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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • I’m probably thinking about this in a naive way. I’d love to see proprietary models, if trained using public information, be required to become public and free via legislation. AI companies can compete on selling GPU time, on ease of use.

    And, if AI companies are required to figure out attribution in order to be able to use their work commercially, research will accelerate in that area because money. No I don’t know how that would work either.

    Still probably a bad idea but I haven’t figured out why yet.

    Thank you for your well written reply.




  • Advice from most to least certain: If you want very long standby time (a reliably perfect first print after literally months of inactivity) and you have the space for an ugly cube of a printer, laser is the only option. Ink tank printers have unexpected wear parts, like internal ink sponges.

    Black and white laser is stupid simple. Color laser “prints” four times in series onto an intermediate transfer belt (ITB) and then puts that onto the paper, still super reliable but bulkier, and your prints get watermarked with yellow dots because FBI or something. I’d go color.

    Toner lock-in is becoming more common, not just for HP. If your page count is going to be low, just pay full price for name brand toner. If you don’t want to do that, like your use case could involve printing a single page or entire binders of paper between months of inactivity, read on.

    Start your printer research by shopping for cheap off brand toner, get a sense for what they’re selling the most of and what that’s compatible with, and see what printers they support.

    Some aftermarket toner just works, out of the box, because the printer isn’t crazy locked down. Those cartridges have normal sounding instructions. Some aftermarket toner requires you to transplant a chip from a first party cartridge, and their instructions include this. Avoid those printers.

    And consider used printers. I have a used HP LaserJet Pro MFP M477fdw that I love, but I would never ever buy another HP printer, especially not one made later than this one. Be very careful before buying any HP printer, especially one made in the past 6-8 years. Even wear items (like the ITB) have modules with firmware and compatibility requirements, and I’m worried I could be one replacement component away from suddenly having a locked down printer.


  • I self host, on a personal domain I registered in June 2000. Mostly followed a 13?-part tutorial at I think linuxbabe dot com, was the first one that seemed to genuinely be trying to help you set up a good environment, not just as a way to say “doesn’t this sound difficult? Impossible even? Coincidentally you can pay us to do this instead.” Except I put everything on its own VM instead of all on one. (Even a VM for just opendkim, which was maybe not necessary.)

    Mostly iPhone mail app and/or Roundcube webmail.

    Yes highly recommend it, for receiving email. Greylist blocks like 99.8% of spam. Sending works fine for me, because it’s an old domain with history. I don’t think brand new domains have the same experience.



  • I think this was asked in good faith, but is unfortunately unlikely to produce useful discussion. The down-voters are right but the original poster shouldn’t feel bad for asking.

    Short answer: it’s ok to say “maybe, we have no way to know, moving on” when something is unknowable like this.

    Longer answer / topic hijack: as voters there are many contradictions in our system, and important and necessary information is often hidden from us. Doing the best we can might take various forms:

    • choose government ran by the least-evil people possible and trust the imperfect system formed by the structured interactions of those people

    • choose government that follows policies that align the best with your values or your ethical understanding of the world

    • choose government that is best able to reduce harms and injustices, in a practical and realistic way that anticipates the acts of other factions

    • choose government led by people you hate the least — no, this one is toxic, lazy, easy to manipulate with lies. Manipulators know the longer they keep people hot with emotion the less time people spend learning.

    Please do not reply to this with hatred or calls for strong emotion. Leaders at any level can be deliberately evil, sure, but it’s never helpful to dehumanize entire clusters or demographics.


  • Also, the development and evolution of these open technologies relies on human interest and attention, and that attention can be diminished, even starved, by free, closed offerings.

    Evil plan step 1: make a free closed alternative and make it better than everything else. Discord for chat, Facebook for forums and chat/email, etc.

    Step 2: wait a few years, or a decade or more. The world will largely forget how to use the open alternatives. Instant messengers, forums, chat services, just give them a decade to die out. Privately hosted communities, either move to Facebook, pay for commercial anti-spam support, spend massive volunteer hours, or drown in spam.

    Step 3: monetize your now-captive audience. What else are they going to use? Tools and apps from the 2000s?











  • Really great ideas. I read up a bit on Fediblock and I think you’re absolutely right.

    If I could riff off of your ideas a bit: instance-blocking recommendation lists bundle an entire stack of things together:

    • statements of fact or intent: this is wrong, this is right, this is insulting and harmful, this is insulting but not harmful if you can laugh at it

    • value judgements about those statements: I care about this issue but not that issue, this wrong statement is easily disproven, that wrong statement takes paragraphs to disprove, etc.

    • actions to take based on those value judgements: block, tag with a statement, link to an article, etc.

    With things bundled, the whole stack has to be a pretty close match for a user’s own values, or else there’s friction. The user can just tolerate the friction, maybe miss out on some content, or they can decide to switch to a whole new list.

    Suppose we could unbundle those from each other. Subscribe to the work of a group of volunteers that recommends safe defaults but lets you customize things when you encounter friction points.