ArchRecord

@ArchRecord@lemm.ee

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Haha SO TRUE!⁩ ⁨⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Haha so true!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam games will now need to fully disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s definitely true, I probably should have been a little more clear in my response, specifying that it can run at startup, but doesn’t always do so.

  I’ll edit my comment so nobody gets the wrong idea. Thanks for pointing that out!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam games will now need to fully disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  To put it very simply, the ‘kernel’ has significant control over your OS as it essentially runs above everything else in terms of system privileges.

  It runs at startup, so this means if you install a game with kernel-level anticheat, the moment your system turns on, the game’s publisher has software running on your system that can restrict the installation of a particular driver, stop certain software from running, or, even insidiously spy on your system’s activity if they wished to. (and reverse-engineering the code to figure out if they are spying on you is a felony because of DRM-related laws)

  It basically means trusting every single game publisher with kernel-level anticheat in their games to have a full view into your system, and the ability to effectively control it, without any legal recourse or transparency, all to try (and usually fail) to stop cheating in games.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Clever, clever⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Computers are a fundamental part of that process in modern times.

  If you were taking a test to assess how much weight you could lift, and you got a robot to lift 2,000 lbs for you, saying you should pass for lifting 2000 lbs would be stupid. The argument wouldn’t make sense. Why? Because the same exact logic applies. The test is to assess you, not the machine.

  Just because computers exist, can do things, and are available to you, doesn’t mean that anything to assess your capabilities can now just assess the best available technology instead of you.

  Like spell check? Or grammar check?

  Spell/Grammar check doesn’t generate large parts of a paper, it refines what you already wrote, by simply rephrasing or fixing typos. If I write a paragraph of text and run it through spell & grammar check, the most you’d get is a paper without spelling errors, and maybe a couple different phrases used to link some words together.

  If I asked an LLM to write a paragraph of text about a particular topic, even if I gave it some references of what I knew, I’d likely get a paper written entirely differently from my original mental picture of it, that might include more or less information than I’d intended, with different turns of phrase than I’d use, and no cohesion with whatever I might generate later in a different session with the LLM.

  These are not even remotely comparable.

  Assuming the point is how well someone conveys information, then wouldn’t many people better be better at conveying info by using machines as much as reasonable? Why should they be punished for this? Or forced to pretend that they’re not using machines their whole lives?

  This is an interesting question, but I think it mistakes a replacement for a tool on a fundamental level.

  I use LLMs from time to time to better explain a concept to myself, or to get ideas for how to rephrase some text I’m writing. But if I used the LLM all the time, for all my work, then me being there is sort of pointless.

  Because, the thing is, most LLMs aren’t used in a way that conveys info you already know. They primarily operate by simply regurgitating existing information (rather, associations between words) within their model weights. You don’t easily draw out any new insights, perspectives, or content, from something that doesn’t have the capability to do so.

  On top of that, let’s use a simple analogy. Let’s say I’m in charge of calculating the math required for a rocket launch. I designate all the work to an automated calculator, which does all the work for me. I don’t know math, since I’ve used a calculator for all math all my life, but the calculator should know.

  I am incapable of ever checking, proofreading, or even conceptualizing the output.

  If asked about the calculations, I can provide no answer. If they don’t work out, I have no clue why. And if I ever want to compute something more complicated than the calculator can, I can’t, because I don’t even know what the calculator does. I have to then learn everything it knows, before I can exceed its capabilities.

  We’ve always used technology to augment human capabilities, but replacing them often just means we can’t progress as easily in the long-term.

  Short-term, sure, these papers could be written and replaced by an LLM. Long-term, nobody knows how to write papers. If nobody knows how to properly convey information, where does an LLM get its training data on modern information? How do you properly explain to it what you want? How do you proofread the output?

  If you entirely replace human work with that of a machine, you also lose the ability to truly understand, check, and build upon the very thing that replaced you.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Clever, clever⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Schools are not about education but about privilege, filtering, indoctrination, control, etc.

  Many people attending school, primarily higher education like college, are privileged because education costs money, and those with more money are often more privileged. That does not mean school itself is about privilege, it means people with privilege can afford to attend it more easily. Of course, grants, scholarships, and savings still exist, and help many people afford education.

  “Filtering” doesn’t exactly provide enough context to make sense in this argument.

  Indoctrination, if we go by the definition that defines it as teaching someone to accept a doctrine uncritically, is the opposite of what most educational institutions teach. If you understood how much effort goes into teaching critical thought as a skill to be used within and outside of education, you’d likely see how this doesn’t make much sense. Furthermore, the heavily diverse range of beliefs, people, and viewpoints on campuses often provides a more well-rounded, diverse understanding of the world, and of the people’s views within it, than a non-educational background can.

  “Control” is just another fearmongering word. What control, exactly? How is it being applied?

  Maybe if a “teacher” has to trick their students in order to enforce pointless manual labor, then it’s not worth doing.

  They’re not tricking students, they’re tricking LLMs that students are using to get out of doing the work required of them to get a degree. The entire point of a degree is to signify that you understand the skills and topics required for a particular field. If you don’t want to actually get the knowledge signified by the degree, then you can put “I use ChatGPT and it does just as good” on your resume, and see if employers value that the same.

  Maybe if homework can be done by statistics, then it’s not worth doing.

  All math homework can be done by a calculator. All the writing courses I did throughout elementary and middle school would have likely graded me higher if I’d used a modern LLM. All the history assignment’s questions could have been answered with access to Wikipedia.

  But if I’d done that, I wouldn’t know math, I would know no history, and I wouldn’t be able to properly write any long-form content.

  Even when technology exists that can replace functions the human brain can do, we don’t just sacrifice all attempts to use the knowledge ourselves because this machine can do it better, because without that, we would be limiting our future potential.

  This sounds fake. It seems like only the most careless students wouldn’t notice this “hidden” prompt or the quote from the dog.

  The prompt is likely colored the same as the page to make it visually invisible to the human eye upon first inspection.

  And I’m sorry to say, but often times, the students who are the most careless, unwilling to even check work, and simply incapable of doing work themselves, are usually the same ones who use ChatGPT, and don’t even proofread the output.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Inside the U.S. Government-Bought Tool That Can Track Phones at Abortion Clinics⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Just like how the moment their videotape rental history was exposed, that was when privacy became an absolute must in the case of video rental services.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Seeking feedback: how should lemm.ee move forward with external images? (related to frequent broken images)⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This is something I think would be the best solution. It seems like the best possible tradeoff between user privacy, and actual effectiveness.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Cory Doctorow] With An Audacious Plan To Halt The Internet’s Enshittification And Throw It Into Reverse⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Better than completely allowing capital to do whatever it wants without even attempting to push back.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Please Don’t Make Me Download Another App | Our phones are being overrun⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  As Cory Doctorow put it, “An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to add an ad-blocker to it.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨the problem of sex⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  “Why sex?”

  10/10 starter question, no notes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Despite tech-savvy reputation, Gen Z falls behind in keyboard typing skills⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The highest usage of ad blockers happens within the age range of 18-24, which categorically includes Gen Z.

  The second highest age range is 25-34, and the third highest is 12-17, which is also included in Gen Z.

  That said, I would argue that, while knowing how to use a smartphone doesn’t make you tech savvy, knowing how to use an ad blocker doesn’t either. It’s as easy as installing an extension.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Discord lowers free upload limit to 10MB: “Storage management is expensive”⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I suppose they could, but even cold storage has a cost, and with the scale Discord’s operating at, they definitely have many terabytes of data that comes into the CDN every day, and that cost adds up if you’re storing it permanently.

  I also think the vast majority of users would prefer being able to upload much higher resolution images and videos, to being able to see the image they sent with their messages a year ago. I don’t often go back through my messages, but I often find myself compressing or lowering the quality of the things I’m uploading on a regular basis.

  They could also do the other common sense thing, which is to, on the client side of things, compress images and videos before sending them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Discord lowers free upload limit to 10MB: “Storage management is expensive”⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The thing is, I did have encryption keys set up. The problem was that Element would repeatedly forget the very encryption keys passed by the other user, and would then have to request the keys again. Any historical message history would be permanently encrypted forever, and wouldn’t decrypt with the new view key.

  After this happened about 4 times, I stopped using it, because it was impossible to maintain conversations for longer than 1-2 weeks before they’d inevitably be lost, and I’d then have to spend about an hour waiting for Element to receive the new encryption keys from the people I was contacting, even when they were already actively online.

  I have no clue what was causing it, but it happened on multiple accounts, on multiple devices, all the time, and there was no conceivable fix. I’m not sure if this is fixed now, but I haven’t had a good reason to go back, especially with other encrypted messaging options out there.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Discord lowers free upload limit to 10MB: “Storage management is expensive”⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Look, I’m as upset as you are about the enshittification of everything, but this is a bit too far.

  There was always legitimate issues with Discord’s storage management, and they at least seem to be taking it seriously now.

  I’m not a massive fan of Discord, but this is a bit of an overreaction.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Discord lowers free upload limit to 10MB: “Storage management is expensive”⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  For real.

  I emailed them once asking about how they were complying with GDPR regulations if they didn’t allow users a way to delete all their message details, and didn’t even have a procedure for GDPR requests, only their standard, much worse privacy-wise account deletion process. They claimed it was because they had a legitimate interest to keep any messages not individually deleted, so the chats would still look coherent after an account was deleted.

  They only delete your message if you delete it individually, so naturally, I was concerned, since you can’t delete messages in a server you were banned from, or left, and Discord provides no way for you to identify old messages in servers you’re not currently in.

  They eventually, supposedly, sent my concerns to their data privacy team.

  They were then sued for 800,000 euros about a month or two later.

  They still don’t allow you to mass delete your message data. They really want to hold onto it for as long as they can.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Discord lowers free upload limit to 10MB: “Storage management is expensive”⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Matrix is nice, but it’s still very bad UX wise.

  I’ve used it on and off for years now, and about 2-4 times a month it loses my chat view encryption keys, and loses me my entire chat history. It also regularly has sync issues between devices signed into the same account, and is relatively slow sometimes to send messages.

  Of course, that’s just my anecdotal experience, but I’ve tried many messaging platforms over the years, and while Matrix (and multiple of its clients, primarily Element) is the most feature-complete compared to Discord, it’s nowhere near properly usable long-term for a mass-market audience.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Discord lowers free upload limit to 10MB: “Storage management is expensive”⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Same here, honestly. I would have thought they’d say something like “hey, we’re going to delete anything 1 year or older starting next month, and reduce that amount slowly down to 6 months with time” just to give people a general warning in case there was anything they were storing through Discord that they wanted to keep.

  There’s also just a ton of optimizations they could have done. Are people repeatedly uploading the same file, with the same name and contents? merge them into one CDN link. They’d probably save hundreds of terabytes of data just from reposted memes alone through a hash matching algorithm.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm the developer of WalkScape, the RuneScape inspired fitness MMORPG where you progress by walking IRL. We're now accepting more people to the Closed Beta!⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I love this and I haven’t even used it yet! 😅

  A few things:

  • I love the idea of paying one-time to play offline, but it’s not currently very possible to do in-app purchases on a ROM like GrapheneOS, which you mentioned in the post as being something users (myself included) have. Will there be a way to pay outside of the in-app purchase dialogue to get access? (i.e. donate through bmac, then link account to app temporarily to confirm) I’d definitely like more of my money to go to you, rather than a play store fee.

    Additionally, will there be a direct APK download at all, or will it only be available through the Play Store? (obviously privacy-preserving frontends like the Aurora Store exist, but it’s nice to have an APK download too 😊)

  • Thank you for making privacy the default setting, while still letting users share more if they want to. This is something I always love to see!

  I’d 100% sign up for the beta right now, but since my GrapheneOS phone doesn’t have the ability to use the Play Store beta features, I’ll hold off on that so I don’t take someone’s spot :)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Firefox rolls out Total Cookie Protection by default to all desktop users worldwide | It is Firefox’s strongest privacy protection to date, confining cookies to the site where they were created⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Disabling cross site cookies and allowing them to exist while siloed within the specific sites that need them are two different things.

  Previous methods of disabling cross site cookies would often break functionality, or prevent a site from using their own analytics software that they contracted out from a third party.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Firefox rolls out Total Cookie Protection by default to all desktop users worldwide | It is Firefox’s strongest privacy protection to date, confining cookies to the site where they were created⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Total Cookie Protection was already a feature, (introduced on Feb 23st 2021) but it was only for people using Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection (ETP) on strict mode.

  They had a less powerful third-party cookie blocking feature for users that didn’t have ETP on strict mode, that blocked third party cookies on specific block lists. (i.e. known tracking companies)

  This just expanded that original functionality, by making it happen on any domain, and have it be the default for all users, rather than an opt-in feature of Enhanced Tracking Protection.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Firefox rolls out Total Cookie Protection by default to all desktop users worldwide | It is Firefox’s strongest privacy protection to date, confining cookies to the site where they were created⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  For those who don’t care to read the full article:

  This basically just confines any cookies generated on a page, to just that page.

  Image

  So, instead of a cookie from, say, Facebook, being stored on site A, then requested for tracking purposes on site B, each individual site would be sent its own separate Facebook cookie, that only gets used on that site, preventing it from tracking you anywhere outside of the specific site you got it from in the first place.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Words truly matter⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There are people who think that “positive” or “negative” words have a magic-like effect on natural processes.

  From what I’ve seen, this was originally popularized in 2004 by Masaru Emoto’s book “The Hidden Messages in Water,” where part of his claims were that snowflakes would develop differently in containers labeled with negative or positive emotions. Image

  Naturally, this turned out to be a complete lie, but many people, such as those in the original post, still believe that words can somehow influence things like mold development on food.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Private voting has been added to PieFed⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I love this approach, balances user freedom & privacy with moderation & voting pattern analysis by the public.

  ActivityPub might mean some data is slightly less private, but that doesn’t mean it has to be.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft will try the data-scraping Windows Recall feature again in October⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  At least they seem to have addressed some of the security implications:

  The database will be encrypted at rest and will require authentication (and periodic reauthentication)

  The feature will also be off by default

  But of course, nothing on the front of whether or not Microsoft will collect data on you using it. We can trust them there, I’m sure.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft will try the data-scraping Windows Recall feature again in October⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Surely they would never add even more telemetry that reports back nearly all of your important online activity to Microsoft.

  Right?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YouTube is Losing The War Against Adblockers⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not entirely sure myself, but the people I’m talking to have much smaller channels than the ones I often see talking about their Premium earnings, so that may have something to do with it.

  I’m not sure if this has an impact as well, but I do know there has also been a lot of users spoofing their locations to regions where the cost of Premium is cheaper (and thus generates less revenue for everyone involved) the vast majority of their viewer numbers are from the US though, so that doesn’t seem to make much sense.

  I do believe it can simply vary in terms of revenue-per-view depending on the creator, though.

  Regardless, I think that, overall, YouTube and YouTubers would make more money if YouTube didn’t price Premium so high, and actually invested a portion of their profits into original content for subscribers. I have a hard time believing that YouTube is generating anywhere near $168/yr from ad supported users, compared to the monthly Premium subscriber cost.

  YouTube’s share of Google’s global revenue is around 10%, but it would need to account for nearly half of Google’s yearly revenue to be earning the same rate as Premium costs, and that’s already including current higher-paying Premium subscribers.

  Obviously, not every user is going to be buying Premium if it becomes cheaper, but YouTube isn’t incentivizing Premium users past just “please don’t use an adblocker, pay us instead.” which I think will inevitably lead to them just not converting enough new subscribers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YouTube is Losing The War Against Adblockers⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Good fucking riddance.

  The sooner they realize the enshittification isn’t working, and is only increasing the amount of people participating in the largest global consumer boycott ever, the sooner they’ll actually try to improve the platform, or die trying.

  YouTube has continuously made the experience worse, adding more and more ads to users not using ad blockers, to compensate for those using them. Guess what, genius? People block ads because they suck. Adding more won’t stop people from using ad blockers!

  And they have the audacity to try selling YouTube Premium for a whopping $14/mo (nowhere near the actual revenue generated from a user watching ads,) then don’t even provide any real benefit past ad blocking, after they deliberately killed YouTube Originals because it didn’t instantaneously bring in immense profits.

  And the content creators I personally know have shown me the amount of money they get from Premium users, and it’s sometimes less than the value of an ad-supported user, even though the Premium user generates more revenue than an ad-supported one.

  I would pay for YouTube Premium if it was a reasonable rate, and actually came with exclusive content, similar to Nebula, but it doesn’t.

  Instead, YouTube has continued to make the interface more and more bloated, slow, and inefficient, and increased the incentives for low-quality, mass-produced content, all while not paying creators enough to support themselves on YouTube’s own platform.

  YouTube can’t see itself as being the cause of its own issues, because it’s blinded by bad ad-driven fiscal policy that has only been a proven failure.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Proton is transitioning towards a non-profit structure | Proton⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The email was more of a summary of past changes.

  The actual donation of shares to the Proton Foundation was a little while ago, and anyone directly subscribed to the Proton Blog probably already saw it (myself included), so seeing it show up again as if it was new news probably just felt a bit jarring to some people.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Linkwarden - An open-source collaborative bookmark manager to collect, organize and preserve webpages | August 2024 Update - Added More Translations, Code Refactoring and Optimization and more... 🚀⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  How have I never heard of this before!? I’ve been looking for exactly this for ages now.

  Already spinning up a docker container!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Patreon: adding Apple’s 30 percent tax is the price of staying in the App Store⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Landlords don’t create the value themselves, they are an intermediary for value.

  Platforms don’t create the value themselves, they are also an intermediary for value.

  The value app stores provide is reach, but they don’t get that value without the developer’s effort. The only thing they provide is the network effect, which is nothing more than a consequence of making themselves the default option for users of these phones.

  For the same reason that landlords don’t provide inherent value, but still capture so much of the housing market, platforms don’t provide inherent value, but still capture so much of the app market.

  They push out competition. If a landlord buys a house, there’s one less house for someone to buy. If an app store brings in another user, there’s one less user that will use other means to acquire an app.

  I myself primarily use alternative means of installing apps. Direct APK downloads, or F-Droid. The only reason these exist is because the apps I use are specifically targeting a privacy-conscious user base that is likely to be using alternative means to acquire apps in the first place.

  Because these platforms immediately monopolize user acquisition by bundling themselves with the OS, they directly fight any pressure to use alternative means, which makes most app developer efforts to create alternative means not worth the time.

  App stores can and should be free. Without an app store, Apple and Google would have barely any market for their phones.

  These platforms exist to give the hardware & OS itself value. The only reason these fees exist is because they are monopolies.