General_Effort
@General_Effort@lemmy.world
- Comment on Why is the human body so incredibly bad at responding to colds? 14 hours ago:
Only if the medication doesn’t work. The evidence is that placebos don’t work. Mostly, the placebo effect is a statistical illusion.
It is plausible that the body will expend more energy to combat a disease if you are (sub-)consciously convinced that you are cared for and don’t need to stress. Stress hormones down-regulate the immune response. Cortisol, used for treatment of autoimmune disorders like asthma and allergies, is a stress hormone.
But a sham treatment could also have the opposite effect. If your subconscious understands that as a signal that you must get back into action, you may end up releasing stress hormones. These psychological effects are just too idiosyncratic and fickle to be used reliably.
Stuff like broken bones or cancer doesn’t respond to psychology at all. The body is already doing all it can.
- Comment on Why is the human body so incredibly bad at responding to colds? 15 hours ago:
It’s more like colds are incredibly good at responding to the human body. Following the evolution of corona was quite amazing, no?
- Comment on ActivityPub vs RSS Atom etc. Why Federate instead of aggrigate? 3 days ago:
Many things are fundamentally feasible. I see 2 things you argue for.
One is changing the caching strategy. I don’t think that’s wise in terms of load sharing, but certainly feasible on a small scale. In certain circumstances, it may be preferred.
The other thing is using older protocols and standards. The practical reason to do this would be to use existing tooling, libraries, code. I’m not seeing such opportunities. I’m not that familiar with these, but it seems like they would have to be extended anyway. So I don’t really see the point.
- Comment on ActivityPub vs RSS Atom etc. Why Federate instead of aggrigate? 3 days ago:
At a minimum this is adding the number of instances that federate a given content streams to the multiple of storage needed to host the content, even if that storage is ephemeral. Not so big a problem at 100,000 users, but at 100,000,000 users this is a lot of storage cost we are talking about. Unless somehow the user/client doesnt cache the content they pull from an instance locally on their device when they view it?
Worry more about the bandwidth. Your instance would have to serve your content to all these 100M users. The way it is, much of the load goes to the instance where a user is registered. That means that an instance can control hosting costs by closing registrations.
My point was this isn’t an issue when all content is self-hosted, because the author as the host can edit, delete, or migrate all they want and maintain full direct control over the source of that content the client interacts with whenever a pull request comes in. Yes the user Caches the content when they read it, but there is no intermediary copy.
There’s the fundamental problem. What you think of as “your” data, other people think of as “their” data. That can’t be resolved. What’s worse is that controlling “your” data requires controlling other people’s computers and devices, as with DRM.
- Comment on Dude... Who the hell wrote all this cr@#? 4 days ago:
Almost?
- Submitted 4 days ago to science_memes@mander.xyz | 17 comments
- Comment on What is with this new generation of shooters writing stuff on the bullets? Is this some new fad like if I go deer hunting or something I write FUCK BAMBI on the bulllet? 5 days ago:
War. War never changes.
- Comment on Uh Oh: Nintendo Just Landed A ‘Summoning’ And ‘Battling’ Patent 5 days ago:
This is a US patent; not directly relevant to Japanese operations.
- Comment on Uh Oh: Nintendo Just Landed A ‘Summoning’ And ‘Battling’ Patent 6 days ago:
Yes, absolutely. And there is money in patent trolling. I just don’t see the business case here. Why damage the Nintendo brand with such shenanigans when you could leave the patent trolling to some formally independent company. Maybe I just underestimate how much money can be made by shaking down small devs.
- Comment on Microsoft doesn't understand the Fediverse 6 days ago:
Depends on the jurisdiction. This is a conflict between freedom of speech and the reputation of the brand (which has financial value). Countries with a more recent monarchical past tend to value reputation over free speech, eg Japan but also Europe. The US has been a republic for a quarter millennium. Since MS is a US company, I think they wouldn’t even pursue this in the first place.
Generally, service providers are exempt for liability for such things if they follow certain rules of conduct. EG the US DMCA says that you are not liable for copyright infringement, if you comply with takedown notices. I’m not sure how that works for trademarks in the US.
Generally, though, you should expect to be held responsible for any infringing content on your service, once you learn/are notified about it. You will be treated as if you had created the content yourself. That means that you will have to make the argument in court that the use of the trademark was legal. And if you lose, you will pay the damages.
Questions?
- Comment on Uh Oh: Nintendo Just Landed A ‘Summoning’ And ‘Battling’ Patent 6 days ago:
This patent could have a chilling effect, but there’s no way it would stand up in court. They can still use it as a bargaining chip. Court cases are expensive. And if you don’t have a legal department, they are also a personal drain. But that’s small fry. Financially, I don’t believe it makes sense for them to resort to criminality to get such a patent. Maybe they hope it will influence their court case in Japan against Palworld?
- Submitted 6 days ago to games@lemmy.world | 44 comments
- Comment on Microsoft doesn't understand the Fediverse 6 days ago:
You have full control over a server on which you chose to run certain Software. But you feel you don’t have to comply with takedown requests because that’s just how the software works? That may work on indulgent parents but not in court. If you’re too technically inept to know how to comply, then you’re just not complying. End of story.
- Comment on RFK Jr. Blames violent video games for Mass Shootings. 6 days ago:
What did they tell him about how his father and uncle died?
Probably the truth, just like they told him the truth about vaccines.
- Comment on Microsoft doesn't understand the Fediverse 6 days ago:
Holy shit. I can’t believe that 65 people upvoted this. Do you really believe that’s how the world works? Are you actually adults?
- Comment on Nepal’s prime minister resigns after 19 killed in protests against social media ban and corruption 1 week ago:
That’s why the protests started.
- Comment on Nepal’s prime minister resigns after 19 killed in protests against social media ban and corruption 1 week ago:
The imposition of the ban was discussed in this community. I agree that this is barely on topic but that’s precisely why it should be available here. So that people who are interested in social media bans but not in world news, can find the info in the same channels and put the FO to the FA.
- Nepal’s prime minister resigns after 19 killed in protests against social media ban and corruptionapnews.com ↗Submitted 1 week ago to technology@lemmy.world | 8 comments
- Comment on Statement on discourse about ActivityPub and AT Protocol by W3C SocialCG 1 week ago:
It was signed by a number of people, including OG ActivityPub contributors. I guess you’d have to know what goes on in the mailing list.
Looking around here, there’s a lot of ignorant hostility. I am always surprised by how tech-illiterate fediverse fans are. People who feel that that’s their peer group probably have a hard time ignoring that background toxicity.
- Comment on Statement on discourse about ActivityPub and AT Protocol by W3C SocialCG 1 week ago:
The statement has been… uh… updated. The URL now reads:
A statement was originally published here, however, we have since received an objections to its publication citing that proper processes were not followed, and therefore it has been taken down and republished on Emelia’s website instead, whilst we seek community group consensus. When Emelia merged the pull request, she had been granted permission to do so by the co-chair of the Social Web CG, and given the number of signatories with various significant contributions to ActivityPub and ActivityStreams, Emelia believed that there was enough agreement to publish.
- Comment on How decentralized Bluesky is compared to the Fediverse. 1 week ago:
I assume it proves that there is a public key associated with each vote.
It doesn’t sound like cryptography is able to add anything worthwhile. You have to trust the instance to police itself. Self-hosted instances still don’t vote anonymously.
A group of users has to cooperate to hide their votes from others and each other. Only the tally is known, but you have to trust the group. On the Fediverse, such a group will be the users of an instance. The more users the instance has, the more anonymous the individual becomes.
You have to trust the instance admins to weed out bots and sock puppets, which is extra hard when they don’t see the votes either. Presumably, compensating by collecting and keeping other data, such as IPs, for longer is undesirable. You have to believe that admins, volunteers all, are willing to do the extra work and that they don’t actually favor manipulation for ideological reasons.
The only way to uncover untrustworthy instances is to look at aggregated data. I guess you’d have to get/scrape data for some community and then analyze by instance if the number of posters is out of whack with the number of voters. I wonder if anyone’s ever done such a thing. It’s certainly more challenging than looking at oddities among voters who brigade some topic.
Admins of large instances could get away with having many sock voters among the real users, if they wanted to manipulate discussions for, say, ideological reasons.
- Comment on How decentralized Bluesky is compared to the Fediverse. 1 week ago:
You could also make it prove each vote comes from one real account and that no account voted twice.
How would it prove that the account is real? I suspect that the meaning of “real account” is not the opposite of bot or sockpuppet.
- Comment on How decentralized Bluesky is compared to the Fediverse. 1 week ago:
But accounts are already pseudonymous?
Here’s where I am at:
I can check if my votes are federated correctly by checking if any of my votes are suppressed or votes in my name are made up. If my instance sends a different random token with each vote, I can still do that, as long as I know which tokens are assigned to my votes.
But vote tallies can also be manipulated by making up new votes through fake/bot accounts. If a vote can be connected to posts, this can be checked to some degree. Say, if an instance has a lot of voters that never post, that indicates a problem.
I don’t see how the second thing with E2EE.
- Comment on How decentralized Bluesky is compared to the Fediverse. 1 week ago:
Wait. What is the relation to vote federation?
- Comment on How decentralized Bluesky is compared to the Fediverse. 1 week ago:
It’s doable with E2E encryption,
How?
- Comment on How decentralized Bluesky is compared to the Fediverse. 1 week ago:
Federation requires openness and that goes badly with secrecy. You can argue that one has to trust instance owners anyway, but knowing the users and not just the tallies makes uncovering manipulation easier.
- Comment on What If There’s No AGI? 1 week ago:
It’s so hard to keep up these days.
BBC: Lab-grown brain cells play video game Pong
Full paper(2022): In vitro neurons learn and exhibit sentience when embodied in a simulated game-world
- Comment on How decentralized Bluesky is compared to the Fediverse. 2 weeks ago:
That’s not how it works.
- Comment on How decentralized Bluesky is compared to the Fediverse. 2 weeks ago:
How do you algorithmically manipulate those 12M people with Mastodon?
The usual way, whatever that is. What would Mastodon do about it? How do you manipulate Bluesky?
BTW, Bluesky has almost 40M users.
It’s the number in OP, so I ran with that. The fediverse number apparently excludes Gab and Truth Social. Makes sense, since those aren’t federated with the rest, but that also shows an issue.
- Comment on How decentralized Bluesky is compared to the Fediverse. 2 weeks ago:
Alternate history: Bluesky never happens. Instead, some company opens up a Mastodon instance as a Twitter replacement. So instead of Bluesky with 12M+ users, there’s a Mastodon instance with 12M+ users. Now what?
