Skip Navigation

InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)M

mspencer712

@ mspencer712 @programming.dev

Posts
0
Comments
159
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • "Politics"

    Jump

  • Not every photo was like this, but the ones that forced my hand were clearly suggestive of a strip-tease. And that specifically is what I didn’t want in my Patreon feed, in between her NSFW comics (which I enjoyed!) and other pervy content creators and, you know, retro gaming and science YouTubers.

    My wife looks at pervy stuff too, and we share links / peep at each other’s monitors, etc. And honestly she might be totally fine with it, especially if I explained it. I just felt like it wasn’t worth having an uncomfortable conversation with my wife over. It felt like an inconsiderate emotional bait and switch. “Hey Reddit, come to my Patreon for pervy comics.” … “Now that you’ve already paid, and unsubscribing would mean I keep the money and you get nothing … surprise, there’s also nearly-nude or hand-bra-type pics, that you can’t remove, with frequent reminders that the $50 tier gets full nudes. Now I’ve handed you a problem. Now you have to deal with this. Thanks for your support!”

    I don’t think kemono has everything archived but you can see enough there to get a picture of what she’s been doing. And I want to take a moment to subvert that scummy call-and-response site spam pattern that gets used. I’ve only ever visited this site with ublock Origin on Firefox, so it could have the worst sort of pop up cancer and I wouldn’t know any better. If you visit, keep your shields up. But kemono seems to be a site that mirrors Patreon and other similar sites, via users contributing their logged in session keys and letting the site mirror whatever they have access to. I didn’t know about kemono dot Sierra Uniform until recently and I have no idea if references to it are kosher. But there you go.

  • "Politics"

    Jump

  • I tried to support this artist on Patreon. Heard there were NSFW comics there. Well, yes, but mostly a creepy OnlyFans-esque collection of nearly nude sexy photos of the artist, with frequent calls for payment for explicit nudes.

    (Edit from below, as I figure out what I’m trying to say) It’s a sort of emotional bait and switch. “Come support me, there’s nsfw comics.” “Ooh I love those, my wife loves those, I’m in.” “Whoops, actually there’s also these risqué photos. Maybe your wife will be ok with it, maybe not. You can choose to have the conversation if you want. But now I’ve handed you a problem, unless you want to just immediately unsubscribe. In which case I still keep the money but you get nothing. Thanks for your support!” (End of edit)

    Only artist Patreon I’ve ever unsubscribed from for content reasons. (I’m married, intended to support an artist, not to gawk at an OnlyFans.) From what I can tell from kemono (Patreon content mirror - visit with Adblock on), she’s still doing it.

    I’m genuinely not sure if I’m being too sensitive or if this is genuinely behavior that shouldn’t be supported. Comics like this one are really good. I’m torn.

  • Firefox deletes promise to never sell personal data, asks users not to panic

    Jump

  • I hope they explain further. Honestly I don’t think the “oh crap I need to know if it’s good or bad right now!” camp is really going to care, but it still feels a little uncomfortable. (As opposed to the “this could be either way, I don’t have enough evidence to decide right now, and I’m ok with holding that uncertainty in my brain until new evidence moves my needle” camp)

    Are forked builds possible with third party service references neutered?

  • What do you use as your personal domain for email?

    Jump

  • I would say it’s important not to conflate privacy with secrecy. If you have a domain with your name on it (e.g. my mspencer.net) but create email aliases for every situation, sites won’t be automatically correlating your addresses with each other. How do they know which addresses are yours and which aren’t? More importantly, if you self host, emails are encrypted in flight and live on your own hardware at rest, so nobody external to any conversation will be snooping on message contents.

    I’m sure legally it has no effect, but I have postfix configured to refuse emails with “updated terms” and “updated our terms” in the body. If I still haven’t been notified that a site’s terms have been updated to allow some new horribleness, they can’t claim they made me aware, huh? I guess they’ll just have to send me paper mail if it’s so important to them.

    (You could do that too, if you self host postfix / dovecot / roundcube / opendkim and use greylist and RBLs for anti-spam. It’s been effortless for me, after an admittedly grueling initial setup process taking several days to learn and fail with.)

  • Why do most Americans use an iPhone?

    Jump

  • I’m a professional C# developer, and I switched to iPhone in 2020. Mostly I wanted a more controlled, curated App Store for increased confidence in a safe execution environment. I’ll pay the $100/yr for a developer account if I really need to build and run my own code.

    The lack of ad block options bugs me. I also don’t use iCloud.

    I have doubts about whether this question is asking or proselytizing.

  • DeepSeek Proves It: Open Source is the Secret to Dominating Tech Markets (and Wall Street has it wrong).

    Jump

  • I don’t like this. Everything you’re saying is true, but this argument isn’t persuasive, it’s dehumanizing. Making people feel bad for disagreeing doesn’t convince them to stop disagreeing.

    A more enlightened perspective might be “this might be true or it might not be, so I’m keeping an open mind and waiting for more evidence to arrive in the future.”

  • ‘Forbidden Words’: Github Reveals How Software Engineers Are Purging Federal Databases

    Jump

  • Judges can act.

  • ‘Forbidden Words’: Github Reveals How Software Engineers Are Purging Federal Databases

    Jump

  • These systems all have disaster recovery plans. We can’t possibly know how competent their admins are or how up to date their backups are. But it’s not our job to know this. Debating details isn’t the point, and there’s zero amount of online discussion that will make the worry and anxiety go away. Just remember there are backups and be calm.

    Personally I know that media companies, who use their content to sell ads, will not protect me from this “worry and anxiety denial of service” that’s going on. They sell more ads when people doom scroll. So I have to protect myself. I want you to protect yourself as well.

    I try to recognize when there are things I can’t do anything about, but that I know good people are still working to protect.

  • DeepSeek collects keystroke data and more, storing it in Chinese servers

    Jump

  • This makes me sad, that we can’t engage in civil discussion about this. Why did you assume and not ask questions? Be curious, not judgmental.

    To me it’s a question of laws. The laws of the U.S. at least somewhat constrain the people of my own country, and can prevent them from working against their own citizens. Like me.

    Please be kind when replying.

  • DeepSeek collects keystroke data and more, storing it in Chinese servers

    Jump

  • As a US citizen, I prefer services that US consumer protections could apply to. (While we still have them, ahem.) I know that Chinese laws will not protect me from things a Chinese business does in China.

    (What’s with the rude replies? Did I fail to notice what instance I’m on or something?)

  • Is a Seedbox right for me?

    Jump

  • Don’t worry, you aren’t missing much. That paragraph was kind of goofy anyway.

  • Is a Seedbox right for me?

    Jump

  • Think of a Seedbox as a cloud service provider with convenience features focused on enabling piracy, by keeping the hardware in a jurisdiction that doesn’t care what you pirate and giving you one-click easy installation methods for apps that make piracy simple. But without going so far as “Thank you for your payment, download these specific media files here.”

    You debatably have to be a techie. But by techie standards it’s very easy to use.

    If you really hate piracy, I suppose you could pay for one for a month, get the identity of who you paid, and use one of the apps to host a shell script that listens on one of the few public ports you have access to, that answers every incoming connection with “this is a seed box operated by ABC, with cards payments accepted by LMNOP Inc in Athens, Greece.”

    But the most common usage is running packaged software they let you run (like BT clients you can remote-control, sickchill, radarr, sonarr, Plex, etc.) or remote desktops or shells. Usually implemented as docker containers.

  • What's up with employee-owned companies/co-ops? How does it compare to a strong union?

    Jump

  • Scrooge McDuck is an employee of his companies too.

  • If the internet went away indefinitely, what things would you wish you had downloaded before it happened?

    Jump

  • BBS software. Nerds always find a way. I guess if I have to be a sysop now…

  • I am in the US and its gotten very political but as pretty much a peon do I just tune the stuff out thinking its fear mongering? Or should I closely pay attention to it?

    Jump

  • I’m genuinely worried it’s yet another deliberate denial of service against our ability to detect evil. I work extra hard to only pay attention to what is actually done that seems like it could stick.

    Mostly I trust that good people in positions of trust (e.g. ACLU or EFF) will call out when there’s an opportunity for mass mobilization to make a real difference.

  • Decentralized Social Media Is the Only Alternative to the Tech Oligarchy

    Jump

  • I think I communicated part of this badly. My intent was to address “what is this speech?” classification, to make moderation scale better. I might have misunderstood you but I think you’re talking about a “who is speaking?” problem. That would be solved by something different.

  • Decentralized Social Media Is the Only Alternative to the Tech Oligarchy

    Jump

  • I mentioned this in another comment, but we need to somehow move away from free form text. So here’s a super flawed makes-you-think idea to start the conversation:

    Suppose you had an alternative kind of Lemmy instance where every post has to include both the post like normal and a “Simple English” summary of your own post. (Like, using only the “ten hundred most common words” Simple English) If your summary doesn’t match your text, that’s bannable. (It’s a hypothetical, just go with me on this.)

    Now you have simple text you can search against, use automated moderation tools on, and run scripts against. If there’s a debate, code can follow the conversation and intervene if someone is being dishonest. If lots of users are saying the same thing, their statements can be merged to avoid duplicate effort. If someone is breaking the rules, rule enforcement can be automated.

    Ok so obviously this idea as written can never work. (Though I love the idea of brand new users only being allowed to post in Simple English until they are allow-listed, to avoid spam, but that’s a different thing.) But the essence and meaning of a post can be represented in some way. Analyze things automatically with an LLM, make people diagram their sentences like English class, I don’t know.

  • Decentralized Social Media Is the Only Alternative to the Tech Oligarchy

    Jump

  • My own “we need” list, from a dork who stood up a web server nearly 25 years ago to host weeb crap for friends on IRC:

    We need a baseline security architecture recipe people can follow, to cover the huge gap in needs between “I’m running one thing for the general public and I hope it doesn’t get hacked” and “I’m running a hundred things in different VMs and containers and I don’t want to lose everything when just one of them gets hacked.”

    (I’m slowly building something like this for mspencer.net but it’s difficult. I’ll happily share what I learn for others to copy, since I have no proprietary interest in it, but I kinda suck at this and someone else succeeding first is far more likely)

    We need innovative ways to represent the various ideas, contributions, debates, informative replies, and everything else we share, beyond just free form text with an image. Private communities get drowned in spam and “brain resource exhaustion attacks” without it. Decompose the task of moderation into pieces that can be divided up and audited, where right now they’re all very top down.

    Distributed identity management (original 90s PGP web of trust type stuff) can allow moderating users without mass-judging entire instances or network services. Users have keys and sign stuff, and those cryptographic signatures can be used to prove “you said you would honor rule X, but you broke that rule here, as attested to by these signing users.” So people or communities that care about rule X know to maybe not trust that user to follow that rule.

  • Nazis

    Jump

  • I’m a little worried about the distraction this is causing, distraction away from taking real action that can help. Like, felon and nazi are real and useful predictive attributes, but we kind of already knew some of that.

    I feel like a better focus would be on taking action - donation, volunteerism, things your class valedictorian would do - to counter actual harmful or evil changes that are made in actual legislation. It sucks to have to prop up things that make America actually great ourselves because narrow minded politicians cut public funding. But to keep these things alive, we have to step up.

    We already made our predictions known. Deep down we already know this isn’t convincing anybody new. The next step is taking action. Local non-profits want to hear from you. If it’s a cause that you think might be threatened, and you care about it, you might be able to help.

  • A noticeable difference in kernels?

    Jump

  • Apologies, I did the American thing. Checks, which get turned into X9.100 files, which are just digital versions of bags of bundles of checks, with check images that were TIFF images in CCITT T.6 encoding.