I don’t entirely agree. TikTok isn’t just silly dances, thirst traps, and trends—it has played a significant role in community organizing and coalition-building across social movements. Consider the university Pro-Palestine encampments or mainstream news reporting on social media reaction to the United Healthcare CEO’s killing. Neither is solely attributable to TikTok, but the scale and nature of discussion on the platform have demonstrably influenced real-world conversation and activism. Another example is Keith Lee’s viral restaurant reviews transforming the viability of small mom and pop businesses overnight.

What sets TikTok apart isn’t just its massive reach (150 million monthly active users, nearly half the US population) but also its algorithm and features that enable collaborative, asynchronous discussion. Unlike YouTube Shorts or Instagram Reels, where content is mostly one-off entertainment with fleeting comment sections, TikTok fosters actual conversations. Features like stitching allow users to directly respond to others, creating an evolving discourse where users can trace context. At times, entire feeds become dominated by discussion of a single topic—sometimes celebrity gossip, but often major events like October 7 or the United Healthcare CEO killing. This level of organic, large-scale discourse doesn’t happen the same way on other platforms. A great example of this dynamic was when TikTok users collectively decided to migrate to the actually Chinese app XiaoHongShu specifically to spite the US government. That didn’t just happen—it was discussed and coordinated.

In my view, TikTok is a national security threat not because of unproven claims about data leaks or state-authored propaganda, but because it provides an already restless and dissatisfied population with a real platform to discuss issues and organize. If a decentralized, open-source alternative existed at scale, TikTok itself wouldn’t be necessary. I acknowledge that TikTok—like any centralized platform—has real issues, particularly around privacy and censorship. But until such a decentralized alternative gains traction, TikTok remains important. And even then, I doubt the US government would be any more comfortable with a decentralized version, since it still wouldn’t give them control over what discussions take place.

94% AI generated per zerogpt.com

Nooooo some of my favorite science education channels are PBS 😭

“Legal resident” is an open compound word spelled with a space, not an adjective modifying a noun. An elementary school at the top of a hill is not a “high school” even though it is high and also a school. This is because “high school” is a word that means specifically secondary school (in North America at least), which excludes primary/elementary schools. Likewise in the United States, a “legal resident” refers to a non-citizen lawful permanent resident, not just any person who resides in a country legally.

I am curious how either unit would earn revenue as an independent company.

Will Android get to keep the Play Store? Does that include media? Do they charge Google to distribute the Maps app?

Will Google pay Chrome to stay the default search engine? Maybe Chrome can charge schools and libraries for ChromeOS updates?

1. The certificate and private key need to be on your home server since that’s where the TLS is decrypted.
2. You should be able to tunnel TLS traffic through WireGuard, so no port forwarding is needed.
3. You’d probably want to move Nginx Proxy Manager to your home server as an ingress gateway (and you can keep all the config + TLS certificates). Then on your VPS, you would no longer need the complexity and something like HAProxy, vanilla Nginx, or Traefik would suffice. Seems like NPM has an open issue to add support for TLS passthrough, but in my opinion it’s simpler to just have your VPS forward all traffic to one port on your home server.

For added security, you can make sure the proxy on the VPS only routes traffic for the correct domain using SNI. That way if someone hits your IP randomly, it only goes to your home server if the correct domain name was requested as well.

What you’re doing makes sense to me. Good luck!

Color is mostly a biological sensation. In low light, humans lose color acuity because rods are activated more than cones. Objects reflect the same wavelengths, but our cones can’t activate due to low energy. Does this mean color fades in low light? It depends on the physiology of the perceiver.

Humans have three color receptors peak-sensitive to red, green, and blue. Dogs have only two: yellow and blue. This means they can’t distinguish certain wavelengths. To dogs and colorblind humans, red and green look the same because their receptors are activated similarly. Color isn’t just a property of light; it’s a biological perceptual experience.

Even if they don’t use AI, they probably trade with a company that does.

Gee, if only the private corporation with a near monopoly on “progressive” general election ballot lines would hold meaningful, competitive primary elections for the highest office in the land. But no, it’s “tradition” for unelected party insiders to clear the field for demonstrably unpopular incumbents who broke their campaign promise of running a single term. Better to handpick the nominee before voters even get a say.

Look at NYC. Their ranked-choice mayoral primary is competitive, and voters turn out when it actually matters. You can’t blame people for skipping a rigged system that’s failing to produce candidates they actually like. Doing so isn’t gonna lower cost of living or fix the broken US healthcare system, which is what most people are actually voting for when they get the chance.

It’s the right to bear arms, not the right to bare arms!

For rule 2, I would suggest two changes:

1. Rename “blacklist” to “blocklist” in the spirit of inclusivity
2. Focus on reliability and accuracy rather than political bias

My guess is the purpose of rule #2 is to prevent opinion pieces and misinformation from being published as “news”. If the goal is to limit opinion articles presented as “news”, then perhaps the rule should instead clarify A) whether opinion pieces are allowed (and how that is defined) and B) if they are allowed whether they should be marked as such.

If the goal of rule #2 is to achieve some sort of “political neutrality”, I would challenge whether that should be a goal. This community has an inherent political bias that manifests in which articles people share and how they upvote or downvote. I don’t think that removing sources on the basis of political affiliation per se minimizes harm, and I strongly prefer a focus on removing posts that contain verifiable inaccuracies. Of course, it will ultimately be up to the moderation team to decide what actually constitutes misinformation (and there is bias there too), but I hope that shifting the focus toward that goal explicitly will mean that they will more carefully consider their own biases when exercising the moderation power.

Edit: typo

Ableism. As disability advocate Imani Barbarin says, if bigotry is the goal, ableism and eugenics are the toolkit. If you look at the history of any form of systemic bigotry, the justification for human atrocities almost always boils down to “well these people can’t contribute to society, so they don’t deserve to be a part of it.”

I feel like the bigger issue is all the CO2 emitted from burning literal carbon. Using fossil fuels is just burning trees with extra steps (millennia of burial and compression).

I use different types, cultivars, or alternative names for potatoes. Device names over the years have included: russet, yukon gold, ranger, marispiper, vivaldi, ratte, snowden, spud, and tater.

A PBC still has outside equity owners who need returns and have voting power. The designation gives the board permission to weigh stakeholder interests to avoid lawsuit, but: 1) it doesn’t change what the investors who funded the company actually need from it, and 2) it doesn’t change the fact that those investors own the equity and can replace the board if they’re unhappy.

As the other person mentioned, the problem with our current system capitalism is they still need to know someone “with tens of millions of dollars to burn.” Someone who, once they own a controlling interest, can just replace the board with people who prioritize returns. If we lived under socialism, those tens of millions of dollars would just come from the state as a low-interest loan that doesn’t confer control.

So the end result of this is… companies race to burn fossil fuels into plastic to take water away from municipal or agricultural sources, remove as much safety filtering as they legally (or illegally) can “because it’s cheaper and more competitive” and buy up as much water rights and other water bottling companies as they can with the centralized capital because economies of scale mean better margins. And then once they have a monopoly, they jack up the price and screw over everyone who doesn’t have free water in their taps (which is everyone because the cities all got priced out and had to sell their water rights so now people have to buy bottled water).

Regulation in this scenario doesn’t work because the water companies are operating in some country across the world which has no money or army to enforce its laws. Or the local politicians are corrupt. There is no competition because people don’t have any real choice: they have to drink water which means they have to buy it from some company (as opposed to getting it for free as a human right). That is the big lie we’re all told about capitalism: that competition is a given in every market, government regulation is “in the way” and that the free market will somehow lead to the best outcome for all. At least for water (and also for web browsers), that is patently and obviously not true.

Edit: link formatting

If Brew sucks, why is it the preferred package manager for CLI tools in Bazzite?

An app that’s like Uber or Lyft, but it only calls your friends who have cars and would be willing/able to give you a ride. It shows you how far they are (if they share location with the app) and how long it would take to get you to your destination. Based on the trip distance and current prices, it could also suggest how much you would owe if you wanted to cover their gas.

I have an inside joke with a friend who lives nearby that if she ever needs a ride she should download an app that’s like Uber but it only calls me. I think if I actually made it, she would actually put it in her rideshare folder and use it instead of forgetting to message me! So yeah if you made it and it was open source I might actually use it haha

You know container image attestations are a thing, right?

I usually say “semiweekly” to mean twice per week. I also say “semimonthly” to mean twice per month (24 times per year) as opposed to “biweekly” (26 times per year).