_WC

Pardon the rant, it's just topical for me because I'm in unplanned car-buying mode and it's at the front of my mind right now.

I'm not a fan of the haggling system that's common and accepted in the US car dealership model. The thing that bothers me most about it, though, is how other people feel entitled to comment, interject, critique, and judge you on your haggling prowes and savvy both before and after your purchase. It's unavoidable; even if you try to keep it a secret during the process, once you show up to work driving a different car, inevitably someone notices and asks, "Did you get a good deal?" Of course you can deflect, lie, change the subject, but I'm annoyed that it's such a common topic in the first place. I don't want to have to justify my choice to someone else.

Right now, we're dealing with a sudden loss of a car, so my spouse and I are somewhat desperate and need a car right now. That takes a lot of decision room off the table, and we'll have to take what we can get. It doesn't help that we're not in a major metro market so the choices are slim. Still, we're getting the 'Don't go there they'll rip you off," "Make sure you use the end-of-month quotas to your advantage," type of advice from friends who know we're car shopping. I know they're trying to be helpful as they see it, but it really adds to the stress we're already under to find something while working around schedules. I don't care about price as much as finding something that fits our needs in this messed up post-COVID distorted market with few options.

I know I'm not the first person to feel this way. Thanks for listening to my rant.

I was checking if Relay still works for me (it does), and happened to see this post at the top of my feed calling out bots on programming: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/14trtla/the_ai_bots_have_arrived_at_rprogramming/

First off, I was surprised that programming was allowing posts again; last I checked it was restricted. Judging by timestamps, it looks like it opened up 2 days ago.

The weird thing is that most posts since reopening have negative scores and no comments. example with several 0 karma posts.

Is this a continuing protest by r/programming users? Are they calling out bots and astroturfing with a scorched earth approach? I haven't checked the 0 karma posts closely to see if they are all bots, but that would make sense since not all posts are zeroed.

Have been avoiding reddit in general so I'm out of the loop.