Count the fingers

I switched to Waterfox recently. I really like it. It actually seems to work more consistently than Firefox did.

This video seems very low effort. If your going to waste vaste amounts of vital resources, at least generate something unusual. And clearly tag it as Gen AI.

“Video by Tom Furse” - Don’t know why this annoys me the most. At best he edited the output of a selection of prompts to fit the music.

The only AI music video I’ve actually enjoyed watching is this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGIvO4eh190

In the description they clearly state the reason for using AI (plus they also used some 3D tools.)

Gen Ai is good for generating horrible nightmarish visuals.

I think I hate Gen AI so much because by default it generates dream-like/nightmare imagery, hallucinations. We try and force it to produce real-life representations.

It’s an uncanny valley generator, used incorrectly.

It’s a lab-grown meat, that no matter how it’s manipulated, just doesn’t taste right. But companies try and pass it off as it’s from an animal.

For Christ-sake, if people want to use this abomination of a tool, use it to generate abominations.

Yeah they are sneaky. You are forced to download everything.

Do a “manual search” on the Nvidia driver page.

Once the “Game Ready” drivers are downloaded. Uninstall the nvidia app (if it’s installed already.)

Now to install.

Basically for any windows software, always choose “Custom (Advanced)” installation, instead of “Express (Recommended)”.

For nvidia, the next page will show you 3-4 options. Untick everything accept “Graphics driver”.

Definitely ignore “HD audio”. It tends to mess up your sound (at least that’s my experience.)

and “PhysX System Software” unless this out of date or missing. Then you can tick this.

Then just your graphics drivers will be installed.

Obviously you will miss out on the various additional features the nvidia app provides, like auto tweaking game settings. But it’s always a tradeoff.

As I said above. Always do “Custom” installs on ANY software. 75% of the time you end up automatically opting into to various forms of telemetry, and at worst find your browers have new plugins, your search engine changed, and antivirus installed. It can be time-consuming to uninstall.

Hope that helps. Let me know if you have more questions. I tried to add screenshots but the Lemmy app wasn’t having it.

I use this - https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil

But obviously get opinions from other sources first.

It claims to disable most Windows telemetry. Some Adobe. But I haven’t actually done any testing to prove it’s the case. It’s a pretty useful tool. Just use the restore point option first.

Last time I tried this method of disabling Adobe telemetry, photoshop stopped opening after a few days.

For nvidia/amd, just install the drivers, not their tool suite.

As the other posters mention, try to find alternatives.

Other than that, you can try and block at a firewall level. But few companies make it obvious like: http://nerferoustelemetry.pleasedontblockthis.adobe.com/

I literally got recommended this AI band as well. Normally I can search: “X band AI” and I get results whether or not they are real or not.

All I had were 50 pages about the original band leaving Spotify.

I blocked this suspicious sounding band in-case it was AI. Looks like I was right.

Just as a note: earlier this year I stated I’d keep subscribing to Spotify because the recommendations were worth the cost. I was wrong, and I’m slowly starting my transition away.

I know this is just my tiny view on things, but I’ve been testing code from a very experienced Dev, who was recently instructed to use AI coding tools in their work (Cursor, maybe some Copilot).

Functionality in our product is now breaking in weird and wonderful ways. Completely new ‘WTF!’ moments. It’s hard to describe.

Core behavior that I’ve taken for granted - things I didn’t realise could go wrong, are.

It reminds me of when after particular iOS update many years back, (for certain scenarios) Apple’s own calculator wasn’t doing addition correctly.

For me, it’s both fascinating and unnerving. Like some unfathomable cosmic horror.