JustTesting

@JustTesting@lemmy.hogru.ch

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Robot dogs priced at $300,000 a piece are now guarding some of the country’s biggest data centers⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It can be done but doesn’t work that well: www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rliFQ0qyAM

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Meta will shut down VR Horizon Worlds access in June⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Actually anyone can post using the API, and many people did. Lots of the heavily publicized posts were written by humans

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"US Person": is a red flag for financial institutions in Europe⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes it’s a pretty short list and with some caveats. Actually I almost didn’t double check when reading your message, as “only the US and some dictatorship” is usually how these things go, but I was curious and found the wiki page.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  heck if anything, the Fediverse, as it is right now, is more susceptible to this. You can spin up spam instances on new domains, with spam users, and have them federate to existing instances, faster than volunteer run instances can ban/defederate.

  So you end up with not federating by default, but having some trusted web of instances that federate and maybe an approval process for new instances to federate with? But that’ll still lead to centralization with “trusted” instances and new instances having a hard time to join the club (there’s also the scaling problem of the fediverse, but that’s besides the point). So you end up with a few very big instances and the owners of those instances having all the power. Or maybe small isolated islands of mutually trusting instances? Still better than tech oligopoly, but also a far cry from the original dream.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"US Person": is a red flag for financial institutions in Europe⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  is it?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Keycloak or alternative?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I feel Authentik is at the sweet spot between complexity/features (keycloak) and ease of setup (authelia)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Quit ChatGPT: right now! Your subscription is bankrolling authoritarianism | Rutger Bregman⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes. And that requires the participants to self-regulate and be educated, at least beyond a certain number of participants (and this number is more in the 100’s than 1000’s of devices in a city size area).

  In case anyone is interested, in meshtastic, for a regular handheld device, set it to client if in a less populated area, client_mute in densely populated areas. router/repeater only for really well positioned nodes (think top of a mountain, NOT top of a tall building), router_late for ok positioned nodes where there’s other, better router nodes around, but they can cover some dead zone that the better router ones don’t cover. And then there’s other like client_base for e.g. a rooftop node to help handheld devices inside the house reach outside. And follow the guidelines of your local area group/forum/whatever on number of hops, band to use etc.

  None of that is really complicated, but a lot of users will just buy a device, turn it on excitedly with default settings, see that messaging works and not dig deeper, and then worsen then network for everyone.

  With meshcore, there’s a repeater firmware and a client firmware, it’s not just a setting that can be selected in the app. Default is client, and switching to repeater mean reflashing the firmware. And more clients don’t really matter for the network, since they don’t repeat. So much less risk of an unwitting user worsening the network.

  And if anyone wants to play with this, all the devices should support both meshtastic and meshcore firmware, so you can play with both and see which you prefer.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Quit ChatGPT: right now! Your subscription is bankrolling authoritarianism | Rutger Bregman⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m definitely not an expert radio operator or anything, but this is how I understood it.

  With Meshtastic, no, it actually gets worse beyond a certain point, especially in dense areas. Each radio rebroadcasts messages, so more message fill the air, causing more congestion. setting devices to client_mute (no rebroadcasting of messages) alleviates this to some extent, but most people don’t do that. In general, a few well placed nodes are better than a lot of clients.

  Meshcore with dedicated Repeater nodes alleviates that a bit, as a node is either a client that can originate messages, or a Repeater that can only rebroadcast. And it has a bit better routing protocol, reducing unnecessary duplicates in some cases.

  The radio band is license free in many countries, but there’s still some restriction, e.g. 10% duty cycle in my country, which means no radio can be sending more than 10% of the time (so 1 minute in every 10 minute window). That combined with (afaik) nodes only being able so send one message at a time limits how many messages can be in flight at an instant. And more clients increases background chatter from e.g. node announcements and duplicates, leading to further congestion. And in meshtastic, since packets “flood” out in all directions, and each node rebroadcasts again, and it’s not directional, all the packets travel all over the place when you send a message. You could have a packet traveling in circles between new nodes for a long time.

  E.g. in my region, originally the default for meshtastic was 7 hops on long range fast preset. That led to congestion so they switched to medium range fast, then recommended limiting hops to 5, and now ideally to 3, just so there’s less chatter and less utilisation of the channel. 3 hops is barely enough for me to get out of the city I live in. Meshcore also does floods, but also can keep track of paths so you can have a relayed connection along a specific path that does not flood out in all directions, along with putting up repeaters being a conscious and strategic choice by users, so you get something more like a dedicated highway of repeaters that are placed high up and can relay messages much better than some client down at street level could. And the hop limit is more like 64 (I think it can be higher but that’s what is set somewhere in the firmware). And repeaters are stationary, so they don’t need to announce themselves to the network that often (e.g. every 3 hours in meshtastic vs every 24-48 hours in mesh core). All of that means less channel utilization and longer reach.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Quit ChatGPT: right now! Your subscription is bankrolling authoritarianism | Rutger Bregman⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I agree, that would be amazing. I also hope it will help with some truly local community building (no troll farms from halfway across the planet spamming shit). Weather stations are already possible with sensor nodes, and most big repeaters have weather data. Though not like weather forecasts or anything.

  The main issue would probably just be congestion, not even bandwidth. Once it’s used a lot, some packets will just be dropped due to congestion and you don’t get a reply at all.

  A bit less of a problem with meshcore, with meshtastic in densely populated areas most users still don’t set their devices to client_mute, causing unnecessary rebroadcasts and even more congestion. Though with enough adoptions maybe governments might lower their restrictions on duty cycle, allowing for more traffic.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Quit ChatGPT: right now! Your subscription is bankrolling authoritarianism | Rutger Bregman⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Meshcore might be a bit better suited for this, if you want to reach a forum further than 50-100km away reliably.

  With the room servers it almost supports this use case already

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are there regions of the world where local men and women have divergent accents?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Thai has some different words and accents used by male and female speakers. best source i could find with a quick search though i’d have liked a more detailed one.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Car Wash Test on 53 leading AI models: "I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?"⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not talking about the quality of LLMs (they suck, in so many different ways…).

  I’m criticizing the experiment setup, it is not really statistically sound. Doing 10 tests each with 52 different models is almost bound to have one model be correct 100% of the time (even if the true probability is closer to 50%), by pure chance. Doing 100 tests each might yield very different results with none of them answering correct 100% of the time. Or put another way, the p-values of the tests performed are pretty high, not <0.05, so the results don’t really say what they purport to say.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Car Wash Test on 53 leading AI models: "I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?"⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  10 tests per model seems like way too little and they should give confidence intervals…

  the 10/10 vs. 8/10 is just as likely due chance than any real difference. But some people will definitely use this to justify model choice.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Across the US, people are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras. Anger over ICE connections and privacy violations is fueling the sabotage.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think >50% of my up votes are me swiping right to go back but missing the screen border by a tiny bit, causing the jerboa swipe to vote to kick in.

  so who knows, maybe they just accidentally hit the downvote arrow while scrolling?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Students Are Being Treated Like Guinea Pigs:' Inside an AI-Powered Private School⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’d prefer 1.0 school, but hopefully they’ll work out most the kinks in the beta version already. Alpha should just be for internal testing, aka the CEOs kids…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Borrowing money against their stuff to get more stuff to borrow money...⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh was that why they threw the tomato sauce on that one painting? Now it all makes sense

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do they turn Federation into a dystopia?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I think there’s still a lot of room to explore without abandoning the utopia setting. like we usually only see the spaceship stuff, but what about a more political drama taking place on member worlds, that kind of thing, i think it could be amazing.

  also, as you say, it’s been done for 60 years. Might as well do the same thing over again for a new generation that hasn’t seen tos/tng/ds9. They don’t know it yet, so it’s not overused, and the TOS audience wouldn’t be the target audience anyways. and could still explore new topics. the audience isn’t the same, our world isn’t the same, making the same show again would still not be boring as it be a completely different thing.

  Both approaches can work imo and have a place, without the need to go more dystopia.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ad blocking is alive and well, despite Chrome's attempts to make it harder⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Plus firefox mostly exists because google pays them, probably so there’s no anti-trust action against them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A lot of the laid-off staff from the Washington Post should start a news cooperative. Seriously!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Don’t know about the second point, but on the first, there’s a online newspaper here that does it pretty well. It’s like 240$ a year, but with the option to pay however little/much you want. the articles can be shared freely (no paywall, though i think since a year ago you need to enter your email to read, used to be completely free to share), but can’t be discovered/found unless you’re subscibed. it’s split into two legal entities, the newspaper that employs the journalists and a second non-profit that actually collects the payments and that every subscriber is allowed to vote in, elect leadership for etc. that works out guidelines for the newspaper part to follow.

  has been working pretty well for several years now and it’s one of the last few places of quality, independent journalism in my country

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI agents now have their own Reddit-style social network, and it's getting weird fast⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah but don’t worry, there’s also skills for scanning skills for security risks, so all good /s

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI agents now have their own Reddit-style social network, and it's getting weird fast⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  They also have a ‘skill’ sharing page (a skill is just a text document with instructions) and depending on config, the bot can search for and ‘install’ new skills on its own. and agyone can upload a skill. So supply chain attacks are an option, too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pope Leo XIV brings not peace but a sword to AI oligarchs and a slop-mad world in new address, says it's 'Turning people into passive consumers of unthought thoughts'⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I got mine from kultofathena.com 20 years ago for 40 bucks (though with fancier blade), but just checked and don’t think they sell it anymore.

  Image

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task – MIT Media Lab⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m sorry, that came off very passive-aggressive, I really shouldn’t post at 3 am when I can sleep.

  The whole dark ages, and golden ages thing is just very annoying, made up during the renaissance, in part as a useful tool to go “look how shit everything is, I will make it great and amazing like it was before”, still a favorite to use by populists (in reference to whatever time is most suitable) and it’s been repeated so much, it actually works, everyone kinda just accepted it. But then when you dig into it, the middle ages weren’t really worse in terms of invention/art/etc. than the renaissance, nor was there this big stagnation after the decline of the roman empire, and people always made art, new inventions and great achievements, along with cruelty, bloodshed and other awful things. But then this has been a relatively recent shift in historical research, so not that well known

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task – MIT Media Lab⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  In other news, dark ages are a myth disproven by science.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What steps can be taken to prevent AI training and scraping of my public facing website?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  A big issue is that this works for bots that announce themselves as such, but there’s lots that pretend to be regular users, with fake user agents and ips selected from a random pool with each ip only sending like 1-3 request/day, but overall many thousands of requests. In my experience a lot of them are from huawei and tencent cloud/ASN

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why ActivityPub over Nostr? - function only⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t actually know how nostr deals with messages if you’re offline, if at all, not that familiar with the protocol. But your idea sounds workable.

  I tend to come at it from the other side, I like the federated model, but think the “supernodes” could behave more like dedicated relays. Like, a lemmy server right now does a lot of things, like serve a frontend, do expensive database queries to show a sorted feed, etc. and a lot of that does not scale very well. So having different kinds of nodes with more specialization, while still following a federated model makes sense to me. Right now if one of my users subscribes to some community, that community’s instance will start spamming my instance with updates nonstop, even though that user might not be active or might not even read that community anymore. It would be nicer if there was some kind of beefy instance I could request this data from if necessary, without getting each and every update even though 90% of it might never be viewed. But keeping individual instances that could have their own community and themes, or just be hosted for you and your friends to reduce the burden on non-techies having to self-host something.

  Or put another way, instead of making the relays more instance-y, embrace the super instances and make them more relay-y, but tailor made for that job and still hostable by anyone, if they want to spend on the hardware. But I’m still not clear on where you’d draw the line/how exactly you’d split the responsibility. For lemmy, instead of sending 100’s of requests in parallel for each thing that happens, a super-instance could just consolidate all the events and send them as single big requests/batches to sub-instances and maybe that’s a good place to draw the line?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Guarding My Git Forge Against AI Scrapers⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  it’s [iocaine)(docs.rs/crate/iocaine/latest) not Locaine, tripped me up at first as well.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why ActivityPub over Nostr? - function only⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  this article and the accompanying discussion from lobsters is very relevant. Though the article itself is a bit one sided in favor of nostr, it doesn’t do a great job arguing why a relay really is better

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I Went All-In on AI. The MIT Study Is Right.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  so the obvious solution is to just have humans execute our code manually. Grab a pen and some crayons, go through it step by step and write variable values on the paper and draw the interface with the crayons and show it on a webcam or something. And they can fill in the gaps with what they think the code in question is supposed to do. easy!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anubis is awesome and I want to talk aout it⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You mean for the referer part? Of course you don’t want it for all urls and there’s some legitimate cases. I have that on specific urls where it’s highly unlikely, not every url. E.g. a direct link to a single comment in lemmy, plus whitelisting logged-in users. Plus a limit, like >3 times an hour before a ban.

  It’s a pretty consistent bot pattern, they will go to some subsubpage with no referer with no prior traffic from that it, and then no other traffic from that ip after that for a bit (since they cycle though ip’s on each request) but you will get a ton of these requests across all ips they use. It was one of the most common patterns i saw when i followed the logs for a while.