Unfortunately the spam arms race has destroyed any chance of search going back to the good ole days. SEO and AI content farms means we’ll need a whole new system to categorize webpages, as well as filter out human sounding but low effort spam.

Point being, it’s no longer enough to find a page that’s relevant to the topic, it has to be relevant and actually deliver information, which currently the only feasible tech that can differentiate those is LLMs.

If you want barebones Windows I’d suggest you cough cough obtain Windows 10 LTSC.

It’s got most the bloatware cut out, you just have to reenable the old style picture viewer.

Though when I eventually make a new PC, I’m probably just gonna use Linux Mint because I hear running Windows games/software isn’t nearly as bad nowadays, thanks Steam.

May I introduce you to our lord and savior JavaScript?

Some of these issues would probably be avoided if the server enforced using the threads feature for topics and conversations, but at that point you might as well just use reddit (or lemmy).