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Zak

@Zak@lemmy.world

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A social app for creatives, Cara grew from 40k to 650k users in a week because artists are fed up with Meta’s AI policies | TechCrunch (techcrunch.com)

Artists have finally had enough with Meta’s predatory AI policies, but Meta’s loss is Cara’s gain. An artist-run, anti-AI social platform, Cara has grown from 40,000 to 650,000 users within the last week, catapulting it to the top of the App Store charts....

Zak,
@Zak@lemmy.world avatar

Libre means free as in freedom rather than free as in cost. A service that costs money to use, but communicates using open protocols, gives you full control over your data, and allows you to easily migrate to competitors and self-hosted solutions might be described as “libre”.

Zak,
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They’re using loaded language to say that without access to the source code and the ability to modify it, Cara could start behaving in a way you don’t like and you wouldn’t be able to do anything about it.

Zak,
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I think it would be great for new social things like this to just speak ActivityPub. They can build up their own user experience and culture while joining a larger network. I don’t have a problem with the software itself being non-free if the protocols are and they commit to supporting account migration.

Zak,
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ActivityPub supports alsoKnownAs and movedTo so that users can migrate their social graphs to a different server or software. Of course that doesn’t work for migrating from networks that don’t support ActivityPub.

Content import is a separate issue, but I can imagine it being helpful as well.

Zak,
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And the losing server has to cooperate, which is why I mentioned the commitment to support migrating away.

ATProto/Bluesky has some interesting ideas, and I’m interested to see how that develops as third parties start supporting the protocol. For a new service launching now, I think ActivityPub is the more important protocol to support, but it’s presumably possible to support both.

Zak,
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I would LOVE feedback from folks if you get a chance to try it out!

I have feedback completely unrelated to the recommendation engine: please consider using CSS prefers-color-scheme instead of defaulting to light mode.

Zak,
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Privacy can mean different things in different contexts.

Some peoples’ thoughts go first to sharing content with a restricted audience. ActivityPub isn’t good at that since the admins of every server involved can access the content. That’s also true of centralized social media, though sometimes the admins of those services seem farther removed from users’ social lives. E2EE chat like Matrix and Signal are good options for that use case, and there has been work on adding E2EE options to some ActivityPub software.

I usually treat social media as public, so I’m not concerned with restricting access to things I share that way. I am, however concerned about service providers monitoring behavior like how long I spend looking at a particular post, or trying to track my browsing habits on third-party websites. Fediverse projects do not normally include those kinds of behaviors, and it would be scandalous if a service provider added them.

Zak,
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I block ads pretty aggressively, and I find it surprising anyone else can tolerate the modern internet without doing so.

Zak,
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Andrew Cuomo has not been convicted of a crime, so he cannot be sentenced to prison.

Zak,
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Whatever you pick, please be thoughtful about your use of captchas and try to avoid subjecting people to them frequently.

Does the USA have any open market cellular options that are legitimate pay-as-you-go and only for what you use options like Europe yet?

I’ve lived under a rock for 10 years. I did Metro ages ago while most were still on contracts. Surely we’ve reached true capitalist open market freedom by now. Is it still total closed market, noncompetitive, privateering corruption?

Zak,
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People in Europe switched to internet based messaging (mostly WhatsApp) as soon as smartphones got popular enough.

Zak, (edited )
@Zak@lemmy.world avatar

If you’re signed in to a Google account on an Android device with Google Play Services installed, a VPN will not hide your location from Google because the device has several ways to determine your location other than your IP address. You might be able to disable Google’s location services permissions on the device, and if you’re just going for a casual privacy upgrade, that should give you one.

If you really don’t want Google knowing where you are, you probably can’t use a phone with Google Play Services on it, as it integrates itself fairly deeply into the OS and can’t necessarily be trusted to follow the permissions model in the future, even if it can be shown to do so today. Avoiding that means installing a third-party Android build on your phone. Note that a lot of third-party apps rely on Google services, and while an open source substitute exists, it’s not always a smooth experience.

Zak,
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The public should not care what Kyle Rittenhouse thinks and we should not amplify a stupid thing he said.

Zak,
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I looked over the metrics in the article and none of them approximate what percentage of Americans are struggling to pay their bills. That number probably closely approximates the percentage who think the economy isn’t doing well. This is a different situation from people wrongly believing crime rates are high.

Zak, (edited )
@Zak@lemmy.world avatar

This review actually tested the laser’s output and found it to be 2mW, which should be fine for pets if you’re not pointing it directly into their eyes (which I assume you wouldn’t).

My one concern is that green lasers are actually diode pumped solid state lasers which produce green light by frequency-doubling infrared, and some designs can actually emit much more infrared than green. I’m not sure if the author tested for infrared.

Edit: I asked the author about IR and they got 2.1mW@1064nm, with the caveat that the laser power meter may not be very precise at low power levels. That’s probably not dangerous.

Zak,
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One of the things that makes IR dangerous is that there’s no blink reflex, but that’s a problem when it’s IR-only, or the IR is much more powerful than the visible light. There have been cases of green lasers where the IR significantly exceeds the visible light and the advertised power level, but that’s not what was measured here.

The total power is under 5mW, which is low-risk even with a brief, accidental direct eye exposure.

Zak,
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Instant message apps just got replaced with Whatsapp, Signal, etc.

Alternately, Whatsapp, Signal, etc… are instant message apps. I’m a little surprised none of the messaging apps that had been popular on PCs managed to stay popular on mobile.

Zak, (edited )
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People are still using that shit because other people they want to interact with are still using that shit. Network effects are hard to break.

I occasionally use it to complain at corporations, mostly when their websites show me captchas but occasionally for other customer service issues.

Do we need to create increasingly more children for a stable economy?

So in the whole anti-natalism/pro-natalism conversation (which I’m mostly agnostic/undecided on, currently), my friend who is a pro-natalist, argued that the success/stability of our world economy is dependent on procreating more children each year than the previous year, so that we not only replace the numbers of the people...

Zak, (edited )
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more and more human labor to “pay back the debts” of previous generations

There is no law of economics stating that a generation of people has to consume more than it produces.

Zak,
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Even if somebody wanted to make an unmoderated ATProto app, I guess they could? Good luck with the app stores and regulators and users

ActivityPub provides the option to do just that. Anybody can spin up a server running Mastodon, Lemmy, Pleroma, etc… and moderate it however they like. There are a multitude of clients in app stores and an unmoderated server won’t affect that because they’re generic clients like web browsers. There are countries such a server could be hosted in with minimal regulations.

As for users… you’ll probably get some and they’ll probably be horrible. Most people will probably block your server.

Zak,
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It seems like there are some good ideas in there. Are there third parties out there running servers for each component that are open to the public yet?

Zak,
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Yes, a code-oriented one meant to be very fast and responsive. It’s pre-alpha on Linux but compiles without any fuss for me. I haven’t spent much time with it, but the only bug I’ve seen so far is an uncommanded theme change when switching between files.

Zak,
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Can we do Emacs vs. Vi next?

Zak,
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I think it’s a small, but very loud minority who have unrealistic expectations about how other people will use data they share in a manner that’s inherently rather public. I kind of see where they’re coming from, but ActivityPub with open federation doesn’t work that way.

Zak,
@Zak@lemmy.world avatar

There are two general areas:

  • The history of the internet is full of examples of companies taking data about or creative output from people and trying to make money from it without permission, in ways the original creator might not like. Nobody has gone there with a Fediverse scraper or search project that we know of yet, but it’s going to happen if the Fediverse gets big enough.
  • Some people want to be able to easily share things with a certain audience without them being easily discoverable by a different audience. There are of course privacy settings to control visibility and software like Matrix that provides not only access control by cryptographic security, but those add friction. It’s only possible for this group to have it both ways if nobody develops good search tools, which turns some of them into bullies.
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