site banner

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 13, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

5
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Yeah, I've gotten some stuff off Temu. The app is hilariously gamified and scammy but the stuff I ordered did arrive and was as described. The quality is about what you would expect, which is to say "adequate for single-use items".

I got some 2.5kwh DC House batteries at half off vs amazon, which are actually a reputable brand. There's a small amount of "quality" stuff floating in the chineseium garbage patch, but a lot of it ranges from "mislabed" to "dangerous" to "literally just a printed picture of the item"

As a knitter, my new favorite example of Temu-style trash is the fake sweater, where someone used AI to generate a very complex cabled sweater design, and then printed that design onto a t-shirt.

That's amazing. There's also a bizarre amount of AI porn printed on metal plates(?) with names like "antique vintage something or other." So I wonder if half of this stuff isn't just AI slapping random stuff scraped from social media on products with associated tags.

T-shirts were the first thing they automated that with, like when you go "I want this on a t-shirt!" on Twitter and 5 bots immediately scrape the pic and post a store link.

"I want this on a t-shirt!"

Then people started trolling with images from Disney, Nintendo and worse https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-want-this-on-a-shirt-bot-bait