I know nothing about parrots, but you want a cat. A bird that sits in the corner and squawks occasionally is not affectionate or interesting, and intelligent is debatable. But a cat who will come curl up in your lap or who is amenable to snuggles pretty much at will is going to be much more comforting.

Goldman Sachs wants everyone to use AI, just not against them. C’mon guys it’s no fair! :P

Honestly I use discord for this because of the more immediate responses when I’m feeling lonely. I’m in a couple of medium-sized communities that have members around the world so there’s pretty much always someone on.

• ublock origin, first last and if necessary only extension you really need
• dark reader
• youtube shorts block - converts shorts links into regular video player with actual fucking seek/volume controls
• youtube sponsor block - I pay for my bandwidth, I decide what gets downloaded.
• privacy badger

Couple things…

The nerd brigade is reporting for duty. They probably won’t win any push-up contests and might not be sharpshooters.

I’ve been a nerd since the 80s and I’ll have you know I’m a great shot even with my eyes being fucked. Fuck your stereotyping bullshit.

Bosworth said Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg supported his decision to join the Reserve. “There’s a lot of patriotism that has been under the covers that I think is coming to light in the Valley,” he said.

That’s not patriotism, that’s oligarchs who are utterly dependent upon deregulation to stay oligarchs eagerly kowtowing to the fascist regime in order to curry favor.

The frontline is everywhere; there be no shelter here.

-Rage Against the Machine, No Shelter

What do you imagine ‘destroying the web’ looks like if not killing off huge swaths of websites that relied on traffic/ads to sustain themselves? Do you imagine a man has to bleed all the way out before we can say he’s going to die, or is it sufficient to look at the severity of the wound to critical systems in his body and determine that he is probably going to die?

Yeah, I used ABP for a while and got occasional ads, didn’t discover uBO til later.

Don’t make this out like it’s some brilliant plan only a mustache-twirling villain could pull off; buying politicians is what oligarchs do, Musk just netted himself a bigger fish than most. He saw a rare opportunity to dribble some money on the king of all grifter politicians who is only interested in enriching himself and inflating his ego to get the things he wanted. But it’s not clever or brilliant or genius, buying politicians is in fact rather pedestrian these days.

So let me get this straight, you’re worried about giving the fascists who have shown zero compunction about lying and making shit up at literally every turn a justification for being fascists? They’ve been spinning non-issues into crises and fabricating bullshit whole-cloth the entire time, why do you imagine they care whether their reasons are legitimate or not? Do you think they would just stop being fascists if everybody was super chill? Someone else refuted that idea far more eloquently than I can::

But the point is that significantly lower traffic will kill the business model of many websites, and thus kill many websites.

Oh no, China is stealing your data! Wait, America is also stealing your data and you don’t care? Hmm.

Yeah, it could be, but these guys aren’t looking to replace human workers with a robust, well-trained, and properly-deployed AI, they’re looking to slash and burn their labor costs with whatever they think will squeak by.

I’ve used Amazon’s AI live chat bots a fair bit over the years and I have to say they’re actually pretty good. 90% of the time they can resolve the issue themselves (at least in my experience) and faster than it would take to connect to a person. But most people don’t have Amazon’s budget or customer service-oriented business model.

Nah, cults have other characteristics too, like a particularly charismatic leader, a tendency to have an extreme us-vs-them mentality, a desire for isolation rather than spreading the ‘good word’ far and wide, etc. There are definitely things that distinguish a cult of 100 people from a religion of 100 people, for example.

You could describe literally all human activity in the entire history of the earth that way, so that’s not particularly helpful. :P

Your scale is off there… it should probably be more like: cult(-100)...religion(-80).................atheism(0).................?'

A group of people that is very serious about what they believe in, no matter how illogical it is.

It’s pretty easy to invert that statement: a group of people that is very unserious about what they believe in? That would be folks like DIscordians, the Church of the SubGenius, Pastafarians, etc.

‘Yeah I have no idea whose hand that is stuck up my asshole and operating me like a sock-puppet. whistles innocently’

Yeah, close to probably 10 years for me.

Interesting, I never even knew Brave had that stuff built in, i switched from Chrome years ago and installing ublock origin had already just become the default thing I do to any browser first thing by that point. Though I will note this line in the link you provided:

For as long as we’re able (and assuming the cooperation of the extension authors), Brave will continue to support some privacy-relevant MV2 extensions—specifically AdGuard, NoScript, uBlock Origin, and uMatrix

Which suggests that they’re planning to eventually be forced into Manifest V3 (or something similar) to gimp those extensions, but I s’pose I’ll give it a shot without ublock and see how it goes. Firefox has given me trouble in a bunch of ways (not remembering per-page zoom, hotkeys changing on me unexpectedly, issues with reddit/lemmy on long posts, etc) and I wouldn’t mind switching back.