Someone stole my digital camera when I was a kid. I left it near the window at the place we were staying at for our vacation and someone must have grabbed it from the outside while we were gone. I was probably pretty mad about it back then. Nothing since, that I can remember right now at least.
My Uncle Alex, who is up in Heaven now, one of the things he found objectionable about human beings was that they so rarely noticed it when times were sweet. We could be drinking lemonade in the shade of an apple tree in the summertime, and Uncle Alex would interrupt the conversation to say, “If this isn’t nice, what is?”
So I hope that you will do the same for the rest of your lives. When things are going sweetly and peacefully, please pause a moment, and then say out loud, "If this isn’t nice, what is?”
Isn't it crazy how you can "go there" when you think about it. It's my lesson in the fact that all emotions are valid. Because I can be young again, and grumpy that some "sumabitch" stole something from me. Among other emotions from memories. But I will say it's horrible to have somoene smile and enjoy your company all while sliding stuff into their pockets. A gal I once didn't like (I like her mama though because she had short blonde hair and a ton of strength) stole something from me too and lied up and down the street over that one. She can go puck herself too, but I also acknowledge big picture these things are just little pieces of my life hahaha!
Infinite suffering for a small group of people in exchange for saving everyone else in existence is basically the story of the Heralds in Stormlight Archive
I see comments/posts like this all the time for drinking and gambling on TikTok and idk why but they always get a laugh out of me. I guess it’s just so stupid/goofy? idk I like what I like
They were fantastic to use. I remember using ResEdit back in the day to change my menu names in the Finder, knowing what every system extension did so I could delete non essential ones to speed up the system.
Unlike these days, you spent more time getting work done, rather than fighting the application or OS.
I loathe how new OS’s and programs change the UI / UX these days and make it worse every time. Looking at you Adobe / Microsoft!
OP doesn’t know when to walk away, or when to run. He probably doesn’t even know when to fold.
Kenny Rogers makes some fine fried chicken, though it doesn’t compare to the actual original recipe that The Colonel sold, which is possible to recreate, but no longer possible to buy, prepared for consumption, ever since KFC took over the store in Corbin.
I guess I’ll have to try the different replica recipes found online. The stuff that you get at KFC itself is mediocre at best and I lost interest in it as soon as a better chicken joint turned up near me.
Honestly, my biggest issue with LLMs is how they source their training data to create “their own” stuff. A meme calling it a plagiarism machine struck a chord with me. Almost anyone else I’d sympathize with, but fuck Spez.
Yep they now get paid for the data we have them. I have no sympathy lol. At least these models can’t actually store it all losslessly by any stretch of the imagination. The compression factors would have to be like 100-200X+ anything we’ve ever been able to achieve before. The numbers don’t work out. The models do encode a lot though and some of it is going to include actual full text data etc but it’ll still be kinda fuzzy.
I think we do need ALL OPEN SOURCE. Not just for AI, but I know on that point I’m preaching to the choir here lol
What resonated with me is people calling LLMs and Stable Diffusion “copyright laundering”. If copyright ever swung in AI’s favor it would be super easy to train an AI on stuff you want to steal, add in some generic training, and now you have a “new” piece of art.
LLMs and Stable Diffusion are just compression algorithms for abstract patterns, only one level above data.
Bro, I rage at Ubuntu. Literally. Kinda unhappy when at work and using my Kubuntu.
(But unhappiest with Windows)
At home, 4 Devices use Arch Linux and I am the happiest person on earth with them. I love knowing how I set them up and how to fix something when broken.
I reinstalled Windoes 4 times because it somehow broke, while I still kept my Arch Linux through over 4 years.
(Generally, I dont tinker much with Arch Linux and generally was a Person who spent a lot of time with a Girlfriend. I read that wife, kids and etc was a point. Thus, I am mentioning how satisfied I am not only with my OS but life too. I also love my work, I just ignore that Ubuntu breaks sometimes. But generally, I wished I would be hsing Arch on my work)
Everyone always says this like it’s some kind of gotcha, but all of my nuked posts still have my “fuck you, reddit” content and haven’t been reverted. It’s been nearly exactly a year.
Maybe reddit has an offline copy of my old content and that of others somewhere, but if so they’d be handing that directly over to whoever under some kind of agreement – that certainly wouldn’t be the subject of any kind of site crawling which is the crux of the issue here.
You’re ignoring the idea that they could still be working on a way to restore content and haven’t completed that process yet
Or that they could start feeding your archived (not cached) data directly to the AI companies anyway for a price
IMO, you can win by jamming your “transmissions” with noise. It’s easier to hide in noise as noise than it Is to be silent IMO. Muddy the waters as it were
Right, which means it can be fairly considered when discussing the real crux of the issue with AI and bug tech companies right now, which is the monetization of other peoples content.
If we’re discussing this, we should be looking at whether or not companies are doing this, given they have motive and specific, relevant circumstance to enact such behavior.
Lack of evidence means you need to investigate for said evidence. It does not mean you should not investigate. Privacy advocates, members of any org/cert with an ethics statement should be blowing the whistle on any kind of activity that would mean a users data is not being deleted upon their request, especially considering reddits global usage.
it never was deleted, all that happened is that an extra line was added to a database that said “comment 65432426542654 now should be displayed as “fuck you, reddit” rather than the original text”. The original post is still in an earlier row available to reddit, it just isnt being displayed on their web page.
i went looking for old comments and posts i had made after i overwrote then wiped them. They’re still gone. i looked again several months later, and they were still gone.
so, unless reddit did a massive restore of everyone’s comments/posts except for my 4 accounts, then i don’t believe they did it at all except for a select number of top contributors who deleted their content.
You are assuming edits overwrite existing content. Instead of overwriting, they could just store the edited post as a new entry in the database with a higher version number. Then, you only show the latest version of each post to the end users while keeping the older versions available die Reddit’s own use.
In fact, it is extremely likely they do this. It is basically a necessity if you want to be able to properly moderate a site like Reddit. Otherwise you could simply post spam or unsavory content, and then overwrite it with something benign an hour or so later, before there were enough reports and a moderator would have gotten a chance to review it.
this could also be explained by sketchy scripts failing to completely delete posts/comments, which i even noticed myself when checking that they had done their jobs properly. as i mentioned in another comment, i had to run the shredder scripts several times for complete overwrite/deletion. or it could be database errors failing to register edits/deletions due to extremely heavy loads at the time. it could be a lot of things.
the point is that we don’t have any direct evidence of what it actually was, just a lot of circumstantial evidence and a lot of speculation. nothing definitive.
Reddit used to be open source. There is still a copy of that source available on github. It’s 7 years old so it’s probably significantly different from what they are running now. Still, it gives some insight into the design.
I haven’t dug around the code enough to figure out how editing works, it’s Python code so an unreadable mess. The database design also seems very strange. It’s like they built a database system on top of a database.
This is not evidence that overwritten and deleted comments could be restored to the original state. Moreover, that points to the original source code of Reddit, not the current code of Reddit.
This is also not evidence that deleted or overwritten and deleted comments have been restored. This is merely evidence that, at one time, this is how deleted comments used to be handled.
All this is evidence of is, as you put it, things are very strange in the code.
I never claimed it was evidence of how it currently works, only that it gives some insight into how Reddit was designed. I would be very surprised if they changed this aspect of the design. It makes sense to not delete comments or edits for reasons I mentioned before. Unfortunately we won’t know for sure unless Reddit confirms it.
For example, deleted comments aren’t deleted, it just sets a deleted flag.
FWIW even when you properly delete something from a database table, the deleted row can be reconstructed from the audit tables. And even if that weren’t the case, databases are regularly backed up to tape drives or whatever - when people delete or munge all their comments, Reddit doesn’t go back into all the backups and make the same changes there. In fact, I would imagine that when they sell their shit to companies for AI training, they sell old pre-AI backups rather than a latest copy.
i suspect that was more likely incomplete deletions than reddit restoring content. those scripts were pretty janky. i had to run mine several times to get everything, as it didn’t work fully the first couple of times. same with the overwrites. took a few times for those to get everything, especially on older accounts with lots of posts and comments.
I’d read some claims that posts appeared to be deleted but then later came back. Could’ve even been some sort of caching shenanigans with their local browser though I guess.
so, unless reddit did a massive restore of everyone’s comments/posts except for my 4 accounts, then i don’t believe they did it at all except for a select number of top contributors who deleted their content.
but there’s no evidence they’re keeping everyone’s deleted-but-restored comments from public view or whatever it is you’re suggesting. or even anything past whaat this one person found. in fact, there isn’t even any evidence that what happened to this user was intentional and not a bug or some other fluke.
sure, reddit would have a vested interest in doing this, and what you’ve presented is suspicious, but it’s hardly conclusive of anything. all it does is raise more questions. but it doesn’t provide answers.
On the other side of the same coin: When I mass edited my comments before quitting Reddit, I got site-banned. Basically, my first account’s automated edit got me auto-banned from several subs with pro-spez mods. Some subs had set their automod to detect when people were using the more popular methods of auto-editing, and set the automod to ban for using them. Then when I did the same with my second (and third, and fourth, and fifth, etc…) account, it almost immediately got site-banned for ban evasion.
Basically, account 1 was banned from a sub, so when account 2 started doing the same thing on the same IP address, it was flagged as ban evasion. And ban evasion is one of the few things that will get you banned site-wide instead of just from a specific sub.
I went back and checked a few months ago, and all of those site bans were lifted and the edits were undone. Likely because a site ban prevents the comments from showing up (which hurts Reddit’s bottom line, because they show up as a bunch of [removed] comments instead,) but also prevented any of the edits from actually being published. So when they lifted the site ban (to get those old comments to show back up again) it was as if I had never edited them at all. I had probably a million karma spread across my various accounts. I was extremely active at one point, so Reddit had a direct incentive to unban those accounts with literal thousands of comments.
They're not selling the ability to scrape their publicly viewable site, they're selling API access to their database. Deleted posts aren't removed from that database.
It’s infuriating (mildly may be an understatement).
My neighbor ended up getting “a virus” on her laptop. It wasn’t actually a virus as best I could tell, but instead, it was a full screen pop-up browser window with no window controls.
The scam had a bunch of scary messaging and loud sound playing an alarm with someone stating that the computer was infected and that it was also infecting Microsoft’s servers. Further, the scam insisted that she call the number on the screen or she will face legal issues.
For an older non-technical person, it was frightening.
After this happened a second time, I did a little more digging to see if I could figure out what was going on. Virus scans showed no infection and I couldn’t find much online with specifics about what I was seeing.
Turns out, my neighbor was going to Google, searching for terms like “Amazon”, and then she was clicking the first ad / sponsored link in the results expecting to be taken to the Amazon website. Instead, the sponsored ad on Google search was linking to a blog on Microsoft’s Azure hosting services, which then triggered the full screen non-closable scam.
I even tested it out on one of my old laptops. Went to Google search, tried the exact search term she used, and sure enough, the same exact thing happened. I reported the ad, it is clearly malicious and a scam. It’s ridiculous that Google actually serves up malicious ads like this. And the ad was up there for days after I reported it. I sincerely hope nobody actually got scammed by it, but I definitely feel like Google should be responsible for any damages/losses.
I did go ahead and install ad blockers on all her browsers, removed google search from being the default search engine, and showed her how to avoid clicking on ads and sponsored links if/when any slip through the cracks. So, hopefully it won’t happen again.
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