AmbitiousProcess (they/them)

I’ve found https://megalodon.jp/ to work similarly. Japanese site, and has some quirks with how large of a page it will archive before only saving a screenshot, but it works.

(all links are an alternative frontend to Twitter for both privacy, and because they often block users who aren’t signed in from viewing posts)

I can’t find the original person that quote tweeted it with “update”, but I did find the original 6ixBuzz post, and in the comments you can see this guy saying “Here’s what they will look like 10 minutes later in that neighbourhood” and saying “of course it’s AI” in the comments to someone. Seems like he probably was the one to generate the image.

Other people are now AI generating videos of specifically black teenagers stealing from them, and claiming the image is an example of a “government plan gone awry”. 🤦

Holy shit, I didn’t even notice 💀

Looks like the service itself is real: https://equip.sport/

But maybe someone just wanted to farm outrage using it?

Who wouldn’t want to be a “pro” at having a machine think for them? Sign me up!!! /s

the main perk is not that it removes ads but that there will be slightly less of them.

It does remove ads in most videos, just not in Shorts, or on music videos. The whole deal is they’re essentially un-bundling a music subscription from YT Premium, which makes it cheaper, and is then better if you, say, watch YouTube, but already use Spotify for your music.

Essentially, you don’t see any ads when you watch videos, AKA no midrolls, but you might see a small banner ad above the list of next suggested videos to the right of the video player, and if you constantly scroll shorts they might toss some ads in there as well.

Personally, as someone who doesn’t use YouTube for music, and doesn’t like scrolling shorts, I see this as perfectly reasonable as a way to reduce the cost, especially when you can click the Theater mode button on any video to block out the majority of the suggested videos area by default before any sidebar ad would even make it on your screen.

Yeah, one of the few electrified versions of traditional products that genuinely has a good reason to be electrified. There’s a lot of evidence showing they’re way better at cleaning your teeth than a regular toothbrush.

God yes. (pun intended)

I once overheard a woman in a store going “Jesus provides”… while staring at a wall of drinks carefully stocked by employees and made in factories built and operated by other people.

This company is known for this. To clarify, I mean known for making deliberately inflammatory ads, then showing them as obtrusively or carelessly as possible, because it gets people to post about it.

The only reason their company got popular in the first place was when they put these ads everywhere to piss people off and generate engagement.

https://startupsmagazine.co.uk/article-clickbait-stop-hiring-humans-marketing-campaign-made-artisan-go-viral

“The goal of the campaign was always to rage bait”

This guerrilla marketing approach, combined with traditional media coverage and tactics, led to significant success. Artisan saw a remarkable +197% growth in brand search traffic, quickly establishing itself as the most well-known AI employee creator.

But will Lidl actually listen? That’s the real question.

They might not care if one person tells them that, or even if many of them do, especially if they make the calculus that those people will probably still be buying other things at Lidl anyways.

If sales for the product drops because people are putting sticky notes on them, knocking them over or hiding them behind other products, etc, then Lidl has a reason to not bother with the hassle.

It also benefits movements through the radical flank effect. (e.g. when white people saw the Black Panther Party carrying guns to protect their community, MLK Jr’s fairly peaceful sit-ins seemed not that bad in comparison, and when having to make a choice on whether or not to give black people rights, it was easier to justify doing so if the perceived alternative was “black people in the streets with guns”)

In this case, the options then become “buy products that always have random sticky notes and are telling me I’m a bad person” vs “grab the product that doesn’t have the sticky notes”.

If it becomes increasingly annoying to buy products which support Israel because there’s constantly little sticky notes/stickers, people pushing things further back on shelves or flipping products around, etc, then it becomes a lot easier to justify just… not bothering buying the products that are being boycotted. (and it also saves people the hassle of looking up which products are being boycotted, which just makes the lives of anti-Zionists easier)

I don’t mind and actually prefer if it hits a bit less strongly over the next few weeks. Yesterday was lots of heart racing, nausea, and digestive issues haha.

Okay yeah, that’ll probably work out just fine for you then!

Caffeine usually causes me anxiety so I’ll hold off until I start finding the meds less effective.

To be clear, caffeine isn’t something most psychiatrists would recommend, and it’s most effective to just have an increased overall dosage, especially given caffeine is more likely to cause anxiety. I personally just find that it sometimes affects different things.

So for example, if I’m on my meds, AND I take caffeine, I might find myself more focused than usual, but if I’m not careful it could lead to me getting focused on something totally random or unproductive, so I have to choose if I want that added risk of accidentally blowing an hour or two on something totally unrelated to what I sat down to do.

I consider caffeine less of a “making your meds effects stronger” kinda thing, and more of an “altering how your brain responds to your meds in some ways” kind of thing. Depending on the person and their needs, adding caffeine could have wildly different results. Best to focus on meds dosage first imo.

I can’t wait until it calms down because I’m experiencing emotions and feelings I never felt and it’s a bit overwhelming. I feel like I need to relearn how to communicate and move and pick things up and work and be a human lol.

Gosh that’s so true. When you live your life trying to accounting for how your brain works on its own, and suddenly you’ve got meds that totally change how your brain is able to operate, you gotta re-train your brain a bit. All part of the process though :)

This seems too good to be true. I didn’t even know existence could be like this. Is this normal? Is it the honeymoon phase? Is it just because I’m taking an amphetamine? I’m beside myself and life feels like I’ve got all the cheat codes now. It seems too good to be true.

Kinda depends honestly. As I’m sure you know, these meds aren’t something that perform consistently across different people, but your experience isn’t uncommon.

For me personally, I had a fairly calm feeling start, and it took me till the end of the day to realize that I had barely touched social media, gotten 3X the normal amount of work done, and also had near zero anxiety.

A few weeks in, and it was more of a subtle effect, after slightly bumping up my dose after experimenting with it a bit to get some better results. I’m not sure if it was placebo, or just my body adjusting, but overall things are still way better. When I’m on my meds, I don’t overthink things anymore, my anxiety is lessened (though not gone like it originally was), and I find it easier, but not guaranteed, to switch from social media to more productive tasks, and to stay focused on those tasks.

Personally, based on what I’ve seen and heard, and what my psychiatrist has told me, I’d say you’ll probably have an experience like this:

1. Kaboom, everything is amazing, life is perfect (lasts anywhere from a few days to a few weeks)
2. Doesn’t hit as strongly as it did the first time, but still works okay
3. Not working as well, requires bumping up the dose (dose increases are incredibly common for the majority of people on ADHD meds, all part of the process, don’t sweat it!)
4. Taking your meds helps you consistently stay focused the majority of the time, and you’ll probably find most anxiety you experience will only be anxiety over something truly worthy of it, like an imminent deadline, rather than just anything under the sun.

If you want to help keep your meds effective, or just generally wanna try to make things easier for yourself, you can try supplementing a little caffeine in and seeing if it helps give you a boost (be warned this can cause headaches or anxiety spikes too, so start with a small amount of caffeine and go from there. I find it causes headaches and anxiety for me, but drastically increases my ability to hyperfocus on things, ideally something worth my time)

Or if you have extended release and instant release meds, you can try taking a small amount of instant release and your extended release at the same time to give you a boost, so you can start being productive on something, and then the extended meds will just help you continue well throughout the day after you’re already on track doing whatever it is you need to do.

I’d say that “too good to be true” feeling is true to the extent you probably will never reach the exact same high as when your brain wasn’t used to it yet at all, but overall, the meds will help a lot, even if it’s not “every day is world changingly good”, and that’s perfectly fine :)

I thought the main draw of the Fediverse was the idea of finding a community where you feel like you belong, that fits your interests, but the structure seems to work against that

The main draw is the federated core principles. The specialized community part is sort of a secondary effect.

If Reddit doesn’t like your community, your comments, or your account in general, you’re gone.

If Reddit wants to make more money off you by forcing ads into their pages and app, most users who don’t know how to use an alternate frontend are screwed.

And if Reddit decides they get a legal right to use all your content for AI training, sell your data to advertisers, and add a subscription fee on top, you don’t get a choice.

If a federated instance decides they want to cram ads in, the entire federated network of Lemmy/PieFed instances doesn’t get affected, and the content from that instance can still be viewed without ads.

Reddit is a monopoly, and thus carries monopoly power over how the platform and its communities operate. The fediverse is distributed, and no instance carries monopoly power over the others. This resists enshittification.

Now, it’s true there’s less activity here, but that’s not always a bad thing, nor is it unexpected. It makes moderation easier, karma farming isn’t really a thing, and a smaller platform is just naturally going to have less people engaging with it. But you’re here now, and there’s now 4 posts and 1 comment that otherwise would not exist had you not joined.

Every new user makes the fediverse more valuable for others. If there’s a community you want to exist, start it, and eventually other people will find it too if people who are interested in it join the fediverse.

I’m not here to tell you that this is perfect, or that it’s always better to have less people. Having more people means more opinions, niche communities, etc. But you don’t get there in a day, and the fediverse is only growing.

We have thematic instances, but as soon as you look at the “All” feed, it just flattens everything back into one generic Reddit clone. If you only look at your local instance to avoid that, you’re just isolating yourself, and at that point, you might as well just use a multireddit on Reddit without needing to make a new account.

Remember that you can follow communities outside your instance, and that is your algorithm. Reddit figures out what you like, and shows you more of it. Lemmy/PieFed asks you what you like, and you have to tell it what to show you more of. I particularly enjoy PieFed because it has “feeds” that combine multiple communities into a larger bundle so it’s easy to follow many of them.

If you rely on the “All” feed, that’s no different than going to the homepage of Reddit and saying “show me the top posts for today”. If you follow communities you like, that’s like going to Reddit and saying “show me my personalized feed.” The only difference is that you are responsible for personalizing your feed, because there is no algorithm. It’s not the most user-friendly, but it also resists algorithmically-optimized retention, which I think we all know isn’t great for our attention spans.

The benefit you get from using the fediverse is not being reliant on a corporation’s algorithm to determine what you should see, and being on a network that inherently resists enshittification and routes around censorship. The goal is that it becomes large enough for these more niche communities to find an audience larger than just the few who started them.

Don’t make trends your identity.

You don’t want to look back on your life and all the photos you have of yourself, just to realize every fashion choice, purchase, event you went to, and way you talked was all because it was seen as cool, trendy, or “normal.”

Live your life in a way that feels right and true to who you are, and what your values are, not what anybody else things is “right” for you to do.

The insurance company is going to have a doctor who said you don’t need it.

To add on to this, my psychologist told me that he’s had antipsychotic meds denied by a urologist before, because the insurance companies often don’t actually care what field the doctor is in. All they care about is getting to say “a doctor” reviewed it.

General strikes are illegal in the US.

It’s not illegal to strike on a date with other people. It’s illegal for unions to call for a “general strike” because it’s considered them calling a strike on behalf of other non-union employees for other businesses.

Also, jobs can fire workers on the spot for participating in them

Not always, (though yes, it would probably be likely for many people) since they can use things like sick/vacation days conveniently timed right, or if they’re backed up by a union, they might have a contract that helps to prevent at-will firing without certain specific causes, excluding striking.

However, if enough people strike, it’s kind of hard to enforce coming into work via firings, as it’s similar to if an entire unionized company goes on strike. What are you gonna do? Fire every single worker and shut down for good the next day because the only person running every single operation is the remaining CEO?

even if the workers are part of a union and the union want to participate.

As long as the union doesn’t say “this is a general strike” and just says “we are striking on this date for better working conditions”, and that date happens to be the same day other unions are striking, it’s legal. There is no law preventing different unions from striking on the same dates, and it would take very long for any legal process to try and make that claim before the strike has already occurred.

national guards have been sent in to shut down general strikes in the past.

This is the most likely outcome in my opinion. However, it’s still kind of hard to actually enforce the end of a general strike. It’s one thing to arrest someone, or to stop them from doing a given thing, but it’s another to forcibly remove people from their homes and make them work no matter their condition or reason.

Essentially, I’m saying it’d be messy.

Doing it multiple days? You realize most people live paycheck to paycheck? Nobody wants to tell their kids they’re going to be homeless.

This is the biggest hurdle, though there is a degree to which it can be mitigated, at least for a little while. For example, there are a lot of people with backyard and community gardens, small businesses with stockpiles that are willing to support their community as we’ve seen with the current situation in Minnesota, not to mention that if the situation got bad enough you’d probably just see people stealing from their nearest billionaire-owned store because fuck it, why not screw them over more?

To clarify, I’m not like, disputing your actual overarching thesis here, or saying a general strike is easy or likely to succeed, I’m just saying it’s not entirely impossible :)

Most of the time, if someone’s phone is confiscated by any kind of officers/agents, it’s gonna be stored somewhere just so they can have it. Even if they don’t want to release a video, they can still crack your phone and get your data, (considering your phone has to be after the first unlock state to record things on it, it would be trivial to exfiltrate all data on the phone unencrypted) like your messaging history, to later paint you as a terrorist or find some other thing they can use to smear your reputation as a martyr.

They don’t want to release the video because it’d make them look horrible.

Unfortunately there’s no real way to identify him from the profile, but this guy’s almost certainly just a harmless troll.

His profile has zero identifying info and is clearly intended to be a harassment account. (literally the only post he’s ever made is a sign saying “Support Your Local ICE Raids”) A clear hallmark of a troll is just an account made for a clear and obvious purpose: aggravating you.

The name “Frank Rizzo” is the same as this Frank Rizzo who did things like urging supporters to “vote white”, decreasing black people hired as part of the police force, raiding the Black Panther Party, general police brutality and racism, etc. A common thing trolls will do is take the name of a historical figure that somewhat aligns with the ideologies they’re trolling about, and using that name or a variation of it.

If he actually intended to kill your family, he wouldn’t have given you advance warning so you could prepare, and if he was local and was just stupid enough to do so, he probably would have shown up already.

Trolls incredibly frequently will just say anything they can to make you either angry or afraid, death threats included.

I’m not necessarily saying there’s no threat here, but it seems to me like just a guy making a deliberately inflammatory account, using data brokers to get freely available information because you annoyed him a bit, then saying what he can to make you angry and afraid because that’s why he made the account in the first place.

Edit: to clarify, I’m not trying to make light of the situation at all, I just think personally this seems like a lot of troll accounts I’ve seen before.

This doesn’t always work, especially if you:

• View by All/Trending/the equivalent depending on your client/instance
• Follow broad communities (e.g. Shitposting where literally any topic is allowed, but you’d rather just not see more politics)
• Follow communities that have rules against certain content that is sometimes just ignored, especially by new posters (e.g. there might be a “News” community that has a rule called “No U.S. Politics” but people in the U.S. will still post something related to American politics there because they simply didn’t read the rules first)

And on PieFed, you can either block things by keyword entirely, or just make them Semi-Transparent if you still want to see them in your feed occasionally, but just have it be easier to skip over.

For example, here’s my filter for the words “Trump” and “Musk” turned on and off, where you can see the filter being on makes the post transparent enough that it’s kinda annoying to look at unless you really want to.

You can also set an expiry date if you only want the filter to work for a certain amount of time.