I like to code, garden and tinker

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Cake day: February 9th, 2024

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  • Centralization is a weakness. These services can be targeted by governments that want to limit communication. Free speech is a commodity, and servers host this free speech. If a hostile organization, such as a government, targets a channel of free speech such as those hosted on a platform that makes it easy to setup a mastodon instance, this become an easy target that will affect a large portion of users. If you are serious about freedom, you have the freedom to self-host your own platforms.

    Edit: I realize my post doesn’t answer the question proposed, but it’s more of an argument against such services. I would argue self-hosting doesn’t rely on paying third-parties to host your software, but I guess this is in the eye of the hoster.









  • dudeami0@lemmy.dudeami.wintoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldNon-Cloudflare AI blocking?
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    3 months ago

    The only way I can think of is require users to authenticate themselves, but this isn’t much of a hurdle.

    To get into the details of it, what do you define as an AI bot? Are you worried about scrappers grabbing the contents of you website? What is the activities of an “AI Bot”. Are you worried about AI bots registering and using your platform?

    The real answer is not even cloudflare will fully defend you from this. If anything cloudflare is just making sure they get paid for access to your website by AI scappers. As someone who has worked around bot protections (albeit in a different context than web scrapping), it’s a game of cat and mouse. If you or some company you hire are not actively working against automated access, you lose as the other side is active.

    Just think of your point that they are using residential IP addresses. How do they get these addresses? They provide addons/extensions for browsers that offer some service (generally free VPNs) in exchange for access to your PC and therefore your internet in the contract you agree to. The same can be used by any addon, and if the addon has permissions to read any website they can scrape those websites using legit users for whatever purposes they want. The recent exposure of the Honey scam highlights this, as it’s very easy to get users to install addons by selling users they might save a small amount of money (or make money for other programs). There will be users who are compromised by addons/extensions or even just viruses that will be able to extract the data you are trying to protect.


  • I do agree that human nature is a huge problem. For a utopian government, I do think that is fairly impossible at the moment. As you have said we will need some novel idea or technology, or human nature will have to evolve in some way (that could take a very long time though).

    As for citizens advocating for themselves, you seem to be thinking of peaceful ways to have a government that avoids becoming corrupt. While ideal, as we know humans are far from that and why eventually corruption turns to revolt if the needs of citizens are not met. I am not saying this will solve the issue either. As far as I can tell it just renews the cycle at best, or continues the corruption under a new group at worst. I only say this as technically this is a way citizens will eventually advocate for their rights if the government becomes too corrupt.

    As for the desires of laws for each individual citizen, this is essentially impossible as only very small groups will have ideals and values that are homogeneous. In a populace large enough, human nature will lead to conflicting ideas on which laws should exist and how governments should run. In democracies, this plays into the hands of people or organizations with nefarious political goals. These groups can exploit human nature to get citizens to focus emotionally on a small subset of policies and laws. This tactic can be very powerful in places that don’t regulate this kind of propaganda, such as the United States.

    I would argue this form of political propaganda being pushed by powerful groups that don’t represent the majority of citizens, towards citizens in other groups is one of the main cause of citizens being politically inactive. This creates biases and causes a lot of people to make decisions based on issues whose prevalence is artificially amplified. While that issue may be very important and should be advocated for, this should not be left to powerful groups or organizations that are not representative of the citizens. This also creates a ton of noise, making other issues that may directly affect or be advocated for by a large portion of the population to be obscured. All of this leads to information overload, fatigue, and complacency which leads to ignoring politics and possibly being politically inactive. I say possibly because people will still vote because it’s their civic duty but will be uninformed which can be even more dangerous than not participating in politics. This also turns politics into a sport based on what the current political “hot topic” is, which a lot of people don’t want to participate in and turns them away from being active politically.

    In my opinion, the best solution to get citizens politically active is the need to make politics less biased and present legislation and policies in a fairer fashion. This will not get every citizen involved, but it will encourage more unbiased and informed decisions which will further fight corruption. Politically active citizens can look at legislation and policy proposals and make the sometimes difficult decision of which is the best choice in the present moment. This should also help with “political fatigue” which can cause citizens to not participate. Of course some people will never vote (unless forced to by law), but the best we can do is try to make the process simpler and use less of peoples time and resources.

    All this being said, it will still be an uphill battle for democracies such as the United States to undo the influence of powerful groups in politics, and make their democracies fairer and more representative of the people. I wouldn’t say it’s impossible, but to do so peacefully will take a ton of perseverance, hard work, and most likely a bit of luck.


  • I would argue this is more an issue of when citizens get complacent and stop holding those who govern them accountable. This is when any form of government will eventually start turning to the corruption. Those in power can change the rules while citizens are going about their lives. It works even better if the citizens are too busy and stressed out to worry about “silly things like politics”.



  • My question is, why give it for free? Has their product developed enough to win in the AI developer space? Are we reaching the point where you could self-host an AI code assistant as good as copilot? Or are projects such as johnny.ai (renamed, I’m not going to advertise it) challenging Microsoft’s market share in the AI developer space?

    My only guess is Microsoft wants you to get used to their ecosystem and further ingrain developers into their development ecosystem. At best, once you are used to their ecosystem you’ll stick with them out of familiarity. At worst, they can use your input (prompts, refactors, etc) to further the development of copilot.

    To me this smells of typical subsidizing of a product to capture market share then lock in that market share. Anything I’m missing?

    Edit: johnny.ai seems to be a domain offered for resale by godaddy. I didn’t mean to link them but I’ll leave it here, don’t give godaddy money as they are a terrible domain name registrar.


  • It’s is M.2, but not the M/B+M key most M2 SSDs use but rather a A+E meant for WIFI/Bluetooth. According to this video it’s essentially 2 PCI Express x1 lanes and USB 2.0. The video goes on to explain some possible alternative uses:

    • A gigabit ethernet adapter
    • 2x SATA ports for a standard SATA drive
    • Coral tensor processor
    • SD card reader
    • 2x USB A-type ports
    • Some type of SIM card adapter (video wasn’t quite sure on it either)
    • A PCI Express x16 slot that only functionally works as a x1

    So while does this slot has it’s uses, it’s not meant to be used for M.2 drives but rather WIFI.




  • Just the act of refusing makes the act of seizing your phone legal or not. If you legally give them your phone by your own will, they are able to use all evidence they find in the courts. If you deny to give them your phone, and they seize it anyways and access it you have a valid path to throw the evidence they discover out as an illegal search and seizure of your property. I’m not a lawyer but that is the general thought process on denying them access to your property.

    Edit: Just want to say this mostly pretains to United States law and similar legal structures. This advice is not applicable everywhere and you should research your countries rights and legal protections.