I’ll add that old expeditions can be played and the rewards earned. It takes a bit of wrangling but is not out of reach for the non-techical. You have to be offline during the play-through but can go online again afterward.

https://cwmonkey.github.io/nms-expeditions/ That repo has the tools and instructions to make it happen. It also has links to some other resources interested parties might find useful.

Dogs may be goobers but they aren’t spuds and not acceptable foodstuffs either way. Regardless of breed. You monster.

tl;dr: you’re paying for search either way. A reliable and secure open-source non-profit would be better but I’d rather be paying directly than use a “free” service which extracts an opaque and invariably sinister cost in perpetuity.

No one should have to pay for anything. We have enough excess that a gift economy is entirely feasible. Convincing folks of that, creating new systems to realize the possibility, and shifting from our existing systems, are all separate and difficult tasks.

In the current system I do think an independently run organization funded by the public (likely via taxes but possibly via private donation) does make sense though. In lieu of that, or something better, there is no useful internet search without payment. Using free search engines means either someone else eats the cost (which may work for small/local communities but isn’t scalable without massive public funding and/or taxes) or the cost is subsidized a la surveillance capitalism and advertising.

Using free services run for profit extracts a cost that may be difficult to measure but there is no doubt it exists. When for-profit companies obscure that cost I am compelled to assume it is because they estimate I would not be willing to pay the asking price for their services.

Adjust this relationship to the magnitude of entire societies enveloped within, and seemingly dependent on, those services and the choice to personally decouple from that paradigm is an incredibly attractive option. I think, if one has the means, it may be ethically compelling as well (but that’s a different conversation).

That’s excellent! I’m with you and agree that we’re the minority.

The center point of dialogue on this topic isn’t about Google specifically though. It’s addressing the rug pull of the internet we were sold on while it was being built, and enshittification more generally. Not merely its possibility or even inevitability within capitalism but that the enshittification of everything is being normalized while the internet the public built is being stripped for parts by robber-barons.

So much so that industries built around norms, and all of the labor and jobs within them, are being lost. Even setting ideals aside for a moment: the harm that brings to the lives of working class people is immense. A minor apocalypse with long-term consequences all for short-term gains for a scant few over a handful of financial quarters. The beast is eating itself in real-time.

Even for those who champion it the reality of the situation is sour at best.

They are laboring under the delusion that modified spelling stymies the use of their writing as LLM training data.

It doesn’t. But it does garner attention (which is, I suspect, the real reason for their behavior).