jarfil
@jarfil@beehaw.org
Programmer and sysadmin (DevOps?), wannabe polymath in tech, science and the mind. Neurodivergent, disabled, burned out, and close to throwing in the towel, but still liking ponies 🦄 and sometimes willing to discuss stuff.
- Comment on Death Of A Forum: How The UK’s Online Safety Act Is Killing Communities 1 day ago:
In the EU, not in UK, but stuff like this is why I decided to pull the plug on everything public several years ago. A single individual can’t afford to risk it.
- Comment on Apple urged to axe AI feature after creating false headline claiming that Lugi shot himself 1 day ago:
What do you mean by “human oversight”? You must mean AI oversight… 🫠
- Comment on Take It Down Act Has Best Of Intentions, Worst Of Mechanisms 2 days ago:
The problem lies in what is a “depiction”. The way it is written, even cropped, rotated, blurred, or in any other way processed files of that “depiction”, would fall under the “identical” part.
Since perceptual hashing does exist, there are open source libraries to run it, and even Beehaw runs an AI based image filter, the “reasonable effort” is arguably to use all those tools as the bare minimum. Even if they sometimes (or always) fail at removing all instances of a depiction.
But ultimately, deciding whether a service has applied all “reasonable efforts” to remove “identical copies” of a “depiction”, will fall on the shoulders of a judge… and even starting to go there, can bankrupt most sites.
- Comment on Take It Down Act Has Best Of Intentions, Worst Of Mechanisms 2 days ago:
Depends on “how identical” is “identical”.
The SHA hash of a file, is easy to calculate, but pretty much useless at detecting similar images; change a single bit, and the SHA hash changes.
In order to detect similar content, you need perceptual hashes, which are no longer that easy to calculate.
- Comment on Google Contract Staff Reach Union Deal Banning Keystroke Monitoring 2 days ago:
Yeah, I was afraid that would be the case. Recently we’re getting some “consent or pay” popups, which are also being debated and will likely become illegal.
Guess it makes even more sense to use a VPN in the US, then.
- Comment on Google Contract Staff Reach Union Deal Banning Keystroke Monitoring 3 days ago:
Is this a EU-only feature?
- Comment on Fake AI versions of world-renowned academics are spreading claims that Ukraine should surrender to Russia 3 days ago:
110 million in cities vs. 36 million in the countryside. That’s about the population of all of Ukraine.
Paying for the service, works like in every other conflict area. Internet is the new Radio Free Europe.
restricted this service upon request from Moscow in the past
When? If it’s about that one Ukraine drone attack, it was a US restriction.
Blocking the signal is trivial? Then why is Russia losing inland tankers on the Black Sea after they’ve messed up the passage of seaworthy ones into the Sea of Azov while trying to stop those Starlink controlled Ukrainian drones. Why not simply block the signal?
- Comment on Fake AI versions of world-renowned academics are spreading claims that Ukraine should surrender to Russia 3 days ago:
🙄… They’re experimenting with cutting access, precisely because the ship has sailed on controlling the devices.
NK is a paranoid Orwellian state with generational punishments, where everyone reports on everyone else. Russia has nowhere that level of control over its people, their only option is to control the ISPs… and I bet that when they do, people will sneak in some Starlink access points.
- Comment on yeah, I game on APUs 3 days ago:
Goat Simulator, 62fps 1080p, 70% GPU use, 2W TDP avg, 5W peak.
My GPU? A smartphone’s Mali-G68 😁
- Comment on Denmark: Union website deindexed by Google in the firm’s latest search experiment 3 days ago:
Canada, Australia, Germany, Denmark… Same thing happened in Spain in 2014 already:
…wikipedia.org/…/Spanish_Newspaper_Publishers'_As…
Google cut out all Spanish news sources in 2014, until they came back crying in 2022:
- Comment on Denmark: Union website deindexed by Google in the firm’s latest search experiment 4 days ago:
First, they have a news section, making them a publisher:
journalistforbundet.dk/nyheder
Second, the union is:
for people who work in journalism, media and communications
journalistforbundet.dk/dj-english
That also includes publishers.
- Comment on Fake AI versions of world-renowned academics are spreading claims that Ukraine should surrender to Russia 4 days ago:
OMG that site… 🤮
They could do that right now, but their priority seems to be different. NK controls its people’s Internet use by controlling their devices, in Russia that boat has sailed, 35% of people have a desktop or laptop, 85% have Internet access via uncontrolled devices.
- Comment on Fake AI versions of world-renowned academics are spreading claims that Ukraine should surrender to Russia 4 days ago:
Kind of… but I feel like Russia is more concerned with its plans to completely cut off its national Internet, which would leave all domains like this as either unresolvable, or inaccessible.
- Comment on Fake AI versions of world-renowned academics are spreading claims that Ukraine should surrender to Russia 4 days ago:
Is it though?
The Insider is based in Latvia, and has been labeled as a “foreign agent” by Russia.
- Comment on Denmark: Union website deindexed by Google in the firm’s latest search experiment 4 days ago:
Publishers are the evil ones here.
- Comment on Denmark: Union website deindexed by Google in the firm’s latest search experiment 4 days ago:
The firm launched this project after European publishers demanded more information about the traffic brought to their websites by Google search as part of the implementation of the EU Copyright Directive.
For the full context:
- Publishers want to force Google to pay them for “copying” their news into the search engine.
- Google claims publishers would die of starvation without Google.
- In countries where such forced royalties were implemented, Google simply delisted everyone… until publishers came back crying about lost visits.
- Comment on A New Social 4 days ago:
Oh, the irony:
snarfed.org/2023-11-27_re-introducing-bridgy-fed
I’ve self-funded Bridgy classic for 12 years and Bridgy Fed for 6 years so far, and I can continue indefinitely. I have experience scaling services like these as personal projects. I care about and believe in decentralized social networks
Centralized love for decentralized networks 🙄
- Comment on Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far 4 days ago:
Depending on when you tried that, it might’ve been fixed already.
I’m using GA on a Nest Mini, and Gemini on a smartphone. It started being unable to do pretty much anything; right now (Dec 2024) it can do all I ask it for, but still claims to be unable to fully replace GA.
Also have Samsung’s Bixby, which has better integration with phone apps, and returning search results, but fails more than Gemini at summarizing them, or answering general questions… so yeah, YMMV.
- Comment on Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far 5 days ago:
I find Gemini “somewhat useful”, on a smartphone. It’s not a game changer, but it can often answer the thing I want even when it misheard it, much better than Google Assistant.
- Comment on Is there any (single player playable) game under $10 or equivalent which has made you point any go "ha" or given you an equivalent feeling because it was that enjoyable for every moment you played it? 6 days ago:
I’ve spent way more than 100 hours on plenty of games over the years, games that nowadays are below $10, like:
- Doom
- Duke Nukem 3D
- Tetris
- BlockOut (now, BlockOut II)
- MS Flight Simulator 5.0
- F-117A 2.0
- Monkey Island 1
- Monkey Island 2
- Ultima Online (now, UO Outlands)
There are many free-to-play mobile games with optional ads, that I’ve also enjoyed for over 100 hours each before they became frustrating, but hard to make a list now.
Many others have been mentioned already.
- Comment on Roskomnadzor sent an abuse report to Hetzner regarding @Bellingcat account on mstdn.social fedi instance 6 days ago:
You’re thinking of a blacklist: “block NONE except [list]”. I’m speaking of a whitelist: “block ALL except [list]”.
Making a list of IPs registered with, and allowed by the government, is quite easy. China, Russia, Iran, etc. have been making those lists for years at this point.
- Comment on Roskomnadzor sent an abuse report to Hetzner regarding @Bellingcat account on mstdn.social fedi instance 1 week ago:
Blocking is quite trivial with a whitelist… what isn’t so trivial, is to block while keeping the appearances of not blocking, or block while IT workers at ISPs and hosting providers are morally opposed to blocking.
Keep in mind that Russia has already done the “block it all” experiment in 2019, and keeps practicing it: techradar.com/…/russia-disconnects-several-region…
- Comment on Roskomnadzor sent an abuse report to Hetzner regarding @Bellingcat account on mstdn.social fedi instance 1 week ago:
All service providers in the EU have to follow a similar abuse report handling procedure.
They usually require a response to abuse tickets within 24h, so better have someone capable of responding at least twice a day. Unless the abuse goes against the provider’s ToS (don’t do that), simply responding to it should make it go away… as in, the provider washes their hands and lets the reporting party and you sort it among yourselves, be it in court or whatever. Russian government agencies are not very likely to win a case in the EU these days, though.
If you don’t want to deal with hosting providers, you can self-host and deal with your ISP.
This varies a lot from one ISP to another, some will cut you off at the first sign of abuse, others will ignore abuse reports like nothing happened, while others will port-filter you so you can’t even host stuff yourself. You will also find that most residential IP ranges are on blacklists used by mail providers.
To increase the likelihood of staying online, use redundancy. For a while, I used to manage a system with two hosting providers, acting as reverse proxies and fallback for a local dual server setup with dual PSUs, dual UPSs, with dual connections to two ISPs via two routers. We used to get close to “six 9s” uptime.
- Comment on Mark Zuckerberg's Meta donates $1m to U.S. President-elect Trump fund 1 week ago:
I bet you’re wrong… most people won’t complain, or care 🫤
- Comment on Blacksky Is Nothing Like Black Twitter—and It Doesn’t Need to Be 1 week ago:
Bluesky seems to want users to pick 3rd-party moderators, what they call “Labelers”:
It’s not a bad concept, reducing Bluesky’s expenses and involvement, while at the same time allowing each user to “pick and choose” the moderation that they’d prefer. The downside, is that 3rd-party moderators might not be able to “ban” at a scale of over 10 million users.
- Comment on Luigi Mangione, CEO shooting suspect, is a tech worker 1 week ago:
No need to skip anything; they aren’t themselves allowed to spy on their own citizens, but if any of the other eyes does, then they can share the info. It’s been like that from the beginning.
- Comment on anyone know any good android games? 1 week ago:
What kind of handheld, what genre, open source or anything goes…?
There are many decent games, as in “none or optional ads, not pay to win”. Some P2W can be played up to a certain point before they become obnoxious.
Recently I’ve been playing casual/idle ones:
- Rush Royale
- Raid Rush
- Pocket Champs
- Capybara Go
Before that, I went through a phase of RTS:
- Last War
- Top Heroes
- Million Lords
Before that… don’t remember anymore, I keep switching genres every few months 🤷
- Comment on Your Bluesky Posts Are Probably In A Bunch of AI Datasets Now [404 Media] 2 weeks ago:
From a copyright point of view… the rights to each piece of content are of each owner… but each owner is sharing that content with an instance, with the intent of it getting re-shared to further instances.
In a strict sense, most instances are in breach of copyright law: they don’t require users to agree to an EULA specifying how the content will be used, they don’t require federated instances to agree to the same terms, they don’t make end users agree to the terms of other instances, and generally allow users to submit someone else’s content (see: memes) without the owner’s authorization, then share and re-share it across the federated network. A fully “copyright compliant” protocol, would need to have these things baked into it from the beginning… which would make joining the federated network a royal PITA.
With the current approach of “like, chill bro”… anyone can set up an instance, federate with whatever target or federated-of-a-target one, and save all the data without any consequences. The fact of receiving federated data, carries an implicit consent to process that data, and definitely does nothing to prevent random processing.
Scraping the web endpoint of an instance, carries the rules set by the EULA of that endpoint… which tend to be none, or in the best case, are that of the least restrictive instance offering that federated data.
All of that, before scrapers simply ignoring any requirements.
- Comment on draw.io changed license from Apache 2.0 to non-FOSS-license on August 27, 2024 2 months ago:
As usual, the unresolved underlying issue is, how to get funding for FLOSS projects.
Entitled cheapskates are nothing new; a generic solution to the issue, would be something new.
- Comment on Chinese EV owners are losing access to smartphone app updates and driving features when companies go bust 3 months ago:
By the time they’re about to go belly up, companies no longer have the resources to ensure they comb through the code to remove the parts licensed from 3rd parties, and the liquidators see all assets as something to sell in order to cover whatever loans the company got.
In an ideal world, consumers would never buy a non-open sourced car, or phone, or IoT device.
In the real world, regulators need to force companies to give consumers at least some basic way to control the products they buy.
