hendrik

I think it’s fascinating tech. And fun to play with. But I think a lot if the every-day use-cases are more of a gimmick. In the good old times we could look up facts on Wikipedia. Or google why the yellow light on the router started flashing and we’d find an answer on Reddit. Now we ask ChatGPT, but that alone doen’t increase my quality of life. I’d rather have it sort the mess on my 8TB hdd, find a cheaper insurance company for the car. Do my stupid paperwork at home… And maybe I’d like an AI robot to do the chores for me. Laundry, dishes… So I can relax and do other things. But I feel it’s still early days for the really useful tasks. AI is more useful for replacing callcenter workers, assisting programmers… And unfortunately it’s bad for the environment and makes computer hardware unaffordable.

Empathy and availability are great. Listen to them, respect their struggles growing up. I don’t think that necessarily means being strict/authoritative or lenient, for me it means more feeling respected as a person. And a sane, straightforward way to deal with mistakes. Because we all make mistakes. Especially while learning and growing up.

And I’d say shared memories are awesome. Whatever that means for you. Go on a Canoe trip, teach them how to fix their bike, do woodworks, drill a hole into the wall or bake a cake.

To be fair, you accumulated most of the downvotes (I see) in a single post and the attached comments. You got two things at the same time: the unpopularopinions community tends to be harsh. From my experience I’d say you get way more downvotes there, than in other communities. And secondly, you picked one of the two super controversial topics. Brace for downvotes if you post about AI. Or Israel. Dunno if the latter toned down a bit, or if I’ve unsubscribed from enough communities since.

It’ll be better with almost all other topics.

Not sure if I’d go straight for “silencing”. I mean the post and most comments are still there. So it’s just that you got a lot of backlash. But I can still read what you wrote. And you got quite some engagement. But I get what you mean.

And down-votes are a bit weird. We never agree if they mean bury the content somewhere at the bottom. Or if it means " I disagree with what you wrote". That just gets lumped together. And some people use them sparingly, some hand out a lot of downvotes. Which I guess could be fine if they’re used to for the frontpage ranking to sort the posts. But the way we use them doesn’t really give them the right weight.

And by the way, I’m not sure if I like up-votes either. You’ll get 300 of them for re-posting a meme. And 3 upvotes for coming up with really good advice to someone’s question.

Yeah, me too. For some hobbies there just isn’t a lot of activity.

We have some regular pc gaming communities:

• !pcgaming@lemmy.ca
• !linux_gaming@lemmy.world
• !pixeldungeon@lemmy.world
• !factorio@lemmy.world
• !steamdeck@sopuli.xyz
• !zocken@feddit.org

And some about tabletop games:

• !tabletop@beehaw.org
• !dnd@lemmy.world
• !scifi@ttrpg.network

Not sure if there’s more, that’s about the ones I’m aware of. Lemmyverse.net has a few more: https://lemmyverse.net/communities?query=gam

Well, previously we had LemmyNSFW. That one died, pretty much out of the blue. Now the second admin(?) of it launched FediNSFW as a successor. We have that - for now - I guess? They said they’re gonna try to make sure the same thing doesn’t happen again.

But I guess it’s still a single point of failure. If they don’t properly ensure there’s several people who own the domain and hosting infrastructure, can administer the contracts, server etc, it might still be down to one person and their ability to keep it up. And if there’s legal troubles, uncertainty, not enough donations, law changes or the hoster or Cloudflare pulls the trigger, that might be the end of all of it as well. A severe technical issue/mistake could also take down a singular instance. And due to the delicate nature of NSFW content, they probably can’t afford to be 100% transparent with us, so I wouldn’t know whether they’re in a healthy place or not.

I mean there’s nothing wrong with FediNSFW’s existence. I just think it’s massively questionable to all bet on the same horse, and then call us the “Fediverse”, a decentral platform…

I think so as well. Porn is available in abundance. We don’t really need it here. What I think could be nice is people who like to write erotic fiction as a hobby and post their original content. Or people discuss erotic computer games. Or like relationship advice and NSFW questions in case some country abolishes sex ed. Maybe talking about piracy, mental issues, loss… all the things that are deemed “not advertiser friendly” on commercial platforms. That’d be something positive. But it’s not easy. And it often all gets lumped together under some big NSFW umbrella and 95% of people want to share pron clips anyway. Mostly with zero care for copyright or the creators’ consent.

Hehe. Yeah, I don’t think we need more content. There’s already some out there. And everyone can add more, all they need is 20sec of time and a redgifs link. What we really need is more admins run servers to host that stuff. And a bigger admin team for the already existing instance so it doesn’t just randomly go away along with all the content, as well. Maybe one or two lawyers, or someone with expertise in bullet-proof hosting, to set it up properly. (And we likely need moderators as well. Half of the communities on the old server used to be a desert. Claimed en masse by some nominal members who left a long time ago.) But original content is certainly welcome 😆

Probably more NSFW instances? We barely have one.

Well, computer programmers still do things like Project Euler and code wars. Some people go Geocaching and more organized events which include riddles and different places. We got Escape Rooms… People still listen to shortwave radio and figure out whether number stations change due to the Iran war… I read people tried to use modern AI on the Voynich manuscript and other older riddles… It’s probably all out there, just the internet changed, and now it’s almost impossible to find in the big haystack and walled discord rooms etc. And social media got more consumerist. You’d (on average) be mindlessly doomscrolling there, these days. Not actively look for puzzles to solve.

Well, Matrix is the newer one. But projects like Snikket look like a fresh breeze in the older XMPP ecosystem as well.

I don’t think your comparison is entirely correct. You can mess up cryptography in Matrix. Or for some weird reason or bug, the first three messages in a room won’t decrypt. It’s rare but I had these things happen. I’d say it’s acceptable, but not 100% perfect either.

I don’t think messages synchronize from other servers. I could be wrong. But when my server is down, nothing synchronizes any more.

I think the reporting on Matrix’ metadata leakage is overrated. You’ll have any regular federated messenger forward metadata to connected instances. It’s probably a similar situation for XMPP?! If you’re worried about metadata, don’t federate with other instances.

And with performance… Yeah, Synapse is kind of bloated in my opinion. Same with the most popular/official(?) client. Most XMPP servers and clients use way less. You could pick a project like Continuwuity however and run a Matrix server with way less resource usage than your average Synapse server. There’s also many clients available.

Ultimately, I think they’re both valid options. You’ll get some mild annoyances either way. Matrix has some more features. But the landscape is scattered between clients as well and maybe they don’t support multiple accounts, or message threads… Maybe they support the things you need. And with XMPP and its XEPs, it’s a similar story. Though XMPP has been around for quite a while and a similar amount of stuff is supported in the established clients.

No clue what’s best for a scooter. But last time I checked, both bicycle stores and workware garment stores had some nice options. Something like this, and with workwear there’s different looks and options available for every season:

https://www.strauss.com/de/de/warnschutzjacken/warnschutz-softshelljacke-e-s-motion-24-7-3210970-84511-1498.html

But there’s also basic safety jackets you can put on over your regular stuff for a few bucks. Just make sure the reflectors aren’t fake.

An eMTB hardtail. I forgot which one, we talked about so many different manufacturers and models. And then they all have different variants of the same model, both by year and configuration and at some point my brain just froze 😆

Some day I’ll get one as well. Seems there’s quite a selection of nice e mountain bikes out there with a good price-value ratio, these days. Though, I really struggle finding one. I’m a bit tall, and none of them fit properly. So I’m a bit stuck at looking up frame measurements and visiting stores to try some… I mean for the time being, I still have my old trusty bicycle. It just doesn’t do forest and trails, and doesn’t do any “E” either… I guess I better get in shape to keep up this year.

Thanks. Yeah. My wife also just ordered an E-Bike. Didn’t arrive yet, either. But she didn’t blog about it 😂

And, how bad is it?

Oh nevermind. Stupid me, expecting the article to contain some sort of answer to the question in the headline… Or any information at all, except they ordered one and how much the shipping was… 👎

Lots of good comments here. Just wanted to say: Privacy often depends on the threat scenario. What really helps is encryption.

And if you need anonymity within the network, that needs to be baked into the protocol. Like I2P or TOR do on the internet. They bounce traffic through random nodes so nobody knows both sender and receiver at the same time. That of course makes it expensive for the network, and slow.

Other protocols just send packets from a sender to a receiver. That’s fast. But people en-route know who’s communicating with each other. Packets might be encrypted, though. So third parties can’t look inside what kind of information is exchanged.

And there’s a million different threat scenarios with the surveillance state. They might be far away and not catch the radio you’re sending through the air. They might come and triangulate your position once you transmit any stuff over radio.

And the internet is just complicated. Most traffic there is encrypted these days. But the easy stuff they’ll do is just ask Google what’s on your account. Or have a side-channel to the data that’s generated for the advertising industry. Or bug your phone or unlock it. Or subpoena the internet service provider, or mobile phone provider. So they can see what DNS queries you do. Or your phone location 24/7. Or they’ll get access to your modern car electronics…

So depending on what you’re trying to do, you might want to get rid of your smartphone, modern car etc. Credit card, NFC train ticket… Accounts with big corporations… That’s all data the surveillance state is more interested in than random chat messages… Though, those have an impact as well. So it really depends on what we’re trying to protect here, because there’s so many different attacks on privacy from all kinds of directions. It is a chore.

It’s nothing a little music can’t help!

I think there’s a lot of nuance here. I mean the Fediverse isn’t super efficient. But it manages to do what it’s supposed to do. And it really depends. Which Fediverse software. How many people are on those servers, how are they distributed. Do groups of people mingle on certain servers. Do they all subscribe to all the same content out there. Are there really big groups on servers with happen to have a slow internet connection… And then of course can we come up with improvements if we need to.
I think we’re going to find out once (or if) the Fediverse grows substantially. Some design decisions of the Fediverse are indeed a bit of a challenge for unlimited growth. Oftentimes technical challenges can be overcome, though. With clever solutions. Or things turn ot differently than we anticipated. So I don’t think there’s a good practical and straightforward answer to the question.

Sure. I’m not entirely sure how PCIE works these days. But in it good old days we had methods to read pretty much arbitrary memory regions via PCIE or early Thunderbolt(?).

I just figured it’d be massively complicated to wait for the user to pull something on the screen, do computationally expensive OCR, some AI image detection to puzzle documents back together, and then you’d only get a fraction of what’s really stored on the computer and you’d still need a way to send that information home… When you could just pick a plethora of easy options like read all the files from the harddisk and send just them somewhere. I think it’s far more likely they do some easy and straightforward solution. And it’d be more effective as well.

Open-weight AND Open-Source??

And why the Chinese ones? Are the Americans losing the AI race?

Yes. I wouldn’t focus too much on someone being able to tell which map you’re playing, and which color your car has in Need For Speed. It’s way more unsettling what’s in networking equipment. Or inside an Intel Management Engine, and the firmware blobs of all the computer chips. Or the software running on it.