AmbitiousProcess
@AmbitiousProcess@piefed.social
- Comment on He died doing what he loved. 2 weeks ago:
People can care about school shootings while also not wanting to see a dying body and someone's bloody gunshot wound randomly appear on their timeline when they're just trying to look at some fucking memes.
This is like if I started filling your timeline with random snuff films and gore videos, and when you complained, went "OH you don't like this? Well the human trafficking victims used in these videos didn't either."
- Comment on Just a little bit more 3 weeks ago:
Woah woah woah there pal, we don't even say sw--r around these parts, that's too far! If you're going to censor an image at least do it right. smh /j
- Comment on WATER! 4 weeks ago:
I doubt that's the case, currently.
Right now, there's a lot of genuine competition in the AI space, so they're actually trying to out compete one another for market share. It's only once users are locked into using a particular service that they begin deliberate enshittification with the purpose of getting more money, either from paying for tokens, or like Google did when it deliberately made search quality worse so people would see more ads ("What are you gonna do, go to Bing?")
By contrast, if ChatGPT sucks, you can locally host a model, use one from Anthropic, Perplexity, any number of interfaces for open source (or at least, source-available) models like Deepseek, Llama, or Qwen, etc.
It's only once industry consolidation really starts taking place that we'll see things like deliberate measures to make people either spend more on tokens, or make money from things like injecting ads into responses.
- Comment on First time posters be like 4 weeks ago:
It's also just generally easier for first-time users to start using. For anyone curious, their little "feeds" of communities you can follow in one go by topic are super handy.
For example, if I subscribe to the activismplus feed, I automatically subscribe to communities like antiwork, solarpunk, socialism, leftism, anarchism, unions, antifascism, human rights, left urbanism, etc, from a number of different instances all at once.
For a first-time user, it's easier to pick a topic they're interested in and automatically be following all the relevant communities across most instances, rather than subscribing to communities one-by-one over a very long period of time.
- Comment on Everytime i come across a 3d printing post 5 weeks ago:
The MSDS for the filament I use says that it doesn't contain any PBT/vPvB substance or endocrine disruptors. I presume that means it's likely fine, at least for the brand I use.
The only 2 ingredients are PLA, and calcium carbonate, which is also found in egshells, some vegetables, and is coincidentally commonly used as an additive to composting piles that can eliminate pathogens.
I also think the overall amount of pigment entering the environment from something like this will be quite low compared to practically any other contaminant that enters the waste stream from people who just don't know what's compostable throwing random things in the bin.
There's also the fact that there's probably larger overall harms from all the microplastics existing in a landfill rather than being broken down entirely into plant proteins in a composting facility but with a minute amount of contamination. It's not perfect, but it's probably better than leaving all the microplastics floating around for decades if not centuries, depending on the environment.
- Comment on Everytime i come across a 3d printing post 5 weeks ago:
I have absolutely no clue how to calculate that by myself. I think that would call for a... lifecycle analysis.
...
Get it?
...
I'll show myself out.
- Comment on Proton shifts out of Switzerland over snooping law fears 5 weeks ago:
How is it not a shift? It would be an expansion if they were increasing their overall coverage by region in addition to Switzerland, but they're actually moving their infrastructure out of Switzerland, and not hosting it there after the switch is completed, (other than what I'd assume would be things like a VPN endpoint for those who want it, or any services for Swiss customers that want data to remain entirely within Switzerland) because this law would put them under too much scrutiny.
They even state at the very bottom of this blog post about their new AI features that "Proton is moving most of its physical infrastructure out of Switzerland"
Sadly though, I agree with you on the chat control part. I don't think they'll easily be able to escape this no matter where they go. Any still standing bastions of privacy seem to be falling right before our eyes.
- Comment on Everytime i come across a 3d printing post 5 weeks ago:
This paper estimates the CO2e emissions of roughly a 1kg spool (estimates are done by length of filament, not weight, but weight would end up being about 1kg) of PLA filament at 3.10kg of CO2e.
The model used to print the alleged ghost gun is the FMDA 19.2 by "the Gatalog," which when I load it into my slicer shows an estimated 55g of filament used to print when using 15% infill, and 94g with 100% solid infill, for an estimated 0.1705-0.2914 CO2e of emissions for the printed parts. (This doesn't include any support material, depending on print positioning)
There's no easy way to determine how much of that could theoretically end up as microplastics though.
As for the metal parts, I have no clue lmao, I don't care to estimate it that much. - Comment on Everytime i come across a 3d printing post 5 weeks ago:
From what I've seen, at the bare minimum, it will break down completely back into plant polymers faster than other plastics could hope to break down into anything non-dangerous to the environment, and even if it does break down into microplastics quicker, I'd rather have something like that, which can then later break down into plant polymers, rather than something that slowly leeches microplastics into the environment for the next few centuries, and doesn't really break down into anything much less dangerous past that point.
To cite some interesting points from the paper you referenced:
The biodegradation of polylactic acid occurs in two main steps: fragmentation and mineralization. [...] which can be biotic or abiotic. For instance, biotic hydrolysis involves microorganisms and/or enzymes, whereas abiotic hydrolysis involves mechanical weathering.
This means it can break down via multiple mechanisms, with or without the presence of any microbes, but only given specific environmental circumstances, which is why it doesn't work well in aquatic environments, as previously mentioned. However, some of it does still break down there, and if it later exits that aquatic environment, other processes can begin to break down what remains.
The authors concluded that polylactic acid and its blends are similar to non-biodegradable plastics in terms of biodegradation in aquatic environment.
[They] proposed that low temperatures along with low bacterial density make the sea water unsuitable for the biodegradation of polylactic acid.
However, on the microplastics point, while they do state it degrades quickly, in terms of overall quantity of microplastics produced, it's actually lower than other common plastics.
The authors reported that polylactic acid forms almost 18 times fewer microplastics as compared to the petroleum-based plastic, polypropylene.
They do still mention that it will still likely have many negative effects on marine life, though, even given that. Surely we'll stop dumping plastics in the ocean now, for the good of the planet! Or not, because profits matter more, am I right?
From another study, it seems that soil with certain combinations of bacteria, at regular temperatures found in nature, could mineralize about 24% of PLA in 150 days, which is pretty damn good compared to how long it would take non-bioplastics to do so.
And of course, when put into dedicated composting facilities that can reach high temperatures, PLA can be composted extremely effectively. And this is just regular PLA we're talking about, not things like cPLA, which can be 100% composted within regular composting facilities within 2-4 months. (coincidentally, most biodegradable utensils are now made of cPLA)
I wouldn't doubt we start seeing even more compostable variants of filament for 3D printers specifically popping up as actual distribution and manufacturing for the material becomes more cost effective and widespread. I was able to find cPLA filament at a reasonable price just from a simple search, and there's even a biodegradable flexible filament as an alternative to TPU, made of oyster powder, which is 100% compostable (though is about 4-8X the price of regular TPU per gram as of now)
None of this discounts any of the current environmental impacts of 3D printing materials, of course, but a lot of PLA now can already be almost entirely, if not actually entirely composted in local municipal composting facilities, and there's even more compostable alternatives that exist today.
I compost my failed or no-longer-needed PLA prints, and my city even explicitly states to put it in my compost bin, as it's supported by our composting system.
- Comment on Mississippi Senator tells his constituents to 'get a life' 5 weeks ago:
I don't think a lot of these people understand what it means for them to be a public servant. This is not a job where you put your interests first. You are quite literally a servant to your constituents, and your entire purpose during your term is to serve their wishes, to carry out the will of the people. The amount of people that will get elected into a role like that, then be shocked when the people that elected them ask them to do things for them is baffling to me.
- Comment on When Americans Fly Economy, They're Actually Paying for Someone Else to Fly Private 5 weeks ago:
The fuel rates are currently about $0.22/gallon, and are going up to $1.06/gallon over 5 years, but even that wouldn't put them on par with commercial flights (they pay 0.6% of the fees, but use 7% of resources, $1.06 divided by $0.22 gets you 4.81x the current 0.6%, which is still 2.9% of the fees, while using 7% of FAA resources.)
So even with the current fuel rate increases, private jets would still be paying less than half of what they end up using.
- Comment on When Americans Fly Economy, They're Actually Paying for Someone Else to Fly Private 5 weeks ago:
- Tickets for flights are taxed at 7.5% to pay for the FAA
- Average flight with many passengers pays over $2,300 per flight
- Private jets don't have tickets to be taxed, are only taxed on fuel
- Private jets pay an average of about $60 in FAA fees
- Private jets take up about 7% of the FAA's resources, but only make up a fraction of a percent of the revenue
- Thus when you pay the FAA fees on your economy class ticket, you're subsidizing operating the FAA for private jet flights, that don't pay enough to cover their costs.
- Comment on Um... I'm not even using a VPN... Fuck you reddit. 1 month 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 month 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? 1 month 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? 1 month 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 month ago:
Don't forget racist, too!
- Comment on Every support thread on Reddit is literally this now 1 month 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 month 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? 1 month 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? 1 month 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 1 month ago:
- Comment on AI-Generated Malware in Panda Image Hides Persistent Linux Threat 2 months 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 2 months 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. 3 months 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. 3 months 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. 3 months 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 3 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.
