I have been a frequent visitor of the various websites that are now under the Fandom.com umbrella, going back to when it was called Wikia. And if there's one thing that's been a consistent irritation with the platform, it's just how intrusive and annoying the advertising is. (For a sense of how long this has been a problem, see here.)

But worse than the intrusiveness of the sites' ads, their biggest problem is their performance. They can bring Firefox to a crawl.

For a while, it seemed like Fandom had been making some improvements. I could visit, say, Memory Alpha without the CPU on my computer spiking like crazy. But I just tried to look something up on the Forgotten Realms Wiki and, good god, it was terrible.

(And before anyone says anything, no, I have no intention of using an ad blocker to deal with it.)

Am I imagining it or is the platform actually getting worse again?

Looking ahead, the commodification and degradation of the Internet is continuing to take away digital resources that we have come to depend upon over the last 20 years. Whether it’s email or Amazon or YouTube, the decline of all our favorites has been well documented.

But we don’t want to live without these sites and services. Tildes itself is an attempt to preserve one such resource but in a better and more stable way. What other parts of the Internet deserve similar treatment?

Whether it’s open source eBay or community banking or nonprofit versions of Facebook… what would you choose and how would you go about preserving its character and making it workable in the long-term?

Recently I've been coming back to my chrome browsers to find a tab open with the following URL:
(link disabled to prevent giving them any more clicks)

https ://theaisecrets.beehiiv.com/p/chatgpt-can-now-work-docs-apps-websites-emails

This is happening across all my computers, both linux, windows, and linux VM, so I don't think it's OS-specific malware, but I suspect a rogue chrome extension is opening the tab, because I have chrome synced across all affected devices via my google account.

I've searched for this particular problem and URL to no avail, so I wondered if there's a way to track back which extension opened the tab, other than by doing a binary search disabling half my extensions at a time (which would be annoying as hell - the tabs only seem to get opened once a day or so).

I haven’t touched reddit since the APIcalyspe. I’m planning to delete my account but haven’t gotten around to it yet. I was a heavy Apollo user on iOS but never subscribed to it for its push notification service, instead I kept the official reddit app installed and the only thing I used it for were its notifications. I still have both apps installed.

Anyway, I was surprised to see one pop up yesterday, especially since it wasn’t connected to my user activity (a new private message or reply to an old comment of mine or something). The notification was just an ad. More specifically, it was promoting some trending post on the site that had “>12,000 upvotes.” In many many years of having the app installed I’ve never seen that before. Is it new?

Reddit’s had a mildly antagonist relationship with its users for ages, but it feels like they are REALLY intensifying things now. I’m glad I got off the train when I did. And sorry for making yet another post about reddit, I think we’re all getting tired of harping on it here.

Recently, I've been thinking pretty hard about how to archive data. Optical media is out, due to my (possibly irrational?) fear of disc rot. HDDs just break with extended use, SSDs have been known to die with either overuse or just existing for an extended period of time. What's left?

I have heard of tape (of some kind) being used for backup in some bigger operations, but with my experieces with VHS, and to a lesser extent, cassettes, they seem to be very susceptible to mould.

Any suggestions?

YouTube limits ad blocker usage in new test
YouTube could be testing a three-strikes policy for ad blocking (Update)
So its clear now that YouTube is going to limit the usage of Ad blockers in the coming future
I use Ublock Orgin with Firefox which basically used to block all ads and on mobile device I use NewPipe