• 3 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: December 9th, 2024

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  • There are other privacy issues with having an indelible marker as to the origin and chain of custody of every digital artifact. And other non-privacy issues.

    So the idea here is that my phone camera attaches a crypro token to the metadata of every photo it takes? (Or worse, embeds it into the image steganographically like printer dots.) Then if I send that photo to a friend in signal, that app attaches a token indicating the transfer? And so on?

    If that’s a video of say, police murdering someone, maybe I don’t want a perfect trail pointing back to me just to prove I didnt deep fake it. And if that’s where we are, then every video of power being abused is going to “be fake” because no sane person would sacrifice their privacy, possibly their life, to “prove” a video isnt AI generated.

    And those in power, the mainstream media say, aren’t going to demonstrate the crypto chain of custody on every video they show on the news. They’re going to show whatever they want, then say “its legit, trust us!” and most people will.

    These are the fundamental issues with crypto that people actually don’t understand: too much of it is actually opt-in, it’s unclear to most people what’s actually proved or protected, and it doesn’t actually address or understsnd where trust, authority, and power actually come from.


  • It sounds like this guy was also relying on the AI to self-report status. Did any of this happen? Like is the replit AI really hooked up to a CLI, did it even make a DB to start with, was there anything useful in it, and did it actually delete it?

    Or is this all just a long roleplaying session where this guy pretends to run a business and the AI pretends to do employee stuff for him?

    Because 90% of this article is “I asked the AI and it said:” which is not a reliable source for information.


  • Fair cop, I didn’t check source I just saw it mentioned elsewhere. His company being valued at just over a billlion probably confused people.

    I grant that there’s a difference of degrees here, but him being “just” an unethical millionaire doesn’t substantially change my views on the situation.

    Someone in another thread mentioned polyamory which I find a personally interesting angle as well, since I practice relationship anarchy. This situation would just never happen to me because all my paramours know each other and know about the activies we do together. It makes me suspicious of these stories because while I also enjoy laughing at a rich guy getting caught, I don’t like that it culturally reinforces this idea of monogamy as a core value and that breaking the trust of such monogamy should have public consequences.

    Obviously the last thing I want is society-wide condemnation of the wrong aspect of this situation. It isnt the having a side-piece that’s the problem, it’s the lying to your primary partner (and everyone else) that actually creates the trouble.


  • Their reaction is what set it all off too. Even the singer immediately speculates that they’re having an affair because of how they acted. So yeah, even if he wasn’t a billionaire, somebody probably would have doxxed him anyway because there are tons of people that like drama and know they can make money off it. That he is a billionaire and doing something deeply unethical is what makes the story go viral all over social media. Lots and lots of people there want to make money and clout by exploiting any avenue for drama and engagement.

    Perhaps the problems this exposes are not just our grim and omnipresent surveillance apparatus, but the attached system of gig-economy content creators all racing to the lowest common denominator for scraps of engagement and ad revenue? We’ve created a society of unempathetic monsters.



  • CodexArcanum@lemmy.dbzer0.comtolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldWhich git branch are you on?
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    5 months ago

    For all the sudden word scholars here: there is no second word “master” that’s spelled, pronounced, and written exactly the same as the other one but is entirely unrelated to the concept of master\slave. All modern meanings of the word master derive from the same root: magister, meaning an authority or teacher.

    A “master recording” is the authority, the base copy from which all others are duplicated. They aren’t called “slave” copies, although the primary use of the terms in computing did originally use those 2 words. Also as someone else pointed out, you don’t even really make copies of git branches in the same way as audio so the term is misapplied.

    Main is also a bad name, unless you’re working on a solo project with only 1 main branch and some features. As soon as you start collaborating with other people, you should really have individual dev branches or “forks” (be honest, 90% of you aren’t rawdogging git straight from the CLI, there’s a forge website involved as hub) to work on, with an integration\testing “fork”\branch to combine work and a release branch for final code, with each discrete release tagged.

    No gods, no kings, no masters!



  • It’s a fair bit of work to set up, but I replaced Keep with Obsidian.

    I suppose you could just pay for obsidian sync and then basically have parity. I do not. I use syncthing to sync my notebooks (vaults in obsidian terms) between my devices.

    To get my existing notes, I used Google Takeout to get a copy of all my data, but you can just ask for the Keep data. They’ll send you a bunch of json files, which I was able to extract the text of my notes from pretty easily and copy into Obsidian notes.




  • This is a good idea, but also working remote frees up time to meet new affinity groups.

    Not to dump on people’s relaxation strategies, but even the most introverted person can’t survive on video games and gooning alone.

    If you don’t want or like hanging with coworkers, find a local bar to hang out at and meet some folks, go to a community board game night, join a choir, attend an anime viewing night, just do something to take initiative and meet some folks that like what you like.


  • I feel like its a mixed bag. Certainly there’s an infinitely higher chance of someone randomly noticing a backdoor in OSS than in closed source simply because any OSS project in use has someone looking at it. Many closed systems have dusty corners that haven’t had programmer eyes on them in years.

    But also, modern dev requires either more vigilance than most of us have to give or more trust than most of us would ideally be comfortable offering. Forget leftpad, I’ve had npm dependencies run a full python script to compile and build sub dependencies. Every time I run npm update, it could be mining a couple of bitcoins for all I know in addition to installing gigs and gigs of other people’s code.

    The whole industry had deep talks after leftpadgate about what needed to be done and ultimately, not much changed. NPM changed policy so that people couldn’t just dissapear their packages. But we didn’t come up with some better way.

    Pretty much every language has its own NPM now, the problem is more widespread than ever. With Rust, it can run arbitrary macros and rust code in the build files, it can embed C dependencies. I’m not saying it would be super easy to hide something in cargo, i haven’t tried so I don’t know, but i do think the build system is incredibly vulnerable to supply chain attacks. A dependency chain could easily pull in some backdoor native code, embed it deep into your app, and you might never realize it’s even there.





  • I doubt they’ll get anywhere with weak action like that. “Stop forcing copilot on us or we’ll be very sad and we’ll strongly consider moving some of our hosting to another site.”

    GitHub is a disaster for open source software. MS controls some insane amount of all the code created on earth, and even with self-hosted forges being more prolific and easier to access than ever, people act like their projects can’t live without Big Daddy MS’s social media for coders.

    I saw someone the other day, on Lemmy and in full seriousness, proclaim that the world really needed distributed version control. To avoid censorship, like how the fediverse is decentralized.

    This is what GitHub has done to a generation of programmers. For those missing the joke, git is already decentralized. You don’t need a central Hub of some kind for your code. You do for your issues, releases, and all that, but not for the code. And if we’d collectively moved to a well designed, intentionally improved system like Fossil, all that woukd have been decentralized and distributed too.

    But no, easier and more efficient/profitable to keep using the one C library that’s compatible with Torvald’s pile of old Perl scripts. My website can’t live without a built in Travis CI bot and nonstop PRs from dependency bot, but allowing every moron on earth to submit AI generated content, at last we’ve found the step too far.


  • Further, “Whether another user actually downloaded the content that Meta made available” through torrenting “is irrelevant,” the authors alleged. “Meta ‘reproduced’ the works as soon as it made them available to other peers.”

    A “peer” in bittorrent is someone else who is downloading the same file as you. This is opposed to a “seeder” which is also a peer but is only sending data, no longer receiving.

    You don’t have to finish the file to share it though, that’s a major part of bittorrent. Each peer shares parts of the files that they’ve partially downloaded already. So Meta didn’t need to finish and share the whole file to have technically shared some parts of copyrighted works. Unless they just had uploading completely disabled, but they still “reproduced” those works by vectorizing them into an LLM. If Gemini can reproduce a copyrighted work “from memory” then that still counts.

    Now, to be clear, fuck Meta but also fuck this argument. By the same logic, almost any computer on the internet is guilty of copyright infringement. Proxy servers, VPNs, basically any compute that routed those packets temporarily had (or still has for caches, logs, etc) copies of that protected data.

    I don’t think copyrights and open global networks are compatible concepts in the long run. I wonder which the ruling class will destroy first? (Spoilers, how “open” is the internet anymore?)