Peace, Heather

Ace, middle-aged, kinda mellow sort of fangirl; writer of fic; medieval calligrapher and illuminator; in love with pretty colors. I reblog stuff I like with almost no rhyme or reason.

[ralfmaximus]

Some users report Firefox scoffing CPU power

: You guessed it: looks like it's a so-called AI

Mozilla, in its finite wisdom, embedded LLM bots into recent versions of Firefox for the vitally-important purpose of… naming tab groups. Now, some users are noticing CPU and power usage spikes caused by a background process called Inference.

Ugh. Reminder again for Firefox users to visit your about:config page, search for the browser.ml.chat.enabled key, and set that to false:

If yours says true then double-click it until it reads false.

Doing that turns off the AI chatbot features in Firefox, but also the stupid new LLM tab-naming feature that's rolling out.

[a-for-effort-f-for-execution]

if you want to turn off as much ai crap in firefox as possible, from this post on mozilla's connect forum, you should also set all these to false using about:config:

browser.ml.enable

extensions.ml.enabled

browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled

browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled

browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabled

to get rid of the revamped sidebar, which is also trying to incorporate ai:

sidebar.revamp

unrelated anyone got browser recommendations for when we have to jump ship from firefox

[mckitterick]

and now keep in mind that all the other browsers are doing this shit, too, but you can't reconfigure them as with Firefox

on A for Effort's last point, is there any browser that offers users even half as much control as Firefox? if so, I'd like to try it as a backup

[mckitterick]

irritatingly, the list of AI settings in Firefox has grown. to kill them all as of today (Nov 20, 2026), go into about:config and set all of these to false (yes, you'll have to copy and paste them one by one):

browser.ml.enable

browser.ml.chat.enabled

browser.ml.chat.menu

browser.ml.chat.page

browser.ml.chat.page.footerBadge

browser.ml.chat.page.menuBadge

browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled

browser.ml.pageAssist.enabled

browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled

browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabled

extensions.ml.enabled

browser.search.visualSearch.featureGate

in addition to nuking AI, it'll also speed up your browsing

[leggywormy]

It's end of May, yall know what that means

[venndaai]

have you guys heard about the greenland shark. some crazy shit happening there.

[venndaai]

they are sexually mature at ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS OLD.

their (live!) young gestate for. wait for it. eight to eighteen (??) YEARS. can have up to 10 at a time. good grief.

longest lifespan of any vertebrate, up to five hundred years

toxic flesh

has giant eyes but is usually blind because of a weird little crustacean that's evolved to live on and eat their eyes. this doesn't seem to bother them much.

lives in deep cold water and has the lowest swim speed and tail-beat frequency for its size across all fish species. just generally lives life in extreme slow motion

largest genome of any shark

eats everything including moose and polar bears

ma'am you are delightfully strange and I'm privileged to share a planet with you

[fluorescentbrains]

this post prompted me to refresh my memory on Greenland Shark Facts and this detail about how they feed goes so hard

just vacuuming up their unsuspecting prey. whole !

[muffinlance]

Good news good news good news! Recent research suggests the eye parasites do NOT blind them!

Eye-opening research: Greenland sharks maintain vision for centuries through DNA repair mechanism

Dorota Skowronska-Krawczyk sits in her office, eyes fixed on the computer monitor in front of her. "You see it move its eye," says the UC Ir

I <3 you a normal amount Greenland sharks

[nyaa]

“omg you’re just blogging for attention”

and you’re blogging??? for gold? Women? Immortality?

[geekandmisandry]

[fagcrisis]

i hate the word spicy can we bring back calling things erotic

[maryoliveoil]

rolling up to Wendy's to get an erotic chicken sandwich

[swagpaws]

god i hate how normalized diet culture and shit like bmi and calories are. bmi is based on eugenics. calories are a measurement of how much energy something gives u and not at all of how much weight or fat ull gain. diets have been proven to be harmful and ultimately unhelpful in actually losing weight. fatness has been largely proven to not be inherently unhealthy and doesnt inherently cause health issues.

if anyone has more good links to add on then please do and if anyone knows more on this stuff than me then dont hesitate to correct me!

[more-beanies]

FOOD IS GOOD. FOOD IS GOOD. FOOD IS GOOD!! if you’re eating, ever, and even/especially if it’s hard, know that i am personally SO SO proud of you

[normal-horoscopes]

The BMI was invented by Adolphe Quetelet, the 19th century statistician who invented phrenologist anthropometry. He wasn’t just a eugenicist, he was one of the founding fathers of racist pseudoscience. Please do not listen to anything he has to say about your body.

[uglymelon]

“And get this: While epidemiologists use BMI to calculate national obesity rates (nearly 35 percent for adults and 18 percent for kids), the distinctions can be arbitrary. In 1998, the National Institutes of Health lowered the overweight threshold from 27.8 to 25—branding roughly 29 million Americans as fat overnight—to match international guidelines. But critics noted that those guidelines were drafted in part by the International Obesity Task Force, whose two principal funders were companies making weight loss drugs.”

Source: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/08/why-bmi-big-fat-scam/

Why BMI is a big fat scam

Body mass index is used to sell weight loss drugs, set insurance premiums, and counsel patients. There's just one little problem.

[bogleech]

I always thought everyone knew this by like the early 2000s but instead I see more people than ever believing this stuff is real medical science

[whatbigotspost]

Man if y'all folks up thread thought this situation was bad back in 2021 (as I did too) you won’t BELIEVE what the 2026 cultural convo on these topics is like.

[nasa]

Join Moon Joy June!

Are you in need of some serious Moon joy? Get ready for Moon Joy June. NASA is hosting a month-long art challenge and we would love for you to participate! For every week of June, NASA will introduce a new prompt to inspire artists and creators of all kinds:

June 1-7: Launch 

June 8-14: Moon 

June 15-21: Crew 

June 22-30: Earth 

To share your Moon joy-inspired art on Tumblr, use the hashtag #ArtemisArtShow.

The sky is (not) the limit! We encourage all forms of art, including but not limited to: paintings, drawings, sculptures, dances, music, animations, nail art, latte foam art, poetry, fashion. Choose your favorite medium and share it with us!

Learn more about the challenge in our FAQ. Happy Moon Joy June to all who celebrate!

[twiststreet]

She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.

She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.

81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.

The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.

Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.

Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.

The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.

She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.

Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.

When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.

The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.

When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.

The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.

You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.

Edited down a long tweet. (x)

[depsidase]

[barkingbarghest]

Here is an article from NPR about it (May 22, 2026):

Carolina Milanesi, an independent technology analyst, said Google is trying to make its cash cow business — search — richer and more personalized, and it will make shopping easier. But there is a risk that users may have fewer choices about what to click. "Right now it's: I ask a question, I get a bunch of answers and I feel that I'm in control as to which answer I take, or if I'm looking for something, which product I'm going to end up buying. That is going to be less so going forward," she said. Milanesi envisions AI-enabled search and agents proposing products to consumers — perhaps even those they have requested — but with less clarity or choice around where it's coming from. "If you're going to say: 'I want a pair of Jordans, go find them,' you're not necessarily sure what steps have been taken and whether the AI has used a source or a store that was paid for and therefore came up in the search results," she said, "or if AI actually went and did their due diligence and picked the best for me as a customer."

And here's one from Time magazine (May 20, 2026):

While Google already has “AI Mode,” the company will now power the whole search bar through its new Gemini 3.5 Flash model.  Instead of the classic list of blue links, Google Search will now also generate a custom page with an AI-generated summary of what you’re searching about, which will then trigger a conversation with AI Mode on the main page, allowing users to ask follow-up questions—similar to the kind of layout you would see when opening ChatGPT.

And a little more from Time's article on how this may affect the websites that we are trying to search for:

When Google first started implementing AI-assisted results, news publishers warned of “catastrophic” impacts on the industry, much of which relies on Google search to drive users to their websites.  Last year, news websites saw significant traffic declines as chatbots increasingly replaced Google search as the primary way to find sites and ask questions.  Small businesses also noted drops in traffic to their sites from Google, which has traditionally delivered customers.   Lily Ray, vice president of SEO strategy & research at Amsive, a digital marketing agency, warned as early as last year that Google’s planned changes to search are “going to have a devastating impact on the Internet.”  “It will severely cut into the main source of revenue for most publishers and it will disincentivize content creators who rely on organic search traffic, which is millions of websites, maybe more,” she told Technology Magazine.  

[anarchopuppy]

noai.duckduckgo.com blocks all AI content in search results automatically

[redstonedust]

its probably a normal sign for the economy that all of my adulthood fantasies are like "imagine having your own kitchen living room and bathroom to decorate" "what if i could get on a train" "maybe one day i could purchase a sturdy pair of shoes" "i should save and invest in a single bicycle"

[depsidase]

[barkingbarghest]

Here is an article from NPR about it (May 22, 2026):

Carolina Milanesi, an independent technology analyst, said Google is trying to make its cash cow business — search — richer and more personalized, and it will make shopping easier. But there is a risk that users may have fewer choices about what to click. "Right now it's: I ask a question, I get a bunch of answers and I feel that I'm in control as to which answer I take, or if I'm looking for something, which product I'm going to end up buying. That is going to be less so going forward," she said. Milanesi envisions AI-enabled search and agents proposing products to consumers — perhaps even those they have requested — but with less clarity or choice around where it's coming from. "If you're going to say: 'I want a pair of Jordans, go find them,' you're not necessarily sure what steps have been taken and whether the AI has used a source or a store that was paid for and therefore came up in the search results," she said, "or if AI actually went and did their due diligence and picked the best for me as a customer."

And here's one from Time magazine (May 20, 2026):

While Google already has “AI Mode,” the company will now power the whole search bar through its new Gemini 3.5 Flash model.  Instead of the classic list of blue links, Google Search will now also generate a custom page with an AI-generated summary of what you’re searching about, which will then trigger a conversation with AI Mode on the main page, allowing users to ask follow-up questions—similar to the kind of layout you would see when opening ChatGPT.

And a little more from Time's article on how this may affect the websites that we are trying to search for:

When Google first started implementing AI-assisted results, news publishers warned of “catastrophic” impacts on the industry, much of which relies on Google search to drive users to their websites.  Last year, news websites saw significant traffic declines as chatbots increasingly replaced Google search as the primary way to find sites and ask questions.  Small businesses also noted drops in traffic to their sites from Google, which has traditionally delivered customers.   Lily Ray, vice president of SEO strategy & research at Amsive, a digital marketing agency, warned as early as last year that Google’s planned changes to search are “going to have a devastating impact on the Internet.”  “It will severely cut into the main source of revenue for most publishers and it will disincentivize content creators who rely on organic search traffic, which is millions of websites, maybe more,” she told Technology Magazine.  

[anarchopuppy]

noai.duckduckgo.com blocks all AI content in search results automatically

[bisexuanal]

You can really tell who’s never experienced poverty and food insecurity when it comes to discussions around food costs and how unhealthy food is cheaper. Some fucker always comes in with the price of like… lettuce or… apples. And it’s like yeah bitch but can you work an 11 hour shift after eating some salad and an apple!?! Find me something cheaper, and more filling than the broke ass staples of boxed mac and cheese, hot dogs, noodles, bread, beans, and rice. I’ll wait.

It also ignores the mental toll that poverty takes like maybe your home made veggie filled recipe isn’t crazy expensive but it also involves prep time and cooking time and organization in terms of fresh food that a lotta poor people can’t manage.

Not to mention if you can only afford to get to the store once every couple weeks via bus or cab then you can’t keep fresh veg on deck.

But ya know.. poor people are just dumb and lazy.

[status-quo-hater]

The other tell (to me) that someone has never experienced poverty or food insecurity is when people are viscerally disgusted by the idea of eating anything past expiration date, God forbid food that was pulled out of the garbage.

I have probably eaten more free food than food I’ve paid for. Because I don’t care if it’s expired or from the trash, as long as it passes the look test, smell test, and taste test, it’s fine.

40% of food in this country literally just goes to landfills because it’s more profitable to destroy edible food that won’t sell than it is to give it away/heavily discount it before it goes out of date.

We could enormously cut down on both food waste and hunger if there were laws passed making extremely heavy discounts on nearly out of date food mandatory.

[vampire-loving-vampire]

why is ut always "being fat puts pressure on ur joints" but never "being skinny makes u more vulnerable to joint/bone injury" like lets be real im not playing this game with u where u get to pretend u know anything about medicine much less my personal case . u are going to have things happen to u and ur body no matter what size u are and pretending fat people are somehow the only people who can possibly sustain weight related injuries PISSES ME OFF . be fucking serious

[mousegirlheart]

people give me shit like "you wouldn't have such severely impaired mobility if you weren't so incredibly fat" like nice try fucker i lost my mobility when i was thin and fit and then i got fat when i could no longer walk, you know fuck all about me.

[enbaluka-tokyo-drift]

[000l]

[shrewreadings]

like to charge, reblog to cast.

[liirker-at-thresholds]

I really like how the scientology speedrunning trend is developing, in this clip we see that the participants are

Not deterred by the closed door

Working as a group

Protecting their identities

Inflicting material costs to the institution via property destruction

Getting away at the end

These ideas were not all here from the beginning. They are genuinely gaining experience that can be applied elsewhere

[liirker-at-thresholds]

The church of scientology is on tumblr and they are sending me anon asks telling me that they can't even commit to reporting a post

[stillnaomi]

using violence to liberate people from sweatshops, unsafe mines, and grinding poverty isn't the same as using violence to impose those things on people. the idea that violence is morally repugnant regardless of context is a belief that every oppressor throughout history would love for the oppressed to hold