They have an “AI” (LLM with shiny UI) that will find your (unknowing, completely uninterested in your company with no prior idea it exists) customer’s social media pages, then cold email them (with totals in the thousands of emails weekly) complement them on topics from their recent tweets as if it’s a real human, then go on to sell them things with large amounts of marketing jargon in the same paragraph.

Any company that uses this on me is losing my business immediately.

The old 8th grade sex education curriculum in Orange County, while promoting abstinence, acknowledged that some students are sexually active. It provided information on how to prevent unintended pregnancy and protect against STDs if students engaged in sexual activity. This information has been deleted from the new curriculum.

The old Orange County 8th grade curriculum also included information about the various kinds of birth control, their efficacy, and whether or not they helped reduce the risk of STDs. This information has also been removed.

In Orange County’s new 8th grade curriculum, there are no descriptions of the different forms of birth control and no explanation of which forms of birth control are effective in preventing the transmission of STDs. This is a particularly important issue in Florida, which is currently “reporting more HIV diagnoses than almost any other state.”

These are the kinds of changes you get when you have people developing curriculum without actually understanding any of the evidence, and just going off vibes.

“No sex = no pregnancy, surely the kids will understand and follow our instructions on this!”

“No sex = no need for birth control, so why tell them about it?”

It baffles me how stupid some members of our society can be.

It’s the network effect. It’s always the network effect.

Your current platform enshittified. Where do you go? Well, the majority of people are going to Bluesky, and it’s familiar in terms of UI, so you go there. Sure, you could convince someone like that to try something like Mastodon, but Mastodon is comparably much smaller than Bluesky, so its intrinsic value to people is substantially lower, not to mention the fact that without an algorithm, most of these users have no clue how to curate a feed, since every platform has an algorithm now. A lot of these people will have never used an algorithm-less platform in their entire life.

The same goes for Reddit vs. Lemmy. Reddit has much more users than Lemmy, more niche communities, higher engagement, etc. Why move somewhere that’s identical in function if it’s smaller? Your current platform works well enough.

I think it’s easy to underestimate how much censorship and enshittification people are willing to put up with. People will put up with a lot before they switch platforms. Reddit not letting people publish a person’s manifesto isn’t gonna convince many people to abandon their entire accounts and communities and to switch to Lemmy.

It literally took Twitter being rebranded into oblivion, and turned into an explicit safe haven for fascists and far-right freaks, with an algorithm deboosting non paid-for content multiple times over before people really started flocking out in large numbers.

I wholeheartedly reject the notion that they don’t care about the economy.

To add more proof to this, according to the Pew Research Center, the economy made up a massive swath of the top issue for voters in this last election.

Our society ties worth to wealth.

To a capitalist, If you’re homeless, you have less moral value than someone who exploited millions of people’s need for healthcare for his own gain.

And there are a lot of capitalists.

The difference is that, in this case “anything” for these merch sellers is selling merchandise with words printed on them for money, whereas “anything” for healthcare insurance CEOs is denying care for people and allowing them to suffer and die.

Sure, they’re both doing it to turn a profit, but the motive and rationale is entirely different.

Something along the lines of “Murder is wrong but also this man’s policies at his company led to a third of people’s claims being denied and 22 billion dollars just last year being taken as profit off people actively having their healthcare denied and maybe, just maybe, we should do something about that.”

They do, with a rate of about 1/3rd of all claims.

To anyone unaware, here’s your reminder that United Healthcare made $22,000,000,000 in profit in just 2023 alone.

This man’s actions running United Healthcare resulted in massive corporate profits at the expense of thousands of people’s lives.

What happened to him wasn’t unexpected, it was an inevitability. Murderers with enough kills under their belt inevitably get the death penalty, through the justice system or otherwise.

Just as someone already mentioned in this thread, I can vouch for Immich as well. I self host it (currently via Umbrel on a Pi 5 purely for simplicity) and the duplicate detection feature is very handy.

Oh, and the AI face detection feature is great for finding all the photos you have of a given person, but it sometimes screws up and thinks the same person is two different people, but it allows you to merge them anyways, so it’s fine.

The interface is great, there’s no paywalled features (although they do have a “license,” which is purely a donation) and it generally feels pretty slick.

I would warn to anyone considering trying it that it is still in heavy development, and that means it could break and lose all your photos. Keep backups, 3-2-1 rule, all that jazz.

Which also has the additional benefit for homeowners of local backup power in the case of a blackout :)

You can bet that on day one he’ll claim NASA is less efficient than SpaceX, and therefore their budget should be directed to his company instead.

People do use “wokeness” to describe forced/pandering diversity, but I’ve never seen that to describe just people who happen to be black or a woman in games. Sadly can agree though that it happens with gay/trans characters-

The problem is, any new diverse characters/media is immediately treated as “forced.” It happens less with race than it does sexuality/gender, since sexuality and gender are generally newer in terms of broad acceptance compared to existing acceptance for racial diversity, but it does indeed happen.

Diversity is absolutely a more left leaning idea, especially nowadays, when diversity is actively feared by the right, which is why they are almost always on the side of the racists/sexists/homophobes/transphobes/etc today and throughout history. I’m not saying those on the right can’t accept diversity, but that they often don’t.

Friend and I tried it a couple years back.

His phone is now permanently banned from the McDonald’s app for life.

The actual definition of wokeness isn’t diversity, but the term “woke” has just become synonymous with any left-leaning ideas (including diversity) because of how commonly people on the right continue to use it as a word to define “anything I don’t like.”

B-b-but I don’t want to actually see those people in my games! I just want them to make them! /s

Trains

I’ve seen at least 8 so far.

Cracks me up every time.

He had $6.2 million at MINIMUM

According to this great reporting by Protos, he holds over $580,000,000 in just Bitcoin, with tens (and sometimes hundreds) of millions in other assets, like TRON (the coin you can see promoted on the side of his microphone in the article’s photo) which is a clone of the Ethereum blockchain he made by simply copying the code, artificially lowering fees, then publishing it as if he created it.

Not only is he a rich douchebag, but he’s also a plagiarist.

This is exactly how it works, although they’ve started trying to give you different deals ($1 instead of free, only works on second purchase, fries instead of nuggets, etc)

The app will ban both your IP and MAC address if you use it too many times, so make sure you can either create a new one (via a VM) or randomize it. (Via a custom ROM with MAC randomization enabled)

Don’t ask me how I know.