I get it's a joke but in case someone thinks it'ss serious, unless you install it literally in the middle of nowhere with no CCTVs and also no one to connect to it, you will only stand out more in the crowd as you make your escape...
Put dollar store lamp with enabled lightbulb in backpack. Enter library. Scope out cameras. Find outlet in blind spot. Install lamp and bulb. Drop hints like qr sticky notes, or riddles like don't ban books, turn ur bulb on. WinRAR.
If you put something the oppressive regime really doesn't like, finding who went into the blind spot in the time that the lamp appeared is easily automated. Ingress & egress are covered. You may get lucky but you might be gambling your family on it too.
Freedom has a price, people outside the regime (refugees of the regime) could explain and pay friends outside of the oppressive regime, to sell them at a loss (below market rate).
People inside the oppressive regime will unwittingly buy smart bulbs, that only activate after enough were smuggled in at the same date, so that by the time the regime detects some, all bulbs will be traced to non-refugee sellers outside its jurisdiction, absolving any unwitting participants buying and powering them, so it's important the ad doesn't advertise any quirks or functionality added, as that would compromise the buyers.
By having the sellers be random foreigners (from the perspective of the oppressive regime), the regime can't punish the family of the refugees sponsoring this infiltration, if it doesn't know which refugee friends the seller has (so it should also be a low contact friend, so the refugee would have to convince a friend to do one large batch once, and never meet again..., which is a bit sad).
This assumes commercial entities aren't selling friend network data, or if they do, that oppressive regimes somehow can't get their hands on it. A rather dubious assumption in 2026...
I'm probably a heavier user of reddit than most but I recently deleted the reddit app on my phone because it's just too much. I still use the site though, but now I use an iPad with old.reddit to make using it as difficult as possible.
There's a very strong hive mind there. It takes very little to grassroots a subreddit. Just like at the biking subreddits and tire recommendations. It's almost always the GP 5000 that is recommended. Which, don't get me wrong, it's a great tire. But it isn't always the best, and there are tires out there that beat it. The community has just latched on to the one true tire and that's all you'll ever see recommended.
Most subreddits that do any sort of product recommendation have the same problem. For a while, the pilot metro was the fountain pen de jure, or Stronglifts the default recommendation for weightlifting (and now it's never recommended).
If they hive mind rallies around products like this, it also rallys around other ideas, policies and whatnot. Just look at the politics subreddit and see nonstop "Israel bad" "Chuck Schumer is feckless" or "jews control the funding of the democrats" everywhere. Even where it doesn't make sense. You can have one of those muckraking websites that run an article like "Schumer didn't vote against [insert house bill]" and it gets to the top and the narrative is relentless against schumer, even though he literally can't vote against a house measure since he's in the senate. Is he feckless? Absolutely. Does that mean everything he does or doesn't do is a sign of his fecklessness? Absolutely not.
In the hivemind, there's no room for nuance, it's all "look at that bitch eating crackers"
Reddit is a pretty extreme example, though, where mods are basically subreddit dictators. For whatever reason, Reddit gave enormous amount of censorship and conversation-shaping power to mods, to the point where a handful of like-minded mods can enforce in great detail what is allowed to be discussed and what isn't.
Pretty sure if you unmasked the subreddit mods, the reason for the "circling around a particular brand recommendation" observation would become clear.
Mods are also not as independent from each other and from Reddit staff as Reddit would like you to think. At the beginning it may have been whoever created the subreddit, but that stopped being the case over time - we saw the extreme case in the 2023 API crisis when Reddit staff simply fired all the moderators who disagreed with them, and installed moderators who agreed with them more.
> For whatever reason, Reddit gave enormous amount of censorship and conversation-shaping power to mods
It's been "bad" since the 2010s, but censorship went into overdrive once OpenAI struck a deal with Reddit a few years ago (2021?). The mods do the dirty work of aggressively sanitizing all future training data for "safety" so the entire site is curated to align with ChatGPT now.
What you are describing is not hivemind, but rather paid participants. Companies pay for these "grassroots" recommendations, and Iran pays for those Jews posts.
It used to be more subtle with real people paid to post, but AI has made the quantity of it skyrocket, to the point where you can start to notice it, if you pay attention.
For example you'll see some comment about Jews, and very rapidly a bunch of upvotes. And you'll see a very similar comment elsewhere, with the same upvote pattern.
I've cut back quite a bit my participation in these types of sites once I realized just how many of the "people" I'm talking to are actually bots.
I don't know. I don't think it takes too many paid participants to sway a large group of non-paid participants who perpetuate the paid position.
Especially for product reviews, at the end of the day, the best product is the one you bought since most of them work well enough. I buy a new tire for my bike and buy the one reddit recommended and the next ride, buoyed by excitement for the new tire, go out and ride 1-2 mph faster than before, now all of a sudden I'm a convert. It's the best tire ever and I recommend it to all my friends.
Nevermind I don't have anything to compare it too.
This is super common in astrophotography community. You ask people what's the best camera or best mount and because they're so expensive most people only have had one, or maybe two and so everyone comes along to recommend their particular item because clearly it's better than the rest, when in fact, it's all about equal but nobody has compared. Part of that makes sense too, right? I buy a mount for my telescope from Software Bisque that's $14k and I decide to add another pier to my backyard observatory, $14k is a lot to gamble on and I know I'm happy with the mount I currently have, I'm just going to buy it again. I never tried iOptron's $7k alternative because if I hated it, I've wasted $7k
I'm actually pretty thankful that the GP 5000 is a solid consensus recommendation for general road racing. I see some others being mentioned though, I think Pirelli Zeros?
Contrast that with gravel tires, where there is zero consensus. The conditions vary and the sport is evolving quite a bit over time as well, so it's understandable. But it's a huge time suck to try and puzzle out a near-optimal decision. I wish there was a "good-enough" consensus.
>see nonstop "Israel bad" "Chuck Schumer is feckless" or "jews control
9 times out of 10 somebody who perceives a huge amount of anti Semitism online wrapped up in criticism of israel will absolutely categorically refuse to condemn the genocide.
When they refuse, this is how you can tell that it is simply projection and disguised islamophobia.
Israel is also pretty open about funding bots to spread that kind of message both offline and online.
Exactly right. It's a good place to gather information, but it's not a good place for discussion or for community. It's very useful; but it's not a place to spend time.
I follow dozens of subs through RSS and that’s pretty good. You just need a reader which has features to filter out certain users and words (like Newsblur what I use)
Yep, if you haven't lost the will to put a bit of curation work upfront, RSS never stopped being the right answer.
Substack has been a pretty good addition to the landscape, bringing lots of people into blogging (without calling it that). But for the skimming/reading interface, RSS beats the app.
In a pursuit of saving even more money, I noticed a lot of T14 ThinkPads have missing/broken keys. Replacement keyboard is $20 and a few minutes of work. Worth about a $50-$100 discount.
I’m running MultiScrobbler to scrobble from multiple sources (Spotify/PlexAmp) to multiple sinks (Last.fm/ListenBrainz/Maloja). Looks like they already support writing to Rocksky!
> "[...] they just last way longer than any of their competitors."
Citations, please.
In the meantime, an anecdote: My oldest modern-era (64-bit) daily driver is one I use heavily since 15 years. An HP, 16 or 17 years old. The only component that ever caked-out in that bird was the original mechanical hard drive, which died just this year. Similar experiences with IBM/Lenovo, Panasonic and Fujitsu. Apple laptops I don't even look at for they don't offer anything I need.
I recently had to gift someone some books, so I decided to try B&N online shipping since Amazon sometimes damages books. I ordered 3 books: all 3 came loose in a big box, all 3 were damaged: they looked like used books, unacceptable as a gift. I returned them, they didn't have ship-to-store option (which was what Gemini was telling me to push for), and they sent me new ones: all 3 arrived damaged, again. It turns out, B&N is worse than Amazon: 100% book damage rate on 6 books, worse customer support, worse return policy, worse everything. Enshitification 100%.
I have found basically no way to buy books online where they don't arrive damaged at this point. I've gone through multiple return/rebuy cycles with Amazon trying to get an undamaged copy and have just given up. I don't know if it's my local distribution center, but it's something like 90% damaged on arrival at this point.
Amazon has had massive quality reduction over the years in their service, but this one and the poor-quality knock-off books are the ones that bother me most.
Oh wow, yeah, this is clearly a parody of that IPv8 draft. Just look at the ASCII tables! I suppose it's a commentary on how low the bar is for submitting drafts to the IETF.
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