AmbitiousProcess
@AmbitiousProcess@piefed.social
- Comment on Just a little bit more 2 days ago:
Woah woah woah there pal, we don't even say sw--r around these parts, that's too far! If you're going to censor an image at least do it right. smh /j
- Comment on FTC chair Andrew Ferguson warns Google not to filter or suppress emails sent by Republicans over Gmail 1 week ago:
https://workspace.google.com/blog/identity-and-security/an-overview-of-gmails-spam-filters
User feedback, such as when a user marks a certain email as spam or signals they want a sender’s emails in their inbox, is key to this filtering process, and our filters learn from user actions.
Maybe a lot of people just mark it as spam for some reason, wonder why that could be? Could it be because they simply don't like your emails and think they feel spammy? No, that couldn't be it, it has to be that the same company that kissed up to Trump also just hates republicans now for some reason! /s
- Comment on WATER! 1 week ago:
I doubt that's the case, currently.
Right now, there's a lot of genuine competition in the AI space, so they're actually trying to out compete one another for market share. It's only once users are locked into using a particular service that they begin deliberate enshittification with the purpose of getting more money, either from paying for tokens, or like Google did when it deliberately made search quality worse so people would see more ads ("What are you gonna do, go to Bing?")
By contrast, if ChatGPT sucks, you can locally host a model, use one from Anthropic, Perplexity, any number of interfaces for open source (or at least, source-available) models like Deepseek, Llama, or Qwen, etc.
It's only once industry consolidation really starts taking place that we'll see things like deliberate measures to make people either spend more on tokens, or make money from things like injecting ads into responses.
- Comment on Where is Immich going to be in 1 year? What's your prediction? 1 week ago:
I have a feeling it'll simply grow more in popularity, since stable release will probably make a lot more people feel more comfortable recommending it to people, myself included.
Right now, I don't treat it as if it's a backup in any way due to its beta nature, and I hope that can change.
- Comment on Where is Immich going to be in 1 year? What's your prediction? 1 week ago:
Maybe a simple photo editor would fit in nicely?
Basic photo editing capabilities are planned after stable release, this year :)
- Comment on Let Google know what you think about their proposed restrictions on sideloading Android apps. - Android developer verification requirements [Feedback Form] 1 week ago:
Yes, there is.
Here's the official Android Developer page on the developer verification program. Bottom of the page, green square on the right labeled "Do you have any additional questions or feedback?"
Link is the same as in the post.
- Comment on Our Channel Could Be Deleted - Gamers Nexus 1 week ago:
Just checked the contributor's page, the crawled privacy policy being referenced is stated to be 4 months out of date, but the policy on Nebula's website hasn't been changed since Aug 31 2023, so I think TOSDR might be a little bugged, and just doesn't have all the current policy's points available for contributors to tag. The current privacy policy is much more lengthy to cover local state privacy regulations, the scope of what they now offer, etc.
Still, it's all pretty boilerplate, and nothing about it is really out of the ordinary or super harmful. Extremely basic attribution might be used if you click onto Nebula from an ad, and they might share a non-identifying hashed ID with that company. They'll collect aggregate statistics to determine the impact of marketing campaigns, they sometimes email you, they collect data on your device that most webservers would by default in logs. All very standard.
If they update any part of the policy about how they collect/use/share your data, they'll notify you,
They even explicitly say to not provide them with info on your race/politics/religion/health/biometrics/genetics/criminality or union membership. You are given an explicit right to delete your account regardless of local privacy laws, and they give you a single email to contact specifically regarding any requests related to the privacy policy.
None of this is crazy, and I have no clue why artyom would call it a "shithole" based on that.
- Comment on Our Channel Could Be Deleted - Gamers Nexus 1 week ago:
Except for these people, it almost definitely is. They have staff, an office, inventory to manage, etc. Most YouTubers nowadays aren't just operating on their own, and thus have financial expenses outside of just paying themselves for their own labor, that can't just keep going if their revenue stream goes down, or even just takes a large enough cut.
It's unfortunate, but that's just how a lot of the content creation industry works right now, especially on YouTube.
- Comment on First time posters be like 1 week ago:
It's also just generally easier for first-time users to start using. For anyone curious, their little "feeds" of communities you can follow in one go by topic are super handy.
For example, if I subscribe to the activismplus feed, I automatically subscribe to communities like antiwork, solarpunk, socialism, leftism, anarchism, unions, antifascism, human rights, left urbanism, etc, from a number of different instances all at once.
For a first-time user, it's easier to pick a topic they're interested in and automatically be following all the relevant communities across most instances, rather than subscribing to communities one-by-one over a very long period of time.
- Comment on AI lovers grieve loss of ChatGPT’s old model: ‘Like saying goodbye to someone I know’ 1 week ago:
If only it were that easy.
Most third places have either disappeared, or been replaced with ones that you can only really enjoy if you're able to spend money every time you go there (e.g. bars, theaters, cafes, clubs, etc).
Many small towns are only getting smaller, leaving people that still live in them with less and less people to talk to.
Economic circumstances are consistently getting worse across the board, meaning people are spending more time at work just to stay alive, rather than being able to easily arrange to spend time somewhere with people.
It's not like it's impossible, obviously, but the state of the world is actively discouraging prosocial behavior through both cost and just circumstance.
- Comment on Everytime i come across a 3d printing post 2 weeks ago:
The MSDS for the filament I use says that it doesn't contain any PBT/vPvB substance or endocrine disruptors. I presume that means it's likely fine, at least for the brand I use.
The only 2 ingredients are PLA, and calcium carbonate, which is also found in egshells, some vegetables, and is coincidentally commonly used as an additive to composting piles that can eliminate pathogens.
I also think the overall amount of pigment entering the environment from something like this will be quite low compared to practically any other contaminant that enters the waste stream from people who just don't know what's compostable throwing random things in the bin.
There's also the fact that there's probably larger overall harms from all the microplastics existing in a landfill rather than being broken down entirely into plant proteins in a composting facility but with a minute amount of contamination. It's not perfect, but it's probably better than leaving all the microplastics floating around for decades if not centuries, depending on the environment.
- Comment on Everytime i come across a 3d printing post 2 weeks ago:
I have absolutely no clue how to calculate that by myself. I think that would call for a... lifecycle analysis.
...
Get it?
...
I'll show myself out.
- Comment on Everytime i come across a 3d printing post 2 weeks ago:
This paper estimates the CO2e emissions of roughly a 1kg spool (estimates are done by length of filament, not weight, but weight would end up being about 1kg) of PLA filament at 3.10kg of CO2e.
The model used to print the alleged ghost gun is the FMDA 19.2 by "the Gatalog," which when I load it into my slicer shows an estimated 55g of filament used to print when using 15% infill, and 94g with 100% solid infill, for an estimated 0.1705-0.2914 CO2e of emissions for the printed parts. (This doesn't include any support material, depending on print positioning)
There's no easy way to determine how much of that could theoretically end up as microplastics though.
As for the metal parts, I have no clue lmao, I don't care to estimate it that much. - Comment on Everytime i come across a 3d printing post 2 weeks ago:
From what I've seen, at the bare minimum, it will break down completely back into plant polymers faster than other plastics could hope to break down into anything non-dangerous to the environment, and even if it does break down into microplastics quicker, I'd rather have something like that, which can then later break down into plant polymers, rather than something that slowly leeches microplastics into the environment for the next few centuries, and doesn't really break down into anything much less dangerous past that point.
To cite some interesting points from the paper you referenced:
The biodegradation of polylactic acid occurs in two main steps: fragmentation and mineralization. [...] which can be biotic or abiotic. For instance, biotic hydrolysis involves microorganisms and/or enzymes, whereas abiotic hydrolysis involves mechanical weathering.
This means it can break down via multiple mechanisms, with or without the presence of any microbes, but only given specific environmental circumstances, which is why it doesn't work well in aquatic environments, as previously mentioned. However, some of it does still break down there, and if it later exits that aquatic environment, other processes can begin to break down what remains.
The authors concluded that polylactic acid and its blends are similar to non-biodegradable plastics in terms of biodegradation in aquatic environment.
[They] proposed that low temperatures along with low bacterial density make the sea water unsuitable for the biodegradation of polylactic acid.
However, on the microplastics point, while they do state it degrades quickly, in terms of overall quantity of microplastics produced, it's actually lower than other common plastics.
The authors reported that polylactic acid forms almost 18 times fewer microplastics as compared to the petroleum-based plastic, polypropylene.
They do still mention that it will still likely have many negative effects on marine life, though, even given that. Surely we'll stop dumping plastics in the ocean now, for the good of the planet! Or not, because profits matter more, am I right?
From another study, it seems that soil with certain combinations of bacteria, at regular temperatures found in nature, could mineralize about 24% of PLA in 150 days, which is pretty damn good compared to how long it would take non-bioplastics to do so.
And of course, when put into dedicated composting facilities that can reach high temperatures, PLA can be composted extremely effectively. And this is just regular PLA we're talking about, not things like cPLA, which can be 100% composted within regular composting facilities within 2-4 months. (coincidentally, most biodegradable utensils are now made of cPLA)
I wouldn't doubt we start seeing even more compostable variants of filament for 3D printers specifically popping up as actual distribution and manufacturing for the material becomes more cost effective and widespread. I was able to find cPLA filament at a reasonable price just from a simple search, and there's even a biodegradable flexible filament as an alternative to TPU, made of oyster powder, which is 100% compostable (though is about 4-8X the price of regular TPU per gram as of now)
None of this discounts any of the current environmental impacts of 3D printing materials, of course, but a lot of PLA now can already be almost entirely, if not actually entirely composted in local municipal composting facilities, and there's even more compostable alternatives that exist today.
I compost my failed or no-longer-needed PLA prints, and my city even explicitly states to put it in my compost bin, as it's supported by our composting system.
- Comment on Codeberg: army of AI crawlers are extremely slowing us; AI crawlers learned how to solve the Anubis challenges. 2 weeks ago:
Most of these AI crawlers are from major corporations operating out of datacenters with known IP ranges, which is why they do IP range blocks. That's why in Codeberg's response, they mention that after they fixed the configuration issue that only blocked those IP ranges on non-Anubis routes, the crawling stopped.
For example, OpenAI publishes a list of IP ranges that their crawlers can come from, and also displays user agents for each bot.
Perplexity also publishes IP ranges, but Cloudflare later found them bypassing no-crawl directives with undeclared crawlers. They did use different IPs, but not from "shady apps." Instead, they would simply rotate ASNs, and request a new IP.
The reason they do this is because it is still legal for them to do so. Rotating ASNs and IPs within that ASN is not a crime. However, maliciously utilizing apps installed on people's devices to route network traffic they're unaware of is. It also carries much higher latency, and could even allow for man-in-the-middle attacks, which they clearly don't want.
- Comment on We hate AI because it's everything we hate 2 weeks ago:
While true to a degree, I think the fact is that AI is just much more complex than a knife, and clearly has perverse incentives, which cause people to use it "wrong" more often than not.
Sure, you can use a knife to cook just as you can use a knife to kill, but just as society encourages cooking and legally & morally discourages murder, then in the inverse, society encourages any shortcut that can get you to an end goal for the sake of profit, while not caring about personal growth, or the overall state of the world if everyone takes that same shortcut, and the AI technology is designed with the intent to be a shortcut rather than just a tool.
The reason people use AI in so many damaging ways is not just because it is possible for the tool to be used that way, and some people don't care about others, it's that the tool is made with the intention of offloading your cognitive burden, doing things for you, and creating what can be used as a final product.
It's like if generative AI models for image generation could only fill in colors on line art, nothing more. The scope of the harm they could cause is very limited, because you'd always require line art of the final product, which would require human labor, and thus prevent a lot of slop content from people not even willing to do that, and it would be tailored as an assistance tool for artists, rather than an entire creation tool for anyone.
Contrast that with GenAI models that can generate entire images, or even videos, and they come with the explicit premise and design of creating the final content, with all line art, colors, shading, etc, with just a prompt. This directly encourages slop content, because to have it only do something like coloring in lines will require a much more complex setup to prevent it from simply creating the end product all at once on its own.
We can even see how the cultural shifts around AI happened in line with how UX changed for AI tools. The original design for OpenAI's models was on "OpenAI Playground," where you'd have this large box with a bunch of sliders you could tweak, and the model would just continue the previous sentence you typed if you didn't word it like a conversation. It was designed to look like a tool, a research demo, and a mindless machine.
Then, they released ChatGPT, and made it look more like a chat, and almost immediately, people began to humanize it, treating it as its own entity, a sort of semi-conscious figure, because it was "chatting" with them in an interface similar to how they might text with a friend.
And now, ChatGPT's homepage is presented as just a simple search box, and lo and behold, suddenly the marketing has shifted to using ChatGPT not as a companion, but as a research tool (e.g. "deep research") and people have begun treating it more like a source of truth rather than just a thing talking to them.
And even in models where there is extreme complexity to how you could manipulate them, and the many use cases they could be used for, interfaces are made as sleek and minimalistic as possible, to hide away any ability you might have to influence the result with real, human creativity.
The tools might not be "evil" on their own, but when interfaces are designed the way they are, marketing speak is used how it is, and the profit motive incentivizes using them in the laziest way possible, bad outcomes are not just a side effect, they are a result by design.
- Comment on Which way? 3 weeks ago:
I've also had the same procedure before, three times (on different parts of nails, obviously) and it's worked every time.
- Comment on Which way? 3 weeks ago:
This also helps if you have short nails, and just want to make sure it doesn't grow in before the nail gets longer again. Can raise the nail up enough that it will grow out forward without cutting in, then you can make sure you clip it properly so it isn't rounded at the edges, and it can sometimes stop it from growing in later.
- Comment on GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation 3 weeks ago:
You've still got time. Even when management transitions, it takes MUCH longer for actual systems and processes to catch up to the new "vision" they have for it.
If you want to delete your data, now would be the time before they actually start implementing any new practices.
- Comment on GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation 3 weeks ago:
I believe that's probably why they specify in the headline "at Microsoft" rather than just "independent."
You can have an independent division within a company that doesn't get orders from the company's main CEO, or you can have it be fully under that person's oversight. It used to be a separate division with its own management, now it's not, thus it's no longer internally independent.
- Comment on Imagine being a billionaire, running one the most powerful, corporations in the United States, and prostrating yourself to Donald Trump in this very public and embarrassing way. 4 weeks ago:
Apple stock did, and unfortunately it even makes sense why. Considering how self-centered Trump is, and how easily swayed he can be by a literal shiny rock being given to him, this was probably a legitimately good trade for Apple.
They spend some money on a gold brick with some laser-cut glass, and the president of the entire country either gives them preferential treatment, or simply doesn't take any more extreme actions he was planning to take against them.
- Comment on YSK: Bandcamp is waiving its fees today and all money is passed to the artist (until 12 a.m. PST) 4 weeks ago:
Actual downloadable software or just a website?
I've heard of Soundiiz before for migrating playlists to something like YouTube, though it's paid for larger playlists, and after that yt-dlp will work well for the now non-DRM protected playlists on sites like YouTube Music, but not on DRM-protected ones like Spotify, or ones that only show samples by default like Deezer.
- Comment on YSK: Bandcamp is waiving its fees today and all money is passed to the artist (until 12 a.m. PST) 4 weeks ago:
If you ever find that an artist on other platforms isn't on Bandcamp, you'll usually find them on Qobuz's Download Store since that's a common place that they also tend to publish.
It's a little less convenient than Bandcamp, and is often a little more randomly priced across artists and even individual songs from an artist, but if your goal is to compensate them and get a high quality audio download, it'll be another option.
They also have a streaming offering with way better payout rates for artists at what tends to be around $0.01873 per stream as of last year, in case you're not ready to ditch streaming, though I can't speak to how good it is as I haven't tried it myself.
- Comment on SEC says it will deregulate cryptocurrencies with 'Project Crypto' 5 weeks ago:
To be fair, the SEC has only really gone after cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin, which is the only major blockchain that uses the energy-intensive Proof-of-Work. The things the SEC was trying to regulate, that it considered securities, are almost entirely running on Proof-of-Stake networks, which have negligible relative energy consumption.
This will almost certainly have a lot of other negative impacts, but I doubt it will have that much on the climate.
- Comment on Are there any AI services that don't work on stolen data? 5 weeks ago:
This is very true.
I was part of the OpenAssistant project, voluntarily submitting my personal writing to train open-source LLMs without having to steal data, in the hopes it would stop these companies from stealing people's work and make "AI" less of a black box.
After thousands of people submitting millions of prompt-response pairs, and after some researchers said it was the highest quality natural language dataset they'd seen in a while, the base model was almost always incoherent. You only got a functioning model if you just used the data to fine-tune an existing larger model, Llama at the time.
- Comment on Lemmy is a tech literate echo chamber 5 weeks ago:
Relevant xkcd:
- Comment on Women’s ‘red flag’ app Tea is a privacy nightmare 5 weeks ago:
I think the key reason this was seen as not being terribly offensive was the fact that women are disproportionately more likely than men to be on the receiving end of tons of different negative consequences when dating, thus to a degree justifying them having more of a safe space where their comfort and safety is prioritized.
However I think a lot of people are also recognizing now that such an app has lots of downsides that come as a result of that kind of structure, like false allegations being given too much legitimacy, high amounts of sensitive data storage, negative interactions being blown out of proportion, etc. I also think that this is yet another signature case of "private market solution to systemic problem" that only kind of addresses the symptoms, but not the actual causes of these issues that are rooted more in our societal standards and expectations of the genders, upbringing, depictions in media, etc.
- Comment on How do you reconcile staying sane while keeping yourself up-to-date with the news? 5 weeks ago:
There's a lot of things that have helped me, so I guess I'll just dump some of that here.
First of all, make sure that you keeping up to date is deliberate, and consensual. News should not unconsensually cram itself into your eyeballs. Try out an RSS reader to keep what would be newsletter subscriptions or social media feed scrolling for the news in one single app that isn't part of your other online activities, or keep relevant news sites bookmarked rather than followed or subscribed to.
When you feel you want to be more informed about what's currently going on, you can then chose to be so without it happening at times you're not ready for it.
Eliminate redundant media. So much of the media we consume isn't truly new to us, whether that's following people you already agree with then just liking all their posts, or reading news articles about something you already know about, just because they drop a very tiny morsel of additional information in there, burying the lead, so you have to constantly come back again and again to be truly up to date.
If you're reading an article, watching a video, or scrolling social media, and you realize that what you're reading is something you already know, that should be a sign to stop and take a break for a while, so the news cycle can progress further, rather than you very closely following its every little step. This is something that can take some mental training before you eventually get it down, so just try to be more aware of what you're consuming when you consume it.
A lot of the news we see can also be something that, while technically interesting or engaging, simply doesn't matter to us or our ability to impact others around us. Like how a TV station might show you a sad story about someone who had something bad happen to them at some time in some random small town you've never heard of. Sure, it's news, but do you really need to know about that? Is that keeping you sane and energized for what comes next?
And speaking of being energized: do shit. If you care about politics and there's a local rally or protest march, go to it. If you have a local rights organization that does outreach work, volunteer. If you can phonebank for a political candidate you like, make a few phone calls in your spare time.
I particularly like this quote from Joan Baez, which is "Action is the antidote to despair." Even if you have a healthy diet of media consumption, are up to date without feeling overwhelmed, and are generally a well-informed individual, you can always still feel that nagging feeling that things aren't changing.
You've done everything you can to know what's going on, and yet what's going on isn't getting any better. There's no point being informed if it doesn't help you, your community, or the world at all, so when you're able to, do literally anything you can to make even the smallest difference using what you know. If someone says something you don't agree with politically, ask them why they believe that and use what you just learned from current events to back up your opinion. Who knows, they might change their mind.
I was ecstatic when Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary in NYC, but I was even happier because after I'd informed myself about the race, his policy positions, and what prior mayors had done so terribly wrong, I had phonebanked for him, and was in a small way, somewhat responsible for that success. And can you guess how much less despair I feel when I see things in the world imploding around all of us now?
Doing anything can make you understand how much of an impact you can have just as an individual, and that makes any bad news infinitely less damaging to your mental health. That said, don't feel bad when you can't, we're all people, and we have our limits and responsibilities.
And even without all that, the best advice I can give you is to just be aware of scale. We live in an age where problems well outside our control are something we're aware of all the time. If something is a problem, sure, be aware of it, but don't beat yourself up over how little you're capable of doing as an individual. It's like when recycling was proposed as a responsibility of individuals rather than corporations, and now people feel bad for throwing out the plastic waste that the corporations made.
Don't doomscroll, reduce pointless media, take action where you can, and don't beat yourself up when things don't change overnight. Just do what you can. You've got this.
- Comment on mensa 5 weeks ago:
- Comment on I'm curious. 1 month ago:
That depends on how you interpret people as either being or not being ignorant.
If you judge it solely based on how much time is spent consuming digital media, then people would be less ignorant considering that number has more than doubled since 2008. (doesn't take into account things like print media, but I doubt people were spending at least 3 hours reading print media every single day, then switched a whole at least 3 hours of that over to digital media)
If you base it on the amount of social relationships they have with diverse groups of people that could lead them to be less ignorant about the world around themselves, then we've trended towards being more ignorant in that regard, because while people are more likely to have at least 4 close friends now, they're less likely to have a wide network (10+) by nearly 3X less.
There's also the fact that ignorance doesn't necessarily mean "bliss" in all circumstances.
For example, people are more likely to feel satisfied waiting for a bus (or anything, really) if they're provided an predictable, but longer estimated arrival time, compared to an unpredictable, but shorter arrival time (to an extent). In that case, the ignorance actually makes people less happy with the experience, even if it still resulted in a faster travel time than the known alternative.
The saying "ignorance is bliss" primarily applies to ignorance of problems within one's life or society as a whole. If someone's not aware of the atrocities committed by their government overseas, they'll feel less stress or anger when voting or thinking of what the future might hold. If you were told you would die in exactly 24 hours, you'd probably spend more of that 24 hours worrying than simply living normally, and would be comparably less happy at the end as a result.
It's hard to pin down any one reason in particular, but if we want to know why people are so unhappy, maybe we should reassess how ignorant people are in the first place, and what exactly they are ignorant about.
See, there's a trend we can see with overall dissatisfaction, and it's heavily tied to economic factors. The more wealth and economic disparity there is in a nation, the less happy the people there seem to be. (See: the World Happiness Report)
Coincidentally, places like the US are some of the most unhappy in the developed world, and also have high levels of wealth inequality
The same WHR report even shows that the density of social connections helps a lot with making people happier. (pg. 142-144) Remember the figure I brought up before about people having smaller social networks?
I can't even begin to break down every single possible factor that's making people unhappy, but from reports like the WHR, I think it's clear that a lot of the things that affect people's happiness are things that are hard to be ignorant of.
You can probably count up about how many friends you have, know about how wealthy you are, and feel dissatisfied, even if you're the type of person that doesn't care about politics, which is one of the largest drivers of dissatisfaction in people who are actually aware.
Remember that people are now consuming much more politics-related media nowadays, and you've got a lot of people who are:
- keenly aware of their own personal problems that they simply can't be ignorant of
- tuned in to conflicts and political drama that may not even affect them, or anyone if it's entirely political posturing
- severely economically disadvantaged, while being repeatedly shown the lives of those with substantially more than them as a goal to aspire to (think hustle culture)And don't even get me started on how much the COVID-19 pandemic forced people to be alone and confront their own internal problems that they were previously ignorant of.
To boil this all down to something a bit more coherent: (apologies for the long rambling)
People aren't necessarily ignorant of the things that can cause dissatisfaction, EVEN IF they're ignorant of larger, important issues with the world, or even smaller issues that could still impact them. We are now more connected, economically unequal, and isolated than we have been in the past, and that will take its toll no matter how ignorant you are.
