rottingleaf

@rottingleaf@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Kids are making deepfakes of each other, and laws aren’t keeping up⁩ ⁨⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Can you stop trying to find a silver lining in the sexual exploitation of teenage girls?

  Can you please use words by their meaning?

  Also I’ll have to be blunt, but - every human has their own sexuality, with their own level of “drive”, so to say, and their dreams.

  And it’s absolutely normal to dream of other people. Including sexually. Including those who don’t like you. Not only men do that, too. There are no thought crimes.

  So talking about that being easier or harder you are not making any argument at all.

  However. As I said elsewhere, the actions that really harm people should be classified legally and addressed. Like sharing such stuff. But not as making child pornography because it’s not, and not like sexual exploitation because it’s not.

  It’s just that your few posts I’ve seen in this thread seem to say that certain kinds of thought should be illegal, and that’s absolute bullshit. And laws shouldn’t be made based on such emotions.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Kids are making deepfakes of each other, and laws aren’t keeping up⁩ ⁨⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  This definitely will not add in any way to the way women and girls are made to feel entirely disgustingly dehumanized by every man or boy in their lives. Groups of men and boys reducing them and their bodies down to vivid sexual fantasies that they can quickly generate photo realistic images of.

  Sexual attraction doesn’t necessarily involve dehumanization. Unlike most other kinds of interest in a human being, it doesn’t require interest in their personality, but these are logically not the same.

  In general you are using emotional arguments for things that work not through emotion, but through literal interpretation. That’s like using metric calculations for a system that expects imperial. Utterly useless.

  If the person in the image is underaged then it should be classified as child pornography.

  No, it’s not. It’s literally a photorealistic drawing based on a photo (and a dataset to make the generative model). No children have been abused to produce it. Laws work literally.

  If the woman who’s photo is being used hasnt consented to this then it should be classified as sexual exploitation.

  No, because the woman is not being literally sexually exploited. Her photo being used without consent is, I think, subject of some laws. There are no new fundamental legal entities involved.

  Women and girls have faced degrees of this kind of sexual exploitation by men and boys since the latter half of the 20th century. But this is a severe escalation in that behavior. It should be illegal to do this and it should be prosecuted when and where it is found to occur.

  I think I agree. But it’s neither child pornography nor sexual exploitation and can’t be equated to them.

  There are already existing laws for such actions, similar to using a photo of the victim and a pornographic photo, paper, scissors, pencils and glue. Or, if you think the situation is radically different, there should be new punishable crimes introduced.

  Otherwise it’s like punishing everyone caught driving while drunk for non-premeditated murder. One is not the other.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What Does a Post-Google Internet Look Like⁩ ⁨⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  You can make an installer like the one Freenet has. Maybe even a wrapper with a tray icon in Tcl/Tk or something like that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What Does a Post-Google Internet Look Like⁩ ⁨⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Unless general-purpose Internet services will be banned.

  Have you noticed that laws about providing data on bad-bad criminals yadda-yadda implicitly ban everything not allowing to get that data?

  And have you noticed that Russian bans of things that can’t be filtered not only implicitly allow whitelist ban of protocols and services, but are also not very far from what EU and US lawmakers want?

  In any situation, if what powerful guys are doing seems to promise good things for you, first consider the possibility that you don’t understand what they are doing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨No JS, No CSS, No HTML: online "clubs" celebrate plainer websites⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Gemini is just a web replacement protocol. With basic things we remember from olden days Web, but with everything non-essential removed, for a client to be doable in a couple of days. I have my own Gemini viewer, LOL.

  This for me seems a completely different application from torrents.

  I was dreaming for a thing similar to torrent trackers for aggregating storage and computation and indexing and search, with search and aggregation and other services’ responses being structured and standardized, and cryptographic identities, and some kind of market services to sell and buy storage and computation in unified and pooled, but transparent way (scripted by buyer\seller), similar to MMORPG markets, with the representation (what is a siloed service in modern web) being on the client native application, and those services allowing to build any kind of client-server huge system on them, that being global. But that’s more of a global Facebook\Usenet\whatever, a killer of platforms. Their infrastructure is internal, while their representation is public on the Internet. I want to make infrastructure public on the Internet, and representation client-side, sharing it for many kinds of applications. Adding another layer to the OSI model, so to say, between transport and application layer.

  For this application:

  I think you could have some kind of Kademlia-based p2p with groups voluntarily joined (involving very huge groups) where nodes store replicas of partitions of group common data based on their pseudo-random identifiers and/or some kind of ring built from those identifiers, to balance storage and resilience. If a group has a creator, then you can have replication factor propagated signed by them, and membership too signed by them.

  But if having a creator (even with cryptographically delegated decisions) and propagating changes by them is not ok, then maybe just using whole data hash, or it’s bittorrent-like info tree hash, as namespace with peers freely joining it can do.

  Then it may be better to partition not by parts of the whole piece, but by info tree? I guess making it exactly bittorrent-like is not a good idea, rather some kind of block tree, like for a filesystem, and a separate piece of information to lookup which file is in which blocks. If we are doing directory structure.

  Then, with freely joining it, there’s no need in any owners or replication factors, I guess just pseudorandom distribution of hashes will do, and each node storing first partitions closest to its hash.

  Now thinking about it, such a system would be not that different from bittorrent and can even be interoperable with it.

  There’s the issue of updates, yes, hence I’ve started with groups having hierarchy of creators, who can make or accept those updates. Having that and the ability to gradually store one group’s data to another group, it should be possible to do forks of a certain state. But that line of thought makes reusing bittorrent only possible for part of the system.

  The whole database is guaranteed to be more than a normal HDD (1 TB? I dunno). Absolutely guaranteed, no doubt at all. 1 TB (for example) would be someone’s collection of favorite stuff, and not too rich one.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Decline of Usability: Revisited | datagubbe.se⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I blame the idea of the 00s and 10s that there should be some “Zen” in computer UIs and that “Zen” is doing things wrong with the arrogant tone of “you don’t understand it”. Associated with Steve Jobs, but TBH Google as well.

  And also another idea of “you dummy talking about ergonomics can’t be smarter than this big respectable corporation popping out stylish unusable bullshit”.

  So -

  1. pretense of wisdom and taste, under which crowd fashion is masked,
  2. almost aggressive preference for authority over people actually having maybe some wisdom and taste due to being interested in that,
  3. blind trust into whatever tech authority you chose for yourself, because, if you remember, in the 00s it was still perceived as if all people working in anything connected to computers were as cool as aerospace engineers or naval engineers, some kind of elite, including those making user applications,
  4. objective flaw (or upside) of the old normal UIs - they are boring, that’s why UIs in video games and in fashionable chat applications (like ICQ and Skype), not talking about video and audio players, were non-standard like always, I think the solution would be in per-application theming, not in breaking paradigms, again, like with ICQ and old Skype and video games, I prefer it when boredom is thought with different applications having different icons and colors, but the UI paradigm remains the same, I think there was a themed IE called LOTR browser which I used (ok, not really, I used Opera) to complement ICQ, QuickTime player and BitComet, all mentioned had standard paradigm and non-standard look.
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Misogyny and Violent Extremism: Can Big Tech Fix the Glitch?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not a glitch.

  People have spent billions to build systems where such dissemination of crowd emotion is the main difference from the real web (what was on geocities or even LJ, and a bit of that exists in Telegram, because it’s a Russian honeypot to collect intelligence, and Russia could care a bit less about keeping the line that American social media corps, in its effort to make the honeypot actually attractive to use).

  Then spent billions to advertise them. Billions to kill competition.

  Then they’ve lost billions from that, and yet doubled down on it.

  That just doesn’t happen by accident, it’s a whole era of humanity’s history now. Like 20s-50s (the “bad” kind of change, with goosestepping, cult of strong people, attempts to save empires, preparations for a nuclear war, all that) and 60s-90s (the “good” kind of change, with space race, hippies in the west, Soviet official ideology being peace and unification of humanity - BTW, it’s funny how the western politicians of that time freeloaded on that, never denying such a goal, but also never accepting it, thus getting the good parts without the hard ones) and then what we have.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Men are opening up about mental health to AI instead of humans⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Well. Not very different from “opening up” to hashish fumes or Tarot cards or Chinese fortune cookies.

  And robotic therapists are a common enough component of classical science fiction, not even all dystopian.

  For the record, I agree that the results suck. Everything around us is falling apart, have you noticed?

  You can do more with less with 1% deadly error rate, and you can do much more with much less with 10% deadly error rate. Military and economic logic says that the latter wins . Which means the latter wins evolution.

  And we (that is, our parents and grandparents) have built a nice world intended for low error rates, because they didn’t think such a contradiction between efficiency and correctness will happen, or they thought that it’s our job to root out our time’s weeds, loosely quoting Tolkien, and they have rooted out theirs as well as they could.

  Which means that nice world doesn’t survive evolution.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Trump Administration is Building a National Citizenship Data System; State and county election officials can now check the citizenship status of their entire voter lists.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s fascinating to see this find new pastures in the new world. As a proud Russian citizen.

  Some day you’ll remember with nostalgie those years of the ruling party actually caring to win elections.

  Jokes aside, it’s easier to cheat now because it’s easier to do everything, and that’s because of the Internet and modern computing systems.

  You can’t unmince minced meat back.

  But you can apply the same change in a different direction and see that today direct non-anonymous democracy is actually plausible, if it’s instituted, for big countries. 100 years ago it simply wasn’t possible. Now it is.

  Or that today Soviet system (as in Soviet democracy and not totalitarian state capitalism) is actually possible to build now. When they were trying, they couldn’t, they didn’t possess the means.

  And that both these things are actually what these people have done to us, but inverted. Our “direct vote” is the data they collect about us to classify and predict us for control. Our “Soviets” are that classification, and our “central planning” is those predictions and control.

  They’ve done all this, just directed for their own interest. So maybe one can do the opposite.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A Win for Fair Use Is a Win for Libraries: Recent legal decision has reaffirmed the power of fair use in the digital age, and it’s a big win for libraries and the future of public access to knowledge⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s old logic that might not be as certain in the new era.

  What makes profit, can share it with those making laws.

  And one anti-monopoly thing that was at some point common was that it’s illegal to provide a service below market cost to capture markets. Probably if that were applied to the Internet and free services like Facebook and Reddit and Google, many things would go differently.

  But at the same time even today payments over the Internet are problematic. If you could pay for storage and computation the same way you pay for landline, without extra bother, maybe we’d have something better.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Telegram, the FSB, and the Man in the Middle⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Подтвержденных сцуко самим протоколом Телеграмки.

  Ну и, эм, что у силовиков есть доступ к перепискам, уже возникало в куче уголовных дел. Они не слишком прячутся. И это, видимо, были не локальные трояны.

  Т.е. скорее всего доступ со стороны сервера к хранящемуся там.

  А ваццап все-таки E2EE и официальный доступ там к метаданным.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Russian Internet users are unable to access the open Internet⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  They had it coming for those captchas.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨No JS, No CSS, No HTML: online "clubs" celebrate plainer websites⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  And some super advanced LLM powered text compression so you can easily store a copy of 20% of them on your PC to share P2P.

  Nothing can be that advanced and zstd is good enough.

  The idea is cool. With pure p2p exchange being a fallback, and something like trackers in bittorrent being the main center to yield nodes per space (suppose, there’s more than one such archive you’d want to replicate) and per partition (if it’s too big, then maybe it would make sense, but then some of what I wrote further should be reconsidered).

  The problem of torrents and other stuff is that people only store what’s interesting to them.

  If you have to store one humongous archive, and be able to efficiently search it, and avoid losing pieces - then, I think, you need partitioned roughly equal distribution of it over nodes.

  The space of keys (suppose it’s hashes of blocks of the whole) is partitioned by prefix so that a node would store equal amount of blocks of every prefix. And first of all the values closest to the node’s identifier (a bit like in Kademlia) should be stored of those under that space. OK, I’m thinking the first sentence of this paragraph might even be unneeded.

  The data itself should probably be in some supercool format where you don’t need to have it all to decompress only the small part you need, just the beginning with the dictionary and some interval.

  There should also be, as a separate functionality of this system, search by keywords inside intervals, so that search would yield intervals where a certain keyword is encountered. With nodes indexing continuous intervals they can decompress and responding to search requests by those keywords. Ideally a single block should be possible to decompress having the dictionary. I suppose I should do my reading on compression algorithms and formats.

  Probably search function could also involve returning Google-like context. Depending on the space needed.

  Would also need some way to reward contribution, that is, to pay a node owner for storing and serving blocks.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UK’s Major Porn Providers Agree to Age Checks From Next Month; Aylo, Owner of Pornhub, YouPorn, and RedTube, Will Add Age Assurance Checks by July 25.⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yep, ancap thought in terms of efficiency, to justify ancap, goes after the central controller just not having enough information to fully govern a society well enough.

  These fuckers apparently think something changed, if you have one big honeypot of a web and mandate checks (as a justification) that yield said information to them.

  BTW, they are right, until we find a way to decentralize services.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In a First, America Dropped 30,000-Pound Bunker-Busters—But Iran’s Concrete May Be Unbreakable, Scientists Say⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I asked because I’ve heard such advice for bloody countryside home floors. Not even something requiring it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In a First, America Dropped 30,000-Pound Bunker-Busters—But Iran’s Concrete May Be Unbreakable, Scientists Say⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  They mean mixing in steel dust or nylon hair?

  Hard to believe this is a recent enough thought.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨No JS, No CSS, No HTML: online "clubs" celebrate plainer websites⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  HTML 2.0 doesn’t have tables, and tables are not so bad, even org-mode has tables.

  Since HTML 4.01 was a thing when I first saw a website:

  Being able to have buttons is good. Buttons with pictures too.

  And, unlike some people, I liked the idea of framesets. A simple enough websites could have an IRC-like chat frame to the left and the main navigable area to the right.

  And the unholy amount of specific tags is the other side of the coin for not yet using JS and CSS for everything.

  I think an “RHTML” standard as a continuation and maybe simplification of HTML 4.01 (no JS, no CSS, do dynamic things in applets, without Netscape plugins do applets with some new kind of plugins running in a specialized sandboxed VM with JIT) could be useful. Other than this there’s no need in any change at all. It’s perfect. It has all the necessary things for hypertext.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨No JS, No CSS, No HTML: online "clubs" celebrate plainer websites⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  How do you use hyperlinks without HTML?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Software is evolving backwards⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  My experience with Macs was that they are bloody unusable, so can’t help you. They cause me anxiety, kill my eyes and irritate without end.

  Can’t say it’s worse than Windows, of course.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI wins $200m contract with US military for ‘warfighting’⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I dreamed of a moment when further existence of the society without clear and non-ambiguous personal responsibility will be impossible.

  This is that. In olden days, even if an apparatus made a decision, it still consisted of people. Now it’s possible for the mechanism to not involve people. Despite making garbage decisions, that’s something new, or, to be more precise, something forgotten too long ago - of the times of fortunetelling on birds’ intestines and lambs’ bones for strategic decisions. I suppose in those times such fortunetelling was a mechanism to make a decision random enough, thus avoiding dangerous predictability and traitors affecting decisions.

  The problem with AI or “AI” is that it’s not logically the same as that fortunetelling.

  And also, about personal responsibility … in ancient Greece (and Rome) unfortunate result of such decision-making was not blamed on gods, it was blamed on the leader - their lack of favor with gods, or maybe the fortuneteller - for failing to interpret gods’ will, which, in case they could affect the result, correct. Or sometimes the whole unit, or the whole army, or the whole city-state. So the main trait of any human mechanism, for there to be a responsible party, was present.

  Either a clearly predictable set of people in the company providing the program, or the operator, or the officer making decisions, or all of them, should be responsible when using an “AI” to at least match this old way.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Software is evolving backwards⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Don’t forget the spikes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Software is evolving backwards⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I won’t. I see what designers do that looks nice if you only look at it like at a nice pic. Software engineers at least intend to use what they make.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Linus Torvalds and Bill Gates Meet for the First Time Ever⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  If writing code and the J4F book qualify as “literature”, then certainly. Also some of the mailing list posts by Linus - mwahaha.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨RFK Jr. Wants Every American to Be Sporting a Wearable Within Four Years⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I think some org could take the initiative and offer a standard protocol for “that” to communicate to this service.

  Then you could wear something FOSS and clearly not spying, but send some information (if you so wish). Maybe no location, but vitals. Maybe no vitals, but location (suppose you want RFK to see a big “FUCK THE GOAULD” on the map).

  Cause when you put enough money into a project, it might actually happen.

  This is also the mistake everyone made about platforms and social networks.

  I’ll repeat again my idea that similarly to Usenet, there should be standard protocols and universal services for a global public system replacing those (Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Google, whatever). You need a service to store data to be always available - have a standard for that service. You need a service to do some computation - have a standard for submitting a task and storing the result (until retrieved or maybe to the previous kind of service). You need a service to search for objects (common task, yes?) - have a standard for that. You need a service for notifications real-time - have a standard for that too, NOSTR does that now. You need some way to financially incentivize people to provide these services - have a “resource market” service, something like MMORPG item markets (where players script their trade with simple constraints, very easily), to buy&sell space&computation, with payments provided with something like GNU Taler, or BTC Lightning if nothing better. Need common identification - well, there’s OpenID, but one can also have cryptographic identities and identity caching services. Need to actually aggregate hundreds of those services for every task - if search service is not enough (suppose we want to also make search and other services somehow partitioned, or something like that, to accommodate for amounts of data), then have an aggregation service (similar to torrent trackers) or maybe just use DNS for that. Structured machine-processable results of those services allow you to never depend on one platform and have everything they offer. With the specific “kind” being provided by the client application.

  Humanity in our time has all the technologies it needs and none of the will.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple sued by shareholders for allegedly overstating AI progress⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  And the phonetic transcription of that is how we still call that in Russian.

  Well, with “Chinese” in Russian it didn’t stick. I’m somewhat sad, I think certain political conditions also make the Russian language poorer and weaker with time. In 00s I, despite being autistic, could somewhat “feel the wave” of the people around me. Now it just … feels as if someone tracks and tries to slowly kill all the good things, as if just being in control is not enough for those people.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ways the Trump Administration Has Sabotaged America’s Broadband Future⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  And that’s good, you shouldn’t have broadband because then a fucking website will require downloading a gig of data or something.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Software is evolving backwards⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s too easy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple sued by shareholders for allegedly overstating AI progress⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, in Russia in early 00s (my childhood) they’d say that about things looking like Chinese toys of cheap plastic. As in “Chinese means cheap, but low-quality and probably a toy”. Such things were indeed mostly produced in China, so. It’s rather that back then you’d sometimes have better things, now everything is like this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Linus Torvalds and Bill Gates Meet for the First Time Ever⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  When I actually started doing hobby projects, I remembered that feeling with Windows 9x where you learn to avoid “wrong” actions which have a potential of hanging your PC. You don’t even think about it. Just get used that you don’t move the cursor after clicking there, you don’t click here again after a first double click, and other such.

  While things like editing config files were … more normal for the average person even, you’d have a paper manual generally. For everything, kitchen appliances and anything technical you could buy too. You wouldn’t expect everything to just work without reading it. Freezes and crashes were worse.

  Windows won because most people didn’t know of anything else.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Linus Torvalds and Bill Gates Meet for the First Time Ever⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  There were plenty of alternative graphic shells for DOS, too.

  For me it’s interesting to imagine what if a multi-user memory protected yadda-yadda serious system replaced DOS, but preserved the modularity and interoperability of components, so that people would still use different graphic shells, different memory compressors\swappers and so on, and then the PC world would be much more interesting today.

  That’s what, only in the sense of desktop shells, Unix-likes have raising them above Windows, or at least have until X11 dies. I think that XLibre person, despite their mental instability and wish to seek conflicts, was right to fork it and it’s a good call and that XLibre project will live on. Because yes, RedHat had a policy for X11 stagnating and being deprecated, and they imposed it on the Xorg project itself. I think we’ll see that, oh wonder, X11’s modular architecture (in the sense of extensions too) will prove better project-wise than Wayland’s. Even with legacy, technical debt, obsolete paradigm, all those things people like to mention. This happened too late to kill Wayland, but not too late to save X.

  Which is BTW why this meeting involving Dave Cutler is cool again. See, NT is in its architecture more modular than Linux.

  I doubt they are going to do any project, but in case they are - would be cool if it were a third OS in the VMS and NT row. Supporting Linux ABI and drivers, but maybe even allowing to use Windows NT device drivers. How cool would that be.

  OK, that’s what’s called “пикейный жилет” in Russian, utterly useless talk of the kitchen\taxi kind.