Longtime GeekWire readers might recognize my byline from my frequent coverage of the PNW’s video game industry, as well as occasionally dipping into the arts. I am also not a fan of artificial intelligence; if you see my name on an article, that’s a guarantee that no AI was used in its production, at least not deliberately.
To briefly summarize my feelings on the topic: I did not ask for these tools, I do not speak to these machines, I find them to be of little if any use in my day-to-day, I refuse to use them no matter how often their praises are sung, and I resent their intrusion. At least Clippy understood when he wasn’t welcome.
(Whenever I air this opinion in a public venue, someone usually pops up to tell me that this is the future and I risk being left behind. These inevitably turn out to be people who are heavily invested in that future; I am being told that only fools bet on red by people who borrowed money to put all their chips on black. Cool story, slop bucket. Discard the draft and sit back down.)
Towards the end of last year, I hit a saturation point where many of the programs and websites that I use on a daily basis had either pivoted to AI to some degree or were actively threatening to do so. This was often just obnoxious, like YouTube’s unnecessary video and chat “summaries.” At other times, it actively made the experience worse, such as the entirety of modern LinkedIn, which has come to look like MySpace after the robot revolution.
I’d finally had enough, and as one of my New Year’s resolutions for 2026, I’ve done my level best for the last four months to switch to as many LLM-free apps and options as is realistically possible. This is my trip report on the experience, as a hand towards those of you who’re as sick of this as I am.
Vivaldi – Nobody really seems to like Chrome
Google Chrome is the fossil fuel of the modern Internet. We know it’s wasteful and that alternatives exist, but somehow it’s still at the center of everything. There are a number of sites I visit regularly, both on and off the clock, that don’t work, or don’t work as well, in any other browser.
As Chrome continued to gradually force Gemini into every individual aspect of its user experience, I tried to ignore it at first. Then, as I installed an extension specifically to remove the “AI Mode” prompt that I kept clicking on by mistake, I realized the time had come to switch to a new browser.
As it turns out, I was spoiled for choice, although many of the available Chromium options (Arc, Maxthon) are just as obsessed with AI. Brave looked good for a while, but its emphasis on crypto makes me suspicious.
After some experiments, I ended up on Vivaldi. It has a few quirks I’m still getting used to (for example, your active tab is the dark one, which is precisely the opposite of how it works in most other browsers), but it’s responsive, privacy-focused, doesn’t tank my RAM, and works well enough with almost every website that I used to need Chrome for.
Waterfox – Obvious name, obvious replacement
Mozilla Firefox had been my other primary web browser for quite a while, but in recent years, I’d noticed increasing issues with its responsiveness and stability. As it turned out, it wasn’t just me; Mozilla has developed a real problem in recent years with leaving well enough alone.
Then, towards the end of 2025, Mozilla’s new CEO announced that the company plans to go all-in on AI, with an imminent shift to the same kind of integrated agentic model that’s used by other browsers like Opera. While Mozilla’s been careful to say that its AI will be optional, that still struck me as a good excuse to finally throw out Firefox and look for something else.
As it turned out, the solution was fairly close to home. I’d initially checked out Floorp, on the basis that anything with a name that dumb had to be a killer app, but bounced off of it early on.
Instead, I ended up with Waterfox, which is primarily due to the comfort of the familiar. Waterfox is a 15-year-old fork of Firefox that omits many of Mozilla’s recent missteps, as well as addressing a few privacy issues that I hadn’t previously known Firefox had. It is, in many ways, just Firefox, but Not Stupid, which is enough to get it a recommendation.
Paint.net – Because sometimes Photoshop is overkill
Much of writing for the Internet isn’t writing. I am not good at image editing, but it occasionally becomes necessary, so I need to have a decent art program on my machines. I used Photoshop for a while, but for my bare-minimum purposes it’s always been a bit like keeping a jackhammer around in case I need to drive a nail. Worse, it’s an Adobe product, and if there’s something a software company has ever done that’s annoyed you, Adobe did it first or is doing it more enthusiastically.
There are a few decent alternatives to Photoshop out there, such as GIMP, but I’ve gotten the most used to the freeware Paint.net. Some of it is because I appreciate their stubborn refusal to rework their website in the last 20 years – look at that beautiful Web 1.0 design – but Paint.net does everything that I, a permanent novice, need it to do. It’s a welcome dispatch from an era in which programs just worked, instead of trying to ensnare you in their consumer web.
LibreOffice – Open-sourcing my office apps
I’ve been using this open-source replacement for Microsoft Office for years, but before recently, all my recommendations always came with a caveat. LibreOffice did everything I needed it to do – spreadsheets, word processing, direct conversion to .pdf – but played notoriously poorly with other applications in its lane. It couldn’t save a new document as a .docx (.doc, yes, but not .docx) and frequently went haywire whenever someone tried to open a LibreOffice file in another program.
That got quietly ironed out at some point without my noticing. I’d reinstalled LibreOffice on a new computer, and over the course of using it, I noticed that all my previous problems simply no longer applied. It’s now a perfectly viable alternative for all my local word processing needs, and has been working almost flawlessly for the last couple of years. Almost every piece I write starts locally, with a blank LibreOffice document.
Notetab Light – Plain text can be the best text
If I’m not writing in LibreOffice, I’m using this long-running freeware Notepad replacement. Sometimes, such as when you’re writing HTML, coding by hand, or filling out a wiki, plain text is all you need or want.
I had a similar app on my Mac way back in the day. When I made the switch to PC gaming in the 2000s, a pal recommended Notetab Light to me as a solid alternative. They were right, and ever since, NoteTab has always been one of the first things I install on a new computer.
Notetab Light is a useful way to get more customization options out of the most basic text imaginable, such as font size, background color, and automatic backups, with tabbed browsing for easy reference. In a day and age when Microsoft is trying to cram Copilot into everything including Notepad, I can rely on NoteTab to only ever do exactly what I told it to do.
Startpage – Google without the hassles, literally
The problem I’ve encountered with finding an adequate replacement for Google Search is that there isn’t one. A couple independent search engines come close, such as DuckDuckGo, but every so often I still have to go back to Google to get the results I need. My hope is that before too much longer, someone will come out with a functional search engine that’s a deliberate throwback to Google from its “don’t be evil” era.
Right now, the closest thing to that is Startpage, which is essentially an anonymizer for Google. It removes the AI overview and the tracking functions in favor of just giving you some semblance of what you’re actually looking for. It’s a little more convenient than simply adding “reddit” or “-ai” to the end of every search you make.
Protonmail – For Gmail refugees
This might be the most painful switch I’ve made, as I was an early adopter on Gmail. My account has fossilized layers of old emails that go all the way back to almost the beginning of my career. My history lived on that website, which is partially my fault for never deleting or locally archiving anything. Google keeps trying to inextricably bind Gemini into Gmail, though, so away I go.
Protonmail is generally marketed on the basis of its privacy measures, such as end-to-end encryption, but it’s also the natural first port of call for anyone swapping off of Gmail. You can set up auto-forwarding with ease, the UI is comparable if not identical, and its spam filters have yet to fail me. The only real drawback is that it gives you a fraction of the space of a new Gmail account, at “only” 1 GB, so now I have to be one of those “inbox zero” zealots.
Bluesky – What Twitter used to be (still terrible)
Microblogging platforms are, of course, a disease. They encourage the worst kinds of useless communication. They are also really good for quickly gathering information, so at least for what I do, they’re a necessary evil.
The ongoing prominence of Grok wasn’t why I stopped using Twitter, but it was a non-trivial factor. I joined the general exodus to Bluesky in 2024 and haven’t looked back, outside of the occasional bout of trainwreck syndrome.
Sadly, the overall Bluesky experience as of now indicates that most of what you hate about microblogging is due to microbloggers, and that’s platform-agnostic. Microblogging is simply a poor format for nuance or extended discussion. Either you try to express something complicated and your thoughts read like a telegram, or you don’t and you’re communicating exclusively in sound bites.
In addition, the Bluesky team has been talking up the benefits of “vibe coding” recently, which suspiciously coincides with the platform’s newfound tendency to crash without warning. It’s likely not a question of whether Bluesky ends up in the same agentic hell as post-Musk Twitter, but when.
For right now, however, Bluesky has its uses. It’s Twitter c. 2014 or so, providing an online home for a murderer’s row of writers, academics, journalists, and scientists. While it’s also got an inordinate supply of humorless wokescolds and troll accounts, Bluesky is still an interesting place to get news, see art, promote projects, and keep up with all your favorite writers. (And me.) While scrolling through Bluesky, however, you have to ignore its slowly burning fuse.
Bring back the dumb Internet
It’s not possible to get AIs all the way out of my digital life in 2026, more’s the pity. Sites like YouTube and LinkedIn constantly put it front and center, my phone’s constantly trying to turn AI assistance back on, and the handful of holdouts against LLM infestation slim down by the day.
At the same time, however, the current environment has given me a new appreciation for certain things that I never used to think twice about. When you can no longer take it for granted that something was produced by a human, there’s a new appeal to any media’s telltale signs of human imperfection: pencil marks, missed notes, filler words, speaker feedback.
That’s my new justification for any mistakes I make, by the way. They’re the proof I’m human.
My primary takeaway from these last four months, however, has been that I don’t feel as if I’ve missed anything. At time of writing, work-related LLMs primarily strike me as a series of solutions in a frantic search for matching problems. They don’t improve my efficiency as advertised, they actively impede my research, they dramatically expand my personal carbon footprint, and they’re being used to bring about an economic crash by an all-dork incarnation of the Legion of Doom. There’s no good reason to use genAI. Whenever I mention my personal anti-AI stance, I usually get told that I’m at risk of losing everything; practically, I’ve lost nothing.
If this story’s got one moral, that might be it. There’s nothing inevitable about AI.
