I don’t like this. Everything you’re saying is true, but this argument isn’t persuasive, it’s dehumanizing. Making people feel bad for disagreeing doesn’t convince them to stop disagreeing.

A more enlightened perspective might be “this might be true or it might not be, so I’m keeping an open mind and waiting for more evidence to arrive in the future.”

Judges can act.

These systems all have disaster recovery plans. We can’t possibly know how competent their admins are or how up to date their backups are. But it’s not our job to know this. Debating details isn’t the point, and there’s zero amount of online discussion that will make the worry and anxiety go away. Just remember there are backups and be calm.

Personally I know that media companies, who use their content to sell ads, will not protect me from this “worry and anxiety denial of service” that’s going on. They sell more ads when people doom scroll. So I have to protect myself. I want you to protect yourself as well.

I try to recognize when there are things I can’t do anything about, but that I know good people are still working to protect.

This makes me sad, that we can’t engage in civil discussion about this. Why did you assume and not ask questions? Be curious, not judgmental.

To me it’s a question of laws. The laws of the U.S. at least somewhat constrain the people of my own country, and can prevent them from working against their own citizens. Like me.

Please be kind when replying.

As a US citizen, I prefer services that US consumer protections could apply to. (While we still have them, ahem.) I know that Chinese laws will not protect me from things a Chinese business does in China.

(What’s with the rude replies? Did I fail to notice what instance I’m on or something?)

Don’t worry, you aren’t missing much. That paragraph was kind of goofy anyway.

Think of a Seedbox as a cloud service provider with convenience features focused on enabling piracy, by keeping the hardware in a jurisdiction that doesn’t care what you pirate and giving you one-click easy installation methods for apps that make piracy simple. But without going so far as “Thank you for your payment, download these specific media files here.”

You debatably have to be a techie. But by techie standards it’s very easy to use.

If you really hate piracy, I suppose you could pay for one for a month, get the identity of who you paid, and use one of the apps to host a shell script that listens on one of the few public ports you have access to, that answers every incoming connection with “this is a seed box operated by ABC, with cards payments accepted by LMNOP Inc in Athens, Greece.”

But the most common usage is running packaged software they let you run (like BT clients you can remote-control, sickchill, radarr, sonarr, Plex, etc.) or remote desktops or shells. Usually implemented as docker containers.

Scrooge McDuck is an employee of his companies too.

BBS software. Nerds always find a way. I guess if I have to be a sysop now…

I think I communicated part of this badly. My intent was to address “what is this speech?” classification, to make moderation scale better. I might have misunderstood you but I think you’re talking about a “who is speaking?” problem. That would be solved by something different.

I mentioned this in another comment, but we need to somehow move away from free form text. So here’s a super flawed makes-you-think idea to start the conversation:

Suppose you had an alternative kind of Lemmy instance where every post has to include both the post like normal and a “Simple English” summary of your own post. (Like, using only the “ten hundred most common words” Simple English) If your summary doesn’t match your text, that’s bannable. (It’s a hypothetical, just go with me on this.)

Now you have simple text you can search against, use automated moderation tools on, and run scripts against. If there’s a debate, code can follow the conversation and intervene if someone is being dishonest. If lots of users are saying the same thing, their statements can be merged to avoid duplicate effort. If someone is breaking the rules, rule enforcement can be automated.

Ok so obviously this idea as written can never work. (Though I love the idea of brand new users only being allowed to post in Simple English until they are allow-listed, to avoid spam, but that’s a different thing.) But the essence and meaning of a post can be represented in some way. Analyze things automatically with an LLM, make people diagram their sentences like English class, I don’t know.

My own “we need” list, from a dork who stood up a web server nearly 25 years ago to host weeb crap for friends on IRC:

We need a baseline security architecture recipe people can follow, to cover the huge gap in needs between “I’m running one thing for the general public and I hope it doesn’t get hacked” and “I’m running a hundred things in different VMs and containers and I don’t want to lose everything when just one of them gets hacked.”

(I’m slowly building something like this for mspencer.net but it’s difficult. I’ll happily share what I learn for others to copy, since I have no proprietary interest in it, but I kinda suck at this and someone else succeeding first is far more likely)

We need innovative ways to represent the various ideas, contributions, debates, informative replies, and everything else we share, beyond just free form text with an image. Private communities get drowned in spam and “brain resource exhaustion attacks” without it. Decompose the task of moderation into pieces that can be divided up and audited, where right now they’re all very top down.

Distributed identity management (original 90s PGP web of trust type stuff) can allow moderating users without mass-judging entire instances or network services. Users have keys and sign stuff, and those cryptographic signatures can be used to prove “you said you would honor rule X, but you broke that rule here, as attested to by these signing users.” So people or communities that care about rule X know to maybe not trust that user to follow that rule.

Apologies, I did the American thing. Checks, which get turned into X9.100 files, which are just digital versions of bags of bundles of checks, with check images that were TIFF images in CCITT T.6 encoding.

I don’t know if you’re being serious, but I can confirm from my time at as a developer at a banking software company, we didn’t use a hard RT OS even for like Mosler or Hitachi high speed check sorters. Just fast C++ code. (On Windows XP still, when I left in 2016)

(Work load is basically: batch of checks is loaded into an input hopper, along with check sized pieces of paper which are headers and footers, machine rapidly scans MICR lines and they go flying towards output pockets, and our code has something like 20 ms to receive the MICR data and pass back a sorting decision.)

I feel like objecting to the “General advice about email is don’t” thing but I don’t know if I understand the objections well enough to refute them. I self host email for mspencer.net (meaning all requests including DNS are served from hardware in my living space) and I have literally zero spam and can’t remember the last time I had to intervene on my mail server.

On one hand: My emails are received without issue by major providers (outlook, gmail, etc) and I get nearly zero spam. (Two spam senders were using legitimate email services, I reported them, and got human-seeming replies from administrators saying they would take care of it.) And I get amusing pflogsumm (summarizes postfix logs) emails daily showing like 5 emails delivered, 45 rejected, with all of the things that were tried but didn’t work.

On the other: most of the spam prevention comes from greylist, making all new senders retry after a few minutes (because generally a legit MTA will retry while a spammer will not) and that delays most emails by a few minutes. And it was a bear to set up. I used a like 18 step walkthrough on linuxbabe dot com I think, but added some difficulty by storing some use and alias databases on OpenLDAP / slapd instead of in flat files.

But hey, unlimited mail aliases, and I’m thinking of configuring things so emails bounce if they seem to contain just a notification that terms and conditions are updated somewhere. I don’t know, cause some chaos I guess.

And I have no idea if my situation is persuasive for anyone because I don’t know what the general advice means. And I worry it’ll have the unfortunate side effect of making self hosting type nerds like me start forgetting how to run their own email, causing control of email to become more centralized. And I strongly dislike that.

Yep, mspencer dot net (what little of it is currently up, I suck at ops stuff) is 2012-vintage hardware, four boxes totaling 704 GB RAM, 8x10TB SAS disks, and a still-unused LTO-3 tape drive. I’ll upgrade further when I finally figure out how to make proper use of what I already have. Until then it’s all a fancy heated cat tree, more or less.

Same. Went from radiks.net dial-up to US-West business DSL. Registered my domain at the same time, mspencer.net

I don’t know what people call this, but I’m curious if you also need future balance prediction, basically “here’s how much left over you’re going to have this payday, next payday, etc”. I might switch from my homegrown spreadsheet to one of these recommendations if they also support that.

(I’m talking about something where you input your known scheduled debits and credits, especially for people with biweekly paychecks but monthly debits, and then you match recent actual activity with what’s expected. So you get “current balance is $1800 but it’ll get as low as $300 before you get paid next” type info to keep you from over spending.)

I think image generators in general work by iteratively changing random noise and checking it with a classifier, until the resulting image has a stronger and stronger finding of “cat” or “best quality” or “realistic”.

If this classifier provides fine grained descriptive attributes, that’s a nightmare. If it just detects yes or no, that’s probably fine.

I have an iPhone and a gl.inet gl-e750 portable cell router, and my SIM card stays in the router. I don’t actually restrict my phone the way you’re talking about, but this gives me vpn to my home network without needing the vpn running on each client device. And if I wanted to block connections to big tech company services, I could do that.