tal

@ tal @lemmy.today

Posts

637
Comments

12761
Joined

3 yr. ago

Off-and-on trying out an account over at @tal@oleo.cafe due to scraping bots bogging down lemmy.today to the point of near-unusability.

8h ago

Arizona clergy who learn of child abuse in confessions aren’t required to report it, court rules
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tal @lemmy.today 8h ago

It's not very surprising. There's a legal rationale behind it.
Certain classes of people are granted privileged communications.
Lawyers are permitted privileged communications with the people they represent, as those people need to be able to be honest with them about their situation. You cannot compel these communications to be handed over, and I don't believe that there's an obligation to report. The idea is that we donlt want communication to break down with lawyers, because thst causes other social harm.
Similar is also true for certain other relationships, like husband-wife.
Doctor-patient.
And I guess there priest-parisoner; priests often provide a similar counsel-and-advise role.
searches
https://www.encyclopedia.com/law/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/privileged-communication
Privileged communications exist because society values the privacy or purpose of certain relationships. The established privileged communications are those between wife and husband, clergy and communicant, psychotherapist and patient, physician and patient, and attorney and client.
These relationships are protected for various reasons. The wife-husband and clergy-communicant privileges protect the general sanctity of marriage and religion. The psychotherapist or physician and patient privilege promotes full disclosure in the interests of the patient's health. If patients were unable to keep secret communications with psychotherapists or physicians relating to treatment or diagnosis, they might give doctors incomplete information. If doctors received incomplete information, they might be unable to administer health care to the patient, which is the very purpose of the doctor-patient relationship.
The attorney-client privilege exists for roughly the same reason as the physician-patient privilege. In order to secure effective representation, a client must feel free to discuss all aspects of a case without the fear that her attorney will be called at trial to repeat her statements. Likewise, to retain the client's trust and do his job properly, the attorney must be allowed to withhold from the court and opposing party private communications with the client.
A communication is not confidential, and therefore not privileged, if it is overheard by a third party who is not an agent of the listener. Agents include secretaries and other employees of the listener. For example, a communication between a psychotherapist and patient would be privileged even if the psychotherapist's secretary happened to overhear it. In such a case, the secretary could not be forced to testify about the communication. However, a communication between a psychotherapist and a patient on a public elevator occupied by third parties would not be privileged and could be used in court.

8h ago

I just used ddg to search for something and the first result was for a page that 404's, how is that possible?

404 means that a web sever doesn't have something at the URL you requested.

Search engines build an index periodically by looking at what's on a website. That's what provides your search results. They aren't informed if a web server removes or moves content, though eventually, they'll have a bot that checks, notices the change, and updates the index.

They --- well, Google, and I assume most --- will update major sites more frequently, so this is probably more common if you're pulling something off a small, backwater website.

1d ago

If you live in California you can now tell data brokers to delete your personal information. Here’s how to do it

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tal @lemmy.today 1d ago

It's absolutely worth requesting your data to be deleted regardless of where you live by claiming to live in California...

I do think it's possible that some of them won't delete your data upon request, failing to comply with the law

That's not failure to comply with the law if you don't actually live in California.

People have a legal location of residence in the US.

If you want to establish legal residency in a state, you're typically looking at doing something like spending the majority of the year there.

EDIT: I'd also be pretty confident, though the article doesn't talk about it, that California won't normally have jurisdiction for California state law unless a data broker is doing business in California, and that that will also be a constraining factor. Like, if a data broker company is only doing business in, say, Russia, the US will not enforce rulings against them regarding California state law in general.

1d ago

From iPads to XBoxes, Device Prices Soar as AI Hoards Memory Chips

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tal @lemmy.today 1d ago

Because AI has become so lucrative, the three major RAM manufacturers have shifted from mostly producing conventional DRAM to focusing more of their capacity on HBM, which is what AI data centers need.

The author probably wants "DIMMs" rather than "DRAM". HBM memory is DRAM too (well, I guess theoretically you could make non-DRAM memory with an HBM interface, but...)

1d ago

Ostrich sheen "Sea of Okinawa", a blue ink with red sheen

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tal @lemmy.today 1d ago

Yeah, I currently have a pen with about a 50% water-Nitrogen mix. It sheens less like that, but at least it isn't infuriating to use as a regular writing ink that way --- doesn't hard-start if I stop writing for a handful of seconds.

I pretty much entirely use fountain pens for writing, not doing decorative signatures or whatnot. Being pretty is really just a fun plus for me; what's most-important is that it be pleasant to write with. Having the very-most-sheeniest of inks isn't really terribly important, just fun.

Nitrogen seems like a very light Cyan that is super saturated, so diluting it might change the underlying hue to something you won’t like.

It shows up as maybe a medium-dark blue at the 50% dilution point for me. Not far off the Sea of Okinawa ink, somewhat darker.

This experience did inspire me to pick up a Opus 88 Jazz so that I have one eyedropper pen as well, to mix things directly into the pen with a syringe. The TWSBI Eco I did the water-Nitrogen mix in was approximate, and I wasted ink to do the dilution, dipping the thing in water to suck some up, given that the ink was already in the pen.

2d ago

Ostrich sheen "Sea of Okinawa", a blue ink with red sheen

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tal @lemmy.today 2d ago

Thanks again, SimplyGreg (I was the one not happy with Nitrogen). Appreciate it!

2d ago

Open source project fools AI scrapers with poisoned font

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tal @lemmy.today 2d ago

Ehh. It'd kill browser "search text" functionality, as well as Reader Mode on Firefox.

2d ago

People who still use Reddit, why?

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tal @lemmy.today 2d ago

It was made to replace lemmynswf.com but it doesn't even hold a candle to it.

I've good news for you, then. Lemmynsfw.com came back up quite a while back.

2d ago

Trigger rumble for Xbox controller?

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tal @lemmy.today 2d ago

I don't have a fix for you, but a note: I dunno what driver you're using, but if it's xpadneo, as of this 2022 issue:

https://github.com/atar-axis/xpadneo/issues/374

...it sounds like even on Bluetooth, what's being done is a limited-functionality version of what the pad supports. It sounds like the kernel API presently just supports emulating rumble functionality on the triggers, whereas the game controller apparently is capable of providing (more elaborate) force feedback, variable levels of resistance at various points as you depress the trigger.

2d ago

Testing server load with login required on old.lemmy.today

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tal @lemmy.today 2d ago

Thanks so much, mrmanager!

2d ago

Testing server load with login required on old.lemmy.today

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tal @lemmy.today 2d ago

Yeah, I don't want the whole world of social media to wind up in a "get an account everywhere to view anything" situation.

I think that it's a reasonable stopgap fix from an admin standpoint, because there aren't a whole lot of great levers for admins to pull to try to deal with bots beating the hell out of a server. And one can't just have one's server become unusable.

But it should really be something that is addressed on the dev side. Like, we need a real, long-term solution for the Web.

Also, while improving server performance and failure modes under load would help, the "badly-written, aggressive scraper bots that ignore robots.txt and are given loads of network resources clobbering servers" is something that affects many, many different Web servers out there. This isn't a Lemmy problem, nor even just social media problem. It's a Web problem.

I think what really needs to happen is some form of mechanism that makes it hard for purely-automated systems to hammer a server, something that segregates bots and humans. Maybe a CAPTCHA or other proof-of-resource thing or something like that.

It's going to also create server admin problems. Think of things like Web search engines indexing sites --- server admins normally want their servers to be indexed by "good" bots --- so it's going to create additional headache in that even after successfully creating a system that is able to segregate bots and humans, admins have to be able to identify "good" bots --- maybe "good" IP ranges or have "good" bots use public keys or something --- and then whitelist those. Maybe have some mechanism to distribute "good bot" whitelists and an Apache mod that downloads them occasionally, lets an admin subscribe to a whitelist or something.

I also kind of like the ability to occasionally wget -r sections of sites, and a solution of the above sort will break that without logging in in a browser and handing off browser cookies to wget, which is not ideal.

And there's some resource cost to humans --- just lower --- for proof-of-resource solutions, and human time cost for CAPTCHAs, all of which are undesirable.

considers

One unorthodox solution might be making it easier to snapshot a site. Like, okay. One of the things that irritates the hell out of me is that the bots are doing this to a number of websites that go out of their way to make it really easy to distribute the data that they're after.

Like, GitHub --- which has lots of open-source code, which is useful to train coding AI models --- ran into load problems with bots scraping it. That was induced by the same data being massively downloaded over via inefficient Web views. Bots would follow every single link, many of which displayed the same data formatted slightly differently. But...you can already get all of the code far more efficiently, which would be better for GitHub and better for bot operators, by just using git clone to pull the code (and all of its history!). Bot operators could just say "oh, this is GitHub" and just git clone everything and the load would be completely ignorable. I'm sure that people have mass-git-cloned GitHub lots of times before. The reason bot operators presumably aren't doing it is because it takes some amount of time and dev effort on their side compared to just "build generic Web spider and clobber everything".

Same thing for the Threadiverse. The Threadiverse will let you set up a Threadiverse instance and subscribe to everything, efficiently feed all the posts and comments you want to your instance, the moment they come in. In nice, machine-readable form, rather than in something intended for humans that you have to scrape and post-process. But...it takes more dev effort to set up something specific to the Threadiverse than to just treat it like another website.

If there were some sort of widely-adopted API for "request site snapshot" or "request snapshot of changes since time X", widely-enough that it were worth using, maybe bot operators would use that instead. If they don't have to write a "detect GitHub site and git clone" and "detect Lemmy and subscribe to posts and comments" system, but just have a single universal "dump changes" API, they might use that; less dev effort on their end.

considers

I guess the problem is that some website operators might treat the "snapshot API" itself as an opportunity to discriminate between bots and humans, and just return garbage or nothing as a snapshot. Some websites don't want to be scraped at all. If many websites returned incorrect data in response to such an API request, that'd kill the incentive of bot operators to use such an API.

2d ago

Testing server load with login required on old.lemmy.today

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tal @lemmy.today 2d ago

It's probably not directly related to these changes if you're only doing it Saturday and it's only on old.lemmy.com, but if you're looking into load problems, might be indirectly relevant. In the past...I think two days, using the standard Lemmy Web UI, I've seen a high rate of the server returning a page just reading:

Error!
There was an error on the server. Try refreshing your browser. If that doesn't work, come back at a later time. If the problem persists, you can seek help in the Lemmy support community or Lemmy Matrix room.

Sometimes, but not always, the above error text is also followed by:

The server returned this error: Error. This may be useful for admins and developers to diagnose and fix the error

This has not, as far as I can tell, shown up when trying to view lists of posts (like, when I view all subscribed posts) but it does show up when trying to view the page for a post. It appears to affect all posts for me, not just specific ones.

I initially thought that its just that the post had been deleted, but I could view said posts fine on the original, remote instance.

One such example that I just hit, tried to load a number of times unsuccessfully:

https://lemmy.today/post/57605044

Which has, as a remote post:

https://nord.pub/c/games@lemmy.world/p/326761/is-routine-worth-playing

I reloaded five or six times, and eventually it came up locally on lemmy.today.

When it happens, it seems to affect all of the post pages that I try to load.

When I see this, the error page comes up pretty quickly, maybe in a second, so it's not some (long) timeout. Maybe hitting some limit on concurrent database queries or something like that?

tries loading page again

And now that post is back to showing an error. Also, I saw it without doing a cache-invalidating reload on Firefox (shift-reload rather than a normal reload), so whatever the server is trying to generate, and failing, it's not driven by the server trying to respond to something that my browser will have cached.

When the problem is happening, the same problem also shows up when I try to view my user profile page (so doesn't as best I can tell, affect lists of posts, either "all subscribed" or viewing posts in a community, but does affect individual post pages and does affect user profile pages).

2d ago

The hill I will die on: Games are the opposite of fun, and I’d ban them for anyone over 12 | Emily Watkins

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tal @lemmy.today 2d ago

There used to be a convention of having authors who would, at least occasionally, write deliberately-enraging opinion articles in magazines. In my experience, they were typically at the end of magazines. Maybe not outright wrong articles, but they'd make statements that many readers of the magazine would object to.

The idea, as I understand it, was to --- and this was before social media, in the Internet-based sense of the word, developed a focus on this --- drive engagement. People would write letters to the editor complaining and arguing against it, and then the magazine could print some of these in the next issue in the letters section.

John C. Dvorak was the most-prominent example of this that I recall --- he put articles in a few computer magazines --- and was notable in that I recall him publicly-admitting on one occasion that he did this, that it wasn't just that he happened to have controversial opinions.

Huh. Looking at his WP article, it looks like he just died last week.

Anyway, my point is that I could believe that publications might still have authors who do this sort of thing.

3d ago

[SOLVED] Audio problems in Fallout London

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tal @lemmy.today 3d ago

If you're using other mods at the same time, I'd try doing the binary search thing --- turn them off, see if the problem goes away, if so, turn half of them off, see if the problem goes away, then of the problematic half, try turning half of that off, etc.

searches

It sounds like Bethesda says that something similar can happen in their games if you have a 5.1 configuration with nothing hooked up to some of the speakers.

I vaguely recall some bug on very old versions of Proton, something with the sound subsystem, that caused speech to not show up in some Bethesda game, though I think it was a problem that showed up after a while, not always not present from the start of the game. Trying to deal with that was what initially got me to use Proton GE. I doubt that it's what's going on here, but you could try switching Proton versions.

I don't have Fallout 4 installed at the moment, but Skyrim has separate volume sliders in the settings for voice and music, so I assume Fallout 4 does too. You might check that.

3d ago

Do you think I should get a PC or a PS5 for my birthday?

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tal @lemmy.today 3d ago

I personally would much rather have a PC, given a choice between having one or the other. When I have had both in the past, I have always wound up with a console that's gathering dust.

However, that depends on what you're doing with it and what you want. Consoles have their own strong points:

Less setup/troubleshooting/maintenance.
Because the platform is locked down, harder for other players to cheat in multiplayer competitive online games. The PC is open.
Everyone has more-or-less the same hardware, which is typically desirable for 3D multiplayer competitive video games. No "get a more expensive and powerful video card to get a slight edge".
There is basically one standard controller, so games in the game library are more likely to support the features of your controller (assuming, of course, that you're using a controller on the PC).
Some platform-exclusive games (and obviously that cuts both ways, and the PC library is much larger, but if you very specially want some of the PS5 exclusives, you need a PS5 to do it).

3d ago

If you could have a small farm, what would you grow/keep?

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tal @lemmy.today 3d ago

I don't know about a whole farm, but I suppose that the plant that I'd most personally be likely to grow would be some sort of hot peppers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Capsicum_cultivars

Not a lot of work, and nice fresh in small quantities --- so having some growing there is nice. Plus, it's something where a grocery store is only gonna have a limited selection of options relative to what's out there.

Whether that's a good choice is gonna depend on climate where one lives.

I also kind of like pineapple guavas. Those are hard to find in stores (unavailable in many places) as they don't ship well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feijoa

If I didn't personally have to take care of them, probably a variety of fruit trees, grapes, berries, maybe squash. Dad planted stuff around the back yard when I was a kid planned so that there was always something edible out there year-round. Grafted stuff on there too, so you had plumcots on one of the apricot trees, a peach tree that was half yellow and half white, a bunch of types of apples and plums (IIRC seven types on one tree) and so forth. It was neat from a consuming standpoint, but I wouldn't personally want to deal with caring for each. If you enjoy the hobby, though...shrugs More fun than just having a ton of one thing. Not optimal from a cash crop standpoint, though.

EDIT: Oh, strawberries. Not that they're hard to find, but store-bought strawberries are really watery, as they're sold by weight or something like that. If you've ever had strawberries that aren't as heavily watered, like, wild strawberries, it's a neat experience. Much stronger flavor.

3d ago

Arizona, California and Nevada would share cuts under federal proposal to manage the Colorado River

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tal @lemmy.today 3d ago

We can desalinate all the water we want in California --- we already have a bunch of desalination facilities, and can build those out as far as need be --- but desalinated water isn't as cheap as already-fresh water. That's mostly an annoyance for, say, residential use. But it's harder to competitively do agriculture on desalinated water. Israel has done some limited agriculture on desalinated water, but farmers are not generally going to be okay with that as an option. Most agriculture uses a lot of water.

searches

Someone ran the numbers to see roughly what it would cost if we did only desalinated water for everyone in the US.

https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/how-much-energy-does-desalinisation

Producing enough drinking water for someone — assuming 3 litres per day — costs just $2.30 for the entire year. That’s less than the cost of a single bottle of water in many countries.

We actually use way more water than we do for drinking --- we're pretty prolific with water to do things like lawns.

If the average person in the United States uses 310 litres of water per day for domestic uses, it would cost them $0.42 per day. Or $154 per year.

We'd probably want to conserve more nationally in such a scenario (Californians use less than the national average). But even with no conservation, it's very much doable.

It's a cost that we'd rather not pay if we don't have to, as a society, but we certainly are able to do so for residential needs.

But if there isn't enough freshwater to do agriculture, then who gets the freshwater determines which farmers go out of business (or at least have to shift to something else) and which get to keep operating.

4d ago

Low water levels: EU clears old Nazi warships from the Danube

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tal @lemmy.today 4d ago

That's pre-atomic-weapons-testing steel right there.

4d ago

US government map of Africa mislabels every country at global conference

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tal @lemmy.today 4d ago

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/close_enough_for_government_work

Adjective
close enough for government work (not comparable)
(US, idiomatic, humorous, derogatory) Adequate; acceptable as government work, imperfect but not worth the time nor effort of improving.

Synonyms: good enough for government work

5d ago

Speed Dating

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tal @lemmy.today 5d ago

She went for him in late 1993:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds

Linus Torvalds is married to Tove Torvalds (née Monni), a six-time Finnish national karate champion, whom he met in late 1993. He was running introductory computer laboratory exercises for students and instructed the course attendees to send him an e-mail as a test, to which Tove responded with an e-mail asking for a date.

Fedora won't have been around.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedora_Linux

Fedora Linux[10] is a Linux distribution developed by the Fedora Project. It was originally developed in 2003 as a continuation of the Red Hat Linux project.

It looks like there were Linux distributions at the time, but they were very early:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_distribution

Early distributions included:
Torvalds' "Boot-Root" images, from v0.95a onwards "Root" was maintained by Jim Winstead Jr., the aforementioned disk image pair with the kernel and the absolute minimal tools to get started (0.10: 4 November 1991)[12][13][14][15]
MCC Interim Linux (3 March 1992)[16]
TAMU Linux, based on MCC with simpler installation and X11 (14 July 1992)[17]
Softlanding Linux System (SLS) which included the X Window System and was the most comprehensive distribution for a short time (15 August 1992)[18]
H.J. Lu's "bootable rootdisks" (23 September 1992),[19][20] and "Linux Base System" (5 October 1992)[21][22]
Yggdrasil Linux/GNU/X, a commercial distribution (alpha: 8 December 1992)
The two oldest, still active distribution projects started in 1993. The SLS distribution was not well maintained, so in July 1993 a new SLS-based distribution, Slackware, was released by Patrick Volkerding.[23] Also dissatisfied with SLS, Ian Murdock set to create a free distribution by founding Debian in August 1993, with first public BETA released in January 1994 and first stable version in June 1996.[24][25]

I think that there are two possible takeaways from this:

Not clear what distro was used --- if any --- but if it was, it won't have been a presently existing one. It's possible that he was just rolling his own setup, not using a distro at all.
Linus's date with Tove derived from an email exchange. What ninja chicks look for in a guy is possibly an email client, not a Linux distribution at all. It sounds like Linus was probably using Pine at the time (though someone could go dig up mail headers from old emails to check).