Salamander

@Salamander@mander.xyz
5 Post – 100 Comments
Joined 2 years ago

Really cool! I'm excited to learn more about you and the project!

What's the format? Should we submit questions beforehand, or will you process questions that arrive at the start time? I've never participated in an AMA 😅

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My view is: I don't like this cultural element, and I am glad that I live in a country without it. But if I am a visitor from abroad I would not resist the local culture and try to impose my own values. If I am aware of this cultural element and I dislike it, my options would be to either avoid restaurants and other tipping situations as much as I can, or simply account for the tip when making my financial decisions, and pay it.

If I live in the country then it is different, because then I am more entitled to be a driver of change. Personally, my approach would be to support businesses with explicit no-tipping policy, and to refuse receiving tips myself.

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  • Password hashing occurs server-side. Even without removing the hashing step an admin can intercept the plaintext password during login. Use unique safe passwords.

  • An admin can intercept the jwt authentication cookie and use any account that lives in the instance.

  • Private messages are stored as plaintext in the database

  • Admins can see who upvotes/downvotes what

  • These are not things that are unique to Lemmy. This is common.

  • To avoid having to trust your admin, run an instance.

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If the timing is right, I would bring a mushroom grow bag with mushrooms sprouting.

If not... probably my radiacode gamma spectrometer and some of my radioactive items. Maybe a clock with radium painted dials and a piece of trinitite. I think that there are many different points of discussion that can be of interest to a broad audience (radioactivity, spectroscopy, electronics, US labor law story of the radium girls, nuclear explosions, background radiation.... etc). As a bonus I can bring a UV flash light and show the radium fluorescence. Adults love UV flash lights.

I am curious about why lemmy.ml is blocked in your country. Is the 'ml' domain generally blocked? Or was lemmy.ml specifically added to some block list?

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Full genome sequencing.

The price of sequencing continues to decrease as the technology evolves. I have already seen claims of under $1,000 for a full human genome. I haven't looked carefully into those claims, but I think we are around there. In some years full genomes will be so cheap to sequence that it will be routine. I want to buy one of those small Oxford Nanopore MinION sequencers in the future. I'll use it like a pokedex.

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Cool. Thank you for doing this!

Search engines like google aggregate data from multiple sites. I may want to download a datasheet for an electronic component, find an answer to a technical question, find a language learning course site, or look for museums in my area.

Usually I make specific searches with very specific conditions, so I tend to get few and relevant results. I think search engines have their place.

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First of all, congratulations for bringing a baby girl into this world!! You must be really excited! I am very happy for you!

This looks very cool. I set up a wiki (https://ibis.mander.xyz/) and I will make an effort to populate it with some Lemmy lore and interesting science/tech 😄 Hopefully I can set some time aside and help with a tiny bit of code too.

“Reddit represents one of the largest data sets of just human beings talking about interesting things,” Huffman said. “We are not in the business of giving that away for free.”

🤮

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I can tell you one benefit: Money. Most of my server's costs come from storing federated content. Federating with threads would likely be expensive.

I have just tested by uploading/re-downloading an image, and the EXIF data is removed.

I then looked through the Lemmy issues and found this issue related to the image-uploading back-end (pict-rs) removing the EXIF data. In response to this issue, the developer of pict-res (asonix) comments that striping the EXIF data was one of the original motivations for building the uploader.

I am not sure about how to search through the source code of pict-rs, and it seems like this step is not properly documented in the readme file, so I have not been able to find exactly where the metadata removal operation takes place. I think that this is done by invoking 'exiftool'.

You can set up a personalized RSS feed with Feeder. It will take a bit of effort to set up, but you can create a feed that is very well tailored to your interests. You can get news feeds but also subscribe to other kinds of content, like scientific publications and financial statements.

It looks like that specific community has not been fetched yet.

Try searching for: !hardcore@lemmy.ml

This should fetch the community.

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Upgraded! No issues.

Again, thank you for your amazing work!! :D

Thank you!!! Very happy about the moderation tools!

There is a problem opening community pages. I checked and the bug was introduced with this version.

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I think that you can add captions to images, like this:

![image caption](image url)

I wonder whether these tools would identify and read out the caption.

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  • The comment thread began with a user in lemmy.world, and the instance was defederated from beehaw, so that comment and sub-comments were not fetched
  • The 'comment ID' is not shared by different instances, so each instance will assign every comment its own ID.
  • If you want to fetch the comment from a third instance, you would need to click the colorful 'fedisymbol' to get the original link, which is the one from the instance that the original user lives in.

My girlfriend kept complaining about losing her hearts on Duolingo and I was very confused as I never had any "hearts" during regular lessons. Eventually I found out that since I had created a classroom while exploring the site, I was given access to a teacher version of Duolingo - which is basically a free premium version 😅

Thank you for the positivity 💚 I wholeheartedly agree!

Drama and negativity drives engagement, and this form of engagement can easily trigger a feedback loop in which negativity keeps piling on and voices of support are practically muted.

We are participating in an open source project that has some very ambitious goals. Things can be messy, mistakes happen, there are risks, and people have many different opinions and moods. Heated discussions can be a healthy part of the process. But, once the dust is allowed to settle for a bit, it is good to remember that we are humans and that we are here because we have some shared goals.

I think the majority of people around here are kind and have a positive outlook, but perhaps it is more motivating to speak out when we have negative comments than positive ones. So, thank you for taking the time to write this positive message!

🥳 Muchas gracias!

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My personal favorite:

For example I can go up to someone and insult them for all sorts of things - “you’re an ugly stupid worthless piece of trash” and that’s ok but I say “you’re a dirty [racial slur]” all of a sudden it’s different?

If it makes you feel any better, telling someone "you’re an ugly stupid worthless piece of trash" would get you banned from my instance too, so it is not so different.

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Considering the context in which I'm encountering the term "UAP", and the Wiki page I get to if I look up "unidentified aerial phenomena", I worry their mission to get away from the automatic link to extraterrestrials may not be very successful!

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Thank you for your hard work!!

I appreciate that you going through this test period. I hope it all goes smoothly and that at least a few hairs remain on your heads by the end of this week. Good luck!

I have been running an instance without a slur filter for about a year and a half. It is not a big instance, but big enough to have some experience in the field.

In case you are curious, 100% of the many times that I have encountered the n-word in my instance it has been in the context of a very banable offense, and it often requires spending some effort investigating and purging images from the database. The slur filter would block many these federated posts and comments from reaching my instance without the troll/spammer getting any feedback about this.

The filter can be a useful practical tool. The reason I keep it off is because I'm stubborn about not policing the words that people can and can't say. But when I consider what I have experienced and reflect about this, I become more and more skeptical about my choice. The problem is still manageable for my small instance, so I can keep the slur filter off. But I can see that when dealing with this problem at a much larger scale one would want to use any tool at their disposal to make the job easier.

Thank you for making this open source!

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I did not know of the term "open washing" before reading this article. Unfortunately it does seem like the pending EU legislation on AI has created a strong incentive for companies to do their best to dilute the term and benefit from the regulations.

There are some paragraphs in the article that illustrate the point nicely:

In 2024, the AI landscape will be shaken up by the EU's AI Act, the world's first comprehensive AI law, with a projected impact on science and society comparable to GDPR. Fostering open source driven innovation is one of the aims of this legislation. This means it will be putting legal weight on the term “open source”, creating only stronger incentives for lobbying operations driven by corporate interests to water down its definition.

[.....] Under the latest version of the Act, providers of AI models “under a free and open licence” are exempted from the requirement to “draw up and keep up-to-date the technical documentation of the model, including its training and testing process and the results of its evaluation, which shall contain, at a minimum, the elements set out in Annex IXa” (Article 52c:1a). Instead, they would face a much vaguer requirement to “draw up and make publicly available a sufficiently detailed summary about the content used for training of the general-purpose AI model according to a template provided by the AI Office” (Article 52c:1d).

If this exemption or one like it stays in place, it will have two important effects: (i) attaining open source status becomes highly attractive to any generative AI provider, as it provides a way to escape some of the most onerous requirements of technical documentation and the attendant scientific and legal scrutiny; (ii) an as-yet unspecified template (and the AI Office managing it) will become the focus of intense lobbying efforts from multiple stakeholders (e.g., [12]). Figuring out what constitutes a “sufficiently detailed summary” will literally become a million dollar question.

Thank you for pointing out Grayjay, I had not heard of it. I will look into it.

You are awesome! Thanks :D I hope you get to relax this weekend!!

Dragonfruit lemonade (agua de pitahaya) is delicious!

You can create a one-person instance and hold your identity there.

If you what you want is for every server to hold your identity, you have to trust all servers. I think that an evil admin would be able to impersonate any user from any instance if that were the case. How do you delete your account? Can an any admin delete your account everywhere? Which one is the real "you"?

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Works flawlessly now :D Thank you again for your hard work!!

That's awesome! Thanks for sharing

234 posts, 1.12K comments in about 2 and a half years with this account ^_^ So slow and steady, haha. 1,000 in a month is impressive!

Awesome job! Thanks again! Upgraded without issue 🤘🏼

Hmm, interesting. I don't know how to interpret that. Thanks!

I would think that they need to set a somewhat permissive threshold to avoid too many false positives due to people sharing a network. For example, a professor may share a reddit post in a class with 600 students with their laptops connected to the same WiFi. Or several people sharing an airport's WiFi could be looking at /r/all and upvoting the top posts.

I think 8 accounts liking the same post every few days wouldn't be enough to trigger an alarm. But maybe it is, I haven't tried this.

Yes, sorry, there was some serious lagg in fetching posts from Lemmy World that persisted for several days and accumulated a 1-week delay.

But after upgrading Mander it is now fetching data from LW quite rapidly and it should be back in-sync in about a day and a half from now.

If you are curious about the ranking algorithm, there is some info here: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/contributors/07-ranking-algo.html

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You are a crawling microchip that possesses animals with cool abilities

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Exactly. I really enjoyed posting on reddit, but the idea that they see our comments as a trove of data to monetize at the expense of the community that created it really makes me never want to contribute again. Too bad I made the mistake of not deleting all of my comments or replacing them with junk when deleting my account :/

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