I am several hundred opossums in a trench coat

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • After a certain point, learning to code (in the context of application development) becomes less about the lines of code themselves and more about structure and design. In my experience, LLMs can spit out well formatted and reasonably functional short code snippets, with the caveate that it sometimes misunderstands you or if you’re writing ui code, makes very strange decisions (since it has no special/visual reasoning).

    Anyone a year or two of practice can write mostly clean code like an LLM. But most codebases are longer than 100 lines long, and your job is to structure that program and introduce patterns to make it maintainable. LLMs can’t do that, and only you can (and you can’t skip learning to code to just get on to architecture and patterns)



  • As a moderator of a couple communities, some basic/copypasta misbehaviour is caught by automated bots that I largely had to bootstrap or heavily modify myself. Near everything else has to be manually reviewed, which obviously isn’t particularly sustainable in the long term.

    Improving the situation is a complex issue, since these kinds of tools often require a level of secrecy incompatible with FOSS principles to work effectively. If you publicly publish your model/algorithm for detecting spam, spammers will simply craft their content to avoid it by testing against it. This problem extends to accessing third party tools, such as specialised tools Microsoft and Google provide for identifying and reporting CSAM content to authorities. They are generally unwilling to provision their service to small actors, IMO in an attempt to stop producers themselves testing and manipulating their content to subvert the tool.




  • Ok, so they do that. Here are some things that can plausibly go wrong:

    • Are the people posting the story funding thing anonymous? Because if they are, no one will fund it based on a one line description with no details. If the authors are known, any company engaging in the practice will be watching them like a hawk (essentially making investigation impossible)
    • The company engaging in the practice assumes the investigation is aimed at them and temporarily stops double billing until the journalists runs out of budget and everything blows over. They then resume double billing.
    • The company engaging in the practice assumes the investigation is aimed at them and consequently intimidates would-be whistleblowers into staying silent, basically preventing any progress
    • The company intentionally floods “Kickstarter for News” with spurious stories to drown out the item about them
    • The story isn’t funded because it doesn’t agree with the preconceived notion of enough users, who are only willing to fund content matching their own worldview
    • The story isn’t funded because, while people find it is important, more attention was placed on a story that agreed with the preconceived notion of enough users
    • What stories are funded have a huge bias towards the material condition of the wealthy (moreso than now), since they are the only ones with enough disposable income to fund content. Therefore, content focused on the conditions of the poor and marginalised is ironically marginalised
    • Unable to be subsidized by less prestigious entertainment content (like traditional investigative journalism was), the required upfront cost for stories balloons to a size not feasibly collected by donations
    • The wider population becomes apathetic to the platform as a whole (people have actual jobs and lives, and may not have the time to trawl through potential stories for something they want to fund), leaving only the extremely wealthy/powerful to fund stories. As a consequence the media is even more controlled by the elite than it is currently
    • It turns out there was never a story, and those that donated feel burned and are less likely to donate in the future
    • It turns out there was never a story, and, feeling pressure to produce something, the journalists intentionally misconstrue the truth

    I think a crowdsourced approach is a great idea, but only in the sense that my tax dollars go to independent news organisations.






  • Likewise, an open source project can totally die if they refuse to engage with the needs of the users. The lack of moderation and content management tools have been a longstanding criticism of Lemmy, and instances will migrate to alternatives that address these concerns. It is a genuine legal liability for instance operators if they are unable to sufficiently delete CSAM/illegal content or comply with EU regulations.