Terminally online people are always fighting these silly mini-culture wars through the social media platforms our tech overlords have cursed us with. As self-centered consumers of content all day, they lose perspective, and feel the need to maintain their self-esteem and dignity by scoring points with “hot takes” or staying on top with current trends to stay relevant. Some of these takes stick for lack of a better term, and serve as a litmus test for whether you’re a member of the cool in-group, or the cheugy cringe ok boomer out-group.

This serves the overlords by dividing us further, and preventing class consciousness by removing our ability to relate through our innate humanity, since everyone is now a classification that can be marketed to in a nice neat little box packaged and sold to not even the highest bidder but anyone who wants to pay for it. Instead of having a personality and seeing the value in all human beings, they commodify themselves and others into their perceived advertising footprint. I don’t know if this is true for everyone, but it certainly feels that way these days based on the garbage I see coming from short form video content.

If I haven’t made it clear, I’m of the opinion that short form video and social media are really bad for us for a variety of reasons, but especially as a social bonding mechanism.

teeming deez nuts haha gottem

This is your brain on conservatism.

This is exactly it.

They’ll just spin it and it won’t matter because their voter base literally doesn’t care. They are incapable of critical thought, foresight, empathy, accountability, or generally any other positive human trait.

We order a lot of baby stuff on there. They’ve accepted returns on everything that didn’t work or wasn’t what we anticipated. We can walk to a UPS store from our house and drop it off. Anecdotally, they also have the best deals about 50% of the time on PCPartPicker.

It does take longer to fulfill some orders for us. But others show up a day or three early even though we don’t pay for Prime. I used to work for the post office before they switched to their own delivery, and they would drop off their pallets to us in the mornings to be taken out for the last mile by our carriers. It seemed like that was a better experience. It has definitely enshittified somewhat since their golden days.

Yes but I don’t want to type my billing details every time I need some thing. I don’t want to wait 6 weeks. I don’t know if other sites are reputable. I don’t want to pay shipping. I like being able to wishlist stuff or store stuff in my cart for later and read lots of reviews on products (I’m aware many are fake).

There’s also the fact that nearly every website runs on AWS, so even if I boycott Amazon (I’m sure they’ll miss my $100 a month in purchases), I’m still providing them money by visiting the sites that are hosted on AWS. Pretty hard to completely avoid them in this day and age.

I don’t use a single Meta product on purpose. I’m sure they scrape my data despite my best efforts to not be tracked online.

I still unfortunately order things from Amazon for the convenience, use Windows for gaming and at work, and occasionally use Google search with heavy boolean search, custom search engines, and browser extensions for filtering out the garbage. I also still use Google Maps and I have an Android based tv where I occasionally watch SmartTube.

Hell I even get Netflix included with my T-Mobile subscription. My wife watches that.

And for now, I have an iPhone SE until it dies and I make the switch to a Google phone or something.

Typing this out makes me wonder what I’m waiting for to find alternatives for this FAANG garbage, but I have no idea how Facebook still exists.

My school had nothing about react, node, angular, angularJS, SaaS, etc. back in 2015.

We learned Perl, PHP, LAMP stack, SOAP based APIs and other “antiquated” things. Provided a solid foundation of fundamentals that I’ve built a nice career on.

It might have been by design to get a feel for the fundamentals. Or maybe it’s just because the people teaching it have probably left the industry and are teaching how they did it.

My department head was in his 70s and my professors all trended on the older side.

Appreciate the kind words. Been in and out of therapy as needed for a decade or more now. Finally accepting things as they are.

Still alive last I checked but dead to me if that means anything.

My dad used to say “your ass is grass and I’m the lawnmower” as a joke sometimes, but then he would beat the ever living fuck out of me with whatever was in reach and it didn’t seem like he was joking at all.

I was confused by what this meme meant, but it reminded me of that.

Money and time and tragedy and a sense of purpose.

You’re probably pretty young so enjoy it while it lasts.

I’m 5’10”, 200 lbs with 15% body fat and so not a particularly thin guy. I’m primarily a vegetarian/occasional pescatarian. My cholesterol/blood pressure numbers were terrible until I started eating this diet. You don’t need to eat meat (especially sausage) in 2024. Take a supplement for B6 if you’re concerned about it.

People eat different things. It’s fine and probably better for you than what you seem to think is good.

Fuck reddit.

Feeding user data to an LLM. Jacking up API costs. Being generally unusable on mobile. Usurping old.reddit.com to try and force me to the official app on “unmoderated” and NSFW threads.

Now with their IPO and a need to deliver ever increasing subscriber numbers and improved metrics for shareholders every quarter, the writing is on the wall.

I hope it goes to zero. The only sad thing is all the knowledge that will be lost due to the sky high API pricing when the site eventually does sunset. I’m guilty myself of trying to de-enshittify google somewhat by adding reddit to just about every search. Hopefully people smarter than me have ways to archive that info.

Hulu, Tubi, Pluto, and Roku are all real. I know that’s the joke, but for the non americans out there.

I’m not saying the argument doesn’t have merit. I’m saying that this case wasn’t about “paying hush money to a porn star”. I really don’t care who he is if he can’t be nuanced. The world is not black and white. Bad Empanada is guilty of a straw man here and the result is that people who generally agree with the argument can’t tell if this is for or against Trump. Read a certain way it minimizes what Trump did. “Oh those other presidents did war crimes but THIS? This itty bitty little fraud is what gets a former president indicted?”

I can never tell if these memes are astroturfing by monied interests/russian bots pretending to be progressives, if populism leads to the same brainwashed takes as the right, or if progressives are actually this dumb.

I consider myself a socialist and a progressive, and I understand that this was a case of defrauding electors and why the case was a felony. It’s not “paying hush money to a porn star”.

I can’t imagine someone on the right saying this in earnest, as they’d never care about Native Americans or any minority. Only thing I can think is that it’s the right trying to sow discord on the left by feigning moral outrage, or the populist progressives on the left being unable to understand how the world works at all. I honestly can’t tell who is making these brain dead memes.