skullgiver
@skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
- Comment on [deleted] 1 day ago:
I don’t think the science is out on that. For instance, your capacity to fall in love with someone is influenced by their smell as it contains information about their immune system (and, by extent, their immunological compatibility with yours).
Most humans have a need for companionship. It’s the reason solitary confinement is considered torture in most cases. Our brains and bodies are rigged to prefer companionship over being alone most of the time. Put a human alone in a room with a plastic ball with a face drawn on it for long enough, and that plastic ball will be given a name, a personality, and that human will get upset if you dare “hurt” the plastic ball. In a much more dystopian twist on that experiment, people have started “befriending” LLMs now that they’ve grown to have the ability to remember a couple hundred keywords about your user account. The human mind craves being around others.
However, I don’t think whether you like someone or not is purely a function of what they provide for you. You can enjoy the presence of your friends even if you’re sitting in a room silently scrolling on your phone, or watching a TV show.
Their opinions and behaviour towards others definitely also matters. Shared experiences also factor into this stuff somewhere; someone you would normally detest who might’ve been with you through bad times/some traumatic event might end up becoming a friend. Years and years of positive experiences can also make you find excuses for things you would reject in others (which is why even the worst people can have their families and friends protect them). Your friends may have turned into terrible people over the years, and you will find ways to defend their behaviour to yourself and others just because they’re your friends. Similarly, someone you know well might do something terrible out of the blue, and you will recognise that as an outlier event (mental health crisis? sign of illness?) rather than distancing yourself from them like they’re some weirdo in the street.
Maybe ask yourself this: if your friends got hit by a car tomorrow, and suddenly lost their ability to hold an interesting conversation, make witty jokes, or play video games with you, would you stop caring about them? If not, then there’s clearly more to your relationship with them than the basic experiences they can provide.
- Comment on What happens to the content if an Lemmy instance shuts down? 5 days ago:
I don’t see why not. Based on the spec, a server submits a request signed by a keyId which the receiving server caches or obtains, but the new server is also queried for the keys belonging to the actor. You cannot reuse the old key IDs (probably) because it’ll stay in the cache, but you can just add new keys of your own.
Step 10 of the key verification algorithm explicitly instruct the server to ignore the old key and fetch a new one, in case the other server has done a blind key rotation.
In other words, the ActivityPub spec only verifies that an account was the source of a message at the time a server submitted or forwarded an event. It does not validate that an
Update
with new text contents belongs to the same server that onceCreate
d the object.Of course, I expect ActivitiyPub software to (mis)implement this spec in different ways. Some software will be protected against domain hijacking, others will leave domains once registered completely useless in the future for common actor names in ActivityPub.
- Comment on What happens to the content if an Lemmy instance shuts down? 5 days ago:
There is, but the protocol is designed that you can’t buy a domain for a month, set up a server, and then let it expire, leaving it unable to use ActivityPub for decades after because you posted a few things to Mastodon with popular usernames.
- Comment on Do instances exist where you can be 13+? 1 week ago:
Kids shouldn’t even be on social media, but at least the corporate ones are covering their ass against lawsuits well enough that they try to moderate content.
The Fediverse is not a place for kids. Servers catering especially towards kids are DEFINITELY not for kids, because that’s exactly the kind of server I would build if I were a pedo.
The legal requirements for hosting content for kids are a massive headache that you definitely don’t want to take on as a volunteer. The Fediverse can’t even comply with the GDPR, let alone COPPA and its many international alternatives that actually see enforcement.
Of course I was a kid on the internet too and very few websites care about lying about your age, but if you do that and see the occasional dick, fetish porn or gore, you’ve only got yourself to blame. Plus, the Fediverse is full of misinformation, lies, and propaganda, from every side of the spectrum. Moderators can only do so much, and some moderators straight-up post misinformation and propaganda themselves. Best not to expose kids to any it that shit until their brains have developed a bit more.
- Comment on What happens to the content if an Lemmy instance shuts down? 1 week ago:
Note that because of the way federation works, the domain can be bought by someone else who can then use the connections and links to lemm.ee images and posts to peddle spam and other nonsense. It’s not a problem as long as the domain name stays under control of the lemm.ee admins, but if they don’t renew their registration then anyone can pretend to be the old lemm.ee server.
Best for lemm.ee users to delete images from their posts and comments now so whoever grabs the domain in a year or so can’t use it to inject weird shit into your old posts as easily. Of course they still can create new accounts for all.the old account names and post in your name if they want, but the user private keys should prevent that for individual posts if the other server software is smart enough to validate them.
- Comment on Spicy food never affects my gut and everyone thinks it's really weird. How unusual is this and what could be happening to explain why spicy food doesn't affect me? 1 week ago:
Capsacin is not soluble in water, so water and spicy food don’t really interact. Unless the water is contaminated, chugging water won’t do more than make you pee.
The capsacin applying signals as if your bowels are literally on fire and your body reacting to it as if it’s poisonous will, though. Many people can apply the same trick they can apply when they get the shits from milk: just consume a decent amount of it every day and your body will get used to it eventually. Not recommended if you have roommates or a difficult to reach toilet, though.
Of course it could be that standard Taiwanese drinking water is so contaminated that chugging it does give you mild food poisoning, but that doesn’t change the fact that people not eating large amounts of capsacin still get the shits when they eat spicy food.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
So far the only companies making you use one are the multiplayer gaming companies that are using TPMs for hardware IDs to ban cheaters and expensive corporate software using them for remote attestation on hardware the company owns.
If you’re salty about the whole Windows 10 thing, you’ve got until at least October 2027 until Microsoft drops support for it (security beyond the 10 year window announced at the launch of Windows 10 cost like 5 bucks a month though) or you can install an OS from someone who’s still willing to maintain support for old hardware, like Google’s ChromeOS or maybe Linux.
It’s only really a problem if you’re unwilling to pay for (or pirate) updates and are afraid to separate yourself from the large corporations building your current OS.
- Comment on Is there a way I can easily set up my own federated instance for free or no? 2 weeks ago:
Oracle has a generous free server offering. You will need to trust Oracle not to turn off your server because a business customer needs it, though. Availability of their good free tier also fluctuates and you need to figure out their weird IP/firewall/security config.
You need a domain name to effectively federate, too. There are free options available for those too, but they’re not very reliable.
- Comment on Pull request to begin to add ActivityPub support to the bluesly PDS 2 weeks ago:
We pretty much had this when the first reliable Mastodon<->Bluesky bridge came online. The Fediverse side protested and made the entire system opt-in.
When this goes live, I expect people to treat it the same as every other sizeable social media joining the Fediverse, with outrange and block lists.
- Comment on Why do so many people delete their posts? 3 weeks ago:
To prevent annoying trolls from digging through my post history, mostly. I’ve seen people do this on Lemmy, one person even had a stalker that would go server to server to reply angrily to their posts because he felt “wronged” somehow. Plus, nobody is reading this stuff after a month anyway, the only readership of old comments is AI scrapers trying to steal my words for their algorithm.
Of course, deleting stuff on Lemmy doesn’t mean actually deleting anything. You can trivially ignore deletion requests as a server and some seem to keep old copies of deleted content.
There’s no automated way to do it with Lemmy so I’ve written my own automation tool that occasionally runs.
- Comment on YSK You can browse, upvote, reply, uplvote, follow and post on Lemmy using a Mastodon account. Short guide. 3 months ago:
WordPress now doesn’t need a plugin anymore, ActivityPub has beek built into the main product. As for the rest, I think the *Key software went through three or four popular forks, but everything in the pic is open source and can still be run if you’d like to.
- Comment on YSK You can browse, upvote, reply, uplvote, follow and post on Lemmy using a Mastodon account. Short guide. 3 months ago:
You can create anything that abides by the spec and it should somewhat work. However, Lemmy won’t know what to do with a stream of Location objects and Mastodon won’t know how to deal with replies on a calendar event. Most of the Fediverse maps their functionality onto a subset of the protocol that’s implemented by most other servers.
There’s absolutely nothing stopping you from creating a Fediverse LinkedIn that can work together with the rest of the Fediverse. Same with a federated 4chan or a federated review website. The spec is quite open ended. The challenge is finding enough people willing to join your server, and moderating the initial servers. That last part is mostly unsolved because only a sliver of the population wants to moderate and with no clear direction from above, having a solid moderation policy is effectively impossible.
- Comment on Kagi search engine now has a Fediverse search option. 3 months ago:
Oh, that wasn’t a dig at you! I just find it entertaining how the same technology with the same risks and impact on the future web are treated completely differently based on what company puts their name on the blog post.
FWIW both use cases seem good to me, Kagi’s for using the privacy enhancing properties and Cloudflare’s for decreasing the need for their CAPTCHA/bot blocking software to be cranked up to the level it’s at now. For now only Safari and Kagi’s addons are using the tech (Cloudflare turned off their experiment) so there’s no reason to be bothered at the moment anyway.
- Comment on Kagi search engine now has a Fediverse search option. 3 months ago:
Doing continuing business with Yandex at all is bad enough for me. I’m having enough trouble cutting off Russia-supporting products and services already, I’m not taking on new ones if I can avoid it.
Kagi is a great concept for a search engine, but looking at the forum posts by their CEO, their priorities clearly won’t ever align with mine. I hope they get similar competition as Google crumbles further and further, because their business model is how search engines should be making money.
- Comment on Kagi search engine now has a Fediverse search option. 3 months ago:
Funny how the tech space is hyped up about privacy pass when Kagi implemented it, but got outraged when Cloudflare worked with Apple to try to use it as a CAPTCHA alternative.
- Comment on Kagi search engine now has a Fediverse search option. 3 months ago:
Paying Yandex is a deal breaker for me. As much as Yandex may want to be independent, they cannot be because of the country they’re based in. With the way things are going, the same may be true of Google and Kagi itself somewhere within the next four years.
Kagi defends itself by saying it’s “only used 2% of the time” which would make a better argument that turning off the feature to distance themselves from Russia has little impact than a defence for working with them. There’s also the “but we’ve always done it like this” defence and something about “providing the best results” but neither are great arguments.
- Comment on What are some of the things someone permanently relocating away from the US should be aware of? 3 months ago:
Whoops, brainfart. In my defence, I’ve only ever used yards in video games :)
- Comment on What are some of the things someone permanently relocating away from the US should be aware of? 3 months ago:
Whoops, brainfart. In my defence, I’ve only ever used yards in video games :)
- Comment on What are some of the things someone permanently relocating away from the US should be aware of? 3 months ago:
Welcome to Europe! I hope you’ll have fun over here. Lots of things can or will be different, but not necessarily in a bad way.
Laws are different. Sounds kind of obvious, until you learn that some countries have serious sentences for things like littering or chewing gum in public. Read up on the basics just in case. Knowing things like the fact that several EU countries demand that anyone can show ID at all times, so carrying an ID card or passport is mandatory, can save you from an awkward fine. Your foreign drivers license is NOT valid ID!
The legal system may work differently. The “you have the right to remain silent” thing may not apply. Lawyers may work differently. The country you’re relocating to may not have juries as part of the legal system. You’re probably not going to need that information, but you’re better off reading up on the basics just in case, you don’t want to get surprised.
Police violence and racism still exist in Europe, though it usually manifests in a different way. The difference will probably depend on your background and where exactly you’re coming from, but there’s no direct need to be nervous around police officers. Most of them don’t have guns, and if they do, pulling them out at something as banal as a traffic stop will get them in trouble. However, if you’re awfully nervous for no reason, they may start to get suspicious.
Some countries offer some social benefits to only their citizens, not to legal migrants. Make sure you know what you are and aren’t entitled to so you don’t find yourself footing a massive medical bill. Also check for any mandatory insurances that may not apply to you now.
Not every American credit card is widely accepted. They’ll work in things like hotels, but maybe not for parking infrastructure. In some countries, credit cards barely work in grocery stores, for instance, especially in debit card-first countries. Taking out money abroad also costs quite a lot, so look into if you need to get a local banking account.
Your driver’s license is likely valid, but needs to be converted to an international driver’s license for it to be recognized as such.
If you get a mobile phone subscription from an EU country, mobile roaming charges are basically non-existent. However, if you’re traveling, make sure you remember what countries are EU or not. Unexpected Swiss data charges from driving along the border can ruin your week.
If you’re between 18 and 21: the drinking age is lower. Please don’t drink yourself into a coma. Additional alcohol laws may apply: some countries only allow selling alcohol at government run facilities, for instance.
Smoking rules and practices differ per country and region. Some countries ban smoking in public outright, others still very much smoke everywhere.
Some things will be a lot cheaper (healthcare), others will be a lot more expensive (alcohol, cigarettes, fuel). If you’ve planned ahead on your finances, make sure to use local prices.
Many American brands have identical packaging for differently flavored products. We have coke and Fanta and Pepsi, but they may not taste like you expect. Same goes for a lot of food: many foodstuffs are still filled with sugar, but from what I’ve heard American food is even more sugary somehow, so food may taste a bit bland when you first get here. If you have a healthy diet, that should correct itself in a few weeks.
I’ve never seen those mythical free soda refills mentioned in American movies in Europe. An expensive four euro glass of soda probably doesn’t come with a free refill.
Housing may work differently. Every country has their own rules for social housing and who can apply under what conditions. There are huge businesses out there that make money off scamming rich expats because of this. Make sure you’re informed of the local housing situation ahead of moving, unless your company arranges (temporary) living arrangements for you. Some expats in cities like Amsterdam find themselves struggling for months to get a basic apartment, wasting a lot of money on hotels despite their lavish income.
I’d recommend learning the local language, even if everyone you interact with at work will speak English. Quite a lot of expats find themselves socially isolated because the local populace doesn’t want to speak English when hanging out with friends. Europeans, especially the younger half, generally understand English to the point where you can make yourself clear, so you have time, but if you want to make friends, you need to integrate.
As you’ve probably heard, tipping is different. Tipping differs from “optional, but very welcome” to “insulting because of associations with bribes” depending on where you go. Read up on local customs if you’re not going out with locals.
Advertised pricing is almost always including tax. Don’t add the 19-21% VAT in your head like you would with some American taxes, expect to pay the price as advertised. There are some exceptions (bottle deposits, for instance, but you can get that money back by handing in bottles at the right places) which will differ per country, but those shouldn’t break the bank.
Some countries are moving towards becoming cashless in practice. I use cash about five times a year, plus about a third of the times I visit Germany. Some stores may not accept cash. If you combine that with the “not all stores accept American credit cards”, you may find yourself in a pickle. Luckily, things like Google Pay and Apple Pay use a universal protocol of sorts, so you can try setting that up as a backup.
Check out how public transport works. Some countries let you travel for free, others will require paper tickets, and there are countries where your credit card can act like a travel pass. Some places sell tickets inside trains, others will demand you buy a ticket before entering.
Traffic will work differently. Traffic signs are usually quite universal (stop signs even say STOP in France, unlike in French Canada!) but there are additional traffic indicators that probably work differently. Think painted lines on the ground to indicate right of way, special asphalt colours to indicate bicycle paths, but also traffic light placement. A quick read up before venturing into traffic would be wise. Some countries have a system where traffic coming from the right in an unmarked, unprioritised intersection will have right of way. If you’re driving or taking a bike, better check up on when you need to stop! Also, crossing the road is generally not illegal (“jaywalking”), but use common sense when to use that freedom.
Lastly, the tax thing: unless you earn serious bank, you’re probably not paying extra taxes in the US. However, you are obligated to fill out tax forms. How the tax situation works depends on the country you move to. Some will have you pay American taxes and subtract them from local taxes, others will work the other way around. Either way, you’re probably not paying extra; despite what some people claim, tax pressure within the EU and America is actually quite similar. You will end up with extra paperwork, though. Speaking of, check the pension situation for the job you’re working for. If you don’t check, you may end up paying into a foreign pension plan you won’t have easy access to when you retire.
- Comment on is shadowbanning a thing on lemmy? 3 months ago:
Instances can ban you without others being affected. Your comments could be visible on one instance and not on another, so there’s a level of shadow banning going on.
Real shadow banning isn’t implemented in Lemmy. It could be, but it’d only work for accounts on the same server. It’d also be pretty easy to detect, although the same also goes for other places that do effectively use shadow banning to fight trolls and bots. The people shadow banning works against aren’t smart enough to verify that they haven’t been caught in the first place.
- Comment on [PSA] Lemmy account deletion is a mess 4 months ago:
It’s a Rust program I wrote that runs on my Lemmy server, but in theory it should work with any Lemmy server.
I’ve thrown the code and a compiled version of the binaries on Github if you’re interested: source binary downloads
- Comment on Terroristic threats allowed on lemmy.ml!?! 8 months ago:
That screenshot again proves that this person is extremely cringe, presumably a troll, but there’s still no threat. At worst that’s racism against Americans. Should obviously be removed by moderators from any normal online service that wants to encourage pleasant conversation, but that’s not necessarily illegal.
As for the PDF, that’s not a legal definition by any kind, it’s a quick explainer for a law that only applies to hosting providers receiving complaints from European authorities. So yes, if the Belgian police sent a takedown notice regarding terroristic content then it does apply.
However, that regulation is mere instruction to EU states to draft compliant laws. It’s not actionable legislation in itself (similar to the GDPR).
The full text of the Regulation does include this instruction for EU countries, which I haven’t seen before:
In order to provide clarity about the actions that both hosting service providers and competent authorities are to take to address the dissemination of terrorist content online, this Regulation should establish a definition of ‘terrorist content’ for preventative purposes, consistent with the definitions of relevant offences under Directive (EU) 2017/541 of the European Parliament and of the Council (6). Given the need to address the most harmful terrorist propaganda online, that definition should cover material that incites or solicits someone to commit, or to contribute to the commission of, terrorist offences, solicits someone to participate in activities of a terrorist group, or glorifies terrorist activities including by disseminating material depicting a terrorist attack. The definition should also include material that provides instruction on the making or use of explosives, firearms or other weapons or noxious or hazardous substances, as well as chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) substances, or on other specific methods or techniques, including the selection of targets, for the purpose of committing or contributing to the commission of terrorist offences. Such material includes text, images, sound recordings and videos, as well as live transmissions of terrorist offences, that cause a danger of further such offences being committed. When assessing whether material constitutes terrorist content within the meaning of this Regulation, competent authorities and hosting service providers should take into account factors such as the nature and wording of statements, the context in which the statements were made and their potential to lead to harmful consequences in respect of the security and safety of persons. The fact that the material was produced by, is attributable to or is disseminated on behalf of a person, group or entity included in the Union list of persons, groups and entities involved in terrorist acts and subject to restrictive measures should constitute an important factor in the assessment.
However, the Regulation also refers to human rights such as freedom of expression. One can be of the opinion that it’s better for the USA to stop existing without any plans or support for actual genocide. Someone expressing hate for your country isn’t immediately a terrorist.
- Comment on Terroristic threats allowed on lemmy.ml!?! 8 months ago:
Do you have a copy of the actual threat? Because “you are a settler” is stupid but not an actual threat.
I don’t know where you got that picture from, I can’t find the legal definition for a terroristic threat within the EU. The best I could find is:
For the purposes of this Convention, “public provocation to commit a terorist offence” means the distribution, or otherwise making available, of a message to the public, with the intent to incite the commission of a terrorist offence, where such conduct, whether or not directly committed.
That’s just a convention, though, not direct law. The definition by the convention does require proof of intent, which I haven’t found about the cringe hexbear user.
- Comment on Terroristic threats allowed on lemmy.ml!?! 8 months ago:
Shouting non-credible threats (that, based on the screenshot, I can only assume are ironic in the first place) into the internet void isn’t making “terroristic threats”. Feeding the trolls and name calling isn’t conductive either.
Most of the internet is kids and people with nothing better to do with their lives.
- Comment on The 42 year old new hire at your job confesses to you that he has had 48 different jobs in his life. What is your opinion on that? 8 months ago:
Could be gig jobs as well. With seasonal work you can easily get four jobs or more in a year without even doing anything unusual.
- Comment on Phonebooks 8 months ago:
This was much less of an issue back when you couldn’t open a bank account in someone’s name from halfway across the world. Phishing and identity theft were impossible to pull off until companies started trusting phone services and later the internet. You needed to show up in person with a realistic fake ID to do anything malicious.
Now that nobody meets face to face for stuff like cashing a cheque or even ordering a large quantity of groceries anymore, the few bits of personal information we can use to prove our identity are the only things protecting us.
- Comment on What are the pros and cons to buying a smart watch from temu? 8 months ago:
All the terrible quality and human rights violations also apply to any other Chinese shop as well as Amazon or whatever your local Amazon equivalent is. I’ve found the exact same shit sold on Temu in physical store shelves for those cost-saving stores. The entire supply chain is fucked.
I do order shit directly from China, but only if I need something specific like phone parts or electronics that I see “local” shops carry with the exact same photos, descriptions, and pictures, for twice or triple the price. I’ve fallen for that trick too many times, I’ll go straight to the source now.
- Comment on Must EU banks provide basic service via internet? 8 months ago:
I’ve had similar issues with getting CSS tables to lay out properly in Chrome. Worked fine in IE/Edge/Firefox/WebKit but Chrome just randomly threw a fit and rearranged items for no reason, even the Javascript engine agreed with me that the tables should look like they were supposed to but they just didn’t when rendered.
My experience with SVGs in Firefox is that Firefox supports pretty much every basic features, but it expects the SVGs to be up to spec. As it turns out, a lot of SVGs on the web rely on quirks and side effects and you only find out they’re technically invalid when digging deep into the spec. Them behaving differently whether or not there’s an img tag around them also doesn’t help, and I’ve run into a few files using SVG features that only worked in some Adobe product and Chrome (only on desktop, IIRC) .
Getting browsers to work consistently still sucks, even when it’s not nearly as big a problem as it was fifteen years ago. I totally get why people don’t test for Firefox. We didn’t use to test for Safari for the very same reason; practically none of our end users used it and there are no usable cross platform browsers to test with even if they were, so we’d probably tell them to download Chrome anyway. Safari mostly worked well enough that if someone decided to pull out an iPad during demos it didn’t completely fail and that was food enough. Firefox only worked because devs preferred its superior web development tools.
- Comment on Must EU banks provide basic service via internet? 8 months ago:
If there are obligations, Firefox is such a fringe user agent these days that they can probably go without supporting it. The 3.8% of Swedes not using Chromium or Safari will fall off any serious compatibility requirements.
I doubt anything will break in Firefox, though.
- Comment on What are the pros and cons to buying a smart watch from temu? 8 months ago:
Pro: it’ll probably work well enough to get your notifications and maybe even your heart rate and stuff.
Con: it probably won’t arrive. If it does, it probably won’t look like in the pictures if it does, it probably won’t work like described. If it does, it probably has done kind of cheep, toxic chemicals it’ll leave in your arm. If it doesn’t, it’ll probably come with an app that drains your battery. If it doesn’t, it probably sells your live location and notifications to data brokers. If it doesn’t, it’ll probably never receive software updates. If it does, it’ll probably be broken by the end of the year.
There are actually a few relatively cheap smart watches that some people like to reprogram with open source firmware. You can get a Colmi P8 or a Kenboro K9 for less than $30 and flash WaspOS onto it. You have to get lucky and buy the right hardware revision but flashing new firmware onto those things can be as simple as downloading an app and loading a file into it. These devices are underpowered and software availability is limited, but at least with the open source stuff you can rest easy about your data not being sold.