I agree with you that “free market” standpoints aren’t very good places to criticize this decision from – except to point out the hypocrisy of the right-wing, which I do think the original comment was trying to do – but it has to be said that nobody is obligated to criticize both China and the U.S. equally in order to not be a hypocrite.

One simple example of why would be that most if not all users here have absolutely no say at all as to what China does. There aren’t a lot of Chinese citizenry here. But there are a lot of Americans. It so follows that it makes sense to criticize the U.S. more, because many people on Beehaw can actually do something about it, especially in aggregate.

It doesn’t help to criticize China much either, anyway. China’s bad, yes; we know. Even among honest-to-god capital-C Communist circles, China is controversial. Posts about it tend to do three things: 1) Create a sort of misery/anger circle-jerk, 2) arbitrarily and unnecessarily signal to others that you aren’t a tankie, when nobody should really need to clarify that in most scenarios, and 3) further U.S. propaganda interests by taking people’s time and attention away from issues they’re more likely to be able to do something about.

I’m obviously not in favor of forgetting what China’s done, either, but there’s a happy middle-ground I think a lot of Western-centric sites sail right past, and I don’t think any of it is helpful.

Some American or other company should just hurry up and make TokTik and rake in the bucks.

Google’s already been trying with Youtube Shorts. Let’s not encourage them.

This is tragic. Nobody should be gunned down in the street like this.

I agree. Which is why we should address the problem by dealing with the absolutely ghoulish situation that is American health care, profiteering, and late-stage capitalism writ large. If there’s one thing I am very happy about, it is the fact that the number one thing being talked about due to this – besides the shooting itself – is the problem that caused it and so many other deaths; not a preference for vigilante justice, not guns, not terrorists, but a desire for profit above all else, regardless of how many die from lack of care as a result.

To be clear, I suspect you agree, at least with the “ghoulish situation that is American health care” part. But what I want to highlight here is that I don’t think almost anyone wants to live in a world where things like this happen, much less one where so many of us are happy about it. In the end, though, we don’t get a choice. We live in that world, and it is far more important for us to worry about fixing that than it is for us to wring our hands when one of the 1% dies while the millions he’s killed got nowhere near as much sympathy.

Murder is obviously bad. Even when it’s justified, it is a tragedy, and indicative of a failure to find a better solution. But this is a failure of the system people like Brian Thompson helped to create. On some other sites, I see a lot of people saying things like what you’ve done here. They spend time focusing on how his death is tragic, prefacing anything else they wish to say with statements to that effect as though they were warding against a curse. Individually, I don’t find this to be a problem. But when a lot of people are doing it? I think that’s an insult to his victims.

Eh, I’ll take it. Bluesky’s learned some lessons from the past, for what it’s worth. It has more than a few features that make the network lock-in less intense, so while I fully expect it to enshittify, I do think it’ll be less severe of an affair than it was for Twitter.

What I’m more upset about is Threads. I can’t think of anything redeeming about that place.

I can’t say I’m too confident about data that was obtained by methods including 1) Facebook data collection (we trust that now?), 2) machine learning and 3) potentially nebulous, unspecific definitions of various political groups. Still, allow me to indulge in some confirmation bias, if you will:

This shouldn’t surprise anyone, if you ask me. People are stressed and limited on time. Of course they’ll take shortcuts!

On places like Bluesky, most articles, videos or news content I’d share would have more to do with how much I trust the person posting or sharing it than with its main body of content. I figure that someone I value has read it, and so I skip it, because reading it would feel like work and I have to deal with enough of that as it is.

Places like here, I take more caution, but as a direct consequence of that you’ll notice I really don’t post very much at all. Comments, sure, but that’s because those are more my opinion than anything else. I don’t have the bandwidth to put through more effort than I already am.

Maybe learn how to use it correctly in its current state

The slop being talked about in this article was made by OpenAI themselves. You know, the company at the forefront of the genAI/LLM bubble, with billions of dollars of money behind it?

I don’t know what kind of mythical standard it is that you believe generative AI is capable of, but when even the organization at the forefront of the tech can’t make this shit look good, you can’t exactly claim it’s a skill issue.

Mainly to identify plants and mushrooms.

Considering modern-day “AI” track records at this, the only thing I’d trust a device like that to do is massively increase poisoning deaths.

From the article, emphasis mine:

According to a report from Shanghai’s The Paper, the incident involved the company’s branch in Shenzhen’s Longhua district, where an employee involved in the filming said it was intended as a joke, and that the three employees in the video had volunteered to take part. The employee said the branch did not punish employees for small mistakes like forgetting straws.

On Wednesday afternoon, Good Me issued a public apology through its Weibo account. “We’re sorry,” it said. “We were playing with punchlines, and it went all wrong.”

Whether or not you might trust that statement, I do think it’s worthwhile context. This post seems to be making a mountain out of a molehill – even the actual article’s title/subtitle makes it clear this was a joke – and I find that in very poor taste given how high tensions are on this topic.

This is tangential, but am I the only one getting sick and tired of all the topics about China? The imperial core’s news industry’s obsession with the country has never been healthy, and none of the articles being posted have had me thinking any of that is changing. I’m seeing post after post, usually from the same two users, and I’m starting to worry that the line between “documenting the atrocities of an authoritarian country” and “sinophobia” might start to get blurry.

To be clear, I’m not trying to point fingers. I don’t want to make assumptions about the users in question. I’ve just been seeing this for a few months now and it’s getting on my nerves, especially given the political climate of the United States.

I don’t personally believe everything’s so bad as it looks. There’s a lot to be mad about, for sure, but it’s worth remembering that fear and anger are some of the best-selling emotions the news has to offer. Doubly so if it’s about China. But none of that means that things are substantially worse than they used to be. Some of it is that things weren’t as good as we thought, some of it is that things are being made to look worse than they are.

Either way, we didn’t start the fire.

Joel conceived the idea for the song when he had just turned 40. He was in a recording studio and met a 21-year-old friend of Sean Lennon who said “It’s a terrible time to be 21!” Joel replied: “Yeah, I remember when I was 21 — I thought it was an awful time and we had Vietnam, and y’know, drug problems, and civil rights problems and everything seemed to be awful.” The friend replied: “Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it’s different for you. You were a kid in the fifties and everybody knows that nothing happened in the fifties.” Joel retorted: “Wait a minute, didn’t you hear of the Korean War or the Suez Canal Crisis?” Joel later said those headlines formed the basic framework for the song.

I’ve always trusted games published by Annapurna to be something exciting, new, and high quality.

That didn’t make them good either, though. Companies like them and Devolver Digital have had a bad habit of, for lack of a better term, using up developers and throwing them to the curb after. You’ll notice that a lot of stuff they publish get marketed as though Annapurna made them, which ends up hiding the actual developers behind the curtain, thereby robbing them of fans and thus seriously hurting their long-term prospects.

You’re coming out here arguing in favor of a megacorporation keeping even more money for itself instead of artists getting paid for their work. I feel like you should have expected to have upset people.

I think the real answer isn’t DIY pharmaceuticals, but rather universal healthcare, informed consent, and a medical system (both physicians and pharmaceutical manufacturers) that puts patient care above any kind of profit motive

I think just about everyone here agrees. But the question is what to do until that becomes available. We need something in the interim; dangerous as this all is, I can’t find it in me to shun it when the alternative is letting people suffer without access to anything as they desperately wait for a better society to emerge in some unknowable, possibly distant future.

They’ll get better at managing bugs. What we’ll have to watch out for is other shit.

In particular, I’m not keen on the main menu ad for the DLC they slapped on, which stays even if you own the DLC.

I really don’t think these are the same group of people. From the article:

The strike was ignored in some areas, reflecting deep political divisions in Israel after nearly 11 months of fighting.

Those are the people you’re thinking of, and they aren’t striking.

Monopolies depend on the government to exist.

I very much disagree but respect a desire to not get into a debate, so I’ll leave it there.

I really don’t know what that means

“Your freedom ends at my face” is a saying used often here to contend with right-wing group’s insistence on “freedom,” often the kind that involves harming others; e.g. free speech absolutism and the “freedom” to spout neo-Nazi rhetoric that advocates for the murder of minorities, or the “freedom” to not get vaccinated and thus worsen a pandemic. A more full version might be “Your freedom to throw a punch ends where my face begins.” The idea is that it is fair to restrict a freedom if it supports the freedom of others — you might not trust governments to determine where those lines lie, and that’s fair, but that’s a separate issue.

Absolutely none of what you just said justifies Israel willfully bombing hostages.

I don’t know if libertarianism courts a different audience in Brazil, but in the U.S. it has a very rabidly right-wing audience who effectively want to tear down as much government as possible, and who view “your freedom ends at my face” as an insult. It’s the ideology of an extraordinarily unregulated market – a true “free market” – which is a monopolistic and wildly unethical disaster waiting to happen.

Anarcho-capitalism, which your username references, is all of that, only more. So you might understand why effectively everyone here is going to treat that with extreme suspicion.

It is, but DdCno1’s been taking a pro-Israel stance into a very, very pro-Palestine site. I really don’t know what else they’d expect besides pushback, honestly.

So you believe that erstwhile hostage rescuers have no responsibility to actually keep the hostages alive, then? Because you’re writing apologia for that.