CoderKat

CoderKat, 10 months ago

You gotta stop counting total users. Only active users should be counted. We know there's utterly massive numbers of bots being created. Plus people have multiple accounts from trying out different instances even if they'll only use one.

CoderKat, 10 months ago

One thing I'll say is that both kbin and Lemmy need improvements in order to recommend smaller instances. The UX around being the first in the server to subscribe to a sub is really, really bad. Seriously, try it if you haven't yet. Magazine search won't find the sub. It won't show up on the front page. If you try and visit the sub, you'll get a 404 and no way to subscribe. You have to know specifically how to search for the sub in order to get the option to subscribe, and even then you won't see any existing content in it.

The problem is less impactful in larger instances because there's a better chance that you're not the first or that the sub was basically "seeded" for major instances. It's a terrible divide in UX.

CoderKat, 10 months ago

Strongly agreed. I view this as the biggest issue with LLMs. They will hallucinate a confidently incorrect answer for those cases. It makes them misinformation machines.

CoderKat, 10 months ago

A little, but I kinda love it. It's a feeling of so many options and I find it kinda exciting.

CoderKat, 10 months ago

-1

197

Banana

CoderKat, 10 months ago

Yeah. Some people don't like it out of concerns of privacy, but it's worth it, since letting your website get overrun by bots will kill it.

CoderKat, 10 months ago

Yeah. A bad faith admin can bypass pretty much whatever they want. They can even leave captchas and such on to give the impression that captchas aren't working, because they can just create accounts through direct database access (which can instantly create as many accounts as you want).

Without some central or trusted way to ensure that accounts are created only while jumping through the right hoops, it's utterly trivial to create bots.

Perhaps it's even a sign that we shouldn't bother trying to stop bots at sign up. We could instead have something like when you post on a server, that server will send you a challenge (such a captcha) and you must solve the challenge for the post to go through. We could require that for the first time you post on each server, but to keep it from being really annoying, we could make it so that servers can share that they verified an account and we'd only acknowledge that verification if it comes from a manually currated set of trusted servers.

In other words, rather than a captcha on sign up, you'd see a captcha when you first go to post/vote/etc on the first major server (or each server until you interact with a major one). If you signed up on a trusted server in the first place, you won't have to do this.

Though honestly that's still pretty annoying and is a downside to federation. Another option is to semi centralize the signup, with trusted servers doing the signup for untrusted ones.

CoderKat, 10 months ago

There something to be said about how making something harder to see can still have merit. But on the other hand, that just means that the average person won't realize it's a thing but hardcore users and determined people will.

...I also wonder how long it'll be before we have some subreddit that automatically bans people based on their voting. Downvote a mod's comment? That's a banning. Upvote a post in a sub's mortal nemesis? That's a banning. Downvote a comment that the mod decides didn't fit their definition of how downvotes should be used? You better believe that's a banning.

CoderKat, 10 months ago

You definitely don't need blockchain for this. But you do need protocol changes. You could have the host instance (ie, the instance the thread/post is in) be the only one that keeps track of votes and have it regularly communicate to other instances how many votes the post has. The host instance would still have to track who voted in what way (to prevent multi voting), but it can keep the identities secret.

CoderKat, 10 months ago

Yeah, he's a horrible, evil war criminal. Yet, at the same time, his coup succeeding seems the best thing for Ukraine, since he seems to have no desire to continue the war in Ukraine.

CoderKat, 10 months ago

Tiktok is the absolute worst at irrational censorship. It's a shame because the site is immensely popular and that means it is full of very interesting content. Yet, this is far from the first unreasonable thing they've been removing. It's well known how Tiktok users came up with alternative words to circumvent words that were likely to get their content removed (e.g., "unalived" instead of "killed").

CoderKat, 10 months ago

Plus they've had a very long time to grow their teams. Skyrim came out 12 years ago. We're looking at over 15 years delay for a sequel to one of the best selling games of all time.

On the short term, you can't grow very fast. Developers take a long time to onboard and while new ones are onboarding, senior devs will have to spend a bunch of time mentoring the new ones. But on the long run, you can certainly scale up considerably, especially with enough investment.

CoderKat, 10 months ago

I think the more support you have, the more likely others will support you. So you want everyone to know about your supporters. I'm sure there's a number of people who've wanted to overthrow Putin for a looooong time and were just waiting for something that actually stood a chance of success.

CoderKat, 10 months ago

Such an adorable bedframe. Oh, and the cat too!

CoderKat, 10 months ago

Plus the kinds of people that migrated to Voat were... Not good people. IIRC, it was particularly the banning of FatPeopleHate that got many to move to Voat. The kind of people who'd quit a website because they said to stop harassing people for being fat are not good people. By comparison, this time, we're migrating because Reddit is being disrespectful towards frankly all their users, but also particularly mods and the visibility impaired.

CoderKat, 10 months ago

I think the biggest gain is simply that this guy and likely any other Putin replacement would end the war in Ukraine, because they know it's a waste of lives, money, and reputation. It's hard to be worse than Putin at this point. And heck, even with Putin still on the "throne", it could give Putin the excuse his cowardly ass needs to back out of the war.

CoderKat, 10 months ago

It's true. I've reported so many to the secret poop police. They're always laughing at first like it's not serious, up until they break down the bathroom door. Not so funny in a Montana gulag, is it?

CoderKat, 10 months ago

I fully agree with you. 2001 is literally the most disappointing movie I've ever watched. Not exaggerating. I heard so much about it and was excited to finally watch it, only to be extremely let down by how boring it is. Only good thing I got out of it is memes and references. I'd name my Google Home HAL if I could (but literally no major smart device lets you set their name).

One opinion of mine that may be unpopular is that Star Wars has very amateur writing. I say this this mostly in reference to how the villains are so comically evil, yet so incompetent that the galaxy spanning villain is frequently defeated by a band of a couple hundred rebels. There's many parts of Star Wars I really enjoy (I've admittedly seen nearly every TV show and movie), but the big picture writing is pretty much never one of them.

Andor had the best writing among any of the Star Wars movies/shows I've seen, because it frequently showed the villains as terrified themselves. Plus the very first "villain" we encounter isn't actually wrong (he's a security guard investigating the murders of some people and genuinely believes he's trying to stop a murderer).

CoderKat, 10 months ago

Strongly agreed. I think a lot of commenters in this thread are getting derailed by their feelings towards Meta. This is truly a dumb, dumb law and it's extremely embarrassing that it even passed.

It's not just Meta. No company wants to comply with this poorly thought out law, written by people who apparently have no idea how the internet works.

I think most of the people in the comments cheering this on haven't read the bill. It requires them to pay news sites to link to the news site. Which is utterly insane. Linking to news sites is a win win. It means Facebook or Google gets to show relevant content and the news site gets users. This bill is going to hurt Canadian news sites because sites like Google and Facebook will avoid linking to them.

CoderKat, 10 months ago

I'm not sure I see how that would affect the developer. The charge back would be only to the reseller, wouldn't it?

CoderKat, 10 months ago

What does the smaller number on the left mean? I'm guessing it's some form of "in the past day/week/month"?

Also, what does special equipment include?

CoderKat, 10 months ago

Dear witchymemes, how is your day going?

CoderKat, 10 months ago

https://youtu.be/Z6oeAdemFZw

CoderKat, 10 months ago

Is there a sub yet where I could get some of that juice?