ShadowPouncer
Because they are unilaterally removing benefits that people have already paid for, and are explicitly stating that they will provide no refunds.
If you paid for a year of premium, a good chunk of the benefit has been the coins to buy awards.
After they get rid of both coins and awards, well, you have still paid for premium in advance, but it is now worth a fair bit less to some people.
Also bad, but more arguably in regards to the law, they are choosing to remove all past awards on posts and comments.
Which means that people who have bought coins (or premium to get coins) are having all of that undone, again, without any possibility of refund.
Arguably, this is much more problematic for people who had purchased coins, but who had not used them all before the announcement. Because that’s taking the money, and then simply choosing not to provide the service that was paid for, while simultaneously stating that there will be no refunds.
You could try to argue that, well, they can use those coins up until they turn buying awards off… Except, well, one of the nice things about awards is that they last as long as the post or comment does.
This is… Problematic.
Extremely problematic.
Yep.
The only big complication with doing stuff that way is that if you get enough attention, abruptly people start looking at your stuff a lot harder.
And then you get shredded, and lose all credibility for the rest of your career.
Claiming to have discovered something absolutely ground breaking, that everyone in the field would want to replicate almost immediately, is exactly the kind of thing that would sink someone doing this.
But then again, people are idiots sometimes.
Based on the comment, I think that what is wanted is a little different than what people are assuming.
First, it sounds like there is a desire to implement enough of the Mastodon API that various mobile Mastodon clients can connect to kbin.social and interact with that side of things. I have no idea how difficult this would be, but I suspect that it would be an interesting undertaking.
And second, unrelated, but it came up in the comments, and I think it would be an excellent idea, there is definitely a desire to implement a Mastodon-like way to export and import enough of your account information to easily migrate to another instance.
In my opinion, there needs to be an option that can both import and export a fully Mastodon compatible format, so that people can migrate from Mastodon to kbin, and can migrate back from kbin to Mastodon, at least for stuff where that makes sense.
At the same time, I am unsure if that format would be sufficient for everything required to migrate from one instance of kbin to another, or between kbin and lemmy.
And given that last point, it should come as no surprise that I think that if another format is needed, or even an extension to the existing format, that should really be coordinated with Lemmy, so that it is easier to move around the entire ecosystem.
The advice to always use a unique password per site is an excellent one.
The why is multifaceted, and some of them are moderately complex.
First off, not every site is going to be storing your password in a good a secure manner.
In an ideal world, every site on the planet would be hashing it with something like bcrypt with a fairly aggressive cost setting, and good salts.
And they would have a way to automatically rehash your password on login in the event that the password hashing settings change. (Almost everyone misses this one.)
In practice… It could be stored in plain text. It could be hashed with classic crypt(), or with md5 or sha1 with no salt. There are so many ways to get it wrong.
On the rehashing one, they could have picked something that was best practices at the time, you setup your account, and then two years later, best practices have changed, it turns out that there was a way to attack the previous way, so they change how they do it… And that’s great for everyone who changes their password or sets up a new account after that change, but everyone who did it before that change? Well, those passwords are just sitting there hashed by the old method indefinitely.
Or someone could compromise the site, and grab every password everyone enters.
Or you could fall prey to a phishing attack, and type your login to what looks exactly like the site in question, but is infact a common typo of the real domain.
Again, there are a lot of ways for the password used on a site to get compromised. Many of those ways are entirely out of your control. It is standard practice for attackers to attempt to use that password and username / email on other services when this happens, just so that they can see what else they can get into.
Don’t let that work.
Alright, now, who wants to come up with a ‘good enough’ generative AI tool to generate fake irises on a smartphone screen, and what do you think would be necessary (if anything) to convince the orb-shaped device that it’s a real iris?
That is the goal of this project, right?
You’re both right, but I’m pretty sure that you’re having two separate but related discussions.
Certification by itself does absolutely nothing. It’s a piece of paper.
However, it’s a piece of paper that you can not get unless you’ve done a bunch of other stuff.
Regulations would have prevented this, because they would have required the certifications, which would have required the other stuff.
In this case, they didn’t do the other stuff.
They didn’t test the hull to see if it could take the pressure.
They explicitly decided not to bother testing the hull to see if it could actually take the pressure.
They certainly didn’t do any fatigue testing to see how repeated pressure cycles impacted the material. The material that is extremely complex, and which nobody has done this with.
Because they didn’t do that testing, they had no way to reliably know if other steps were required, like only using it X number of times, or establishing processes to do specific inspections to look for whatever kinds of damage might happen as a result of repeated stress.
So yes, if they had actually followed the process, this wouldn’t have happened. They explicitly arranged to use the vessel in locations where they could not be held to the process.
But they didn’t want to follow the process. Which means more than ‘they didn’t do the certification’, it means that they also didn’t do many of the other things that would have been required to get that certification.
And the lack of regulation meant that nobody could shut them down for those decisions.
I would argue that we are, as a planetary civilization, almost past the point where a war of that sort is even possible.
On the other hand, if China were to ever shun NK, I would bet that their government would likely collapse in less than a decade.
Sadly, China has a ton of reasons to want to prevent that, one of the bigger ones being the border with NK where many, many refugees would try to cross into China.
I could however see, someday, China agreeing to a massive backroom deal on a scale that would be unprecedented:
China abruptly works to ensure a complete collapse of the NK government, without any NK nuclear weapons either coming into play or any NK nuclear weapons going missing (except to China itself, if it wants them).
And SK along with a good chunk of the Western world agrees to immediately conduct one of the largest humanitarian missions in history, to ensure that nobody is fleeing NK into China unless they have tons of assets and they want to avoid repercussions for their actions.
There are, sadly, a lot of reasons why China wouldn’t want the western powers capable of pulling that off to have control of territory that close to China though.
SK would be their safest bet, but SK doesn’t have the resources to pull of that kind of a humanitarian effort.
And the chances that someone like the US wouldn’t take the chance to plop a military base in what is currently NK seems awfully slim.
As best as I’ve been able to tell, it was a mixture of:
An increasingly narrow social circle of people willing and able to disagree with him.
An increasingly large social circle of people willing to tell him what he wants to hear, and willing to try and shape his world view.
And drugs.
He has sadly reached the stage where he is unwilling to have anyone around him who will openly disagree with him. Doing so is a firing offense.
He has absolutely reached the point wealth wise where it is impossible to make new friends who you can trust to not have a motive in every interaction with you.
And he has, without question, become someone that decent people from his past likely wouldn’t want to be around.
I’m not sure that it’s going to be possible for someone in his current position to reform without losing the vast majority of his fortune first. And even then, I’m not nearly as optimistic as I could be.
Mastodon absolutely does have a weakness of making it more difficult to find people that you want to follow based on what you have already engaged with.
And from a purely user perspective, that is a weakness.
But it’s also a very distinct choice. Because having enough data to be able to meaningfully make such recommendations means having a central database of every user interaction by every user.
And it also means making choices and value judgements which, almost by definition, can not be value neutral.
If the creators of the algorithm are good, they will actually be aware of the choices and value judgements being made, if not, well… They will still be making them, just not in nearly as educated of a way.
On the whole, I really hope that we eventually come up with answers to these problems that make it possible for a user to make those choices, and to have the amount of recommendations that they want, while somehow not having anyone have the huge database of user interactions. I’m not sure if that’s even possible, most especially if you assume that there will be entities on the fediverse that are fudging their data to get recommended in ways that other users don’t want.
But it sure would be interesting to try.