melmi

melmi , 21 days ago

But how will you get a “universal” view of the fediverse? No single authoritative view exists.

You yourself acknowledge that this is complicated, but I honestly don’t understand what appeal a hacked together fake centralized system would have for people if they don’t care about decentralization in the first place. Any such solution is almost inevitably gonna end up being janky and hacked together just to present a façade of worse Reddit.

Lemmy’s strength is its decentralization and federation. It’s not a problem to be solved, it’s a feature that’s attractive in its own right. It doesn’t need mass appeal, it’s a niche project and probably always will be. I don’t think papering over the fundamental design of the software will make it meaningfully more attractive to the non-technically minded.

melmi , 27 days ago (edited 27 days ago)

WG uses UDP, so as long as your firewall is configured correctly it should be impossible to scan the open port. Any packet hitting the open port that isn’t valid or doesn’t have a valid key is just dropped, same as any ports that are closed.

Most modern firewalls default to dropping packets, so you won’t be showing up in scans even with an open WG port.

melmi , 27 days ago

Yes, but only if your firewall is set to reject instead of drop. The documentation you linked mentions this; that’s why open ports are listed as open|filtered because any port that’s “open” might actually be being filtered (dropped).

On a modern firewall, an nmap scan will show every port as open|filtered, regardless of whether it’s open or not.

Edit: Here’s the relevant bit from the documentation:

The most curious element of this table may be the open|filtered state. It is a symptom of the biggest challenges with UDP scanning: open ports rarely respond to empty probes. Those ports for which Nmap has a protocol-specific payload are more likely to get a response and be marked open, but for the rest, the target TCP/IP stack simply passes the empty packet up to a listening application, which usually discards it immediately as invalid. If ports in all other states would respond, then open ports could all be deduced by elimination. Unfortunately, firewalls and filtering devices are also known to drop packets without responding. So when Nmap receives no response after several attempts, it cannot determine whether the port is open or filtered. When Nmap was released, filtering devices were rare enough that Nmap could (and did) simply assume that the port was open. The Internet is better guarded now, so Nmap changed in 2004 (version 3.70) to report non-responsive UDP ports as open|filtered instead.

melmi , 29 days ago

Tbf, I don’t often talk to children about work, and I don’t think most adults would want me to talk to them like a child.

Plus, talking to children doesn’t come naturally to everyone. It’s certainly not fair to describe it as “very easy”.

melmi , 30 days ago

The “make a fork” thing is part of the issue, I think. In general there’s this culture in the open source community that if you want a feature, you should implement it yourself and not expect the maintainers to implement it for you. And that’s good advice to some extent, it’s great to encourage more people to volunteer and it’s great to discourage entitlement.

But on the other hand, this is toxic because not everyone can contribute. Telling non-technical users to “make it yourself” is essentially telling them to fuck off. To use the house metaphor, people don’t usually need to design and renovate their houses on their own, because that’s not their skillset, and it’s unreasonable to expect that anyone who wants a house should become an architect.

Even among technical users, there are reasons they can’t contribute. Not everyone has time to contribute to FOSS, and that’s especially notable for non-programmers who would have to get comfortable with writing code and contributing in the first place.

melmi , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

Google destroys their own search engine by encouraging terrible SEO nonsense and then offers the solution in the form of these AI overviews, cutting results out of the picture entirely.

You search something on the Web nowadays half the results are written by AI anyway.

I don’t really care about the “human element” or whatever, but AI is such a hype train right now. It’s still early days for the tech, it still hallucinates a lot, and I fundamentally can’t trust it—even if I trusted the people making it, which I don’t.

melmi , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

Just because you can work with one monitor doesn’t mean multiple monitors isn’t more comfortable though. You can have multiple windows open at once, at full size, and glance between them freely. No need for them to share the limited real estate of a single monitor.

I run Sway on my laptop because it lets me take full advantage of my single monitor, but on my multi monitor desktop setup I use a regular floating DE.

melmi , 1 month ago

Systemd does a lot of things that could probably be separate projects, but run0 is an example of something that benefits from being a part of systemd. It ties directly into the existing service manager to spawn new processes.

melmi , 1 month ago

It definitely encrypts the traffic, the problem is that it encrypts the traffic in a recognizable way that DPI can recognize. It’s easy for someone snooping on your traffic to tell that you’re using Wireguard, but because it’s encrypted they can’t tell the content of the message.

melmi , 1 month ago

Not familiar with the game or the publisher at all, but this definitely feels like engagement bait.

melmi , 1 month ago

A lot of Linux ISOs are hybrid images which can be booted if flashed directly to a USB stick.

melmi , 1 month ago

This works because block devices like /dev/sdX are just files. If you cp a file onto another file, it overwrites the data of the destination with the source. A block device represents the device itself, not the filesystem; if you wanted to put the ISO inside the filesystem, you’d have to mount it first.

melmi , 1 month ago

I do think people get caught up in hating Epic, but the difference is that if any of those developers felt like releasing on another platform, they could. The “exclusivity”, such as it is, is just happenstance. Whereas Epic’s exclusives are largely actual contracts.

99% of the games on that list are small-time indie games that only release on Steam because that’s where the market share is, and they probably only have the dev capacity to support a single platform. Steam also has a lot of API support for devs. Those games exist on Epic too, but when people complain about Epic they aren’t complaining about those games, they’re complaining about bigger games that are artificial exclusives, timed or otherwise.

Steam offers the better customer experience, and Epic can’t compete with it, so instead they just buy exclusivity rights to games. It’s arguably anti-consumer, and definitely different from those games that just happen to only be available on one platform or another.

melmi , 1 month ago

Technically the US annexed Canada in the Fallout universe, so you could have a Canadian Fallout and still be “in the US”. Vault-Tec even started building vaults up there.

Probably won’t do that, but it would be interesting. A potentially cool idea would be to set a game on the former Canadian border. Maybe then a DLC could be in Canada proper.

melmi , 1 month ago

Because if people want to see what ChatGPT says, they can ask it themselves. You’re not contributing anything by copy-pasting from ChatGPT. If you have commentary on what ChatGPT had to say, that could be different, but you literally just used ChatGPT’s output as your whole comment.

melmi , 1 month ago

I just don’t understand why you want to copy-paste ChatGPT. Surely the parent commenter could access ChatGPT if they wanted, so you’re not bringing a new perspective. If “content” is all that matters, you could generate a thousand different ChatGPT responses and reply to their comment with each one, but that’s not acceptable. Why not?

People come here for a conversation with other people, and copy-paste ChatGPT responses don’t actually contribute to that. If all they want is information/content, there are better places to find it. They could use ChatGPT, sure, but they could also use Wikipedia or even an economics textbook. It’s up to them. Even if they use ChatGPT, they’d probably prompt it a few times in a few different ways to get the best info for them.

If you really want to use ChatGPT in your responses, why not add your own voice? When I suggested commentary I don’t mean that you should just prompt ChatGPT into pretending to be a human, I mean that you should add your own perspective. Editorialize. Pull out the good bits.

melmi , 1 month ago

There are already AI-written books flooding the market, not to mention other forms of written misinformation.

melmi , 2 months ago

If only

melmi , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Most things should be behind Authelia. It’s hard to know how to help without knowing what exactly you’re doing with it but generally speaking Authelia means you can have SSO+2FA for every app, even apps that don’t provide it by default.

It also means that if you have users, you don’t need them to store a bunch of passwords.

One big thing to keep in mind is that anything with its own login system may be more involved to get working behind Authelia, like Nextcloud.

melmi , 2 months ago

I had issues connecting to Nextcloud from mobile clients when using Authelia, they didn’t like it, but if there’s a workaround for that that’s great

melmi , 2 months ago

Goes to show I don’t know much about SSO I suppose. Time to do some more research

melmi , 2 months ago

Except GNU is a great example of an acronym that is pronounceable. It’s even in the dictionary. The GNU mascot is a gnu, in fact.

LGBTQIA+ is essentially unpronounceable, thus we treat it as an initialism. Not that that’s a requirement, there are examples like VIP where even though we could pronounce it we pronounce each letter individually.

melmi , 2 months ago

That’s not what’s going on here. It’s just doing what it’s been told, which is repeating the system prompt. It has nothing to do with Gab, this trick or variations of it work on pretty much any GPT deployment.

We need to be careful about anthropomorphizing AI.

melmi , 2 months ago

The problem with a “beneficial to humanity” axis is that I think that most people think their political beliefs, if enacted, would be beneficial to humanity. Most people aren’t the villains of their own stories.

The very act of politics is to disagree on what is best for humanity.

melmi , 2 months ago

I don’t think that “everyone is inherently equal” is a conclusion you can reach through logic. I’d argue that it’s more like an axiom, something you have to accept as true in order to build a foundation of a moral system.

This may seem like an arbitrary distinction, but I think it’s important to distinguish because some people don’t accept the axiom that “everyone is inherently equal”. Some people are simply stronger (or smarter/more “fit”) than others, they’ll argue, and it’s unjust to impose arbitrary systems of “fairness” onto them.

In fact, they may believe that it is better for humanity as a whole for those who are stronger/smarter/more fit to have positions of power over those who are not, and believe that efforts for “equality” are actually upsetting the natural way of things and thus making humanity worse off.

People who have this way of thinking largely cannot be convinced to change through pure logical argument (just as a leftist is unlikely to be swayed by the logic of a social darwinist) because their fundamental core beliefs are different, the axioms all of their logic is built on top of.

And it’s worth noting that while this system of morality is repugnant, it doesn’t inherently result in everyone killing each other like you claim. Even if you’re completely amoral, you won’t kill your neighbor because then the police will arrest you and put you on trial. Fascist governments also tend to have more punitive justice systems, to further discourage such behavior. And on the governmental side, they want to discourage random killing because they want their populace to be productive, not killing their own.

melmi , 2 months ago

But hey, instead of killing everyone, eugenics could lead us to a beautiful stratified future, like depicted in the aspirational sci-fi utopia of Brave New World!

I agree with you, ultimately. My point is just that “good for humanity vs bad for humanity” isn’t a debate, there’s no “We want to ruin humanity” party. Most people see their own viewpoint as being best for humanity, unless they’re a psychopath or a nihilist.

There are fundamental differences in political views as well as ethical beliefs, and any attempt to boil them down to “good for humanity” vs “bad for humanity” is going to be inherently political. I think “what’s best for humanity” is a good guiding metric to determine what one finds ethical, but using it to categorize others’ political beliefs is going to be divisive at best.

In other words, it’s not comparable to the left/right axis, which may be insufficient and one-dimensional, but at least it describes something that can be somewhat objective (if controversial and ill-defined). Someone can be happy with their position on the axis. Whereas if it were good/bad, everyone would place themselves at Maximum Good, therefore it’s not really useful or comparable to the left/right paradigm.

melmi , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

CSAM is supposed to be more explicit that the images are essentially crime scene photographs, and to emphasize that it is Abuse first and foremost and not merely pornography.

CP is a morally neutral term, or at least the components words themselves are. CSAM is not, and is explicitly negative.

melmi , 2 months ago

That’s I guess why CSEM is used, because if the images are being shared around exploitation has clearly occurred. I can see where you’re coming from though.

What I will say is that there are some weird laws around it, and there have even been cases where kids have been convicted of producing child pornography… of themselves. It’s a bizarre situation. If anything, seems like abuse of the court system at that point.

Luckily a lot of places have been patching the holes in their laws.

melmi , 2 months ago

These are the voyages of the starship PrtScrnprise.

melmi , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

There is a standard naming convention, and it predates the creation of Discovery. Voyager is VOY, and Enterprise is ENT. No one calls Voyager “STV”, as that would cause confusion with Star Trek V, the movie. If you’ve ever used Memory Alpha or participated in a fan community like Daystrom you’ll know that this has been standard for a long time. By extension, Discovery is DIS, Picard is PIC, and Prodigy is PRO.

DSC is a special case because it’s used internally by the production (even shows up in the show itself once or twice) so some people have taken to using it, but it’s not consistent with the other naming schemes we use so it’s not standard. In fact, when it came out that Voyager was referred to internally as VGR, basically no one switched because everyone was so used to calling it VOY.

melmi , 2 months ago

Out of curiosity, who do you see as the LGBTQ+ characters? I can think of a few, but outside of mirror universe eps no one is actually established as queer. It’s all subtext, or implied.

Then there’s the big lesbian kiss with Jadzia, and that’s awesome, but immediately after they decide that they shouldn’t be doing this and they go their separate ways, and Jadzia never to my knowledge expresses her attraction to a woman again. Even in that case, it’s unique because said woman used to be a man. It’s not Jadzia just being attracted to a woman on her own merits.

What’s big about new Trek is that the characters are actually queer in the text, not just subtext. I’m a big fan of reading Garak and Bashir as queer, but they’re fundamentally not good representation because as far as the story itself is concerned, they’re two straight men. It’s only through the actors’ performances that the queer implications shine through.

melmi , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

I disagree. It would be better to set a precedent that using people’s voices without permission is not okay. Even in your example, you’re suggesting that you would have a Patreon while publishing mods that contain voice clips made using AI. In this scenario, you’ve made money from these unauthorized voice recreations. It doesn’t matter if you’re hoping to one day hire the VAs themselves, in the interim you’re profiting off their work.

Ultimately though, I don’t think it matters if you’re making money or not. I got caught up in the tech excitement of voice AI when we first started seeing it, but as we’ve had the strike and more VAs and other actors sharing their opinions on it I’ve come to be reminded of just how important consent is.

In the OP article, Amelia Tyler isn’t saying anything about making money off her voice, she said “to actually take my voice and use it to train something without my permission, I think that should be illegal”. I think that’s a good line to draw.

melmi , 2 months ago

This is certainly an interesting topic. There are men who are comfortable wearing dresses and wearing makeup and all that, just as there are women who are comfortable with cutting their hair short and wearing baggy clothes and all that. It’s also true that those people are sometimes harassed and called “eggs” by people who are ostensibly trans-friendly (especially fem-presenting guys).

But I don’t think that that is equivalent to the trans experience. I assume you’re not trans, correct me if I’m wrong, but dysphoria is a real thing that for many people is very deeply related to physical body parts, and your theory just doesn’t account for that at all. I don’t think that your average fem-presenting guy wants to take HRT to get breasts, let alone go to the extra length of getting bottom surgery and get vaginoplasty. There’s clearly something more about dysphoria than it just being a matter of what they like differing from what’s socially acceptable, unless you broaden it so wide as “liking having breasts or a vagina” or “liking having a penis”, and even that is a stretch because dysphoria is a very visceral sense of wrongness in one’s body that goes much deeper than just preferring a different body part.

Not all dysphoria is physical, either. It can relate to misgendering, or any number of societal things that aren’t necessarily related to just what we’re “allowed” to do. Frankly, unless gender is outright abolished and there are no longer distinctions between genders or even societal differentiation between sexes, I don’t see it going away. And even in a post-gender world, I imagine there would still be trans people (perhaps by another name) who experienced physical dysphoria.

Your theory also doesn’t account for trans people who present as would be socially acceptable for their assigned gender at birth, and have interests that are similar to their AGAB, but still identify as trans and even may experience dysphoria.

All in all, while I appreciate your conclusion to support trans people, I disagree with your reasoning. I don’t think that being trans is merely a result of one’s likes not being in line with societal norms. I think it goes much deeper than that, and can’t be reduced to such a simple cause.

melmi , 2 months ago

I would rather X didn’t get access to deadly neurotoxin, thanks

melmi , 2 months ago

There are two Star Trek total conversions for Stellaris, even, each with their own unique approach. New Civilizations might even be a little better, imo.

Also, Resurgence already came out, to mixed reviews—but no microtransactions! It’s coming out on Steam in May, but that’s because it was a timed Epic exclusive.

melmi , 2 months ago

I tried to play it when it came out, but there were some visual issues that started to give me a migraine so I put it down and just haven’t picked it up since. At some point I’ll give it another shot and see if they fixed the migraine issue haha

melmi , 2 months ago

I have nothing wrong with lighthearted takes on Trek, but choosing to make the movie about “fascist space emperor joins the CIA” lighthearted seems like a dubious choice. I guess we’ll see how they portray it but given how Trek has handled S31 so far, I don’t want to get my hopes up.

melmi , 2 months ago

Unless they’re running LFS, I don’t see the point. By the time the antivirus database is updated, surely an update will be available in the package repo?

The Linux ecosystem is built around package repos rather than manually installed software, so antivirus makes even less sense on Linux than it does on Windows. If there’s malware it’ll get removed from the repo as soon as it’s detected.

melmi , 2 months ago

I feel like this would be spotted and stamped out immediately. Everyone’s eyes are on Threads right now; astroturfed content might sneak in on Mastodon, where regular Threads content will be mixed in with the hypothetical astroturfed content, but here on Lemmy there will be little to no Threads presence due to lack of interoperability, so every single Threads account that shows up will be noticed. It’s already super visible when Mastodon users show up due to the weird formatting issues that happen due to the lack of support.

I just don’t see an astroturf campaign as being viable unless Threads implements community functionality, which seems pretty far out when they’re only now implementing basic federation with Mastodon.

melmi , 2 months ago

These are all rough averages, of course, but Tweets can be rather bigger than 140 bytes since they’re Unicode, not ASCII. What’s Twitter without emoji?

melmi , 2 months ago

We already have a confusing abbreviation: B vs b. One is bits, one is bytes.

It’s a pretty drastic difference. One Gb per second is only 125 MB per second. Don’t mess up your capitalization!

melmi , 3 months ago

I can understand the concern with the ethics of AI art and plagiarism, but you’re painting with a broad brush when you say that computer engineering can’t be art.

Without considering AI, you can certainly make art through code. Math can be beautiful. Shaders in particular are a ripe avenue for programmatically generating art.

There are a lot of artists out there creating art through code, and there have been for significantly longer than the AI fad has been around. The act of creating the art is simply in writing the code, rather than in picking up a paintbrush. I doubt you accuse people who paint in Photoshop of “letting the computer paint for them”, even if they use filters or something like the bucket fill tool. That’s code creating art right there. But someone still had to input creativity, and writing code to create art that looks good requires creativity and effort and is absolutely art.

AI art has different problems with it, but “programming isn’t art” isn’t one of those reasons.

melmi , 3 months ago

My analogy was off the mark a bit, you’re right. But for example, have you seen some of the stuff people have made on Shadertoy? Incredible art, made from pure shader code.

melmi , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

Why would a random browser extension take it upon itself to snoop on your traffic to ensure that the websites you’re using can’t be used for illegal things, and then intentionally break it if it detects something it thinks it’s illegitimate? That’s a huge breach of privacy. It’s just malware at that point. It’s not like a court of law would hold your browser extensions responsible for your piracy. That’s like blaming a cup holder because the car was used in a robbery.

No, I think this is just a bug. Especially since people have reported that the extension breaks other websites too.

melmi , 3 months ago

Did you use AI to write this? Kinda ironic, don’t you think?

melmi , 3 months ago

If you wrote this yourself, that’s even more ironic, because you used the same format that ChatGPT likes to spit out. Humans influence ChatGPT -> ChatGPT influences humans. Everything’s come full circle.

I ask though because on your profile you’ve used ChatGPT to write comments before.

melmi , 3 months ago

So this is just a thing now? Removing media from the world?

They found out it works so now it’s gonna become a trend.

melmi , 3 months ago

Like other people have said, this is very similar to how the Internet already works. All you need to do to connect to the Internet is connect to a single router that’s a part of it, at least in theory. The Internet is already decentralized on the backend, it’s just that only big players get to be a part of it for the most part.

A fundamental problem with your decentralization idea is that on a mesh network, you become reliant on your upstream(s) for your connection. You think Comcast is annoying, or your connection is slow? Imagine trying to troubleshoot your Internet connection and having to go deal with your neighbor instead, but he’s at work so you have to wait for him, but oh he’s too tired so he’ll help you tomorrow…

Not to mention that this severely limits speeds. No longer can your connection go from your house, to the street, to the backbone, and then straight to Google’s servers, now it has to go bounce around between a number of potentially unreliable consumer connections, run by non-professionals.

In a system like this, inevitably local organizations or companies will pop up to take the burden off individuals, which would provide massive QoL improvements, and we’d end up with ISPs again.

That said, there’s a lot of people doing hobby network stuff out there. I know some hackerspaces have their own local hobbynets, that then connect to each other over the open Internet using VPN tunnels. This solves some of the reliability problem, plus it’s just a hobby thing so it isn’t a problem that it’s slow and kinda bad. Then there are even individuals who get their own routers (or VPSes) and plop them in datacenters to participate in the internet alongside big companies and ISPs. Neither of these require new protocols, everything can be done with TCP/IP and BGP. (Plus a splash of VPN protocols here and there.)