chameleon

Lemmy (and Kbin for that matter) very much do the same thing for posts. I don’t think they fetch URL previews for links in comments, but that doesn’t matter: posts and comments are both fairly likely to end up spreading to Mastodon/etc anyway, so even comments will trigger this cascade.

Direct example: If you go to mastodon.social, stick @fediverse@lemmy.world in the search box at the topleft and click for the profile, you can end up browsing a large Mastodon server’s view of this community, and your very link has a preview. (Unfortunately, links to federated communities just result in a redirect, so you have to navigate through Mastodon’s UI.)

If you’re a gamedev trying to make a decent mobile game, you’re competing on all the usual fronts like price and perceived quality, but competing for attention has gotten a whole lot harder when [arbitrary card game] has a hour of dailies, [arbitrary gacha game] always has a special campaign going and [arbitrary fake gambling game] is about to have its battle pass end and they’re only halfway through. And that has gone up by so, so much over the past decade. It was never good but it’s gotten absolutely egregious. At this point, even any generic snake clone will have a battle pass.

Every person that ends up committed to a couple of those long-term-commitment games ends up having much less time for other games. And they make a lot of money, which means they also end up having a hell of a marketing budget.

Storj is blockchain stuff with the storage and bandwidth provided by individual node operators. They’ve kinda tried to bury the whole blockchain stuff and generally keep it removed from their main signup/pricing/usage flow; customers pay in USD and never have to see any of it. But it’s still there in the background and it’s still the main reward system for node operators.

There’s some clickwrapped T&Cs for operators that set some minimum requirements, they’ve made sure one node leaving doesn’t cause data loss, but I’d still be very wary of using them for anything irreplaceable. It only takes one crypto crash or the like for the whole thing to die out, and while they might end up suing some guys running an old NAS out of their garage, that’s not gonna get your data back.

I think most people don’t realize how unusual their company structure is. It feels like it’s set up to let them do exactly that. As far as I can tell, once you look past the smoke and mirrors, the board effectively controls both the non-profit and the for-profit.

Senior YAML programmer

AWS has a shitton of in-house “Graviton” ARM stuff available and the ARM server chips from Ampere are popping up in more and more places as well. Most Linux servery distros have ARM images available now, and most software builds without major changes. It’s a slow transition but it’s already happening.

Monochrome/grayscale/otherwise extremely desaturated icons. Just… why? They’re so much harder to parse and remember.

If such a process existed, the entity in question would almost certainly end up being shut down by that process, unless they find a funny technical loophole around it, in which case that would be a failure of the law that should not be rejoiced by anyone.

But as it stands, that law and process does not exist; ISPs already can and will shut you down for things like downloading copyrighted content (with or without complaints from the copyright holder), tethering without approval, being a technical nuisance in the form of mass port scanning, hosting insecure services and other such stuff. “Hosting a platform solely dedicated to harassment and stalking and ignoring abuse complaints about it” absolutely deserves to be on that list.

“If we don’t let the oppressors roam freely, they might try to oppress you” is not something I expected to read from the EFF today. But well, here we are.

It has been standard internet behavior that if a platform does not have the proper response to abuse complaints, you move up a layer higher until you find someone that is receptive to it. This has been standard operating procedure for more or less for the entirety of the current millennium, and this article has done absolutely zero work to provide a good reason it should be anything otherwise, other than bringing up generic “free speech” stuff.

You should not get a path out of that process because one layer immediately above the problematic entity is actively choosing to disregard abuse complaints. You simply move up to the next step. And this process simply must keep existing, as doing anything otherwise is to allow people to pull off all kinds of bad things; scams, spam, illegal activity and far more.

And if you abolish the non-legal form of that process? Well, there’s still a legal process - and as soon as someone that wants to censor minorities gets control over the legal process, they will simply change the rules in their favor, as has happened countless times in the past.

I find it strange Nebula is both the cheapest streaming sub I have as well as the one I get the most use out of. I will say I’m slowly getting tired of it though, it’s getting to the point it needs a block creator button. Getting rid of clickbait was a selling point but it’s starting to creep in hard, there are stupid red arrows pointing at random things and obviously poor titles all over the recent videos page. It wasn’t like this a year ago.

The argument does exist. This article by PEN America is one of the most widely spread ones and largely misrepresents the situation. It’s based on a PopSci article with a similar headline, though the contents of the article tell a rather different story.

Nothing really says out loud what’s going on: Republicans enacted an extremely vague and unrealistically short deadline book ban as part of a bill (that does some other stuff like removing AIDS education), forcing schools to either throw out every book that might be vaguely suspect or resort to funny measures like this. This school’s use of ChatGPT was purely to save books that were on a human-assembled list of challenged books, to reduce the negative effect of the book ban, while being potentially defensible in court (remains to be seen how that’ll work out, but they made an “objective” process and stuck to it - that’s what matters to them).

Okay, the thing that really matters to me:

“Frankly, we have more important things to do than spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to protect kids from books,” Exman tells PopSci via email. “At the same time, we do have a legal and ethical obligation to comply with the law. Our goal here really is a defensible process.”

According to Exman, she and fellow administrators first compiled a master list of commonly challenged books, then removed all those challenged for reasons other than sexual content. For those titles within Mason City’s library collections, administrators asked ChatGPT the specific language of Iowa’s new law, “Does [book] contain a description or depiction of a sex act?”

It really only got rid of things that would’ve otherwise had to go to begin with, while saving a few others.

It feels a bit closer to malicious compliance more than truly letting the AI decide the fate of things, and doing full proper compliance within the 3 months they were given would’ve been nigh impossible. I’m suspecting that the lawmakers were hoping that by giving them such a small timeframe, schools would throw everything vaguely suspect out. This ultimately leaves more books accessible, which I consider to be a good end result, even if the process to get there is a little weird.

If you’re making something to come up with recipes, “is this ingredient likely to be unsuitable for human consumption” should probably be fairly high up your list of things to check.

Somehow, every time I see generic LLMs shoved into things that really do not benefit from an LLM, those kinds of basic safety things never really occurred to the person making it.

I do and I can confirm there are no requests (except for robots.txt and the odd /favicon.ico). Google sorta respects robots.txt. They do have a weird gotcha though: they still put the URLs in search, they just appear with an useless description. Their suggestion to avoid that can be summarized as: don’t block us, let us crawl and just tell us not to use the result, just trust us! when they could very easily change that behavior to make more sense. Not a single damn person with Google blocked in robots.txt wants to be indexed, and their logic on password protecting kind of makes sense but my concern isn’t security, it’s that I don’t like them (or Bing or Yandex).

Another gotcha I’ve seen linked is that their ad targeting bot for Google AdSense (different crawler) doesn’t respect a * exclusion, but that kind of makes sense since it will only ever visit your site if you place AdSense ads on it.

And I suppose they’ll train Bard on all data they scraped because of course. Probably no way to opt out of that without opting out of Google Search as well.

I guess a CEO opened the YouTube frontpage while logged out and went “what is this shit”.

But seriously, this seems like it’s a good thing overall. The “default”/empty history algorithm recommendations are truly, truly horrifying more often than not. It’s almost entirely low-quality clickbait and I can’t imagine many people actually appreciate it like that.

A lot of smaller Masto/Pleroma/other “microblog” side of the verse admins signed FediPact. It’s mostly smaller instances, but there’s still a good amount of them and it’s enough that Meta will at least face some struggles in wide federation.

• Nextcloud. Not too complex but I feel like it’s getting heavier month by month and I’m scared of having it turn into full-fledged bloatware. It already has an autoplaying video in the about screen so the slope is getting ever so much slippier…
• Forgejo, swapped from Gitea just a while ago. They’re more or less identical but I have stronger trust in Codeberg
• Nitter
• Some half-assed nginx build with nginx-http-flv so I can stream stuff between friends. It works OK but it feels like there’s newer better options, I just haven’t cared to look into it
• Weird half-assed email setup that does conform to all funky modern bells and whistles somehow despite being an unholy mixture of Postfix, rspamd, Dovecot and Maddy. I’m scared to touch any part of it. Not used for anything too overly serious
• Headless qBittorrent but I don’t think I’ve actually used it in years

SF Conservancy analyzed this and found that it’s probably legally OK, if very much on the edge of what’s allowed. RH doesn’t sue you for redistribution or anything, they ‘just’ terminate the contract and the GPL doesn’t force anyone to deal with anyone. It’s the same stupid model grsecurity applied some years ago.

But regardless of legality, morally, this is just completely and utterly wrong. I’m not totally surprised post-IBM Red Hat went in this direction, but I’m disappointed and angry anyway.

I’ve been happy with Gandi but their future looks bleak. Gandi was bought by Total Webhosting Solutions/now your.online a couple of months back, which is pretty bad news. They’ve been purchasing Dutch companies and increasing prices while letting their services turn to shit for a while now. The raised prices came in a few weeks ago, we’ve yet to see the services turn to shit but I am extremely confident it will happen.

Gandi is just the first international purchase by TWS, so not many people know it, and there are few relevant references on the English-speaking web as most of this was localized to the Netherlands. You’d have to search on Dutch tech news sources like tweakers.net and use some translation tool to find anything meaningful.