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submitted 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) by bitofhope@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

A tale of a man on the Internet who caught a cold

Based on a true story

Damn, the fever is down and the cough is easing up, but my nose feels like it's lined with sandpaper. What to do? Look it up!

Duck Duck Go: dry sinuses

Results:

  • (Amazon) Dry Nasal Passage – Deals on Dry Nasal Passage [ad]
  • (Thrive Market) Banyan Sinus Nasal Drops – Organic Sinus Remedy [ad]
  • (Healthline) Dry Sinuses: Inside Nose, Throat, Symptoms, Headache, and More…
  • (Medical News Today) Dry sinuses: Remedies, causes, and how to treat them – Medical…
  • (Healthline) 5 Effective Ways to Treat a Dry Nose

Alright, I'll take the bottom Healthline link, the one that doesn't look like it had a stroke.

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They're the same fucking site. Alright, maybe this is another of those cases where DDG is easy to SEO game.

Duck Duck Go: dry sinuses !g

I'll just fucking ignore the AI answer before it tells me to eat glue. Oh, the results are the fucking same, but there's a Mayo Clinic in there. I know from experience that one has also cucked itself from the EU. Fine, I'll throw the Healthline link to archive.is

To verify you're not a robot, please click on tiny pixelated images of fire hydrants for five minutes while an actual robot pretends to know better than you what fire hydrants look like. Doesn't this make you so confident about self-driving cars?

One eternity of downloading later:

How to treat dry sinuses

Dry sinuses occur when the mucous membranes in your sinuses lack proper moisture. This can lead to dry nasal passages, discomfort, nosebleeds, and similar unpleasant symptoms. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Curabitur sagittis eros vitae elit vehicula congue. Curabitur pellentesque risus sit amet ipsum vehicula, nec elementum sem iaculis. Mauris fermentum egestas est non tempus. Aenean urna diam, bibendum ac aliquet id, vulputate ut nunc. Ut luctus leo eu lacus consequat vulputate. In consequat augue at cursus tempor. Aenean tristique felis id fermentum tristique. Maecenas fermentum nunc vitae purus efficitur, id malesuada dui elementum. Etiam lobortis viverra turpis eu eleifend. Integer ac efficitur lacus. Nullam rutrum nisl lacus, bibendum maximus turpis vehicula eu. In at turpis lacus. Etiam libero tellus, imperdiet a fringilla non, tincidunt id ligula. Ut sodales convallis mauris sed semper. Nunc laoreet eros eget nulla mollis consectetur.

What are the symptoms of dry sinuses?

Aliquam sem tellus, interdum non mattis eget, imperdiet nec odio. Duis est mauris, posuere at risus vel, eleifend iaculis tortor. Vivamus in nisi sit amet sapien vestibulum ultricies eu eu ante. Integer eleifend augue mollis, vehicula orci et, condimentum orci. In et ultricies ligula. Praesent vitae lacus neque. Aliquam venenatis aliquam nulla ut dapibus. Integer a ligula a tortor consequat interdum in quis mi. Nam hendrerit mauris vel augue mollis ullamcorper ac ut justo. Curabitur aliquet eros ipsum, sit amet tempus ipsum tincidunt ac.

What causes dry sinuses?

Ut elementum elementum sapien, et interdum dolor commodo eu. Integer euismod rutrum augue in consectetur. Cras vel ultrices odio, nec congue massa. Proin et congue erat, et feugiat magna. Curabitur blandit vitae ligula sed sollicitudin. Nunc et suscipit quam. Morbi convallis, nisl vel tincidunt tempus, nisi dolor porta tellus, quis rhoncus urna enim vel libero. In iaculis ut elit sed interdum. Aliquam et felis at ante sodales pellentesque non vel diam. Donec consectetur eget metus aliquet gravida. Ut diam ipsum, ornare ac ullamcorper ac, tempus ut tortor. Maecenas dapibus auctor laoreet. Donec varius congue velit, id gravida ex ultricies vitae. Donec scelerisque condimentum erat. Donec auctor lacus sed risus vehicula placerat.

How are dry sinuses treated?

There are many ways you can treat dry sinuses at home to alleviate discomfort caused by seasonal allergies, irritation from chemicals, or drying from medications or dry air. To get relief, you can:

  • place a humidifier in your bedroom at night to keep the air from getting too dry
  • stop taking drying medications, such as antihistamines (or ask your doctor or pharmacist to help you choose something with fewer side effects)
  • drink plenty of water to stay hydrated get some fresh air if the air in your house is stale or stagnant
  • remove as many allergens and irritants from your environment as possible
  • irrigate your sinuses with sterile saline using a neti pot or similar product
  • use nasal spray to hydrate and lubricate your nasal passages and sinuses
  • take a hot shower and inhale the steam
  • diffuse essential oils like lavender, peppermint, or lemon for allergies

In some cases, your doctor might need to recommend treatment for your dry sinuses. Make an appointment with your doctor if you:

  • have an autoimmune disorder like Sjögren syndrome
  • praesent eget ipsum bibendum turpis blandit vulputate hendrerit quis lorem. Sed aliquam feugiat bibendum. Pellentesque ornare erat id quam fermentum congue. Proin vitae pretium urna. Nunc tincidunt, lectus id fermentum aliquam, felis justo molestie est, quis viverra erat mauris at nulla. Fusce viverra justo dapibus, venenatis metus at, hendrerit dui. Interdum et malesuada fames ac ante ipsum primis in faucibus. Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent per conubia nostra, per inceptos himenaeos. Fusce eget neque luctus, euismod elit at, finibus erat. Vestibulum semper nunc a enim sagittis tristique. Praesent vestibulum tincidunt ex, eget luctus tortor iaculis et. Maecenas sit amet purus non orci dapibus pellentesque nec vitae lectus.

Alright, take it easy with antihistamines and dig out that nasal spray. Thanks, internet. This definitely needed all these steps to solve.

Edit: archive link to the actual article in case it'll save someone else a couple of minutes

top 21 comments
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[-] theparadox@lemmy.world 9 points 15 hours ago

My elderly mother was advised to purchase a personal EKG/ECG monitor to help investigate occasional atypical heart behavior. She purchased a KardiaMobile 6L. I helped her set it up this weekend - requires a phone app to connect to the device via BT... and, of course, an account with a possibility paid subscription... good lord.

At every turn there are popups for a US $11.99/Month or $99/Year service, required for any use cases that aren't look at recent records and export a PDF. App closes in the background and opens again... full screen popup next time it opens. Finish an EKG? Popup offering service to have a specialist look at the EKG. Main screen? List of every service not included with the free tier in its own little box with a button to subscribe for each.

So now my mother is supposed to find her instructions on how to navigate around this bullshit, with large text and fingers so dry she struggles to activate the touch screen without a stylus, during an abnormal cardiac event... then navigate around more bullshit to find the record in her history and send her doctor the PDF.

I really wish there was a mandatory interface for consumer medical devices (or just... devices in general) or something so I could just make a solution to bypass the bullshit and get the thing do what it was designed to do. Open the app, big button to record an EKG, prompt to save it or send it after.

[-] HedyL@awful.systems 2 points 11 hours ago

To me, those forced Google AI answers are a lot more disconcerting than even all the rest. Sure, publishers always hated content creators, because paying them ate into their profit margins from advertising. However, Google always got most of its content (the indexed webpages) for free anyway, so what exactly was their problem?

Also, how much more energy do these forced AI answers consume, compared with regular search queries? Has anyone done the math?

Furthermore, if many people really loved that feature so much, why not make it opt-in?

At the same time, as many people already pointed out, prioritizing AI-generated answers will probably further disincentivize creators of good original content, which means there will be even less usable material to feed to AI in the future.

Is it really all about pleasing Wall Street? Or about getting people to spend more time on Google itself rather than leave for other websites? Are they really confident that they will all stay and not disappear completely at some point?

[-] cstross@wandering.shop 3 points 10 hours ago

@HedyL One twist: I imagine google devotes CONSIDERABLE effort to aggressively caching LLM-generated answers (probably parsing queries and merging similar ones before checking the cache for previous replies). That'd reduce their costs substantially compared to just throwing every question at an LLM directly. And it keeps eyeballs on Google's own content and own served ads rather than wandering off into the wildernessd of the non-google public web.

[-] bitofhope@awful.systems 31 points 23 hours ago

You're finally awake! That fall looked really bad. Cookies? SEO? What are you talking about? Let's go play some browser games on Miniclip.

[-] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 12 points 21 hours ago

TAKE ME BACK

[-] truxnell@infosec.pub 7 points 21 hours ago

I want to wake up in this timeline.

[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 13 points 20 hours ago

Different rant, but why are so many sites so slow? Loading times seem to have gone up, not down.

Please note this is rethorical, dont be like the sites asking me if I want to turn on notifications.

[-] TonyTonyChopper@mander.xyz 9 points 17 hours ago

200 MB of Javascript to display a static box of text

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 20 points 22 hours ago

Damn, the fever is down and the cough is easing up, but my nose feels like it’s lined with sandpaper

probably an allergic preaction to what you were about to find

[-] prex@aussie.zone 7 points 21 hours ago

Upvoting for preaction.

I typed it into ddg & got a whole lot of law related sites i.e. pre-action.

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 6 points 21 hours ago

I just typed it into my post box

[-] NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 15 points 22 hours ago
  • remove as many allergens and irritants from your environment as possible

Burn the flowers. Burn the grass.

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 9 points 22 hours ago

reminded of twisted's issue 5000

[-] MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 6 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago)

Disable third-party frames and scripts (medium blocking mode in ubLock) and most sites do what they're supposed to: just display the content. The others, enable third-party scripts and use one of the cookie banner lists from uBlock. And one special site, once in a blue moon, needs you to enable third-party frames too.

[-] bitofhope@awful.systems 11 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago)

I didn't ask for advice, but the painkillers are kicking in so I forgive you. I was browsing the intertubes from my bed on my smart telephone. Marvelous, handy little devices these things. The only problem is they don't have a proper fucking version of Firefox available on them, only poor imitations that lack such necessities as ublock origin and whatnot.

This rant is about the way search engines have been kneecapped and searching for simple information on the web is now a massive hassle because some suit wearing bottom feeders with the moral backbone of crustacean thought they could squeeze a few more drops of our collective lifeblood on the unholy altar of mammon by poisoning the well and not even having the common decency to peddle a better cure than fucking markov chains. I don't have anything against content blockers, some of my worst enemies are javascripts, but a client side patch does not solve the problem of every major website (aside from maybe Wikipedia) relying on spyware as a business model, gaming the system to make search engines ignore better sites if there are any, giving a middle finger to regional regulations telling you not to rely on spyware as a business model, and burying whatever useful and relevant information may still be left in droning filler that reads like a middle schooler padding out their essay word count.

As tragically true as it is that intentionally maiming my web browser by disabling web features it's supposed to support in order to browse the actual website I'm browsing on the web with my web browser whose purpose is browsing websites enables it to browse the websites, that's only another item on a long list of reasons why and how the web has been ruthlessly defiled into the grotesque monstrosity it is now. Blessed be ad blocker developers, I hope their next move is inventing a time machine and preventing Google from purchasing DoubleClick in 2008. Preferably using violence.

[-] real_squids@sopuli.xyz 5 points 19 hours ago

I think they brought it back, im on firefox 100.1.2 and have the usual ublock. Unless they removed add-ons again, in which case - lmao

[-] ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org 2 points 19 hours ago

The only problem is they don't have a proper fucking version of Firefox available on them, only poor imitations that lack such necessities as ublock origin and whatnot.

what kind of smart telephone is that, a blackberry?

[-] bitofhope@awful.systems 8 points 18 hours ago

You know what, yeah. It's a Blackberry Mobira Cityman Western Electric Model 500 Nokia 3310 Apple Banana Samsung Galaxy Supernova Explosion iNote Xperia Sidekick N-Gage 3G 4G 5G Pro Max. It's running whatever happens to be the hippest new privacy focused ROM that you haven't used. I need this particular model for my work and to access my bank and if I buy a second phone my dog will die.

If I personally justify to you that I've jumped through as many hoops on my end as possible, will you stop missing the point and realize the onus should not be on each individual end user to partially deshittify the web back into barely usable state?

[-] ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org 4 points 18 hours ago

no, you're totally right, but it was just interesting

[-] bitofhope@awful.systems 6 points 18 hours ago

Alright fair enough. It's an iPhone. All the browsers on this thing are just Safari reskins (i.e. Chromium reskins). No browser add-ons allowed due to Apple's policy. I don't like it and I don't expect my next phone to be an Apple product. DNS based ad blocking helps a little bit.

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 4 points 17 hours ago

yeah I've found reasonable success with 1Blocker (and its local VPN proxy thingy, which I happen to have lifetime because early customer), but also

  1. iOS-Fx does not get the same treatment as Safari does, and it's fucking whacky
  2. a lot of sites are aggressively shitty about pushing a particular form of non-blockable/less-blockable on for mobile UAs
  3. fuck apple so much for driving this shit
this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2025
47 points (100.0% liked)

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