Empathy

If it were the US vs another democratic country, I would feel like that too.

I'm particularly concerned with China (and Russia) because:

• They are not a democratic country.
• They do not have freedom of speech like most countries
• As far as I perceive, they are generally enemies of well-intentioned countries.

I might have a different perspective though. I'm a fairly recent US immigrant from Canada.

Edit: I'd like to add, my tone may come across wrong over written text, I'm just trying to understand people's overall perspective and whether mine is different, I'm not trying to argue and I'm not upset at you nor any of the commenters I've seen on similar posts.

I'm a bit worried about the amount of people I see making this argument whenever I see posts about a TikTok ban/acquisition.

I'm getting the impression that, either:

1. People don't believe there's (significant) Chinese propaganda on TikTok.
2. People believe there would be (significant) US propaganda on TikTok following an acquisition.
3. Given the choice, people would rather see Chinese propaganda than US propaganda.

Am I correct? Is there a nuance I'm missing?

I can understand concerns over point #2 here, but #1 and #3 seem wild to me.

I really like the word you used, code smell. I often have a hard time expressing to co-workers in code reviews why something feels off, it just does.

I only worked there for a few months. I was not treated well.

They gave me most of my schedule within a few days of my shifts, and frequently called me in my off days to demand I come in. This is against official policy, but clearly it wasn't enforced.

Additionally, I was blatantly lied to during the interview then gaslit. The only reason I accepted the job was because they had recruiters at my college advertising a program where students would only work seasonally outside college semesters. I wanted to focus on my studies and my college was very cheap. They reiterated that during my interview. A few days from my semester starting, they started listing several upcoming days where I'd need to work, and called me a liar for telling them I wasn't supposed to work outside semesters.

There were other issues I'd rather not bother writing here.

The most insulting part of all this isn't even how they treated me, it's how I can't bring that up to anyone without people jumping to poor lil Costco's defense and saying it's "for sure only the store you worked at".

In case anybody feels the urge to call me spoiled, I also worked at Walmart and it didn't really leave an impression on me. It was fine, my only negative experience there was one HR person.

If it was something self-hosted on the web, it may have been Clarity AI.

I think your comment embodies Rust more than any I've seen before

I'm trying out Kagi a little bit, and it has a federation search mode of some kind. I tried it for a search and it gave me results from Lemmy.

I don't know yet how Kagi compares to Google in terms of results quality, I barely used it so far. It's pretty expensive though.

That's what I do all the time, and not on purpose. I don't know what's wrong with me

I use main because, although I never heard of anybody actually getting offended by master, it costs me nothing to use main instead. Also it looks prettier and seems to be the new convention ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Ironically, the best way I found to combat this is to use search engines that summarize result pages with AI (e.g., Bing Copilot or Perplexity).

It still sucks even with those options, but it at-least reduces the need to go through several pages of results before finding the first relevant one. Still, the LLMs of those engines hallucinate regularly and give very naive answers, so they're mostly useful for finding relevant sources IMO.

Disclaimer: I pay for Perplexity. I use Perplexity every day but I haven't tried Bing Copilot that much. I haven't used ChatGPT much, I find it way too unreliable, I can't trust its answers. I'm not an investor nor employee of either.

I've been wondering for a long time whether I'd ever meet somebody else who doesn't use their phone in the bathroom.

I don't really judge the people who do, might as well be entertained rather than doing nothing, but I personally feel like my hands are dirty while I'm on the toilet even if I don't do anything (probably just a mental thing). Also, even on the bus, I had a tendency to just get lost in my head.

Also $83/mo HOA, oof.

Thanks for looking it up!