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[melyzard]

As more and more people are being forced to switch to Windows 11, Microsoft's most AI-malware-ridden OS yet, I've been putting together articles and links for how to undo the damage and save your battery, your RAM, your disk space, your privacy, and your sanity from this bullshit.

FIRST:

The easiest way to get rid of the majority of the bullshit that Windows is forcing on us, as of October 2025, is this one-stop-one-click debloat solution from a modern day hero:

GitHub - Raphire/Win11Debloat: A simple, lightweight PowerShell script to remove pre-installed apps, disable telemetry, as well as perform v

A simple, lightweight PowerShell script to remove pre-installed apps, disable telemetry, as well as perform various other changes to customi

It's very easy, even if you're not tech savvy or get scared of pop up windows saying "ARE YOU SURE?" Yes, you are sure, I promise. This program takes maybe two minutes and will save you SO MUCH pain, time, and money (and exploitation).

Now that you've done that, here's the cleanup, to catch the little shit that the debloat might have missed (most of this will already be done by debloat, but hey, it's good to double check).

Sick of AI in your Windows 11 PC? Here's how to get rid of it

Microsoft wants to put AI everywhere on your PC, but you can take back control.

Even just reading about some of these features makes me angry. Fucking Copilot and "Discover" AI scrapers are in Notepad. NOTEPAD. And then there's this uncanny valley garbage:

No uncanny valley video calls for me, thanks! (Also, what else is it doing while it scans your face and listens to your calls? What else, microsoft? Because there was a lot of memory being assigned to this program for a simple "smooths your skin" add on).

Stop Windows 11's most intrusive ads with these 9 easy tweaks

Tired of Microsoft pushing ads throughout Windows 11? Here are the settings you can tweak to turn them off and reclaim some privacy.

The truly insane number of places they have stuck ads on your own home computer is sickening. Become Unmarketable.

Bonus:

Some background programs you probably don't need that are taking up space and how to remove them (Microsoft forums, 2024)

Your Samsung Galaxy Phone comes with 22 apps you don't need (Android Police, 2025)

How to disable the AI in firefox (still the only browser that lets you do this permanently) (Windows Report, 2025)

[theculturedmarxist]

>First, we’ve discovered that about a quarter of all the internet connection in or out of the house were ad related. In a few hours, that’s about 10,000 out of 40,000 processed.

>We also discovered that every link on Twitter was blocked. This was solved by whitelisting the https://t.co domain.

>Once out browsing the Web, everything is loading pretty much instantly. It turns out most of that Page Loading malarkey we’ve been accustomed to is related to sites running auctions to sell Ad space to show you before the page loads. All gone now.

>We then found that the Samsung TV (which I really like) is very fond of yapping all about itself to Samsung HQ. All stopped now. No sign of any breakages in its function, so I’m happy enough with that.

>The primary source of distress came from the habitual Lemmings player in the house, who found they could no longer watch ads to build up their in-app gold. A workaround is being considered for this.

>The next ambition is to advance the Ad blocking so that it seamlessly removed YouTube Ads. This is the subject of ongoing research, and tinkering continues. All in all, a very successful experiment.

>Certainly this exceeds my equivalent childhood project of disassembling and assembling our rotary dial telephone. A project whose only utility was finding out how to make the phone ring when nobody was calling.

>Update: All4 on the telly appears not to have any ads any more. Goodbye Arnold Clarke!

>Lemmings problem now solved.

>Can confirm, after small tests, that RTÉ Player ads are now gone and the player on the phone is now just delivering swift, ad free streams at first click.

>Some queries along the lines of “Are you not stealing the internet?” Firstly, this is my network, so I may set it up as I please (or, you know, my son can do it and I can give him a stupid thumbs up in response). But there is a wider question, based on the ads=internet model.

>I’m afraid I passed the You Wouldn’t Download A Car point back when I first installed ad-blocking plug-ins on a browser. But consider my chatty TV. Individual consumer choice is not the method of addressing pervasive commercial surveillance.

>Should I feel morally obliged not to mute the TV when the ads come on? No, this is a standing tension- a clash of interests. But I think my interest in my family not being under intrusive or covert surveillance at home is superior to the ad company’s wish to profile them.

>Aside: 24 hours of Pi Hole stats suggests that Samsung TVs are very chatty. 14,170 chats a day.

>YouTube blocking seems difficult, as the ads usually come from the same domain as the videos. Haven’t tried it, but all of the content can also be delivered from a no-cookies version of the YouTube domain, which doesn’t have the ads. I have asked my son to poke at that idea.

[monitor-offist-deactivated20250]

fastest reblog in the west

[dduane]

Yeppers. :)

[the-original-sineater]

reblogging for study later AND to spread the info.

[them-faetale]

Seriously, get and run PiHole if you can. It changes your internet experience so much for the better. I get shocked when I visit a website when I'm someone else's network, by just how many ads the internet is flooded with now. Take back control.

[estro-boi]

we gotta get back to torrent distribution, i just watched someone eat eight grand in bandwidth charges because they ran a direct-download piracy site with local file hosting through cloudflare. torrents were invented literally for this exact reason

[estro-boi]

torrents work like this

i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3

unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it

i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map

i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs

this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.

crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.

please learn to torrent

[macleod]

How to Use Torrents (with Pictures) - wikiHow

An expert guide to get started using torrentsTorrents are one of the most popular forms of file sharing on the internet, accounting for over

always use qbittorrent, do not use bittorrent or utorrent.

[innerchildabortionclinic]

whenever some sort of unethical labor practice is exposed there's a top redditor in the article comments like "ummm shouldn't these people organize their workplace then? why is it my fault for buying something made with cheap labor?" as if there's not people risking their lives for labor rights in every fucking country this applies to. matter of fact there's corporations who have ended up in lawsuits for killing off labor activists. there are ongoing conflicts surrounding this. everyone on planet earth is a whole person with aspirations regardless of circumstance and no one wants to suffer horrible working conditions no matter how much neoliberals write about the feminist potential of sweatshops

[snagbreac]

https://actonlivingwages.com/

[kawuli]

random PSA, I know a lot of people use duckduckgo as a Google alternative search engine, but it always kind of annoyed me when I was using it because it felt like No Name Brand Google

I have switched to using Startpage.com and vastly prefer it. for one thing, instead of displaying an "AI summary" at the top of the search results (unless you turn it off, yes I know), it displays the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article, with link, whenever it finds one that's relevant.

also a waaayyyyy better sense of design than duckduckgo

also private, European based, least annoying search I've used lately (RIP old "don't be evil" Google)

[yomikoreadsbooks]

Keeping a list of Google alternatives just in case…

[saxifraga-x-urbium]

i have one of those, scraped from multiple different rec posts:

Search Engines

Infinity Search is an alternative search engine with a special focus on privacy

DuckDuckGo is a popular search engine for those who value their privacy and are put off by the thought of their every query being tracked and logged. Uses bangs, ![site] for in-page search (sells your data to microsoft and draws from fucking bing)

WolframAlpha is a privately owned search engine that allows you to “compute expert-level answers using Wolfram’s breakthrough algorithms, knowledgebase, and AI technology.” A data search engine.

Boardreader is a search engine for forums and message boards. It allows you to search forums and then filter down results by date and language.

Based in France, Qwant is a privacy-based search engine that won’t record your searches or use your personal details for advertising. Uses “&” as a bang search.

Another privacy-based search engine is Search Encrypt, which uses local encryption to ensure that users’ identifiable information cannot be tracked. Metasearch across multiple engines. 

Offering unbiased results from several sources, SearX is a metasearch engine that aims to present a free, decentralized view of the internet. Can be self-hosted. 

Gibiru’s tagline is “Unfiltered private search” and that’s exactly what it offers. Requires AnonymoX Firefox add-on for privacy. 

Disconnect allows you to conduct anonymous searches through a search engine of your choice.

Swisscows provides fully encrypted searches to protect your privacy and security. Built-in violence/porn filter cannot be overridden. 

MetaGer offers “Privacy Protected Search & Find” through its anonymised search. A plugin will allow it to be made a default.

Gigablast is a private search engine that indexes millions of websites and servers real-time information without tracking your data, keeping you hidden from marketers and spammers. Variety of filtration and refinement options for searching. 

Oscobo is a search engine that protects your privacy while you search the web. By not using any third-party tools or scripts, your data is protected from hacking and misuse. Has a Chrome extension to allow use in toolbar. 

https://search.marginalia.nu/ an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed. Use old-school searching rather than query-based for the best results. 

https://www.mojeek.com/ 

https://wiby.me/ - It’s goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites. 

https://4get.ca/ it works a lot like SearX, but honestly better. It doesn’t have its own index, but pulls from many others. I think it’s the best for research, since it allows you to search for answers from different indexes, is easy to configure, add free, and avoids censorship as much as it can.

https://www.searchenginemap.com/ for more on how search engines relate to each other.

https://yep.com/ is a crawler

https://www.etools.ch/ retrieves from Google, Mojeek, Bing, and Yandex, like Searx

https://www.dogpile.com/ 

https://searxng.org/ (next gen Searx)

https://luxxle.com/ - possibly conservative?

https://presearch.com/ - good for academic?

https://kagi.com/smallweb - free/randomised Kagi.

Other Searchers

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free.https://cosine.club/ is an electronic music similarity search engine

[liache]

i love that we and cats share pareidolia (seeing patterns where they dont exist), but instead of seeing faces in everyday objects like us, they see snakes

that computer cord? snake. string? small snake. cucumber? short fat straight snake

[yiffmaster]

snake pareidolia is one of the strongest things in human minds too! people report freezing mid-stride before being consciously aware of a snake in front of them, and the same happens with coiled rope, etc. in humans and other primates. it’s even been proposed that the need to detect snakes was a factor in the development of primates’ insanely good color eyesight

[ehlbee]

It’s because snakes are wonderful and we must stop and admire them at any cost

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

wish lion's mane jellyfish would stop doing that

[coastalqueerlive]

doing what?

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

i was going to say doing THAT

but apparently this photo is fake which is an enormous burst of relief to my already fragile, suddering psyche.

sadly though THIS photo of a barrel jellfish is real

don’t like that

[getgoodloser]

Yeah sure that photo is fake, but what ISN'T fake is the fact that the largest lion's mane jellyfish found was about 36 meters long. The average blue whale is about 25 meters long btw.

[getgoodloser]

Here if you'd like to see it:

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

we DO NOT TALK ABOUT TENTACLE LENGTH that is VERBOTEN

[wolfy8tyu]

damn, the girth on those tendrils tho

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

WE DO NOT TALK ABOUT TENTACLE GIRTH

[snowthesprite]

Idk what the fuck yall talken about but I see jellyfish and by god do I love dem on bread.

Some of my favorite jellyfish (sorry if I go on a tanget and vear off jellyfish)

are the Stygiomedusa gigantea, which I believe is also called the blanket jellyfish, but like dude look up a video of it moving it is chilling and fantastic! This thing is 10 meters long, so not the largest here, but ohohoho look at my love

It is a deep sea jellyfish and is one of the largest invertebrate predators known. However, according to Cambridge, it has been consistently recorded in the twilight and sunlight depth zones down south so do with that what you will :)

If we want to keep going down the large and length category of ocean creatures, allow me to introduce the current longest recorded ocean animal. A deep sea siphonophore that clocks in at around 46 meters; my beautiful death halo

Technically siphonophores are hundreds upon hundreds of tinier organisms that grouped together to make a bigger one, but for all intents and purposes, this is one animal. Some of them are incredibly beautiful!

However there is also ones not so pretty, main one was something I saw a month or so ago and it looked like someone had fused like a dozen human limbs together and they were flailing to move and jesus christ yall can go mentally scar yourselves.

Man I can’t find a good picture but Deepsea Oddities has a really good video on them (and on other ocean related things… mostly deep sea)

[jenn-the-mostly-harmless]

Oh hey, I drew a siphonophore mermaid awhile back, or as I like to call her (them?) a siphonosiren.

[howtobangyourmonster]

[lilithsaintcrow]

"This week I discovered the same pattern, executed by Google. Google Chrome is reaching into users' machines and writing a 4 GB on-device AI model file to disk without asking."

Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent. At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane. — Th

Google Chrome is downloading a 4 GB Gemini Nano model onto users' machines without consent, with no opt-in, no opt-out short of enterprise t

[spockvarietyhour]

Google Chrome Secretly Downloads Huge Local AI Models

Google Chrome automatically installs local neural network components on user systems via default configurations. The browser downloads a 4GB

Procedures for disabling it

[bucketofdeltav]

So my beta reader for the Big Fics is an astrophysicist, right. Who is currently also writing a hard sci-fi novel about the exploration of Phobos (more power to them, I cannot with the physics required for that, best I can do is soft sci-fi/fantasy and that reminds me I should finish that story).

Anyway I was bitching about how hard it is to come up with feasible planets in Star Wars because sometimes you need a new planet from scratch and sometimes you need to know more about a planet than the 'has jungles, is probably a moon technically' than Wookieepedia will give you, and they're like 'oh yeah I can do something about that'.

So they've written (in Matlab but they swear it will run as a .exe as well and I may be conscripted to embed it as a web tool at some point) a star system generator.

You input what you know about the planet (ecosystem, population, sun colour, does it have liquid water, does it have a moon or moons, is it a moon or moons, temperature averages, atmosphere, you get me) and it will give you the... everything else about the star system, in obedience to real-universe physics. And if you input nothing you get a randomly generated star system.

And I’m like oh I know people who will be into this with a vengeance, and they're not on Tumblr, so this is me seeing who exactly would be keen on, and I cannot stress this enough, a real-physics comprehensive star system generator.

It's still in the debugging phase (last error fixed: every planet wants to have a population of exactly 5000 regardless of other factors, turned out to be a missing equals sign somewhere), but I'm psyched for this and trying to gauge interest for how high a priority 'make this an accessible web tool' needs to be.

[melyzard]

[elodieunderglass]

@bucketofdeltav says the URL is here: http://tumblr.com/star-system-generator

okay it has its own blog now (@star-system-generator) on Tumblr

Follow @star-system-generator and get more of the good stuff by joining Tumblr today. Dive in!

[cassassinated]

I miss the days when, no matter how slow your internet was, if you paused any video and let it buffer long enough, you could watch it uninterrupted

[mythicalwashrag]

[useful-info-haver]

If you use Firefox, you can go to the about:config page, search for "media.mediasource.enabled" and double click on it to set it to false. After you restart Firefox, all youtube videos will load entirely even when paused! This also affects other streaming websites :)

[nyxgoddessofcandles]

There's more to do actually, now

go to About:config find media.mediasource.enabled and toggle it to false find media.cache_readahead_limit and change it to 9999 find media.cache_resume_threshold and change it to 9999

additionally if you'd prefer mp4 to webm

also in about:config, find: media.encoder.webm.enabled media.mediasource.webm.audio.enabled media.mediasource.webm.enabled media.webm.enabled and toggle them all to false

note! this will limit video to 1080p

and use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dont-accept-webp/ to kill WebP Fuck Google

[vortex-vt]

We jailbreaking browsers now lmao

[charlesoberonn]

The reverse of cozy games that are actually psychological-horror: A psychological-horror game that is actually a cozy life-sim.

You start in a creepy abandoned town full of nightmarish horrors, and you beautify it bit by bit. You befriend the monsters and help solve their problems so that they don't want to murder people anymore.

[1000-life-hacks]

[snagbreac]

[deervsheadlights]

[oneheadtoanother]

[byjove]

I am so sad

[wizard0rb]

how life feels when you want video essays that aren’t just plot/wikipedia summaries and are made by people who have read at least one book in the last decade