Woah, I thought I was in [email protected] for a minute there.

Reddit: “Nobody gets to secretly experiment on Reddit users with AI-generated comments but us!”

I’m a little disappointed it’s not a GUI written in Visual Basic. (Kidding, kidding.)

Respect.

I haven’t quit or tried to, but:

• I do things while I’ve got YouTube on in the background more than I dedicate my attention to it. Writing code, playing a video game, etc.
• I almost never log in to YouTube. And I clear my cookies at least daily. So I don’t succumb to “the algorithm” very much. I do use NewPipe on my phone for music and such, but again, no algorithm involved. But generally I go specifically to what I want to watch or search specifically for what I want to watch and watch it. I also turn autoplay off.
• I have published videos on YouTube, but I’m resolved not to any more. Any more videos I might make in the future, I’ll put on PeerTube.

I have a short list of creators I follow (but without using things like the bell/subscription feature on YouTube). Short enough that I can keep the list in my head. One of those creators I also support on Patreon.

I guess all that to say, I do hedge my use of YouTube, but quitting isn’t on my radar any time soon.

Hear hear.

I wonder if there’s a way to prevent people from even knowing that two different votes came from the same user.

What I outlined above should prevent anyone from knowing two different votes came from the same user… without specifically trying that user’s id on each. That’s what the salt (the comment/post id) is for.

I’ve personally been banned from one community for downvoting too consistently.

Votes should be anonymous.

I tend to agree, but the fact is that they aren’t anonymous. This tool just exposes the already-existing fact that Lemmy expressly does not guarantee anonymity for votes. The solution isn’t to not for the poster to not publish this tool. Believe me, such tools already exist in private even if none other than this one are published. Publishing this one only democratizes access to that information. (And not entirely, I don’t think. From what I’m seeing on the page, it looks like it still requires an admin account on an instance. Update: Actually, I’m not sure if it requires an admin account or not. Either way, though.) The solution is (if it’s possible) to make Lemmy itself protect voters’ anonymity.

The reason why instances know who has up/down voted things (rather than only keeping an anonymized “total” for each post/comment) is so it can prevent double-voting.

Maybe instead of usernames, the instances could store/trade… salted hashes of the usernames where the salt is the title or unique identifier of the post/comment being voted on? It wouldn’t be perfect, but it would allow the instance to figure out whether the currently-viewing or currently-voting user has already voted while also making it harder for anyone else to get that information. About the only way a tool could tell you exhaustively who had voted if that were how things worked that I can think of off hand is to try every username on Lemmy one-by-one until all the votes were accounted for.

(Of course, malicious instances could still keep track of usernames or unique user ids who up/downvoted, but only on the instance on which the vote was cast. Also, one downside of this approach would be increased CPU usage. How much? Not sure. It might be trivial. Or maybe not. Dunno.)

And there may be much better ways to do this. I haven’t really thought about it much. I also haven’t checked whether there is an open ticket asking for improved anonymity for votes already.

(Also, full disclosure, all of the above was written after only an extremely brief skim of the linked page.)

(One more edit. Something IHawkMike said led me to realize that the scheme I described above would allow instances to manipulate votes by just inventing hashes. Like, grabbing 512 bits of data from /dev/urandom and giving it to other instances as if it was a hash of a username or user id when, in fact, it’s not a hash of anything. Other instances wouldn’t be able to easily tell that it wasn’t the hash of a valid user id. I haven’t thought how to go about solving that yet. Maybe if it occurs to me, I’ll update this post.)

Yeah, what I’ve heard about it has made it sound like the judge is probably broadly sympathetic to the SFC’s arguments, which of course is a good thing. It’s been a bit since I’ve really looked deeply into it, but at least what I’ve heard sounds hopeful.

I’m probably getting my hopes up too high, but it’d be so great if that case went the SFC’s way. (And stayed that way on appeals or whatever.)

IANAL, but the fact that what they’re suing for isn’t money but rather for the courts to force Visio to comply with the GPL, that probably means that a settlement is unlikely, and a judgement is going to have much more profound effects on the industry than a settlement would.

Anyway. That whole case fascinates me. We’ll see how things go. 🤞

Congratulations, Google, you can spy on math now.

5318008

Clear.

5318008

Clear.

5318008

etc

Does just broader vocabulary count? Maybe it’s just a rule that everyone sits down with a dictionary every couple of weeks for 30 minutes just opening it to a random page.

Also, more latin phrases. That’s cool shit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P55t6eryY3g

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnmRYRRDbuw

I joined when it was for students only and quit sometime around 2007. There was a “quit Facebook day” once a year that was for raising awareness about how evil Facebook was even back then. I quit on one of those days. At least that’s part of the reason why I quit. Also the only Facebook friend I really interacted with abruptly got extremely fundamentalist Christian and started posting stuff that I couldn’t stand to be assaulted with.

Jean-Luc Picard is entirely too classy to snore.

Yeah, it’s like prosecuting women for miscarriages. Oh wait.

NO

I think you’re misunderstanding octopus_ink’s comment. Are you thinking octopus_ink is a 4chan refugee? I think they’re just a Lemmy user hoping we don’t get flooded with 4chan assholes.

This article is full of AI criti-hype.

My place of work used to have a fairly large “data entry” department until they… did… something to make that job kindof unnecessary. They laid off pretty much all of that department. And I’m told the boss who was over them before they were laid off returned to his office to find a sizeable human shit directly atop his desk.

Another story. My own boss (actually my boss’s boss) was a massive asshole. Committed the team to a completely unreasonable deadline in conversations with the C-level folks above him, and then threw temper tantrums when the deadline wasn’t hit. He turned the daily standup into a 7:30am (in-person) daily demo to prove we were making progress and weren’t… I dunno… slacking off or whatever. Many a temper tantrum was had in those demos as well.

I quit and made no secret of why. After I left, I heard through the grapevine that in a meeting with the CTO, the asshole boss accused the CTO of being incompetent and said that he was gunning for the CTO’s job. The CTO, sensibly, told the asshole boss to do not pass go, do not collect $200, security will escort you out of the building and we’ll ship you your personal effects from your office.

And then I quit the place I’d gone to and went back to where the asshole boss had been and I’m still working there. Definitely would not have considered coming back if he was still there.

Ok. One more story about the other place. They switched from one chat provider to another. But they never actually shut down the one they were migrating away from. Several folks never left the old chat. When it was discovered that on the old chat service, said folks were trading really really inappropriate holocaust jokes, the whole office got a talking to in very vague terms. It wasn’t until like a month later that someone explained to me what had precipitated that.