• 0 Posts
  • 18 Comments
Joined 6 months ago
cake
Cake day: May 13th, 2024

help-circle
  • So let me get this straight: I’m supposed to vote for someone who thinks it is too politically inconvenient to be publically against an ongoing genocide? Who is sending arms and aid to a nation committing genocide??

    There were snipers on the roof of my college because of the pro Palestinian protesters. Pro Palestinian protesters get lumped in with antisemites due to just having human empathy. The voters needed something more than what we saw in the news: furrowed brows, hand wringing, and money sent for bombs. Palestinians die wretched deaths even if you feel real bad about it.

    I can imagine the energy that we all could have felt if Harris/Biden had actually did the right thing.

    I voted for Harris by the way. Not because I expected she’d end the genocide, but because Trump isn’t a statesman and can’t be trusted if we get dragged into war.




  • There are no checks whatsoever, no email or phone number required, no verification options—it just hands you an account for a 99-year-old, with full access to all chat features. (It took maybe five clicks from having no account to being able to play Blood & Gore.)

    Come on now Kotaku. I was a kid once on the internet. I lied about my age once to sign up for Neopets, which had text forums, private messages and user-created pages. You could even use HTML and hotlink images. It really wasn’t a big deal because my parents paid attention to what I did online, and the audience of the website was just children or people who wanted to play a simple game.

    My mom ended up playing it, so she must have known I lied about my age to get access. She had hella neopoints.

    For content marked 17+, you do need to verify your age with documentation

    WHY IS THERE CONTENT FOR 17+ ON ROBLOX? Isn’t this the TRUE child safety problem? Why do this at all? Why attract people looking for 17+ content on a platform for children??? I read that Hindenburg report, the entire platform is a mess. This company deserves to fail and those investors deserve to be left holding the bag.




  • We need to stop pretending this is due to a lack of education or critical thinking. Sure, that’s true for some, but I’m betting the vast majority of these conspiracy theories are spread by people that know that they are lies and don’t care. Evil Russian propaganda bots aren’t a great explanation for the totality of the phenomena. People say outrageous things because it gets them clicks on the internet and hurts the “other team”.

    We saw it recently with the lady lying about hatian immigrants eating cats - link. She didn’t care how true it was - only that it hurt the other team. They have it comin’, anyway, is their perspective when they’re saying these things.



  • I tried to write the most biased scaremongering paper about microplastics for a college course and I couldn’t find much directly linking human health to microplastics that was peer reviewed.

    The main paper in this article, the one claiming its human brain samples are 0.5% plastic, is preprint - not peer reviewed. So, reporting on it like this is unethical tbh.

    Truthfully, scientists have been looking for this sort of link in animals, and they can’t find earthshaking evidence of it. Most of the papers I found showed weak evidence of harm to animals. Most of the scarier papers have to do with how these plastics absorb chemical pollution in sea water, fish then eat the particles and are harmed. These papers point out they have trouble separating general harm from pollution from harm from microplastics pollution.

    Microplastics don’t seem to go up the food chain either, seems most plastics people eat are introduced through processing it. So, stop eating processed food. Stop wearing polyester while you’re at it, a lot of microplastics come from laundry.

    I’m not saying microplastics aren’t bad for human health. It’s just incredibly hard to study and it’s definitely not as bad as lead or asbestos. If it was, scientists would have found that link already.

    The worst news I ran across was that there is no human control group for this stuff. Everyone is full of microplastics. Those are the only peer reviewed human studies this article mentions - the sort that are like “Of samples from 20 different people, they were all full of plastics! We need grant money for more study”.

    I hope they get that grant money.


  • Yea, I agree. It’s good enough. Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound like it was a bad solution, it’s just not perfect and people ought to be aware of limitations.

    I used a small instance in my example so the problem was easier to understand, but a motivated person could target someone on a large instance, too, so long as that person tended to vote in the posts they commented on.

    Just for example (and I feel like I should mention, I have no bad feelings towards this guy), Flying Squid on lemmy.world posts all over the place, even on topics with few upvotes. If you pull all his posts, and all votes left in those posts from all users, I bet you could find one voter who stands out from the crowd. You just need to find the guy following him everywhere: himself.

    I mean, if he tends to leave votes in topics he comments on, which I assume he does.

    It would have to be a very targeted attack and that’s much better than the system lemmy uses right now. I’m remembering the mass tagger on Reddit, I thought that add on was pretty toxic sometimes.

    Also, it just occurred to me, on Lemmy, when you post you start with one vote, your own. I can even remove this vote (and I’ll do it and start this post off with score 0). I wonder how this vote is handled internally? That would be an immediate flaw in this attempt to protect people’s privacy.


  • While not a perfect solution, this seems very smart. It’s a great mitigation tactic to try to keep user’s privacy intact.

    Seems to me there’s still routes to deanonymization:

    1. Pull posts that a user has posted or commented in
    2. Do an analysis of all actors in these posts. The poster’s voting actor will be over represented (if they act like I assume most users do. I upvote people I reply to etc)
    3. if the results aren’t immediately obvious, statistical analysis might reveal your target.

    Piefed is smaller than lemmy, right? So if only one targeted posting account is voting somewhat consistently in posts where few piefed users vote/post/view, you got your guy.

    Obviously this is way harder than just viewing votes. Not sure who would go to the trouble. But a deanonymization attack is still possible. Perhaps rotate the ids of the voting accounts periodically?


  • I think they should be public. They’re already accessible for mbin posts and anyone administrating a lemmy instance. It should be clear to all users that their votes are already not private.

    Someone could make a lemmy instance just to get voting behavior and make a website with cool graphs and stuff today and the only thing that could stop them is defederation. If Lemmy gets popular, this is just an inevitability.

    Imagine if a large instance decided to do that today. Imagine if lemmy.world released lemmy.world/votes. Would people defederate just for that? Remember: Mbin already displays scores and I don’t think anyone has defederated over it.

    Might as well put it on the interface so everyone understands it isn’t private. Rip off the bandaid.



  • He’s a vaccine denier. Edit: Trump was awful at handling COVID but he was not antivax.

    ap link

    TLDR: On the small island of Samoa, poor hospital management caused muscle relaxant to be administered instead of measles vaccinations in some children and there were injuries and deaths. In the wake of this RFK flew there and spread his antivax nonsense (he makes money off books about this). Afterword there’s a measles outbreak and 83 children and infants died.

    It’s pretty hard to compare him and Trump because he never had the power Trump did. Anyone who thinks he’s a reasonable alternative is totally misinformed.

    I can’t wait for what John Oliver has to say. The man is a train wreck.





  • I tried Linux briefly in highschool (around the year 2000) before going back to Windows (I love video games). I switched about 2 years ago back to Linux (Debian). Your comment made me remember xscreensaver and I went and installed it again. The matrix screensaver is a huge throwback, I love it and I missed it.

    But it was a pain to do this. I’m using KDE/Plasma on Debian, and I had to follow this process to get it done. My lock buttons built into KDE menus still don’t work despite replacing kscreenlocker_greet like the manpage recommends. I’m not sure it’s worth my time to try to figure out, since the page warns an update will revert this. I’m not going to remember how to fix it later. I choose to lock my computer with super+L so this isn’t a huge issue for me.

    The process to use xscreensaver with gnome looks equally bad.

    WHY is this so tough, though? Debian “just works” for me, so needing to fumble through this manpage feels pretty lame. The process looks similar on other distros, from a quick google. I’m not an IT person or a programmer, and this doesn’t feel very “linux” that it’s this way. Why would these window managers replace something that just works?

    I suppose it does look a bit dated?