A list of other things I dislike but have worse alternatives.

Every other site is the worst site ever made. Sometimes blocking you explicitly or asking you to turn off adblock, invariably having autoplaying videos and throbbing chat wigglers and banner advertisements and popups asking you for your email address for a 10% off coupon to some banal bullshit. This is the common denominator I am complaining about.

Amazon is something I've been complaining about lately. I won't extol further how much better Amazon is than the competition, despite being abhorrent. The ceiling is in hell and the floor is in a deeper ring of hell. Sometimes I use Amazon.

Linux is kind of crazy. "Linux sucks" is a pretty good series of essays about its problems. But it's the only desktop OS that works. I use MacOS pretty regularly and it's a daily exercise in prostrating myself to the whims of reprehensibly crazed Silicon Valley fucks. When I see people using Windows 11 I feel a sick kind of pity. Item 1 is about websites, but operating systems are also websites now.

LLMs probably generate better recipes at this point. When I'm looking for how long to bake chicken thighs or whatever, I find myself stopping my search at the DuckDuckGo or Google AI summary. They've never failed me, and that's not surprising, "Bake X for Y minutes at Z degrees" is probably in the training data thousands of times. The alternative is clicking through the worst article ever made, searching for the brief relevant bit of text sandwiched between walls of personal anecdote and walls of comments. I'm pretty sure if I asked an LLM for a cookie recipe, I'd simply get one that worked at this point. There are a handful of sites that do work though, such as King Arthur, but mostly I just use books. I often transcribe recipes into Markdown files and use those. If I were a less insufferable person who cared more about my own wellbeing than my own neuroses that I pretend are principles, I think I would use an LLM.

uh. a certain browser. There's this browser, created by a crazed right-wing homophobe, which shoves ads and undesirable services into your face, forcing AI on you, the community is full of some of the worst people on the internet, and it doesn't even work. That browser is Firefox. There is another browser called Brave, which shares all those properties, except it does work. I've talked about Brave on here before and my problems with Firefox, I won't get into them, but... Man, things are very very very dire in the browser landscape.

Lobste.rs is like HackerNews but much better. Very good if you want a Jstpstlike for interesting Computer things.

NatGeo printouts and Mapqeust. Sometimes I want to, say, get Chinese takeout from a place near me. I have no idea how people do this in the year 2026. The options for maps are pretty dire. You have Google Maps which is the best, and obviously is not an option (ICE), and also it's much worse than it was in 2010 anyways. Then you have Apple Maps which is very information sparse, with a horrible UX with the longest, interaction-blocking animations throughout Apple's platforms, with very poor performance, neither a compass nor a scale that can persist on screen, gestures that are easy to invoke which can helpfully leave you with a totally useless 3D perspective, and so many bugs that often necessitate closing and restarting the app. It's some of the worst software ever made. Apple fans love it. Then there are Duck Maps which is only Apple Maps, but with fewer bugs but with many other UX flaws. I wish someone could make a website that I could use to patronize takeout places within a 15 minutes drive that doesn't also tick the needle one notch higher on ICE's skills. The open alternatives aren't much better (OSM, FacilMaps, Google Maps was notably degraded in 2016 and everything is worse now. I once saw someone use ChatGPT to find a restaurant near them and I laughed it off at the time, but now I wonder if even that might be better. Why is everything so bad. Why is our world made worse on purpose, to the point where asking an LLM to do it is better? Why? Anyways, the answer to this is (1) buy National Geographic maps (note: their online storefront is exclusively Amazon) or (2) MapQuest.com is probably the best map site worth using to find food in your area, and it does not have an arbitration clause. Or, maybe just asking ChatGPT I guess. Another option is using GrubHub or DoorDash as a search engine, for the very specific task of finding food

car. man