Last time I was tempted to use suid, it was in order to allow an application I’d written to listen on 80 and 443. Fortunately I found the capabilities way of doing that (setcap 'cap_net_bind_service=+ep' executable) and that was the first I ever heard of capabilities. I consider myself pretty Linux-savvy, but it was pretty recently that I learned about capabilities.

The only thing more subversive than silly hats is signing your Lemmy posts.

TootSweet

There’s no more today, there’s only now.

ChatGPT

Arm yourself with knowledge

Bruh

My favorite book ever. “Hackers” by Steven Levy. It really does a good job of giving you a sense of the early days of software development and the background behind/before the Free Software movement.

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

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.

Jean-Luc Picard is entirely too classy to snore.

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.

4chan and Jira too. It does seem like a lot of things have had outages lately.

I really can’t overstate how much respect I have for Kuhn and the SFC. If RMS and the FSF are the Free Software movement’s past, Kuhn and the SFC are it’s future, and I can’t imagine anyone better to carry that particular torch.