This is actually a very good and nuanced reply.

We’re going through similar problems in Britain. There are a lot of people from deprived communities that suffered during the seventies (Winter of Discontent, high inflation), had their manufacturing/mining jobs and access to social housing dismantled under Margaret Thatcher during the eighties, were ignored by successive leaders (John Major, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown), then suffered through austerity at the hands of David Cameron.

Meanwhile, the media had been pushing tonnes of hatred towards immigrants and to nobody’s surprise, hate crimes against Muslims and Eastern Europeans have skyrocketed. Things are so bad that we voted to leave the European Union in 2016, voted in a corrupt Tory government that pulled us out of the bloc in 2020, and given the trend of our most recent election, it’s becoming increasingly likely that we are going to vote in a far-right government by 2029 or earlier.

Reminds me too much of those penny arcade machines.

Anybody who legitimately gets giddy-as-fuck over the thought of a Muslim woman being stoned to death for adultery should not be trusted with dating advice. Yet somehow this asshole has a social media following of millions, has indoctornated a lot of young people into misogynistic views (I know secondary school teachers who have seen pupils gobble up lots of Andrew Tate content), has eluded bans from mainstream social media (his shit is still all over YouTube), and still has a following despite facing rape and human trafficking charges and being on EUROPOL’s wanted list.

Isn’t this at all concerning, and a big sign that society is failing men?

He looks like the Stonks meme guy. No seriously…

There’s a very good way of gauging how much of a dystopian shithole our world has become, and that’s by simply watching quiz shows on daytime TV.

Compare Who Wants To Be A Millionaire to The Chase. In its original run, WWTBAM had two milestones for answering 5 (£1,000) and 10 (£32,000) questions correct respectively. This meant that failing after one of these checkpoints guaranteed you that prize. The Chase on the other hand is a series of quick-fire pub quiz rounds with some notoriously difficult questions where you’re up against a professional quizzer and have to survive multiple rounds, before all the remaining contestants have to beat the ‘Chaser’ in a two-minute quick-fire round of pub quiz questions. Fail at any point? “You get nothing! You lose! Good day sir!”

The Chase is legitimately a much harder show where it is exponentially harder to actually win a cash prize as a contestant and that is one of the main reasons I fucking hate that show.

Where am I going with this? With the way the economy, automation, AI, scarcity, human population growth, etc is going, we are one day going to reach a point where we’ll have to compete in game shows just to get a fucking job! If recruiters are making you record 2 to 5 minute video responses on a fucking job application, then we’re already part-way there.

Honda 100%. Even if Elon Musk wasn’t a colossal douche, I wouldn’t want to drive a truck that looks like it was ripped verbatim from a SNES game.

If you asked me fifteen years ago if I wanted to live in the United States, I would have jumped on the first ship to Staten Island in a heartbeat.

Nowadays I don’t even want to visit the country, and unjust bullshit like this is a big reason why. Y’all have a serious problem with allowing your police forces to do whatever the hell they want and argue “qualified immunity” for things that would land you significant prison time in another developed country.

I really question why there’s still a lifelong waiting list to apply for a visa to work in the US, when the state of the country is actually quite bleak…

On the plus side, the sheer power consumption of using an LLM to dish out targeted advertisements will be prohibitively expensive. Any agency stupid enough to do this with current technology is gonna go bust.

As for hosting the LLM locally on the viewer’s machine… Remember the furore of shady companies burying crypto miners into their software? This is going to be even more wasteful of system resources and is going to result in such a sluggish user experience that the industry will go bankrupt.

Everyone would likely defederate from them, much in the same way that you all rushed to close the shutters upon Threads.

I also don’t ever see this happening, unless Spez fucks up with Reddit so badly that it sparks a mass user exodus, much in the same way that Digg v4 sank any hopes of Kevin Rose remaining a successful tech entrepreneur.

I don’t think the “decentralize and federate everything” strategy is a good idea when it comes to online marketplaces.

We’ve seen how quickly bad actors can wreak havoc on the Fediverse like that one time when Lemmy Shitpost was closed for weeks due to people creating new instances of their own and spamming the community with CSAM. Imagine how much you open the community up to scams or criminal activity when money gets involved.

I used to work for a small PPI claims management company. Our accounts team had a WhatsApp group for social discussion outside of work.

All of our internal work comms were handled through Slack.

That’s the only silver lining I can think of with Ron DeSantis and the fight Disney chose to pick with him. Imagine pissing off the Republicans to the point where they do positive copyright reforms.

Anyone with basic critical thinking skills would have known this whole scandal was bullshit in the first place. Did it not occur to any of these TERFs and transphobes that Algeria (a Muslim nation known for persecuting the LGBTQ community as a whole) is one of the least-likely nations to field a trans candidate?

I have a hypothesis that all the good people with a moral compass left Reddit in disgust over the API changes, and effectively being forced into using the official Reddit app. What remains of Reddit are the sociopathic assholes.

Disclaimer: I work in accountancy (Commercial Finance) but my advice should be taken with a pinch of salt.

1. Diversify your investments. Have savings across multiple bank accounts so that the unlikely event where one bank fails doesn’t wipe out your financial wealth., and overall don’t put your eggs in one basket.

2. Currently, the best ROI/passive income you’ll get is from corporate bonds. A cursory glance at the Hargreaves Lansdown website shows me quite a few corporate bonds and gilts that have a voucher rate (% return each year) of over 8 percent. Do bear in mind that a bond is a loan instrument where the ROI is based on both the maturity date (the date you get paid back plus interest) and the overall risk of the debt.

3. Another good option is to invest in high dividend yield shares or ETFs. These can offer superior returns on investment to the interest you’d get from a savings account.

4. Avoid day trading or swing trading unless you 100% absolutely know what the fuck you’re doing. Unlike what many YouTube ‘gurus’ claim, making a living off the stock market requires a high amount of starting capital to see any kind of tangible ROI, plus sophisticated stock trading software and knowledge on how to exploit trends.

5. Same goes for penny stocks (i.e. the FTSE AIM All Share market.) You can make some rookie gains from it. Many of the companies listed on this index are oil/gas/mineral exploratory firms that are likely not going to see any kind of profit unless they strike it big, find a new oil well, lithium mine, etc and get the necessary contracts and investment to extract those resources. They’re penny stocks for a reason.

6. Side hustles. For example, I have two friends that are karaoke DJs and they get gigs where bars pay them to host nights. Bookkeeping is another one, but you really are going to have a lot of competition in that respect, and you will probably need the right qualifications to do it.

7. Screw crypto. At best cryptocurrencies are speculative assets that are scarce and expensive because the very nature of how their blockchains were designed make it take exponentially more effort to mine a new coin. At worst, they’re used to launder criminal proceeds (Monero is a good example of one where the blockchain is encrypted.) NFTs are even worse.

Tell that to Roman Polanski.

On one hand, the Olympic Games are a sporting event and past criminal convictions should not automatically disqualify someone from competing

But on the other hand, he raped a twelve year old girl. That’s irredeemable.

It’s 14 in Germany but apparently parental consent is needed, otherwise it’s 16.

Nothing. I theorize that the good people who looked at Spez with disgust left Reddit. I’d rather not have the power tripping cucks who made Reddit bad come here

A couple of years ago i would say that a month of tinder gold or whatever isn’t the worst idea ever. Right now it totally is. It still probably maybe helps, but it’s just not worth the money. You can swipe more and get seen more and that might still be true, but your subscription doesn’t change the fact that the women you like get thousands of likes and you just go under or are lucky as fuck

I think it’s more like the online dating space has been enshittified by one company buying out most of its competition and then jacking up prices. Hinge are owned by Match Group, who also own Match.com, Tinder, POF, Okcupid, The League and a few others. All of these are now overglorified Tinder clones that adopted the same ‘swipe left/right to match’ formula.

Also I suspect there may be some kind of shadowban on my account. Apparently this is a thing frequently mentioned on /r/SwipeHelper, /r/HingeApp and /r/OnlineDating, and the only way people have gotten past it is fully deleting their accounts, waiting a few months and then registering afresh. If that is the case and my profile is being obfuscated for whatever reason (maybe because I recently reactivated it after going dormant), then that would make Hinge X blatant false advertising.

If i were you i would shoot my shot at karaoke, and just do dating apps on the side

I mean… I would, but I don’t really approach women that I find attractive (mainly fear of rejection, or worse, or I know for a fact that they’re not single), and the only attention I seem to get is from gay guys and the occasional lady old enough to be my grandma. As I’m not into either, it can make me uncomfortable at times.

The main group chat I’m in mainly consists of middle-aged men and women. I’m also friends with two DJs who host evenings at various pubs which I often attend. Some of our regulars either already are professional singers, or have the talent to be.

I wouldn’t exactly say I’m a good singer and when people say I’ve got a good voice, I feel like they’re either being nice, or they’re drunk and easily impressed. I’ve definitely improved compared to when I first started doing this, to the point where I don’t quite hate the sound of my own voice anymore and there are some go-to songs that I can sing somewhat well. I really do want to take professional singing lessons and improve my voice to the point where I could be like a siren. Maybe that would have been a better investment than a dating app.

Probably the best compliment I got was when I went to a Central Bristol pub for a Christmas karaoke eve. The place was packed and about half the pub was cordoned off for a pre-booked work Christmas party. I sung Poison Arrow by ABC (one of my go-to songs) and on a part of the second verse which I legitimately belted out loudly, I audibly heard one of the guys in the work crowd go “Fuck me…” in astonishment. I left that place soon after, both because they were inundated with requests, and to get away from an Aussie lady who I met previously, she was living in a homeless shelter and was spending her eves scrounging off other guys in that place.