I found out and continue to fuck around with this. It’s lovely!

My most recent fucking around.

Obligatory (at the right time code!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=notKtAgfwDA&t=63s

Ah, that All Saints Day thing makes WAY more sense than my Halloween thing!

They’re botching an old joke by trying to hammer it into your bit about schnitzel.

The old joke: “How do you spot the vegan in the crowd?” “Don’t worry, they’ll tell you.” It’s a commentary about how vegans will insert themselves into every conversation, on any topic, and somehow make it about veganism. (You know. Like what just happened, just very incompetently.)

It seems @jerkface@lemmy.ca is a vegan, if this post of theirs has any meaning, so they’re trying, rather incompetently, to flip the joke on its head and say that no it’s actually the people who eat normally that somehow have this behaviour (even though it makes no sense on the face of it).

First, I’ll give you the answer to your question. Then I’ll add some commentary.

To identify AI-generated misinformation on social media, users should employ a combination of critical thinking, technical tools, and awareness of common tactics:

1. Analyze visual anomalies in images
Look for AI-generated image flaws like distorted hands (extra fingers, fused digits), unnatural lighting, or illogical object arrangements. Pages posting large volumes of stylistically similar content (e.g., “wood carving phases” followed by “sushi art phases”) may indicate AI content farms.

2. Verify sources and cross-check claims
Search key phrases or use reverse image search tools (Google Lens) to check image origins. Reputable news organizations rarely break stories exclusively through random social media posts – absence of coverage elsewhere is a red flag.

3. Assess emotional manipulation tactics
Content provoking strong outrage, fear, or excitement deserves extra scrutiny. AI-generated political deepfakes often use inflammatory language alongside synthetic media.

4. Investigate account behavior
Suspicious accounts may exhibit:

• Excessive emoji/hashtag use
• Repetitive phrasing patterns
• Rapid follower growth without clear cause
• Coordinated posting across multiple pages

5. Leverage media literacy resources
Use tools like the News Literacy Project for verification techniques. Platforms like NewsGuard track AI-enabled fake news sites, which increased 10x in 2023.

6. Assume synthetic content is possible
Even professional-looking videos could be AI-generated (e.g., OpenAI’s Sora). For text, AI detectors are unreliable – focus on content plausibility and sourcing instead.

7. Report suspicious content
Flag posts to platform moderators and share debunking resources in comments when safe. Collaborative efforts between tech companies, fact-checkers, and governments are improving detection systems.

Critical first steps:

• Pause before sharing emotionally charged content
• Verify through independent searches
• Consider motives – does this content benefit scammers/spammers?

Now for the commentary.

The above was generated by a degenerative AI. (Perplexity to be specific.) Perhaps an expert in the field might tell that it’s LLM output, but I sure as Hell couldn’t. And that’s where the problem lies. It was once trivial to spot content generated by LLMs because the hallucinations were egregious I didn’t fact-check everything in this case (like do NewsGuard, Sora, and the News Literacy Project even exist?), but if someone posted that to me I would not bother fact-checking because it’s very plausible on the face of it.

For images there’s one tell that the bot didn’t provide. Because of the way image generation works, there’s an unnatural evenness of light and dark spaces in AI imagery. Once you’ve trained yourself a bit on known AI images compared with equivalent non-AI images you can’t unsee it. But it’s subtle and you have to explicitly look for it. It’s not something that’s going to jump out at you. The metadata checks others mentioned here, and the motivational checks are probably a better source.

Mixing household cleaners.

I tried to clean a stubborn stain in a toilet once. I used a toilet bowl cleaner and it just wasn’t doing the job. In a fit of pique and stupidity (pique stupidity) I took a bottle of bleach and dumped it on the stain.

I knew something went wrong the moment I saw the bubbling. And the weird green stuff coming from the toilet in what looked for all the world like stranded smoke. But green.

So I hastily looked at the toiler bowl cleaner ingredients in the huge warning label that specifically said not to mix it with bleach. A quick formula translation in my head later:

NaClO+2HCl→Cl2+H2O+NaCl

Fuck.

I fled the bathroom and ran to the balcony as chlorine gas filled the apartment’s lower half, spilling out of windows as it filled to that height, following me out the balcony door and bathing my legs up to my knees in chlorine as it spilled over the edge, with me leaning as far as I could into fresh air so I wouldn’t breathe it in.

After what seemed like forever, I was able to hazard going back inside. I then opened the front door and set fans in each room to blow toward the hall where fans blew the air out the front door.

Two good things happened from this.

1. The toilet had never looked cleaner. It was like it had been freshly installed straight from the factory.

2. There were no living vermin in that apartment. From the smallest dust mite on up.

Ever since then, I don’t mix household chemicals. Ever. Even if I “know” it’s safe.

In Toronto I ran into Styx at the airport.

I mean it literally. I bounced off Tommy Shaw and kind of reeled into James Young. (Totally my fault.)

They were actually really nice, checking if I was OK and once it clicked who I was talking to, putting up with my squeeing fangurl behaviour. Both of us were waiting for our respective flights so I got to talk with them a good half-hour before my flight started boarding.

The USA. Hate to put it so starkly, but right now I wish the USA would just vanish without a trace.

As a child and teenager I was a USA-stan. Then I was “so bored of the USA”. Now I wish it would just shut the fuck up and go away.

Because they don’t want (mental) toddlers high on Halloween candy voting? 🤷‍♀️

TIL that rectally administered diazepam is a thing.

I think I could have lived my whole life not knowing that and been the happier for it.

Having to explain that a certain infamous “Chinese alphabet” font¹ (favoured by tattoo joints everywhere) is not how you write in Chinese. There is a shocking number of people who have somehow managed to grow up not just to adulthood but to senior citizen levels who think that foreign languages are just English with a funky spelling; that grammar rules are otherwise the same, and that words translate one for one (and sometimes, in extreme cases, like the gibberish font, letter for letter).

¹ https://hanzismatter.blogspot.com/2006/08/gibberish-asian-font-mystery-solved.html

Similar enough tastes that we have something in common to talk about, but different enough tastes that there’s a reason to talk.

What? And remove the joy of people making that pun themselves? Nah. It’s more fun letting other people have fun!

You would be shocked at the number of “Irish”-Americans who believe the IRA are good guys.

No troubles, mate.

Completely different words.

Breaking down the words:

• 投 tóu: cast, throw
• 桃 táo: peach
• 报 bào: report
• 李 lǐ: plum

This sounds like gibberish because it is. Chinese characters aren’t quite words, but are more like “roots” in English (like “bio” meaning “life”). As such they have broad and shifting meanings. The big two are the first word and the third. The first word literally means “throw” or “cast” (as in fishing line), but has other shades of meaning that imply “giving”. The third word literally means “report” in most uses, but can also mean “repay” or “reciprocate”. Factor into this that word forms and declensions just aren’t a thing in Chinese, and this particular expression stems from the Book of Songs which is written in the very, very, very terse language of Classical Chinese and …

… well translation is shifty and difficult.

Another way to translate this (with implied meanings in [brackets]) could be: “toss [someone a] peach [and he will] reciprocate [with a] plum”.

Or, you know, give a peach in return for a plum. (And my brain screwed up above which I will correct: I flipped plum and peach for some reason.)

As for the other part of your question, the characters for the online purchasing platform are: 淘宝. Breaking that down:

• 淘 táo: wash, cleanse, sift, eliminate
• 宝 bǎo: treasure, jewel

That first one is MOSTLY used to talk about sifting (such that 淘金 means “sift gold” or more idiomatically “pan for gold”). So the literal translation of that name is “sift treasure” or, more idiomatically, “treasure hunt”.

Insert the “the more you know” meme right here. 😆

A vaguely similar expression exists in Chinese: 投桃报李 (tóu táo bào lǐ or “give a peach in return for a plum”). It suggests that reciprocity is key to gift-giving; that giving is as much part of the joy as is receiving.

For the first problem, you use thicker grades of plastic. If you tried to tear one of these plastic milk bags by hand you’d be … well … it’s hard, just trust me. (Hell, they’re even marginally knife-resistant. Don’t ask me how I found out.)

For the second problem there are special holders custom shaped to put the bags in. Maybe a picture will help.

Wait until you find out that craft beer in China is sold in bags too.

Yeah, pretty much.

I’m not sure where the difficulty lies.

You take milk. You take a plastic bag. You put the milk into the plastic bag.

(I’m not being sarcastic here, I’m genuinely flummoxed at where the conceptual problem is.)