I figure there's definitely going to be a lot of Talk now with the ceasefire. So, here's some rules.
If you hate Jews, you're not allowed to say anything about the hostages. If you ever tore down a poster of the hostages, you're not allowed to say anything about the hostages. If you believed the posters were "Zionist propaganda," if you laughed at swastikas drawn on them, you're not allowed to talk about them.
If you ever told us they weren't important, that they deserve it, that they should die, you cannot talk about them. If you mocked their appearance, if you thought Hamas was nice for baking a cake, if you thought people should get over it, if you didn't believe them, if you rooted for their destruction, you cannot talk about them.
If you took our word, twisted it, and used Zionist as an insult, Zionazi, Zio (a term popularized by David Duke), if you started seeing sense with David Duke, Osama bin Laden, Sinwar, Hitler, because they were "anti-Zionist" You aren't allowed in our spaces. If you don't listen to us when we say anti-Zionism is jew hatred, if the only Jews you care about are JVP and Neturei Karta, you're not allowed in our spaces.
If you thought October 7th was justified, if you want to globalize the intifada, if you shouted From the river to the sea at us, if you put Sinwar and Hamas on a pedestal, if you don't acknowledge Hamas, and Hezbollah, and the Houthis, or any other terrorist group is a terrorist group, stay away from us. If you did a Nazi salute, drew swastikas, use the red triangle (a symbol used for marking which houses were going to be attacked on October 7), called for the final solution, praised Hamas for trying to finish what Hitler started, if you told us to go back to Europe (we know what you meant), if you saw any of this and you didn't say anything, stay away from us, and admit you're a Jew hater.
And if you're Islamophobic or believe Palestinians don't deserve rights, you can also shut up.
All of these are things I've actually seen, by the way.
(Does not apply to non-Zionists. Goyim are fine to interact, No Jew Haters.)
Also: We will not forget what you did to us, to them. We won't forget the friends we lost in favor of Jew hatred. We won't forget being forced out of previously safe spaces; fandom, queer, hobby. Our inability to exist in our own spaces without being exposed to hate speech and death wishes.
We won't forget the mocking of Israelis, of the hostages, of the complete disrespect to those that came back alive, those who didn't. The lack of care to Jews who were murdered. The justification.
The twisting of our words to fit your narrative. Your clear lack of care about actual Palestinians, in lieu of only caring about the terrorists who hate Jews. Your rehashing of old old Jew hatred. Like we don't notice it.
The thing is, I do want Netenyahu arrested. I do think he's a war criminal, and I do think Israel would be better off with him behind bars.
But I want the Israelis to do it. I want the Israelis to get a chance to handle their problems themselves. I want Netenyahu to have to confront the material harm that he's caused to his own people, and I want those people to have their justice.
I want Netenyahu to be brought to justice by the people he actually hurt, not some thirty year old New Yorker who thinks he knows better than Jews about antisemitism and feels entitled to speak over us about our own history for some goddamn reason.
No that thing you dislike isn’t “spiritually Israeli”. You know what is spiritually Israeli? What's the core of Israeli spiritual life? Judaism. But you aren’t gonna say something is spiritually Jewish out loud to devalue it, are you?
Oh, you meant it has colonialist vibes? That it’s a fascist or right-wing power structure? That it’s the result of genocidal actions? Then why aren’t you saying it’s spiritually American or French or British? Why are you so intent on using a Jewish country (no matter how immoral its actions) to critique things you dislike? Why are you ok mocking things by lumping them in with the spiritual (ie. jewish) aspect of Israel? Please, explain to me how that actually isn’t antisemitic.
"Degrees are actually meaningless, expertise means nothing, and anyone should be able to cheat their way to the top" is the exact kind of anti-intellectualism that the right uses to justify attacking higher education and installing lunatics like RFK Jr. into positions of power, but you also hear it on left-leaning sites like tumblr and bluesky combined with smol bean victimhood to justify cheating with ShitGPT and never having to experience the shocking trauma of being expected to do an assignment on your own and turn it in on time instead of scrolling through tiktok 24/7. I'm beyond fed up with it. We're witnessing the consequences of having violently unqualified jackasses in positions of power right now. I don't care about your excuses for why academic dishonesty is heckin' valid.
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).
One of those fandom things that I love is when there’s new characters around and, with the unwavering confidence of an old farmer appraising cattle, fanfic authors take one good look at them, tilt their imaginary hat, and go “Aye. Praise kink, that one. Mighty case of praise kink if I ever saw one.” And everyone else just “aye.”
“I don’t think the Highschool AU is going to come in too strong this year. Fandoms a touch jaded for that. But the hurt/comfort is growin’ thick as weeds and twice as fast. It’ll be a good harvest, fer sure.”
Shout out to everyone on my dashboard who is enthusiastically talking about whatever the fuck theyre into that I don't recognise. Love your enthusiasm, keep going, I don't know what's happening but i support u
there seems to be a fundamental disagreement between microwave oven manufacturers and the producers of microwave meals over whether the customer should know the wattage of their microwave or if such details should be abstracted away from them
the microwave rice demands 800 watts of power for 2 minutes, but all the microwave can offer me three settings: one low, one high, and one somewhere in the middle. I turn it to the one in the middle as I happen to know 800W is the average power of most microwaves. the light comes on and the bag of rice starts slowly turning, but rather than hearing the usual rumble of the microwave, I instead start hearing short snippets of conversation - words snatched from the ether. the lights flicker and a chill runs up my spine. the voices remind me of those "spirit boxes" ghost hunters use. I double check the setting on the microwave. "ah," I say, remembering that I had set it to medium,
