Melmi

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.

I don’t think the relevance of the TLD matters. It’s worth being aware of whether you’re using a ccTLD, especially in the case of countries like Afghanistan, but you also used .io as an example which is overwhelmingly used by non-British Indian Ocean Territory sites and is proven reliable. It’s even managed by an American company.

Then .app isn’t a part of the original TLDs, but actually a part of the new wave of modern gTLDs. And if you’re considering .app, there’s no reason not to consider the thousands of other generic TLDs out there.

Like with the ccTLDs, the only thing you have to consider is the trustworthiness of the managing org.

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.

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.

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”.

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.

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.

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.

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

If only

A tiefling divine soul sorcerer with the Criminal background. He was born to two pious tiefling clerics of Lathander who saw their fiendish blood as a curse, and prayed to cleanse their unborn child of devilish influence. When he was born a Divine Soul, his parents tried to raise him as their perfect priestess. He had to be a model tiefling, a representative of his entire race as well as Lathander himself. He chafed under the obligation and ran away from home, living on the streets and stealing to get by, all while trying to hide his divine soul powers out of a combination of rejecting them and just trying not to draw attention.

Slinking around in the shadows eventually led to him wandering into the Mists of Ravenloft, and he found himself in Barovia. He found his way into a party and essentially just acted like the party rogue for a bit until combat came and he got backed into a corner and he suddenly started throwing around guiding bolts.

I was really looking forward to doing a whole arc with him reclaiming his powers and figuring out what it meant to be himself, but OOC stuff led to me leaving that group before he had a chance to leave his edgy rogue phase :c

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If they were regulating Instagram and Facebook, I’d actually be happier about it. It’s not like the US is some bastion of digital privacy, and TikTok is bad because the data use is unregulated. Our own wholesome homegrown data brokers spy on us just as much, and they too do who knows what with the data.

American data brokers are no better, and are happy to sell data to foreign powers. Biden had to make an executive order about it recently. Blatant privacy invasion has become a standard practice in the tech industry, and there are a million different companies trading your information around. That’s the real issue at play here, and TikTok is just one of many fish in the sea. My data might even be more valuable to American companies than Chinese ones, because the American ones stand to exploit me for more profit. Or they’ll sell it to government (s), which… Yeah.

And of course TikTok could be sold. That’s exactly what I was talking about with strongarming—sell your platform to a corporation in our jurisdiction, or else we cut you off from a huge part of your userbase. It’s not really an option, it’s an ultimatum. It’d be one thing if we regulated the use of that data, but we don’t really—we don’t have meaningful data privacy laws here, at least not that apply in this circumstance. We’re being spied on just as badly. Forcing them to move here would just mean American agencies and companies would have more control over the platform, and more access to the data it generates, neither of which they’ve built much trust in their ability to do ethically.