I don’t like that it’s not open source, and there are opt-in AI features, but I can highly, highly recommend Kagi from a pure search result standpoint, and one of the only alternatives with their own search index.

(Give it a try, they’ve apparently just opened up their search for users without an account to try it out.)

Almost all the slop websites aren’t even shown (or put in a “Listicles” section where they can be accessed, but are not intrusive and do not look like proper results, and you can prioritize/deprioritize sites (for example, I have gituib/reddit/stackoverflow to always show on top, quora and pinterest to never show at all).

Oh, and they have a fediverse “lens” which actually manages to reliably search Lemmy.

This doesn’t really address the future of crawling, just the “Google has gone to shit” part 😄

Perfection

Numpad/pin input. Utterly useless in my opinion. Also apparently activates itself pretty regularly by accident from palms resting when typing. YouTube comments are full of people desperate for a windows/driver update which lets you deactivate this thing.

Oh, btw, I did not go through the trouble of enabling support under Linux (you can, but it’s optional, because, well… Linux)

I think it’s a matter of preference. Haven’t noticed the screen being a mirror yet, but then again I feel like any even mildly matte screen looks like it’s being viewed through a veil…

I am a bit worried/curious about how the oled will deal with my very static waybars though, lol

It generally works, yes, but I’d hold off for another month or two in the hopes of the issues being resolved in the kernel

Decided on this:

Still had some issues under Linux / NixOS a couple of weeks ago (hardware-wise everything worked; but specific programs, esp. Librewolf, will randomly start eating CPU and battery out of nowhere, with what looks like noops. Haven’t investigated further, yet.

That’s not fair! I care! A lot!

Just had to buy a new laptop for new place of employment. It took real time, effort, and care, but I’ve finally found a recent laptop matching my hardware requirements and sense of aesthetics at a reasonable price, without that hideous copilot button :)

We did a rewatch just in time. S1 is as phenomenal as ever. S2 as such a jarring contrast.

That being said, E3 was SLIGHTLY less shit. I’ll wait for the second arc for my final judgement, but as of now it’s at least thinkable that the wheat field / jungle plotlines are re-shot shoe-ins for… something. The Mon / Dedra plotlines have a very different feel to it. Certainly not S1, but far above the other plotlines.

I’m not filled with confidence though. Had a look on IMDb, and basically the entire crew was swapped out between seasons.

Yeah. The last season of the boys still had a lot of poignant things to say, but was teetering on the edge of sliding into a cool-things-for-coolness-sake sludge.

Not the usual topic around here, but a scream into the void no less…

Andor season 1 was art.

Andor season 2 is just… Bad.

All the important people appear to have been replaced. It’s everything - music, direction, lighting, sets (why are we back to The Volume after S1 was so praised for its on-location sets?!), and the goddamn shit humor.

Here and there, a conversation shines through from (presumably) Gilroy’s original script, everything else is a farce, and that is me being nice.

The actors are still phenomenal.

But almost no scene seems to have PURPOSE. This show is now just bastardizing its own AESTHETICS.

What is curious though is that two days before release, the internet was FLOODED with glowing reviews of “one of the best seasons of television of all time”, “the darkest and most mature star wars has ever been”, “if you liked S1, you will love S2”. And now actual, post-release reviews are impossible to find.

Over on reddit, every even mildly critical comment is buried. Seems to me like concerted bot actions tbh, a lot of the glowing comments read like LLM as well.

Idk, maybe I’m the idiot for expecting more. But it hurts to go from a labor-of-love S1 which felt like an instruction manual for revolution, so real was what it had to say and critique, to S2 “pew pew, haha, look, we’re doing STAR WARS TM” shit that feels like Kenobi instead of Andor S1.

Yeah, that this happens elsewhere I have no doubt, I just never noticed on GH before.

Ah, I had been wondering if this is new, or I had just never noticed it. So it’s the latter, good to know.

It’s kind of genius as well… A single comment will get the attention of potentially dozens of people, sent to a valid email address without having to guess/buy lists, and there’s an air of “trust” around the (completely legit) mail you then get from github, containing the link.

Oh god

Although… Do you think VideCodersTM read github issues?

I got a spam message with a phishing link… Via Github? Seriously? Are we really doing this?

Not a completely unusual comment… From the URL it was very obvious that this was a phishing link though. Curiosity got the better of me. The site shows you a “cloudflare” captcha. OK, let’s click the checkbox. The usual loading animation starts, then this is shown:

Yeah ok, right…

I’m actually a bit impressed with this, these captchas are so common, I didn’t even really think about checking the box. But of course, that interaction means the browser will allow the site to add something to your clipboard.

But like… Why distribute it via Github? I cannot think of a worse audience to try and con into “paste something random into your windows console”. Am I just being naive here? Is this something common I somehow never experienced before?

Dang… The author realized an actual problem / inconvenience people had, and somehow went on to think “I know! I’ll have a random nonsense generator make up the data! That’s a great solution!”

Such a treasure of a channel

What could possibly go wrong!

Kagi lenses “focus” the search. So normal web search definitely can contain fediverse results, but with the lens switched on, you ONLY get fediverse results.

It’s a good day to be an EU citizen.
Just like yesterday.
just like tomorrow.
Just like any other day except whenever some asshole pushes for ChatControl