Any company from an English speaking country supporting anti-lgbtq+ by giving money to someone so venomous sucks and definitely should be boycotted.
I specify English speaking country because, while they definitely should be doing better research, my experience is that companies from non-English speaking countries are often missing the context about the why supporting a certain IP is bad. And more, the people from that country who don’t speak English are also missing the context and thus will buy. Not an excuse for sure, but something to know.
Dingbats have come after our buddy John Scalzi, over the last twenty-four hours, giving him grief for not being AI-friendly.* (eyeroll) So John has had to spell out his feelings about this in more depth.
The same dingbats have also confused him with our old friend Charles Stross (which is deeply funny in all kinds of different ways, but never mind that). So Charlie, too, has had to spell out his feelings about this.
So why not join in? Here's my take, expressed some while back, and a little amplified to reflect the day's business.
None of the works on the Ebooks Direct website, whether literary or artistic, are or ever will be produced using AI technologies. Just so yo
TL:DR; Leaving aside all other considerations for the moment, I will not use technologies trained with material stolen from my colleagues. "Lie down with pigs, get up with mud," the saying has it. "Lie down with thieves..."? Fill in the blanks for yourselves. ...Me? I refuse to handle stolen goods. Period.
And—not naming some of the colleagues, but some of you will know who I mean—this excerpt (in which I also speak for @petermorwood, because I know damn well what he'd say):
We do not use, and will not use, ChatGPT, Claude, or any similar tool. Ever. ...Not even "just for research." Not even "just for outlining." Not even "just for brainstorming."
You need a brain to brainstorm. "Generative" "AI" has none. As by-choice "brain-only writers", we decline collaboration with the non-brained.
And that's that.
(sigh) Meanwhile: look here! Books written by the honestly, organically brained. And on sale, too!
Details about our summer sale are here.
(Please do consider a purchase... or reblogging this for the sake of the gossip, if nothing else.)
*They actually called him their new favorite Bad Word, a "decel"! Like deceleration is a bad idea when you're heading head-first at better-than-escape-velocity toward what has a 50-50 chance of being a very big rock. (eyeroll) Jeeeeez but "what are they teaching them at these schools."
Also noting that this line has a lot of clothing that works for people who need easy chest access or have limited upper body mobility, like if you are recovering from surgery or doing chemo
Cassandra: YOU ARE ALL GOING TO REGRET THIS SO MUCH YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW.
Odysseus: Regret it why?
Cassandra: You won’t believe me if I tell you. If I prophecy, nobody believes me. That is my curse.
Odysseus: … I’m Nobody. Fill me in.
*A couple of months later*
Odysseus: HELLO PENELOPE, I AM HERE PRECISELY ON TIME AND NOT YEARS LATE incidentally I rescued and adopted a Trojan seer while I was away, she’s great, got me home really fast, Cassandra this is your new mother who’s not going to treat you like shit.
Penelope: … I’m going to need more details, but okay, sure.
Honestly, collectively, I don't think people are angry enough about AI companies, specifically Anthropics destruction of books; it is already bad enough they're using them for training data, to extend the life of the Ouroboros machine, but they are destroying them because of "copyright," and pro-AI people are blaming the destruction of these books on authors not wanting their books stolen, so copyright adapted; even then, ownership of the book shouldn't give them the authority to destroy them en mass.
Like always a US ruling, a US decision is destroying culture, a single judge is to blame for allowing them to do this, by considering it fair use; it isn't even classics they're destroying most of the time, but early scientific journals, and war diaries, from people who fought in them, and more; they aren't just destroying culture, they're destroying memories of people. They're committing disgusting acts, and it's up to us to stop them because, in silence they've doing this, and genuinely, for what?
They've already begun showing signs of decay, and even the CEO of Anthropic admitted they need hundreds of billions, otherwise they'll go bankrupt, and OpenAI is already teetering on; they have already scraped the entire internet to get to this point, there isn't enough training data in physical media, or in Google Books to get them much further before they begin swallowing themselves. I, for one, cannot wait for that day.
This will be for nothing.
Anyone, who uses Anthropic, or AI in any capacity (bar those who addicted to ChatBots, that is a different issue entirely), is compliant in this, and fuck them; especially fuck those who think they're being creative by generating a book or art, they're not.
The soul of art is perspective, and the muse; in writing, it is telling a story, politically, of your life, through characters and a world you grow to love, and develop ever so carefully, AI slop can never and will never compare because it cannot live, and feel, and anyone who thinks their slop is equal, is kidding themselves, and I fucking pity them.
As a writer, it appalls me, but furthermore, as a person, it appalls me that these people's legacies are being destroyed, and corrupted for a company that wants money, and a monopoly over information.
We must keep physical media alive, because education and information is the soul of rebellion, and they don't want us to have that.
(7/30/26) The Red Cross just declared the second US blood crisis in its history.
Summer sees both a drop off in donations and, at least for our trauma center, a spike in traumas. Trauma centers across the US are in danger of running out of blood for our trauma patients TODAY, which is very scary but, unlike much of the other scary national news coming across our screens these days, is something you can help fix immediately and directly.
We need ASAP donations of blood, for people to spread the word, and for manager types to help facilitate others' donations. All blood types are needed, but universal donor blood (type O) is especially dire.
Many things that previously made people ineligible have been rolled back. If you previously thought you were ineligible, please consider checking current guidelines!
While O- is the most dire need as it can be safely given to anyone in an emergency, all types are needed! Our emergent release blood is being pulled for patients who have a high chance of death if they don't get blood within the hour. Once they're stabilized, they can have their type confirmed and get blood of a specific, matching type released to them so that O- can go to the patients who need it most.
Canada is also in a blood shortage, not just the US. Even if you're not in the USA or Canada, maybe check locally, especially if it's summer where you are.
The only time I remember ever seeing a blood drive off the top of my head, was way back in college. Hopefully their website lists places to go to donate?
i never really got it when people made posts about light pollution and seeing all the stars for the first time and crying. i always assumed that everyone has gone on a road trip to a bortle 1.0 place and seen stars like that, and it's fantastic, but not like life changing. and then i went to europe last month and was in a mountaintop village of like 300 people and could see about 5 stars in the sky. like fewer than i can see from my home in a big metropolitan city.
my apologies to the non-africans, i did not realise how fucked your sky is
the thing that makes me mad about light pollution is that so much of it could be fixed by downward-facing light fixtures and doing that would also massively reduce energy usage bc all that light cast upward is wasted energy
Finding out AI companies are chewing through - literally, they’re pulping and burning them as they go - millions of books often including 1/1s and old texts that cannot be reprinted
Meanwhile there’s always some dipshit telling me AI is the future and we’ve got to just let companies erase human history and literature so they can train their abomination machines to pretend to think like people because a judge said it’s fine
So I got told I shouldn't use em dashes in my assignment because they're associated with ai... so I could potentially miss out on a huge chunk of my grade if a marker sees (correctly used) punctuation that's existed since as early as the 15th century because... they'll automatically suspect I've used the Plagiarising-Earth-Destroying-Creativity-Killing Slop Machine.
what a time to be alive.
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).
yousharknotpass
2087
gamechangershow
amandla
areudirty
izzy806
ellievsbear
pixelskylines
titsay
