Max-P

Here’s a snapshot of the evil propaganda they’re so afraid of: https://www.max-p.me/p/2025/rednote/rednote-snapshot.mp4

Their daily life looks just like ours, similar hobbies including cars and guns and tanks and cat ears.

I’d be surprised, unless they somehow managed to train 9 year olds into tricking americans into teaching them english on a live call all basically overnight, at the scale of several thousands of them. If that’s chinese propaganda then man they sure have heartwarming propaganda. I’m sure there’s inherent bias due to culture, it’s still China. But I doubt they were prepared for this at all.

It also was never really picked with the intent to switch, the meme was to just download it and browse it a bit so it goes at the top of the downloads chart and beats Meta. The happy accident is the part where people browsed it and figured it’s pretty nice on there and turned the whole thing into a mass scale cultural exchange.

The irony in all that is I haven’t found anything sketchy in it yet. On Android they’re not asking any non-standard permissions, much less than TikTok or even YouTube both of which ask for accessing connected biometric/fitness devices. REDnote asks for the device’s ad ID. All the sensitive ones are runtime permissions it doesn’t ask until you ask for it like access the camera to post a video. I’m sure they track everything you do in-app like everyone else, but nothing that gives me the ick having installed. Facebook Messenger in comparison wants full access to telephony and SMS services, your contacts, start background service on boot, bluetooth and NFC. I haven’t pulled out WireShark yet but from a basic Android permission perspective it doesn’t have access to much of anything to begin with.

It’s literally just a random chinese app intended for mainland China, and that’s kind of what sticks about it: it’s just not really that evil. There’s no ads, no influencers, no celebrities, those are all bannable offenses even. It’s just… kinda nice and nobody expected that at all.

As someone that admins hundreds of MySQL at work, I’d go with PostgreSQL.

To talk to the people much more than just navigating the app, they want to meaningfully engage and be accessible to the chinese people because it’s their app meant for actual chinese people.

It’s not even to go for a TikTok clone, it’s more to do with the avoidance of Meta products because they’re following Twitter and allowing toxicity and constantly pushing ads and influencers and MAGA. Someone decided hey it would be funny if we just installed an actual Chinese app just out of spite since we’re effectively getting censored anyway so getting censored on a chinese app to blow it all up would be funny. It was supposed to be a meme.

Turns out the chinese people on there were mostly excited to get so much attention and an opportunity to talk with americans. Loads of kids there practicing their english, and people felt so welcomed they’re trying to learn the language and everything’s subtitled in chinese+english because they want to communicate back and make their content accessible to them out of respect. There’s plenty of content there to teach chinese to the newcomers too. Bunch decided to stay because it’s just pretty nice since the lack of politics and “sensitive” topics it’s a very positive and welcoming platform for once.

The whole thing is a completely accidental cultural exchange on a massive scale, and a very rare case where americans and chinese people kind of can talk directly like that. Both sides gets to peek at the other’s lifestyle and bond over common things instead of hating on eachother. They aren’t learning chinese to use the app, they’re learning it to communicate and exchange with the people. The chinese government seems unconcerned and welcoming as an extra fuck you to the US.

The algorithm is surprisingly not really biased nor pushing propaganda. It’s happily suggesting me openly queer content (with a lack of hate comments and americans being called out for their hateful comments), they have gun content, they have a car scene, they have their thirst traps (with respectful comments), it’s really not all that different than us and not the propaganda machine the US is so concerned about. It kind of leans more left than TikTok if anything, which makes the ban even more questionable.

I’m witnessing it firsthand, conservatives with a long history of being conservative on TikTok, spending a couple hours talking to chinese citizens and coming back completely shocked they have eggs for the equivalent of less than a dollar here, and massive family sized grocery hauls for like 50 bucks. People that thought their entire life chinese people work 80 hours week in dirty factories and basically slave labour, and they get on there and see average office workers ordering and showing their DoorDash equivalent like it’s the price of a coffee.

You don’t have to be a tankie to see why the government is worried. At minimum hundreds of thousands of americans are seeing chinese people living in (or appear to be living in) much better conditions than they do, and it’s making a lot of them rethink their life especially gen-z. That’s a huge threat to the US stability whether it’s clever chinese propaganda or not, or even whether you think it’s a good thing or not.

The national security threat in question is americans accessing Chinese content and figuring out the commies have everything they thought voting Trump would give them.

They didn’t even believe the CCP propaganda there and we’re just coming in being like “yeah it’s actually worse than that”. At this point it’s worth it for them to just… let it be because we’re giving them better than their own propaganda.

The “threat” is americans daring going a bit more left than even the democrats. It’s not about China, it’s about controlling and owning social media to control the narrative.

The same as already happens on lemmy.ml 😂

Also shockingly getting more gun content than I ever did on TikTok and YouTube, turns out they kinda like guns too minus the shooting schools part.

Yep, the sentiment is overwhelmingly what’s so bad about China having our data when Meta does exactly the same if not worse. There’s literal memes about skipping the middleman and sending it directly to China.

Quite a bunch are also learning mandarin to integrate better with them and a lot of chatter about how the divide is entitely made up by the government. The governments are fighting but the people on both sides are nice.

Some culture shock for americans is families in China can actually afford to stock up on food without going broke. Like, a lot of americans are seeing through the US propaganda for the first time.

They might not have free speech there and the guidelines are pretty strict, but one glaring thing is it’s just a good experience there. No arguing, no shitty political takes. The lack of constant negativity and fighting is a breath of fresh air compared to what the american social medias are pushing non-stop because it’s clicks and views and ad money.

I think it’s all a good thing: diversification of social media platforms so you get different perspectives and cultures. We get to see first hand what life really is over there and the reverse as well. And the likelyhood that both the US and China pressure social medias to silence the same discourse is pretty small. You can make fun of Trump and Musk all day there and you won’t mysteriously get burried by the algorithn because Elon pulled some strings to quiet it down. The good stuff has a tendency of being on the other side of borders.

You know the government fucked up big time when thousands of americans are fleeing to Chinese apps and learning the language and all.

Ultimately we need to prepare for a future where the majority of jobs have been automated and need a way to keep the economy going. Everyone being employed full time is just something that is not sustainable on the long term as technology progresses. We’ll eventually need UBI because otherwise all the money will be transferred to nearly fully automated companies controlling basically everything. We just won’t be able to keep everyone employed without creating a massive amount of bullshit jobs nobody really wants to do. The better way is UBI and people going into research or creative works, and aim higher like space travel.

We’re not quite ready yet and people are way too invested in capitalism for this to work just yet. But it will become a necessity eventually. It’s not just affecting IT, it’s affecting all sectors: we can basically 3D print houses now, we’re not far off automating farming either. We will reach a point where most of society has been automated, we can feed everyone effortlessly.

Damn that’s a lot of bandwidth

Because the government wants the data collection. They just want it to be an american company so they get a copy of it all.

To kind of visually see it, I found this thread of some guy that took oscilloscope captures of the output of their UPS and they’re all pseudo-sines: https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/so-i-bought-an-oscilloscope.2413789/

As you can see, the power isn’t very smooth at all. It’s good enough for a lot of use cases and lower end power supplies, because they just shove that into a bridge rectifier and capacitors. Higher end power supplies have tighter margins, and are also more likely to have more safety features to protect the PC so they can get into protection mode and shut off. Because bad power can mean dips in power to the system which can cause calculation errors which is very undesirable especially in on a server. It probably also messes with power factor correction circuits, which is something cheap PSUs often cheap out on but a good high quality one would have and may shut down because of it.

As you can see in those images too, it spends a significant amount of time at 0V (no power, that’s at the middle of the screen) whereas the sine waves spends an infinitely short time at 0, it goes positive and then negative immediately. All the time spent at 0, you rely on big capacitors in the PSU to hold enough charge to make it to the next burst of power. With the sine wave they’d hold just long enough (we’re going down to 12V and 5V from 120/240V input, so the amount of time normally spent at or below ±12V is actually fairly short).

It’s technically the same average power, so most devices don’t really care. It really depends on the design of the particular unit, some can deal with some really bad power inputs and manage just fine and some will get damaged over long term use. Old linear ones with an AC transformer on the input in particular can be unhappy because of magnetic field saturation and other crazy inductor shenanigans.

Pure sine UPSes are better because they’re basically the same as what comes out of the wall outlet. Line interactive ones are even better because they’re ready to take over the moment power goes out and exactly at the same spot in the sine wave so the jitter isn’t quite as bad during the transition. Double conversion is the top tier because they always run off the battery, so there’s no interruption for the connected computer at all. Losing power just means the battery isn’t being charged/kept topped off from the wall anymore so it starts discharging.

If you look at my username you’ll see I do run my own instance so I’ve gone through the process :)

I would probably just skip the Lemmy Easy Deploy and just do a regular deployment so it doesn’t mess with your existing. Getting it running with just Docker is not that much harder and you just need to point your NGINX to it. Easy Deploy kind of assumes it’s got the whole machine for itself so it’ll try to bind on the same ports as your existing NGINX, so does the official Ansible as well.

You really just need a postgres instance, the backend, pictrs, the frontend and some NGINX glue to make it work. I recommend stealing the files from the official Ansible, as there’s a few gotchas in the NGINX config as the frontend and backend share the same host and one is just layered on top.

Hasn’t cost me a penny, hurray for unmetered bandwidth

Unless it’s running as your own user as part of your session. /etc for system-wide and ~/.config for your own user makes a lot of sense.

How does that even work for those hosting their own? Do I just give myself Bluesky+? Because all those features I already have by virtue of hosting my own data.

To add: a lot of cert providers also offer ACME so while the primary user of ACME is LetsEncrypt, you can use the same tech and validations as LetsEncrypt on other vendors too.