mfed1122
@mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de
- Comment on I may swear like a pirate, but I'm a fucking PRINCIPLED pirate 11 hours ago:
Asking if people could spot the antichrist has always seemed paradoxical to me. Isn’t the antichrist’s defining thing that he will deceive people into following him? Lost cause imo
- Comment on Breaking The Creepy AI in Police Cameras 3 days ago:
Yooooooo what he’s the Flashbulb!? Crazy lol. I’ve loved his music for years now. Did not at all realize it was the same guy. Taste goes with taste I suppose
- Comment on Breaking The Creepy AI in Police Cameras 3 days ago:
Woah, this guy is great. I wish it were possible for me to do something like this full time, but I lack the wide skills he’s got. I wonder how long it takes to get to that level? And I wonder if there’s any organizations that might sort of scratch this itch? Been fantasizing about working for the IFF or something like that.
Really really love how he ends the video by insulting and criticizing the companies that asked him to sponsor them. Insane power move
- Comment on Birds of peace 4 days ago:
ADHD brain is multi-threading
- Comment on Birds of peace 4 days ago:
I like how this style of writing seems to honestly reflect internal deep-level thought processes. It feels like debugging into the assembly level of consciousness.
- Comment on Trump is building ‘one interface to rule them all.’ It’s terrifying. 5 days ago:
Oh God yes a still sentient and thinking brain just completely devoid of sensory input for eternity until he goes mad. Ironic fates ftw
- Comment on [deleted] 5 days ago:
I am always very proud to say I am a bad driver for this very reason. I am a very bad driver. But I am a better than average bias-recognizer
- Comment on do what you love 1 week ago:
This is PURE speculation, but I feel like this could be caused by the only people who feel comfortable getting a philosophy degree are wealthy connected people. I know a lot of people from my high school that have stereotypical “be poor forever” degrees and are doing great - but if you knew them in high school, you’d know that they had millionaire parents. All the poor kids went for safer degrees because they knew they’d need money.
- Comment on Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel? 1 week ago:
By negligence, I meant that the cost is negligible to the companies running scrapers, not that the solution itself is negligent. I should have said “negligibility” of Anubis, sorry - that was poor clarity on my part.
But I do think that the cost of it is indeed negligible, as the article shows. It doesn’t really matter if the author is biased or not, their analysis of the costs seems reasonable. I would need a counter-argument against that to think they were wrong. Just because they’re biased isn’t enough to discount the quantification they attempted to bring to the debate.
Also, I don’t think there’s any hypocrisy in me saying I’ve only thought about other solutions here and there - I’m not maintaining an anti-scraping library. And there’s already been indications that scrapers are just accepting the cost Anubis on Codeberg, right? So I’m not trying to say I’m some sort of tech genius who has the right idea here, but from what Codeberg was saying, and from the numbers in this article, it sure looks like Anubis isn’t the right idea. I am indeed only having fun with my suggestions, not making whole libraries out of them and pronouncing them to be solutions. I personally haven’t seen evidence that Anubis is so clearly working?
- Comment on Computer Science, a popular college major, has one of the highest unemployment rates 1 week ago:
I thought that at first too and I wasn’t gonna say anything but I was thinking to myself “bro is definitely writing some really shitty code”
- Comment on Computer Science, a popular college major, has one of the highest unemployment rates 1 week ago:
Oversaturated?!? Maybe if you’re a plebian bootcamp passionless 0.1x-er who hasn’t even contributed to multiple open source projects or founded at least 3 startups. Maybe you should try internalizing all PhD-worthy algorithms from the last 30 years to reproduce them on the spot from memory like I did, or else do you really even care about the craft??? You need to understand this industry is full of math olympiad prodigy coder geniuses who work 80 hours a week like me so yeah it’s competitive. Nothing oversaturated about that
/s
- Comment on Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel? 1 week ago:
Yeah, well-written stuff. I think Anubis will come and go. This beautifully demonstrates and, best of all, quantifies the negligence of Anubis.
It’s very interesting to try to think of what would work, even conceptually. Some sort of purely client-side captcha type of thing perhaps. I keep thinking about it in half-assed ways for minutes at a time.
Maybe something that scrambles the characters of the site according to some random “offset” of some sort, e.g maybe randomly selecting a modulus size and an offset to cycle them, or even just a good ol’ cipher. And the “captcha” consists of a slider that adjusts the offset. You as the viewer know it’s solved when the text becomes something sensical - so there’s no need for the client code to store a readable key that could be used to auto-undo the scrambling. You could maybe even have some values of the slider randomly chosen to produce English text if the crawler got smart enough to check for legibility (not sure how to hide which slider positions would be these red herring ones though) - which could maybe be enough to trick the crawler into picking up junk text sometimes.
- Comment on New project, new energy 1 week ago:
Yeah I have had some luck with this I suppose. Like taking a break for the 1 year plan to do a little 1 week side quest.
- Comment on New project, new energy 1 week ago:
My first thought was “but all my projects are so big it’ll be years before I can do another one”, which is making me think my problem is project scope. But then, since I’m into solo game dev, there’s only so much scope reduction I can do…
- Comment on New project, new energy 1 week ago:
Truest thing ever. I TRULY need to overcome this because, not to sound un-humble or anything, but I (and probably everyone else who has this tendency) am totally capable of creating and finishing some pretty awesome stuff. But if I keep going like this, I’ll never finish anything…I know the shitpost comm isn’t maybe the most fitting spot for this discussion, but, like…does anyone have any advice?
- Comment on Codeberg: army of AI crawlers are extremely slowing us; AI crawlers learned how to solve the Anubis challenges. 1 week ago:
Yeah you’re right, I was using AI in the colloquial modern sense. My mistake. It actually drives me nuts when people do that. I should have said “without compute-heavy AI”.
- Comment on Codeberg: army of AI crawlers are extremely slowing us; AI crawlers learned how to solve the Anubis challenges. 1 week ago:
Yeah, I do. I’m just grasping at straws. But you’re right, the only real solution, ironically, is to have non-open sites where you need accounts to view content. I wouldn’t mind seeing some private phpbb forums though.
- Comment on Codeberg: army of AI crawlers are extremely slowing us; AI crawlers learned how to solve the Anubis challenges. 1 week ago:
The crawlers are likely not AI though, but yes OCR could be done effectively without AI anyways. This idea ultimately boils down to the same hope Anubis had of making the processing costs large enough to not be worth it.
- Comment on Codeberg: army of AI crawlers are extremely slowing us; AI crawlers learned how to solve the Anubis challenges. 1 week ago:
I wasn’t being totally serious, but also, I do think that while accessibility concerns come from a good place, there is some practical limitation that must be accepted when building fringe and counter-cultural things. Like, my hidden rebel base can’t have a wheelchair accessible ramp at the entrance, because then my base isn’t hidden anymore. It sucks that some solutions can’t work for everyone, but if we just throw them out because it won’t work for 5% of people, we end up with nothing. I’d rather have a solution that works for 95% of people than no solution at all. I’m not saying that people who use screen readers are second-class citizens. If crawlers were vision-based then I might suggest matching text to background colors so that only screen readers work to understand the site. Because something that works for 5% of people is also better than no solution at all. We need to tolerate having imperfect first attempts and understand that more sophisticated infrastructure comes later.
But yes my image map idea is pretty much a joke nonetheless
- Comment on Codeberg: army of AI crawlers are extremely slowing us; AI crawlers learned how to solve the Anubis challenges. 1 week ago:
Okay what about…what about uhhh… Static site builders that render the whole page out as an image map, making it visible for humans but useless forccrawlers 🤔🤔🤔
- Comment on Codeberg: army of AI crawlers are extremely slowing us; AI crawlers learned how to solve the Anubis challenges. 1 week ago:
homestarrunner.com/toons/backtoawebsite
“Lemme get that hit counter!”
- Comment on FFmpeg moves to Forgejo 1 week ago:
I’m trying to take a progress over perfection approach to these things. My number one priority was to get off of Chrome and Firefox is pretty rough on mobile. I tried a few things and Brave was the one with the best experience, especially because of the ad blocking without needing to mess around with a bunch of plugins. I figure I can go deeper into that iceberg over time. What do you use?
- Comment on FFmpeg moves to Forgejo 1 week ago:
Yeah same, I’m on Brave and Anubis is blocking me. Inb4 I am told to commit sudoku for using Brave, yes I know the owner sucks
- Comment on The two types of people 1 week ago:
“I Transformed Into An Invisible Tiger And Began Killing Billionaires” - A cat-and-mouse Death Note style detective anime about a college freshman communist tech nerd who miraculously gains the ability to transform into an invisible tiger and uses his leet Linux hacking skills to track down billionaire targets. At first the supernatural crimes are easy to carry out, but the billionaires soon start to develop bunkers and defense systems against the mysterious threat. But when the killer discovers that a prodigy medical genius has acquired the same power, and intends to unveil their research on it to earn a Nobel Prize - that’s when things really start to get complicated.
DM me for my Venmo info for any royalties thank you
- Comment on Me too. 2 weeks ago:
This is a great example in support of something I often think about. We see our consciousness as “me” and as “the thing in charge” of the body, but really it’s more of an ancillary subprocess that the body runs for its own benefit. It’s just a special subprocess that does its job best when it mistakenly thinks of itself as being the boss of the body.
- Comment on This website is for humans 2 weeks ago:
Def check out neocities more, also melonking.net and his projects are pretty cool, particularly melonland.net/surf-club has a lot of good sites on it
- Comment on Drug Enforcement Administration agent used Illinois cop’s Flock license plate reader password for immigration enforcement searches 2 weeks ago:
I see what you’re saying. You’re not talking about “making sense” in an ethical or social well-being sense, you mean it’s literally confusing why the technology wouldn’t be used for all kinds of crimes, given that it already exists - irrespective of whether the technology should be used. Is that right? Like, sure it’s dystopian and creepy, but why wouldn’t the creepy dystopia use the tech for all cases then rather than just some? That’s a good question. I think because there is legitimately some understanding of the dangers of using these powerful tools willy-nilly. While people aren’t perfect angels, they also aren’t perfect devils either. Another factor is that there is some pressure to appear not to be overly heavy-handed with these tools - as we see in those chats, they knew it made them look bad for this to get out.
And the final most pessimistic factor is that this company almost certainly chargers per seat, so giving direct usernames and logins to every officer or even every department is probably absurdly expensive. Companies will often try to limit their license seats to as few people as possible and then just funnel as much different people’s work through that one person’s license as they can.
- Comment on Drug Enforcement Administration agent used Illinois cop’s Flock license plate reader password for immigration enforcement searches 2 weeks ago:
It does make sense. Police are not perfect saint-like beings, and the government is not composed of perfect beings either. I’m not sure what kind of person you are, but I’m sure there are some things you enjoy and partake in which some other social group really despises. If you’re religious, it may be militant atheists who despise you going to church. If you’re not religious, it may be militant theists who despise you not going to church. The point is, there’s probably some social cultures out there that hate you for the things that you love. Those people may not be in charge right now, but they might be one day. Those people can end up in police departments, as developers for these camera companies, as administrators for the database that collects information on where you drive and when. Those people, being imperfect as they are, may not always resist the temptation to use this system in a way to track down and identify people like you for doing whatever it is that you love and they hate. Now you end up on a list for that.
There’s no denying that sophisticated surveillance technology does make it easier to catch criminals and does legitimately protect from the threats those criminals pose. But surveillance technology, by it’s very nature, cannot surveil only the criminals - it has to surveil everyone to find the criminals. And the notion of what is criminal may change. If your favorite hobby becomes criminalized, or if the government criminalizes your identity itself, these beautifully effective tools are suddenly turned against you.
There is a happy medium to be found between giving your society tools to enforce the will of constituents, vs. giving your society tools that be too easily abused. Given that this tool is already being abused, it probably isn’t worth the benefits.
- Comment on Drug Enforcement Administration agent used Illinois cop’s Flock license plate reader password for immigration enforcement searches 2 weeks ago:
That was fast! I feel like I only started hearing about Flock, what, two weeks ago?
- Comment on Drug Enforcement Administration agent used Illinois cop’s Flock license plate reader password for immigration enforcement searches 2 weeks ago:
Yeah but police literally get away with murder here so I don’t think this will end up making a big splash