Unruffled [they/them]

wiki-user: unruffled

“In every State, the government is nothing but a permanent conspiracy on the part of the minority against the majority, which it enslaves and fleeces.”

- Mikhail Bakunin

Queer/trans gender abolitionist | anarchist | piracy enthusiast

aspe:keyoxide.org:LSZT4AL3BUPMJZGHIJAVZAJLHY

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  • 26 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • I came to this post late, but though I’d add my 2 cents since it’s an interesting topic.

    Sin 1: Instance Selection Paralysis - is a legit issue but is mitigated somewhat now we have meta websites like https://join-lemmy.org/instances, though it would be good to have it hosted by a fully independent group that cannot be claimed to be partisan.

    Sin 2: Timeline Turmoil - the suggested fix of “Cut the interface down to one feed” seems ridiculous to me. Having a quick and easy way to switch between different feed types like local/new vs subscribed/active was fantastic from day 1. Maybe mastadon users simply prefer a more basic experience? The article does seem very mastadon centric.

    Sin 3: Remote Interaction Purgatory - seems like a valid complaint. I mainly stick to lemmy and piefed for this reason.

    Sin 4: DM Disasters Waiting to Happen - also seems valid.

    Sin 5: Ghost Conversations and Phantom Followers - seems to be mostly technically resolved by now.

    Sin 6 (Part 1): Search Without Surveillance - this is basically impossible to implement, because LLMs and search engines do not care about your personal preferences, and will scrape everything that is public. Unless we achieve a 100% block rate on scrapers (not likely) then one should assume everything you type is subject to surveillance. And even then, any 3-letter agency could spin up a server and ingest all the federated content with nobody being any the wiser. An illusion of security is worse than no security imo.

    Sin 6 (Part 2): Content Discovery Mirage - fairly interesting and I like the way you can create and publish feeds of communities on a specific topic, for example, on Piefed. Would be great if that feature came to Lemmy.

    Sin 7: User Discovery Hell - I really don’t understand the difference between this one and the previous one. Both seem to be talking about sharing curated / aggregated feeds.











  • That is exactly the case. I really can’t be bothered reading this whole fucking post, so I’m gonna just reply to you, since you sound reasonably sane.

    First, it should be obvious to everyone that their post and comment histories are completely public, and accessible to anyone on the fediverse. There is zero privacy on the fediverse. Your comment histories have already been scraped a thousand times over by every big model out there.

    All we have at the moment is a simple script, developed by one of our mods (who will be publishing it on codeberg soon), that any user can run that logs into lemmy using your own account, and downloads a set number (or time period) of comments into a text file. There is no abuse of admin powers going on, it’s just the stock lemmy/piefed api. This is massively faster than manually paging through comment histories on lemmy, and can make mod decisions more robust and more informed.

    Using the text file, mods or admins can quickly search for keywords or whatever, using a simple text editor, or simply skim read it. Another option is to ingest it into an LLM to provide a summary. I tried doing that just a handful of times, for testing, but honestly I found it a bit cumbersome and who knows if the summary is actually accurate given the tendency for hallucinations? A couple of tests seemed consistent with my own assessment, and a couple were way off base.

    That told me everything I need to know about how much to trust the summaries… very little. I honestly don’t think they are much of a value add, because you just can’t reliably trust the results. In any case, we have absolutely no plans to use llms for that on a regular basis, I just wanted to see what it came up with, and how well it matched a manual assessment.

    And to also clarify, there is/was absolutely no automated scanning of users. The process is the same as always. We get a report, we investigate the report, and make a human mod decision. The only difference in this case is that the investigation can be done more efficiently, because we don’t have to go slowly paging through comments and searching through the Lemmy UI for the relevant data.

    Obviously as well, no mod or admin is gonna download the entire comments history of a user unless it is a complicated report that is difficult to get to the bottom of from a quick look at the report. 90%+ of mod actions would never need that much detail.

    The way OPs post was written was obviously designed from the ground up to stir up drama about AI use. Honestly, I don’t know why he’s still malding, but Rimu seems to be engaging in a lot of very bad faith hit pieces at the moment, designed solely to stir up drama, and directed at our instance. It’s really shitty behaviour.