Giver of skulls

Verified icon

  • 0 Posts
  • 834 Comments
Joined 101 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 6th, 1923

help-circle

  • ActivityPub is actually a good way to authenticate things. If an organization vouches for something they can post it on their server and it can be viewed elsewhere.

    AP has some pretty big issues when it comes to moving servers, expiring and re-purchased domain names, and other such edge cases. Servers either blindly accept new keys after a certain time, or are vulnerable to enabling key ransoming after hacks (the reason HKPK went nowhere).


  • We could just move to a “watermark” system where everyone takes credit for their contributions.

    North Korea actually has this embedded in their government Linux distro and it works well as long as everyone who opens the file runs a supported OS. Not for AI, but to track who wrote what unpleasant documents, but still, it proves the idea can work.

    On the other hand, how do you determine trust? I can generate a million plausible names and digital addresses on my computer. Half the images I see online are screenshots or screen recordings already (because “save as” isn’t available on “modern” websites).

    In theory, we can solve this by simply having digital stuff be signed, but setting up a web of trust will be difficult. Especially since most of the internet is semi-anonymous.

    Funnily enough, the Fediverse already signs most data, so this scheme is already active unintentionally here on Lemmy! But for all I know, you’re not really “Kevon Looney” and just a fake from another server.



  • Because you can’t just boolean search the entirety of the web the same way you do a local database. You’re not getting all results every time you search, that’d be insanely inefficient, so doing full filters like with boolean database search won’t work.

    That said, based on my experience with Google, negations work just fine, as do double quotes. Last time I checked NEAR even worked pretty well. AND is implied, OR used to work but is probably derived from the rest of the query these days.

    People hate it when their query doesn’t return anything. So, whenever you search for something and get very little results, search engines will relax their boundaries to find something that may answer your query.

    Search engines in the early 00s had them because they required very specific phrase matches and the experience was horrible. You either got millions or results that didn’t relate to what you were searching for or you got none and had to start over.

    At some point, search engines started interpreting what you mean instead of what you type. For most people, searching for “rain” and getting results about “precipitation” is exactly what they want. Using the 90s/00s search term syntax, you’d need to type “~rain” to also get synonyms, which is obviously a terrible user experience that serves only the most pedantic people.





  • I think the people complaining about this stuff fall into several categories. One of them is depicted well by that GIF. A second group is just upset about environmental regulations existing. There’s probably a third group out there with some kind of hypersensitivity for things touching their face. And maybe a fourth group who hates it when things change even if there are good reasons for it (can relate, was diagnosed as autistic).

    I feel bad for the people with hypersensitivities but the rest should just suck it up already. Maybe some bamboo or metal straws can help these folks get used to the new bottles? They’re available online for cheap.


  • There’s a good reason why many carbonated drinks stopped being sold in glass bottles. When you go over a certain volume, they become bombs. There are videos online or 2L soda bottles falling over and sending shards of glass flying everywhere. I’d rather not have that back.

    Glass bottles are also great at starting fires when they’re left outside by trashy people. Looking at how often I still find plastic trash in the woods, I’m not sure if switching to glass would make that much of an improvement.

    Plus, you’d still have the same problem with the bottle cap.


  • The later seasons let go of some of the Burnham stuff and let characters like Adira have their own plots. I believe Paul and Hugh also had a few arcs though I never got into them myself.

    I just didn’t like early Burnham as a character. I didn’t like most of Sisko either. That doesn’t make a show bad, necessarily, but I felt like Discovery didn’t offer a whole lot of B plot/secondary characters to compensate. Without secondary perspectives to offset Sisko’s heavy moral/philosophical arc, I probably would’ve hated DS9 as well.

    In the later seasons, Burnham became more nuanced by having Book as a sidekick, as well as fleshing out the crew a lot more. They were no longer hurdles in the way of Burnhams’s self redemption arc/current goal in life.

    TNG also had their terrible episodes, but there were just a lot more of them. Season 1 of TNG got 26/22/26/26/26/26/26 episodes versus Discovery’s 15/14/13/13/10. There was also no single overarching plot, so Picard could play a flute and live the life of an alien for a whole episode without derailing any story plans. The “monster of the week” approach also helped inspire some real good moral and philosophical debate that would otherwise never would’ve been written into a single story, but also some of the most cringeworthy TV I’ve seen.

    Somewhere in the middle of DS9 and Voyager, Star Trek started aiming towards broader plot lines. At first they were multiple seasons long (though some of them had to be smuggled past Berman), but with Enterprise they became per-season. This makes it very difficult to compare old and new Trek, or even early and late seasons of the same show, because the dynamic changed.







  • Votes federate, but only for communities followed. I won’t see your votes in a community that I don’t follow, but I can see when you upvoted or downvoted what post in the community.

    A scraper could simply follow every community on a Lemmy server and, barring Lemmy performance issues, will receive all comments and votes.

    Just a quick and dirty SQL query of which votes of yours are in my server’s database:

    select comment_like.score as score,comment_like.published as when, person.actor_id as who, comment.ap_id as what from comment_like join person on person.id = comment_like.person_id join comment on comment.id = comment_like.comment_id where person.actor_id = 'https://lemmy.ml/u/GolfNovemberUniform' order by comment_like.published desc; 
    

    The same info is also available for posts, of course, I just didn’t want to bother making the query any longer.

    Server admins/mods on Lemmy also have a button to see who upvoted and downvoted each post. This is just the inverse of that.