I’ve been having fun writing a dumb userscript to help me cope with this.

Yes, it can put back a bird of your choosing as a logo, but why stop there.

Instead of tweeting on Twitter, I can now spez on Reddit, skeet on Bluesky, or just eXecrate on X, the Elon way.

It’s ridiculous and pointless, and I’m not sorry.

Well, this was before his dark period. He was still trying.

And also, how dare you sir!

I just watched the trailer, and it feels really familiar, like I’ve seen it before, but I don’t really remember anything about it…

…so I guess I’ll just watch it (again.)

Thanks for the suggestion!

Yes, there’s an underlying taste of “oh my god look how they massacred a great idea” to it, but I’ve learned to swish it in my mouth and savor it by now.

Next (2007), starring the One True God, alongside Julianne Moore and Jessica Biel.

It’s a brilliant movie (loosely) based on a Philip K Dick short story. It’s been nominated and won actual awards (Worst Actor and Worst Supporting Actress from the prestigious Razzie Awards, Worst Foreign Actor from the Yoga Awards), and it stands the test of time comfortably at 28% on the tomatometer.

I wish I was kidding. I’ve watched this over a dozen times. I can’t stop. Send help.

Honestly, it depends on your job.
Some jobs will fire you for taking too long in the restroom.
Those are not good jobs.

At other jobs, nobody will flinch if you send a quick note saying you gotta leave now for personal reasons and just take off.

I’ve been an immigrant for about 25 years now. Not sure if that counts, but I’ve been slacking and haven’t gotten a citizenship yet, so… probably?

I can confirm that I’ve up until now always been on one of the health plans my employer made available to me. It certainly made things easier that I was never out of job, and all of those jobs provided great benefits (typical white collar computer nerd stuff.)

However, I stopped working last year, and my 18 months of COBRA (a continuation of employer-provided coverage after leaving a job, except you pay yourself the premiums your employer was paying (about ~$2000/month for me)) are running out very soon, so I’m discovering the bizarro world that is US healthcare without an employer plan.

I’ve contacted some insurance brokers to help me find a new plan, and each one of them has tried to push weird non-ACA-compliant plans to me under false pretenses (ie. they’ve actively lied to me about what the plans were.)
Sometimes the awful stereotypes about a profession are awful for a reason.

Which leaves me with the ACA marketplace, where every single plan is significantly worse than anything any of my employers ever offered, both in terms of breath of network, prescription coverage, and geographical coverage. I didn’t mention the famously terrible mental health insurance coverage because it was already impossible for me to get in-network care there even with my employer plan.

And then if you figure out which is the least bad plan in the 100+ sad plans offered to you, and you commit the faux-pas of googling them, you’ll get a deluge of screaming victims of those plans wishing they had picked anything else because their experience was a literal nightmare.

So that’s encouraging.

In specific terms, the ACA healthcare.gov site I linked above lets you put a list of doctors and medications to see which plans support them, and the answer for me is “none.” None of the plans available would cover all the medical care me and my wife are getting on an ongoing basis.
So it becomes a matter of picking and choosing what I’m going to pay out of pocket.
For example, right now I pay $0 for various insulin pens, but a great number of those plans won’t cover those, or cover a little bottle of insulin instead you’re expected to use with disposable needles each time you’ll fill yourself and inject yourself with, and hopefully not fuck it up. Out of pocket, with some “discount card” (GoodRX or whatever), a month supply of the pens would add up to roughly $800. So something that was “free” to us (if you ignore the large insurance premiums) is going to feel like quite the luxury instead.

One of the aforementioned lovable insurance brokers suggested that I create a fake company in order to be eligible for reasonable employer-sponsored plans and avoid this nonsense. Sounds great, except for the whole fraud thing and the risk of getting found out and denied at the time when I’d need it the most (which would probably also be when an insurance provider would look the closest to try to find any reasons to deny a large claim.)

And then, there’s the quasi-scam that targets religious (and/or desperate) people, known as “health care sharing ministries.”
They appear to be very affordable plans with great coverage, managed by “faith-based organizations.”
They are not insurance, and ostensibly claim to simply “share the burden” of healthcare across all their members.
Notably, they are not actually obligated to meet any of the (low) bars set by the ACA, or to simply pay any of the insurance claims their members send them, and so sometimes they don’t. Tough break.

At the end of the day, I’m still going to pick an ACA plan and just pay out of pocket whatever isn’t covered. I just have to settle on a plan, which feels like picking from a set of shrunken and half torn blankets the one to use on my bed.

Anyway… what would I change? Nothing obviously. All is for the best in the best of possible worlds.

I’m still occasionally browsing spezworld in read only mode and I thought I was doing okay but I just found old.lemmy.world and now it feels like I’ve relapsed.

I was watching the network traffic sent by Twitter the other day, as one does, and apparently whenever you stop scrolling for a few seconds, whatever post is visible on screen at that time gets added to a little pile that then gets “subscribed to” because it generated “engagement”, no click needed.
This whole insidious recommendation nonsense was probably a subplot in the classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus.

Almost entirely unrelated, but I’ve been playing The Algorithm (part of the Tenet OST, by Ludwig Göransson) on repeat for a bit now. It’s also become my ring tone, and if I can infect at least one other hapless soul with it, I’ll be satisfied.

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It could be anything that makes it worth paying money for the accounts in the first place.

Unfortunately, looking from the outside, it’s difficult to tell if an account has been bought, hacked, or if the original owner just decided to become a scumbag out of nowhere.

For example, have a look at https://www.reddit.com/user/fakerht, a 4 years old account that, just 30 minutes ago, decided to promote a scam site that attempts to steal crypto by luring them with the promise of an airdrop.

deleted by creator

That mirrors the tension many reddit mods struggled with recently… It’s difficult to push back against Reddit without also punishing its active users in some real way.

The folks using Reddit are still real human beings. But I get that not everybody is going to draw the line in the same spot.

Last I checked, there were at least 3 subreddits where cryptocurrency is being handed out regularly to active participants.
They’re called “Community Points”, and get a custom name for each sub (“moons” in /r/cryptocurrency, “donuts” in /r/ethtrader, and “bricks” in /r/fortniteBR.)

I don’t know how the other subs fared, but /r/cryptocurrency became noticeably gamed by actors attempting to maximize their financial gains.

So… I guess it’s gonna be awesome.

To push back on that a bit, many Reddit “aged accounts” are used to push scams to the great unwashed masses.

I’m not sure it’s morally okay to turn a blind eye from who’s buying those accounts or why.

That sounds like an improbable attempt to leverage the notion that minors can’t enter into a legally binding contract into a loophole to get anything for free by simply having your kid order it.

I have a small userscript/style tweak to remove all input fields from reddit, so I’m still allowing myself to browse reddit in read-only mode on desktop, with no mobile access.

It’s a gentle way to wean myself off. I’m still waiting for my GDPR data dump anyway, so I need to check reddit fairly regularly to be able to grab it when/if it arrives.

ViolentMonkey is open source, TamperMonkey is not.

You don’t have to, but it’d be a lot cooler if you did.

I agree, but there’s a non-zero chance I don’t have a full picture of things yet, and maybe things aren’t that bad. Or won’t be that bad.

On the surface, inconsistencies like this seem like they might encourage users to group themselves on a few massive servers that have a lot of local content guaranteed to be consistent rather than spreading themselves across many small instances (power law graph goes here.)

But maybe not. I don’t know. Maybe the system naturally converges toward clusters of interests where each instance is primarily focused on a few things, and while the federation mechanism exists and is mostly useful, it is a secondary feature behind a primary use-case where folks preferentially engage with their local communities.

Overall, I wonder how much of all this is colored by expectations we’ve developed while using Reddit.
All this fediverse stuff is built on very different foundations than things like twitter or reddit, and while it’s easy to gloss over it because the UIs look superficially similar, they’ve made some fundamentally different trade-offs.

But maybe the consistency stuff could get better over time too. Maybe there’ll be a smoother experience to better flag when and why things are inconsistent (“instance X hasn’t sent us activity updates since T”, “instance X has partially defederated from us”, etc.), and maybe even offer targeted palliative measures rather than a generic disclaimer.
All this stuff is under fairly active development still, so there’s hope.

Welp, I’m new too, but I think this is more or less working as intended.

The federation mechanism is a “best effort” thing, so there’s literally no guarantee that you’ll get the same view for the same thing loaded through two different instances.

I started writing a userscript to “normalize” URLs so clicking on a link to kbin.social on a different instance would transform the link URL to keep you on your original instance, but with the distinct possibility of missing content because of it, I’m not sure it’s actually a good idea.

The auto-refresh-and-btw-lemme-close-the-image-you-were-looking-at behavior isn’t happening on every instance, but it definitely happens on lemmy.world. Maybe this is an artifact of the websocket approach, and that’ll go away in 0.18? No idea.

At this point, the usage pattern I’m leaning toward is to find good communities/magazines, subscribe to them, and stick to the “subscribed” view. The most consistent results will always be with subs that are local to the current instance, so if most of your subscriptions are on instance X, you probably don’t really want to have your account on instance Y.