Yes I think it’s about time for him to invest in one

Honest question, what are the incentives for instance operators to play nice, so to speak? And not just recreate new oligarch safe havens?

It seems like each instance is a miniature zone of centralization and it’s still incumbent on individuals to create their own circles of influence. For better or worse that’s how we get hivemind echo chambers and I’m not sure it’s even in human nature to seek anything else.

Alternatively we have to rescue our friends and families when they start to fall for BS and educate them aggressively on improving the sourcing of their information.

Had one for a while. It’s ok but the places you can safely ride are more limited than you think. E-scooters are a far superior invention for mobility.

My TikTok feed is full of content that I find interesting and educational, from creators who work hard to make something valuable.

For them, banning TikTok means the work they put in to curating an audience will be partially lost, they’ll retain only the followers who find them on another app. If they are monetizing, they’ll potentially have to start over. That may discourage some who are just getting started from developing their craft.

If china, bytedance, meta, or any other platform is collecting user data in such a way as to be a national threat they definitely need to cut it out and this should be regulated. For example, it should be impossible to identify the location of military generals based on where their wives access TikTok from, or who’s having an affair with who based on proximity to each other, or to develop a vast dataset of individually identifiable profiles of every user that could be used to selectively damage their character.

Aside from these problems, which are potentially solvable, I think the individual creator/maker economy is an awesome way to give more power to the people.

Bots don’t paste. If it a selenium related bot it would inject the value or type out each keypress.

It only causes real users pain

Send them an invoice for your consulting services. Or, sue for kidnapping.

Thanks for taking the time to comment! It’s really informative

Just pray. If your God is the creator of the universe, it’s pretty likely he can handle the situation once you let him know.

Otoh replacing all those taxi drivers with robots could actually calm the chaos… But put millions of barely-surviving people out of a no-education-needed job.

Imagining how or if these will ever come to some of the most chaotic cities, such as Bangkok, Mumbai, heck… anywhere in India, Davao, etc where the rules of traffic are based on who believes in reincarnation the most.

Bluesky is being run by a funded professional startup team and is aimed at the masses. Mastodon is run by activists and software devs and brings in other like minded folks.

The smart ones all know how to use VPNs as well. They know what’s up.

Crazy thing is they only need to control the masses who are mostly uneducated or don’t care enough to figure out what’s going on. Turns out that even the USA has a massive group of the latter type.

Accelerate, brake, accelerate, brake, accelerate, brake on repeat when on a wide open road.

Some drivers do this seemingly without being aware and once you notice it’s impossible to ignore how irritating the feeling is.

What in the HIPPA violation

I guess this device needed to connect to some remotely hosted server that enabled its functionality. And the company was losing money and hoping that sales would eventually pick up enough to make them profitable. But their latest investor decided not to put any more money in, and the company ran out of cash and can’t pay its bills anymore.

The entrepreneur thought he could get more investor cash and ran the business in such a way that it would fall off a cliff if he didn’t. And… He failed to secure more financing.

I have mixed feelings about products like this… If the device somehow needed to host an entire internet’s worth of data to function, it certainly wouldn’t have cost only $800. But when you buy a product that depends on the ongoing viability of the seller, you’re in a position of caveat emptor - You better vet them out yourself, especially if they’re new.

Hopefully the founders feel some emotional attachment to their product and the trust bestowed upon them by their unknowing customers, and release whatever on the back end makes the thing work so that motivated customers could reactivate their devices somehow.

Hah, I installed Postiz just yesterday, interesting to see this thread. It’s like buffer or one of the other paid tools to schedule your social media posts and track engagement. Of course, of particular interest to our community, Postiz is self hosted.

It doesn’t have as many features yet as the major SaaS businesses, but the software is looking good and quite usable right now. I’m sure the more people who use it and support the developer, the more this tool can grow.

For example you can plug in your OpenAI API key and get an LLM chat interface inside the software while writing social posts. But I don’t think it learns your style or creates posts using any kind of system prompt yet unless you type it in each time.

Another thing I couldn’t figure out so far is how to limit which social media channels individual users can see. For example my business has several different units and there’s a different marketing team on each unit, so they shouldn’t be able to post into other channels.

If you’re in the business of needing to post regularly on a lot of channels I think postiz is worth checking out.

Training takes more resources.

Querying takes less resources.

The factory gets paid in step #1 (many can accept direct wire transfers or have Hong Kong/Singapore/ or even New York banks). Sometimes a deposit is made to start an order and the final amount is paid to release it from the factory after inspection.

There are agents who can handle funds on your behalf and when you work with a new factory or it is a super large order, it is common to use a service that will escrow the funds until the goods have been inspected and released.

Sometimes we even have our own staff monitor the assembly and packaging inside the factory to be sure the quality of parts we ordered are actually going into each piece. This is normal every day in Chinese factories, they know the game.

Here’s how tariffs work (I import stuff from china)

1. I find a Chinese manufacturer of widgets and negotiate with them. One of their first questions is, what incoterms do I require? I tell them EXW which makes their quotation the easiest to provide.

EXW means that once the goods are ready, I’ll send my shipping agent to go get them and bring them to me in my country.

2. I call my agent and tell them to get the goods. They ask a lot of questions about the contents of the goods and figure out which HS code to use, which is a classification of what the goods are (such as bicycle tires, or unfinished lumber, or whatever).

3. The agent prepares an assload of documentation for my shipment. They send a truck to the Chinese warehouse, get the stuff, load it into a container, take it to a shipyard. It’s loaded, boat moves to the US, boat is then unloaded, and my container is put into an inspection queue.

4. The shipping agent forwards the documents about my container, which has not been released, to US customs. US customers decides if they want to manually inspect it or not, and then issues an invoice for the taxes. My agent calls me and says Mr. Nucleative, your customs bill is $9,845.50.

I pay them, they pay the US customs office. Customs releases my container.

5. The truck is cleared to pick up my container and drive it to my warehouse.

6. Now I unload and sell the goods to my customers.

Did you notice in step #4 that I paid the import tariffs? Now my cost to get the goods to my customers went way up. My margins are pretty thin, so I can’t do this business unless I charge my customers more or else I’m running a charity. Now, my customers have to pay me more. That money goes straight to the US government.

Hypothetically now it’s less unattractive to set up a factory in the USA, encouraging more local jobs. But damn, did you know we also need to import rubber, and metal, and machine parts, and cardboard for packaging, and all the other raw supplies either way? The local factories, if there are any, can probably not increase production to meet demand anyways, at least not in a month or two. Does anybody remember what happend when demand outstrips supply?

There is no rocket science here, just people learning from the wrong people.

A valid point but tangential to the issue