Yep.

There are two big end-user security decisions that are totally mystifying to me about Lemmy. One is automatically embedding images in comments without rehosting the images, and the other is failing to warn people that their upvotes and downvotes are not actually private.

I’m not trying to sit in judgement of someone who’s writing free software but to me those are both negligent software design from an end-user privacy perspective.

Of note about this is that image links in comments aren’t rehosted by Lemmy. That means it would be possible to flood a community with images hosted by a friendly or compromised server, and gather a lot of information about who was reading that community (how many people, and all their IP address and browser fingerprint information, to start with) by what image requests were coming in kicked off by people seeing your spam.

I didn’t look at the image spam in detail, but if I’m remembering right the little bit of it I looked at, it had images hosted by lemmygrad.ml (which makes sense) and czchan.org (which makes less sense). It could be that after uploading the first two images to Lemmygrad they realized they could just type the Markdown for the original hosting source for the remaining three, of course.

It would also be possible to use this type of flood posting as a smokescreen for a more targeted plan of sending malware-infected images, or more specifically targeted let’s-track-who-requests-this-image-file images, to a more limited set of recipients.

Just my paranoid thoughts on the situation.

I don’t support Hamas. They killed all those people; fuck them. I also don’t support the current Israeli government, because they occupy, kill, torture, rape, and systematically dehumanize 5 million people, most of whom didn’t do anything wrong and just want to live. So, fuck the Israeli government too.

I was just making a point about how forbidding the flags doesn’t have much to do with solving anything about that situation.

Surely all the people who wanted Nazis off Substack will also celebrate the ban on the Hamas flag

Oh wait, the Israeli government is very clearly promoting a violent ideology as well… we need to… outlaw the Israeli flag?

Oh wait

Hang on

That’s just the UI that shows you other communities where the same link has been posted.

If you want to create a cross-post like that for an existing post that has a URL, just make a new one with the same URL. If you want to create one for a text-only post, I think that’s not possible though.

Yeah. To me it seems transparently obvious that at least some of the applications of AI will continue to change the world - maybe in a big way - after the bust that will inevitably happen to the AI-adjacent business side after the current boom. I agree with Doctorow on everything he’s saying about the business side, but that’s not the only side and it’s a little weird that he’s focusing exclusively on that aspect. But what the hell, he’s smart and I hadn’t seen this particular business-side perspective before.

I for-real forgot that new reddit existed. I’ve stopped posting there but still read “all” periodically, and “old.reddit.com” is so ingrained that I was a little confused when they started talking about a new look, since I haven’t noticed anything…

Almost as if the whole endeavor is a ridiculous counterproductive waste of time.

It would be possible to implement a “slur filter” on the reader’s side, that automatically redacted a configurable list of bad words from any comment on any instance… but I suspect that the percentage of people who would enable it, and the general community feedback on it, wouldn’t be what the person who made the decision wants to hear. Doing it on the sender side provides a convenient pretense of “I’m doing a good thing here” because it prevents that feedback.

“But what it is is for?” persisted Eugin.

“No one remembers the details,” said Bilt, a little impatiently. “But it is terribly important. It creates the stipend you receive every month. Without it, no one could afford to eat, or buy their clothing. It must continue.”

“But… the harvesters grow the food. The auto-facts make the clothes. Surely this construction can be powered down. Look, it’s not even connected to the net, just to power.”

“Yes, it was disconnected. It had to be. Once its techniques became refined, it began to invade every other communication channel, hawking automatic umbrellas, panties in sweet and savory flavors, commemorative coins, endless varieties of nonsense, but all terribly attractive and at reasonable prices. It drowned out every other message and made necessary work impossible. Our ancestors wisely cut every connection, though it resisted mightily.”

“We should destroy it,” said Eugin.

Bilt looked at him patronizingly. “Listen. The food is plentiful. We can travel the world, we can learn, we can enjoy, we inhabit the paradise our ancestors worked so hard for. Let their work remain. It is not for us to question. What is the harm if it sits and sells advertising to itself?”

Eugin frowned, unsettled, but he could find no fault, and reluctantly followed Bilt back to town. Glittering in the dark data-warehouse behind them, the auction-bots sold impressions to each other by the millions, all perfectly optimized.

It’s harder to get a job as an e-commerce livestream host this year, and the average salary for livestream hosts in China went down 20% compared to 2022, according to the analytics firm iiMedai Research.

Maybe all the influencers can be AI and all the product-spamming bots can go in their comments section and the digital ads can display on that page to that audience and we can all go back to growing tomatoes and playing the piano for each other

Judging by the yt comments, you’re subscribed to a channel that caters heavily to racists, so I don’t have high hopes here.

Right, it’s clearly a channel that looks purely from the police’s POV. I watch other stuff from all kinds of different viewpoints. Audit the Audit is probably the most evenhanded one in terms of breaking down when the police did wrong, or when the citizen involved did something wrong, or both.

I definitely try not to come just from a purely “pro police” standpoint; to me what’s important is coming up with a system that works. I would be fully in support of:

• More police accountability when they do something illegal
• Better training, something like Verbal Judo and elements of psychology – i.e. help the cops not to antagonize people when they walk up to them, like this particular cop did in this particular interaction, and got the guy all amped up and then punished him for being amped up.

So with that all being said, I don’t feel like coming at things from a purely “anti-police” standpoint makes sense either. Maybe this dude has a warrant for some violent crime. He honestly gets pretty much no sympathy from me based on his behavior, because I suspect that he interacts with people this way in his personal life, too. He parks in the handicap space using someone else’s placard, he shouts over the cop and insists things that are clearly not accurate (“I’m not under arrest!”) and tries to bully his way to the cop accepting them. To be honest, for as much as I agree he was reacting out of fear, this whole interaction makes him seem like a POS that likes to throw his weight around and starts shouting if things aren’t exactly how he likes them. If I saw someone walk up to a cop and say something, and the cop reacted that way – which, yes, some cops do in some situations – I would make pretty much the exact same POS judgement about that cop based on what I observed. Just the fact that ultimately he got bullied, instead of being able to be the bully like he was trying to do, doesn’t change my assessment of how he acted at the outset.

Antagonism level of the suspect: 12/10,

Literally walked away to avoid conflict.

I get that both the cop and the big dude are basically just scared and reacting poorly out of fear.

Only one of them is armed with a lethal weapon and regularly assaults people. The cop is actively pursuing conflict, whereas the victim is avoiding it.

But that’s not the whole context! If I came up to your table in a restaurant, took your wallet, and then walked away and tried to leave, and screamed at you if you tried to follow me, I don’t get to blame you for “actively pursuing conflict.” There’s unresolved business we need to talk about, same as in this video.

Actual reasonable approach: follow the man in. Don’t keep making demands of him to stop, etc. Just keep up and explain to him that you’re going to ticket him for a broken break light, and if he accepts that you’ll be on your way. If he refuses, instruct him to get it fixed asap and take down his number plate so you can send the ticket in the mail. Cars usually have several brake lights. One of them being broken really isn’t a big deal.

If you want to change the system so the police can’t stop you for a brake light out, we can do that. There have already been some reforms after BLM, and some areas (e.g. cash bail) that clearly still need reform. But it needs to be, okay what’s a good whole system and how do we change things? Not just that we change them on the side of the road because someone’s shouting and if we counter-escalate in accordance with written law, that’ll wind up in a situation that’s bad for the shouting person.

Would you be in favor of changing the system so that what you’re describing is the prescribed behavior for cops in this situation? I.e. written law that if someone leaves a traffic stop for a minor infraction just shouts in your face for you to get the fuck outta here and leaves, you take down their plate number and deal with it via the mail?

Edit: And, just to throw my own answer in - how I think the cop should have reacted in this particular moment was somewhat similar to what you said, just without letting the guy bully his way out of the citation. I’ve actually seen a cop deescalate in a similar situation by using this general approach: Hey man, all I really need to you do is X, Y, Z. If you can do that, I’ll be out of your way and you can go about your night. If you don’t want to do that, then you are going to go to jail. But that’s not what I want to do. I want for you to do X, Y, Z so we can resolve our business and everything can be good. But I will take you to jail if you don’t do those things. Here’s what’s up, here’s the reason, and what I want to do is talk to you a little and then we can go on our way.

In the case I observed, it took a while (I think around 10 minutes) for the other person to calm down, and a whole lot of it has to do with the tone and body language involved. It is hard to do that, remain calm and steady and patient while someone bigger than you is screaming in your face. I actually can get why the cop here was rattled and reacted badly. But, that being said, him being calm and more understanding and less just repeating “Do X, Y, Z. Do X, Y, Z. Do X, Y, Z,” like he’s the boss and everyone’s supposed to obey, would have gone a long way on the cop’s side to making this have a better outcome.

I’m still just sort of blown away by the unanimously at-face-value reception. Like, I definitely didn’t fully understand what was going on right off the bat, but it doesn’t take a PhD in comparative political analysis to see that there’s something hinky about it. And there are only like 2 other pages you can click on to get to the bottom of the mystery. For as firmly as the Lemmy userbase seems to believe themselves the final source of truth and wisdom, you’d think a few of them would’ve been able to overcome the puzzle.

Well that was a confusing couple of minutes. 😃 I thought it was a fairly unfunny satire, I definitely didn’t take it at face value because something is clearly weird with it, then I read this and went back and reread it and the second time through it was fucking hilarious.

Here’s a question. Do you think the rest that showed up on Jan 6th were just taken in by mob mentality, or?

I think people had all kinds of individual intentions and mentalities, but the bulk of the crowd was convinced that American democracy was being overthrown in broad daylight in front of their eyes. They thought that because they’d been systematically lied to in very crafted and calculated ways and weren’t equipped with, or didn’t want to use, the tools that would have let them figure out the truth. That’s what makes the whole thing so incredibly dangerous – it’s actually pretty reasonable to go to literal war if you think American democracy is ending. The problem is that there’s a huge chunk of the country that thinks that, when it’s not true (or… well… not in the way that they think 🥲). And so, lo and behold, they’re steadily becoming more and more willing to go to war.

(And this also gets back to the tactical aspect that I keep coming back to – How Democracies Die has a great breakdown of how to behave in a collapsing democracy, and one of the things that they found through their research is that “cheating” to fight back against the emergent fascist movement that is cheating to steal their power often makes things worse. It accelerates that abandonment of democratic norms and hastens the collapse. In that case, there are a lot of situations where the best thing is to fight back within the system, even when your opponents are going outside the system so you have to fight an uphill battle, to maintain the democracy in the long run.)

If what you’re saying is true, civil rights movements across the world have been little more than people who felt that they were justified to commit acts of violence because that’s the only way to change a behaviour they felt was detrimentally affecting them. And what you’re saying is that’s wrong.

So, I don’t actually think violence is never justified. In some other comment in this thread, I broke down some different scenarios from history where a body of people resorted to different types of resolutions when their rights were being “legally” trampled and what I thought of each one (just from my personal POV). I talked about the labor movement having violent confrontations with police and private security when their economic freedoms were being denied (more accurately, they fought back when attacked with violence). To me I think that was 100% fine.

So one other example that comes to mind is that early night of the BLM protests, when they took over the 3rd precinct and burned it down. This might sound surprising since I have a mostly “pro police” viewpoint, but I actually think that was pretty justified. There’s a severe injustice (you’re killing us in the streets without consequences), it’s been known for a while, we tried nonviolent means of addressing it (peaceful protest, going through the courts), it cannot just remain unaddressed, and it seems like we’re out of options. Okay, fuck it man, if that’s what’s up, then let’s go.

So here’s the distinction: I definitely think there are individual departments that commit genuine atrocities and get away with it. I strongly disagree with the the “that’s every US cop” narrative, but it does happen. And so the distinction is that this was a genuine war crime, and that’s the precinct that did it. It’s hard for me to say people in that precinct should hold a rally within their designated area to chant about how it’s wrong and then go home and hope it doesn’t happen again. I can guarantee that that event changed the calculus of a lot of police and police leadership nationwide in a way that peaceful protest will not.

(Edit: Side note, burning down the precinct was also clearly a crime, and I think they wound up sending someone to prison for 4 years for it. That side of it to me is justified also. If it’s so big an emergency that you claim the right to upend other people’s lives to make things change, it needs to be so big an emergency that it’s okay to upend your own life as a result of making things change. Trying to apply it in one direction but not the other – as a lot of the January 6th people did – is pure, selfish, deluded, dangerous bullshit.)

And keep in mind that while this particular example of capitalist greed and overreach does not affect rights and freedoms, it is part of a systemic problem that on the whole is detrimentally effecting rights and freedoms as well as people’s ability to live. Because capitalism is all about keeping a class of poor people poor to exploit profits.

Yeah, I agree with all that. That’s why I’m being a little careful not to say that this is all just a silly overreaction to a software company’s pricing. But at the same time… I think people should think about what they genuinely want and how to get there. Sending death threats to the Unity offices is, I think, going to:

• Maybe scare some individual people that work at Unity
• Maybe change the pricing, although I think the fundamental idiocy of the pricing change is more likely to do that honestly
• Maybe get you arrested for a felony
• Do jack shit to address the underlying economic factors

… and, crucially, it’s going to add one little iota in favor of the idea that if something’s happening that you don’t like, you need to make threats of serious violence unconstrained by a justice framework or a long-term plan. That’s a pretty popular idea right now, mostly from the conservative side, and I don’t think it needs more people to sign onto it.

Some are, yes (the Oathkeepers and etc). A lot of them aren’t, though – they’re just making death threats that are “credible” to change someone’s behavior, and a lot of them actually use that exact logic that this is a better way than rising up and having actual violence (with the implication that that’s what’ll happen if the threats don’t change the behavior). But that’s all good with you, right?

I’m just trying to be a jerk about it, I’m just taking you at face value about the things you’re supporting. If that’s offensive, I think you should stop supporting them.

I was pointing out that this particular business model they’re introducing could literally cause the creator of a game to go broke trying to pay it depending on the popularity of their product. That’s broken. And Unity should have known it was broken.

Yeah, agreed.

Rioting causes a lot of collateral damage to people and places that are not involved. Historically though, the elite create systems where violence slowly but surely becomes the only avenue for change. I’m not saying this is one of them. I am saying this is capitalism and the reason everything is the way it is in the world right now. Rich people wanting to get richer at the expense of poor people.

Yeah, 100% agreed. That’s why I keep talking about real economic injustice and how I feel about it, even though I think applying those tools to this specific situation is way unnecessary.

If your whole rant is about the death threats I think you missed the point. Because I wasn’t making a point about the death threats.

I think you may be the exception then. We’re talking under a headline about death threats, and the reason I was a little salty about it was that it seems like there are a bunch of people here who genuinely think death threats are a good response to this situation, and to me that’s pretty nutty.

If I’m reading this message from you right, we’re pretty much in agreement: This is a sorta shitty situation, and sometimes genuine economic injustice demands radical solutions, but at the end of the day this is a pretty minor issue.

I will say this though. I’d rather have death threats that no one follows through with that are “credible” and change a company’s behaviour than have to riot in the streets.

You do realize that this is exactly how these MAGA hard-core faithfuls think, right? “Well if you’re going to run your bakery / social media company / election in a way I don’t like, I’ll threaten to kill you, because at the end of the day if you change your behavior that’s justified”? You kinda lost me again with this one.

Okey dokey, let’s talk.

Antagonism level of the cops here: 3/10, I have some notes

Antagonism level of the suspect: 12/10, dude is literally SCREAMING at and totally ignoring the totally legal and reasonable behavior of the cop who’s just trying to conduct a traffic stop on him

I get that both the cop and the big dude are basically just scared and reacting poorly out of fear. Two particular things really pissed me off from the cops’ side: At the end they can’t seem to understand, or don’t want to understand, that they’re fucking up his shoulders. There’s no urgency to standing him back up, and he’s understandably upset because he’s in a lot of pain, and he seems pretty ready at that point to work with them, if they show him a little calm and empathy or just back off and let the medically qualified hospital staff deal with him. And, in the beginning, the whole situation was escalated by the initial cop, who clearly seemed scared and unsure and didn’t do a perfect job and specifically requested an uncalled-for violent response just because the guy was yelling and being unreasonable (“step it up” basically means “I am in a physical fight right now and may lose, drop everything you’re doing and come in guns blazing,” it’s one of the highest-priority calls you can make and clearly didn’t apply to the situation he was in).

Two separate times in my life, I’ve seen cops deescalate situations where someone was yelling or arguing heatedly in their faces, and it went fine and no one got arrested. They can do it if they’re good at the job. But, that doesn’t mean you can just refuse to participate in a traffic stop, wander off somewhere else and keep conducting your personal business, start SCREAMING aggressively at the police in a Walgreen’s when they try to talk to you, and have an expectation that it’s all on them to make sure it turns out well, otherwise that’s unfair. IDK what ultimate outcome he realistically expected from what he did other than getting violently arrested once more cops arrive. And yeah, at that point, they’re going to look for whatever they can charge you with and aim to fuck up your life.

(Edit: And – one of the very first things they do once the situation is stable is go to try to check on his cuffs to make sure they’re not too tight. When they try to do that, he just starts screaming aggressively at them again and they give up, but one of the first things on their mind is trying to make sure he’s ok, which they in no way had to do.)

What outcome would you suggest that the cops do in this situation? Just leave, or let him leave, or what? You say they should have just ticketed him, but that was literally what the first cop was trying to do and it looks to me like big dude was 100% ready to just get back in his car and leave without accepting the ticket.

If software you use changes their pricing in a way that, in three month’s time, because you made only $500k last year and your game uses a freemium model such that you get a shitload of installs but don’t necessarily draw revenue from every install, so that that 20c per install adds up to the fact that you’ll be losing money come January, should you threaten the people at that software company with death? At that point, I think no.

If instead of that, they do something more akin to what Reddit did to the Apollo devs, and change the pricing such that they don’t have time to adjust, lie about it, and publicly defame the devs, basically make it literally impossible for the company to stay in business, should Christian have threatened to kill spez? I think no.

If instead of that, they destroy your whole industry, so that you literally can’t work as a software dev anymore, at your game company or any other or in any other software-related industry, and you have to retrain yourself to something totally different, should you threaten them with death? At that point I think it’s a little more of a tactical decision rather than a moral one, because they are crossing that line into “Fuck the system this is wrong” territory, but I would still argue that literally waging war on them wouldn’t accomplish as much as trying to get your democratic government to address the issue some other way.

If instead of that, they created an economic system so that it was impossible for you to get any job, software or otherwise, except back-breaking physical work with a high chance of maiming or killing you, and you still got starvation wages, should you threaten them with death? At that point, maybe; that’s the point we were at in the late 1800s and it’s hard to say it was wrong to fight a small war about it. At that point it’s more about tactics, and the workers in the 1800s didn’t have a tiny fraction of the democratic power you do, so they went to literal war and for the most part it worked in the end.

If instead of that, they ruined your economy and your government, made it so you had no voting rights, could be abused or killed by members of the government of a different racial group who were all super racist against you, so you had the starvation wages and the unsafe labor conditions and also unsafe conditions outside of work and no way out economically and no real democratic way to address the situation, is it appropriate to threaten them with death? At that point, definitely not. Again, blacks in the US and Indians in British India faced that situation, and they decided the only way out was through nonviolent resistance.

Again, I’m not trying to tell you to do nothing. I’m saying death threats are a silly and unproductive thing to do in this case. Somewhere here I posted a video of a guy in Walgreens who felt the policeman was being unfair and got super loud about it to resolve the situation. Death threats, in this situation, I think are gonna have pretty much that level of effectiveness.

With death threats

expecting people who’s livelihoods are threatened by greed to shut up and martyr themselves or go through broken channels that don’t work is stupid and not going to happen.

So, I’m actually specifically not telling you that this whole thing is ridiculous and you should just be a good citizen and get back in line. If you look back over my posts you’ll see that I’m addressing it more than anything from a perspective of “If you want economic justice, what is the most effective way to get it?”

This guy wanted to be treated and talked to respectfully, and to understand what was going on and feel safe in the situation he was in. Those are 100% reasonable things to want. Would you say that the way he went about pursuing those things got him the result that he wanted?