Stop giving them ideas

Yeah, it’s a point of pride by now. His narcissism means he’ll resent being ordered to do it, and will pull every tactic he can to deny and delay. He can easily scrounge up the money, but he doesn’t want to. So he’ll delay until the courts start putting liens on his assets. And even then, the lien would only take effect once he sells the affected asset, so he could just refuse to ever sell it.

I’m honestly shocked that nobody has corrected my incorrect usage of Poe’s Law.

I think this is a very well thought out approach to handling it. I can’t personally think of any better solutions, at least. I probably would have chosen some different phrasing for the tags, (CBH feels… Disconnected? I’d probably go with something like “No AI” or “AI-Free” instead), but that’s just a matter of personal diction. Outright banning posts about projects that use AI likely isn’t going to be feasible in the long run, and I think that simple declaration requirements will go a long way towards encouraging people to actually disclose their usage.

If you outright ban it, people will simply hide their usage. It feels like it’s akin to the US War On Drugs^TM in that way. If you allow it and simply require responsible disclosure, more people will be inclined to be upfront about it. And that allows projects to be more accurately audited and vetted. The same way the war on drugs consolidated power to organized gangs (by making them the only ones capable of producing and transporting illegal drugs at scale), an outright ban on AI would only encourage people to hide their usage.

One potential way I see people trying to skirt the rules regarding self-promos is via proxy/strawman accounts. It would be trivial for me to spin up a dummy account and post my own project as an “I found this cool project but don’t have to disclose my AI use because I didn’t make it” post. I don’t personally have any projects in the works to post about, but I can easily see someone using it to try and skirt the disclosure requirements. Especially when we have seen situations like the (now infamous) Huntarr debacle, where the vibe-coder dev was actively avoiding AI disclosures. Because they knew it would tank the project’s popularity if people knew it was vibe coded.

I’m not sure if there is a good solution for this potential issue, except maybe to limit posts by new users. But even that is trivial to bypass. If you limit them based on account age, simply making a few strawman accounts and waiting for them to age is easy. Hell, I already have a few old throwaway accounts that I could swap over to whenever I want, and I’m not even planning anything nefarious.

There are similar problems with restricting users based on post/comment count, as that will likely stifle discussion from new users who are trying to be active in the community. One of the more frustrating parts about Reddit was that many of the most popular subs banned posts from users who were below a certain post karma threshold or who didn’t have enough previous posts. It created a catch-22 where you needed to have a few popular posts before you were allowed to make any posts. So there were people posting on random niche subs, simply for karma farming before they could then post on the larger subs. And if I was a vibe coder without scruples who is already looking to skirt the rules, it would be trivial for me to spin up an LLM and let it make a few comments before I start using it as a dummy account.

This may end up being a non-issue in the grand scheme of things. But I figured I’d mention it, because I genuinely don’t see a good solution for patching the big glaring hole in the self-promo rule. You’re absolutely correct that requiring disclosure for every post is unrealistic, because lots of users who post projects here aren’t the devs. They just stumbled across a cool project and wanted to share it, and they have no realistic way of knowing if the project uses AI. And if you restrict promo posts to only devs, you’ll only get posts from the people who fall into the (likely very small) overlapping section on the “is a Lemmy user” and “makes projects” Venn diagram. Lemmy is already a small community in the grand scheme of things. And restricting promo posts to only the people actively developing the projects would make it feel even smaller.

If I do use mine, I’ll put it up on codeberg so everyone can see exactly what its doing… and then get mad and tell me there is a better way.

Poe’s Law is always in effect. The best way to get an answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it is to post an incorrect answer, because people will go out of their way to correct you.

Portable DVD players, yeah. This was literally the first thing I thought of when I saw the headline.

I block all of my smart TVs at the DNS level with my pi-holes. All of the benefits (native streaming apps, easy casting, a functional remote without any fuss, etc) without any of the ads or tracking.

Yes, but not everything does. But luckily, Docker exists on Windows. So anything that runs on Docker can be run on Windows.

Given, Docker’s implementation on Windows is… Uhh… Not Great^TM. Because it’s basically using WSL to trick Windows into supporting a Linux file system. So it has some quirks. But it does technically work.

You have trouble getting Docker to auto-start on Windows? I thought that was the default behavior… Hell, even if it’s not, you can just add a Docker shortcut to the Startup folder.

Yeah, I keep a “Kids” profile on my Plex/Jellyfin server, specifically so I can throw Bluey, Mr Rogers Neighborhood, Miss Rachel, etc on and not worry about it. Elsagate (which is still a big problem) means you can’t just put on YouTube Kids and expect auto-played content to stay safe. But with my server, running solely on content I have curated, I know that everything in that “Kids” profile is going to be safe.

Yeah, gas stations in competitive areas will even occasionally sell gas at a minor loss, to drive more traffic into the lobby where they make the vast bulk of their profit. Gas station pump prices are almost universally determined by the price they can get their fuel at. And that price isn’t set by the station, it is set by the refineries and distributors, who largely base their prices off of oil futures. And oil futures don’t give a fuck what current oil prices are. If gas prices are high right now, it’s because gas distributors expect the price of oil to go up again.

Usenet will likely still be around, and torrents are like playing whack-a-mole.

My only complaint is that lots of my streaming devices don’t natively support newer codecs. So if I convert everything to AV1, my server will end up transcoding basically everything. Smart TVs are particularly bad about supporting anything past h264.

Yeah, the *Arr stack has effectively eliminated the need to permanently retain media. I want to watch something? I just request it, and 10-20 minutes later it is available on my server. I tend to treat *Arr requests the same way I used to treat Blockbuster trips. It takes a few minutes to get what you want to watch, but that’s also a chance to make some popcorn, grab a beer, and settle in.

I only (“only”) keep ~25-30TB of media available at any one moment. And even that is plenty. It’s literally hundreds of movies and TV shows. And if I want to purge old content, that’s easy to do too. Hell, I can even sort by the last time it was watched, and start with the shit that hasn’t been touched in like 18 months.

Yeah, WordPress is an extremely common vector for automated attacks. It’s highly expandable, but those plugins often aren’t secure. Even my tiny site (it isn’t running WordPress, and doesn’t even have a landing page because I only use it for my own stuff) sees a ton of attempted Wordpress attacks.

Ah, so ~0.909091 furlongs if we only count the play area. 1.090909 furlongs if we count the 10 yard infields.

When you remove the top 10% of earners, the average American wage drops to something like $35-40k. America may be the most prosperous country in the world, but it’s only going to a few people.

There is a car rental company that has been pushing legitimately awful AI ads on YouTube. Congrats, I probably wasn’t going to rent a car from you. But now I will specifically avoid your company if I ever need to rent a car.

Yeah, the vast majority of people barely even know how to use a web browser. They won’t care about (or even notice) this change.

3D printed gun designs these days don’t even use plastic for most of the critical parts. The goal is to print a frame, which you can then assemble into a full gun using durable off-the-shelf parts that are available from any hardware store. No need to 3D print a bolt (and deal with all of the manufacturing issues that entails) when you can just buy a bolt for 5¢ at any hardware store. Especially when that bolt will be more precise and durable than the plastic bolt you would have printed.

It’s the old carpentry idea that if you can’t get precision by hand, you can borrow it from something else. Need to cut a bunch of identical boards, with precision in 64ths of an inch? A #8-32 bolt will have 32 threads per inch. So a half turn on the bolt will advance or retract the bolt 1/64 inches, accurate down to whatever the bolt manufacturer’s clearance is. Probably a few thousands of an inch. Build a jig to hold your boards at the saw, and thread a bolt into the jig to act as the board stop. Now you can turn the bolt to adjust your clearance as needed, and you’ll be accurate down to 1/64 by only making half turns each time.

And 3D printed guns use the same concept. You don’t print a plastic barrel that will explode after two or three shots, you just leave a void for a store-bought pipe to fit into the frame. The pipe will be more durable and more precise than anything you could feasibly print. You don’t need to 3D print a firing pin that will blunt/shatter/jam after a few uses, when you can just use a steel nail that will have better durability and avoid jamming. And all of the parts you need can be bought at a hardware store without raising any suspicions. That’s part of what makes this so dumb. They’re not just requiring printers to scan for potential gun parts. They would require printers to scan for anything that could potentially hold or manipulate gun parts. And that is a much broader spectrum than simply scanning for the shapes of the parts directly.

Probably the part where keeping everything local would allow the driver to easily bypass the device. Splice a few wires, and boom. But if it is doing some off-site verification, they’ll be able to immediately know if the device is disabled. Similarly, they could do things like monitor the car’s location in real time, and have it throw up a red flag if the car is moving but the driver hasn’t performed a test. That would be a sign of tampering.

It also allows them to know if the driver fails the test, which is important for probation/parole reasons, where not drinking is often a condition of release. So if they fail the test, it should automatically alert their supervising officer. Can’t do that if it’s all local.