AmbitiousProcess

@AmbitiousProcess@piefed.social

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Um... I'm not even using a VPN... Fuck you reddit.⁩ ⁨⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I know. I also know not everyone likes installing extensions in their browser because they can be a security risk, and they can even change your browser fingerprint (which makes your browser more trackable), compared to bookmarklets, which do not.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Um... I'm not even using a VPN... Fuck you reddit.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I do the same thing here. I even use a bookmarklet that converts a current tab in reddit.com to an old.reddit.com link.

  (code if anyone's interested) javascript:(function() { var currentUrl = window.location.href; var newUrl = currentUrl.replace(/^https:\/\/www\.reddit\.com/, 'https://old.reddit.com'); window.location.href = newUrl; })();

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Which way?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I've also had the same procedure before, three times (on different parts of nails, obviously) and it's worked every time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Which way?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  This also helps if you have short nails, and just want to make sure it doesn't grow in before the nail gets longer again. Can raise the nail up enough that it will grow out forward without cutting in, then you can make sure you clip it properly so it isn't rounded at the edges, and it can sometimes stop it from growing in later.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Every support thread on Reddit is literally this now⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Don't forget racist, too!

  we didnt ban them for being racist - spez

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Every support thread on Reddit is literally this now⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  They don't delete your content, they just redact your username and disassociate each individual comment from your larger profile so nobody could, for example, click on the deleted user who posted a comment in r/abc and see they also posted a particular comment in r/xyz.

  The reason tools like Redact (many of them all use this same name lol) have taken off in popularity is because they delete, or redact the contents of your posts before you delete the account, thus making even that vestigial data worthless.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Thinheritance⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Give BuyNothing a shot if you haven't already!

  They have an app and facebook groups depending on where people are willing to use it, but instead of it being a marketplace, everything on it is free. (though you can offer to pay shipping from a local provider)

  Lots of people offer up furniture, especially older/antique stuff on there all the time, as well as tons of other stuff. Also a great way to get rid of things you don't personally want anymore but don't want anyone to end up paying out of pocket for.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are there any AI services that don't work on stolen data?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This is very true.

  I was part of the OpenAssistant project, voluntarily submitting my personal writing to train open-source LLMs without having to steal data, in the hopes it would stop these companies from stealing people's work and make "AI" less of a black box.

  After thousands of people submitting millions of prompt-response pairs, and after some researchers said it was the highest quality natural language dataset they'd seen in a while, the base model was almost always incoherent. You only got a functioning model if you just used the data to fine-tune an existing larger model, Llama at the time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do you reconcile staying sane while keeping yourself up-to-date with the news?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There's a lot of things that have helped me, so I guess I'll just dump some of that here.

  First of all, make sure that you keeping up to date is deliberate, and consensual. News should not unconsensually cram itself into your eyeballs. Try out an RSS reader to keep what would be newsletter subscriptions or social media feed scrolling for the news in one single app that isn't part of your other online activities, or keep relevant news sites bookmarked rather than followed or subscribed to.

  When you feel you want to be more informed about what's currently going on, you can then chose to be so without it happening at times you're not ready for it.

  Eliminate redundant media. So much of the media we consume isn't truly new to us, whether that's following people you already agree with then just liking all their posts, or reading news articles about something you already know about, just because they drop a very tiny morsel of additional information in there, burying the lead, so you have to constantly come back again and again to be truly up to date.

  If you're reading an article, watching a video, or scrolling social media, and you realize that what you're reading is something you already know, that should be a sign to stop and take a break for a while, so the news cycle can progress further, rather than you very closely following its every little step. This is something that can take some mental training before you eventually get it down, so just try to be more aware of what you're consuming when you consume it.

  A lot of the news we see can also be something that, while technically interesting or engaging, simply doesn't matter to us or our ability to impact others around us. Like how a TV station might show you a sad story about someone who had something bad happen to them at some time in some random small town you've never heard of. Sure, it's news, but do you really need to know about that? Is that keeping you sane and energized for what comes next?

  And speaking of being energized: do shit. If you care about politics and there's a local rally or protest march, go to it. If you have a local rights organization that does outreach work, volunteer. If you can phonebank for a political candidate you like, make a few phone calls in your spare time.

  I particularly like this quote from Joan Baez, which is "Action is the antidote to despair." Even if you have a healthy diet of media consumption, are up to date without feeling overwhelmed, and are generally a well-informed individual, you can always still feel that nagging feeling that things aren't changing.

  You've done everything you can to know what's going on, and yet what's going on isn't getting any better. There's no point being informed if it doesn't help you, your community, or the world at all, so when you're able to, do literally anything you can to make even the smallest difference using what you know. If someone says something you don't agree with politically, ask them why they believe that and use what you just learned from current events to back up your opinion. Who knows, they might change their mind.

  I was ecstatic when Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary in NYC, but I was even happier because after I'd informed myself about the race, his policy positions, and what prior mayors had done so terribly wrong, I had phonebanked for him, and was in a small way, somewhat responsible for that success. And can you guess how much less despair I feel when I see things in the world imploding around all of us now?

  Doing anything can make you understand how much of an impact you can have just as an individual, and that makes any bad news infinitely less damaging to your mental health. That said, don't feel bad when you can't, we're all people, and we have our limits and responsibilities.

  And even without all that, the best advice I can give you is to just be aware of scale. We live in an age where problems well outside our control are something we're aware of all the time. If something is a problem, sure, be aware of it, but don't beat yourself up over how little you're capable of doing as an individual. It's like when recycling was proposed as a responsibility of individuals rather than corporations, and now people feel bad for throwing out the plastic waste that the corporations made.

  Don't doomscroll, reduce pointless media, take action where you can, and don't beat yourself up when things don't change overnight. Just do what you can. You've got this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ultra high iq⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I would say the verdict is a solid yes.

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• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI-Generated Malware in Panda Image Hides Persistent Linux Threat⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Not whatsoever.

  Practically any mining software would allow you to change a pool whenever you felt like it, and making a script that just goes "oh, x.x.x.x isn't responding anymore, I should point my hashrate to y.y.y.y now" is... not hard, to say the least.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨oops⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Used to?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Google about to destroy the web? Google says a new AI tool on its search engine will rejuvenate the internet. Others predict an apocalypse for websites.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I'd actually found them to be better than Google for a while, but coincidentally after the AI craze started really taking off, search quality significantly degraded. Maybe that's not so much of a coincidence after all.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Google about to destroy the web? Google says a new AI tool on its search engine will rejuvenate the internet. Others predict an apocalypse for websites.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Presearch is not fully decentralized.

  All the services that manage advertising, staking/marketplace/rewards functionality, and unnamed "other critical Presearch services" are all "centrally managed by Presearch" according to their own documentation.

  The nodes that actually help scrape and serve content are also reliant on Presearch's centralized servers. Every search must go through Presearch's "Node Gateway Server," which is centrally managed by them. That removes identifying metadata and IP info.

  That central server then determines where your request goes. It could be going to open nodes run by volunteers, or it could be their own personal nodes. You cannot verify this due to how the structure of the network works.

  Presearch's search index is not decentralized. It's a frontend for other indexes. (e.g. it outsources queries to other search engines, databases, and APIs for services it's configured to use) This means it does not actually have an index that is independent from these central services. I'll give it a pass for this since most search engines are like this today, but many of them are developing their own indexes that are much more robust than what Presearch seems to be doing.

  This node can return results to the gateway. There doesn't seem to be any way that the gateway can verify that what it's being provided is actually what was available on the open web. For example, the node could just send back results with links that are all affiliate links to services it thinks are vaguely relevant to the query, and the gateway would assume that these queries are valid.

  For the gateway to verify these are accurate, it would have to additionally scrape these services itself, which would render the entire purpose of the nodes pointless. The docs claim it can "ensure that each node is only running trusted Presearch software," but it does not control the root of trust, and thus it has the same pitfalls that games have had for years trying to enforce anticheat (that is to say, it's simply impossible to guarantee unless presearch could do all the processing within a TPM module that they entirely control, which they don't. Not to mention that it would cause a number of privacy issues)

  A better model would be one where nodes are solely used for hosting to take the burden off a central server for storing the index, and chunks sent to nodes would be hashed, with the hash stored on the central server. When the central server needs a chunk of data based on a query, it sends a request, verifies the hash matches, then forwards it to the user, thus taking the storage burden off the main server and making the only cost bottleneck the bandwidth, but that's not what Presearch is doing here.

  This doesn't make Presearch bad in itself, but it's most definitely not* decentralized. All core search functionality relies on *their servers alone, and it simply adds additional risk of bad actors being able to manipulate search results.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Google about to destroy the web? Google says a new AI tool on its search engine will rejuvenate the internet. Others predict an apocalypse for websites.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Is there truly an audience for "I don't want any proof, just answer my question"?

  More people than I think we'd like to admit. Most people don't spend time verifying whether or not what they've seen is true, they just believe what they see first, especially if it conforms to their existing beliefs.

  After all, these models are quite literally plausibility machines. Their entire goal is to generate text that sounds plausibly accurate, because that's how manual content reviewers fine-tune them. Their sole purpose is to generate whatever sounds plausible, not what's necessarily correct, so if there's one thing that will convince the masses that what it says is correct, it will be these "AI" models.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Meta and Yandex are de-anonymizing Android users’ web browsing identifiers⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I don't understand why anyone uses any of their platforms.

  The answer to this question about almost any shitty platform is almost always the network effect.

  Leaving Meta's platforms means leaving where most of your friends and family spend their time digitally, which makes it harder to connect with the people you know. No one can collectively agree on an alternative platform to all simultaneously move to, so in most cases, leaving Meta practically means cutting yourself off from your entire social graph.