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drmoose

@drmoose@lemmy.world

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drmoose ,

Letter is 215.9mm x 279.4mm lmao

drmoose ,

6-9 holes? Is that where Swedes keep their meatballs

drmoose ,

You really think people are too dumb to remember 2 letter codes that are literally printed on everything? Come on man :D

drmoose ,

8.5" is not any easier to divide than 297mm.
Try dividing 8.5" by 8. What is that? 12 pebbles and 14 glibglobs each?

drmoose ,

Ah yes - a system that uses both fractions and decimals!

drmoose ,

Shadow banning is definitely too much imo. It's simply unethical no matter how you look at it.

First, it doesn't do anything to prevent bots. It takes less than a second for a bot to check whether they are shadow banned. It's simply a tool to bully and gaslight people - just block them. Why these abusive games?

drmoose ,

Effectiveness is irrelevant here. Breaking troll's kneecaps would be very effective too.

This mental manipulation and gaslighting has no place in our society. We're literally suffering the consequences of this right now.

drmoose ,

It's definitely morally bankrupt imo and we can agree to disagree here as I don't think this topic can be expanded further.

drmoose ,

The rise of alt-right and conspiracies would be a one obvious one.

drmoose ,

You don't see how opaque manipulation fuels conspiracies and paranoia? Come on dude.

drmoose ,

You have real stats to back that claim? Because leaving this up to benevolent dictators is kinda silly.

drmoose ,

I never said it was a singular cause just a contributor

drmoose ,

Nah man it's completely different when society regulates itself through transparent rules vs opaque ones. It's more organized and self balancing.

drmoose ,

It's unrelated to the current topic but yes. Terms of service should be both ways. We already do that for user data through GDPR and similar laws and inevitably all users will have more rights including right to transparency.

I find it kinda funny that you argue against this on a platform that was founded because reddit was extremely opaque. We even have a transparent mod log here. So you really need more examples that transparency is good?

drmoose ,

This form of propaganda is my pet peeve. It's not "your posts" as soon as you put something to public you don't get to eat your cake. It's out there, you shared it. Don't share it if you don't want humanity to ingest and use it.

drmoose ,

Fediverse is designed to do exactly that. It's free flow of information which is a good thing. Don't let corporations hijack this beautiful concept. We all want information to be free.

drmoose ,

It's the opposite!
There's legal precedence that scraping public data is 100% legal in the US.

There are few countries where scraping is illegal though like Japan and China. European countries often also have things called "database protection" laws that forbid replicating public databases through scraping or any other means but that has to be a big chunk of overal database. Also there are personally identifiable info (PII) protection laws that protect storing of people data without their consent (like GDPR).

Source: I work with anti bot tech and we have to explain this to almost every customer who wants to "sue the web scrapers" that lol if Linkedin couldn't do it, you're not sueing anyone.

drmoose ,

Scraping at scale is actually cheaper than buying API access. It's a massive rising market, try googling "web scraping service" and there are hundreds of services that provide API to scrape any public web page and bypass the blocks for you and render all of the javascript.

drmoose ,

Following a developing thread is a very tiny use case I'd imagine and even then you can just scrape the backend API that is used on the public page for the same results as private API.

drmoose ,

yeah but you don't get to choose that. You give away that right as soon as you participate in public discourse. It's a zero sum game - either it's a public for everyone or no one.

Don't get me wrong, Reddit is a bitch but I think people want to cut their noses off to spite their faces here. It's much more important to have free information flow than to fuck reddit.

My fear is that people will vote in some really dumb rules to spite AI and restrict free information flow accidentally.

drmoose ,

Even with autopilot I feel it's unlikely that driver would not be liable. We didn't have a case yet but once this happens and goes higher to courts it'll immediatly establish a liability precedence.

Some interesting headlines:

So I'm pretty sure that autopilot drivers would be found liable very fast if this developed further.

drmoose ,

Inb4 "the pirates are destroying the industry"

drmoose ,

That's just nostalgia speaking. It was closed source OS that objectively sucked and had zero app support.

drmoose ,

It almost feels like if it wasn't for Microsoft Europe could have actually been a tech super power 🙄

drmoose ,

FYI 90% of those bots are scrapers and natural automation tools which are harmless.

drmoose ,

200usd is 10 months of chatgpt subscription. So it definitely has objective value. I'd buy it just make my own little bot or as casual toy. There's no subscription or anything either.

I agree that the hate is meme levels of stupid. Sure the device sucks but people pick on the weirdest shit like "it uses android" or "it runs VM for actions that have no API" - well duuuuh.

drmoose ,

You cant automate free chatgpt but you can easily automate rabbit's api

drmoose ,

Stolen ideas? Riscv is open source and a laptop is not exactly some unique intellectual property. You're just showing your xenophobia here.

drmoose ,

Nah dude it's a just a laptop lmao

drmoose ,

People being so cheap and refusing to pay 5-15$/mo for unlimited music streaming. What a weird reality we're living in 🙄

drmoose ,

but it's a free plan and if you can't afford 5-15$/mo for unlimited music and can afford to spend time complaining about this then you have some much bigger problems in your life.

drmoose ,

Not buying the argument that people don't have 5 usd to spare. People are just being cheap. Either pirate or pay for a service, asking for a free service is plain silly.

If you have ethical concerns then don't use Spotify at all.

drmoose ,

It's one thing to liberate IP and another to use someone's service.

drmoose ,

Sundar Pichai will go down as one of the worst tech CEOs. Dude appears as such a nice guy from podcasts I've listened with him but really awful at his job and has zero consistent personality. He's a straight up corporate robot with no original opinions or idealogies. Unfortunately, none of that is visible or really matters because Google has infinite source of ad money so any KPIs are made irrelevant.

drmoose ,

While reporting record profits! lmao you can't make this shit up.

drmoose ,

hot take: Sundar Pichai is the first LLM CEO.

drmoose ,

Google is too big to fail. Yes they'll lose a lot of customers and products but they only need to keep the ads and maybe google cloud engine running. Everything else is irrelevant until Google.com becomes irrelevant.

drmoose ,

Article doesn't even mention PIN. Where are you getting this "advice"?

drmoose ,

I still don't get where are you seeing this advice in the article. No one is recommending "6 digit passcodes". AFAIK all contemporary phones use mixed character passwords these days. I just setup a second hand s22 and it asked me to create a full password as primary authentication with all of the brute force strength hints etc.

Your perception might be a bit outdated here.

drmoose ,

Yes the contemporary phones literally bug and warn you if you don't. Password is much easier to remember than 6 digits too imo.

drmoose ,

I went to check it out yesterday and I think I actually got dumber in 5 minutes I spent there.

drmoose ,

I work in bot protection and it's a sound idea but doesn't really work in practice. As long as there's more than 1$ of value to be gained it's worth it for the bot makers.

This also makes it so that botting is only accesible to select few actors that have the required resources i.e. russian troll farms or large bot networks from china, in turn this increases their value. This is very good for them.

Reality is that the only way to stop bots is to constantly change up the detection system. This is called a "cat and mouse" sort of problem and it really is the only way to do it. The attacker always has to catch up and it can be trivial that takes them couple of hours to do but it also reveals behavior patterns for marking bot accounts. This actually works really well in practice but requires a lot of dev resources and many companies low-key like bots which is another thread entirely.

drmoose ,

lol I actually never liked Twitter even when I was an early adopter but I'm only interested in it as a professional case study. I do like Mastodon a lot though and so I get the appeal of Twitter done right!

drmoose ,

develop systems that can identify unwanted users like bots, spammers, people who abuse the product and break ToS etc. Most bad actors are very dumb but fighting this at scale is actually very interesting. Also most bots (like 90%) are just scrapers (data collectors) especially when it comes to Twitter which has absurd API pricings but cost almost nothing to scrape lol

drmoose ,

Hey man it gets me employed and I even get to work on foss on work hours sometimes. Thanks! :)

drmoose ,

yeah sorry "protection against bots" just doesn't roll of the tongue as easily lol

drmoose ,

As Kungen already answered - stats! You can sell bot traffic as real traffic which inflates your numbers.

For stuff like social media, bots increase engagement too. Many new products and networks actually generate a lot of fake content to attract organic growth. I.e. if bot likes your comment you're likely to engage more. If it likes your product review you're likely to review more stuff etc.

Tracking bots can also generate reverse analytics. For example if you know that your competitors are scraping fishing equipment data from your store it could mean they're working on a competing fishing related product.

Lastly, you can feed fake data to bots to manipulate competitors. This is somewhat illegal (no real legal precedent yet afaik though its a clear intent to harm other businesses) but it can really powerful in the wrong hands.

Edit: worth nothing that a lot of bot traffic is good. Sometimes you want to be scraped as it is a form of organic engagement and increases the value of your data and often backlinks growth (e.g. indexers like Google etc)

drmoose ,

Never had to deal with attacks originating from US or Europe so thats kinda true actually :)

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