> If AI frees up VFX artists so they can work on movies rather than commercials, I'm all for that.
This isn’t how it works. Excel didn’t free up bookkeepers to become CFOs. Digital photography didn’t free up photo lab technicians to become cinematographers.
The person who in 1970 would have been an accountant at Ford Motor Company with a pension and a mortgage is now, displaced by Excel, working at two burger joints to make ends meet, with no realistic path to anything better. The VFX artists will follow in the exact same footsteps. The shareholders will keep the difference, as they have time and again.
> First and foremost listen to what your child is interested in
A child can only ever have interest in things he or she has been exposed to. A good environment will expose them to many different things, expanding their menu of interest options.
Most platforms for the last decade have used phone numbers for real-human detection. Facebook is well known to quickly lock new signups' accounts until they give a phone number. Obviously that can be gamed by some people in some places, but all countries on earth have mobile phones now and purchase of a SIM card often requires showing ID to authorities.
Who cares about planetary scale? Back when your networking reach was largely limited by the size of your area code, local BBSes had user verification and were incredibly popular.
Nextdoor is the only social network I have used that confirms your real-life location, and it's not any better than the planetary scale sites. BBSes were better due to how users self-selected into them. Small geographic clusters don't inherently promote quality.
My favorite Reddit UX scam is that you tap on comments to collapse them along with their children, UNLESS they’re an ad that masks itself exactly like a comment in which case you tap it with the intent of collapsing it, but instead you inadvertently increase RDDT shareholder value (at the expense of the time you waste closing the webview)!
I'm saying you don't even need a substitute. Genuinely looking back, I was more anxious when I would browse reddit in my free time.
I promise, disengage from social media (and the doom news cycle for that matter) and you'll be happier, or at least you'll worry about stuff you can control instead of stuff you can't.
"Extreme left" said by someone likely from the USA is slightly left-of-center basically anywhere else.
The USA democrats and "left" have been overton window'ed so hard that a actual democratic socialist, Mamdani, is compared to being a communist. https://nypost.com/cover/november-5-2025/
There's also hundreds of Lemmy federated servers. I'm sure some are actual communist. But there's plenty for all walks of life. And it's like Mastodon in that regard.
And honestly, if "killing SNAP and other public benefits for poor people" is capitalist, I want nothing to do with that. That is completely ethically bankrupt. Doubly so being one of the richest countries in the world. Absolutely 0 people should be starving. And I'd also say that 0 people should be involuntarily homeless. (some may want to, and choose to be vagabonds and travel. they should have that right! but they should also be able to choose to have a home.)
>"Extreme left" said by someone likely from the USA is slightly left-of-center basically anywhere else.
This is a 2000s era meme that was started to try and get people to see reason and vote against Bush, but it is not true and has not been for coming up on a decade. The Democratic Party is to the left of many European left parties, especially on issues like immigration and freedom of identity, and its politicians (especially the young ones) regularly pitch welfare state expansions that are more generous than European counterparts (see Kat Abu on 'medicare for anyone physically present in the US, for free'; a more generous offer than even the NHS).
Is that the democratic party or a fringe left that is trying to accomplish something as part of the party ? what policies did the democrats actually implement across the years? Bernie is considered by the democratic party leadership to be a radical(hes not) and would prop up anyone but him
>What policies did the Democrats actually implement over the years?
Roughly in order: Don't Ask/Don't Tell repeal. Dodd-Frank. Lily Ledbetter (extends the statute of limitations on equal pay suits). Making it clear that sexual orientation and gender identity are equal to race in hate crime law. Banning lifetime coverage caps so your insurer cannot simply decide your life is not worth living and banning the practice of excluding pre-existing conditions from healthcare coverage so that you are not enslaved to whatever employer you happened to be working for when you got the worst news of your life. Establishing the CFPB to end unfair credit practices like medical debt reporting. Capping the cost of insulin at $35 per month for Medicare. Allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices. ACA subsidy expansion. People our normie centrist presidents put on the bench decided Obergefell. People our normie centrist presidents put on the bench are protecting human expression.
You have to engage in motivated reasoning not to recognize these things as making life better. If you want to make life even better, consider voting for Democrats. When you don't vote for them, they become the minority party. When they are the minority party, no amount of impotent screaming or saying please can turn 49 votes into 61 votes, nor can it force Republicans to help them help you.
Bernie is a loudmouth with almost no legislative accomplishments that spent his life building his own brand and ratfucking the party. Of course the party leadership doesn't like him. When you get a rock in your shoe, do you like the rock?
Actual leaders are in the trenches right now embarrassing the GOP with this shutdown to force them to make COVID-era healthcare subsidies permanent. What's Bernie doing except derailing news events to complain that party leadership isn't supporting his faction in comparatively irrelevant local races?
Ah yes, so one candidate for the Democratic primary (she isn’t even a Dem primary winner yet) for one of 434 Congressional seats may have a position that on the edge might be slightly more “left wing” on one issue in one of the more right wing Western European nations, is clearly evidence that the U.S. is no longer far to Europe’s right…
To be fair, setting aside my snark, I don’t disagree with you. The real problem here is simply the fact that the single axis left-right political framework is insufficient to capture even the simplest democracy in the world right now.
And the US has made huge leaps to the left on some axes, but is still far to the right of the European center on many other axes.
The OP says tankies. Those kinds of extreme left are extreme even by non-USA standards. A European-style democratic socialist like Mamdani would be, one hopes, to the right of them. Tankies were largely forced out of European mainstream parties after the shocks of 1937, 1956 and 1968.
Lemmy is occupied by tankies and Marxist leninists and that’s not my type of lefties. They also espouse violence which I don’t like.
For example the main federated server is called lemmy.ml ml standing for Marxist leninists. They are also the developer server hence all federated servers have to federate with them.
I built my private version of Infinity for Android. The steps were 90% automated. They were in a Reddit thread like this one (I just pasted the first thing I found now), although I don't know if the build process still works. https://www.reddit.com/r/Infinity_For_Reddit/comments/1izm7c... -- you have to side-load the app, which is a little tricky because you have to load it onto your phone. I think put it on a private Google Drive.
Maybe similar solutions exist for iOS, but maybe the side-loading is not as easy?
Anyway, on Windows/Chrome I use uBlock Origin and never see any ads in Reddit online. There was a lot of drama about reddit selling out in 2023 (I was sad to see Infinity die), but there are tech solutions to avoid its enshittification.
Not to mention that, at least on the iOS app, the button to close an ad is in a totally different place than the rest of the UI screens, which is always in the top-left of the screen. A small “X” is placed in the middle-left of the ad image, to make you spend an extra second finding it, which I would assume they are happy to report as a user engagement metric to their advertisers.
Depending on the location, state of the bone and other parameters, anything from mild discomfort to catastrophic failure of the implant and a jaw fracture.
I have four implants, two in my lower jaw, two in my upper jaw. My lower jaw is basically stone, an extremely hard bone even by usual lower jaw standards; the dentists (plural, as one was unable to finish the job) drilling into it destroyed a few drilling bits doing so. I have never had any problems with the lower jaw implants. That bone can take almost anything in stride.
My upper jaw, on the other hand ... very delicate, just enough bone left for the implants to work, and I learnt to be careful about biting into anything harder with them.
It is and many immigrant families frequent their origin countries for this purpose (my own as well as many others I know), but it’s hard for someone born and raised in the United States to conceptualize what this looks like in a country like Portugal, Armenia, Russia, Turkey, Korea, etc. There’s issues of trust, risk, learning new and unusual systems, travel discomfort, and the incumbent American system benefits from this. It’s a massive thing for someone in Nebraska to say “let me check treatment options for my chronic back pain in Seoul and run the numbers”.
There’s nothing, absolutely nothing that as an immigrant I loathe more in the United States than the healthcare system. It is disgusting. The mediocrity of the average doctor combined with how much they charge for that mediocrity blows my mind every time life forces me into their wretched cabinets.
What is the conceptual difference between Cloudflare and the companies in that list? We all love a David vs Goliath story, but haven’t we learned anything after buying the “Don’t Be Evil” bullshit?
Cloudflare sells network services. You want services, you can buy services. It isn't a vertically integrated monstrosity where every transaction bounces around departments and partners having value extracted that you didn't want extracted. Some things are even free or at cost, not freemium just-sign-this-user-agreement-you-won't-feel-a-thing.
But certainly worth keeping an eye on, especially as they branch out into things like stable coins and payment processing.
Cloudflare sells the service of making your life more annoying, to people who aren't you, and have no reason to make your life more annoying, but Cloudflare didn't tell them it would, and also they don't really care either way.
This isn’t how it works. Excel didn’t free up bookkeepers to become CFOs. Digital photography didn’t free up photo lab technicians to become cinematographers.
The person who in 1970 would have been an accountant at Ford Motor Company with a pension and a mortgage is now, displaced by Excel, working at two burger joints to make ends meet, with no realistic path to anything better. The VFX artists will follow in the exact same footsteps. The shareholders will keep the difference, as they have time and again.