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r00ty Admin

@[email protected]

I'm the administrator of kbin.life, a general purpose/tech orientated kbin instance.

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Are they the same people that say we shouldn't ask for a pay-rise because the cost of everything is going up, because it will cause the cost of stuff to go up even more? Or the same tools operating the Bank of England increasing interest rates to curb inflation despite that fact the only prices inflating now are food (and I guess property rent), i.e. essentials we NEED to buy causing food poverty and/or home repossessions?

I don't doubt they're super smart at economics. I just think they might have lost touch with the effect these ideas (like the one in this post) have on real people.

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You'll get a new one, with blackjack and hookers.

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Well, I can confirm you made it all the way across the fediverse divide into my kbin instance fine.

not seeing any non negligible difference between 60 and 120 Hz, am I weird?

Just got a new phone (OnePlus Nord 3), turned refresh rate HUD in developer settings and I see some parts of the system and some apps display 120 Hz but I have problem noticing any difference, same with my wife’s Redmi Note 12, i have to look very carefully and maaaybe I notice some different, not sure

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I think in most cases it won't matter, and many people cannot perceive the difference.

But from my own experience I did the csgo sniper test map (where you look down to the doors and shoot the random npc players that will jump across).

While I didn't think it felt different I could consistently hit at more than twice the rate on 144hz vs 60.

After using 144hz for a while there is a more visible juddering when switching to 60. But it's not jarring or annoying.

So I'd say for most cases it doesn't matter. If you play fps games, there's a definite advantage to a higher frame rate. Unconsciously I guess you're able to use that extra info.

This isn't new either. I used to play Cs1.6 on crt. We'd often play on a lower resolution to get higher screen refresh. My screen would for example show 800x600 at 120hz.

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That was kinda the other way round. But it's set in 2028... So maybe.

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This is going to be true of any open standard used by multiple vendors. As all the software matures this will be less of an issue. I think in terms of adoption it's still early days yet.

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There at least needs to be some extensions. I'm thinking of methods of secure migration (both instance: domain to domain and user: instance to instance) and a method for adopting a community that existed on a now offline instance.

Why does it seem different platforms of the fediverse are not so good at communicating with each other? Is this something that will eventually improve? (kbin.social)

I have an account on kbin. Recently I saw a post across my feed in which a magazine that I follow (that's based on a Lemmy instance) was celebrating over 1k subscribers. When I visited, I saw only 240 or so....

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This is where things get even more confusing. Kbin DOES have boosts. Plus upvotes and downvotes. So, mastedon boosts become boosts. Lemmy upvotes become upvotes. Lemmy downvotes become. Well nothing right now. There's a lot of things that are still work in progress and even though they all talk the same protocol there are concepts that are interpreted differently.

There's also the standard, and then what's generally used. I fixed an issue recently with kbin, which was happening on the rare occasion I had an interaction with "lotide" (another activitypub program). Lemmy and kbin (and probably mastedon, I dunno) always put "To" and "Cc" as a json array even if there's just one element. But lotide doesn't if there is only one item (often the case in To). This is fine as far as I can see in ActivityPub's structure. But, kbin expected an array. These kind of things are going to be ironed out now there's far more content moving around. The errors will be appearing in our logs and they will be gradually resolved.

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Half right. I can talk from kbin->kbin/lemmy. Since that is what I'm doing here.

Yep, when you search for a remote community your instance will connect to the remote one to look for that community/group/user. If it finds it, it will show all the info about it. Kbin will also automatically subscribe you to it.

Once the remote instance has your subscription, from that moment on it will send all interactions with that community to your instance. This results in some confusing things happening. You'll see a lot of new stuff start to appear, but sometimes old stuff, but not all old stuff. The reason for this is, if someone on another instance comments or likes a comment on old content, your local instance will not be able to action that like (or at least show it) or comment without getting the comments above that one up to the post. Which is why you'll see a mix of old and new content, but never all of it.

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Yes, that's likely exactly what happened.

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No. Both UDP and TCP can be intercepted the same. The difference is that UDP sends a packet to an address. But doesn't have any in built system to check that it arrived, that it arrived intact or to resend if it didn't. There's also no built in way to protect against spoofing or out of order packet delivery. But generally implementations will handle the ones that are important of those themselves.

TCP establishes a circuit, packets are sent, verified and resent if required until the original data, in the correct order is delivered to the application. Also there is some protection against spoofing with sequence numbering. The downside is that time sensitive data might be delayed because of the retransmission and re-assembling. Which is why time sensitive streams like VoIP are usually sent over UDP.

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Yeah, this is a known interoperability thing between kbin and lemmy. So, I'm afraid I can't give you this week's lottery numbers ahead of time.

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Nah, it was TCP. But there was a pixel out and didn't pass checksum. This is the retransmission.

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Re-federation is probably possible. BUT! You're going to always have problems with older content. Case in point my federation error messages is at 2300. About half are failed requests on fmhy.ml.

So for re-federation what's needed:

1: Remote instances should unsubscribe all users from any fmhy groups. They're dead now. They can only announce that and hope they do. I reckon when their errors start ramping up (as I saw yesterday) they will be looking into why. Probably to help de-federate from the old URL
2: The fmhy instance should unsubscribe all users from all remote groups but keep a note of the groups while identifying as fmhy.ml. Then once on a configuration for the new domain re-subscribe to each one. The first step should hopefully stop them trying (and failing) to federate new events to the old URL. The second step should trigger federation with the new one.
3: They could be able to keep the DB. But I am not sure in what places the old domain might be stored in the DB and what would need fixing there. Also not sure if they'd need to regenerate keys. Not sure if they'll see the key was attached to the old domain and refuse to talk to the instance.

Now what's going to be a problem? Well ALL the existing content out there has references to users on the old domain. It's VERY hard to fix that. Like every instance would need to fix their database. Not worth it. But, whenever someone likes/unlikes or comments or whatever a post made from fmhy.ml then there's a good chance a remote instance will queue up a retrieval of:

1: User info about the poster/commentor/liker
2: Missing comments/posts for a like/comment event

And those will fail and error log. I don't think there's a way around that aside from editing the whole database on every instance. Again, IMO not worth it.

Would be a nice federation feature if, provided you could identify with the correct private key, announce a domain change which would automatically trigger the above in federated instances, or at the very least some kind of internal redirect for outgoing messages.

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Yes, although you might need to fudge keys if they're properly enforced. Looking at kbin I can see requests are at least signed with the private key. Not sure if the public key is stored somewhere in database, or is pulled from the instance using DNS as a security guarantor (I guess) every time.

I don't have any subscriptions to them, but I have those 1000+ errors just from posts their users were involved in.

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Possibly. I think mastadon has been around a bit longer though? Not sure why the old domain must be up. Unless they don't store public keys of known instances and they rely on DNS for the security.

e.g. Instance A signs a request, Instance B queries Instance A via DNS lookup (as is normal) and checks public key confirms signature and allows it.

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Yeah, which is why I think storing remote user and instance public keys might be better. Then that can be used to authenticate the migration request (it'd probably need to be an extension to the activitypub standard).

The biggest problem I see is that an instance doesn't know about all the instances that have data pointing to them. So how does it communicate the changes to everyone? The mastadon way is probably the sensible way to do it, despite not supporting the loss of control of domain scenario.

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Even now? I remember when it was new I tried it, must have been 20 or so years ago. Super fast for the time, but had a nack for randomly corrupting data. After the third reformat, I went back to ext2.

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Oh. I did not know that! I thought it was some vague reference to losing entire weekends fixing the corrupt data.

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I think so. The fact they did this almost certainly knowing exactly what would be made makes it clear. They did this for pure engagement numbers. The saying used to be "Any publicity is good publicity", now it seems it's more like "Any engagement is good engagement".

Anybody remember Usenet? (kbin.social)

So I've finally been doing my little reddit/twitter migration against my better judgement (my better judgement would say to take the opportunity to get off the internet but who listens to that loser). I'm finding all these platforms interesting, I particularly like how kbin combines both formats and links up to Mastodon, that's...

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Yeah, I was going to say. Usenet now is spam and piracy. I think the last time I used it for its proper purpose was the early 2000s.

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It actually worked in a very similar way. The only difference was you needed to make connections with other servers manually.

But once you had that connection, your server subscribes to groups and once subscribed would get sent all future articles which you'd store locally and serve to clients.

That's the real difference. Fediverse gives everyone access unless explicitly blocked. Usenet only gave access to known servers.

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But the reason 1 cannot work for federation is because an instance doesn't know about other instances. To work you need to be able to reach out. But a new instance doesn't know about any other instances.

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Ads is my line in the sand. They bring in ads on my tier (HD 2 connections) and they'll be dropped in a flash.

The streaming market was good when Netflix were pretty much the main game in town and had most of the content.

I don't want to pirate. But I also don't want a huge monthly bill for multiple services with multiple interfaces to get still less content. I kept Netflix around but any shenanigans that effect me and I'm out.

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Here's the thing. The Terminator movies were a warning against government/army AI. Actually slightly before that I guess wargames was too. But, honestly I'm not worried about military AI taking over.

I think if the military setup an AI, they would have multiple ways to kill it off in seconds. I mean, they would be in a more dangerous position to have an AI "gone wild". But not because of the movies, but because of how they work, they would have a lot of systems in place to mitigate disaster. Is it possible to go wrong? Yes. Likely? No.

I'm far more worried about the geeky kid that now has access to open source AI that can be retasked. Someone that doesn't understand the consequences of their actions fully, or at least can't properly quantify the risks they're taking. But, is smart enough to make use of these tools to their own end.

Some of you might still be teenagers, but those that aren't, remember back. Wouldn't you potentially think it'd be cool to create an auto gpt or some form of adversarial AI with an open ended success criteria that are either implicitly dangerous and/or illegal, or are broad enough to mean the AI will see the easiest path to success is to do dangerous and/or illegal things to reach its goal. You know, for fun. Just to see if it would work.

I'm not convinced the AI is quite there yet to be dangerous, or maybe it is. I've honestly not kept close tabs on this. But, when it does reach that level of maturity, a lot of the tools are still open source, they can be modified, any protections removed "for the lols" or "just to see what it can do" and someone without the level of control a government/military entity has could easily lose control of their own AI. That's what scares me, not a Joshua or Skynet.

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That's a real concern. In the long run it will likely backfire. AI needs human input to work. If it starts getting other AI fed as its input, things will start to go bad in a fairly short order. Also, that is another point. Big business is likely another probable source of runaway AI. I trust business use of AI less than anyone else.

There's also a critical mass to unemployment to which revolution is inevitable. There would likely be UBI and an assured standard of living when we get close to that, and you'd be able to try to make extra money from your passion. I don't doubt that corporations will happily dump their employees for AI at a moment's notice once it's proved out. Big business is extremely predictable in that sense. Zero forward planning beyond the current quarter. But I have some optimism that some common sense would prevail from some source, and they'd not just leave 50%+ of the population to die slowly.

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Don't discount the possibility that some people that use vim, are old enough to remember using vi, over a modem connection. When you know the keyboard shortcuts it can be a lot quicker too even now.

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Well it is. But back on unix proper it was just called vi, not vim (aliased to vi)

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A lot of the things I'm using are generally hangovers from those low bandwidth days. I've opened a file and I know what I want is a way down? Not a problem 10-Page down to move 10 pages down the file without sending all that to the terminal.

What to cut the next 5 lines into the buffer? 5dd. Move to the line you want to paste to. Want to remove the next 5 characters? 5x. Often on a slow link moving your cursor along had a delay. But if you knew how far you needed to go you could do 30+arrow right to get the cursor to move directly there.

I think most are obsolete now, but I'm still used to using them out of habit mostly.

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You think anyone above line manager realises that cloud problems are beyond the remit of whatever is left of their IT dept?

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Weird, my company uses Exchange online and I didn't notice. Perhaps because I'm slacking reading/replying here!

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I think this is right but to make it work you'd need to do one of two things to pull it off. First off, if you're doing it just for Web the nginx proxy putting original ip in the header and unpacking on the other side is the smart move. Otherwise.

1: route all your traffic on your side via the vpn, and have the routing on the vpn side forward the packets to the intranet ip on your side not do dnat on it.

2: if you want to route normal traffic over your normal link then you could do it with source routing on the router. You would need two subnets, one for your normal Internet and one for the vpn traffic. Setup source routing to route packets with the vpn ip addresses go via vpn and the rest nat the normal way then the same as before, vpn on cloud forwards not nat to your side of the vpn.

In both cases snat should be done on the cloud side.

It's a fiddly setup just to get the ip addresses though.

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Well, I was replying to OP through your reply since it was pretty much spot on. Except I was giving some idea of other ways to bring the original IP through a VPN using the linux ip stack features. Whatever way they go about it, it's a lot of effort for not that much upside though.

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Simpsons did it, Simpsons did it!

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Or just post from kbin. I only get the upvotes. I'm shielded from all the negativity.

No, Ernest don't fix that it's fine!

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I think the problem is people say lemmy when they mean either. My cheat sheet.

Fediverse: a family of applications that are able to communicate with each other and provide various facilities.

Threadiverse: subset of the fediverse, any federated program providing content aggregation / forum facilities.

Lemmy: the main established application in the genre. Providing a primarily content aggregation and forum redditesque experience.

Kbin: newer project providing the news aggregation and forum features but also micro logging that works with mastadon.

Others I don't know about but do exist.

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You are reading a post from kbin right now, typed from my phone.

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Every instance is doing this, right now. When you post on one instance, every instance with a single subscriber to the community gets sent a copy.

On kbin, even the media is stored on the instance. It helps distribute the load. Instances share posts between instances which can then each support many users.

In terms of "taking over" a community. Not so easy.

See, I could take [email protected] from my instance, do some SQL hacking and turn it into a local community. But, that would only work on my instance. Everyone else would still be following the original and the original would still exist.

For it to work it needs to be a co-ordinated community move.

Mods pick an instance with as much of the original data already federated as possible. They communicate the new home. People start subscribing, the old group is made read only with a message linking the new one.

To keep existing posts though other instances would also need to SQL hack. So adding some features to communicate and automate the SQL effort would be a nice thing.

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The public links with post and comment in are used specifically for federation and can only really be used to build a hierarchy upwards. The use case for this probably will make it make more sense.

Say I subscribe to a remote community from my instance. I won't get anything specifically until an activity happens. The first activity I get is a like for a comment. But I don't have the comment. But luckily the like message has a link to the comment URL. So now I can fetch that. But how can I just show a comment out of context? I cannot, but the comment json tells me what it is in reply to. Maybe a post, maybe another comment. I can just keep fetching up the tree until I get to the post. Once I have all that I have something that can be rendered, the whole hierarchy from the liked comment to the post.

That's why it works that way. It's probably just to save on DB queries, why query the DB for all the comments if in normal federation use case it already has the comment(s) it wants if it reached the post.

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You can see the hierarchy above not below.

You might get a like. It looks like:

like: [
    "id" => "https://lemmy.one/activities/like/7d0ef24f-755f-48dd-9b37-ea42041cb34e",
    "actor" => "https://lemmy.one/u/Matt",
    "object" => "https://lemmy.procrastinati.org/comment/146844",
    "type" => "Like",
    "audience" => "https://lemdro.id/c/android"
]

In the object property you see the comment. If you visit that you'll get among the rest of the json for the comment

"inReplyTo": "https://lemmy.world/comment/1269475",

And again

"inReplyTo": "https://lemdro.id/post/77457",

Now you have the hierarchy from the like's comment to the post. Not the rest of the tree, enough to render the comment in context though.

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I expect it does, from the lemmy API. But from the ActivityPub api, it doesn't make sense to.

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If people say lemmy, I just mentally include kbin. Because by and large they don't realise people on kbin are reading and replying to their comments and probably don't realise it's not all just lemmy. It's just see lemmy as threadiverse for most purposes.

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I don't think I'd call it close to an exodus. But, really that doesn't matter. It doesn't matter to us if people are leaving reddit. What matters is that there's enough people here to create a feed with interesting subjects that we can reply to, or we can create content and people will likely reply to it.

We're at that critical mass now where the content isn't really a problem. There's plenty.

While we have that happening, over time as reddit do more corporately motivated rubbish to their users, they will be looking for alternatives and the threadiverse should be a tempting one.

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I don't know. If you locked someone in a room. Showed them a single news broadcast, and from then on just replayed back at them anything they say.. They'd go mad too.

How do we know that everyone on the internet isn't just a bot?

I mean, there might be a secret AI technology that is so advanced to the point that it can mimic a real human, make posts and comments that looks like its written by a human and even intentionally doing speling mistakes to simulate human errors. How do we know that such AI hasn’t already infiltrated the internet and everything...

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If you've not made an AI bot version of yourself to post stuff online, what are you even doing with your life?

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Ah, you're on the free plan.

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I like to think that this "strike" came about because an actor watched that black mirror episode, and thought "cool!". Right up until their friend said "They can almost do that you know" and they were like "WHAT WHAT WHAAAAAT?"

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