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.

Yay, boobies & locks!!

Do you think the HRT could be making the feelings you describe in your first comment more intense? Female puberty is often a tumultuous time emotionally until the brain acclimatises, even as it brings great relief and many satisfying changes, and fluctuating levels at any time can have a similar effect.

Be gentle to yourself, and try to do things you find comforting.

To add to replies confirming he actually sounds this way, his sister seems to have a similar issue, albeit less marked.

Not wild at all - who better to help with intelligence than defectors?

Founder of the school I went to maybe somewhat similar to your idol, having had to flee himself once he spoke out against the regime he’d previously advised on education, then persuaded parents to send their teenagers to him after. It is said the war memorial is one of the few which has British and German in equal measure, so he wasn’t successful beyond keeping his own pupils safe whilst they were still his pupils.

Wake every day overwhelmed with dread, and the clinging stench of death and misery coating my everything.

Yup, there’s plenty of scope for closer ties between Mexico (along with other Central America countries) & the EU.

Just as Nazi Germany caused millions to flee Europe for the US, Fascist US is causing the first of millions to flee to Europe.

Here’s hoping all who make it will be safe for at least several generations.

Concentration camps conveniently situated near farms & factories & burgeoning with detained “undesirables”.

Doesn’t even need to be perpetrated directly by the Trump regime when he has pardoned Jan 6th extremists who have a great many non-MAGA journalists on their list of targets for summary execution, along with details about their lives.

Because they mostly have no clue that measles is a potentially fatal illness, with potential severe lifelong complications including some which require 24/7/365 full nursing care.

They think of it as a mild rash with mild flu-y symptoms for a week or two.

They also have no idea it is so very contagious.

So though the measles vaccine has an amazing safety & efficacy record, whether singly or as part of the combined MMR, with endless research turfing up no link to autism whatsoever, and carrying only a negligible risk of vaccine injury (none as severe as the complications of measles), those who reject it do so not only out of totally false beliefs about the vaccine, but also out of fully wild misconceptions about the risk of measles.

Though now the anti-vaxx movement has become such a big thing for a while, they’re all egging each other on with the help of ideological pundits. This combines to create a group highly distrustful of public health organisations and all medical advice on the matter, who are much more resistant to accepting correct information than their vaccine-shy counterparts ever were in the past. It also seems to be true that scary conspiracy theories are comforting to them in a world where serious infections can just catch a person, where autism isn’t something one can simply opt out of - they want simple answers, and everything which debunks that simple wilful ignorance is a threat to their sense of security.

Pretty sure AfD’s Alice Weidel additionally doesn’t even live in Germany but in Switzerland.

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.

Got it. And what did you make of her suggesting that in response?

Wait, did your caseworker just announce this eligibility to you without you having asked about it?

Or have I wildly misread the situation?

Late to reply, but very excited to have Moldova in our Union. I realise a yes vote is not a given, so all power for continuing the campaign to join if it does not succeed this time.

Going to come back to this to reflect in more detail to your original post and to this comment, but wanted to quickly float the idea that perhaps these people view you as particularly sound, so when they lay things on you or are just more emotional or intense in front of you, and you seem unphased - neither rushing to condemn them nor scrambling to reassure - they interpret that as disapproval from someone whom they find sound. And that because they value your judgement & integrity, they get sheepish and awkward in the absence of a strong outward reaction, which in turn you interpret as them thinking ill of you.

Only suggesting this because have seen quite a bit of this between people, and experienced mild versions of both ends of that dynamic.

Not that it helps, if it even resonates, or provides guidance.