A software developer and Linux nerd, living in Germany. I’m usually a chill dude but my online persona doesn’t always reflect my true personality. Take what I say with a grain of salt, I usually try to be nice and give good advice, though.
I’m into Free Software, selfhosting, microcontrollers and electronics, freedom, privacy and the usual stuff. And a few select other random things as well.
Uh sorry, is there a good way to tell RAM usage on a different phone with more RAM? I didn’t find any usage number in the settings. It’s a ~50MB app. So at leat they didn’t include as much bloat as other apps do… You can try it. It allows you do watch videos right away, without signing up.
There’s good and bad tools out there? Most free internet services that pop up on the first page of Google are in fact rubbish. But that doesn’t mean there’s good ones. I once tried tools for detecting AI text for a different reason and there were one or two who didn’t have any false positives with the 20-30 example texts I tried. Schools and universities have come to use the same tools. Seems they also look at how people are typing, that’s pretty much 100% accurate, but people do both.
There’s also crazy different approaches out there. Like looking at the probability distribution of the vocabulary and see if that matches ChatGPT. And it’ll be a certain unique probability distribution since that’s what ChatGPT is. It has to leave a fingerprint, since it’s picking the words based on probability. And there’s more good strategies. We have one or two open-source tools which demonstrate how it can be done without AI. There’s of course also the option to train another AI model / classifier to figure out what constitutes AI text and what isn’t. That also works.
And @cinoreus@lemmy.world : Another democracy idea I recently wrote down somewhere, was the idea of German clubs / organizations I’m familiar with. That can be anything from a few people do sports once a week, maybe your boy scouts, or KDE e.V. or the Free Software Foundation Europe e.V.
That’s a legal status. Comes with minimum standards. But I think one clever thing about it is how it tends to push democracy down to the members / people involved. Like: you have to come up with your individual statute, you’re responsible to appoint your management board. And your highest body is the general assembly. The people in power are more in a role to execute what the organization wants. Specifics are down to what the members like to implement.
And the authorities don’t care too much(?!). There’s standards on how clubs have to operate. Like your group needs to follow a purpose and write it down. Simple majority rule for regular decisions in the general assembly, 75% majority votes to change the statute. But you do it as a community, you do your statute, assemblies, subgroups and elections and then you get to identify with it. Government doesn’t hold your hands too much from my perspective. They’ll read the statue and care if it meets the requirements. And later on they’ll simply need to (occasionally) check whether your organization is up to their own statute. Especially once there’s complaints. (And Germans love to complain, so you can be sure there will be feedback once something remotely goes wrong.)
And in practice, you’ll get things like a regular general assembly. You can come as a member, listen to the board explain what they did, what issues they faced, what they spent your membership fee on… Maybe you’re in a position to vote on something or elect the next board. Or give your opinion on whether you’re alright with what your old board did. Sometimes you can send in ideas as a member and make people decide on it. And someone is going to write a summary so there’s accountability for third parties in case they’re interested.
My idea was to push people towards something more like a grassroots democracy. Maybe as an admin I don’t care too much with making exact rules that fit for every community. Maybe democracy should be done and be alive / lived by the involved people themselves. That’ll strengthen their group cohesion. And they need to live it anyway. Make them come up with an idea for a community along with goals and rules, the first board of moderators, signed by 7 people and off they go. After that you (as an admin) just check on them. See if they do general assemblies at regular intervals, if those meet your minimum democratic requirements. But other than that they get to live democracy and the community put in the work to make it happen. And what they have to do is send back some accountability to retain their status as a democratic entity.
(And depending on the minimum requirements set, this might even include an Athens style democracy, if a communitiy likes to come up with a statute like that.)
Hmmh. Good point. One remark I have: That’s kind of made for councils. So you get a representative sample of the population. And than you have like 501 individuals to discuss and make policy. I’m not entirely sure, but it feels to me there’s a lower boundary with group size. Once you randomly sample just 3 individuals, I’d be surprised it works as I expect you more to end up with randomness (in the decisions as well). Not with representation.
But also doesn’t feel like a new problem to me. For example the US Americans sample their juries in a court. On the other hand they don’t randomly sample the sheriff. Looks to me someone already put in some thought. And there’s extra things. Like extra steps when sampling the jurors. It’s not …here’s your jury, off you go… But there’s an entire complicated extra process to it. I suppose that might be related to something like the comparatively small group size of such a jury.
I think it’s a great idea. Why the Athens way with a lottery, though? Is that to address some specific thing, or just because you’d like to see how it goes? Because we kind of moved away from that in modern democracy, and now we do elections instead of a lottery. Likely because of …reasons.
Time slots etc also good ideas. We already have to factor that in because the userbase lives in vastly different timezones. And it’s great if spam etc gets removed in a timely matter and we don’t always have to wait until it’s 5pm in the States. Some good mod and admin teams already do it.
I have a suggestion and an explanation…
We software developers tend to send that kind of information anyway. We tend to get bug reports “I didn’t get a message” or “The button XY doesn’t work properly” and now it’s massively helpful information whether to look for the bug in Lemmy’s codebase, or in Summit. Or any of the other 5 clients. It’s also not what people usually complain about. I mean you’re sending your entire username to the server, so you’re 100% identifiable. And then the server operator knows when you’re awake and scrolling, based on when you send requests to the server. What exactly you like to click on and read… So you pretty much have to trust your server admins anyway. A user agent string is more information. But sending it or not sending it both leaves you 100% identifiable once you log in.
And Tealk is right as well. We’ve now come to use it in the war against the AI scrapers. They’ve nearly brought several Fediverse servers to their knees. It’s only due to patterns in the traffic like this (and JavaScript to burn CPU cycles on your device) that still allows us to distinguish you from the AI companies so we can fulfill your requests instead of letting the bots use up all the bandwidth. The current situation is real bad. And turned out the user agent string, while technically not being essential for the servers, they’re a real good telltale sign for this. It’s my first line of defense, since blocking IP ranges got meaningless.
As a suggestion: If it’s not in any of the existing Apps: Request it. Find the one or two App(s) you like the most. Navigate to their bugtracker and feature requests. And ask politely whether they’d like to add that feature for you. Maybe other people are interested as well. Include a bit of info: what you’d like the app to do. why. and a few words about your specific use-case. Maybe you can get a conversation going.
How about a Privacy Web-Browser? For example IronFox is a privacy-oriented Firefox fork. By default it does send an user agent string. But you can make it install addons, for example an addon to change the user agent string to something generic (and fake).
To be honest, this is a very specific method, and I don’t know which problem we’re facing. So this might as well be some A-B problem. So what are you trying to achieve?
I usually start with the Wikipedia Article when I’m interested in new things. It’ll have many references at the bottom to read more about a concept.
Interestingly enough, there’s zero mention of Claude in there. And when I google it, there’s many very convoluted blog posts. And I can’t tell whether it’s above my head or hallucinated stories. They go on for like 20 pages but don’t really explain anything with all those words. Or what they actually found in Claude’s code.
Symbolic-AI in itself isn’t too hard. That’s stuff from the 1980s and in every computer science textbook. Just no clue how something like an expert system is supposed to be connected to a Chatbot or programming agent.
Totally agree. First of all with the Linux vs Meme… Yeah, we’re all living in more than one dimension. Guess I more or less wanted to say, most helpful advice I got on what non-spec combinations of RAM and computers work etc… I got from Reddit. I think it’s a bit an amount of users thing.
I’m also for human connection. I’m also here to talk to people. Especially in the comments. Also why I sometimes disagree with people on what the Threadiverse needs more of.
With the pamphlet bombings… Well, the internet changed a lot in my lifetime. We had times we thought it was a bit unethical to do statistics on what software you install, hence what packages in Debian are installed how many times. As a more privacy-oriented person you were told to just put it out there and not worry about collecting that kind of data… Or just write your Blog mainly for yourself and maybe some people will like it as well. I think as of today, that’s very niche way of thinking. Thanks to the advertising industry, we need exact page impressions. And everyone expects social media to come with all these engagement metrics, how many people saw the post… Not only professional “influencers”. I’ve heard random people will also have a look at the numbers. And your local youth organization also wants to know about the propagation of their invitation to the summer party. What the algorithm does to their posts, etc… Just counting how many people showed up isn’t how communication works any more. At least in my experience.
I’ve upheld the opinion, the change in the MAU is probably a rough indicator on our attractiveness. If a place is nice, people will come and want to join the party. But it’s a bit of a diffuse metric and doesn’t tell anything in specific. Plus it’s not the only factor.
If my quickly written down SQL query is right, those are the numbers for the last month from my instance’s perspective (my subscribed communities):
num_comments | upvotes_on_posts | downvotes_on_posts | num_posts
--------------+------------------+--------------------+-----------
188597 | 1646685 | 46461 | 13928
So without the boosts, it’d be a total score of 135.
I guess with statistics, you’d always better ask a very specific question. I mean, these are just numbers, I guess? And if you’re fixing an old Linux computer, there is no point in lots of people commenting on meme posts. You want the one person who’s done this before to be part of the network, read your post and then reply… Or if you want to discuss politics, all the people re-posting the news articles on geopolitics don’t really count, you’ve already read the newspaper, now you’d like nuanced opinions in the comments. I’m a bit unsure whether a single abstract number means anything.
For the health of the overall network, I think MAU isn’t even all that bad. There’s probably a strong connection between “health” of a place, and how many people think it’s worth subscribing and then coming back on a regular basis.
Solid choice. I like Flask’s design. They have good documentation as well. And PieFed (and probably lots of other projects) also rely on flask-login and all these extensions.
I think Quart is the more modern (async) Flask successor. Or people use FastAPI, … That’s where active development happens. The Flask ecosystem is more stable, mature I guess? There’s plenty old plugins without recent updates. But most I had a look at were written in a very clean way, and they’re probably perfectly fine. Unless they’re niche or you find some discussion about security-related stuff in the bugtracker.
Yeah, It’s a weak point anyway. While the graphs aren’t detailed research, there’s also no reason to believe dbzer0’s perspective on the same network includes 8 times as many new users as LW for some reason. Or all the users in their communities have 8x worse karma for some external reasons. So we probably need further research.
It’s the “anarchist” mindset 🫣
Yes. As far as I know, any gguf file should be completely safe. There had been some bugs/security vulnerabilities early on in llama.cpp, but they fixed that and I think overall, they have a good track record.
Issues might come after that, if you run some Agents on top of it, and give them access to your computer. But you don’t have to do that. If you just talk to it, I don’t see any reason to be alarmed. Other than the usual stuff. Keep using your own brain once in a while, and don’t blindly trust what AI Chatbots tell you, they give inaccurate information all the time 😅
I’ve never heard that story. I think they might be hallucinating or trolling. Of course if you pull random Docker containers or execute some Github project to try new AI, you’re running other people’s code, and that could do arbitrary things…
But that’s not what we do. Usually, we download models in safetensors format, or gguf. And those are specifically designed to prevent this very thing, and not contain executable code.
Tools and MCP servers are a different story. Once you give your LLM access to the internet, it …well… has access to the internet. It mostly does what it’s supposed to do. But there’s occasional stories how someone’s AI Agent deleted all their email. Or reproduced some scifi story tropes and tried to use the internet to blackmail their user. AI can also make mistakes. Like you tell it to write a software project and it accidentally includes your password and API key. Or tell private information about you to other people if you grant it generous access to everything. The news about OpenClaw is full of hilarous anecdotes about things going wrong.
I’d ask someone who needs these transcriptions first. I tend more towards “Nay”. I mean if they want AI transcriptions, I guess they could just run their own AI. And that way they get to choose between human and AI ones. I’m kind of against flooding the internet with AI content as long as the recipients can do it themselves.