Modern Web Woes - I'm mad at the internet

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Nitro! said:
A couple bucks here and there for quality search results I wouldn't mind paying for but I'm a spiteful man forced to use Google's and Microsoft's products elsewhere and scraping their results without giving them tracking data balances the scales to me.

I'm trying a meta-SearXNG instance. It highlights how wildly inaccurate the results can be (why do I get the homepage of Google and YouTube for unrelated queries) but after a handful of tries you hit on an instance that hasn't been strangled by bots lately or assaults you with another Anubis prompt and you'll get what you want.

Typing this out I'm making a pretty good case for ponying up the cash. (:_(
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Well I get the satisfaction of denying Google and Bing their metrics but you're still getting their skewed and narrative promoted results. To paraphrase Foundring, 'no Serbian ever called me a cracker.' So there's the quality aspect as well as the privacy.

But honestly, it's just zero hassle and nice to use and I have the privacy built-in. I must do dozens of searches in a day so it's well worth it to me.
 
Harvey Danger said:
I am researching an obscure technical question for a coding side project. Google sucks, surely Brave search will enlighten me.

Top results are all Youtube videos and reddit, with a Wikipedia article on the side. The expected searchslop. And then they suggest "similar" searches:

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I can't prove it, but this feels like the concept of searching itself has been pajeet-ified.
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Google, Bing, and Duckduckgo all have identical results. I don't know where Brave's results come from, but I'd suspect they're very similar to the other mockingbird search engines. Yandex isn't perfect, but at least it actually have it's own results where these others seem to have the exact same indexes.
Zeftax said:
I've heard many people complain about how useless search has become these past few years, some switched to using LLMs as a "search engine" instead.
I may be too conspiracy-brained, but I fully believe this is not a coincidence - I think these engines are purposefully shooting themselves in the foot to funnel their users into using their LLMs instead.
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It's clearly deliberate. Like when they wanted to on-board everybody to the Internet and they made search really good and later started censoring it once every body was hooked. It's the same thing with LLM. They want to hook everybody into using it so they hobble their other products and make LLM feel like the best choice to hook people before they start changing high fees or censor it too.

There is nothing stopping these companies from connecting the search engines in to the LLMs so that when you search the algorithm being ran is actually the LLM. Whether it's a chat bot or a search engine they are really just interfaces that are different, the algorithm being called could be the same. I have not gotten any good results of LLMs so I have given up using them. I don't gamble, so spending hours trying to coax the LLM into doing regression analysis on players statistics from Wikipedia is not interesting to me. I'm convinced it's a nothing burger. A while back I was trying too look for a book and asked an LLM for what book I was looking for, I had seen it in the past then lost the link, and it would just reapeat the same generic canned results. It didn't know what was different about the books. It wasn't even holding a conversation with me. We are a long way off from beating the Turing Test. That was only a few moths ago. I've also gotten misguided information from LLM instant answers that they put at the top of search now. If they were good, I'd be saying good things about them, but I haven't had that experience.
 
Harvey Danger said:
I am researching an obscure technical question for a coding side project. Google sucks, surely Brave search will enlighten me.

Top results are all Youtube videos and reddit, with a Wikipedia article on the side. The expected searchslop. And then they suggest "similar" searches:

View attachment 8079369

I can't prove it, but this feels like the concept of searching itself has been pajeet-ified.
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Would it be PL to ask what the actual question is? I'd be interested to see what Kagi.com thought. Kagi allows you to just click on search results and move certain sites in the result like Reddit and YouTube up or down in priority for any future searches. You can also save different search profiles, say if you wanted one specifically for searching technical information.
 
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Overly Serious said:
Would it be PL to ask what the actual question is? I'd be interested to see what Kagi.com thought.
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I don't remember the exact phrasing I used, but it was basically "running Javascript in a CLI process". I have a very silly idea about accessing Kiwi Farms from a terminal text-only browser.

Brave did give me a few leads (fucking Node), but you can see how wildly off the "related searches" were.
 
I don't know if this is the right thread but, Rant Incoming: Fuck eBay.

To make a really long story short, I have been using eBay for years, buying and selling, but I stopped using them recently. Over those years I have had to constantly battle eBay's guidelines and selling policies, shipping bullshit, that bullshit with PayPal, and them changing the site every 4 months cause it was funny. But I finally decided to use them again cause I needed money, and I had something I wasn't using, perfect use case for eBay right?

I list the item, want it to go international. Month goes by, watchers but no buyers. lower price. More watchers no buyers. Another month, guy messages me if I can send it international, say yes and tell him price. Says he can't cause it's blocked international. Turns out eBay had my account preferences to block international. Fix it, message guy, he buys. Ask how he wants it shipped, no response, ship it anyway. Can't use UPS like I stated in the listing, had to use USPS. Gonna take a month to get to him instead of 10 days, oh well not my problem. eBay takes their pound of flesh, no money for me yet. Been 6 days, wtf, why no money? Says money is on hold until 1 day before arrival, 30 days from now.

I was a loyal customer and seller for years, I have sold thousands through them, and they have always FUCKED me. The thing I sold is worth $400, one share of eBay stock is $100, eBay's net worth is $45 Billion, you really just can't give me the money? I could have probably pawned the item for $100, and got the money now. Instead, I just gave away my item for free while e-Gay says "Trust me Bro" and diddles my money. It took 2 months to sell, another month until I get my money, I don't have the thing I sold cause I shipped it, I sold it to a guy in another country with Zero Feedback, so he is probably just gonna send it back when he gets the Tariff on it.

To top it all off, they had the fucking Gaul to offer me "Instant Pay Upgrade" after I sold the Item, for a fee of course. Fuck Em, never using them again, I'm gonna close my account after I get my money. IF I get my money.
TL;DR: I'm tired of getting fucked by eBay for free, and I would like to be payed for my time, but since I won't be, I'm deleting my account.

Edit: To a previous post about eBay fees, I'm not good enough at math but I swear they are double dipping into everything, not just sales tax. They definitely charge fees after sales tax. If it isn't illegal it should be. I have no choice in the matter charging of sales tax and the buyer has to pay. So why do I get charged fees based on what the other guy has to pay plus what the government is getting?
 
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Harvey Danger said:
I don't remember the exact phrasing I used, but it was basically "running Javascript in a CLI process". I have a very silly idea about accessing Kiwi Farms from a terminal text-only browser.

Brave did give me a few leads (fucking Node), but you can see how wildly off the "related searches" were.
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Well on-topic, Kagi gave me a whole page of responses none of which include Reddit (I think I might have that lowered in results priority on this profile). Some YouTube.

But off-topic, if you want a non-browser Javascript runtime, that would be Node, sorry. If you mean an interactive CLI that isn't the browser Console, that's again, node. Though amusingly Kagi threw up this using WScript. That will give you the ability to parse Javascript that isn't Node and isn't a browser. You can pipe what you like to it because it's Windows / PowerShell. I think from what you say though, this is a "wrong question." If your text-only browser can handle Javascript then there's nothing to do. If it can't, you're writing your own implementation and have fun with that!

Really what you want is for Null to implement a full headerless REST inteface to KiwiFarm's content. But... I'd stand well back when asking. :story:
 
Overly Serious said:
But off-topic, if you want a non-browser Javascript runtime, that would be Node, sorry. If you mean an interactive CLI that isn't the browser Console, that's again, node... If your text-only browser can handle Javascript then there's nothing to do. If it can't, you're writing your own implementation and have fun with that!
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That's the conclusion I came to as well. There's also possibilities like Browsh which may technically fit my requirements, but it's a little heavy and requires Firefox as a dependency. I'm halfway down a rabbit hole and may decide it's more trouble than the funny conclusion is worth.

Still doesn't explain why the search AI thinks that's related to "What is meant by Agile software development".

Overly Serious said:
Really what you want is for Null to implement a full headerless REST inteface to KiwiFarm's content. But... I'd stand well back when asking
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It would be quicker to roll my own browser.

Really all I'm trying to do is get through Kiwiflare without needing Null to change anything. Browsing the Farms without Javascript shouldn't be a novel technical challenge. I shouldn't need to run a full Gecko engine to gossip about cokehead lawyers and Youtube has-beens, I should be able to view a mostly-text forum in a minimalistic browser or even terminal window. (Although there's something poetic about requiring the warcrime called Node to enable stickers.)

I guess it's inevitable that side-stepping all the Modern Web Woes now requires dirty hacks. Things like Kiwiflare/Anubis, Cloudflare itself, Captchas, etc are all sadly necessary protections to keep the ancient, high-trust Web protocol going. Maybe modern web devs are so immersed in the enshittification, they grew up in it as a baseline, that the rest of the garbage they output doesn't seem as bad.
 
Here, have an EXTRA SPOOKY HALLOWEEN HORROR

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Five minutes trialing Salesforce convinced me I don't EVER want that company anywhere near my place of employment. It basically creates a panopticon for salespeople, all everything you put on it gets funneled to the faggots in San Francisco who will know everything about your company and who you sell to, for them to turn around and sell that information to your competitors. In exchange you get AI bullshit that doesn't work and a jeet tech support line that will never ever resolve anything.

FUCK SALESFORCE.
 
Harvey Danger said:
Still doesn't explain why the search AI thinks that's related to "What is meant by Agile software development".
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Well I didn't get that with Kagi, fyi. But I didn't have your exact prompt.

Harvey Danger said:
It would be quicker to roll my own browser.

Really all I'm trying to do is get through Kiwiflare without needing Null to change anything. Browsing the Farms without Javascript shouldn't be a novel technical challenge. I shouldn't need to run a full Gecko engine to gossip about cokehead lawyers and Youtube has-beens, I should be able to view a mostly-text forum in a minimalistic browser or even terminal window. (Although there's something poetic about requiring the warcrime called Node to enable stickers.)

I guess it's inevitable that side-stepping all the Modern Web Woes now requires dirty hacks. Things like Kiwiflare/Anubis, Cloudflare itself, Captchas, etc are all sadly necessary protections to keep the ancient, high-trust Web protocol going. Maybe modern web devs are so immersed in the enshittification, they grew up in it as a baseline, that the rest of the garbage they output doesn't seem as bad.
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Well Null has said his goal for the new codebase is to have the site work without Javascript. I think he's a madman but it'll be fun. And go like shit off a shovel.

Move this to another thread if you want to continue this, but if that's all you're trying to do is get past the speed bump of KiwiFlare so you can use a browser that doesn't support Javascript... some sort of client-side proxy should work, no? Maybe cobble something together in NGINX or roll your own in Python or PHP. Stick it in a docker container, send responses matching the challenge off to something that can handle Javascript which would probably be Node but if you don't want that you could use WScript, maybe? Send back the response from the proxy and share back any cookies to the browser. But do you really want to browse the site via text?
 
Harvey Danger said:
I guess it's inevitable that side-stepping all the Modern Web Woes now requires dirty hacks. Things like Kiwiflare/Anubis, Cloudflare itself, Captchas, etc are all sadly necessary protections to keep the ancient, high-trust Web protocol going. Maybe modern web devs are so immersed in the enshittification, they grew up in it as a baseline, that the rest of the garbage they output doesn't seem as bad.
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Very Zen: The best browser is no browser. As much as possible, you should access the web with tools like ytp-dl.
 
DavidS877 said:
@y a t s has made a library for that: https://gitgud.io/yats/firebird not sure if it works with the latest KiwiFlare security upgrades.
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Thanks for the shout out. It still works perfectly and adapts to all difficulty scaling.

There's also https://gitgud.io/yats/phoenix (github mirror) which can be used as a front-end invoked from the command-line. Just note that you should change ONION_HOST in line 25 of phoenix.go to HOST unless you want to use tor. I should probably move this to an env variable at some point.

Edit: Kiwiflare challenge redirects are signaled by a 203 status. You could probably set up a quick little local proxy to handle catching this and solving.
 
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There is some other stuff I want to post somewhere. But I'm not sure what the best thread would be. On privacy the impending inshitification of the internet, how it's not the right or left. It's agencies like this one, that are the people trying to get governments to agree to this, and are successful doing it.

Meanwhile it feels like it's not getting the attention it should while it's happening. And if people do care later it's going to be too late.

Idk. I remembered this thread was here. Maybe the closest place for it?

Anyway. I'm glad some people are starting to talk more about palantir. Some people are talking about flok. And the others. But it's not enough to matter. And Trump isn't going to try stopping it. He's buddies with them. Like I said, this isn't left vs right.

During earlier administrations they've pushed for similar things but used censoring hate speech and similar things as the reason this stuff is needed. At least on the broader subject of everything we are seeing happening, digital ID, being forced to use them online, or for downloading apps, AI surveillance (camera and online), and strengthening their control of the flow of information.
 
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Internet Archive keeps getting worse.

At first, the calendar of archived sites loaded fine without JavaScript.

Then, it needed JavaShit to even work.

Then, "failed with status 498" errors meant having to change the URL to change the year (probably unless you use "Google Chrome").

Now, the calendar doesn't even show up. Just "failed with status 498" BS.
 

Google has been using its vast array of metadata to scam advertising customers by claiming successful sales through inference instead of influence.

You do not hate advertising enough.
 
Not sure if this is better fit here or the old tech you miss / new trends you hate, but I'm MATI.
My younger brother asked me to help him install a minecraft modpack today, since it keeps crashing when he tries it.
He installed some "curseforge" (I remembered that they had provided skyrim mods back in the day, looked them up and they got bought out by amazon, then a literal israeli company, figures) launcher from the internet (an appimage, of course...), when he was showing me the problem, the launcher was absolutely infested with adverts.
I tried to tell him without using expletives that the more adverts a website has, the more useless it is, and if an actual computer program you download has adverts it is useless completely and should be classified as malware, he told me he does not mind the ads as long as they aren't obstructive (mind you, they took up what felt like the majority of the screen).
Well, I knew that curseforge was a mod website, so I told him not to use the launcher and just download the mods from the site normally. I visited the site to download the modpack and it was clearly geared towards the most apoidic of individuals (paraphrased from memory from every page on the site in bold letters near the top: "STILL not using the app?!"), downloaded the modpack zip and wanted to plug it into multiMC and be done with it.
MultiMC surprised me, but in a completely opposite way to curseforge, no ads, but instead a cute kitten playing with a ball of yarn on the background, love it. I tried to import the ZIP but it told me it could not recognize the format, weird. My brother told me to try it through gdlauncher, since that has curseforge import support. I followed his advice and indeed, some special curseforge import button was present. I put in the zip and it started downloading mods, this befuddled me, as I thought the mods were supposed to be in that zip, but it did not befuddle me nearly as much as when it told me that it could not download some of the mods automatically, because it is not allowed, and instead opened a web browser and went to the URLs of certain mods on curseforge and downloaded them manually.
At this point, I decided to investigate that ZIP file. It contained just a CDL. Now, I am a big Xanadu shill, so I don't really have a problem with this by itself (although I would not list it as "downloading the pack" on the site, instead add an option to "download the CDL", so I don't get stuck without internet with just a JSON when I expected the files), if it were handled properly (through torrents / multiple mirrors / something like that), not just and only from curse forge, with some even needing you to visit the site again and wait through their download slowdown timer for each file.
The modpack downloaded by then, I launched it, and it loaded fine. It was some zombie survival game, so at least he is not into doing the labubus or whatever is popular this month.
I felt bad for not getting to experience the internet before the eternal september, but this generation is trully and well fucked.
They will only ever know the fully corpo-ified internet, and not even the early net corpo startups that at least tried to be funny, but these sterile digital pens for the sole purpose of herding the cattle towards a purchase. They will never, ever, see a website forum with its own smileys made to fit the theme, hell, even sites with a unique theme. Only flat and soulles "web apps" that use "emojis", a few years into the future maybe even some AI-generated abominations on top of that.
When I grew up, people that used computers didn't hack them as much as the people before me, but it wasn't really discouraged either. Nowadays, they won't even give you the fucking files when you download a modpack. I bet they would distribute it as a binary plugin only available through that launcher with a connected government ID (the launcher would, obviously, run in ring 0, the whole time your system is up) if they could.
I wonder how long can this situation keep getting worse before it implodes and people start making more local nets again. I sure would miss you all at least a little bit, but would probably not mind having just a BBS with people only from my city too much.
 
Zeftax said:
Stuff
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The main thing to remember is that we have reached a point now to where social media and other algorithm driven websites are essentially normie containment zones. There can be decent content buried under the mounds and mounds of slop on those sites from time to time (YouTube stands out given its monopoly in video hosting), but the small web is a better place to spend the bulk of one's time online; you just have to use alternative search engines to find stuff on them. Fuck, Newgrounds still has stuff posted to it regularly that is infinitely better than the slop on ShitTok.
 
Merton J. Dingle said:
The main thing to remember is that we have reached a point now to where social media and other algorithm driven websites are essentially normie containment zones. There can be decent content buried under the mounds and mounds of slop on those sites from time to time (YouTube stands out given its monopoly in video hosting), but the small web is a better place to spend the bulk of one's time online; you just have to use alternative search engines to find stuff on them. Fuck, Newgrounds still has stuff posted to it regularly that is infinitely better than the slop on ShitTok.
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I'll have to check out current day newgrounds. I haven't been on that site in a decade+
 
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