Step 1: Post anything with a rage bait title
Step 2: Some poster comes in with an obviously bad take
Step 3: That obviously bad take gets upvoted/liked/whatever
Step 4: Now people have to engage with it because it's been pushed to the top
Step 5: Drama/engagement/so much traffic tho

Social media sites just automated steps 1-3 and all us dummies fall right into it.
I wish there was a meta category? Is there? #meta-tildes
Edit: oh there is a ~Tildes. apologies.

I am a hobby programmer and spend most of my evenings coding. My monitor has a built-in backlight, but I've always found that just a bit too weak for my liking. Turning on the lamp in the room is too bright and produces glare, using a table lamp is directional and imbalanced. Using an LED strip on the underside of the table does not illuminate my desk at all, so it's not particularly useful.

Recently, I stumbled across monitor lights again, and for some reason impulse-bought one. A super simple ~45cm wide, dimmable straight one with warm white colour. Let me tell you this thing is incredible. It provides exactly enough light without producing glare. The light comes from the centre and my hands cast an unobtrusive shadow. I've only used it for a couple of hours at this point, but the difference is remarkable. My eyes feel way less strained.

For context I'm using a 32:9 UW monitor with 1800R curvature, so this doesn't cover more than ~40% of the screen, yet there is absolutely no visible glare at all! The monitor looks completely unaffected.

Do you use one as well? What's your experience with it?

I have apparently hit the limit with how many gmail addresses I can open associated with my phone number.

and honestly, I hate that I have to rely on google for the various email addresses I need.

which makes me wonder, I own a domain. can I use that to instead setup various email addresses that i can use for different purposes, just as sending or receiving and when it comes to receiving, setup some inboxes so it forward to my personal email + a friend's email?

i don't really know the best options for this or even where to start. I originally bought my domain on namecheap but I migrated it over to cloudflare so I could use it for setting up cloudflare argo tunnels.

I frequently need to source products and materials for various work projects, often from abroad, which means I can't go to a showroom to inspect quality. The visual quality (and haptic quality, which to some extent can be gauged visually) of these things is extremely important and I'm extremely fussy about what I want.

Some companies have started using AI generated product photos. No matter how perfectly they're supposed to represent the product, I really need to see a real photograph to decide whether the product is useful for me. It isn't always immediately apparent that an image is generated. This means that what was already a massive undertaking before has become double that: browsing through hundreds of options globally and painstakingly analysing the quality of each option, but now with the added step of first verifying I can actually trust what I see in the image.

I don't ever want to have to go through this verification step for the same item/company more than once. So I would need a way to blacklist product pages / manufacturer sites in a way that works for any website and is intuitive and quick to use. Ideally, I'd love a way to just put a large red "stamp" or popup (or something else that can't go unnoticed) over the page that tells me I've already inspected that site and it's not trustworthy.

I am especially asking for English thesauri suggestions. But curious for any resource in general.

The reason I use Goldendict is that I can host a lot of local dictionaries that I do not physically own without relying on the internet.

This video is a bit goofy in content, but I came across this youtube short of an MMA fighter "Seamus O'Grady". I don't know all that much about MMA, but I find it somewhat interesting and look up more clips about the dude. I then try looking up who this guy is online, and he's entirely AI generated from what I can gather (youtube comments say he's AI and there are no pages online about him).

These videos are basically indistinguishable from reality. The biggest "tell" is just how surreal the actual situation is, not necessarily the ability of AI to generate something life-like. And, of course, AI generated video will only get better. As far as I'm concerned, we've officially reached the point, in a completely non-hyperbolic way, where there's basically no reason to believe that what you're seeing online is real, unless it's coming from the verified account of a "legacy" creator.

There are some major questions that now get raised. Is video as evidence at all basically a thing of the past? How can we admit video evidence into a court of law, perhaps unless it's played directly off a recording device that's technologically incapable of having video uploaded to it? Is citizen journalism even possible now? How can we trust, from today onwards, that we aren't being fed a narrative by even traditional media that's a complete literal fiction?

The recent post on EU's search index got me thinking: the real reason I (personally) haven't been able to shift to other search engines (like duckduckgo; I currently cannot afford Kagi) is Google has these information cards that "summarize" useful information in an information card. For example, it can give you the recent results of the sports team you searched for. Or it can give you synopsis of a movie and the list of its cast and crew.

However, recently Google has started replacing these information cards with AI-generated content. Not to be against AI summaries, but the whole UX is pretty bad (I can't just click the cast member and go to their information card on Google); and it seems it is only going to get worse.

So my question: Are there any search engines that do this well?

I know duckduckgo has an information card which usually is a summary of the wikipedia page of whatever you searched for. I would use something like letterboxd or goodreads on the first go but I have found (a) the websites to be a bit clunky for a quick search (b) they are not as good for fuzzy search.