I’ve been using Duckduckgo with uBlock for years, so I had no real problems with anything like the hell of Google “sponsored content” until Duckduckgo started putting up their own AI search assistant. Since then I’ve gone from start.duckduckgo.com to noai.duckduckgo.com because I got tired of turning their search assist off and couldn’t reliably block it with uBlock because they kept changing it. (I delete all cookies after every browser session and do not maintain individual app accounts, so their AI settings options were never gonna work for me.)

Because of the way my brain works, I literally don’t even want to see what AI says until I’ve done my own looking. Yet I never failed to turn it off, because I just can’t rely on it.

Usually when I’m looking for something I’m in a hurry, so it’s less trouble for me to just pick my own sources, preferably older than 2023 if possible, and read a bit myself than to spend time getting blithely lied to, or even just suspect hallucination/omission to the point that I think I need to verify it before I can rely on it.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that for me, it is literally faster to skim three or four completely different primary sources than it is to try to verify the assertions in a single search assist paragraph: one is just light reading, the other is point by point comparison of the AI offering against multiple independent sources. So I read.

I’ve never regretted summarizing a topic myself, but I’ve definitely gotten some rotten eggs from AI, both in blatant non-truths AND in holes of omission you could drive a truck through. I won’t make that mistake again. So for me, AI summaries are well worth staying wary of for now.

I can’t judge you for that, I feel like you probably got the very best Copilot has to offer, lol

With 68% of consumers reporting using AI to support their decision making, voice is making this easier. [1]

Does anybody actually believe that 68% of consumers use or even want Copilot? But they included a source for this very generous assertion at the bottom of the page:

[1] Based on Microsoft-commissioned online study of U.S. consumers ages 13 years of age or older conducted by Edelman DXI and Assembly, 1,000 participants, July 2025.

Oh yeah, that’s compelling: US consumers, 13 years old and older. An entire thousand of them!

So the only question I have left is which junior high principal Microsoft “compensated” for this survey, and what happened to the 320 summer school attendees who said fuck you, no anyway.

I followed this tutorial on YT after a failed Win11/Linux dual boot that crashed Win11 completely and only booted into Linux, and it worked perfectly.

Essentially, this guy’s strategy is to create a second EFI partition for the new Linux install, remove the boot flag from the original Windows EFI long enough to go through the Linux install, then put the boot flag back where it was and update GRUB accordingly, allowing GRUB to find and note any other operating systems on the disk. After that both Windows and Linux stay in their own walled spaces and Windows never gets to overwrite the Linux EFI, which is the source of all the misery.

There’s more to the detail, of course, but that’s the gist of it. I have dual-booted Linux with this method solely on single partitioned disks, and never on different disks, so I couldn’t tell you whether a separate disk is a guarantee of anything or not, but after I started deliberately creating separate EFI partitions for dual-boot situations I’ve never had a problem.

This video is specifically for Zorin but I’ve used the same strategy successfully on other distros. He has also done specific dual-boot walkthrough videos for a number of other dual-boot installs and troubleshooting as well, so check the channel if you want to find other distros. I did not see Bazzite specifically, but I saw plenty of Fedora. (No affiliation with this channel, I’ve just used a number of his videos and appreciate the specific care and accuracy he gives his tutorials.) Hope this helps.

Don’t get too excited: the titles have NOT actually been stripped, he has simply “agreed not to use them.”

From further down the page:

For context: Prince Andrew’s statement earlier said he had taken the decision, with the King’s agreement, to no longer use his titles. Stripping him of his titles would require an act of Parliament - a legal mechanism last used following the First World War.

and further down still:

As a reminder, Prince Andrew has voluntarily decided to stop using his titles. He will remain a prince as it is a title from his birth, as the son of the monarch, with the titles he has since lost only given to him later in life

The nonce formerly known as Duke of York also remains eighth in line to the throne.

A word of caution: do whatever you can to ascertain the actual tastes of the person for whom you are setting up this media access, because you could easily make things worse. You are setting up media for them to consume for hours on end that they will not easily be able to change or to stop. Done wrong, it is the stuff of nightmares.

I don’t want to discourage you in any way. I just want to make it clear that your FIRST task, should you choose to do this, is start with asking around that person’s friends and family about what music and media they actually enjoy, and then get them that, specifically, avoiding anything that differs from it too widely because they will not be able to change the channel or turn it off. What you love may sound like screeching gears to them, so don’t add that. Stick with what you can verify that they like.

A good place to start is their own media collection. If they’re my age, which is to say old, they may have physical media you can flip through, like CDs and books, as well as what is lying around the house, like magazines. What was on their nightstand when they went into the hospital? What was in the player when they last listened to it? When you talk to their adult children, what movies do they remember their mom loved? What song would light her up when she happened to hear it? What era of music does she love best? Was she a radio listener before she became disabled (likes variety, can stand anything that gets played) or an album/playlist listener (like curated content, and perhaps one artist or style of music in a sitting).

If you can’t find any of this out specifically, go for soothing, slow and quiet, but not melancholy, played at LOW VOLUME. Like Bach cantatas on lute, for example, or ambient guitar, not least because neurological conditions can make what used to be pleasant listening actually painful. This vanilla pudding of music may not be your taste, you might even find it repulsive, but it’s a pleasant enough change from silence, and anodyne enough at any volume that it won’t make her worse off if there’s something going on in her brain you don’t know about yet because she has not been able to communicate.

So be careful. Because again, you are about to subject this person to hours of sound on end with no reliable way to switch it off.

You’re doing a wonderful thing. But you’ve got your work cut out for you first. If you get stuck, find out her age for me and I’ll put you together a short, safe list to start with.

I’ve been off Reddit totally since 2023, so part of my understanding may be out of date, but before that I was on for many years and watched how powermods became powermods.

Thus this situation is very unusual. Reddit never did anything about the powermod situation before, but now, suddenly, it’s a big deal. For years (over a decade, at least) users have been screaming about the worst abuses on the site being from powermods, and time after time Reddit bent over backwards to not only avoid doing anything about it, but seemed to grasp every opportunity to enhance the problem any way they could, shutting down complaints rather than the power trippin’ bastards that were regularly creating the problems.

Note that powermods very frequently mod the largest subs, which is how they became powermods to start with: modding a sub that got big and then being invited to help mod new subs that then also grew in popularity.

For myself, I don’t think anyone would give two shits if “powermods” only had an aggregate total of 500 users each, but very frequently they have millions, even tens of millions. Looking at the largest subs on the site and the powermods on those subs, and how many of those powemods are crossovers on equally dominant subs, you see the same core group of powermods across all the top sites, give or take a few individually here and there.

Strangely, this is the group Reddit is now disbanding.

Another thing to consider is how many powermods went on to become admins over the years. At least a handful: I don’t know the exact number anymore but it’s non-zero. Powermods who are admins are especially useful to Reddit, because they ensure that the c-suite has direct control over some of the largest subs without ever appearing to do so.

All this is to say that the powermod situation has been mutually beneficial to Reddit admin for ages, which is why they never changed it or even really acknowledged it.

But now, for the first time since 2005, Reddit powermods are suddenly a problem. So what’s changed? Cui bono?

My guess is that Reddit admin is about to a) yank the entire site to the hard right by removing pretty much all effective human moderation and thus preventing powermods from being able to stand in their way across the largest subs (some of which we’ve already seen and the article addresses), and/or b) introduce some other vile change or policy that is certain to piss off EVERYONE, including every non-bot mod on the site, to the point that admin expects a general revolt even among the powermods and need to dilute the individual power of mods in advance.

One very hypothetical change that could do the trick is Reddit forcing mods, including powermods, to quietly engage in collecting evidence of and reporting users and content that admin would like to sell to the current US admin, for example: intel which Reddit is well situated to provide and for which the current administration has already been calling in the wake of a certain recent death. What if Reddit decides to go all in with the present political trajectory, looking for political power as well as the payout they’re usually in it for, and in so doing force mods to comply or lose their subs? It’s not like Reddit hasn’t already done it for less.

Again, these are just my own musings. But whatever the reason, Reddit admin calling it quits with the powermods suggests something much larger than just another light rehabbing of Reddit power structures.

After I didn’t see the mentioned content I looked around Zdnet, and I think you might have meant to link this article instead:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/rebooting-your-phone-daily-is-your-best-defense-against-zero-click-attacks-heres-why/

Bad click, it happens. Good article, though. Thanks!

You’re right. Young people are drowned in bad news. But part of this is by choice. I don’t consume any form of media in which I am unable to carefully curate my own content, meaning that Meta, X, IG, FB, and the rest are NOT feeding me that shit 24/7 because I like the dopamine hits and can’t put it down.

That’s another thing we can individually do for ourselves instead of waiting for someone else to change it for us. I do care about young people, quite a bit, and historically they as a moral group are on the right side of history. For example, it was the young people that clued the rest of us in that Israel was committing genocide, and worse still, just how overwhelmingly complicit we as a nation (US), our government and our corporations, really are in it. Even I had no idea, and I’ve been paying attention. It is the bravery of the young in openly demonstrating and protesting that has, again, showed the rest of us that there is still a sense of humanity in this nation.

But I can’t curate their media consumption for them.

And yes, I was in my thirties when Columbine happened. And the mere fact that I can pull the name of a wildflower out of my ass twenty-six years later and you know exactly what I mean by it is proof of how deeply it cut at the time. We talked about it daily and it led the news not for weeks but for months. It wasn’t 9/11, but it was close. IF anyone thinks I overreacted to the comment to which I responded above, that is nothing compared to the ostracization that person would have gotten twenty-six years ago.

That, of course, is when there was still an overriding sense of how we each contribute to our own environments, before most social media, and long before anyone got the bright idea to steer public opinion with it, much less the newest and ugliest form of the age-old divide-and-conquer strategy we’re seeing now.

I don’t blame anyone their self-preservation: as you can see from my first paragraph, I certainly engage in it myself. But self-preservation is one thing. Adding fuel to the fire with my own bored disinterest in your pain is quite another. And as you can see, I haven’t done that either.

As for my comment, to be honest I would have just downvoted and moved on, had it not been for the puppet behind them going, “Downvoted for speaking truth!” No, I downvoted because what they wrote was a lazy, dishonest, inhumane, and all around shitty thing to say, with zero truth in it at all. And instead of slinking away, I decided to say WHY I downvoted.

We can’t change the world one at a time. We have to band together. And that actually does happen, far more frequently than the “bad news” that is crafted to discourage us from starting would ever allow you to believe.

But until then, we can each think about how to improve our own experience, and take action to help ourselves that does not involve moving a Columbine-level mass killing to a lazy, bored, “just another day” comment in the language that we choose, or calling it “truth!” when someone else does it.

So let me ask you a question in return. Do you think that in general, readers are helped or collectively harmed by the normalization of horrific acts?

Old enough to know that casually dehumanizing people we don’t know is part of how we got to where we are.

We can’t change what the media does, or what society does. But we CAN change ourselves, and choose not to heap our own thoughtless words onto the pile of disinterest that makes the most horrific acts okay as long as they are done to someone else.

From the article:

Local news, Kare 11, confirmed the shooter’s name was Robin Westman, 23. Westman grew up in Richfield, and Westman’s mother worked at Annunciation school in some capacity. Westman applied in Dakota county to change their birth name from Robert to Robin because they identified as a woman, according to court documents obtained by the Guardian. That request was granted in January 2020.

so just a normal Back to School season in the US of A

For me, it has nothing to do with country. But I am disgusted by your comment just the same. There is nothing “true” about it at all.

1. Mass murder is not normal. Mass shootings of innocents, be they children or churchgoers or shoppers or clubgoers, are never normal. Even if they happen daily – and the US may well be reaching that point – they will NEVER be anything short of aberrant in the most vile way, regardless of the country in which they occur.

In case this isn’t clear, and to illustrate just how lazy your cheap potshot is, I’d like to reframe it in terms of Gaza: the schoolchildren shot in Gaza as they run toward food, terrified to go but too hungry not to run into the shooting zone, is that too just business as usual for you?

For me, the killings of Gazans are equally as evil and unnecessary as any other murder – and murder is exactly what that is – thus I do not make low-effort cracks about them, or Ukrainians, or literally anyone who is murdered just trying to live their lives. That is my genuine position on the murder of innocents, so particularly lazy and disinterested cracks like yours stand out.

2. By calling a school shooting “normal” YOU are literally normalizing it in your own language.

3. Your apparent boredom with the murder of children is revolting.

4. Your censure toward the actual villains (the shooter, the society that missed or could not adequately address the warning signs, the corrupt politicians who flatly refuse to address the problem even after DECADES of citizens begging for some level of gun control, the culture that crushes the most vulnerable among us to the point they snap, etc) is entirely missing.

Pick one. Take a lazy potshot at THAT instead.

Hence my downvote, and I regret I have only one to give.

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

deleted by creator