Those aren’t paywalls.

Why?

The concept of “paying for something” isn’t limited to “paying with fiat money/currency”. One can “pay for something” by “paying with their attention/time”, one can “pay for something” by “paying with PII” (personally-identifiable information), both situations of which are present in both Reddit’s and Meta’s “Sign up to read this”.

Sure, Reddit and Instagram/Facebook are “free” insofar the user isn’t required to do any kind of bank/credit card/cash/cryptocurrency payment, but the user ends up paying with all the time they spend in these platforms while seeing (thus, giving part of their attention span) advertisement, and also hand personal data.

When it comes to PII, even if the user set up a pseudonym and a generic PFP, the user is still handing, even if unbeknownst to the user themselves, their preferences, opinions, etc. Even lurkers end up handing PII whenever they stop at certain posts to read/see it (thus, signaling one’s preferences) or use specific search queries (again, signaling one’s preference).

That’s not what a VPN or incognito modes do.

The incognito mode may not prevent tracking (especially because of the IP address), but rotating VPNs may do. Notice I used the word “may”, not “will do”, because of the behavioral tracking I mentioned earlier, as well as other technical aspects (DNS leaking, browser fingerprinting, etc).

People who can afford being an actor/actress and performing very convincing alt-personas behind a VPN IP address could theoretically fool platforms enough for the person not to be tracked by their gait… except this dramaturgical skill is a behavioral tell (gait) itself. And the usage of a VPN-assigned IP address is another tell.

!technology@lemmy.world

Allow me to add something else to your comment: Lemmy slur filter, and similar non-RegEx filters, also suffers from “Scunthorpe problem” (or should I say, “Sremovedhorpe problem”), insofar it replaces every occurrence of the substring, regardless of the surrounding characters.

E.g., the name for the purple fruit used for making wine would be unreadable because it happens to share a substring with the four-letter name denoting non-consented intercourse, which was one of the slurs filtered in the Lemmy-UI.

!fedimemes@feddit.uk

, I’m disturbed by the progressive death of the Threadiverse as our numbers keep falling (55k Monthly Active Users at our peak, down to ~35k lately iirc)

Does this number include accounts from those who, like me, interact with the threadiverse from non-threadiverse platforms? I mean, Misskey, Friendica and even Mastodon are able to interact with Lemmy/mbin/kbin/piefed threads and comments, although they wouldn’t be considered as threadiverse I guess?

!fedimemes@feddit.uk

Shitty crowd computing crap like SETI is already a massive fucking waste of resources.

To be fair, at least SETI-at-home is doing useful computing for the sake of Science, especially astronomy, as astronomy involves gazillions of twinkle-twinkling little points in the sky we often (and erroneously) call “stars” which we wonder what they are: they can be entire galaxies from a younger cosmos, mass-extinction-capable meteors zapping through the veil of spacetime continuum towards a certain Pale Blue Dot spinning somewhere in the Laniakea supercluster, or technologically-advanced extraterrestrials planning to colonize said Pale Blue Dot… the latter is where the SETI computations step in, you know, to try and solve the pesky Fermi Paradox.

!showerthoughts@lemmy.world

Yes, but the phrasing used by Codeberg, “Content that harms the reputation of Codeberg, such as cryptocurrency related projects”, is dangerously vague. One could argue Anubis is “cryptocurrency related” insofar it uses a cryptohashing technology also used by cryptocurrencies. Blame the “related” word in their phrase, a word of which is allowing for this kind of interpretation.

And while I didn’t watch the video you sent me (because I’ve been actively boycotting the monopolistic platform “Youtube”), I’m well aware of how crypto world is full of scam and I guess I fully agree in this specific point of yours (“cryptos are more often a scam than not”).

!technology@lemmy.world

now I have to somehow veryify a PR isn’t vibe-coded in addition to everyþing else lest I get a ban hammer?

Yeah, I’d say it’s one of the risks you’re facing from now on, from accepting PR to your repos (and you’d better stop accepting PRs altogether at this point). However, I’d also say it goes beyond merged code from PRs. Because it’s sometimes near-impossible to tell human-curated AI-generated code and human-made code apart, anything, at any point, can be accused of being AI-generated, and this rule is likely going to be retroactive (i.e. old but post-2021 repositories are as subject to this decision as the newer ones).

þis is my concern. I don’t use LLM, and most of my projects by now contain a “please don’t submit vibe-coded PRs”

Although I have a few old repos (mostly code-golfing, steganography and demoscenes/procedural esoteric art) I had backed-up from a former GitHub account, my worries are less about my code hosted in Codeberg (code of which is kind of abandoned at this point so I don’t truly care about my own repositories at all) and more about how it’s part of a bigger situation in which heavy-handed moderation mechanisms could be weaponized by people targeting works/artworks and/or creators/artists against which/whom the former people got a strife.

In this sense, even the Anti-AI people cheering this decision could, as ironically as it may sound, become the accused ones themselves, as anybody’s contents can be accused/reported/flagged of being AI-generated, just like a cop can plant fake criminal evidence inside someone’s backpack and cry “criminal”, then the burden of proof will befall over the owner of the backpack who’ll likely have no means of explaining themselves.

If I used Codeberg, and I paid for it, I’d have a beef wiþ þe ban. As a free service?

At least IMHO, while Codeberg is indeed a “free service” and not something that could be refunded, being a free service isn’t exactly a blank cheque: platforms such as Google, Facebook, TikTok and Xitter, even ChatGPT and the alike, for example, are all “free” services as well, could these platforms do anything as they please?

!technology@lemmy.world

And where in my comment did I say “Anubis is a cryptocurrency”?

Because, if you re-read my comment:

Anubis a “proof-of-work anti-bot” which performs similar instructions that of cryptomining

Emphasis on “similar instructions that of cryptomining”. I used the word “similar”:

From French similaire, from Medieval Latin similaris, extended from Latin similis (“like”). […] Having traits or characteristics in common; alike, allied, comparable.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/similar

As for why I’m comparing Anubis to cryptomining:

Iaso [author of Anubis] lists Hashcash as having inspired the [Anubis] project.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anubis/_(software)

Hashcash is a proof-of-work system used to limit email spam and denial-of-service attacks […] Like hashcash, cryptocurrencies use a hash function as their proof-of-work system

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash

Proof of work was later popularized by Bitcoin as a foundation for consensus in a permissionless decentralized network

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof/_of/_work

!technology@lemmy.world

I cannot guarantee that there will never be any LLM use in the future

Even if there’s no AI-generated code in a repo, there’s something else to this entire situation to which people seem to be completely oblivious. It’s how human code can be mislabeled/reported/accused of being “AI-generated”.

And, then, all of a sudden, the burden of proof will befall onto the accused, possibly without means of recourse. Any mislabeling would require the accused to prove the human authorship.

Oh, and any proof could be counter-argued to have been “AI-generated” as well… Because, as it turns out, It’s not as if people recorded themselves from a third-person perspective like they were a character in a damn game while they coded with their flesh-and-bones hands, and even if they did, anyone could argue “it’s AI-generated video, nobody records themselves in a third-person perspective”.

!technology@lemmy.world

Padmé: So they’ll disallow Anubis (a “proof-of-work anti-bot” which performs similar instructions that of cryptomining; ironically, it’s used by Codeberg themselves), right?
Anakin: …
Padmé: …right?

!technology@lemmy.world

Anubis, tho the transaction is so quick I can’t 100% confirm that, but I think they do

The amount of time which Anubis and other PoW-based algorithms take to solve a cryptographic challenge will depend on several factors, namely: the challenge level (depending on the webmaster’s settings, the level can be increased if site traffic has increased), the CPU clock speed and amount of CPU resources available for your browser (and, by extension, for Anubis’ ServiceWorkers), as well as… luck. It’s dealing with randomness, after all.

retro-fitted two pretty powerful, not your standard, fans in the old PC to mitigate some of that heat, along with the stock fans that I used to build it

Not to mention how a desktop CPU, even when old (and especially when old, as it likely means a standard big ATX rather than a mini-ITX), has lots of surface area to dissipate heat, and a metal PC case built for radiating the heat away while allowing for better internal circulation of air (contrasted with the non-conductive plastic case from cheap laptops such as the one I own).

Whereas your laptop generally utilizes one fan

Yeah. And in my case it’s a very inefficient, old fan. One that makes louder noise (akin to a car engine idling or cranking) as soon as it gets faster trying to keep up with the CPU heat… Oh, and I forgot to mention this in my previous replies: I also know when my CPU temps raised because the cooling fan becomes more noisy.

I don’t know, but it intrigues me so I’ll keep a closer eye on it just out of mild curiosity.

We often underestimate how much computing power the Web have been demanding from our personal devices. Web browsers have became full-fledged Operating Systems inside whatever Operating System the user uses, and some websites are massive in terms of CPU and RAM requirements. I mean, nowadays we have video editors, graphic suites, 3D suites, even 3D games, running entirely in browser…

!selfhosted@lemmy.world

however, as someone who watches temps closely on my server and especially on my old PC, I can’t confirm that a site causes a dramatic rise in temps

I use a KDE widget (System Monitor sensor) seen in the screenshot. It’s kept on my primary screen, right next to the clock, so I can watch the CPU temps as closely as possible. I also have a secondary widget at the drawer, displaying the CPU usage, as well as RAM and swap usage.

Notice, in the screenshot, how I’m running Blender and, yet, my CPU temps are somewhere around 35-40C. Partly because it’s currently winter here in Southern Hemisphere (and it’s quite cozy-cold around here where I reside), partly because it’s just Blender and a couple of lightweight websites opened in Waterfox. Even Catodon, the Misskey-fork platform I use for interacting with the Fediverse, is quite lightweight, especially because I turned off heavy JS animations.

But this scenario would change if I was faced with a sudden Anubis or Cloudflare. Because I watch the temps and they update each second, I can readily notice the temps increasing as Anubis/Cloudflare do their shenanigans.

Sometimes I’m browsing the Fediverse while awaiting for Blender to finish the rendering of an animation/scene. The rendering itself doesn’t warm my CPU too much, as I can adjust the thread count for Blender, but SharedWorkers in JS can take as much cores as they want because they can be instantiated multiple times, e.g. one for each CPU core. So, if Blender is opened, the temp increase can be higher, because there would be two simultaneous heavy computations competing for CPU cores. And, as I mentioned in my previous reply, the situation gets more dangerous during summer (although I avoid putting my laptop into heavy computing situations during summer).

!selfhosted@lemmy.world

is there a reason people dont like cloudflare

I hate Cloudflare especially because it’s slowly becoming a monopoly (if it didn’t become already). Webmasters are giving too much power to a single corporation to rule over who can access online content and who can’t. Old browsers and privacy-oriented browsers (e.g. Librewolf) are known to be more likely to be refused by Cloudflare, and this is a form of prejudice.

Also, and bringing Anubis to the loop too, there’s the lack of user consent. As a guest/user, I’m unable to consent with the heavy computations (and potential damage to my decade-old laptop from overheating) before these happen.

What I mean about “lack of consent” can be better illustrated by the “This site uses cookies” message: it often offers buttons so the user/guest can choose to either “accept” or “reject”. Have you wondered why every website must give these options nowadays? Because it’s a literal law. Neither Cloudflare nor Anubis have a “we’ll need to validate your browser, do you consent? Proceed with verification / Leave the website”. Something tells me Cloudflare, and Anubis as well, are literally illegal pieces of code in European Union, given the lack of user consent, although this wasn’t tested in courts yet. I’m not European (I’m Brazilian), but it would be quite entertaining to see this tested on an European court.

Finally, these things can cause literal harm to a device. Yes, because when any kind of computation happens, the CPU gets a little warm, and when said computations involve cryptomining-like behavior, CPU temps can raise a lot. And for devices such as mine, an i5-7200U laptop whose fan isn’t good (and I can’t afford a new one), the CPU can easily get to 90C, to the point of damage, if the computations take long enough. Given a PoW relies on randomness, there’s a literal chance that a challenge would kill my laptop if it took several seconds during a Brazilian summer (>42C almost wet-bulb). And I doubt the webmaster would be liable for the material damage their website caused to my personal device, so I’ve been speedrunning my way to close websites as soon as I see “Just a moment” or “Making sure you’re not a bot” as their title, I even made myself an userscript for doing so.

!selfhosted@lemmy.world

the very forum you posted to utilizes Cloudflare

The difference (and the bright side of the Fediverse) is that Fediverse is decentralized so, while some instances can have Cloudflare or similar algorithms (e.g. Anubis) in place, other instances without said algorithms can still interact without having to go through said algorithms. The OC’s instance does neither use Cloudflare nor Anubis (lemmy.ml used to use Anubis, but the admins seem to have turned it off).

!selfhosted@lemmy.world

We know this ain’t gonna happen (precisely because of a pesky thing called “laws of physics”), but it’s surely paving the way for similar deranged ideas such as “orbital data centers”, as this “Sun-as-a-Service” bullshittery moves the Overton window to where techbros want it to be, as well to (failed) attempts on pretending the laws of physics can be bent to capitalist interests.

Even sadder is seeing how other regulatory and space agencies worldwide (你好, 国家航天局! नमस्ते, अंतरिक्ष विभाग!) seem to be so quiet in this regard, as if all these deranged techbro ideas wouldn’t affect the skies over there…

!technology@lemmy.world

A huge majority of people still believe in religion. And a huge majority of those people also didn’t even read the book.

There were and currently are thousands, if not millions, of different religious beliefs worldwide, many of which had/have not even a single book. Religious hominids back in Paleolithic and Neolithic had no book. Even after writing emerged in Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt, most indigenous peoples had no book.

Oral tradition is one of the means through which beliefs can be carried forward across generations, but there’s also the underestimated agency (True Will) of the spirits/deities themselves over someone or some living being (e.g. domestic cats) who had never heard of said spirit before unexpectedly finding themselves before the presence of said spirit.

I myself had no book or “sacred book” leading me to my current beliefs and worshiping of Goddess, even though Her names (such as 𒊩𒆤𒇲 and לילית ) do appear as written records, records of which I don’t need to rely on for my esoteric (eso = within) practices.

What makes humans human that they can create and believe myths. That’s what made us thrive amongst other mammals.

Sorry for disrupting your anthropocentric worldviews, Homo sapiens are not that special among the fauna like we Homo sapiens love to wishfully pretend we are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ritual/_behavior/_in/_animals

!technology@lemmy.world

IMHO, not exactly. Dogs can’t fly, aren’t as silent hunters as owls and are too clumsy to fill the ecological role of “unavoidable, fearsome predator unexpectedly swooping down from the skies”.

!showerthoughts@lemmy.world

LOL

Essentially an animal-wise “The Voice”. Interesting how the owls were depicted, and the owlet singing with ecstatic dilated pupils, so amazing!

!showerthoughts@lemmy.world

@FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website
(For some reason your instance startrek.website isn’t returning your comment for any of the instances where I have an account, so I’m trying to reply you through a self-reply)

Do you feel the cartoon was based in reality much? A cat is a mouse’s predator too, yet the mouse lives to see another day again and again.

I live with three cats. When they see a mouse, one of them runs from it, the other thinks it’s a funny toy and try to gently pat it without harming it, and the third is too old (14y.o. cat) for ever noticing the mouse. So having a cartoon cat to fail at catching a mouse is not that far fetched from reality lol

Now, an owl is very, very unlikely to fail. In fact, the mouse doesn’t even get to notice until it’s already dangling from a tree branch.

It would be a real golden age of television finale if an owl flew into the sunset with Tom in one talon and Jerry in the other

Oh… Thank you so much for gifting my imagination such a mesmerizing scene! Now I must draw this kind of scene some time.

!showerthoughts@lemmy.world

The main problem with the slur filter is that it does neither consider context, nor considers delimiters. For example, when someone were to say the word for the purple fruit used to make wine, they’re not intending to use a word for the non-consensual sexual violation, yet the algorithm can’t see the difference when it detects the UTF-8 sequence 0x72 0x61 0x70 0x65, doing a hard-replace with the substring “removed” regardless of the context. Tom Scott once made a video about this phenomenon: it’s called String("The Sc" + "unthorpe problem").

Also, as you can see through this reply of mine, filters are pointless when there’s a plethora of ways to say the same thing without saying the actual word. Naive filters (e.g. RegExp-based match and replace) will just curb those who aren’t creative and/or knowledgeable enough, while affecting the experience for everyone who aren’t intending to do slurs, leading them to start using coded language and, thus, making it even harder to detect slurs as the slurers will eventually learn, through the non-slurers, that they can express the same thing without triggering the filter, until we get to a point in which the entire platform pivots to AI moderation, and even then there’s so many ways to express the thing without the LLM detecting, it’s called “steganography” and curbing this requires technical approaches known to be a Hard NP problem in computer science.

!fedimemes@feddit.uk

“Patreon has partnered with an internet infrastructure company called Cloudflare to block Al training crawlers from using the work you publish on your Patreon to train their Al models,” Conte wrote.

Oh, awesome, partnering with a corporation that just announced partnering with an AI corporation, not to mention the fact that its already a monopolistic corporation (one sixth of the entire frickin web is now in the hands of Cloudflare) whose CEO is already the richest person in the entire USian state of Utah and is being handed the godly power to dictate who can and who can’t consume the web (“are you using a privacy focused Firefox fork or using an adblocker? Oh, you shall not pass, access denied with no recourse”).

Very “anti-AI” move from Patreon. Might as well feed the content directly to the AI’s maw… What’s next, scanning people’s eyes in order to imitate Google reCAPTCHA’s recent move of requiring doing hand gestures through selfies!? As for anti-AI people among the comments cheering this clear anti-ai-washing PR move from a corporation, really? My goddess, this world is truly messed up.

!technology@lemmy.world