#AI web browsing

[10bmnews]

Is AI going to be the future of web browsing? - The Times of India

Representative image (Picture credit: NYT) When was the last time you thought about your web browser? If you don’t remember, no one will blame you. Web browsers have remained fundamentally unchanged for decades: You open an app, such as Chrome, Safari or Firefox, and type a website into the address bar, and off you go. A web browser is important because so much of what we do on computers takes…

[pennyplainknits]

If you use firefox you can assign a wikipedia specific search right from your address bar using a keyboard shortcut, or type the search into the bar, and then click the little wikipedia icon that comes up. You can also add other search engines (like one for the Internet Archive for defunct webpages)

wikipedia no longer being anywhere near the top of search results when looking up anything feels eviscerating

[insightfultake]

AI Browsers: The Future of Online Search

For over two decades, web browsers like Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Safari, and Firefox have shaped the way we explore the internet. They have become an everyday tool, just like books once were for libraries. But now, something entirely new is emerging—a new type of browser that doesn’t just let you search but helps you think, decide, and act. These are AI browsers, and they might soon change the way we use the internet completely.

[aishuglb12]

Perplexity Launches Comet: An AI-Powered Web Browser for the Future of the Internet

Perplexity AI is entering a bold new chapter in AI innovation with the launch of its latest product: Comet, an artificial intelligence-powered web browser. Designed to redefine how users interact with the internet, Comet combines AI-powered search with enterprise integration and advanced conversational features — and it’s available now to select Perplexity Max subscribers.

“built Comet to let the internet do what it has been begging to do: to amplify our intelligence.” Perplexity launched its AI-powered browser Comet for $200/month subscribers with voice/text capabilities. Comet integrates with enterprise tools like Slack and delivers AI-driven answers with citations. Comet is a step toward a smarter, more intuitive internet experience powered by conversational AI.

Table of Contents

What’s the Innovation? A New Era of Browsing Begins

Key Features of Comet: What It Can Do

When Was It Introduced?

Why This Matters

How Comet Is Different from Traditional Browsers

FAQ

What’s the Innovation? A New Era of Browsing Begins

Comet isn’t just a browser — it’s a smart assistant.

While traditional browsers rely on users navigating through countless tabs and links, Comet is built to deliver direct, intelligent answers to queries using natural language processing. Users can interact with the browser via voice or text, turning the act of browsing into a seamless conversation.

“We built Comet to let the internet do what it has been begging to do: to amplify our intelligence,” Perplexity stated in a blog post.

Key Features of Comet: What It Can Do

AI-Powered Conversational Interface: Ask complex questions via voice or text, and get accurate, sourced answers instantly.

Enterprise App Integration: Connect with workplace tools like Slack to make your workflow smarter and faster.

Real-Time AI Assistance: Navigate and consume information using an AI agent that can summarize, search, and cite sources.

Subscriber-Exclusive Access: Currently available only to Perplexity Max users (priced at $200/month).

Invite-Only Rollout: Access is being rolled out gradually over the summer via a waitlist.

When Was It Introduced?

Comet was officially launched on July 10, 2025, with immediate access for Perplexity Max subscribers. Wider availability is expected later this year as feedback from early users shapes its development.

Why This Matters

Comet represents a new frontier in web browsing, where AI doesn’t just fetch content — it understands, summarizes, and contextualizes it. With growing frustration over traditional search engines overloaded with ads and SEO-driven fluff, Comet promises a clean, direct, and intelligent experience.

Perplexity is positioning itself as a serious competitor to Google and Microsoft in the battle for the next-gen internet.

Additionally, this launch follows news that Perplexity is raising $500 million at a $14 billion valuation, highlighting investor confidence in its disruptive approach.

How Comet Is Different from Traditional Browsers

Unlike Chrome or Edge, which focus on performance and compatibility, Comet is conversation-first. It treats the web as an extension of your brain — an AI-powered tool to enhance thinking and learning, not just a way to load websites.

Key differences include:

AI-summarized web results with source citations

Natural language-driven actions instead of typing queries into a search bar

Real-time integration with business tools

Read More : Perplexity Launches Comet: An AI-Powered Web Browser for the Future of the Internet

[sandeep01world]

Anthropic's Web Search JUST Changed Everything

[olivergisttv]

How to Use AI-Powered Browsers for Faster Web Surfing

AI-powered browsers have revolutionized web surfing by offering faster and smarter browsing experiences. Here’s how to make the most out of AI features for speedier web surfing:   1. Utilize Predictive Search AI browsers can anticipate what you’re looking for as you type, offering instant search suggestions. Use this feature to find relevant content faster without typing the full query. How to…

[all-the-fish]

Oh, you know, just the usual internet browsing experience in the year of 2024

Some links and explanations since I figured it might be useful to some people, and writing down stuff is nice.

First of all, get Firefox. Yes, it has apps for Android/iOS too. It allows more extensions and customization (except the iOS version), it tracks less, the company has a less shitty attitude about things. Currently all the other alternatives are variations of Chromium, which means no matter how degoogled they supposedly are, Google has almost a monopoly on web browsing and that's not great. Basically they can introduce extremely user unfriendly updates and there's nothing forcing them to not do it, and nowhere for people to escape to. Current examples of their suggested updates are disabling/severly limiting adblocks in June 2024, and this great suggestion to force sites to verify "web environment integrity" ("oh you don't run a version of chromium we approve, such as the one that runs working adblocks? no web for you.").

uBlockOrigin - barely needs any explanation but yes, it works. You can whitelist whatever you want to support through displaying ads. You can also easily "adblock" site elements that annoy you. "Please log in" notice that won't go away? Important news tm sidebar that gives you sensory overload? Bye.

Dark Reader - a site you use has no dark mode? Now it has. Fairly customizable, also has some basic options for visually impaired people.

SponsorBlock for YouTube - highlights/skips (you choose) sponsored bits in the videos based on user submissions, and a few other things people often skip ("pls like and subscribe!"). A bit more controversial than normal adblock since the creators get some decent money from this, but also a lot of the big sponsors are kinda scummy and offer inferior product for superior price (or try to sell you a star jpg land ownership in Scotland to become a lord), so hearing an ad for that for the 20th time is kinda annoying. But also some creators make their sponsored segments hilarious.

Privacy Badger (and Ghostery I suppose) - I'm not actually sure how needed these are with uBlock and Firefox set to block any tracking it can, but that's basically what it does. Find someone more educated on this topic than me for more info.

Https Everywhere - I... can't actually find the extension anymore, also Firefox has this as an option in its settings now, so this is probably obsolete, whoops.

Facebook Container - also comes with Firefox by default I think. Keeps FB from snooping around outside of FB. It does that a lot, even if you don't have an account.

WebP / Avif image converter - have you ever saved an image and then discovered you can't view it, because it's WebP/Avif? You can now save it as a jpg.

YouTube Search Fixer - have you noticed that youtube search has been even worse than usual lately, with inserting all those unrelated videos into your search results? This fixes that. Also has an option to force shorts to play in the normal video window.

Consent-O-Matic - automatically rejects cookies/gdpr consent forms. While automated, you might still get a second or two of flashing popups being yeeted.

XKit Rewritten - current most up to date "variation "fork" of XKit I think? Has settings in extension settings instead of an extra tumblr button. As long as you get over the new dash layout current tumblr is kinda fine tbh, so this isn't as important as in the past, but still nice. I mostly use it to hide some visual bloat and mark posts on the dash I've already seen.

YouTube NonStop - do you want to punch youtube every time it pauses a video to check if you're still there? This saves your fists.

uBlacklist - blacklists sites from your search results. Obviously has a lot of different uses, but I use it to hide ai generated stuff from image search results. Here's a site list for that.

Redirect AMP to HTML - redirects links from their amp version to the normal version. Amp link is a version of a site made faster and more accessible for phones by Bing/Google. Good in theory, but lets search engines prefer some pages to others (that don't have an amp version), and afaik takes traffic from the original page too. Here's some more reading about why it's an issue, I don't think I can make a good tl;dr on this.

Also since I used this in the tags, here's some reading about enshittification and why the current mainstream internet/services kinda suck.

[schizodiaries]

I’m seeing a lot of great discussion on my dashboard about generative AI and psychosis. I’m so glad psychotic and schizospec people are talking about this again, and I’m not sure there’s anything else I could add that hasn’t already been brought up.

All I wanted to say was my psychotic break happened just before the big genAI boom. If it had happened even a year later, I’m almost certain AI generated content would have made it so much worse for me. I was already having a hard time browsing the web, unable to tell if what I was seeing was real or manufactured by an outside force. Knowing how things are nowadays with AI (the fake images, fake videos and audio, fake posts, fake chatbots) I can’t help but worry that more people are going to be at risk of experiencing a serious break from reality.

If you know anyone who is psychotic or schizospec, has a family history of schizophrenia, is prone to mental health issues, etc., I encourage you to have a discussion with them about what generative AI is and how it works. They likely won’t be able to avoid it altogether since it’s so prevalent online, and they might even willingly engage with it out of boredom or curiosity. I think one help thing we can do for our potentially psychotic loved ones is to equip them with knowledge about what they’re dealing with. That way if they do end up losing touch with their senses, they might have an easier time reality checking and coming down from it. But of course if the time does come when they have a major psychotic break, please be there for them and support them as best you can. Never let them feel alone, afraid, or ashamed.

[inqroot]

What if I took dkos and made him a shimeji lol

Let me start with, I think this can be interpreted as either post-epilogue or as part of an au. Salvation could be created from digital fragments of Dokja (like an avatar) or just born entirely from coding, for the sake of this lore/info dump I'm going with the "no-scenarios AU and Salvation is a smart AI somewhere between JARVIS from Iron Man and the Rotom phone/dex from Pokemon"

His "core" entity lives with Dokja and Joonghyuk, but kimcom, Uriel, and Persephone/Hades have copies of him as well (Dokja did offer to send Salvation to Lee Sookyung but she declined saying she doesn't like bothering with any more technology than needed) Demon King Of Salvation is his legal name, but default nicknames are Salvation, Guwon/91 (in english), 99 (pronounced ni-ni / night night, it became a pavlovian habit from when users go to bed)

Additional registered nicknames include- Squid (Joonghyuk, Sooyoung) Hyung (Gilyoung) Ahjussi (Yoosung, Mia) Rat (Sooyoung, Heewon) Problem (Joonghyuk) Bitch (Dokja, only when they're fighting) Dokja (Uriel, Persephone, Hyunsung, Sangah) (It..gets really confusing if the human Dokja is over)

Salvation has free access to the internet and can be used as a web search, but is usually responsible and only browses around if he's not actively performing a task Takes his data management role very seriously He can split himself and transfer admin copies to other computers/phones (They'll move/behave independently like the kkoma) but it slows down his processing and reaction time so he doesn't like to have more than two or three visual copies of himself at a time (He can still perform all functions while docked, it just creates a window for him to interact with vs having to physically move himself into that space) Everyone in kimcom has a copy of his source code that's automatically synced and backed up every night. Dokja had a scare after he had a laptop melt. Salvation was on Joonghyuk's pc at the time so it was fine but it put the fear of god in Dokja (the first time) Salvation only performs administrative duties as his active function for Dokja, Joonghyuk, Sooyoung, and Donghoon. While he CAN perform these tasks for everyone else, they seem to be content in just having him be a shimeji (kimcom likes to keep a shimeji running for Salvation bc a screen with a running program acts as his scenery. When they found out that Salvation's world is only as many screens as he's running as a shimeji on and is just an empty grid space otherwise, everyone started adding him to the startup programs)

When he's not in work mode, Salvation can get really spicy. With Dokja he commonly steals the cursor, moves windows, rearranges his desktop (not the files bc he's the one that organized them in the first place and gods be damned if he gives himself more work of having to put them back) and actively antagonizes him bc it's funny. A conversation Joonghyuk has heard while passing Dokja's office more than once is Kdj: put that back right now or so help me Dkos: or what, oh nooo don't put me in the recycling bins again I'll fucking eat my way out of it again >:/ Kdj: YOU LITTLE SHIT (Grabs him with cursor or finger if touch screen monitor/cursor is held hostage and just shakes the FUCK out of him) Dkos (while getting shaken like a paint can): I FuCkInG hAtE yOu

He's (usually) more well-behaved when it comes to idling on Joonghyuk's desktop, though. Joonghyuk uses Salvation to handle audio balancing while he's live, and doing program checks while setting up but otherwise leaves him be. Salvation in turn usually only terrorizes the screen when he's starting/ending and not when the game's actually live. Chat can see him and can interact with Salvation through an overlay to keep themselves entertained, he's gone to war with Joonghyuk's chat more than once tbh When Salvation gets too spicy, he'll usually just deal with it or call Dokja over if he's not busy to handle Salvation bc he doesn't want to accidentally hurt him (he's also too tired to deal with this bc Salvation has access to WAY too much shit). He'll switch to a just chatting screen and let Dokja and Salvation beef while he takes a break lmao These fights have happened more than once, so Dokja made an on-screen entity that he affectionately calls "Gay baby jail" (it's shaped like a child's playpen) where he puts Salvation in time out. For some reason Salvation can't physically remove himself from this and it pisses him off. Dokja made the mistake once with forgetting the AI has a MOUTH on him, so this was remedied by an auto-filter while in gay baby jail that converts his speech/dialogue swearing to rubber ducky noises and 🦆emojis Chat has a 500k point redeem that puts Salvation in gay baby jail for 5 minutes (Salvation is actively petitioning to make it 1m points, at LEAST. bc it's what he deserves). It's part of why he actively beefs with chat to keep himself occupied while Joonghyuk is live

He has a squid form that he uses when he goes online There's a menu option on his on-screen display to generate a dumpling for him to eat. He doesn't need food, to be clear, but he still likes eating the dumplings Because he was designed to be an administrative assistant, Salvation can innately defend himself (and his files) from viruses and such to a certain degree, but it's not his core function so he's not specialized in it. This gets remedied later after A Certain EventTM

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

January 18, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Jan 19, 2025

Shortly before midnight last night, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) published its initial findings from a study it undertook last July when it asked eight large companies to turn over information about the data they collect about consumers, product sales, and how the surveillance the companies used affected consumer prices. The FTC focused on the middlemen hired by retailers. Those middlemen use algorithms to tweak and target prices to different markets.

The initial findings of the FTC using data from six of the eight companies show that those prices are not static. Middlemen can target prices to individuals using their location, browsing patterns, shopping history, and even the way they move a mouse over a webpage. They can also use that information to show higher-priced products first in web searches. The FTC found that the intermediaries—the middlemen—worked with at least 250 retailers.

“Initial staff findings show that retailers frequently use people’s personal information to set targeted, tailored prices for goods and services—from a person's location and demographics, down to their mouse movements on a webpage,” said FTC chair Lina Khan. “The FTC should continue to investigate surveillance pricing practices because Americans deserve to know how their private data is being used to set the prices they pay and whether firms are charging different people different prices for the same good or service.”

The FTC has asked for public comment on consumers’ experience with surveillance pricing.

FTC commissioner Andrew N. Ferguson, whom Trump has tapped to chair the commission in his incoming administration, dissented from the report.

Matt Stoller of the nonprofit American Economic Liberties Project, which is working “to address today’s crisis of concentrated economic power,” wrote that “[t]he antitrust enforcers (Lina Khan et al) went full Tony Montana on big business this week before Trump people took over.”

Stoller made a list. The FTC sued John Deere “for generating $6 billion by prohibiting farmers from being able to repair their own equipment,” released a report showing that pharmacy benefit managers had “inflated prices for specialty pharmaceuticals by more than $7 billion,” “sued corporate landlord Greystar, which owns 800,000 apartments, for misleading renters on junk fees,” and “forced health care private equity powerhouse Welsh Carson to stop monopolization of the anesthesia market.”

It sued Pepsi for conspiring to give Walmart exclusive discounts that made prices higher at smaller stores, “​​[l]eft a roadmap for parties who are worried about consolidation in AI by big tech by revealing a host of interlinked relationships among Google, Amazon and Microsoft and Anthropic and OpenAI,” said gig workers can’t be sued for antitrust violations when they try to organize, and forced game developer Cognosphere to pay a $20 million fine for marketing loot boxes to teens under 16 that hid the real costs and misled the teens.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau “sued Capital One for cheating consumers out of $2 billion by misleading consumers over savings accounts,” Stoller continued. It “forced Cash App purveyor Block…to give $120 million in refunds for fostering fraud on its platform and then refusing to offer customer support to affected consumers,” “sued Experian for refusing to give consumers a way to correct errors in credit reports,” ordered Equifax to pay $15 million to a victims’ fund for “failing to properly investigate errors on credit reports,” and ordered “Honda Finance to pay $12.8 million for reporting inaccurate information that smeared the credit reports of Honda and Acura drivers.”

The Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice sued “seven giant corporate landlords for rent-fixing, using the software and consulting firm RealPage,” Stoller went on. It “sued $600 billion private equity titan KKR for systemically misleading the government on more than a dozen acquisitions.”

“Honorary mention goes to [Secretary Pete Buttigieg] at the Department of Transportation for suing Southwest and fining Frontier for ‘chronically delayed flights,’” Stoller concluded. He added more results to the list in his newsletter BIG.

Meanwhile, last night, while the leaders in the cryptocurrency industry were at a ball in honor of President-elect Trump’s inauguration, Trump launched his own cryptocurrency. By morning he appeared to have made more than $25 billion, at least on paper. According to Eric Lipton at the New York Times, “ethics experts assailed [the business] as a blatant effort to cash in on the office he is about to occupy again.”

Adav Noti, executive director of the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center, told Lipton: “It is literally cashing in on the presidency—creating a financial instrument so people can transfer money to the president’s family in connection with his office. It is beyond unprecedented.” Cryptocurrency leaders worried that just as their industry seems on the verge of becoming mainstream, Trump’s obvious cashing-in would hurt its reputation. Venture capitalist Nick Tomaino posted: “Trump owning 80 percent and timing launch hours before inauguration is predatory and many will likely get hurt by it.”

Yesterday the European Commission, which is the executive arm of the European Union, asked X, the social media company owned by Trump-adjacent billionaire Elon Musk, to hand over internal documents about the company’s algorithms that give far-right posts and politicians more visibility than other political groups. The European Union has been investigating X since December 2023 out of concerns about how it deals with the spread of disinformation and illegal content. The European Union’s Digital Services Act regulates online platforms to prevent illegal and harmful activities, as well as the spread of disinformation.

Today in Washington, D.C., the National Mall was filled with thousands of people voicing their opposition to President-elect Trump and his policies. Online speculation has been rampant that Trump moved his inauguration indoors to avoid visual comparisons between today’s protesters and inaugural attendees. Brutally cold weather also descended on President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration, but a sea of attendees nonetheless filled the National Mall.

Trump has always understood the importance of visuals and has worked hard to project an image of an invincible leader. Moving the inauguration indoors takes away that image, though, and people who have spent thousands of dollars to travel to the capital to see his inauguration are now unhappy to discover they will be limited to watching his motorcade drive by them. On social media, one user posted: “MAGA doesn’t realize the symbolism of [Trump] moving the inauguration inside: The billionaires, millionaires and oligarchs will be at his side, while his loyal followers are left outside in the cold. Welcome to the next 4+ years.”

Trump is not as good at governing as he is at performance: his approach to crises is to blame Democrats for them. But he is about to take office with majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate, putting responsibility for governance firmly into his hands.

Right off the bat, he has at least two major problems at hand.

Last night, Commissioner Tyler Harper of the Georgia Department of Agriculture suspended all “poultry exhibitions, shows, swaps, meets, and sales” until further notice after officials found Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza, or bird flu, in a commercial flock. As birds die from the disease or are culled to prevent its spread, the cost of eggs is rising—just as Trump, who vowed to reduce grocery prices, takes office.

There have been 67 confirmed cases of the bird flu in the U.S. among humans who have caught the disease from birds. Most cases in humans are mild, but public health officials are watching the virus with concern because bird flu variants are unpredictable. On Friday, outgoing Health and Human Services secretary Xavier Becerra announced $590 million in funding to Moderna to help speed up production of a vaccine that covers the bird flu. Juliana Kim of NPR explained that this funding comes on top of $176 million that Health and Human Services awarded to Moderna last July.

The second major problem is financial. On Friday, Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen wrote to congressional leaders to warn them that the Treasury would hit the debt ceiling on January 21 and be forced to begin using extraordinary measures in order to pay outstanding obligations and prevent defaulting on the national debt. Those measures mean the Treasury will stop paying into certain federal retirement accounts as required by law, expecting to make up that difference later.

Yellen reminded congressional leaders: “The debt limit does not authorize new spending, but it creates a risk that the federal government might not be able to finance its existing legal obligations that Congresses and Presidents of both parties have made in the past.” She added, “I respectfully urge Congress to act promptly to protect the full faith and credit of the United States.”

Both the avian flu and the limits of the debt ceiling must be managed, and managed quickly, and solutions will require expertise and political skill.

Rather than offering their solutions to these problems, the Trump team leaked that it intended to begin mass deportations on Tuesday morning in Chicago, choosing that city because it has large numbers of immigrants and because Trump’s people have been fighting with Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, a Democrat. Michelle Hackman, Joe Barrett, and Paul Kiernan of the Wall Street Journal, who broke the story, reported that Trump’s people had prepared to amplify their efforts with the help of right-wing media.

But once the news leaked of the plan and undermined the “shock and awe” the administration wanted, Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan said the team was reconsidering it.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[jesterwaves]

Making a personal website

Why do it?

Having a website is a great creative outlet, and gives you way more control over your space than social media. You are in full control of the content you host on your site, and, if you ever need to migrate to a new host for it, you won’t have to worry about losing a bunch of stuff (for the most part)

Make a page that's just a bunch of pictures of wizards! Turn it into an ARG! Use it as a portfolio! Make it dedicated to your OC Verse(s)! The world's your oyster! HTML and CSS may seem like a lot at first but it's honestly not very hard to learn!

You don't need to be an expert to have a good looking website!

Sections:

Where to Host + File Hosting

Actually Making a Website

What to write your code IN

Keeping Your Site Accessible

Preventing Scrapping with a robots.txt

Etiquette and Useful Terms

Where to Host

There are a few places around the net you can find, but for a personal, fully customizable site you’ll want to avoid commercial places like Squarespace. Squarespace is aimed at people who don’t want to make a site from scratch and are specifically looking at something professional for a portfolio or business. You won't have the rights to the code!

Neocities is the biggest name in the indie web space right now, but Nekoweb has gained some attention lately. You can even use both as a mirror of one another, and if you ever need to move hosts, you can download all your files from either of them.

Differences Between Neocities and Nekoweb:

Neocities offers 1 GB of storage

Nekoweb offers 50MB of storage (half of neocities)

Nekoweb does NOT restrict what file types you can host

Neocities restricts file types to non-supporters. Most files are fine, you'll probably only run into issue with video or audio files (but those eat up a lot of space anyway...) Full list here

IMO Neocities is also just more beginner friendly

NOTE: nekoweb has a robots.txt on their server by default, neocities does not but AFAIK new sites will be given a robots.txt for which they can set the allowed/disallowed themselves. There has been some misinfo about this: this is not neocities giving your data to ai, this is really just the default state of the internet, unfortunately. Either way, you can set up a robots.txt yourself to say whatever you want!

Alternate File Hosting

It’s best to host everything you can on the same host as your site, but if you're limited in space or type, you can host it somewhere else.

Make sure to use something dedicated to hosting files, otherwise your links may end up breaking (so don't use discord). I use file garden, which I have liked, though it's slow sometimes. I know others around neocities who have used catbox.moe… but those links always break for me, for some reason.

If you don’t mind hosting on youtube or soundcloud, there are ways you can embed those players onto your site as well!

I host audio and my art gallery on file garden; everything else is directly on my site and it only takes up 2.5% of my 1 GB of space!

Nekoweb and Neocities aren't meant to be used as file hosts, so don't try to use your neocities as "extra storage" for your nekoweb site, or visa versa.

The Actual “Making a Website” Part

For designing your website, I recommend to browse around personal sites on neocities and nekoweb for inspiration before drawing something out. If you don’t want to design a site yourself, there are plenty of templates, including the classic sadgrl.online site generator (and this guide to tweaking it).

Neocities Guides for Absolute Beginners (if you've never used any html, this is a good starting place)

Making a layout from start to finish (if you know what an html tag is, this should be fine for you; it's what I used!)

Making your website responsive (I swear it’s so easy to make your website mobile accessible unless you’re doing something totally crazy with it)

Sadgrls other guides

The Mozilla and W3Schools documentation are useful resources, but may be confusing to you at first. I myself learned basic HTML, CSS, and Javascript ages ago on Khan Academy, but as Khan Academy started using AI at some point, I have no idea how those hold up.

Take it in pieces, you’ll get a hang of it!

Relative Links

You don't need to link your full URL to link an image; you can link files relatively. For example, if I have a page in my main directory, and an image in folder titled "images" within that directory, I can just link it like this: "/images/image.png" You may or may not need the slash in the beginning, depending on your host. For neocities, I typically don't.

But what if you have a page in a folder and want to access a link in the main directory? Just add two dots for each folder you want to move backwards from: "../image.png" (1 folder backwards) "../../image.png" (2 folders backwards)

Avoid using relative links on your "not_found.html" page, because that page displays anytime a user tries to access a page that doesn't exist, and it will attempt to retrieve links from whatever the user typed into the bar. eg, if a user typed in "your-url/folder/page", it will treat relative links as though it is in that folder.

What to Write Your Code IN

If you make a file for all your website files and organize it in the same way as it is on your website host, you can open your html files in your browser offline and preview how they work and function.

Codepen is a great free code editor for html, css, and js specifically, which also allows a live preview of your site.

I've tried Dreamweaver and it's super buggy (and definitely not worth the price). I know some people use Visual Code Studio but I've never tried it myself.

Keeping Your Site Accessible

Many websites on the indie web right now, are unfortunately, accessibility nightmares… But, it’s actually not that hard to make your website more accessible without sacrificing your artistic intent

Semantic tags are tags that don’t have a specified style but help screen readers interpret content. You should also be careful not to use tags for something other than their intended purpose. Here’s a guide to semantic tags.

Alt text can describe elements to screen readers, but for decorative content like dividers, it's unnecessary. To let a screen reader just pass over them, set the alt property to an empty string ("")

Alt text furthermore should be descriptive but concise. Focus on the most important details and meaning/purpose of the image, not all the little details. Descriptions should also be objective, not subjective.

Color Contrast: text with low contrast against the background may be difficult or even impossible for some people to read. You can check color contrast using firefox’s developer tools, or through this website.

Flashing imagery and bright colors should, at the very least, be warned against. There is a way to use Javascript to freeze gifs, but it’s a bit complicated

Many people make their index page list content warnings so people can prepare themselves ahead of time, or turn back if content on the site may be harmful to them.

These are just the major things I’ve run into myself, but I’m still learning how to make my pages more accessible. For more info on things you can do to make your site more accessible check out these resources.

Prevent Scraping with a Robots.txt

This is not a foolproof method, in fact, bad actors will scrap your files anyway. All a “robots.txt” does is politely request that robots don’t scrap your site for anything… It’s up to the programmers to make their robots LISTEN. Here’s an article that has a blocklist for a bunch of the major bots.

I know this may be demoralizing, but unfortunately the only way you can “protect” your files against ai is to never share them. But, ai can never replace the way you feel about your work or the desire other people have to connect with it. AI can only ever produce a stale, easily digestible imitation… Basically, I know it's scary right now, but keep making your stuff. Do what you can to protect it…. But please don’t let ai stop your spirit!

Etiquette and Useful Terms

88x31 buttons were a staple of the old web, so many people make buttons for their site so other people can link to it!

Hotlinking refers to linking a file from someone else’s site to your own. This isn’t a big problem for big websites like tumblr or twitter, but hotlinking a file from someone’s personal site uses THEIR bandwidth anytime someone loads YOUR site and is frowned upon. This is only applicable to FILES on someone’s page, just linking to their page is fine!

i had an example but tumblr thought it was actual code...

Most browsers allow you to look at the source code for a website by right clicking and choosing "view source". This is a great way to learn how people do certain things... but they may not take kindly if you copy their code. Use it as a guide; don't copy huge chunks of code unless they have said it's okay to.

A webring is a collection of websites with some shared trait/topic that link to each other so that it forms a ring (i.e: Website 1 <--> Website 2 <--> Website 3 <--> Website 1). Web listings and web cliques are similar concepts; it’s basically like joining a club.

An RSS feed is basically like a “following” tab…but for the whole internet (well…any site that has an RSS feed). That way, people who don’t have a neocities or nekoweb (or other) account can get updated whenever your site does. To subscribe to an RSS feed, you’ll need a feed reader, which you can find as an extension for whatever browser you use. As for making a RSS feed, here’s a simple guide.

Javascript’s pretty complicated and I just look up what I want to know and learn from there so I'm not confident to give you help. But, I had to learn that scripts are very picky about where you declare them. If they aren't working, try moving them around.

I'm not an expert, so apologies if I've said anything wrong/confusing. These are resources I found useful or WISH I had when I started. Happy coding!

[mariacallous]

In March 2007, Google’s then senior executive in charge of acquisitions, David Drummond, emailed the company’s board of directors a case for buying DoubleClick. It was an obscure software developer that helped websites sell ads. But it had about 60 percent market share and could accelerate Google’s growth while keeping rivals at bay. A “Microsoft-owned DoubleClick represents a major competitive threat,” court papers show Drummond writing.

Three weeks later, on Friday the 13th, Google announced the acquisition of DoubleClick for $3.1 billion. The US Department of Justice and 17 states including California and Colorado now allege that the day marked the beginning of Google’s unchecked dominance in online ads—and all the trouble that comes with it.

The government contends that controlling DoubleClick enabled Google to corner websites into doing business with its other services. That has resulted in Google allegedly monopolizing three big links of a vital digital advertising supply chain, which funnels over $12 billion in annual revenue to websites and apps in the US alone.

It’s a big amount. But a government expert estimates in court filings that if Google were not allegedly destroying its competition illegally, those publishers would be receiving up to an additional hundreds of millions of dollars each year. Starved of that potential funding, “publishers are pushed to put more ads on their websites, to put more content behind costly paywalls, or to cease business altogether,” the government alleges. It all adds up to a subpar experience on the web for consumers, Colorado attorney general Phil Weiser says.

“Google is able to extract hiked-up costs, and those are passed on to consumers,” he alleges. “The overall outcome we want is for consumers to have more access to content supported by advertising revenue and for people who are seeking advertising not to have to pay inflated costs.”

Google disputes the accusations.

Starting today, both sides’ arguments will be put to the test in what’s expected to be a weekslong trial before US district judge Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria, Virginia. The government wants her to find that Google has violated federal antitrust law and then issue orders that restore competition. In a best-case scenario, according to several Google critics and experts in online ads who spoke with WIRED, internet users could find themselves more pleasantly informed and entertained.

It could take years for the ad market to shake out, says Adam Heimlich, a longtime digital ad executive who’s extensively researched Google. But over time, fresh competition could lower supply chain fees and increase innovation. That would drive “better monetization of websites and better quality of websites,” says Heimlich, who now runs AI software developer Chalice Custom Algorithms.

Tim Vanderhook, CEO of ad-buying software developer Viant Technology, which both competes and partners with Google, believes that consumers would encounter a greater variety of ads, fewer creepy ads, and pages less cluttered with ads. “A substantially improved browsing experience,” he says.

Of course, all depends on the outcome of the case. Over the past year, Google lost its two other antitrust trials—concerning illegal search and mobile app store monopolies. Though the verdicts are under appeal, they’ve made the company’s critics optimistic about the ad tech trial.

Google argues that it faces fierce competition from Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and others. It further contends that customers benefited from each of the acquisitions, contracts, and features that the government is challenging. “Google has designed a set of products that work efficiently with each other and attract a valuable customer base,” the company’s attorneys wrote in a 359-page rebuttal.

For years, Google publicly has maintained that its ad tech projects wouldn’t harm clients or competition. “We will be able to help publishers and advertisers generate more revenue, which will fuel the creation of even more rich and diverse content on the internet,” Drummond testified in 2007 to US senators concerned about the DoubleClick deal’s impact on competition and privacy. US antitrust regulators at the time cleared the purchase. But at least one of them, in hindsight, has said he should have blocked it.

Deep Control

The Justice Department alleges that acquiring DoubleClick gave Google “a pool of captive publishers that now had fewer alternatives and faced substantial switching costs associated with changing to another publisher ad server.” The global market share of Google’s tool for publishers is now 91 percent, according to court papers. The company holds similar control over ad exchanges that broker deals (around 70 percent) and tools used by advertisers (85 percent), the court filings say.

Google’s dominance, the government argues, has “impaired the ability of publishers and advertisers to choose the ad tech tools they would prefer to use and diminished the number and quality of viable options available to them.”

The government alleges that Google staff spoke internally about how they have been earning an unfair portion of what advertisers spend on advertising, to the tune of over a third of every $1 spent in some cases.

Some of Google’s competitors want the tech giant to be broken up into multiple independent companies, so each of its advertising services competes on its own merits without the benefit of one pumping up another. The rivals also support rules that would bar Google from preferencing its own services. “What all in the industry are looking for is fair competition,” Viant’s Vanderhook says.

If Google ad tech alternatives win more business, not everyone is so sure that the users will notice a difference. “We’re talking about moving from the NYSE to Nasdaq,” Ari Paparo, a former DoubleClick and Google executive who now runs the media company Marketecture, tells WIRED. The technology behind the scenes may shift, but the experience for investors—or in this case, internet surfers—doesn’t.

Some advertising experts predict that if Google is broken up, users’ experiences would get even worse. Andrey Meshkov, chief technology officer of ad-block developer AdGuard, expects increasingly invasive tracking as competition intensifies. Products also may cost more because companies need to not only hire additional help to run ads but also buy more ads to achieve the same goals. “So the ad clutter is going to get worse,” Beth Egan, an ad executive turned Syracuse University associate professor, told reporters in a recent call arranged by a Google-funded advocacy group.

But Dina Srinivasan, a former ad executive who as an antitrust scholar wrote a Stanford Technology Law Review paper on Google’s dominance, says advertisers would end up paying lower fees, and the savings would be passed on to their customers. That future would mark an end to the spell Google allegedly cast with its DoubleClick deal. And it could happen even if Google wins in Virginia. A trial in a similar lawsuit filed by Texas, 15 other states, and Puerto Rico is scheduled for March.

[thatstormygeek]

The Rot Economy is neoliberalism’s true innovation: a kind of economic cancer that with few reasons to exist beyond “more” and few justifications beyond “if we don’t let it keep growing then everybody’s pensions blow up.”

I need you to stop trying to explain away how fucking offensive using the internet and technology has become. I need you to stop making excuses for the powerful and consider the sheer scale of the societal ratfucking happening on almost every single device in the world, and consider the ramifications of the difficulty that a human being using the internet has trying to live an honest, dignified and reasonable life. ... The picture I am trying to paint is one of terror and abuse. The average person’s experience of using a computer starts with aggressive interference delivered in a shoddy, sludge-like frame, and as the wider internet opens up to said user, already battered by a horrible user experience, they’re immediately thrown into heavily-algorithmic feeds each built to con them, feeding whatever holds their attention and chucking ads in as best they can. As they browse the web, websites like NBCnews.com feature stories from companies like “WorldTrending.com” with advertisements for bizarre toys written in the style of a blog, so intentional in their deceit that the page in question has a huge disclaimer at the bottom saying it’s an ad. 

Now, what’s important to accept here is that absolutely none of this is done with any real consideration of the wider effects on the customer, as long as the customer continues doing the things that the company needs them to. We, as people, have been trained to accept a kind of digital transience — an inherent knowledge that things will change at random, that the changes may suck, and that we will just have to accept them because that’s how the computer works, and these companies work hard to suppress competition as a means of making sure they can do what they want. In other words, internet users are perpetually thrown into a tornado of different corporate incentives, and the less economically stable or technologically savvy you are, the more likely you are to be at the mercy of them. Every experience is different, wants something, wants you to do something, and the less people know about why the more likely they are to — with good intentions — follow the paths laid out in front of them with little regard for what might be happening, in the same way people happily watch the same TV shows or listen to the same radio stations.  Even if you’re technologically savvy, you’re still dealing with these problems — fresh installs of Windows on new laptops, avoiding certain websites because you’ve learned what the dodgy ones look like, not interacting with random people in your DMs because you know what a spam bot looks like, and so on. It’s not that you’re immune. It’s that you’re instinctually ducking and weaving around an internet and digital ecosystem that continually tries to interrupt you, batting away pop-ups and silencing notifications knowing that they want something from you — and I need you to realize that most people are not like you and are actively victimized by the tech ecosystem. 

The onslaught of AI-generated content — facilitated, in no small part, by Google and Microsoft — has polluted our information ecosystems. AI-generated images and machine-generated text is everywhere, and it’s impossible to avoid, as there is no reliable way to determine the provenance of a piece of content — with one exception, namely the considered scrutiny of a human. This has irreparably damaged the internet in ways I believe few fully understand. This stuff — websites that state falsehoods because an AI hallucinated, or fake pictures of mushrooms and dogs that now dominate Google Images — is not going away. Like microplastics or PFAS chemicals, they’re with us forever, constantly chipping away at our understanding of reality.  These companies unleashed generative AI on the world — or, in the case of Microsoft, facilitated its ascendency — without any consideration of what that would mean for the Internet as an ecosystem. Their concerns were purely short-term. Fiscal. The result? Over-leverage in an industry that has no real path to profitability, burning billions of dollars and the environment - both digital and otherwise - along with it.  ... Societal and cultural pressure is nothing new, but the ways we experience it are now elaborate and chaotic. Our relationships — professional, personal, and romantic — are processed through the funhouse mirror of the platforms, changing in ways both subtle and overt based on the signals we receive from the people we care about, each one twisted and processed through the lens of product managers and growth hackers. Changes to these platforms — even subtle ones — actively change the lives of billions of people, and it feels like we talk about it like being online is some hobbyist pursuit rather than something that many people do more than seeing real people in the real world. ... I believe billions of people are in active combat with their devices every day, swiping away notifications, dodging around intrusive apps, agreeing to privacy policies that they don’t understand, desperately trying to find where an option they used to use has been moved to because a product manager has decided that it needed to be somewhere else. I realize it’s tough to conceptualize because it’s so ubiquitous, but how much do you fight with your computer or smartphone every day? How many times does something break? How many times have you downloaded an app and found it didn’t really do the thing you wanted it to? How many times have you wanted to do something simple and found that it’s actually really annoying?  How much of your life is dodging digital debris, avoiding scams, ads, apps that demand permissions, and endless menu options that bury the simple things that you’re actually trying to do?  You are the victim of a con. You have spent years of your life explaining to yourself and others that “this is just how things are,” accepting conditions that are inherently exploitative and abusive. You are more than likely not deficient, stupid, or “behind the times,” and even if you are, there shouldn’t be multi-billion dollar enterprises that monetize your ignorance.  And it’s time to start holding those responsible accountable.

[azspot]

So there you have it folks. OpenAI's next big thing is the ability to generate a report that you would likely not be able to use in any meaningful way anywhere, because while it can browse the web and find things and write a report, it sources things based on what it thinks can confirm its arguments rather than making sure the source material is valid or respectable. This system may have worked if the internet wasn't entirely poisoned by companies trying to get the highest ranking in Google, and if Google had any interest in making sure its results were high quality, which it does not.

The Generative AI Con

[ferociouslycreativemystery]

Some of my favourite history websites

For all your research, art reference, writers block and extended wikipedia rabbit hole needs!

Some in English...

London Archives Collections Catalogue - has a page with digital documents, which can be browsed by date and filtered/sorted by tags as you like. The oldest digitised one seems to be a roll of pleas from the Tower from 1244. Also has a list of links to other resources on historical London.

London Picture Archive - hundreds of thousands of images from London - photographs, drawings and videos. Want to see the construction of Tower Bridge, or what Victorian Baker Street looked like? Explore using hotspots on maps, searching by street names or use your own keywords.

Street name changes in London - use ctrl+F to find old streetnames and see what they're called today (or vice versa). Useful in combination with the above, or when you're trying to match places from old documents to modern maps, or when working with...

Compare old maps of London (1740s-1960s) - want to see how the layout of the city has changed? Or assess some of the damage done by the blitz by looking at aerial photographs? Go far! Run wild! Get lost! Whatever.

The Victorian Web - aims to be a literal web of information about the British Victorian era, giving an associative rather than a search-based entry point for you to explore the time period. Find out more on their About page here.

...och flera svenska

Digitalt museum - besök museet utan att lämna soffan! Massor av objekt från 110 museer över hela Sverige, med bilder och beskrivningar. Går att söka på ämnesord eller surfa på specifika museum och samlingar. Har själv kollat mycket på gamla virkningar här.

Nordiska museets digitala arkiv - erbjuder material om vanliga mäniskors liv genom historien. Det kanske mest populära är frågelistorna, där du kan läsa röster från hela Sverige berätta utifrån olika teman om sina vardagsliv, från högtider till vanliga aktiviteter, föremål, arbete, mat, boende och teknologiska utvecklingar.

Handskrivna texter från Stockholms stadsarkiv - tack vare AI kan du nu söka på nyckelord i innehållet i dessa handskrivna texter från 1600-1700-talen. Mycket är rättegångsmaterial. Tänk på att stavningar varierar mycket historiskt.

Stockholmskällan - skapad som en lättillgänglig resurs för lärare att kunna använda historiska material i sin undervisning. Perfekt för nybörjare som vill prova att surfa runt bland handplockade historiska primärkällor, med tillhörande beskrivande texter, utan att behöva gräva i arkivförtecknignar. Många dramatiska berättelser finns att hitta här. De har också verktyg för att jämföra kartor över Stockholm från olika århundraden, eller så kan du placera ut en platsmarkör och få upp historiska händelser i närområdet.

Institutet för språk och folkminnen - har ännu mer kulturhistoriskt material. Flygbilder över hela Sverige från 1960 (zooma in och aktivera lagret "Lantmäteriet ortfoto 1960"), eller testa Folke sök för att få en karta över platser som associeras med digitiserat material (som du kan hjälpa till att transkribera om du vill). De ansvarar också för:

Sägenkartan - en karta med upptecknade sägner och folktro från Sverige och Norden. Legenden säger att om du sätter foten här kommer du aldrig mer ut igen.

Riksarkivet - Sveriges högsta arkivinstitution. Har massor av digitiserat material tillgängligt helt gratis i den digitala forskarsalen (släktforskning i Sverige är billigt och busenkelt). Nationella arkivdatabasen (NAD) innehåller också förteckningar över vad som finns bevarat i arkiv över hela Sverige. Kolla upp ditt närområde och se vad som finns att åka å titta och klämma på lokalt vetja!

Other resources that may help

Marginalia search - search engine that prioritises text-heavy websites. Excellent for finding niche blogs and similar.

Paleography - the knowledge to read old handwriting. Lots of scripts have been popular across different periods, some with quite different letter shapes to the ones we're used to (s's that look like f's, h's that make you go huh?). Takes some getting used to, but very fun! Lots of guides for this online and on youtube.

There, those are the ones I've used myself. Feel free to add more of your own in the notes!

[quinloki]

I have the same issue with Shinigami Eyes as I do with ChatGPT, as I do with AI Art, as I do with anything similar to these.

My primary concern is the lack of developing your own skills.

Secondary to that is effectively handing over control of your own development to someone else.

I don't care if AI was environmentally neutral and required zero theft, in the process of making things easier and faster it strips away the foundational building blocks you need to improve. It stymies your ability to brain storm, to outline, to experiment and expand.

It atrophies the skills you need to improve.

Addons for web browsing that mark someone or something as X or Y - be it good or bad - take away from you, the user, the responsibility of sorting that out for yourself. This might seem like a positive relief, in a world where every second seems to be meticulously accounted for, but it - again - takes foundational skills right out from under you.

Things that you can build on to be able to think critically. Skills needed to consider variance and nuance, and knowledge and experience that helps you identify the difference between someone standing by convictions they believe in, and someone who is either misinformed or someone who is trying to deceive you.

Even if it didn't dissolve your capacity to think and consider for yourself, you're still effectively handing over your Character, your Honor, and putting it in someone else's hands. You're letting someone else dictate the convictions of your own self.

I don't care if God stepped down from the heavens and deemed another human flawless and perfectly trustworthy to follow without fear or worry.

I'm not doing it.

I'm not going to let someone else dictate my convictions. I won't hand over the freedom to be myself like that.

I got one life to live, why would I let someone else live it? Why would I let something create a facsimile of my intentions, instead of doing it myself?

Look, I'm sorry, the easy answer isn't the right answer. I'm sorry the easy answer is never the right answer. If the answer sounds and feels easy and alluring and comforting, it is most definitely not the right answer.

Not because we deserve to suffer. Not because the hard way is the ONLY way. But because it's not just a matter of The Easy Answer OR The Hard Answer.

Because there's a infinite line of countless variables and difficulties and nuances and people and thoughts and things to consider, and sometimes it's kind of easy, and sometimes there's satisfaction in the solution, and sometimes there's a real "Huh." moment in the process, and sometimes it is the hardest thing you'll have to do.

And if you don't have the skills, experiences, and support to face that, then when that perfect person dies, or when that addon breaks, or when that fad fades, you're going to be left standing there, waiting for someone else to come along and exist for you.

And to me that's just really, really heartbreaking.