But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao . . .

Contractulations!

@poorusher Happy that you have a new contract. Gefeliciteerd

American Airlines started giving away Wi-Fi on domestic flights recently. You just sign in and a couple of advertisements play and you get to do internet stuff. Nord vpn even works, so if you wanted to keep them from snooping on your browsing, you can.

How awesome!

this. this is good parenting.

Flora! Dragon Thistle! 👏👏👏

Now That's What I Call Striving

I am for this

Wish I was there

Flora of the House Dragon Thistle

good dad

👏👏👏👏👏👏👏

Nothing to see here.

At last, a picture of what’s wrong with me.

Could be a great mantra, especially useful as an auto erase tool, while not listening..

_______ from _______ leaves _______

Actual patriotism, unlike what the brawling, stupid hordes of MAGA think is patriotism.

Öh no!! Duck shawarma!

Aspirational.

When you play the game of thrones, you win AND you die!

They were really wonderful machines and it makes me sad that we have nothing like it any longer.

No exact date unfortunately. Looks like 1960s.
More concept art: https://www.kuriositas.com/2013...

!!!!

Found the same thing in the condenser at my old house once, except it was more intact and mummified.

Surprising lack of scorch marks on the wire insulation.

It happens. We had a press go down a few years ago and when I opened the panel, the rats had been nesting in an unfortunate place.

I have uncovered similar in my line of work.

title+

I can think of worse ways to go

Nice!

Have a glass of Bass!

aaaaaand, i guess i can use this joke post to poll MLTSHP people:

what is your desktop and/or mobile browsing experience these days?

i guess it's come to front of mind setting up a new(-to-me) laptop lately and cleaning up configurations migrated from an ancient machine.

would love to know your preferred desktop and mobile browsers, your search engine prefs, readers/aggregators, extensions and hacks - all the good stuff that keeps your internet firehose palatable.

have at!

For extensions: Ublock Origin all day, and I've recently added this "Staight to Web" extension that forces Google to default to Web Results: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US... As the dev says "This won't improve search results, but should give you a better access to the information you are actually looking for, without being drowned in recommendations, AI generated content, etc." I'm happy with it so far.

@ufez i love uBlock Origin! it absolutely save my life.
and whoa, thank you for the google addon! this will make things so much easier when i use google.

@ufez Thx!

Pi-Hole all day, every day, three times every weekend. A part of this nutritious breakfast.

Firefox with uBlock Origin, Orion with uBlock Origin as backup. Orion is the Safari browser core modified to support both Chrome and Firefox extensions, is fully featured in its free mode; subscriptions only provide access to Kagi for bug reports and developer resources.

noai.duckduckgo.com as default search engine everywhere.

Greasemonkey (Javascript) and Stylish (CSS) plugins for tweaking individual websites to my will. They work in both FF and Orion. Greasemonkey scripts in FF don't always copy and paste cleanly into Orion, but otherwise things work mostly OK.

Can email you my blocklist resources if you'd like. A pastebomb here would not be nice.

Diving into the Greasemonkey scripts...

A bunch for handling Youtube:
* Adds "before:2999" to search queries because for some reason that prompts Youtube to stop inserting unrelated "recommendations" into search results.
* Removes "start_radio=1" from URLs to prevent autoplay.
* Redirects Youtube Shorts to Youtube video UI
* Strip Youtube tracker/referrer strings in links

Redirect Wikipedia mobile UI to desktop (for desktop browsers)

Insert links in Google and DDG to retry the current query in the other search engine.

Various tweaks to Bandcamp pages: Displays album's total playtime, makes the currently-playing track a little more noticeable.

@ardgedee this is great, thank you! TIL about pi-hole. i think i will try setting that up when i get home.

i've been finding myself using the no-ai DDG far more often at home and it has become my default in FF. orion sounds great and i may give it a try to see how i feel about it.

I run DIVERSION off a USB stick on my router (ASUS flashed with Merlin). That keeps our household and my workplace generally ad-free. Search results enshitification still needs improvement.

@samh nice! that sounds like such a clean setup for the whole house.

Desktop: uBlock Origin
iOS: Wipr 2 (I bought it during a sale)
Misc: been meaning to get around to setting up PiHole on my NAS

@spoetz ooh, Wipr 2 looks GREAT! thank you, i'd been looking for a good mobile blocker and this fits the bill perfectly.

Firefox with AI disabled except for local translate, and plugins: ghostery, privacy badger, and uBlock Origin. DDG for search.

@austinhaas nice, i may have to try adding ghostery and privacy badger to my extension stable. did not know EFF had their own extension!

@nikkuneko firefox with ghostery, adblocker ultimate, disconnect. ddg for search. I ran in to problems with privacy badger a few versions of FF ago, I should give it another chance.

no-AI Firefox with uBlock, Privacy Badger and AdBlock Plus. I have a lot of little extensions including a Greasemonkey script to make gmail look less shitty, one to let me check links in web pages (I still have some dubious "webmaster" jobs), paywall-bypassing, paste without formatting, DownThemAll, FB Purity, a Mastodon simplifier, Reddit enhancement suite, a user-agent switcher, YouTube enhancer and something that makes Google Images be less terrible. I have no idea what the web actually looks like anymore.

@nikkuneko Yup. And the (lone?) dev seems to update it regularly.

"That's right, Robin, they're mushrooms."

@me3dia ++

Thinking of Nac Mac Feegles rn

Girl in green dress in lower right corner: At least Operators 1 thru 4 know how to use a pistol properly! Maybe if 5 knew, then Jessica here would still be alive!

i still don’t know what that looks like.

I have a friend / cousin, an editor. They gave me an interesting description of editing a ~memoir whose author used an AI in the writing process, and then went back and forth between the AI and my, extremely able editor cousin, to finish the manuscript. The author prompted the AI that he was deferring to the editor, for some things, and also took valid suggestions from the AI with regard to including more human and personal feelings about remembrances.

I found this to be revelatory.

I've never had a chance to use it because my job isn't that kind of a job but I imagine the temptation to use it for people who struggle with ideas or aren't good writers (but want to be) would be hard to resist.

And in my case, it's not so much 'temptation that is hard to resist' but rather direct orders from above: We either start using AI or we won't be around next year.

@homerj I suggest you be as polite as you would be with a co-worker you respect. Not surrender.

fantastic!

@tonyb thank you! 😬

Cool as heck.

@BennyTheIcepick Thanks!

Or any of his later films. They must’ve made bank.

You got me; I spent waaaaay to long staring at this, trying to find the cheese ball.

Mind immediately went to cheese ball, yes. mlt has changed me

I've never seen this movie - but I feel like I have because ARCHER talks about it so much :D