Anecdotal, but every company I have worked for has banned using ad blockers, I’m guessing the risk from ads is lower than allowing extensions to read and modify all of your webpage data? I use them on all of my personal devices.

Spamming, scams, and many forms of white collar crime are a result of people either getting desperate for a decent living or being greedy and wanting infinitely more than others have. If you take out these two possibilities guess what gets almost entirely extinct.

The AI only needs to alert the doctor that something is off and should be tested for. It does not replace doctors, but augments them. It's actually a great use for AI, it's just not what we think of as AI in a post-LLM world. The medically useful AI is pattern recognition. LLMs may also help doctors if they need a starting point into researching something weird and obscure, but ChatGPT isn't being used for diagnosing patients, nor is anything any AI says the "final verdict". It's just a tool to improve early detection of disorders, or it might point someone towards an useful article or book.

bizarre, dismal What's bizarre and dismal is that someone is so starved for dopamine and attention from corporations that this is how they perceive what life looks like when you are not being targetted. This is my normal view and it is far better.

Never had issue with Firefox in my day to day use, sites load fine, uBlock stops all the annoyances and thankfully youtube works well for me.

I have never used a food delivery service because they all feel so fucking scummy and exploitative. Seems like they are in equal need as we are for regulatory overhaul of this business practice.

I share your frustration. I went nuts about this the other day. It was in the context of searching on a discord server, rather than Google, but it was so aggravating because of the how the "I know better than you" is everywhere nowadays in tech. The discord server was a reading group, and I was searching for discussion regarding a recent book they'd studied, by someone named "Copi". At first, I didn't use quotation marks, and I found my results were swamped with messages that included the word "copy". At this point I was fairly chill and just added quotation marks to my query to emphasise that it definitely was "Copi" I wanted. I still was swamped with messages with "copy", and it drove me mad because there is literally no way to say "fucking use the terms I give you and not the ones you think I want". The software example you give is a great example of when it would be real great to be able to have this ability. TL;DR: Solidarity in rage