Very cool looking. I'll have to put this on the list, probably following ER's expansion

Everything is politics everywhere

This is the way

I'm a prescriber in the US and the name that people will commonly use varies by drug and by region. It's also influenced by whether that medication is even available generically due to patents (if that's the right legal word) on medications being decently long when they first come out.

I agree it's a mess

For allergies? Most people should start with a second generation antihistamine like Allegra or Claritin, they shouldn't cause the same sedation like Benadryl does.

If you're using benadryl for sleep, atarax can be a bit better, but if it is just sleep, I'd stop using any of them. It can be habit forming, fuck up your sleep hygiene, and long term use of anticholinergic medication may increase your risk of dementia in the long run.

This is incredibly generic advice and you should talk to your doctor about any concerns you have.

Ironically I know I just used a bunch of brand names but that's what I refer to them as off the top of my head ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Not unless those things are owned by foreign companies, which I doubt those are

Yeah it's relatively easy to reuse most webcam cameras, you just have to get them connected to a USB cable, then most computers will immediately recognize them as cameras.

Thank you for those resources, they are pretty compelling, especially the Twitter thread, which if true, is good evidence that China has used the data to target specific individuals. That's a problem. And the individual bit is important because I'm unpersuaded by "mass data collection" arguments because a) everyone is doing that and no one seems to care and b) basically the same data is freely purchasable.

The harms associated with the first few links are definitely real, but I would certainly be interested in an apples to apples comparison to other platforms, especially YouTube.

But I think it's also important to recognize that there is a lot of good that comes from TikTok as well. If I can get personal here, I've moved away from family and friends to work a demanding job, and I've found some sense of community on TikTok with people who are into the same hobbies as I am, which I've had difficulty finding IRL. It has also given voice and community to [certain groups of] marginalized people, and, (for better or for worse) is a major platform by which creators can generate revenue by which a lot of them survive.

Obviously a lot of that COULD and SHOULD be hosted on a different platform without all these issues, but right now they are not, so we need to make sure not to throw the baby out with the bath water.

I pointed it out in other comments, but I feel as if the current bill provides too much power to the executive to unilaterally ban foreign outlets from functioning in the US. I'm not a nutty free speech absolutist or anything, but I think anything that has the potential to shut out alternative perspectives like that takes us closer to Chinese style censorship, not farther away.

Ironically, I wonder if a better solution is mandatory integration of positive content algorithms like it seems like douyin has. But then the question is, who picks what's positive? Is religion positive? Patriotism? Depends who you ask.

All in all, I think social media of all kinds has been basically the worst thing to happen to the world in my lifetime, but I think that that the cat is out of the bag on it and we're just pretty fucked.

Thank you for the honest and level conversation here, I do appreciate it.

I usually just harvest usable parts like the hard drive and camera and call it a day.

Alternatively, if you're able to plug an external monitor in and get it to work for setup, you could install some sort of Linux distro on it and run it headless for lots of different purposes.

Here is the full text of the bill in case anyone was curious.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521/text?format=txt&r=1&s=1

In case I'm being downvoted because you think I'm worried about a slippery slope for no reason, I'll link the full text of the bill here.

The process is basically that the president determines that an app is an issue, notifies Congress (who does not need to give approval), then within a certain time period the foreign owner of the all must divest ownership or it would become illegal to distribute that app.

There are definitions laid out in the text. I see nothing that would stop them from banning foreign news sources or potentially foreign shopping platforms except for the clause about "permits a user to create an account or profile to generate, share, and view text, images, videos, real-time communications, or similar content", which could be broadly interpreted.

Do you really want to give the executive branch basically unchecked power to limit our access to voices from outside the country?

https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521/text?format=txt&r=1&s=1

I agree with you. The difference between the other platforms mentioned and TikTok is that TikTok is where the action is right now, so it's the target. The unverified hearsay problem is certainly there, but I don't think it's inherent to TikTok more than any other platform. No matter the platform, rage and engagement are the most important things so the algorithms will always reward them. Even YouTube's algorithm has been highly criticized for funneling people down extremist pipelines.

The TikTok algorithm is incredibly efficient at locking people, especially young people, into scrolling forever. That's bad. However that same criticism has been made against more traditional social media platforms too. Twitter especially has a similar although less effective problem.

Besides vague gesturing at China, I don't see any problem that TikTok has that isn't already present in other social media platforms. If we want to go after all of them, I'd 100% be for it, but this legislation is too targeted and creates a dangerous precedent imo.

100% agree on the searchability. It's totally unusable.