Peculiar blend of uber-bland and brothel.

Two rooms which can be turned into one big space by opening interconnecting double-doors?

Or one huge room with an obvious place to put up a partition wall?

Now you’re living with someone who dreams of being a risky fart, the kitchen counter has won a war of attrition against your left hip bone, and you will never be free of the heady aroma of Lynx & gamer rinsed in a little stagnant water, and you cannot begin the day without a slug of cheap whiskey.

At Towerburn!

Just today a number of my searches had me wondering whether AI slop generators were generating articles and suitably titled websites in response to the searches I was making on my search engine.

I don’t know how they’d do that without being able to snatch search terms I make to my search engine (DDG, with its AI features disabled), just don’t find it plausible that anyone is bothering to generate hundreds of sites on extremely narrow aspects of obscure topics, even if semi-automated.

And they often have the same question worded slightly differently three or four times in the first paragraph.

Increasingly find that search engines ignore instructions to filter by date or site, which coupled with ignoring all operands will kill off their utility entirely.

I’d rather live in the dark, haha!

Probably. Bright, wide-angle downlight dotted all over the damn ceiling create that uncanny valley look.

Struggling to think of any domestic application where they would not be an unreasonable choice - maybe a particularly small shower room where all of the walls where one might mount a wall light have some problem which means they cannot be used. Even then, ugh.

Furnishings are all hired for the photos/viewings from one of those property dressing companies, because apparently many buyers can’t imagine furnished rooms. Typically you can opt to buy these as a job lot from the property dresser. The overall look is simultaneously tacky & bland but really not bad compared to most dressed places.

Sheetrock in the fireplaces is likely because the refurbishment isn’t yet 100% completed per the text. The inserts are either still at the restorers or still being recreated to the original design.

The restoration looks way too harsh in many areas, but if the house was in particularly bad shape before work began, it gets hard to fix damage and retain the softness of age whilst complying with building regs.

Spotlights, however, are death. Whichever heritage officer they worked with should have forbade them that.

Forgot to mention the ice rink of a floor in most of the rooms.

Lethal if a drop of water gets on that.

It has a bulging hand-painted portal, a boat cabin in the loft, a treehouse and a brick oven in the garden.

Fugly but am all in on this.

Whole place is like a car showroom, but brighter.

Do people who have their homes like this have cataracts or something? I dunno how else one could hack spending more than 30 uncomfortable minutes in this kind of glare.

Ceiling spots are the devil’s work, no matter the brightness. So ugly, so impractical, so expensive, intense hassle to get rid of. Urgh.

Possibly they have a pet bird?

The red is a particularly hard shade.

Well, it worked initially, then more often than not my searches produced no results or confusing error messages.

Experimented a lot with the SearxNG settings, and also with my browser and firewall settings in case there was some issue there, and eventually gave up.

I was unable to find information online about the issues I experienced, in part because I had no idea how to describe them in order to find help.

Think I tried it in three different browsers, over the course of a month or so, but primarily in Firefox.

Have tried out SearxNG without self-hosting, via different instances, but had to abandon it as it is way, way beyond my mental capabilities to get it to work.

I doubt I could manage to self-host, having looked into Docker for some other matter.

Using Mojeek currently, which isn’t great but not too terrible.

Yup.

DuckDuckGo’s search engine introduced AI assist and an AI chat as opt-out features, which it repeatedly re-enables at random, with no ability to disable it permanently, even though we’ve been able for years to set a bookmarklet to make all our other DDG settings persist.

Users are very unhappy, with requests for a way to permanently disable AI features ignored, receiving only patronising responses from DDG.

No matter, DDG’s utility for searching has deteriorated these past years so severely, even relative to the deterioration we’ve seen with many other options, that I wonder will it survive.

It is always unfortunate when a recommended privacy tool shifts away from privacy, but several doing so all at once is alarming.

Aye.

Have developed the habit of unblocking telemetry every so often, so that the settings I value show up as in use by someone.

Stunning.

Hope the mystery signed brick will go in along with your own plaque to future humans.

Am tired, but bit confused at sequence of events.

Did Russia ban Mozilla from offering specific extensions, whereupon Mozilla removed for Russian users the banned extensions?

Or…

Did Russia ban Mozilla from offering some undefined type of extension, whereupon Mozilla removed for Russian users any which seemed to fall under the ban under an abundance of caution until they could assess each & reinstate those which did not fit the ban?

Or, more worryingly, but maybe implied by the supposed temporary intent of the ban…

Did Russia ban Mozilla from offering specific extensions, whereupon Mozilla temporarily removed for Russian users the extensions in order to give Russia the ability to track or otherwise meddle with Russian users of those extensions… or to enable Russia to interfere with the extensions’ code for their own ends?

I feel I can make a reasonable guess, but there’s a fairly big safety issue here depending on what happened.

Anyone dissenting within an authoritarian regime knows to exercise extreme caution, but always good to put out reminders to have multiple layers of protection, so if one fails you are still ok.