Crossposted from https://lemmy.ml/post/54435806

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_coverage_of_North_Korea#Sensationalism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Act_(South_Korea) only allowing for negative news against NK

Well, so I looked at the first article, and found some pretty interesting things in there, so I posted it:

Media in North Korea are under some of the strictest government control in the world. [...]

The North Korean government places stringent restrictions on foreign reporters, visitors, and even residents of foreign origin. Freedom of movement is severely curtailed, interactions with local people are supervised, and photography is heavily regulated. Because of this reporters often find it difficult to check stories and establish hard facts. North Korean and Western journalists have different understandings about the role of the media. (The situation is different for Russian and Chinese journalists reporting on North Korea). North Koreans expect Western journalists to behave like Soviet journalists during the Cold War, while Western journalists would like to exert the freedom of the press more widely. Researching topics like prison camps are out of bounds, and North Korean officials are often reluctant to give statements on the record. As with tourists, foreign journalists are always accompanied by minders, and any encounters with locals have been arranged.

Nothing more, nothing less. My post was removed by the moderator. Lol.

P.S.: no, I'm not posting this to PTB, since there's no doubt in my mind about what this is. I'm just sharing this for anyone who wants to have a laugh at the lunacy.

Sorry for the long text, I'm still dealing with some side effects...

So first, a little background. About a decade ago mental health wasn't anything I worried about too much. I had a couple of things I did to keep my mental health running well, but there wasn't all too much I had to do. Of course nothing is always 100% great, but for the most part, things were going well. I had good, even great friends. I had a job I loved, pretty much my dream job with a great boss. I could almost say I loved life. Eventually the one missing puzzle piece came, or so I thought - I got into a relationship. Well, her "mother"/egg donor was a narcissistic, (mostly psychologically, but not only) abusive piece of shit. I'm not going to go into details since they're not relevant for what I'm trying to get off my mind right now (and it will let me avoid potentially triggering topics for whoever might be reading this). Well, within a little under two years my mental health went from what I described before to just about as bad as you can imagine, again without going into detail for the same reason as before. Since a little over 5 years ago I've had pretty much no contact with my ex and her "mother", and in that time I've been battling my mental health problems. Things have gotten much better, but in the meantime I've gotten into a weird state...

The last two months I was in a day clinic, today being my last day. Honestly, save for a couple of more minor issues, the staff was great - including the head doctor, something I'm not used to. They were there to help people, and you noticed it. They didn't get stuck in arbitrary treatment rules, but focused on what the patients need. In my case, they did a paradigm shift in my treatment, and while it's something where the effects are still unfolding (and in the short term had some pretty negative effects - something I was clearly warned about and consented to), I'm hoping that it will have a good effect that will help with my symptoms.

My path there wasn't simple, though. When I arrived, I did the standard depression test they do around here which uses a score to assign the severity of the depression - and I landed smack dab in the middle of a mild depression. My first thought - whelp, I'm in a mild depression and need to take a couple of months off of work to go to a day clinic? Something doesn't add up there, a thought which, looking back, the staff there apparently had as well. I eventually had an hour long conversation with the head doctor which essentially amounted to "what exactly do you need from us?" I went through my background, a fairly long list of symptoms, and the broad strokes of what happened to me. "Do you know what it is?" "No, not directly. My psychologist said something along the lines of 'I don't believe in treating diagnoses, I believe in treating people', which is a thought I can kind of get behind. When getting things lined up to start my treatment here a number of people had mentioned PTSD, but I prefer not to interfere with which diagnoses I get so I don't usually go into much detail there." It apparently gave her some food for thought, a couple of days later she asked if I would be OK with a therapist change, since a different therapist can do a method she thought would be good for my situation. I deferred to her judgement, and so we changed therapists, and the therapy continued from there.

Then, today, I had my final (short) talk with my individual therapist. We eventually went onto the topic of diagnoses. She asked me if I remembered what I got on the depression test from where I started, since she hadn't gotten it during the therapist change (in retrospect, I wonder if that was a tactful "mistake"). I remembered what I had scored, and she said that the diagnosis they were working with for the treatment was a medium depression, later mentioning "if you had a mild depression, we wouldn't have been allowed to treat you here". I asked if there was anything else, and she said no. There was no singular event like a car crash or a violent event that she could use to diagnose PTSD, and she couldn't diagnose "parts of PTSD". There was nothing else that really fit the bill, either, of which she mentioned a couple of examples. I had to fill out the depression test again, and I didn't get to see the results myself because of time constraints, but I'm pretty sure I didn't even score a mild depression, and even if I did score it, it was just, just barely.

Which brings me to the diagnostical situation I'm in now. I'm still pretty far from mentally healthy. There are a number of things I either can't do or have to be extremely careful with since they can trigger some pretty bad things, including bodily symptoms, incapacitating me in severe cases. It holds me back from a number of important things. But my diagnosis? Technically, it's a clean bill of health, at least if my impression from the last depression test is correct. Which does not reflect the reality at all. Heh, maybe if I think about it enough I'll land in depression territory again.

My therapist from the clinic said I can always come back if I need it - which would have the advantage of not going into all the details of what happened in the relationship back then, and also of them knowing exactly where they have to start the treatment. But what if I end up having to go somewhere else for whatever reason? I wouldn't have a diagnosis that warrants treatment in a day clinic, unless things had seriously gone downhill since then. If I technically don't have a depression anymore and there's no other diagnosis left, that would mean I might not even qualify for individual therapy, which I definitely still need. I'm probably worrying too much (probably also a side effect from my last intense therapy session which was only yesterday), but it is kind of a weird feeling to know that you're still fucked up mentally but can't even get a goddamn diagnosis.

Anyone else ever have or heard of anything like this?

To be fair, yes, I'm just another person on the fediverse for all of you, but for me, this is the reality I live in.

I've always wondered about all the AI hate around here, and if this is just a fediverse thing, but realized recently that it's not. In fact, people are generally getting tired of constant LLM and genAI use. I've already noticed people getting turned off by AI flyers more and more, sentences like "oh, they switched to an AI flyer", in a voice of disappointment. And recently, I was at a trade show, talking to one of the reps at a booth, and it was really interesting to hear what he had to say on the topic. Apparently, two years ago, he constantly got questions about AI, wanting to hear that the products contain AI. This year, people also ask him fairly often if his products have AI, hoping to hear that they don't have AI. And he was able to clearly say, there is no AI in his products (at least not the LLM kind, only the classic, non-neural network kind).

Y'all remember that meme about leftists caring about human rights issues and tankies countering that with nothing other than "that's CIA propaganda"? Well, someone . All I commented was "ITT: Insults, putdowns and whataboutisms". Well, now I'm banned from a whole range of Hexbear comms permanently. Reason:

Rule 1: All posts must include links to the subject matter, and no identifying information should be redacted.

Lol.

It took some work to get him out of there. He didn't really like me for it. Although he did appreciate the cuddling afterwards.

As you can see, I'm on mbin, originally because it has the goal of being a network that could be used to access a number of other networks - definitely Lemmy, and Mastodon was promised at some point but I don't think that ever happened - and development doesn't seem to be going further.

So I'm curious - is there a "do-it-all" network? The basic idea is: when I scroll through my feed, I not only see content from Lemmy, but also from Mastodon, Piefed, Peertube, Pixelfed, etc, and can also comment on or create content there. Is that something that exists or is that a pipe dream at the moment? (Or would that not even be possible due to some technical limitation?)

Whelp. So I actually had the most interesting discussion I've had on ML. Generally, I ignore the nasty comments there and only respond to those who are actually trying to have a somewhat decent discussion. They're few and far between, but they exist. Which ended up happening - I had an extended discussion with Cowbee on what a dictatorship is and what democracy is. While IMO there were pretty huge gaps in his arguments, I have to respect that he actually engaged in the discussion without the usual name-calling, putdowns and insults I'm used to on that corner of the fediverse (yes, it's a low bar, but credit where credit is due). And I'll be honest, it was a fascinating window into the world view of people who think like that. Call me crazy, but I actually learned something. At some point, the discussion started going in circles, and I figured there's no point continuing, since as far as I could tell, everything relevant had already been said, and he didn't exactly seem to have anything new to add, either - so I stopped responding. (To be fair, I stopped responding once before because life got in the way, but the discussion resumed after I noticed that the thread was actually still alive for whatever reason.) This morning, I wake up - banned for 6 days. Reason: imperialist. The discussion had next to nothing to do with imperialism. It's like whoever it is who banned me didn't even bother trying to give a proper explanation. Meanwhile comments like

That’s literally exactly what that means you fucking moron

didn't get a ban, even though they're in blatant violation of rule 1:

Be civil and nice.

Interestingly enough, my comments are all still up. I've tried to archive it (unfortunately neither archive.org nor archive.is worked) because I actually genuinely found the discussion interesting, even if Cowbee's arguments ended up reinforcing my own opinion more than I thought it would. Weird place, ML. EDIT: I checked lemmy.ml's modlog and interestingly enough, my ban isn't listed there, even though I'm very clearly banned from the community. Not sure what's going on there (or if I'm maybe misunderstanding how this works)

More and more it seems like I'm seeing opinion columns being posted in the fediverse that are, to be fair, bad takes - but everyone seems to act like it's representative of the entire publication. Which misses the entire point of opinion columns - they're about providing different points of view, food for thought, if you will. Show you things outside of your bubble. The inevitable reality is that if you do that, you're going to have some bad takes. If you don't have some bad takes every once in a while, your opinion column is bad and you should feel bad.

Yeah, there are bad publications that try to distort reality. But you don't identify them by picking out bad takes from their opinion columns.

Unfortunately can't find the original video, but it was just called "subtitles". One of my very first YT Videos, if not the first.

I remember a couple of years ago I read up about the details on how QR codes are created. Specifically the masks that are added at the end to ensure that there aren't any areas with too much whitespace or something that ends up inadvertently looking like the corner of a QR code (that square inside a square thing).

And for some reason, I'm staring at two QR codes in front of me, looking at the details, one looks like it contains a pipe going around a corner, another looks like it has a bit of a star, which made me wonder... Why have I never seen a QR Code with a swastika or something else you really don't want to have on there? I've never seen any word on filtering out stuff like that when it comes to masking.

Am I just too bored out of my mind so that I'm staring at QR Codes like this with way too much imagination or is there something I'm missing?

EDIT: I'm sure it's possible to intentionally create one, I'm thinking more of accidentally creating one. Specifically when I see, for instance, a different QR code on the back of every seat in a train, for instance - you're generating so many, no human is going to check that.