Lemmy - RazBot

China has released a set of guidelines on labeling internet content that is generated or composed by artificial intelligence (AI) technology, which are set to take effect on Sept. 1.

尺ㄖ匚Ҝ　卂几ᗪ　丂ㄒㄖ几乇

What is your line in the sand?

Edit: thank you all for your responses. I think it's important as an American we take your view points seriously. I think of a North Korean living inside of North Korea. They don't really know how bad it is because that is all hidden from them and they've never had anything else. As things get worse for Americans it's important to have your voices because we will become more and more isolated.

Even the guy who said, "lol." Some people need that sort of sobering reaction.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/25826615

For those not familiar, there are numerous messages containing images being repeatedly spammed to many Threadiverse users talking about a Polish girl named "Nicole". This has been ongoing for some time now.

Lemmy permits external inline image references to be embedded in messages. This means that if a unique image URL or set of image URLs are sent to each user, it's possible to log the IP addresses that fetch these images; by analyzing the log, one can determine the IP address that a user has.

In some earlier discussion, someone had claimed that local lemmy instances cache these on their local pict-rs instance and rewrite messages to reference the local image.

It does appear that there is a closed issue on the lemmy issue tracker referencing such a deanonymization attack:

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1036

I had not looked into these earlier, but it looks like such rewriting and caching intending to avoid this attack is not occurring, at least on my home instance. I hadn't looked until the most-recent message, but the image embedded here is indeed remote:

https://lemmy.doesnotexist.club/pictrs/image/323899d9-79dd-4670-8cf9-f6d008c37e79.png

I haven't stored and looked through a list of these, but as I recall, the user sending them is bouncing around different instances. They certainly are not using the same hostname for their lemmy instance as the pict-rs instance; this message was sent from nicole92 on lemmy.latinlok.com, though the image is hosted on lemmy.doesnotexist.club. I don't know whether they are moving around where the pict-rs instance is located from message to message. If not, it might be possible to block the pict-rs instance in your browser. That will only be a temporary fix, since I see no reason that they couldn't also be moving the hostname on the pict-rs instance.

Another mitigation would be to route one's client software or browser through a VPN.

I don't know if there are admins working on addressing the issue; I'd assume so, but I wanted to at least mention that there might be privacy implications to other users.

In any event, regardless of whether the "Nicole" spammer is aiming to deanonymize users, as things stand, it does appear that someone could do so.

My own take is that the best fix here on the lemmy-and-other-Threadiverse-software-side would be to disable inline images in messages. Someone who wants to reference an image can always link to an external image in a messages, and permit a user to click through. But if remote inline image references can be used, there's no great way to prevent a user's IP address from being exposed.

If anyone has other suggestions to mitigate this (maybe a Greasemonkey snippet to require a click to load inline images as a patch for the lemmy Web UI?), I'm all ears.

Google recently open sourced Pebble and today, Repebble has put some of the watches up for preorder.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/luigi-mangione-accused-us-ceo-murder-depicted-london-mural-2025-02-26/

The story at that link is about 1 month old, but someone posted about this mural on Reddit yesterday.

Thoughts?

The "normal" everyone is wishing for was killing us. You just didn't notice.

Let it rot.

Someone just asked the opposite of this question here and I was wondering if there are cases were you're just not interested in something but you know the community is great nonetheless.

White House officials said the installation was an effort to increase internet availability at the complex. They said that some areas of the property could not get cell service and that the existing Wi-Fi infrastructure was overtaxed.

Have you ever heard of the term federation-washing?

"So just do it" is a glaring one for me.

Simply because it is disregarding someone else's thought processes and how their mind works. Where simply 'just do it' is not as easily and readily accomplished. This kind of advice is always uttered when one person is going on about how they're tired of something and want to do something else. So this gets mentioned.

It could be a lot of reasons as to why, even if it is down to the obvious reasons. My valid reason a lot of the time is that I just don't have the energy or will to just magically get myself to do something.

Half of LLM users (49%) think the models they use are smarter than they are, including 26% who think their LLMs are “a lot smarter.” Another 18% think LLMs are as smart as they are. Here are some of the other attributes they see:

• Confident: 57% say the main LLM they use seems to act in a confident way.
• Reasoning: 39% say the main LLM they use shows the capacity to think and reason at least some of the time.
• Sense of humor: 32% say their main LLM seems to have a sense of humor.
• Morals: 25% say their main model acts like it makes moral judgments about right and wrong at least sometimes. Sarcasm: 17% say their prime LLM seems to respond sarcastically.
• Sad: 11% say the main model they use seems to express sadness, while 24% say that model also expresses hope.

The three biggest players in voice assistants –– Google, Apple and Amazon –– have radically different approaches to profiling users, Northeastern University researchers say.

Just here to shed some light on BookWyrm, the Fediverse equivalent of Goodreads. I've been doing some more reading lately, and I like to keep track of what I read and also I like reading other's review, suggestions, etc. Now I boycot amazon and others big tech as much as possible, so for me Bookwyrm is the place to be. It's steadily growing I think, but I thought it deserved some more attention, therefor this post. Same goes for BookBrainz and to a lesser extend IA's Openlibrary. OpenLibrary is, among other things, a place where people catalogue book-metadata, and if a book is not on Bookwyrm yet, it can often be imported from OpenLibrary. Problem with OpenLibrary is that the data is often messy and there are a lot of duplicates. That's where BookBrainz comes in, the book-equivalent of MusicBrainz. They're not that big yet, but what they do very well is that they have got very clean data. I feel like BookBrainz has the potential to be the perfect source of data on books, for other apps to use as they please, similar to how MusicBrainz is already functioning. It just needs more contributors, but I'm sure it's steadily growing. I just started doing my part, adding the books I read on all three.

Would love to hear thoughts on these platforms, as well as other platform suggestion if you've got any.

Edit: changed Bookwyrm.social to BookWyrm, since people should pick an instance themselves.

Tweet 1 & Tweet 2

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/58742668

Computer scientist Stephen Thaler again told his 'Creativity Machine' can't earn a ©

The very short version: It has now become clear that European governments can no longer rely on American clouds, and that we lack good and comprehensive alternatives. Market forces have failed to deliver a truly European cloud, and businesses won’t naturally buy as yet unproven cloud services, even when adorned with a beautiful European 🇪🇺 flag, so for now nothing will happen.

This means it’s time for industrial policy, which requires politics to be proficient in “industry.” Such proficiency is the only way to develop policies and plans that don’t go off the rails (which, unfortunately, can happen in many ways).

With a coherent strategy (see below for a suggestion), governments and industry can rapidly improve the cloud situation, allowing Europe to once more manage its own services without American prying eyes and without fearing the consequences of sanctions & transatlantic disputes.

That concludes the short version.