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t3rmit3

@t3rmit3@beehaw.org

He / They

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

t3rmit3 ,

How would this factor into November? Neither Biden nor Trump will acknowledge Palestinian statehood.

t3rmit3 ,

Yep, sadly government contractors are heavily dominated by Right-wing and pro-authoritarian chuds.

Google fires 28 workers for protesting $1.2 billion Israel contract (www.nbcnews.com)

"Google issued a stern warning to its employees, with the company’s vice president of global security, Chris Rackow, saying, “If you’re one of the few who are tempted to think we’re going to overlook conduct that violates our policies, think again,” according to an internal memo obtained by CNBC."

t3rmit3 ,

You're confusing At-Will employment with Right-to-Work.

Right to work laws make it illegal to require union membership for employment at a place with a union.

At-Will Employment makes it legal for the employee or employer to terminate employment at-will.

They're both bad, you just got them mixed up. :)

t3rmit3 ,

However, despite routinely portraying themselves as both climate champions and defenders of taxpayer interests, New York governor Kathy Hochul and Democratic legislative leaders have so far declined to include the legislation in the final state budget, which is being ironed out this week.

If the provisions are excluded, as some environmental groups now presume, the decision would be a massive win for some of Hochul’s major campaign donors who are tied to fossil fuel companies that would have been required to make payments, according to campaign finance records reviewed by us.

In the absence of a new superfund law, much of the cost of climate mitigation could fall on working-class New Yorkers: Hochul has recently declared that she opposes any new tax increases on the wealthiest residents in her state, which has the country’s second-largest number of billionaires.

Yup, sounds about right.

t3rmit3 ,

Authority is authority.

t3rmit3 ,

Google was exposed years and years ago for using their ML tech for military and police purposes, by their own employees who protested over it. Google just let people lose steam over time, and went right on ahead with it.

Excuse the NYT paywall, but here is an article from 2018 about employees protesting that their AI tech was being used to ID targets, and fears that it would be used for drone strikes: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/technology/google-letter-ceo-pentagon-project.html

t3rmit3 ,

Damn, I have a monthly donation set up with them. Hopefully they can pull through, because they're one of the few investigative outlets left that I still trust.

t3rmit3 ,

I admin linux systems all day at work, and in my spare time on my home lab rackmount setup that lives in the spare bathroom, and I say that to make clear that I'm extremely comfortable with Linux. I got a gaming laptop recently and loaded Ubuntu onto it, and was very underwhelmed with the gaming performance on it. My SteamDeck ran many of the games better, and there were a bunch issues with the OS not being able to keep the integrated graphics card vs the discrete one straight (e.g. switching the load order on reboot, making games constantly try to run on the integrated card), that just made me eventually give up and put Win11 on it. At this point, I'd love for Valve to release a "SteamLap" gaming system, because clearly Linux needs that tight control over the hardware config to get games working well.

t3rmit3 ,

Yeah, it was frustrating because using Ubuntu for gaming on it was the main reason I got the laptop, but I couldn't deal with changing launch options in steam every time I rebooted. Hasn't soured me on Linux gaming, still hoping for that bright future. :)

t3rmit3 ,

There are a lot of days that this genocide, and the complete unwillingness of our government to treat it as such, leaves me incredibly depressed and angry. Only seeing the support that young people are giving, and the spread of anti-settler colonialism and anti-capitalism awareness among young people, gives me a shred of hope.

t3rmit3 , (edited )

Hard disagree with this person.

They're position basically boils down to "Facebook won't tell us what problems were identified with the domains that caused the blocks, but it's better to have guards against malicious domains than not". That is a false dichotomy.

A better response is, "unless Facebook is actually disclosing what issues with the domains caused the flagging, we should not allow them to block news websites, especially when they've been critical of Facebook". To do otherwise is basically just giving them carte blanche to block domains whenever they want to, and assuming on their behalf that they're being honest and benevolent.

They go on to make excuses for Meta all throughout the article:

Whatever issue Facebook flagged regarding those ads — Kendall is not clear, and I suspect that is because Facebook is not clear either

While this interpretation of a deliberate effort by Facebook to silence critical reporting is kind of understandable, given its poor communication and the lack of adequate followup, it hardly strikes me as realistic.

For an even simpler example, consider how someone forgetting a password for their account looks exactly the same as someone trying to break into it. On any website worth its salt, you will be slowed down or prevented from trying more than some small number of password attempts, even if you are the actual account owner. This is common security behaviour; Meta’s is merely more advanced.

As someone who works in security, this is actually a hilarious indictment of how inadvanced Facebook's security would have to be to be mistaking actual organic shares and reposts with malicious boosting attempts, and once again is assuming innocence on their behalf where no assumption of innocence is warranted.

Even their sarcastic line,

If you wanted to make a kind-of-lame modern conspiracy movie

is an unwarranted dismissal of assertions that Meta polices political content on their platforms as being akin to a conspiracy, even though we in fact know they do that. Reporting has shown that Meta does actively take political stances and translate those into actions and policies in their sites.

Hanlon's Razor is about assumptions sans evidence, because of the natural human tendency to automatically interpret actions that harm you as intentional. It's not, however, meant to discount evidence of patterns of malicious behavior by actors known to be problematic.

And this is not a new, one-off behavior on Facebook's part:

The climate divide: How Facebook's algorithm amplifies climate disinformation - Feb2022

Facebook did not label over 50% of posts from top climate change deniers, says new report - Feb2022

Facebook’s New Ad Policies Make It Harder for Climate Groups to Counter Big Oil - Mar2022

I can't tell if the author thinks Facebook's security is advanced, or incompetent.

t3rmit3 ,

I use them regularly, and have never had issues

t3rmit3 ,

The person you're responding to is one of those people that thinks Steam is the DRM, because 1) it checks games against your account the first time you run them, and 2) they don't provide offline installers like GOG.

t3rmit3 ,

Yep, I follow The Verge, Kotaku, and PCGamer for gaming news, and I think PCG and Kotaku both have a weekly "Steam releases you might have missed this week" article, and they're always the stuff that no one who checks Steam new releases would have missed. The authors aren't actually diving deep to discover the hidden gems, they're just checking the top releases that aren't AAA publishers.

I get there's not that much money in video game journalism anymore now that they aren't all getting review copies to drive ad revenue (you can actually thank Steam for that in part, since it's more trustworthy for most people just to read user reviews there, and the other part you can thank all the paid YouTube game reviewers for, since publishers much prefer them to an outlet they can't directly write the ad copy for).

t3rmit3 ,

Valve won't stay that way forever—the company is not immune to the pressures of capitalism

I'm glad that the author recognized the actual root cause of their argument, which is that Capitalism is bad and ruins everything, but why blame Steam for essentially just existing in a Capitalist world? They didn't choose that, and they're certainly doing a hell of a lot more than almost any other company their size that I can think of to resist shitty Capitalist practices.

It really feels like this author is just saying, "they're resisting anti-consumer enshittification practices now, so the only place to go is down, ergo 'timebomb'!".

"Every person who isn't a murderer is just a murder away from becoming a murderer. Timebomb!"

t3rmit3 ,

Agreed. I like Steam.

t3rmit3 ,

The inevitable decline of Steam is going to be much worse after people spent a decade giving it a free pass on lesser issues.

What specifically are you envisioning? If this is just a general kind of, "the bigger they are, the harder they fall" supposition, I don't think that really holds any water; it's just a platitude. If anything, Steam being so ubiquitous could more easily make it's eventual decline a catalyst for legislation to give software license ownership stronger consumer protections. The idea that we should either condemn it now or stop using it, before its decline, makes no sense to me. Is GOG better? Sure. Can it fully replace Steam? No. Is Steam better than Epic, Origin, UPlay? Absolutely. I'm just not sure what the real point of all this condemnation is when they're by far trying, by and large, to treat consumers well. It's just blaming Valve for not being totally and eternally immune to the effects of Capitalism.

the ‘one good company’

No one claims this. The only thing remotely close to that which people claim is that Valve is uniquely positioned to be one of the best digital games distribution platforms due to its private ownership insulating it against shareholder demands (which is by far the largest driver of enshittification), which is also true for GOG, but obviously Valve is still beating them out in capacity and capability currently.

there are plenty of examples to the contrary

Of course, it's a company. But it's still a billion times better than most of its competitors.

t3rmit3 ,

The only "DRM" that they have is checking the game against your steam account the first time you run it. Is that great? No. Would it be nice if they offered offline installers? Of course.

t3rmit3 ,

Sure, and when that happens we should (and many will) abandon the platform. But since, as you seem to be implying, all businesses under Capitalism will eventually enshittify, there's no point abandoning it beforehand, because any alternative you move to will also eventually do so.

t3rmit3 ,

The RFC is actually real, though it it basically a joke: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2322

Management of IP numbers by peg-dhcp

Introduction
This RFC describes a protocol to dynamically hand out ip-numbers on
field networks and small events that don't necessarily have a clear
organisational body.

History of the protocol.

The practice of using pegs for assigning IP-numbers was first used at
the HIP event (http://www.hip97.nl/). HIP stands for Hacking In
Progress, a large three-day event where more then a thousand hackers
from all over the world gathered. This event needed to have a TCP/IP
lan with an Internet connection. Visitors and participants of the
HIP could bring along computers and hook them up to the HIP network.

During preparations for the HIP event we ran into the problem of how
to assign IP-numbers on such a large scale as was predicted for the
event without running into troubles like assigning duplicate numbers
or skipping numbers. Due to the variety of expected computers with
associated IP stacks a software solution like a Unix DHCP server
would probably not function for all cases and create unexpected
technical problems.

t3rmit3 ,

Hell yes, California! I don't love everything most things that Newsom does, and I certainly don't like many of our state and federal legislators, but we are at least markedly better than most other places in this capitalist shithole of a country.

t3rmit3 ,

Influence is about perception, and though it may be other people who are acting on that perception, it is still very carefully and intentionally managed by Meta. Lots of people think Facebook is too important not to be a member of, or that you can't get hired without a LinkedIn, or that you can't use the internet without giving up your info to Apple, Google, or Microsoft, so why even bother trying not to... and they're all false narratives that those companies use their size and money to create and maintain the perception of, even if it's of course the individuals that go along with those narratives. Facebook doesn't have to hold a gun to your head to make you act a certain way.

So yes, Meta absolutely is directly impacting the Fediverse by announcing their intent to offer federation with Threads.

t3rmit3 ,

That being said, I acknowledge and agree that moderation is poor, which is, once again, why you should federate. To let people know they don’t need Meta. To show them how to escape the exploitation and harassment.

You're gonna have to break this down for me, because I'm not seeing the logic.

So I'm a Threads user. I now start seeing Beehaw posts in my feed. Let's say that I'm seeing them alongside Threads-originating posts containing "exploitation and harassment". How does my seeing those Beehaw posts in Threads automatically translate to thinking, "I should leave Threads and join- not Beehaw, which is federated, but another, non-federated instance"?

Or are you advocating for individuals in non-Threads Fediverse instances to do some kind of manual outreach campaign?

t3rmit3 ,

Federating with Threads only hurts Meta. It does not help them in any way.

This is completely false. The entire reason they're federating is to instantly get access to a much larger pool of UGC for their users to interact with. And of course they get to also choose who to federate with and who to block, so they can choose instances that have the kind of content they want, all for free, while suppressing instances they don't like. If your instance starts to try to "convert" people off of Threads, they can (and will) just block you.

Users who create accounts on Threads because they actually want to communicate with people they’ve heard of helps Meta. Defederating helps Meta.

Threads has more users than ALL fedi.db-tracked fediverse instances combined (Threads: 160m, Fediverse: 10m). They don't need us for users, they need us for content. Just like Reddit, there are usually a few dedicated 'content generator' users on any given instance, who post the bulk of the UGC. Gaining access to those is Threads' goal. Federating is how they achieve that.

t3rmit3 , (edited )

ad-free spy-free platforms that give you actual control over what appears in your feed

You won't know any of those are ad-free or spy-free (which is not true anyways, fediverse instances are absolutely being scraped), or know you could control those if you left Threads.

All you'll know is, "I like this (Beehaw) thing I'm seeing in Threads, so to see more of it, I should use Threads more.

t3rmit3 , (edited )

Federating doesn't prevent that either, but at least you won't be rewarding them for it by engaging with them. If Meta wants to sink ActivityPub (or rather, subsume it), it will, and no actions we can take will prevent that, bar forking the standard in some way.

In fact, not federating with Threads is the only potential way to ensure that our instances don't become reliant on functionality that Threads adds, even if we can't save the ActivityPub standard itself.

t3rmit3 ,

Are you going to explain what UGC means?

"User-generated content". Posts, comments, uploaded files, etc.

…why would they do that? Why would they introduce something new just to turn around and try to prevent you from using it?

Why would they try to prevent users from migrating away from their service? Are you seriously asking this?

The reason they’re federating is because of the Digital Markets Act. Same reason WhatsApp is going to interoperate.

LOL they only need us to comply with regulations.

You have asserted this in multiple comments, but the only site I can find asserting this link is a blog post by someone who admits to having only a "surface-level understanding" of DMA, and thinks that this is gaining them data portability.

As someone who works at a very large company that is also affected by DMA, this is not how any company whose legal teams we've spoken with are interpreting this requirement. Data portability is being solved with export standards, so that users can (more) easily migrate to other services. Streaming someone's data over to another platform where they may or may not have an account, or ever intend to go, wouldn't fulfill that requirement, because if the user wishes to move to a non-federated instance, that would not be possible. Portability also cannot be 'favored' under DMA.

That is a separate issue from interoperability, which only works if Threads is allowing federated instances to fully interact with their users' posts, with no loss of functionality, which was at least originally not the plan.

t3rmit3 , (edited )

No, that’s not what I asked.

Yes, it literally is. You quoted where I said:

If your instance starts to try to “convert” people off of Threads, they can (and will) just block you.

And then responded to it by saying:

…why would they do that?

That is literally asking why they would block instances trying to convert users into fediverse users instead of Threads users.

Do you work with Meta?

Do you?

me: Data portability is being solved with export standards, so that users can (more) easily migrate to other services.

you: Are you not aware that WhatsApp is also interoperating to comply with DMA? Another Meta company?

I think you are conflating portability with interoperability. Those are 2 separate requirements.

Portability is about preventing platform lock-in, making it so that users can leave a platform (i.e. Threads), and take their data with them to another platform (any platform, not just ones of the originator's choosing). This is not solved with federation.

Interoperability is the ability for users of one platform to interact with users of another platform, without platform-imposed loss of functionality. Whether ActivityPub can serve as a replacement for an API is something that courts in the EU would have to decide. It is certainly not 1:1.

t3rmit3 ,

Scraping public data is entirely different from collecting your contact history, location history, web browsing traffic, decrypting WhatsApp traffic, etc. etc. and on and on.

Fediverse instances can also do most of this. They know your IP and email, and the stuff you reveal about yourself. You could de-anonymize many users with those 2 plus the info they share about themselves on here, with a bit of OSINT work. Any fediverse apps could also get access to contacts or other locally-stored info on your phone.

"But I wouldn't use that app." Well then you wouldn't be someone using Facebook either. People using Facebook would also be the people granting shady fediverse apps undue permissions.

t3rmit3 ,

I'm not arguing they're comparable; I'm the one out of the 2 of us arguing not to have any interaction with Meta apps, including via federation. I'm arguing that you shouldn't be trying to sell a false sense of anonymity with fediverse instances. You said they're "spy-free", not "far less intrusive than Facebook". The latter is true. The former is not.

t3rmit3 ,

everyone can see it

Yes. Your comment here: https://beehaw.org/comment/3046503

Here's a screenshot of you literally saying what I quoted:
https://beehaw.org/pictrs/image/77af0732-42ed-41f4-9337-05d27d07443b.webp

Hope this helps.

t3rmit3 ,

In other news, the cop was actually right-wing bully all along...

t3rmit3 ,

That part has (maybe-ish?) changed with these most recent amendments. Per the EFF:

The Bill’s Knowledge Standard Has Changed

The first change to the bill is that the knowledge standard has been tightened, so that websites and apps can only be held liable if they actually know there’s a young person using their service. The previous version of the bill regulated any online platform that was used by minors, or was “reasonably likely to be used” by a minor.

The previous version applied to a huge swath of the internet, since the view of what sites are “reasonably likely to be used” by a minor would be up to attorney generals. Other than sites that took big steps, like requiring age verification, almost any site could be “reasonably likely” to be used by a minor.

So in a best-case interpretation under the new text, a site whose ToS does not allow minors to use it would not be required to check everyone's ages to verify no one is a minor, in order not to be liable if a minor accessed adult content on it. The problem is, the bill isn't actually explicit about what qualifies as the site having knowledge of children using it means:

Requiring actual knowledge of minors is an improvement, but the protective effect is small. A site that was told, for instance, that a certain proportion of its users were minors—even if those minors were lying to get access—could be sued by the state. The site might be held liable even if there was one minor user they knew about, perhaps one they’d repeatedly kicked off.

The bill still effectively regulates the entire internet that isn’t age-gated. KOSA is fundamentally a censorship bill, so we’re concerned about its effects on any website or service—whether they’re meant to serve solely adults, solely kids, or both.

No site is going to want to be the ones that an AG tests out their new lawsuit hammer on, so it's likely to end in 1 of 2 ways: either verifying the ages of all users of the platform, or prohibiting all user-generated content to prevent adult content being posted. Republicans are fine with either of those outcomes. The sad thing is the Democrats who either also are, or who don't understand the impacts but are voting on it anyways.

t3rmit3 ,

inb4 Americans use VPN connections to HongKong to get around US censorship laws...

t3rmit3 ,

You've got it backwards. China's increasingly tight social controls, and increasingly antagonistic stance with the US, just means that they're the least likely country to report you to US companies and state governments. I have no plans to ever go to China or Hong Kong.

t3rmit3 ,

I don't know, holding companies hostage sounds great. Companies already hold employees hostage in many ways (life essentials, healthcare, etc).

When Glassdoor was just about employees holding companies' feet to the fire by posting about their shitty management practices, it was great. That it became just another profit-generator corporation is the fault of Capitalism, not its specific business model.

t3rmit3 , (edited )

as we saw with computer chess, novelty can only be interesting for so long once there are no humans involved.

I think this is underestimating or even misunderstanding how entertainment works in our brains. The same game/movie/book produced once by humans, and once by computers, will not be enjoyed differently by our brains. No one watches the credits of a movie for that sweet dopamine hit of knowing it was made by real people.

With chess, the enjoyment isn't watching the pieces move, it's the strategy involved and even the rooting for a player. It's a competitive activity. Movies/books/(most) games are not. It is just watching the pretty images on screen. The character running around the world, opening the loot box. The story in our head.

If the assertion is that computers will never be able to produce a video game or movie or book that a human would actually enjoy for any period, I think that is extremely naive; many thousands of people enjoyed Pong for years, and ChatGPT actually can write a working Pong clone right now. I would be surprised if it couldn't write the kind of infinite-runner games that people still spend hours a day playing on their phones, with only a little debugging needed.

And this is just in the last 4 years, really. 20 years from now? Hoo boy, AI is going to be being used for a LOT of stuff that people do as jobs now (to our collective detriment).

But even if they stay up and running, the public perception of these “services” will likely change once social media is deprived of the last pretense that anything “social” is going on.

They will never let it get there. They will restrict AI use by third parties and users, in favor of their own AI content creation (or curated third party content), so they can keep strict control over how authentic their content feels. TikTok and Twitter don't curate content themselves now (technically not true, they actually do curate the content quite heavily, via algorithms), because their whole model is letting others do it via "popularity" (via said algorithms). If the content that others produce is hurting their business, they'll ban that content in favor of content they control.

a majority of the posting class is coming around to the idea that maybe this stuff is not great for us:

Are they?

TikTok is just TV again

TikTok is basically just broadcast TV now

I must have missed the part of the headline where they say that TV sucks. Most people still watch TV, even young people (they just don't all do it on a TV).

My other hope is that when that time comes, real human-made art made for connecting with human audiences can be more readily recognized by society as the valuable thing it is on its own, not only when it is put to work in service to some marketer turning a profit for some CEO.

This is already recognized by society at large. The problem is that it's not translating into legislation, and legislation is the only way to control corporations. Just look at the state of book publishing; ebook platforms are absolutely destroying the industry, largely unbeknownst to buyers (and unbeknownst by design, because corporations know that buyers would be upset if they knew).

The real question is whether society will come to realize that unending, corporate profit-seeking (which enriches one at the expense of others), and healthy societies (which are based on mutual cooperation), are mutually exclusive goals.

t3rmit3 , (edited )

I also think it’s important to remember that people don’t actually follow Veritasium directly. They follow him indirectly by means of YouTube. If people could actually follow him directly he wouldn’t need to worry about competing with AI crap for the attention of YouTube’s algorithm. But of course, YouTube would never allow that.

People can and do follow him directly: https://www.patreon.com/veritasium

He has 7,463 people actively giving him money each month, entirely divorced from YT.

His continued engagement with the YT algorithms is about growing his viewership. This is true for basically all the largest YT and Twitch creators, who have to diversify their revenue streams off of just those platforms, in order to get truly large (and certainly more stable).

t3rmit3 ,

LMAO PragerU...

t3rmit3 , (edited )

Geology doesn't actually require any amount of time to delineate different epochs, and the clear and measurable changes that have occurred clearly set our current time apart from the Holocene. Microplastics contamination, climate alteration, and atmospheric composition changes due to fossil fuels makes us extremely geologically distinct from 11,000 years ago, or even just 300 years ago.

I don't claim to know where that line should be drawn, but lumping our current world together with the Holocene just because it wasn't that long ago in geological terms, doesn't make sense. Knowing nothing about our current society, looking at rock 5,000 years ago and rock from now, geologists would think some catastrophic changes had occurred.

t3rmit3 ,

Which, it's worth noting, is the same thing that China requires of all companies that want to operate in China.

t3rmit3 ,

Hell yeah! (cries in American)

‘We definitely messed up’: why did Google AI tool make offensive historical images? (www.theguardian.com)

Brin’s “We definitely messed up.”, at an AI “hackathon” event on 2 March, followed a slew of social media posts showing Gemini’s image generation tool depicting a variety of historical figures – including popes, founding fathers of the US and, most excruciatingly, German second world war soldiers – as people of...

t3rmit3 ,

And even worse, it actually reinforces that image within users.

t3rmit3 , (edited )

This doesn't sound like a "DEI-crazed HR department" (article's words), so much as the ACLU cynically crying racism as a way to prevent an employee from having an NLRA-protected claim(s) against them. Their conduct in pushing to invalidate the current NLRB head also suggests that this is purely about avoiding official review, rather than being 'too woke' or something.

t3rmit3 ,

So is the US's.

t3rmit3 , (edited )

Lemmy is not enriching the data you put on it with data that Lemmy purchases from third parties, in order to create a user-product to sell to advertisers. Meta and Discord are (obviously Meta much moreso). That's why advertisers buy from them instead of just scraping your posts themselves.

t3rmit3 , (edited )

If someone was competent enough to author code that’s fit to pull into a project like Lemmy, they’re more than capable of translating those skills to Rust.

With time, perhaps, but why is someone going to do that as a prerequisite for a spare-time FOSS contribution? People tend to contribute to the projects they already have the skills for.

No language seeing modern significant use is so esoteric that a reasonably seasoned developer couldn’t make something competent in it within a week of starting to learn its syntax.

Knowing the minimal syntax of a language to get past compilation errors is not even remotely close to being "competent" in it. You need to learn the language's structures, you need to learn how the compiler works, you need to learn the libraries that the FOSS project is using, you need to learn the security pitfalls for the language... The language used can be a HUGE hurdle to overcome.

"You know Python and Javascript, so you can write competent C++ code that is FOSS-contribution-acceptable if you take a week to learn!" (inb4 memory management and pointers and templates and 'oh no every input field I wrote is a trivial buffer overflow'...)

t3rmit3 , (edited )

This is true regardless of the language in use. I’m not sure why you brought it up.

Because if you know Python, you know requests already. Or flask, or configparser, or itertools, or maybe even pyqt.

Languages all have their own 'most common libraries', which add to the time it takes to learn how to be competent in that language. If a python dev tells me they know all the syntax, but have no clue what itertools or requests are, my eyebrows go up.

There's a lot of language-specific knowledge that needs to be learned before you'll be competent in it, that people don't even think about.

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