Copyright DMCA filings never went to the mods. Those are legal requests and not handling properly can be a nightmare complete with lawyers.
Those requests went via https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/requests/new - no volunteer mods or API requests involved.
You can decouple it by looking to include people who have a broader range of political ideals rather than hiring people further and further to the extremes.
We’re here, we’ve made peace with that the original authors of the project created it because they wanted to have some place where they wouldn’t/couldn’t get kicked off for their political views. That’s fine.
However, as they’re seeing donations from the public and they’re looking to hire people, and the candidates are further to the extremes - that makes this more of a political project than not.
Yes, we can ask our server admins to defederate from those instances… but as long as a criteria for getting paid with the money that Lemmy gets as donations or grants is that you have anti-western views then it is a political project first.
I wanna be able to talk with cats
and (worship) octopuses
Give Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky (and its sequels) a read. Spiders, octopi, and… other.
When people make their professional (developer contributing to FOSS software) and their personal identity the same - especially when there are a limited number of people as representatives of the project or organization the personal views run the risk of causing issues for the professional organization.
This was seen before when Richard Stallman’s less than savory views on some current events of the time came to light and the blowback on FSF.
Having the two original developers be pro China at the time, with funding from NLNet is one thing… but to be actively seeking donations and looking to get enough funding that they can hire more developers - and that may include this individual… that runs the risk of bringing more politics into the core group. That in turn runs the risk of having this be “we’re looking for donations to pay these people.”
We’ve seen it in other companies - where someone on social media representing the company says something “off” and gets fired.
The only way for a financial contributions to “fire” a core group contributor is to withhold funding from the project.
I’ll say it quite frankly - I do not want one iota of any donations that I make to go to this individual.
Some time back there was an attack on Lemmy where (if I recall correctly) HTML embedded in emoji allowed tokens of users viewing the emoji to get stolen… which included administrators auth tokens. There was much havoc wrecked that evening.
The mitigation for this was “all HTML entities are escaped”. Doesn’t matter where they are - they’re escaped. This sometimes leads to them being doubly escaped when rendering. Less than, ampersand, and greater than all get doubly escaped ( > & < ).
… And that gets interesting as I can’t quite tickle that issue.
If the appearance of some social media is “there is reasonable discussion but as soon as something shows up that’s awful, discussion stops there, but it remains up for all to see” - that’s going to have difficulty brining in new people.
Instance blocking but still giving the appearance of condoning the content is going to lead to what appears to be toxic spaces to everyone who hasn’t taken the time to carefully cultivate their block lists.
Ignoring and personally blocking users and instances means that admins and moderators won’t have as good of a view of the health of the communities when everything ends with a troll comment that no one but new users see.
Jetbrains? Good choice.
They’ve recently released a Rust specific IDE - https://www.jetbrains.com/rust/
https://www.rainn.org/news/what-child-sexual-abuse-material-csam
While the term child pornography is still widely used by the public, it’s more accurate to call it what it is: evidence of child sexual abuse. That’s why RAINN and others have stopped using the term child pornography and switched to referring to it as CSAM — child sexual abuse materials.
While some of the pornography online depicts adults who have consented to be filmed, that’s never the case when the images depict children. Just as kids can’t legally consent to sex, they can’t consent to having images of their abuse recorded and distributed. Every explicit photo or video of a kid is actually evidence that the child has been a victim of sexual abuse.
Python isn’t a language I am deeply familiar with.
I am more interested in Lemmy growing on its own, in a different direction than reddit - rather than trying to copy reddit and its features (and problems).
This looks like it is going to run smack into TOS problems. You can claim that its going to be playing whackamole with instances, if it is sufficiently problematic then lawyers can get involved.
Creating these copies of reddit content makes Lemmy look like a ghost town. Copying content from people who didn’t consent to having their content pushed onto the Fediverse and federated across multiple instances (how would you handle a GDPR request?) leads to other problems.
I’m not worried at all about the implementation. I believe that its goal and means are flawed and counterproductive to the growth of the Fediverse as its own thing and contribute to making Lemmy hollow budding of Reddit.
People point to early Reddit and say “see all the bots and fake accounts that were created early on? That’s a bad thing - we’re better than that.” (How Reddit Got Huge: Tons of Fake Accounts)
This project is copying a reddit in content and culture.
If 90 accounts over the course of 15 minutes comment on a post in Lemmy, how many notifications would be sent to the person on Reddit? How frequently? Does it honor the reddit feature of unselecting “notify me about followup comments?”
This is why the next part of the work is to build a bridge to send notifications to the people on reddit.
You do realize how fast this would be used to spam users on Reddit and then how absurdly quickly it would result in the API keys getting restricted?
You want someone else to pay for the disk space and network availability for your videos?
https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks
All programming teams are constructed by and of crazy people
Imagine joining an engineering team. You’re excited and full of ideas, probably just out of school and a world of clean, beautiful designs, awe-inspiring in their aesthetic unity of purpose, economy, and strength. You start by meeting Mary, project leader for a bridge in a major metropolitan area. Mary introduces you to Fred, after you get through the fifteen security checks installed by Dave because Dave had his sweater stolen off his desk once and Never Again. Fred only works with wood, so you ask why he’s involved because this bridge is supposed to allow rush-hour traffic full of cars full of mortal humans to cross a 200-foot drop over rapids. Don’t worry, says Mary, Fred’s going to handle the walkways. What walkways? Well Fred made a good case for walkways and they’re going to add to the bridge’s appeal. Of course, they’ll have to be built without railings, because there’s a strict no railings rule enforced by Phil, who’s not an engineer. Nobody’s sure what Phil does, but it’s definitely full of synergy and has to do with upper management, whom none of the engineers want to deal with so they just let Phil do what he wants. Sara, meanwhile, has found several hemorrhaging-edge paving techniques, and worked them all into the bridge design, so you’ll have to build around each one as the bridge progresses, since each one means different underlying support and safety concerns. Tom and Harry have been working together for years, but have an ongoing feud over whether to use metric or imperial measurements, and it’s become a case of “whoever got to that part of the design first.”
APL and J have made there appearance in here with their awkward syntax and have the advantage of being practical languages in actual use.
Esolanguages are often things that are designed to be difficult in some way, shape, or form. Brainfuck is awkward, but it’s the source of some interesting problems that are only practical because it is such a simple language.
The thing is, once you get your head around it, it isn’t too bad of a language.
I was introduced to FRACTRAN (wiki) in Project Euler - https://projecteuler.net/problem=308
That one… still is beautiful and confusing. It’s based on the manipulation of variables through Gödel numbering (wiki). The program: ( 455/33 , 11/13 , 1/11 , 3/7 , 11/2 , 1/3 ) will multiply the exponents of 2a3b leaving the result in 5ab.
The program ( 17/91 , 78/85 , 19/51 , 23/38 , 29/33 , 77/29 95/23 , 77/19 , 1/17 , 11/13 , 13/11 , 15/2 , 1/7 , 55/1 ) will loop forever, however as it runs the state of the program will occasionally be just a power of 2 with all the other powers (variables) being zero. Those values are: 22 , 23 , 25 , 27 , 211 , 213 , … and so on. It computes prime numbers and stores them in the power of 2 before going to compute the next one.
While I understand the idea of Gödel numbering, the manipulation of those numbers through this process still is difficult for me.
https://www.rosettacode.org/wiki/Category:APL and https://www.rosettacode.org/wiki/Category:J for fun links.
ackermann←{
0=1⊃⍵:1+2⊃⍵
0=2⊃⍵:∇(¯1+1⊃⍵)1
∇(¯1+1⊃⍵),∇(1⊃⍵),¯1+2⊃⍵
}
Traditional APL required its own typewriter ball for printing out programs.
He has an iPad 6
I believe you’d be able to load up Swift Playgrounds on that now as a “here’s a place to start” - https://www.apple.com/swift/playgrounds/ - it is a very safe place to start.
In general, I’m gonna ask “why?” for loading up a Linux distribution on a Mac unless there is specific software that you’re after that only runs on Linux. For the most part, launch a terminal and you’re getting 90% of what the Linux experience has to offer (Mac OSX is a unix certified operating system).
I’d look also for games that are programming under the covers or related. Factorio (circuits) and Minecraft (red stone logic) are two that come to mind first.
Shenzen I/O (and the rest of Zachtronics) along with Human Resource Machine and 7 Billion Humans might be a bit more, but also something he could “grow into”.
I would suggest staying as far away from Roblox as possible.
I wrote this a while back… I still think it’s true (though I don’t think its “finished”)
Factorio
So there’s this game I play… just a little bit. Factorio.
In playing this game, I’ve realized that there are several parts of the game play that are directly applicable to software design. The idea of Patterns becomes more clear on how to explain them and how to use them in regular software when one can point to something a bit more concrete (all be it a construct in a virtual world). A visual example of reasonable design and problems of scale are also software design issues that become more apparent with factorio.
Patterns
Patterns are a favorite rant of mine - that developers are asking for a pattern to do something and you take a Something and a SomethingElse and link them together and you’ve got a working application.
Factorio gives me a better way to explain what a Pattern is.
One of the problems that I’ve had in factorio is a pump that flickers on and off rather quickly. This made a mess of the power display (a very high frequency sine wave was evident - determining the actual overall power consumption over time became more challenging) and lights that were hooked up to it to indicate that the pump was on were flickering at a high frequency (a rather annoying strobe).
The cause was that the pump (and light) were connected to a tank containing refined oil. The pump was to pump off excess when it got to 24,000 units. If the tank was at 24,100 units the pump would pump off 200 units putting it at 23,900 and shutting off. One sixtieth of a second later, something would push another 200 units of refined oil into the tank and the pump would trigger on and off for a sixtieth of a second - the flickering and the high frequency showing up in the power.
The solution to this is to use what is known as a Schmitt trigger. This is a circuit that feeds back to itself with a positive feedback loop. When the trigger turns on at a given threshold it will remain on until the value drops below a different threshold. The way that the trigger was set up was so that when the material reached 24,000 units, it would turn the pump on until the level was at 22,000 units.
The way this was implemented was to use a decider combinator which takes a signal as input (the amount of material in the tank) and sends a signal as output (the value 1 in a given channel) based on some logic (the amount of material in the tank is greater than 24,000). Then a second combinator - an arithmetic combinator - would take that signal of 1 and then multiply it by 2,000 and send that result into the input of the decider combinator. The result would be that the signal is now 26,000 and it would run until the material drops to 24,000 in which case the signal from the decider would switch from 1 to 0 and the arithmetic combinator would stop sending the additional 2000 units as a signal… and we would see the real value of the tank at 22,000.
The Schmitt trigger is a Pattern.
It is silly to be suggesting that one would design something based on the answers to “what are useful Patterns when creating an oil processing area?” One doesn’t add something unless its necessary to solve a problem. And one doesn’t go looking for places to use a Schmitt trigger or other Pattern - they are tools for solving specific problems.
Reasonable design
The first base that a person builds is often what is known as a spaghetti base. The layout is ad-hoc. As you need something from somewhere (some iron plates) to get to somewhere else you split off from a convenient, nearby belt with some iron on it and run it over to the place it is needed. It sounds ok at first, but doing this a few dozen times the layout becomes more and more convoluted.
Enter the main bus.
The main bus is a design where there is a large number of belts running down the center of the base and things tap off of it perpendicular for specific factories that build a given item.
The taps off are well researched designs that have a specific fraction of the items shunted off to the factory. Instead of trying to figure out where the iron came from and how to get more iron down to that place maybe a few hundred tiles away, one can look at the main bus and see a dozen tiles and understand what that sub factory is making and how many resources it needs.
The reasonable design allows one to more quickly fix issues of resource starvation and allocation along with refactoring of specific areas of the overall system without worry about impact to things downstream. The base is reasonable.
Problems of scale
After playing a bit and winning the game a time or two, one gets the urge to build BIG. Not these little “launch a rocket every couple of minutes” but rather “launch a rocket every second.”
The design for the one rocket every few minutes is fundamentally different than the design for one rocket every second. The layout of the base for a simple mainline works well - but it doesn’t have the throughput for materials that would enable the launch a rocket every second goal.
For this, one starts building outpost factories that do one thing, and one thing well. This outpost takes iron ore and produces iron plates. That outpost takes iron plates and copper plates and produces green circuits. So on and so forth.
This is a very different design - switching from a main bus to train logistics (trains become the way to move massive amounts of material). The very structure of the base for a megabase vs a regular base shows differences at every level.
Many times one reads about developers having difficulties with microservices and trying to build something to scale to 1000 users per second. And then comes the moment when they are asked how many users per second they’re currently getting and the answer is something along the lines of “Um, we’re getting maybe 5 a second on a good day… but we’re getting ready for being Amazon or Twitter scale.”
Design for what works. It is often easier to redesign a working system up than it is to try to start out with the megabase or amazon scale system and fight all those little problems of outpost base train networks and microservices that you haven’t encountered before in a working system.
It took them years ago. From 2015 : An NPR Reporter Raced A Machine To Write A News Story. Who Won?
And its only gotten better: Can ChatGPT write a podcast episode? Can AI take our jobs?
To be frank about it, the clips of porn needs instances to follow the steps needed for Section 230 to protect them (see EFF : User Generated Content and the Fediverse: A Legal Primer) otherwise it becomes a huge liability for every site admin who federates with such instances. I am not aware of any instances that have taken the step of registering a DMCA agent with the US Copyright Office.
Additionally, given the nature of the people commenting and the possibility of “oh, I’m 17, is that a problem” without the corresponding tooling for age verification and approved users, the moderation tools need to really get a focus for how to create them, implement them, and federate moderation events out reliably.
Furthermore, a significant amount of porn on Reddit is from amateurs who are trying to monetize or advertise. So far, the Lemmy user base has taken a dim view monetization (other than donations) or advertising. This makes it so that it’s just not worth it for an amateur to need to maintain another social media presence that has little return.
Incidentally…