I’d had it before and disliked it. Probably because it was dried out, crappy, US grocery store stuff that gad been on the shelf for who knows how long.

Tried it again because of TNG, except it was a good loose leaf, and man it was good. Had a box or bag around consistently for decades now.

I can’t believe you worked a B5 ref into a discussion, much less operational differences between Vorlon and Shadow.

Major difference even in the analogy is that Shadows actively and destructively sought control and withheld info whereas Vorlons manipulated by parceling out cryptic messages.

Anyway, yeah… the internet is completely fucked up and full of stupidity, malice, and casual cruelty. Many of us filter it by simply avoiding it by chance (it’s not what we look for) or actively filter it (blocking communities, sites, media, etc.), so we don’t see the shitholes of the internet and the hordes of trolls and wingnuts that are the denizens of these spaces.

Removing filters from LLMs and training them on shitholes will have the expected result.

I see. The initial purchase price is the “payment”. I thought the intimation was some sort of subscription to use Alexa. My bad.

Who pays for Alexa?

You wouldn’t need to do things yourself; you’d just tell your assistant what you need, and it would tap into the whole world of apps and information to do it for you.

Ah, the promise made by every futurist ever.

They’re always wrong. New inventions are used to unemploy people, insert themselves between you and what you want to extract money, or to try to sell you something.

“Glitch”

More like

“Let’s see how people react”

Pihole is great. Been running it for years. It’s almost set-it-and-forget it. There are other ad-blocking services, some free and some not, some with more features but those are usually non-free. Many don’t require the setup that a Raspberry Pi does.

Downsides to Pihole:

People who use your wifi will stay with their old habits of clicking one of the first search results which is usually “sponsored”, an ad, and it will be blocked. People get irritated and it takes them a while to come around.

Raspberry Pis tend to eat SD cards. It’s gotten a lot better and it doesn’t happen as often, but once you get the Pi set up correctly, make a backup mirror of the card so it’s easy to get a new one up and running should the card fail.

The best mobile manager (Pi-Hole Remote) just went non-free for a bunch of features.

It doesn’t block everything. A standard suite of browser plugins for ad- and tracking blockers should be used.

Sometimes a website or service won’t work correctly and you have to sort out whether it’s a browser ad blocker or pihole that’s causing the issue and whitelist the address.

The good stuff-

You can create a VPN on your home LAN, use DDNS, and connect when you’re out and about to get ad-blocking on your mobile. Particularly useful for iphones where they don’t let you have ad-blockers for your browsers.

Customizable blocklists, blacklists and whitelists. There are several user-made lists out there that are useful.

You can easily see what is “phoning home” on your LAN and block it if you want.

Easy to update, easy install on a RPi, and if you install a VNC you can update and manage remotely without Pi-Hole Remote.

It’s free.

A fresh bowlful of faces for the leopards to snack on.

There’s this thing called “Alert Distance”, it’s the distance at which animals perceive and begin to react to a threat.

I’ll use it as an analogue for humans’ perceptions of threat.

Say a squirrel knows a cat is a threat, and may react to it when the cat is 15 feet away, whether that reaction is turning to face the threat, making a warning call, or running away.

Now put 50 cats hiding in the bushes and surrounding area around the squirrel. Can’t see ‘em, so it isn’t a problem, even though the squirrel knows cats are a bad thing. The alert distance hasn’t been triggered. The squirrels in the surrounding neighborhood are disappearing, eaten by cats, but our squirrel isn’t thinking too hard about this. More acorns for me!

Put a car in the garage and you can smell the exhaust. Your eyes probably water from the fumes. You know this is potentially lethal, so you do something about it. Shut off the car, leave the garage, open the garage door, whatever. Your alert distance has been triggered. The threat is right in front of you.

Now, as you say, drive that car outside with millions of other vehicles and systems consuming fossil fuels. No real smell or issues for most of us. The alert is only being triggered by what we read (if we bother to read anything that accurately portrays the threat) and maybe a rare bad storm or cluster of hot days that won’t negatively affect the vast majority of people. Negatively = inconvenience.

I don’t know if squirrels lie to themselves about how close a cat threat might be, but humans excel at lying to each other and to themselves for a crapload of reasons. So the fact is that the threat is invisible to many, ignored by most, and actively and willfully obfuscated by a shitload more. So the figurative alert distance doesn’t even exist at all for the vast majority of humans. It’s not going to kill you now, next week, or even next year.

Even when the world has crumbled, plenty will still lie about what’s to blame.