The web is done. You have to go outside now. "Family recipes" will come back
this post was submitted on 01 May 2025
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I've chosen an outrageous option and just started buying books from used book stores, scanning library books and downloading some to my jellyfin.
If I can't trust the internet I'm just getting off it.
If I couldn't trust a restaurant to not give me food poisoning I'd stop going.
That is not so outragious, actually! My mother was also a crafty type and I inherited a ton of books and copies when she died. They are patiently waiting somewhere in my hobby room, since it is so easy to search on the net. Since every decade is becoming trendy again at a certain point in time, this is a treasure trove waiting to be discovered. I mean, I have a whole series of recipe booklets and crochet patterns from the 70s!
I have learned to appreciate a good index. You can literally tell the good books from the bad ones by how useful the index is I swear.
Also when I want to be able to search them as long it's scanned right and I've got a digital copy I can do Ctrl+F.
Its annoying cause I do have to know I have what I'm looking for and what book it might be in but that's why we have brains I guess.
I have an insane book from the 1950s for how to properly cater and set every possible meal time from summer tea to like fall bonfires but its less about recipes and more about presentation.
This. I've started my collection buying books at estate sales. Dirt cheap and likely from an era where you probably had to be credible to publish something in a bound volume on actual paper.
There's gotta be a series about this. Only "The Old Ones" that can operate something that's not an iDevice, the only ones left who can handwrite and don't use AI for every question they ever had. The only ones with books because everyone else threw them out and burned them. Would be interesting but we are living it right now so maybe no need.
You can install this blacklist with either uBlockOrigin or uBlacklist. It's still being updated:
https://github.com/laylavish/uBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist
uBlockOrigin & uBlacklist Huge AI Blocklist
A huge blocklist of manually curated sites (1000+) that contain AI generated content, for the purposes of cleaning image search engines (Google Search, DuckDuckGo, and Bing) with uBlock Origin or uBlacklist.
Also works on mobile (iOS, iPadOS, Android) via uBlacklist, as well as pihole/adguard (via Hosts file)
Thanks! So thankful that I can could on the open source sommunity for tools like this!
It might be best to return to the days of in-person gatherings of hobbyists. Like my mother and quilting circles.
The point of my doing hobbies is to distract me from how much I dislike interacting with other people, that and developing skills to necessary to work around the hindrances companies (ran by other people) are introducing into practically every product and service I use.
Then there's really not a lot you can do short of manually curating everything or making copies of known-good sites before they get ruined.
You can setup your adblocker to block search results from websites you blacklist with a little bit of work and an understanding of CSS selectors. I cooked up a custom extension to give me a button on each search result to add it to the list.
I still get countless garbage results though and haven’t added to the list in a few months. The internet will just be partially broken until there’s a way to reliably index ai slop sites.
Is it time to bring an old-school, Yahoo!-style directory back?
Webrings, baby
Damn, I had to rummage through some dusty corner of my brain to remember “Webrings”. Nice one. I wonder if they could work as a federated service…
Sorry, no specific tips. Maybe there's a browser plug-in that makes it easy to whitelist websites in a search? I would pay for a search engine where actual human people regularly vet the websites included in it for factual information and unlabeled AI use.
Would Kagi do something like that, ie flag/filter AI slop?
Honestly I’m buying up as many art reference books as I can get my hands on. Find a lot of them in second hand stores. Lots based on video games, movies or technical references like planes or ships.
I have two very different suggestions.
- Firefox has an addon called uBlacklist it allows you to delete bad sites from your searches. Not sure if any other browsers have something like this.
- Your local Public Library is a great, free, resource. Not just for the materials that you can borrow, but may have groups or activities that meet there.
I never had an account but I’d peruse Pinterest for crafting etc ideas. Meow most of them are fake, click bait bs trying to lead you to paid content.
I stopped using Pinterest ages ago, when they started adding ads. Nowadays its ony ads and AI slop there.
It seems like the solution is only using trusted sources like bloggers and YouTubers that you follow.
The problem is finding them and hoping they don't sell out.
You can probably manipulate search results by including (site:example.com OR site:example 2.com) or excluding (-example.com -example2.com) websites.
Learn how to tell fact from fiction and reality-test everything you see. Phone a friend