That’s the bad thing about social media. If no one was doing it before, someone is now!

Jokes aside it’s possible, but with the current LLMs I don’t think there’s really a need for something like that.

Malicious actors usually try to spend the least amount of effort possibile for generalized attacks, because you end up having to often restart when found out.

So they probably just feed an LLM with some examples to get the tone right and prompt it in a way that suits their uses.

You can generate thousands of posts while Lemmy hasn’t even started to reply to one.

If you instead want to know if anyone is taking all the comments on lemmy to feed to some model training… Yeah, of course they are. Federation makes it incredibly easy to do.

If you are talking about Lasagne - the pasta type and not the finished product, you would be right in saying you can find it both with eggs and without, by the article it says it is a north/south thing in Italy. But honestly you can find thousands of variations of them even moving just a few dozens kilometer.

On the contrary to be spaghetti and not something else they need to be - to directly quote - “a special pasta format made exclusively from durum wheat semolina and water, with a long, thin shape and round cross section.”

I’m not sure if it is the same outside of Italy. But at the end just do what makes you happy.

I didn’t know about this project, so I took a quick look around.

I didn’t see any mention of Telemetry or Metrics, but I assume they can use this:

After starting Tails and connecting to Tor, Tails Upgrader automatically checks if upgrades are available and then proposes you to upgrade your USB stick. The upgrades are checked for and downloaded through Tor.

https://tails.net/doc/upgrade/index.en.html#automatic

Still, I just gave this a few minutes, so there could be more.

Considering you seem to dislike the whole concept of Bots, isn’t the Bot toggle in the Lemmy profile exactly what you want?

It auto ignores all posts and comments made by accounts marked as Bots. Sure, the owner of the account has to correctly mark it, but I feel that can easily be solved by reporting unmarked bots.

But I’m interested, if you would like to expand on it, how would you make a bot opt-in?
The only way I could think of is through PMs, but that would be cumbersome, and generally unfit for purpose, for all the involved parties.

Actually Obtainium is mentioned (but thank you, checking back I saw I had a typo in the github link that I had missed, and I’ve now fixed it!), but this is the first time I hear about Accrescent: is it this App store?

You are right, and I forgot to add the link to it in the opening post. I’ll edit it in!

Silverbullet is like that. It is not an electron or native app, you have to run a server and then get to it from the browser.

TLDR it is best run with docker or podman, but IMHO it is pretty good.

I feel there’s some kind of miscommunication going on here.

Probably I’m not understanding what you are putting forward, but to be clear: They are not doing this because they want to. They are doing it because they are forced to do it by the DMA.
It’s true that allegedly they were working on some kind of interoperability layer already. For years now. But no evidence of it being more than lip service to avoid being regulated has ever surfaced - as far as I know.

Which would have been in line with your “Do Nothing”.

as an unwilling Whatsapp user the ability to migrate without having to convince all my social circles to do anything but check a checkbox sounds like a huge step forward.

That’s the point. I feel it will not be a “simple checkbox”, and they will make it the most obnoxious process they can using the Best Dark Patterns the industry has to offer.

Already the general public is not interested in the alternatives or the concept of interoperability - wanting something that Just Works™ - putting in front even the smallest step (and some scary text!) will make the percentage of willing people become even lower.
And that’s not all. As it is portraited in the article by the Threema’s spokeperson it is pretty clear that Meta will just try to make the maintenance of the communication layer as cumbersome as they can - both technically and bureaucratically.
They are explicitly the ones keeping the reins of the standard, the features, the security model, the exchanged data and who, how and when will be approved.

So from one side if they make it hard and scary enough to tank the use rate, they will have the excuse of not being there enough people to give priority to fix it or add features, and from the other side if maintaining the interoperability will be difficult and time consuming enough, the people and businesses from the alternatives or wrappers will not have the incentive to do or keep doing it for the long haul. As we can already see in the article.

Is it better than nothing? Sure, probably. Will it be a slow cooking, easy to break, easy to get excluded from, just bare minimum to comply to the letter but not the spirit of the law? I feel that’s a pretty good bet to make.

Let’s be clear: I will be extremely happy if all the red flags and warning bells that I saw in the article will just end up being figments of my imagination. But yes, I’m very pessimistic - maybe even too much - when I see these kind of corporate speech and keywords.

“One of the core requirements here, and this is really important, is for users for this to be opt-in,” says Brouwer. “I can choose whether or not I want to participate in being open to exchanging messages with third parties. This is important, because it could be a big source of spam and scams.”

Let me translate this for you: "We will make users hop on the most cumbersome, frustrating and inefficient way we can think of to enable interoperability. And making it defaulted to off will mean people using other apps will need to find other channels to ask for it to be enabled on our users’ end, making it worthless.

And don’t forget: we will put a bunch of scary warnings, and only allow to go all in, with no middle ground or granularity!"

Great stuff, thank you. I can’t wait.

“We don’t believe interop chats and WhatsApp chats can evolve at the same pace,” he says, claiming it is “harder to evolve an open network” compared to a closed one.

Ah, so they are going for the Apple’s approach with iMessage and Android sms. Cool, cool.

I hope my corporate-to-common translator is broken, because this does just sound bad.

Any foundation model is trained on a subset of common crawl.

All the data in there is, arguably, copyrighted by one individual or another. There is no equivalent open - or closed - source dataset to it.

Each single post, page, blog, site, has a copyright holder. In the last year big companies have started to change their TOS to make that they are able to use, relicense and generally sell your data hosted in their services as their own for the intent of AI training, so potentially some small parts of common crawl will be licensable in bulk - or directly obtained from the source.

This does still leave out the majority of the data directly or indirectly used today, even if you were willing to pay, because it is unfeasable to search and contract every single rights holder.

On the other side of it there have been work to use less but more heavily curated data, which could potentially generate good small, domain specific, models. But still they will not be like the ones we currently have, and the open source community will not be able to have access to the same amount and quality of data.

It’s an interesting problem that I’m personally really interested to see where it leads.

Give technitium a go, my woes diminished drastically with that.

I have a Boox Nova Air which is still going strong after around 2 years, and honestly it’s pretty good for writing. But I heard a lot of people having problems with updates bricking the device or receiving a bad unit and having an hard time returning it, if bought directly from them. I did not have to talk with support and I avoided the updates, so I can’t say more about that. My experience is overall good with it.

I also have a Kobo Libra H2O that I think is nearing the 4 years mark, and is still going really strong. The biggest problem I had was that it asks for a kobo account during setup, thing that I really dislike. I don’t know if it is still like that.

But, generally, if you want an epub compatible reader that you can mod (NickelMenu etc) and easily side load stuff to, with a kobo libra you can’t go wrong. Even if, to be fair, I’m not up to date with the latest devices and company policies.

One note: the kindle format is pretty closed and all the stuff you buy from amazon is generally DRMed to hell, so it’s not certain that you can pass it to other readers. Just avoid amazon’s ebooks.

EDIT: One thing I missed: PDFs on the default kobo software are bad, the Boox default software for PDF is far better and - in my case - there’s a screen size difference too that can make my opinion biased. Aside from that for pure book reading kobo is generally better, but you need to buy a protective case for it: there are a lot of cheap and good quality compatible ones.

There’s an archived snapshot of the issue: https://web.archive.org/web/20220623132457/https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/820

Until you have up and down votes there always will be someone making a tally.

The concept of Karma of other sites, to be fair, is not as simple as that. A lot of times the Karma is not a straight tally, there are algorithms to mitigate abuse (ex. Try to disregard mass voting, sudden influxes of votes, or known bots votes), or it is used to indirectly move the conversation to a preferred subject (ex. Making points obtained in some discussions or communities less valuable, or directly not considering them).

Luckily or not that kind of Karma is not present here, which basically makes the whole concept of total Karma pretty useless because you really can’t trust the value to be kind of truthful and not manipulated.

Already with all the anti abuse, and it being calculated in a centralized platform, it was generally worthless. Here it is completely worthless. People should just be reminded of its real nature of an easily gamed system, and that it is not what they were used to.

We can only hope that in the long run they will drop it.

Are you talking about this: https://lemmyverse.net/communities ?

There’s this one too: https://browse.feddit.de/ but it is not as nice.