reginn’s heart rather than his head.
hiccup is most likely taking inspiration from these two tales, even if they were not common traditions by the legal and social norms of medieval scandinavia. it comes with the fact of it being the mark of a legend, not a typical man: hjarta (ᚼᛁᛅᚱᛏᛅ, “hearts”) in norse thought carried memory and identity, so piercing/crushing/eating one's heart was like taking their entire being, submitting them to you (as seen in snorri’s edda with loki) or vanishing them forever. taking a heart, therefore, since it carried memories, names and the breath of soul, was a symbolic act of complete annihilation.
so in this scene, he is trying to perform, to live by the great names. so much so that he changed the position of his blade: in this scene, when he’s seconds away from slaying toothless, he supports his trembling right hand with his left. hiccup, who is already seen by his own people as “not viking enough,” is consciously acting, trying to prove to himself he can fit in, wanting to be a vinstri no longer. he wanted to be víss (ᚢᛁᛋᛋ, “a man”/“a right man”).
here, it’s important to note: the daily world of the norsemen was built for the right-handed. most tools, from axes for splitting wood to tools for carving bone or wood, would have been crafted with a right-handed grip in mind. a vinstri would have had to adjust, either by using his non-dominant hand or by using tools in a way they were not intended. oftentimes, a vinstri would even be denied participation in some daily tasks and battles, being ostracised and outcasted if they could not adapt. why, you ask?
tactical techniques, battle arrays and, most importantly, the participation in skjaldborg (ᛋᚴᛁᛅᛚᛏᛒᚢᚱᚴ, “shield wall/rampart of shields”). this was the greatest challenge for left-handed warriors, because shield walls relied on a warrior holding his shield in his left hand, protecting his left side and the right side of the man next to him, while his right hand, holding a spear or sword, would then be free to strike. this discipline was what made it possible to create the o so famous unbreakeable barrier we see referenced in movies, comics, etc. left-handed warriors were either placed on the flanks of the formation, so that their unique stance would be less of a liability, and therefore trained to become one of the starting, warcrying soldiers, or they were placed in the skirmishes with bows and arrows instead. if they were not physically apt enough, they were simply denied on the battlefield.
and, as it’s shown in the first movie, hiccup was completely rejected from any participation in action; his lack of technique and his scrawniness are brought up again and again throughout the first movies and well deep into the series. battle was part of an identity, and it was required for you to be a víss.
so, once again: here, he is performing. he wants to be a regular viking so, so bad, and he knows this is his one true chance.
but he’s not like them! his left hand literally stops him.
it’s not that he couldn’t kill a dragon; he clearly could, had the physical opportunity and even the will to do so. he never stuttered while declaring his heitstrenging, and he seemed to perfectly understand his right of vengeance with his tribe as well. it’s just that hiccup didn’t see an enemy in the night fury in front of him.
if he could not see toothless as his enemy then and there, was it even his right to kill him? hefnd is a right reserved only for enemies, those we do not see as kin and that are dishonourable. if he could not see toothless that way, then what honour was there? was this even the right way of becoming víss? are legends built this way?
the short answer is that, yes, some legends are built that way. shame and honour walk hand in hand: egill’s saga is a lot similar to hiccup’s story. he fails socially many times, he’s often described as arriving too late or uninvited and he constantly insults himself. but despite shame and embarrassment and feeling like he is not víss, he takes his chance anyway, and kills others (often in spaces where he doesn’t even need to be violent, like halls and feasts). a lot of characters do that in old literature to try turning shame into honour, paradoxically painting one as the other. it is a constant struggle to belong at the cost of another.
throughout HTTYD1, hiccup had been debating over the status he would gain if he were to kill this or that dragon; yet, in that single moment, with toothless scared and thinking that would be his end, hiccup finds that he does not want to become that kind of legend.
it is a choice. it is goodness. it is shame.
“i did this.”
he cuts toothless’ ropes down with his left hand. can you guess which hand he used to try and calm down hookfang, too?
in more than a metaphorical sense, he’s making history with his own hands. he is choosing to be more than an ordinary “viking” (or what he perceives as one, even if some chronicles sing about people needing someone like him). rather than performance, rather than following berk tradition blindly, he’s risking everything to pave the right way, even if that means that’s with what is left of him and that he’ll never really belong anywhere.
it is a delicious, wonderful narrative tool for his journey as a character and i wish people talked about it more!
I would like to emphasize that I agree with all of these tags by the way. My post wasn't aiming to pin all of Europe's grotesque racism on the new elections.
A few weeks ago I was at a board game night with some of my old classmates from various mainland European countries. They started talking about how horrible Trump's treatment of immigrants is and how they're so glad to be in Europe where nothing like that is happening right now. I asked them what they thought about the fact that their own governments were complicit in turning the Mediterranean into a mass grave of asylum seekers, and some of them legitimately didn't even know and were surprised to hear that their own governments had enacted policies that caused the deaths of thousands of asylum seekers.
Even here in Iceland, almost nobody has been talking about the fact that some of the far right populist parties have legitimately been talking about wanting to establish detainment camps to keep asylum seekers in.
This post is a few months old now, and the bit about Iceland is now outdated, because Alþingi (the Icelandic parliament) passed the bill approving the detention center for asylum seekers. It will be legal to handcuff and detain children there.
Never let anyone from Europe feed you the lie that racism and fascism are unique to North America in the 21st century.
“You can come out to your parents without giving them a list of all the guys you’re fucking,” says Ilya Rozanov, way too confidently for a man who has never actually met Yuna Hollander, who will Definitely Ask,
oh, shane, you are dating someone!! this is great!! can we meet him? (no) can you tell us his name or what he does for a living? (no) can you tell us what city or even country he lives in? (no) can we see a picture? (no) does he have social media? (no) so.... shane, honey, it kind of sounds like you don't have a boyfriend (yes I do, he lives in… some other part of canada, you don't know him) and maybe you're just saying that because you're not ready to date, but honey, you should date! I have a list of men here, I have a plan to get you a boyfriend, I have the NDA forms right here, we'll get you a raya account… (no!!! mom, I do have someone already, I just can't tell you anything about him, ever)
yuna: ah I see, hmm, one moment please, let me bring up an alphabetical list of all 700+ current MLH players. is it aaron a. aaronson???
shane: of course not!! mom!!!
yuna: you know what, of course not, I'm sorry and it was ridiculous of me to even think so. aaron a. aaronson is a second-rate player on a third-rate team, let me re-sort this list so that the stat leaders are at the top and start again from there, haha, here's a funny one to cross off the list right away, I guess: is it ilya rozanov???
“make yourselves impossible to ignore. 10,000 signatures on twitter is a lot but 10 unique personal emails is enough to derail an entire council session.”
yay! have you heard? silly mail is back!! cherry pie shark 🍒 🥧 this is a postcard and sticker reward for my silly mail members who sign up before june 1st!
tangentwithtanner
romaincrisis
vaporwave
pixelskylines
yousharknotpass
areudirty
