rufus @ rufus @discuss.tchncs.de

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2 yr. ago

Leaf blower? Vacuum? Pay someone $20 to get rid of them so you don't have to do it?

Hmm, the adventure of surfing the web? That forums and such were filled with nerds and quality advice. And the lack of monetization.

I remember (illegally) downloading lots of music, trying webbrowsers and them being super slow on my machine and of course pictures would load even slower. Alter (I think after the 90s were over) discovering Linux, reading forums and everyone was helping each other out. Or discussing detailed things and niche interests. And it had a distinct culture. A suggested/mandatory way of writing and replying so things would be organized and easy to follow.

I think most of the media coverage is hype. That doesn't directly answer your question... But I take everything I read with a grain of salt.

Currently, for the tech industry, it's main use is to generate hype and drive the speculation bubble. Whether it's useful or not, slapping the word "AI" on things and offering AI services increases the value of your company. And I personally think if they complain about this, it's they want the bubble even bigger, but they already did the most obvious things. But that has nothing to do with "find use" in the traditional sense (for the thing itself.)

And other inventions came with hype. Like smartphones (the iPhone.) Everyone wanted one. Lots of people wanted to make cash with that. But still, if it's super new, it's not always obvious at what tasks it excels and what the main benefits are in the long term. At first everyone wants in just because it's cool and everyone else has one. In the end it turned out not every product is better with an App (or Bluetooth). And neither a phone, nor AI can (currently) do the laundry and the other chores. So there is a limit in "use" anyways.

So I think the answer to your question: what did they have in mind... is: What else can we enhance with AI or just slap the words on to make people buy more. And to be cool in the eyes of our investors.

I think one of the next steps is the combination with robotics. That will make it quite more useful. Like input from sensors so AI can take part in the real world, not just the virtual one. But that's going to take some time. We've already started, but it won't happen over night. And for the close future i think it's gonna be gradual increase. AI just needs to get more intelligent, make less errors, be more affordable to run. That's going to be a gradual increase and provide me with a better translation service on my phone, a smart-home that i can interact with better, an assistant that can clean up the mess with all the files on my computer, organize my picture folder... But the revolution already happened. I think it's going to be constant, but smaller steps/ progress from now on.

I'm pretty sure he did this out of this own motivation because he thinks/thought it's a fascinating topic. So, sure this doesn't align with popularity. But it's remarkable anyways, you're right. And I always like to watch the progression. As far as I remember the early videos lacked professional audio and video standards that are nowadays the norm on Youtube. At some point he must have bought better equipment, but his content has been compelling since the start of his Youtube 'career'. 😊

And I quite like the science content on Youtube. There are lots of people making really good videos, both from professional video producers and also from scientists (or hobbyists) who just share their insight and interesting perspective.

And maybe have a look at his Youtube channel and the older videos, too. Lots of them are a bit more philosophical and not too technical for the average person. I think he's quite inspiring and conveys very well what AI safety is about, and what kinds of problems that field of science is concerned with.

Pics or it didn't happen.

(Seriously, I'd like to see the source of this story. Googling "Tim the pencil" doesn't bring up anything related.)

I think the correct way to handle this is to include a bad-bot blocker in your webserver. There are plenty scripts and addons available for the common software stacks. Is fairly easy to set up and comes with far less side-effects.

There are also local and privacy-respecting Web Application Firewalls like ModSecurity, Janusec, Vulture Project (I haven't yet tested them) which could maybe do the same thing.

We're all subject to these crawlers, bots and vulnerability scanners. I also run 3 small websites including mail and a few other services. I rarely block some bot that downloads images over and over again. And fail2ban blocks a lot of brute-forcing attempts. Other than that, the traffic they cause isn't that much compared to a single other service like Matrix chat or some Fediverse software that causes lots of HTTP requests all day long. It runs without Cloudflare or other third-party services for years on my slow home internet connection. Back then even on a single board computer (like the Raspberry Pi.)

So my experience is a bit different. And that I can run 3 websites on a RasPi on a 15MBit connection just fine and other people need Cloudflare for a 1000MBit VPS makes me think it's snake-oil. But yeah, I agree if you block the bots, they stop after some time. That's also my experience. But the traffic isn't that much in the first place and there are better ways to do it in my opinion.

Hmmh, I'd like to - at some point - speak to an admin who has been targeted by a DDoS attack. I know it happened to one Lemmy instance. What I've seen as an admin were some attempts that weren't that bad for us, and that was years ago. It didn't even really stop the service, just cause lots of load on the webserver and made the website open a bit slower than usual. And it was over after a few hours and never happened again. My other servers and websites have never been targeted.

And I wonder if for example the Lemmy instances who use Cloudflare, pay them $240 a year. Because as I read, Cloudflare free ceases service if there is an ongoing DDoS attack.

I think it's mostly Live-Streamers and somewhat high-profile and controversial webservers who get targeted. Like the biggest Lemmy instances. Or if you're successful at messing with the Russian internet trolls. Or play a game in a live stream and your fans like to seriously mess with you, like pay for a virtual attack or swat you. Other than that, I believe 99.9% of people who run internet services will never experience such an attack. And it wouldn't really harm them if their service went down for some time.

Another question would be: What to do with the head now that it's been that way for hundreds of years? Burn it? Bury it? Would any of that help and align with what the person who originally 'owned' that head wanted?

Read a good book on the subject (or two). In my experience that's way better information and more comprehensive than gathering info on the internet.

And I'd agree, start small. Practice first and raise the bar as you learn.

With the equipment, that's indeed a bit difficult. You'd need to learn the specifics and how to decide, or ask someone in the shop and hope they tell you the truth, or join a group or have friends who can help. You can buy cheap stuff and learn with that. But you're bound to buy things twice that way. But the more professional equipment is all specialized stuff. You'd have a different sleeping bag depending on season plus extras like if it needs to repell water and what makes you comfortable. And there are a lot of tents. Some are lightweight so you can carry them on your backpack, some are larger and you can sit inside and cook during a rainstorm, some can withstand storm and lots of rain. Lots of requirements are mutually exclusive. And it can get really expensive anyways, so you have to decide. And with backpacks: I'd go to a store and try a few, it needs to be large enough to fit your stuff but it also needs to fit you.

About water supplies etc you can read in a book. And you should have a try with a cooker and food at home (probably outside). It's easy to forget salt/margarine/a spatula or a suitable bowl for soup if it's your first try. Or misjudge how much fuel to carry for the cooker. Or what kind of (dry) food is lightweight, tasty and fills your stomach after a tiring day in the woods. I mean you should test your equipment anyways, maybe for a weekend first, maybe in proximity of your home or on a camp site. And see what's missing before walking into the wilderness.

And you should also read about how to care for the environment, what kind of soap and toothpaste to use, how to poop...

Also don't buy too much unnecessary stuff. I'd say it's not always obvious what kind of equipment is super handy and which is just dead weight. And not everyone needs the super expensive tent or cooker that can burn almost everything...

Mostly breaking it. They're centralizing stuff and nowadays lots of services depend on that single service provider. And the original idea of the internet was to make everyone equal and have some resilience against single points of failure. That's kind of detrimental to the whole idea.

Secondly, you unencrypt your traffic and send it to them plain so they can read everything. That may or may not be an issue for your use-case, but I like privacy and encryption and no third parties reading my messages.

And the question is: What do you need their service for? I understand that a tunnel is useful if you're behind a NAT. But the DDoS protection and attack prevention is mostly snake-oil for most people. It's often unnecessary, the free tier doesn't include any of the interesting stuff and it's questionable if most people get targeted by DDoS attacks anyways. And as I heard if it comes to that point, they will cease service to you anyways and want to see money ($240 to $2.400 per year.) So I don't see a good reason why you'd use Cloudflare in the first place. Unless you need a tunnel or subscribe to one of the more expensive plans. Otherwise it only has downsides.

I'd agree with the recommendation of Lutris and Bottles. Just install the two and see what you like and which works best. I've heard Lutris is pretty good. And both tools handle most of the underlying stuff for you, like managing Wine and Proton.

There are quite some guides/tutorials/youtube videos on how to use them.

Those who understand binary and those who don't?

Sure. Then just try both, see where you get the most use out of, and focus on that?

What's your goal?

Because campaigning works differently across the globe. So does media coverage and politics and how the different parts of legislative share competence/responsibility.

I'd say you need to follow local news and what happened in the last years to make an informed decision. See which party/politicians built children's playgrounds, did something useful for the community and which major tore down the shops in the city center to make space for more lucrative office buildings... It's really difficult to tell if you don't know what's happening around you but just following world politics. (And local newspapers are long gone, so that's another hurdle.) Where I live they have some scarce information online. And you can also go to them once they go campaigning and listen to them or read some advertising material.

A big part of my decision is the party they're part of. At least when I never read their names before. I'm also not affiliated with one specific party, but I certainly know if I'm conservative, religious or progressive and whether I care for the environment and other people. So I can base my decisions on that and whether their party cares for the things I deem important.

I don't remember that many political arguments. At least not this way conservative<->progressive. I remember them mostly from the comment section of news articles and YouTube videos (since YT has been a thing) and of course Twitter. But less so from dedicated discussion places like forums and such. But my perspective is probably skewed. I wasn't really part of early Reddit. And I'm not American and we have/had different discussions here. Well... Maybe I wasn't that interested in political discussions on the internet when I was young(er). But the places I used to frequent were more focused on specific topics, technology and not about ideology (apart from free software ideology.)

But trolling, flaming, baiting etc has been part of internet culture for a long time. I don't remember how they called brigading before Reddit. I think that is a term I learned in the last few years.

feddit.de is broken as of now. You can't upload images here. Sign up at discuss.tchncs.de (for example. That server works.)

Mirroring works best if you monkey them. Just repeat the exact words just like in an ape voice. A little pantomime helps, too.

Go Ahead. I'm still struggling to find the time to learn Rust. I read the first few chapters of the book, but I'm a bit stuck due to too many side-projects. 😆

With Lemmy, I'd advise you to ask first. Lots of open-source projects gladly accept merge requests... But I think the Lemmy developers/community is a bit different. As far as I know a few people have been burned because they put in days of work and their requests didn't get accepted. That shouldn't stop you, I'd just say ask the devs first so you don't waste your time.