Two days ago, I wanted to make a post about this:
overtime: '钢筋波波球 @zwjzwj2003 人们常常因为加班 而没有出发的勇气 #请选择你的请3休13心动目的地 #我的秋日限定 #我的秋日慢充旅行 overtime [douyin 7685325139940564390]_1080p.mp4', Social Shake 7545071991586622735, 7539525769538899240
I thought that I should not do something until someone else did something. Right now, 饱饱兔 is streaming (she was playing a stringed instrument), and I noticed that 睡够了嘛👿 @60926178257 has a message on her profile saying she's blocked from posting until 27 Oct.
This is a topic that would be of interest only to certain people involved in a government conspiracy. But I don't think anyone who isn't involved in one is reading this site.
I say this as much for my benefit as for anyone else: in a year, I won't remember these events unless I write them down, and so looking at this post would only annoy and confuse me. Douyin's behavior flipped: instead of withholding 720p unless I checked a profile as the first thing I did in a new private browsing window, it was withholding 720p if I did do this.
This followed a period of probably a couple days, where in a new window, the first video I checked would fail to load about three times before it finally worked. It gave the error message, 'failed to load data', even though on the third time this error message disappeared and was replaced by the video's page. I did not extensively test this, but it happened several times. Loading a second video after the first gave this error did not result in the same error.
I interpreted this as that someone involved in a government conspiracy didn't want me to be watching videos on Douyin, or they were indifferent but felt that they should act like they didn't want me to, or they were testing to see what I would do if they acted like they didn't want me to do that.
Mostly, I didn't use Douyin when I saw that this was happening.
This is sort of like when Nitter was giving an error when the first page I checked on it was Yara's account. That might have been happening for a year or more, and I just never suspected it was deliberate, because the blank page was always cleared by reloading the page and I often go many days without restarting my browser. (This pattern, of a web page loading as a blank page, also happened with Google searches like 10 years ago, so someone involved in a government conspiracy could have thought it was reasonable that I would see the blank page and suspect it was due to interference, and not a server problem.)
With Nitter, a day or two after I mentioned that problem on this site, I did a lot of testing to see if it was deliberate (like by varying capitalization). Probably restarted my browser over 100 times, maybe several hundred. Once I had observed a trend of the problem occurring consistently, I tested it by appending slashes to the URL I was using. Often with computers, a wildcard like "*" does not match a directory. You would have to use a pattern like "*/*/*/*/" to match several directories, and an arbitrary number of directories (like 12) would require its own specific pattern.
I don't want to make anyone look bad. Anyway, once I decided that it was due to interference, and not a "random chance to happen due to a faulty server", at least one time that it happened when I tried to visit Yara's profile, I did not reload the page. Maybe it meant that someone was unhappy that I was checking Yara's profile. I don't remember if this happened more than once, and Nitter has closed.
The point is, if someone was trying to stop me from using Douyin, I didn't feel like forcing the issue at that time.
About two days ago (evening of 09 Oct), I was downloading videos on Douyin. Even though, a couple months ago, I made a text file with recommended videos that looked interesting, I'm reluctant to add videos to it because I might not download them before they disappear. It only has about 30 videos right now, but three of them are marked as possibly deleted and most of them were probably added over a month ago. So this is how I end up with multiple tabs open: it forces me to review the video now, instead of later. Each open tab uses resources; I can have maybe four Douyin tabs open at once, or a few more for brief periods of time. It's difficult for me to keep the "average number of videos clicked on in a video's recommended list" below 1, and just like with a virus like COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-02), if the number is even slightly above 1, it leads to exponential growth. So if I open a new tab, it can be a long time before I close it.
This is how I ended up having a video from Douyin user 揽月 @94356635073 open for several hours in a tab.
By the time I finally closed the other tabs that resulted from a video recommended from that tab, the video was no longer available. Another video from her that had appeared in that video's list of recommended videos was also not available. All of the videos from her that I downloaded on 03 Oct were also not available.
Douyin does not really seem to ban people, the way that YouTube or TikTok do. Maybe those platforms ban people mostly because of copyrights, or maybe the fact that all websites in China require a link to a real identity, typically provided through a phone number, means that people are more careful about posting things that would deserve a ban, and so the platform is able to be more considerate towards its users.
What if me simply using Douyin led to users hiding or deleting their videos? What would I do?
In fact, this question has already been answered, in 2010.
After Kate left, I did not resume studying at the table in the common area. She came back about five days later to pick up the things she had left in the kitchen cabinet that had been assigned to her. When I heard sounds from the kitchen that suggested she might be there, I took some kind of food from my room to the kitchen as an excuse to see who was there, and I saw that it was her. And I also saw something else: the blinds on a window in the common area had been improperly manipulated. One side of the bottom part had been pulled up, while the other side was let down, causing it to be severely slanted.
Kate could have noticed this and concluded that I had not studied there that day.
If Kate did not like me at all, she would not have asked me to zip up the back of her dress or witch costume on the day that she left, 31 Oct 2010, and she would not have smiled at me when she was opening the door to leave five days later. The main reason it was possible for her to have ended up liking me was that I had studied at the common table; first before I suspected there was any possibility she could end up liking me, and also later when I knew it was possible.
There was also the time when she locked herself out of her room, and an unknown length of time after this happened I visited the kitchen, saw her not knowing what to do (she might have been lying down on the floor, wrapped in a towel), and helped her.
As to whether it was my 'fault' that she liked me, one time I left a container of Ferrero Rocher chocolates, that I had happened to purchase at a store I visited, in the kitchen area, probably with a note that anyone could have some. Maybe not immediately, but at some point one of them disappeared, and I think Kate ate it. This might have been her inspiration for 'luring' me with the cooked meat that she placed in a bowl on the table that I was studying at, months later.
As I have mentioned, after Kate left, the Korean student Soo-yeon (probably Su-yeon) was still there. A Chinese female also moved in after Kate left. If I wanted to get someone to like me, I could have tried doing what I had already done: studying at the common table. It was not 'taboo' to study there: before I first started studying there, I had seen Kate there with a female friend, and Soo-yeon had studied there a few times at the same time as me.
I did not study there again, after Kate left. It is, therefore, no surprise if I avoid using Douyin as a result of 揽月 @94356635073 making her videos unavailable.
Suppose that I am 'bad'. When I had my door slightly open while studying, and Kate stopped in front of it on 30 Oct 2010 after she had taken her shower, suppose that I wanted her to open the door — like she did the first time I ever saw her — and enter my room.
Whether I wanted this to happen or not, it did not happen. Why would I expect a different outcome if I repeated the same series of events with a different person, by again studying at the common table where I might be seen by other people?
Different subject. Was reading about a cluster of topics related to Europe in World War II. Poland being defeated, and why a nation that had many smart people was unable to avoid an unwanted outcome. Basically, there were strong nations on both sides of Poland. But Poland treated both of them as enemies. Whereas the Soviet Union was treating everyone as its friends. (I don't think anyone made the poll about whether we should resume using female gender when referring to countries.)
The situation was very similar to what can be seen in games with diplomacy, where there are just a small number of people making decisions, not huge nations with millions of citizens and thousands of people who are paid to care about changes that take years to happen. Games vary: in some games, like Master of Orion II, you can benefit from war by taking over the planets of your enemies, or capturing their ships and then scrapping them to obtain their technology. In Age of Empires II, you only benefit from war when you obtain resources that they would have used instead. Both of these situations happen in real life: the US sought to benefit from defeating Iraq by controlling its oil, and Iraq did have to pay reparations to Kuwait for damages, but the United Nations seeks to prevent nations that cause wars from benefiting from them and so wars tend to be destructive for all participants, more like AoE2 than MOO2. I did a search for 'diplo' on a popular AoE2 channel, and this was one of the results. I don't think I've seen it, but it probably has betrayals and surprise attacks.
But, points: German rearmament, someone wrote,
Work by labour historians has determined that many German workers in the 1930s identified passionately with the weapons they were building. While this was in part due to the high status of the skilled work required in the armaments industries, it was also to do with the weapons themselves – they were assertions of national strength, the common property of the German nation.
[...]
The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) provided an ideal testing ground for the proficiency of the new weapons produced by the German factories during the rearmament years.
Article for untermensch; note that if people are grouped as 'black' or 'white', then Russian or Slavic people are not defined as any different than like Anglo-Saxons or something. (Saxons were recently introduced as a separate civilization in AoE2, and Slavs are also present.) The article includes this statement from the 1930s:
Our programme consists... of exterminating one third of the male population of Spain. That would cleanse the country and get rid of the proletariat. And it is also economically convenient. There will be no more unemployment in Spain, do you understand?"
If you asked most people if World War II was caused by mass unemployment, they would say no. But what if you had asked people in the 1930s if they thought that mass unemployment would lead to war?
Do people who care about fashion think that by focusing on the topic, they are helping other people? Do they have specific goals in mind, like "prevent war", and will they change how they act if it does not seem that they are moving towards that goal? If a single person does not have a certain goal, then a group of people who are all similar will not have that goal either. A person in the group might secretly have that goal, and believe that other people secretly have it, and then be surprised to find that they do not. (On the other hand, Eva Braun stopped the leader of Germany from banning women's cosmetics and luxuries during the war.)
Story time. Two days ago, I noticed that I had used the wrong Douyin ID in the filename of some videos I had saved from a certain creator. I sort of thought that she might have two accounts, but since I had only seen one recently, I assumed that the name I was saving her videos with, "小奈,-可奈" was the old name on her account.
But the first name is actually the name on her second account. I saved it like that partly because filenames with a leading hyphen look like an option to a lot of commands; the correct thing to do would be to specify a file like "./file", but it's easier to just never having a leading hyphen in a filename. So I only have one video that's tagged with the Douyin ID of her second account, though there might be many others that I mistagged.
Well, I did a search in a text document, and that one video is this one,
社会摇,六六摇, hello mr dj:
'小奈,-可奈 @58745703188 小蛮腰～ 六六摇,社会摇, hello mr dj [douyin 7540547171873443129][sync tuning].mp4'
end: 7541740700279803162, 7540963619132575014, 7542012541812231484
dl'd: 7539525769538899240
not dl'd 7542852906090073404, 7539867195971587388, 7542535304901758265, 7541345257678736694, 7540667635831885091, 7543955898915736874, 7543059960650943753, 7543247720921386275, 7539783262811557180, 7543619778487110969, 7539530782319070491
deleted, not dl'd: 7543885193145634082
not dl'd two dancers 7543973958195711290
'刘二萌 @2183174872 算我一个 #小蛮腰舞蹈挑战 #六六摇 社会摇, hello mr dj [douyin 7541380772377185596][a +0.24s].mp4'
'铁牛 @38310621386 小蛮腰小蛮腰#小蛮腰 #卡点舞 #甜妹 六六摇,社会摇, hello mr dj [douyin 7543476744449428782][sync tuning].mp4'
'影 🍡 @sy06106901 小蛮腰小蛮腰 #社会摇 #愉几魅由心身 #卡点舞 #抖音舞蹈 #慢摇 hello mr dj [douyin 7543927810073021756][a +0.15]_1808p.mp4'
I made a note to download these on 28 Feb 2026. I thought, even if I'm not using Douyin generally, it should be safe to download just these specific videos, right?
It was not safe. The fifth video I checked, 7539525769538899240, was from 钢筋波波球. It has over 800k likes, and she has ~1600k followers, but I had zero videos from her. Also, I bookmarked this video in a folder, 'crash douyin restart, 30 Aug 2025', which has 49 items.
If I didn't check for other videos from 钢筋波波球 immediately, I might never be able to: she might hide that video, and even if I found her profile on Douyin from a Google or Baidu search for her username, Douyin is not showing a user's videos if you are not logged in. So that is how I found the video about overtime: by playing the first video from her enough times that Douyin thought I liked it, and then scrolling down so that more videos loaded on the page, with one of them being a recent video from her (maybe not that one).
Google translates the description of that video and its tags as,
人们常常因为加班 而没有出发的勇气 #请选择你的请3休13心动目的地 #我的秋日限定 #我的秋日慢充旅行
People often lack the courage to set off because of overtime work. #ChooseYourDreamDestination #MyAutumnExclusive #MySlowPacedAutumnGetaway
The first scene reminds me of a similar paper-throwing scene from the short drama I watched. Even simple shots can take a lot of work.
I feel like if if I didn't say anything about this, someone could be like, "what's the point of trying to fix problems? It doesn't accomplish anything, and it doesn't result in more likes than a video that takes a lot less work."
What I hoped for yesterday was the same as what I hoped for the day before that: for someone who knows of this idea to say, "this fixes a problem I care about. I will try to do something with it."
I don't know how you would fit an explanation of this idea into a 15-second video. I don't think it's possible.
The question about sacrificing to help someone else, from Update 09 Sep 2026, 18:30 (and expanded upon here). Suppose that many people would choose to help the misfortunate group members, even if providing that help is expensive.
Now, consider the group of "all workers". Many people consider this group to not include everyone, thus terms like "the working class" to refer to poor people, excluding rich people who work, like CEOs. Some workers are less fortunate. They work at a company where profits are low, and if they don't work overtime, the company could be forced to close.
Does it help misfortunate workers if people at more successful companies work overtime instead of going on vacation? Consider that there are many different industries and types of work, not just one: does it help a worker in field X if someone in field Y works more, even though they can afford to go on vacation?
I mention Chinese people a lot. But the leader of China has said that 'lying flat' is a harmful attitude, and that people should work hard.
I think this is not as relevant for Chinese culture, but if poor people say that rich people are bad (such as because they can choose to be happy without taking any risks, like taking a boat across the Mediterranean sea to reach Europe), then it motivates people to consider themselves as belonging to the group of poor people, and one way they can do that is to believe that they must work hard or else they won't have the money to buy things they want. In this way, the battle between rich and poor harms the poor, without any intention by rich people to cause that harm to happen.
There are two main points here:
1) If people aren't willing to say that other people from their own country should work less (whether it's overtime or not), they should support workers from other countries working less. A poll from earlier this year or last year (that no one created, probably) was about this, but the question could directly specify specific countries. "US workers: do you want people in China to work less overtime?" "Chinese workers: do you want people in the US to work less overtime?"
People might not say yes. As I have said before, the 'end state' of people using this idea isn't necessarily fewer hours worked than now, because if people voluntarily use fewer fossil fuels now, instead of when a price shocks happens in a decade or two, they might need to spend more time working to get the same output as now.
2) People should not feel bad about letting inefficient companies fail if everyone who worked at that company can get another job elsewhere. Even the owners of the company can get a job if the company fails.
Would you be willing to say that people should work less even if the leader of your country says that they should not?
When I was in Iraq for the US military, there was an option of taking a vacation. I don't remember how long it was supposed to be, because I didn't use it. Out of the people I knew while working at headquarters, I think everyone else used the option. People who didn't want to pay for a flight back to the United States to visit their family could go to a nearby country like the United Arab Emirates.
The thing that I did want to do was to accompany a convoy that was traveling north to Mosul. I think my unit only did this once in the entire time we were in Iraq. I wouldn't have contributed anything at all, so it would have been sort of like sightseeing, although I would have been in the back of an armored vehicle and possibly not even able to look out of a window during multiple days of driving.
I was told that I could go if I could find someone who would agree to do my job while I was gone. This is the same thing that would have happened if I had taken a vacation.
Not everyone is in a position where they can choose to work less. But everyone is in a position of being able to support an effort to change society to encourage people to work less. It requires people to agree on two things: 1) The problem is important. 2) The problem has a solution.
___
Update 12 Oct 2026, 14:55
Poll: "If 100 million people in China worked less overtime, do you think your life would get better or worse?"
___
Update 13 Oct 2026, 15:30
A bunch of recent posts just got a bunch of views. This was still just at 8 (I said I would do a certain thing if the most recent post got 20 views, so I pay attention to its view count), but previous posts have 65, 124, 56, 163, 157, 110, and 166 views, up from 20~30 yesterday.
I made a post on Reddit a couple days ago. About deciding who is good or bad; I'm not looking it up to link it because it might have more or less engagement than I expect (like it could have been deleted, or have 0 upvotes and no comments). If you think about it, if you group people into 'good' based on a certain standard, they don't have a reason to try to achieve more than that standard (unless there's uncertainty about their current score; sort of like my suggestions for adding uncertainty to ladder ratings when using rating for tournament qualification, so people don't stop queueing for games and don't 'throw' games strategically to benefit someone else).
The same kind of uncertainty is in the measure of employment. Someone is "employed" whether they work 40 hours per week, or 80. Hours worked can be tracked separately, but headlines are always about employment (or unemployment) numbers: the number of jobs added, not how much people work in those jobs.
Instead of grouping people into "employed" or "unemployed" (like grouping them into "good" or "bad"), you could have a graph of paid hours worked. This would not be a bell curve, but it would be somewhat similar, with a peak near 40 hours per week.
Can you prove that it is not the case that all the people in a certain country are working exactly the number of hours that they want to work?
You cannot. People might find anecdotes convincing — a news story about how someone suffers due to being poor, or someone saying that they regret working so much and it ruined their marriage — but all the anecdotes someone could read in a lifetime day would still be consistent with the hypothesis that less than 1% of people are not working exactly the number of hours they want to work.
So, what if someone from Country X thinks that everyone in Country X (or 99%) are working exactly as many hours as they want to? Then Country X has no need for this idea. Other countries might use it, but what incentive does that person have to share this idea with people from other countries?
Suppose instead that this person from Country X thinks that everyone in Country Y is working exactly as many hours as they want to, but not in Country X. If Country X uses this idea, people in Country X will work less.
But Country Y will not benefit; in fact, Country Y will be harmed, because people from Country X will spend less money on luxury goods from Country Y.
The poll suggested in the previous update: of course, it's presented as an intelligence test. What will be the result of X happening?
The conclusions that an intelligent person would reach depend on what they consider to be the current true situation: are people in their country already working exactly as much as they want to work, or not?
The poll suggests that if 100 million people in China worked less, it would help other countries. It's generally fair to assume that people are acting rationally: if it doing X would help other people, then there must be also be a negative consequence or people would already be doing X. The apparent logical conclusion (where the conclusion is "probably" true) is that doing X would be harmful either to each of those people, or harmful to China.
But, let's go back to 1935. Germany is building roads, trying to make a car for every family, but also designing and building various machines meant for war.
If hypothetical Nation Z had created a huge demand for German cars by buying a lot of them, there would have been no industrial surplus to create machines meant for war.
Suppose that Nation Z was also able to produce cars. It would have two options: 1) Create cars itself. 2) Buy cars from Germany.
Which option is better?
12 Oct 2026
"I reduced the browser size to try to prevent me visiting @eumieverse's page from counting as impressions of her videos, which would reduce the clickthrough rate. I'm not sure if the different thumbnail for one of her videos is her changing it deliberately, or YouTube using randomly different thumbnails to try to increase clickthrough rate"
"I won't write anything for the weblog for the idea for 24 hours after I hear my mum watching anything on the TV"
It has not been 24 hours. I was thinking of listening to music until midnight and then writing this; it would have been cheating to write it in a text document.
Purpose of this restriction: if I had money, I would be able to live by myself. I would not get distracted whenever my mother played a movie, with periodic ads due to using a free streaming service.
Should this idea depend on whether my mother sees an interesting movie on a streaming service? Of course not. People should have used it before I ran out of money.
When I was young, I had a good ability to ignore other people when I was reading books. But the process of thinking is sort of listening to very quiet thoughts: you are trying to find aspects of a situation you weren't already thinking about. Noises of explosions and car crashes make this difficult. It's better if I don't have any influence on what happens, rather than outputting low-quality thoughts.
My mother recently watched the first Terminator movie, and then Terminator: Genisys. Spoilers:
The behavior of the final antagonist in this second movie reminded me of another film that my mother watched a few days ago: Life (2017). This movie was actually playing when I posted Fashion and Updates to Happy birthday, and the distraction of people dying in a fictional setting might have prevented me from saying some things I might otherwise have said.
There were a lot of parts of the film that I didn't watch, but there is a surprise ending. The audience is led to believe that a certain character is dead, but they aren't.
One could interpret the title in different ways: "Life was found in an unexpected place, and it turned out to be hostile."
Or, "The film is about the patterns that life exhibits, whether that life is human beings, or an alien creature." Life exhibits a pattern of trying to survive, and trying to eliminate threats to itself. Sometimes this leads to conflict; sometimes it does not, because conflict can harm the party that initiated conflict.
The final antagonist of Terminator: Genisys is sort of acting in the same way. But instead of being biological life, it's machine life. This character could have acted to eliminate threats, which would have resulted in a better outcome for them. But they chose a peaceful approach at the beginning. Of course, later on they're shown acting in a way that turns the audience against them, so the message is rather ruined in favor of exciting action, fighting, and explosions. Could that have had some part in the film getting negative reviews? Was it stupid to take the story in this direction, or was it a strategic gambit since a different story might have prevented the planned sequels? If every story had people in the story making optimal decisions from the very start, most stories might be very short. (Examples: horror films, Lord of the Rings if the people making optimal decisions are on the opposite side of the war from the viewpoint characters.)
Also, I thought the message of the film Life was sort of similar to All of Us Are Dead.
