That person has messaged me like 6 times all under different usernames. I block each one. This is hilarious.

If I’ve learned anything as an American living in the US where people constantly talk to each other like shit, it’s that skipping past their commentary and ignoring it entirely is your best approach. If you give those folks even an inch, they think they’ve achieved something. People that offer nothing of value to a conversation while trying to get a rise should not be acknowledged. It hurts them more to be relegated to obscurity.

I hit an age and a point in my life where I stopped caring. All of that toxic masculinity shit should be ignored because it’s just plain unhealthy. I found that I gained more confidence bucking those toxic norms, than I did hiding who I was, or trying to act a certain way to appease people that will never pick up a phone to hangout.

Being sensitive and empathetic is a strength, not a weakness. It shows emotional maturity. Anyone that tells you otherwise doesn’t even know themselves. I’ve known men that would constantly give unsolicited macho advice but rarely had anything to contribute that wasn’t cited from somewhere else. In all of those scenarios, they struggled to find and hold onto healthy relationships and friendships, and they struggled to find their identity. They filled the gaps in with defensive tactics and poor or non-existent communication skills.

I’ve found that when you take risks and be more forward with your feelings, it helps gain confidence and the outward positive energy rubs off. If you find that you’re surrounded by a lot of that macho energy and it puts a toxic damper on who you are, it’s time to leave it behind. Surround yourself with the energy you want to reciprocate. If you can’t find that, spend time alone and find yourself.

Care about what other people think and you will always be their prisoner.

— Lao Tzu

Lol I grew up in NE and hated this. I don’t even like lobster now and never have.

Pick cheaper interests is my only advice lol. If you have to purchase something for a new hobby and it’s over X amount, don’t allow yourself to buy it. My latest hobby is lock picking. Not expensive and I don’t feel guilty picking it up and randomly doing it every few days or so.

Also, get off of social media. The constant scrolling and mental bombardment of other people’s interests mixed with ads for things, is what keeps these kinds of obsessions going. Your brain basically gets overwhelmed with information and never actually slows down to enjoy and sink into anything. I’ve since deleted all social media, and started doing yoga every morning and night to calm my mind, and I find these constant brain overloads have reduced considerably.

Apparently! It’s crazy.

It’s probably not an accurate number, but there’s an app that will give you an estimate of what your MC username is worth if sold. I recall mine being a lot because the name is 5 characters, nothing random, and contains no numbers.

Java version forever. My username is apparently worth like $5k because I’ve had it since Minecraft was $12.

It’s kind of evening out now. It was a fad for a lot of users that came over, but there’s now a good amount of westerners like myself that have stuck it out, are learning a lot, and making connections. I wasn’t a TT user myself and instead was simply trying to find a new way to connect with people and avoid the negativity that permeates western social media.

I’m learning Mandarin, so usually stuff like HelloChinese, or I’ll get on Rednote, and Lemmy.

Free = you’re the product. I’d rather continue to pay for Mullvad at $5 per month.

I saw someone give him genuine advice in a comment and his reply was simply “no.” I get that there are folks legitimately asking for help, but if you constantly bait people with “woe is me” posts and then refuse to listen to a single shred of advice, I have zero to offer.

Life is hard and the best thing that has helped me is finding joy in simpler things through the lens of Taoist philosophy, pulling myself away from screens, and reading more books. At some point you have to take the reins here and live for you, instead of hinging life on what everyone else is doing.

It’s only Chinese surveillance and censorship when you don’t use an open source fork of DeepSeek, which is not possible with OpenAI or any of the other US-based big names. There’s already versions of DS that remove the telemetry and censorship. So it becomes a moot point for one and an unsolvable problem for the others.

Edit: I can’t find one that mentions removal or blocking of telemetry, but this one removes the censorship mechanism. Point still stands. Your data is out there with whoever your AI provider is. It’s part of why I don’t use AI for anything sensitive or important.

All AI does this. It just becomes more obvious that this is tired old anti-China propaganda because we don’t see similar articles for OpenAI and other US-based AI tools.

The difference is that OpenAI is closed-source so you never know what it’s actually doing, and DeepSeek being open source means the data being sent can be seen, and the mechanisms can be removed.

I saved them from a landfill! They smell kinda weird though.

I take it as more of an observation and use it to be more mindful of what I buy, the services I use, etc. The reality is that we don’t know what happens behind the scenes with so much of this stuff, but we can still be conscious of it and use it as an opportunity to reduce clutter in our lives.

Agreed. If I haphazardly ditched services based on the opinions of tech folks, I’d be reduced to using a pair of cans attached with string and nothing else.

Yeah, I think (hope?) we will find that his opinion is not echoed among them.

There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, and that applies to tech. I pay for Proton and this is disappointing af but not shocking. Corporations and wannabe billionaires always fold to fascism.

Gonna start looking around at alternative email services to consider but I use my Proton email everywhere, so switching away is going to suck.

My wife and I rewatched Severance S1 in preparation for S2. What an absolute mindfuck that show is and I love it.