hendrik @ hendrik @palaver.p3x.de

A software developer and Linux nerd, living in Germany. I'm usually a chill

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4 yr. ago

It'd probably lead to lots of small drama and every disagreement getting to a personal level. It's speculation at this point. I also think a decent chunk of people here aren't able to behave nicely. I'm not sure if we should grant them additional capabilities.

But it's not like voting here on Lemmy were the pinnacle of technical advances... It's an echo chamber for popular opinions and common and often uninspiring interests. I think we could change how it works, as it's not super great in the first place.

I don't think that'll work. Asking for consent and retrieving the robots.txt is yet another request with a similar workload. So by that logic, we can't do anything on the internet. Since asking for consent is work and that requires consent, which requires consent... And if you're concerned with efficiency alone, cut the additional asking and complexity by just straightforward doing the single request.

Plus, it's not even that complex. Sending a few bytes of JSON with daily precalculated numbers is a fraction of what a single user interaction does. It's maybe zero point something of a request. Or with a lots of more zero's in-between if we look at what a server does each day. I mean every single refresh of the website or me opening the app loads several files, API endpoints, regularly loads hundreds of kilobytes of Javascript, images etc. There are lots of calculations and database requests involved to display several posts along with votes etc. I'd say one single pageview of me counts like the FediDB collecting stats each day for like 1000 years.

I invented these numbers. They're wrong. But I think you get what I'm trying to say... For all practical purposes, these requests are for free and have zero cost. Plus if it's efficiency, it's always a good idea not to ask to ask, but outright do it and deal with it while answering. So it really can't be computational cost or network traffic. It has to be consent.

(And in developer terms, some things don't even add up. Computers can do billions of operations each second. Network infrastructure can handle somewhere in the ballpark of millions(?) of packets a second. And we're talking about a few of them a day, here. I'd say this is more like someone moving grains of sand in the Sahara with their bare hands. You could do it all your life and it wouldn't really change anything. For practical purposes, it's meaningless on that scale.)

I think it's a general issue with our healthcare system. And the lack of doctors and hospitals is more pronounced in rural areas. But basically the same thing applies in the city. And not just for mental therapy. You often also get to wait for a MRT, if there's something wrong with your foot... I'm not an expert on this. But I guess we could do way better. And I hear that a lot, that someone had to wait for therapy for relatively normal physical issues. And similar things apply to related professions. One home for the elderly next door, just closed a year ago. Not because we don't have elderly people anymore, on the contrary, there is quite some demand. But they just didn't have enough employees to do the work. And at some point they had to close. I think it's going to become a big issue unless we deal with that and find a suatainable solution.

Nice. That's exactly what we need on our phones. And on video players. Just needs support for 20 other languages and be rolled out as open source.

I'm from Germany, too. But judging by what comes across the ocean via the internet... A lot of Americans seem to talk about their anxiety, depression and how it affects them...

And from what I've heard from other people and the news, we (Germans) don't have enough therapists or doctors. It takes quite some time to get an appointment, even if you badly need one. So I'd say we don't have a lot of them.

(Edit: It'll take some time until proper answers trickle in... It's still in the middle of the night in the USA.)

I think the sane approach is: the developers offer one good theme and branding that is the default setting and works well out of the box. And instance administrators can then either be lazy and leave that in place, or (better) go ahead and tweak their place to their liking. Decorate it, make it unique if they like. I think it shows how much effort someone put into something. But on the other hand, you often can't mess with 20 different free software projects and change the CSS code just for the sake of it. I think it's also fine to just leave some things on a good default setting.

Hmmh, I don't think we'll come to an agreement here. I think marriage is a good example, since that comes with lots of implicit consent. First of all you expect to move in together after you got engaged. You do small things like expect to eat dinner together. It's not a question anymore whether everyone cooks their own meal each day. And it extends to big things. Most people expect one party cares for the other once they're old. And stuff like that. And yeah. Intimacy isn't granted. There is a protocol to it. But I'm way more comfortable to make the moves on my partner, than for example place my hands on a stranger on the bus, and see if they take my invitation...

Isn't that how it works? I mean going with your analogy... Sure, you can marry someone and never touch each other or move in together. But that's kind of a weird one, in my opinion. Of course you should be able to do that. But it might require some more explicit agreement than going the default route. And I think that's what happened here. Assumptions have been made, those turned out to be wrong and now people need to find a way to deal with it so everyone's needs are met...

I just can't relate. Doesn't being in a relationship change things? It sure did for me. And I surely act differently around my partner, than I do around strangers. And I'm pretty sure that's how most people handle it. And I don't even think this is the main problem in this case.

Does anyone know why this happens? Do people configure limits based on location in their torrent clients?

Good question. I've also been looking for some good open-source solution to live stream the camera. Using some proper standard ao I can easily use it. Seems most webcam live streaming apps either include proprietary parts, or are unmaintained for several years now. I usually look at what's available in the F-Droid store. But seems we're out of luck. There is "Remote Video Camera" which can transfer video between two phones. But that's pretty much it. If you want to integrate it into other software, search on Github or Google and maybe include in the search query, the protocol or software you want to connect it to.

I just think you're making it way more simple than it is... Why not implement 20 other standards that have been around for 30 years? Why not make software perfect and without issues? Why not anticipate what other people will do with your public API endpoints in the future? Why not all have the same opinions?

There could be many reasons. They forgot, they didn't bother, they didn't consider themselves to be the same as a commercial Google or Yandex crawler... That's why I keep pushing for information and refuse to give a simple answer. Could be an honest mistake. Could be honest and correct to do it and the other side is wrong, since it's not a crawler alike Google or the AI copyright thieves... Could be done maliciously. In my opinion, it's likely that it just hadn't been an issue before, the situation changed and now it is. And we're getting a solution after some pushing. Seems at least FediDB took it offline and they're working on robots.txt support. They did not refuse to do it. So it's fine. And I can't comment on why it hadn't been in place. I'm not involved with that project and the history of it's development.

And keep in mind, Fediverse discoverability tools aren't the same as a content stealing bot. They're there to aid the users. And part of the platform in the broader picture. Mastodon for example isn't very useful unless it provides a few additional tools, so you can actually find people and connect with them. So it'd be wrong to just apply the exact same standards to it like some AI training crawler or Google. There is a lot of nuance to it. And did people in 1994 anticipate our current world and provide robots.txt with the nuanced distinctions so it's just straightforward and easy to implement? I think we agree that it's wrong to violate the other user's demands/wishes now that the're well known. Other than that, I just think it's not very clear who's at fault here, if any.

Plus, I'd argue it isn't even clear whether robots.txt applies to a statistics page. Or a part of a microblogging platform. Those certainly don't crawl any content. Or it's part of what the platform is designed to do. The term "crawler" isn't well defined in RFC 9309. Maybe it's debatable whether that even applies.

Yes. I wholeheartedly agree. Not every use is legitimate. But I'd really need to know what exactly happeded and the whole story to judge here. I'd say if it were a proper crawler, they'd need to read the robots.txt. That's accepted consensus. But is that what's happened here?

And I mean the whole thing with consensus and arbitrary use cases is just complicated. I have a website, and a Fediverse instance. Now you visit it. Is this legitimate? We'd need to factor in why I put it there. And what you're doing with that information. If it's my blog, it's obviously there for you to read it... Or is it...!? Would you call me and ask for permission before reading it? ...That is implied consent. I'd argue this is how the internet works. At least generally speaking. And most of the times it's super easy to tell what's right and what is wrong. But sometimes it isn't.

I guess because it's in the specification? Or absent from it? But I'm not sure. Reading the ActivityPub specification is complicated, because you also need to read ActivityStreams and lots of other references. And I frequently miss stuff that is somehow in there.

But generally we aren't Reddit where someone just says, no we prohibit third party use and everyone needs to use our app by our standards. The whole point of the Fediverse and ActivityPub is to interconnect. And to connect people across platforms. And it doen't even make lots of assumptions. The developers aren't forced to implement a Facebook clone. Or do something like Mastodon or GoToSocial does or likes. They're relatively free to come up with new ideas and adopt things to their liking and use-cases. That's what makes us great and diverse.

I -personally- see a public API endpoint as an invitation to use it. And that's kind of opposed to the consent thing. But I mean, why publish something in the first place, unless it comes with consent?

But with that said... We need some consensus in some areas. There are use cases where things arent obvious from the start. I'm just sad that everyone is ao agitated and seems to just escalate. I'm not sure if they tried talking to each other nicely. I suppose it's not a big deal to just implement the robots.txt and everyone can be happy. Without it needing some drama to get there.

True. Question here is: if you run a federated service... Is that enough to assume you consent to federation? I'd say yes. And those Mastodon crawlers and statistics pages are part of the broader ecosystem of the Fediverse. But yeah, we can disagree here. It's now going to get solved technically.

I still wonder what these mentioned scrapers and crawlers do. And the reasoning for the people to be part of the Fediverse but at the same time not be a public part of the Fediverse in another sense... But I guess they do other things on GoToSocial than I do here on Lemmy.

I think it's just one HTTP request to the nodeinfo API endpoint once a day or so. Can't really be an issue regarding load on the instances.

Fair enough. Though you can automatically set a lighting scene once the Neflix app launches on the TV. And with the motion sensors and the light in the kitchen, you'd need to be patient and just let them time out. You either want it to be automated, or do it manually. Everything in between is just more complicated. But I see where you're going. Automations need to be fine tuned, factor in edge cases. And it's a chore to get them right. Plus I can also imagine lots of scenarios where life is just more dynamic and automations aren't really the correct tool.

Nice. Home Assistant never fails to deliver, they're really one of the more active open source projects. And I even have an old analog phone laying around, together with the needed adapter. I won't be using the Google and Microsoft cloud options, though.

Did someone complain? Or why stop?

Do you really need to transfer anything? Just sign up someplace else, maybe with the same username and continue posting. Keep the old account around and occasionally log in during the first weeks. But in my experience, old posts and comments don't get any engagement anyways, so you won't get any new things in your inbox after 2 weeks or so.

For your existing community subscriptions, try the "Export" and "Import" buttons in your settings. At the top right, behind your username: "Settings" and then there is a button to export everything. You should be able to import that file on your new instance.

And we don't have any karma here, or restrictions for new users to post. So it's not like on Reddit where you'd need your history and score.

Well, Blender and Maya run natively on Linux. And I think Houdini is available for several platforms, too. Seems Linux is amongst them. Plus we generally have good support for Windows software these days. I'm not that much into professional software, and there might be issues with licensing and copy protection... But the Windows-only games from my Steam library for example just run on my computer these days.

Yes, Deepseek V3 is a model. But what I was trying to say, you download the file. But then what? Just having the file stored on your harddisk doesn't do much. You need to run it. That's called "inference" in machine learning/AI terms. The repository you linked, contains some example code how to do it with Huggingface's Transformer library. But there are quite some frameworks out there for running AI models. Ollama would be another one. And it's not just some example code where to start with your own Python program, but a ready-made project/framework with tools and frontends available and an interface for other software to hook into.

And generally, you need some software to actually do something. And how fast it is, depends on the software used, the hardware it's executed on. And in this case, also on the size of the AI model and its architecture. But yeah, Deepseek V3 has some tricks up it's sleeves to make it very efficient. Though, it is really big for home use. I think we're looking at a six-figure price for the hardware to run it. Usually, people use Deepseek R1 models. Or other smaller AI models if they run them themselves.