I can’t be arsed to keep up with changing the config of the browser I didn’t choose every time the device updates with new admin-defined settings. That’s all.

On my personal device I still use Google right now for consistency/because change is hard, but I set the default behavior in Firefox to exclude AI results.

I’d just prefer to use/support a search engine that abstains from AI entirely, regardless of whether or not you can turn it off. I don’t want to be a happy customer of companies that still try to weasel that stuff in, because they won’t stop at a toggle. They never do.

Yeah but you can do the same with Google as well (just can’t be arsed to change the search settings on my work PC), it’s the principle of the thing.

That’d be my guess.

I have never once went out of my way to use Gemini, for example, but having it appear in every other Google search with some lying bullshit to spread is probably driving up their engagement numbers.

I really should stop using Google. But can’t use DDG either because they just use Bing and their own AI service as well, and so does Kagi.

Knew this sort of thing would happen eventually, glad I made the switch away a while back.

When Nova was bought out by Branch, we all knew it couldn’t lead to anything good. But it sucks to switch away, and I know people kept using Nova because they could say “it’s not doing anything sketchy yet.”

With this news, seems safe to say that “yet” is finally “now.” Tim to switch if you haven’t already. I’m happily using Niagara now.

Seems a bit dangerous to make X-ray Glasses without sufficient shielding

Not to mention those companies have divided priorities. Valve’s main income is Steam, they have a vested interest in keeping their product dominant. Microsoft and Epic simply don’t, because their stores are only side projects that incentivise their main income sources. But that’s not to say I want to substitute Steam with some other corpo giant’s latest money grab either.

The bigger question is why more consumer-friendly stores like GOG that sell DRM-free games can’t compete with Steam. High profile games have no incentive to release DRM-free versions of their titles on GOG because the bigger store where they make more money encourages DRM. And these locked-in publisher relationships built on DRM allows Valve to outcompete more consumer-friendly stores through sales and user experience.

Valve gets a lot of clout in the Linux sphere because their adoption of open-source platforms is better than their competitors, and we have the mindset of “a rising tide lifts all ships”, but this is also what we were saying about Google and Android 15 years ago and we can see how that is shaping up. Something something “you either die a hero…”

Basically, Valve is too big to compete with at this point, because any competing product needs to be more perfect out the gate for people to even consider using it. Which is hard to do when you are not as entrenched and don’t have the kind of money Valve has.