This happens on the Google side of the fence as well - this article immediately came to mind.

I’m glad I started self hosting so I still have a “cloud” convenience while still owning all my data and being the sole person responsible for it.

I really want to see what the bullshit looks like - shame the article doesn’t actually show a sample, guess I’d have to make my browser look like an AI crawler

Kind of. They’re actually trying to avoid this according to the article:

“The company says the content served to bots is deliberately irrelevant to the website being crawled, but it is carefully sourced or generated using real scientific facts—such as neutral information about biology, physics, or mathematics—to avoid spreading misinformation (whether this approach effectively prevents misinformation, however, remains unproven).”

Oh, would’ve been so frustrating! I remember having a Pentium 4 laptop with an NVIDIA GPU and that thing unsurprisingly cooked itself, so I then tried 1NSANE (Codemasters’ soft body physics car game) on my crappy little netbook instead and it just couldn’t handle it.

It would be some time before I was gifted an Acer Aspire with dedicated graphics and a busted screen that I could play 1NSANE again

Colobot - don’t think it was “shareware” but it absolutely came as a demo on ceebot.com (still hosted there today I believe). Literally THE game that got me into computer programming and whatnot.

Otherwise for actual shareware, I loved Jazz Jackrabbit 2, Crazy Gravity and The Worm (found it!)

I really wanted to play a couple shareware games called Jetpack Joyride, and Hot Chix n Gear Stix as a kid, but neither of them would play on my Windows XP netbook as they had a hard check for if you were on either Windows 95 or 98, even with compatibility mode.