Lvxferre

Just for reference: in my State (somewhere in Latin America), since 2007, we have a law that TL;DRs to “if you offer a service through a certain mean, you must offer the cancellation method through the same mean; plus by phone, or internet, or snail mail”.

It works like a charm because, contrariwise to what Michael Powell is claiming, customers aren’t such disgustingly stupid trash that will “accidentally” hit the cancel button, nor they deserve to be punished by making cancellation a fucking pain in the arse. (There’s probably similar laws elsewhere.)

Yeah, bullshit machine would be awful for that. The way that it works it’s simply too prone to invent parts that don’t exist, or claim that two pieces are compatible when they aren’t [or vice versa].

I like this piece. Well-thought, and well laid out.

I do believe that mods getting weathered, as OP outlined, is part of the issue. I’m not sure on good ways to solve this, but introducing a few barriers of entry here and there might alleviate it. We just need to be sure that those barriers actually sort good newbies in and bad newbies out, instead of simply locking everyone out. Easier said than done.

Another factor is that moderator work grows faster than community size; you get more threads, each with more activity, users spend more time in your community, they’re from more diverse backgrounds so more likely to disagree, forest fires spread faster so goes on. This is relevant here because communities nowadays tend to be considerably bigger than in the past; and, well, when you got more stuff to do, you tend to do things in a sloppier way.

You can recruit more mods, of course; but mod team size is also a problem, as it’s harder to get everyone in the same page and enforce rules consistently. If one mod is rather lax and another is strict, you get some people getting away doing worse than someone else who got banned, and that makes the whole mod team look powertripping and picking favourites, when it isn’t. (I’m not sure on how to solve this problem besides encouraging people to migrate to smaller communities, once they feel like the ones that they are in are too big.)

All I know is I don’t know how to pick parts and what is compatable with ehat

In addition to the site linked by the other user, you can also websearch “is [part1] compatible with [part2]?” and check the results, they’re often useful.

The site that you’ve linked blocked me for some reason, and cost/benefit in Malta is bound to be different from the one here in LatAm, but I’ve recently built a midrange-ish computer, so might as well list what I bought for reference.

• CPU - Ryzen 7 5700X3D. Good cost/benefit ratio, and rather good performance. I had to buy a third party cooler as the CPU doesn’t come with one, so keep that in mind. I considered the Ryzen 5 5600 for budget reasons, too; it might be an option if you want to make the build cheaper.
• Mobo - Gigabyte B550M Aorus Elite. If coupled with the above you need to Q-Flash update the BIOS, but that was relatively painless. So far it’s working great, can’t complain about it.
• RAM - I went for 2*16GB instead, mostly to future-proof my build. The brand is Apacer Nox, I didn’t find people complaining about it and it had a reasonable price.
• SSD - Adata 480GB.
• PSU - Gamdias Cyclops M1-750B, 750W. Frankly my method to look for a PSU was to look for 700~800W ones in a local forum, with the word “porcaria” (rubbish, shit) alongside it so I could see complains, then I found people actually praising this one.

If I convert my overall costs from reals to euros it was around €500, but keep in mind that I didn’t buy a new HDD or a new GPU. GPUs in special are relatively expensive here, I’m hoping that the prices go down next year.

I think that it would be theoretically possible with a modified client. But in practice you’d filter a lot of genuinely active users out, and still let a lot of those suspicious accounts in. Sadly I think that blocking them individually is a better approach, even if a bit more laborious.

On a lighter note, this sort of user isn’t a big deal here in Lemmy. It’s simply more efficient to manipulate a larger userbase, like Twitter or Reddit.

You’re right. And IMO they should be legally banned from doing so - because the people who signed up for this crap agreed with 23 and Me’s ToS, not with someone else’s.

But, well… as you said, capitalism going to capitalism. The “right thing to do” is often out of the table of options.

I have a relative who considered doing this test. I’m glad that the family talked him out of it. (Surprisingly enough, not just me.)

Anyway, my [hopefully not “hot”] take: for most part the data should be destroyed, as it involves private matters. If there’s data that cannot be reasonably associated with an individual or well-defined group of individuals, perhaps it could be released into the public domain, but I’m not sure on that.

That’s a better way, I agree.

The fun part isn’t even what Apple said - that the emperor is naked - but why it’s doing it. It’s nice bullet against all four of its GAFAM competitors.

It’ll likely turn out that the more dispassionate people in the middle, who are neither strongly for nor against it, will be the ones who had the most accurate view on it.

I believe that some of the people in the middle will have more accurate views on the subject, indeed. However, note that there are multiple ways to be in the “middle ground”, and some are sillier than the extremes.

For example, consider the following views:

1. That LLMs are genuinely intelligent, but useless.
2. That LLMs are dumb, but useful.

Both positions are middle grounds - and yet they can’t be accurate at the same time.

Here’s a simple test showing lack of logic skills of LLM-based chatbots.

1. Pick some public figure (politician, celebrity, etc.), whose parents are known by name, but not themselves public figures.
2. Ask the bot of your choice “who is the [father|mother] of [public person]?”, to check if the bot contains such piece of info.
3. If the bot contains such piece of info, start a new chat.
4. In the new chat, ask the opposite question - “who is the [son|daughter] of [parent mentioned in the previous answer]?”. And watch the bot losing its shit.

I’ll exemplify it with ChatGPT-4o (as provided by DDG) and Katy Perry (parents: Mary Christine and Maurice Hudson).

Note that step #3 is not optional. You must start a new chat; plenty bots are able to retrieve tokens from their previous output within the same chat, and that would stain the test.

Failure to consistently output correct information shows that those bots are unable to perform simple logic operations like “if A is the parent of B, then B is the child of A”.

I’ll also pre-emptively address some ad hoc idiocy that I’ve seen sealions lacking basic reading comprehension (i.e. the sort of people who claims that those systems are able to reason) using against this test:

• “Ackshyually the bot is forgerring it and then reminring it. Just like hoominz” - cut off the crap.
• “Ackshyually you wouldn’t remember things from different conversations.” - cut off the crap.
• [Repeats the test while disingenuously = idiotically omitting step 3] - congrats for proving that there’s a context window and nothing else, you muppet.
• “You can’t prove that it is not smart” - inversion of the burden of the proof. You can’t prove that your mum didn’t get syphilis by sharing a cactus-shaped dildo with Hitler.

I still fail to see how people expect LLMs to reason. It’s like expecting a slice of pizza to reason. That’s just not what it does.

This text provides a rather good analogy between people who think that LLMs reason and people who believe in mentalists.

Yup. And that’s specially great as the boy is just 15, so he’s starting his career really early.

My sides went into orbit!

The way that the Github comment is phrased, it implies that the link contains additional info that hackermondev didn’t mention. It doesn’t - instead it contains a subset of that info, missing critical bits:

1. That Zendesk initially dismissed hackermondev’s report.
2. That the “third parties” in question were Zendesk’s clients.

Both pieces of info were omitted to back up a lie present in the text, that the bug hunter would have “violated key ethical principles”. He didn’t - as he noticed that Zendesk gives no flying fucks about the security issue, and that remediation was unlikely, he warned the people affected by the issue, so they can protect themselves against it.

Zendesk is not just being irresponsible - it’s also being manipulative, and doubling down instead of doing the right thing (“we incorrectly dismissed that report. It was our bad. Here’s your 2k.”) They have no grounds to talk about ethical principles.

“Luanti” is a wordplay on the Finnish word luonti (“creation”) and the programming language Minetest Luanti employs for games and mods, Lua.

In other words it’s the result of mashing Finnish and Portuguese words together. (Lua language is the word for “Moon”. Cue to the logo.)

Intended pronunciation is probably around ['luɐ̯n.ti], although the diphthong doesn’t exist in Finnish. I think that you can get close enough of that in English by saying “Loo an tea”.

Now, if you can only convince some Lemmy users to not say “play minetest luanti lol” once others ask something about Minecraft, even contextually unrelated… some at least have the decency to point out a specific Minetest→Luanti modpack. Plenty don’t even.

Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against Luanti, and I have quite a few things against Microsoft. My issue is exactly what the blog editors are highlighting - it is not a libre Minecraft clone dammit, it’s its own thing. And in certain aspects it might become an even bigger thing, as a platform for voxel games in general.

And overall I think that it’s a good sign that the project is getting its own name instead of being named after something else.

As I mentioned in another thread, about the same topic:

First Zendesk dismissed the report. Then as hackermondev (the hunter) contacted Zendesk’s customers, the issue “magically” becomes relevant again, so they reopen the report and boss the hunter around to not disclose it with the affected parties.

Hackermondev did the morally right thing - from his PoV it was clear that Zendesk wasn’t giving a flying fuck, so he contacted the affected parties.

All this “ackshyually it falls outside the scope of the hunt” boils down to a “not our problem lol”. When you know that your services/goods have a flaw caused by a third party not doing the right thing (mail servers not dropping spoofed mails), and you can reasonably solve the flaw through your craft, not doing so is irresponsible. Doubly true if it the flaw is related to security, as in this case.

I’m glad that Zendesk likely lost way more than the 2k that they would’ve paid hackermondev for the hunt. And also that hackermondev got many times over that value from the affected companies.

What “should be done” is irrelevant - what matters is what “is done”. And plenty servers don’t enforce SPF, DKIM and DMARC. (In fact not even Google and Yahoo did it, before February of this year.)

And, when you know that your product has a flaw caused by a third party not doing the right thing, and you can reasonably solve it through your craft, not solving it is being irresponsible. Doubly true if it the flaw is related to security, as in this case.

Let us learn with Nanni: when Ea-nāṣir sold him shitty copper, instead of producing shitty armour, weapons and tools that might endanger Nanni’s customers, Nanni complained with Ea-nāṣir. Nanni is responsible, Zendesk isn’t. [Sorry, I couldn’t resist.]

[EDIT: can you muppets stop downvoting the comment above? Dave is right, Moonrise is trying to start a discussion, there’s nothing wrong with it.]

What a corporation of muppets! First dismissing the report as “not our problem lol”, then as the hunter contacts affected companies the bug “magically” becomes relevant: they reopen the report, and then boss him around to not disclose it with the affected parties.

I bet that they lost way, way more than the US$2000 that they would’ve paid to the bug hunter. Also, I’m happy that hackermondev got many times that value from the affected companies.

It needs to work and be reliable

True that. And it needs to offer a better service than Google; “our services are federated so please use them!” is not enough to encourage the shift, I think.