Glitchvid

@Glitchvid@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI crawlers cause Wikimedia Commons bandwidth demands to surge 50%.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The amount of stupid AI scraping behavior I see even on my small websites is ridiculous, they’ll endlessly pound identical pages as fast as possible over an entire week, apparently not even checking if the contents changed. Probably some vibe coded shit that barely functions.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Automatically Crack Safes With This Autodialer⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Man this reminds me of the lockers we had in middle school that used dial locks, cheap masterlock jobbies that despite having notches between the major numbers, just being within 2 of the actual number would register.
  Plus it felt like they’d slip internally so if you dialed too quickly (because class starts in 3 minutes at the other end of the building) you’d have to start all over.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Power is not energy: why the difference matters [Technology Connections]⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, electric motors are what I notice the most. Be it on washers/dryers, garbage disposals (which range from 1/3, 1/2, 3/4, 1HP) and more.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Musk 'Pressured' Reddit CEO to Silence DOGE Critics, Leaving Moderators Outraged: Report.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Reddit is becoming such a shit hole anyway, the site barely functions on mobile browser now, half the time it has API errors or fails to load.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Internet forums are disappearing because now everything is Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Further hampered by the Steam “discussions” that are an incredibly unmoderated cesspit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Kagi search engine now has a Fediverse search option.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If they were a small or free service I wouldn’t have much issue, but they do charge, I don’t think it’s too much to ask that they at least attempt to scrape the wider web.

  Building their own database seems the prudent thing long-term, I don’t doubt they could shore up coverage over Bing. They don’t have to replace the other indexes wholesale, just supplement it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Kagi search engine now has a Fediverse search option.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  They have smallweb and news indexing, but other than that AFAICT they rely completely on other providers. Which is a shame, Google allows submitting sites for indexing and notifies if they can’t.

  Running a scraper doesn’t need to cover everything since they have access to other indexes, but they really should be developing that ability instead of relying on Bing and other providers to provide good results, or results at all.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Kagi search engine now has a Fediverse search option.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Small web always returns 0 results for anything that isn’t extremely broad, unfortunately.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Kagi search engine now has a Fediverse search option.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve been using Kagi for the last year+.

  Personally, I wish they’d tone down the AI stuff that ruined Google, but at least you can turn most of it off.

  Their results are okay, a little better than Bing, but obviously they’re limited by their existing index providers, I wish they’d run their own spiders and crawl for their own data, since I think Bing fails on a lot of coverage of obscure websites.

  In general I find the weighting of modern indexes to be subpar, though the SEO industry has made it a hard problem to tackle, I wish more small websites and forums were higher ranked, and AI slop significantly de rated.

  TW: Self harm

  Also not a huge fan of the company and a lot of it’s ardent customers, who heavily protested a suicide prevention popup if you used it to searched for how to kill yourself.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Discord in Early Talks With Bankers for Potential I.P.O.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Matrix is probably something worth looking at, at least from an intellectual standpoint, for you. It uses shared message state and a DAG, plus some fancy perfect forward secrecy (using Signal’s Double Ratchet algorithm), which is at least interesting. There’s also Tox (chat/protocol) if you want totally distributed chat.

  Personally, I really like distributed models from a theoretical standpoint; but for end-user applications they pose very difficult constraints, we live in a world with ⪅50% publicly routed IP for one, they fundamentally require immense data replication, latency in peer-finding, bandwidth constraints, and ultimately sub-par UX. I thought IPFS with a way to pay nodes to pin content was a really neat idea, but hasn’t caught on, for example. Not to discourage you, if you think it’s workable then have at it, but I think it at least explains the current state of things.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Discord in Early Talks With Bankers for Potential I.P.O.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I do think the other home server implementations gaining parity (production-ready) with the reference home server would go a long way. I haven’t run a home server but I’ve heard from those that have that it really has a hard time scaling. (Though this serves as impetus to give it a try over spring break)

  Which brings me to the caveats of the protocol, I personally don’t think the design is ideal, it’s more described as a distributed message bus, what I’ve read of the spec it’s over engineered, it made good decisions wrt using modern web technologies (JSON, WebRTC), but it didn’t scope itself to the particular task.

  That said, I haven’t written a federated protocol, and they have. But if I was going to, I’d really want to look at Discord and see how to copy a lot of that model, but break parts of it out to facilitate federation:

  I originally wrote a huge hypothetical design here that I speculated would fare better, but honestly the specifics become less relevant, point is that the shared state of rooms is a real challenge, and one out of scope for just a federated instant messaging system, and I’m no longer certain it’s viable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Discord in Early Talks With Bankers for Potential I.P.O.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I really wish Matrix had been more successful, but it has some pretty core problems that prevented it from gaining more traction.

  It fell into the same trap as XMPP, though perhaps even worse, with a focus more on its protocol and specification than a single unified product vision. The reference server implementation is slow, and using a language not optimal for its purpose, with alternative server implementations left incomplete and unsupported. It took a long time for them to figure out voice and video and for it to work well, and the “user flow” still isn’t at Discord levels.

  I’ve rooted for Matrix for a long time, but as a former XMPP evangelist, to me the writing on the wall says it isn’t suited for success either. I’d love to be wrong, but I don’t see a way through.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Kevin Rose officially relaunching Digg.com⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  No thanks, people hop from centralized platform to centralized platform thinking things will be different.

  Consolidated power, especially when fully captured by market forces, will always enshitify, the only out is federation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rust is Eating JavaScript⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Rust By Example is very good for showing the ropes in a very practical way, that’s how I got up and running with it.

  Secondly is the O’Reilly book Programming Rust, which is probably closer to what you want, it explains the actual technical details of much of the language, and to me seems written for an audience that already knows programming. Lastly would be Rust for Rustaceans by No Starch Press, if you actually do want to pursue Rust further, as it discusses very, very in detail the systems of the language, and how they can be used to make something so powerful like Serde.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rust is Eating JavaScript⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Maybe give it a try; it’s my favorite language to write programs in now, it has an extremely good standard library, and for everything else there’s a mass of high quality crates, its build system is actually competent and makes compiling on Windows or Linux trivial, plus many, many more quality of life features.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The hardest working font in Manhattan – Aresluna⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  What a wonderfully enchanting exploration of Gorton.

  I’ve had a soft spot for Gordon Modified for a long time, I use Signature Plastics keycaps on almost all my keyboards, with its wonderful rounded characters . There’s just something about it, easy on the eyes, immediately legible at even small scales, it’s a comfort font.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  At what level? I get a student email from my college (outlook based) as do the professors, though communication is primarily through Canvas. So that’s what I see most often in that context.

  I think a lot of people have Gmail incidentally for things like YouTube and other Google account stuff, very few people know you can even bring your own mail.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I still see lots of different emails out there, outlook/hotmail is still huge, yahoo occasionally, icloud in the US.

  Among my techy friend circle all of us have either our own self hosted mail, a ‘privacy’ company email, or something in the middle.

  All to say, I don’t think it’s that uphill of a battle for the very large percentage of Internet users to accept the way federation works.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Regardless if it was the plan, it’s the result.

  I can’t stand what it has become, especially when some of the most problematic subs have massive influence over the rest of the site, like wsb.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Looks like Lemmy is climbing up to the 2023 exodus days numbers again⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, I was starting to feel a bit crazy with how many were coming out of the woodwork with almost exactly that same wording, even in my city’s sub.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Looks like Lemmy is climbing up to the 2023 exodus days numbers again⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I finally made the move to setting up an account here and wean my reddit usage.

  It’s getting so bad on there, so many bots, trolls, and paid agitators. Plus the uptick in fascist apologists. Smaller communities with higher bars to entry produce better conversation, in my experience.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨As Sony exits, Verbatim doubles down on optical media — stable supply of discs is a "top priority" despite shrinking market⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Unfortunately I don’t think Verbatim manufactures any quad-layer, so Sony was the only real option for 128GB disks.

  Furthermore, M-Disc is still very pricey per-GB, and their non M-Disc BD disks aren’t price that much better. I’ve also recently got a spindle of Verbatim BDXLs that every single one would fail to either write or read at the layer transitions, so having a single option here is already proving to be painful.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m really supportive of this kind of protocol. I’ve long advocated for some system that allowed for micro-payments to support websites, both optional and paywall. We’ve seen what the expectation of having “free” services has gotten us, I’d much prefer to chip in to sites that provide me enjoyment or are informative.