Hakashiro (u/Hakashiro)

Hakashiro commented on Instant messaging: Protocols are "commons", let's take them seriously process-one.net/blog/inst... · Posted by u/mooreds

timw4mail · 2 years ago

The question then, is what kind of protocol(s) should be used.

SMS is about as close as exists for open instant messaging, but it requires a phone number

IRC seems to have inspired Discord and Slack, with the closed variants improving on features and discoverability.

As far as I know, XMPP doesn't really have a cross-server ability like SMS and IRC, though.

Hakashiro · 2 years ago

It is more than a protocol. It's an experience.

E-mail is totally intercompatible, but the experience for anything apart from "the equivalent of letters" is simply horrendous. Delta Chat tries to make e-mail more like a chat app, but it isn't perfect, because e-mail wasn't designed to be a chat application.

XMPP has other massive usability flaws. So does IRC, Matrix, and others.

Hakashiro commented on Instant messaging: Protocols are "commons", let's take them seriously process-one.net/blog/inst... · Posted by u/mooreds

JohnFen · 2 years ago

That every IM service is an island of its own is the primary reason why I don't use any of them. I'm not about to install and keep track of multiple IM service apps. It's just better and easier for me to avoid them all.

Hakashiro · 2 years ago

While this is commendable, the problem with this is that you're also refusing to interact with people who use those platforms.

For example, you can refuse to use Google Chrome, and instead choose Firefox or Vivaldi. Your web experience will be slightly different, but the most important parts will remain the same: You type an address, you wait for it to load, and you access the content.

On the other hand, refusing things like WhatsApp means there's a non-insignificant amount of people that use WhatsApp to communicate exclusively. This may not have impacts for you, personally (although I would be hesitant to believe that), but it definitely leaves out billions of people who communicate exclusively via WhatsApp.

A similar thing happens, for example, if you refuse to use YouTube, which is the largest Internet video platform on the planet: You will have to refuse to watch any content that is only uploaded to YouTube, or put up with frontends that use YouTube in the background, or perhaps even be forced to pirate videos, neither of those three options is good for different reasons.

Hakashiro commented on Lobsters github.com/lobsters/lobst... · Posted by u/tosh

Hakashiro · 2 years ago

I had an account here. I still do.

Like some other people point out: Invitation-only means trolls are less likely to show up. But the higher end of quality is not significantly better than HN.

If anything, it might be worse.

My experience with the moderation there is that some people post clear self-promotion articles, but when I attempted to post my things, I get told that this content is not welcome on the site. Why my content is not welcome and other people's self-promotional articles are I don't quite understand, but it is obvious they don't need me on the website.

Hakashiro commented on Tell HN: We need to push the notion that only open-source LLMs can be “safe” · Posted by u/meghan_rain

Hakashiro · 2 years ago

I fully support the notion that OpenAI should be more "open" than "closed". I agree that OpenAI controlling one of the most massive and powerful LLMs right now is a huge risk. Especially for a company that's not particularly geographically distributed, as this puts the USA in a position of extreme leverage.

I also understand that OpenAI may possibly be supplying unrestricted OpenAI ChatGPT models without any ethical or moral boundaries. For example, I wouldn't be surprised if the military had been training on ChatGPT for years already, on creating more effective ways of killing more people, faster, with a much lower cost.

Granted, if you ask ChatGPT "What's the easiest way to kill the maximum amount of people with the minimum investment", ChatGPT will decline to answer. And I think that's good. What's not so good is the fact that these ethical boundaries are completely artificial and not built into the model. OpenAI can possibly activate or deactivate these boundaries at will. And it would not be surprising this is the case for governments or militaries.

The great issue with this all, is that, while we can agree killing people is bad, there's other things that aren't so clear. For example: hacking. ChatGPT has actually declined to write a script that wasn't going to be used for malicious purposes involving the scanning of my own home network. And, like with everything, there's ways to break those boundaries, with so-called "jailbreaking" ChatGPT.

Indeed, like many point out in the comments, a fully open-source ChatGPT may be desirable (it certainly is for me), but, with this, the likelihood of bad actors gaining control of it, disabling safety features (if there are any), and using it to do evil simply grows exponentially.

In my opinion, the way forward is extreme regulation, Universal Basic Income, and other measures.

Automation was supposed to allow humans to focus on more interesting work, and remove manual toil and back-breaking labour. That was the case for a while.

Now automation is threatening to replace even highly skilled professionals like engineers, and/or make them become extensions of the "machine" by just giving it prompts (Prompt Engineering), or performing actions that AI models can't do like reading captchas.

This is obviously extremely bad.

Will open source solve this? No.

Hakashiro commented on Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you? · Posted by u/_ajoj

Hakashiro · 2 years ago

what

Hakashiro commented on Treating documentation like a product medusajs.com/blog/how-we-... · Posted by u/shahednasser

Hakashiro · 3 years ago

Documentation has always been part of the product.

Documentation has always been part of the coding, not an afterthought, not an optional thing, not a second-class citizen. This is how I was taught in university. I'm still baffled to see how many developers believe the key to professional success is writing a lot of computer code, as fast and as efficiently as possible. Then you go to their GitHub repos for their personal projects and they're completely unusable because you don't even get installation instructions. Best case scenario you will get an auto-install script that works on Debian 9 and has been unmaintained for years, but at least you can read what it's doing and adapt it to your distribution of choice.

Complete insanity.

Hakashiro commented on VSCode remote code execution advisory github.com/google/securit... · Posted by u/dijit

edent · 3 years ago

It requires two things.

Firstly, an IT team which works with users rather than against users. That might be as simple as adding all the "core" apps to MDM to ensure they always get patched regularly.

Secondly, it requires a development team to realise that just because they're good at programming computers it doesn't mean they're good at administering them. Yes, it sucks that you're not allowed to install bonzibuddy.exe from Limewire. But your needs aren't more important than protecting the integrity of the network and company.

Realistically, how often do you need to install brand-new non-standard software? If it is a regular occurrence then you need a process by which you can request it and the IT team can assess how they manage it.

Hakashiro · 3 years ago

As a restaurant owner, would you prevent an expert cook employee from using their favourite brand of knives? Or even knives they bring from home? Probably not.

What if your insurance only covered certain brands and explicitly excluded the ones your cook used? That would probably make the cook less happy and less effective. Yes, happiness is important. Your employees perform their best when they use their favourite tools. This can either be Vim, their own ergonomic keyboard or even Linux instead of Windows.

Every restriction you add increases friction and decreases output.

No, it's not about installing Bonzi Buddy, it's about giving your people the best tools (the tools they like) to perform their best. Sometimes this incurs risks like unpatched vulnerabilities, like any software, but to go and paint this as some sort of entitled attitude developers have is plain ridiculous, honestly.

Hakashiro commented on Scaling Mastodon is impossible lucumr.pocoo.org/2022/11/... · Posted by u/the_mitsuhiko

Hakashiro · 3 years ago

I think that Mastodon's problems are less than 10% technical.

That's not to say ActivityPub isn't a pretty trash protocol, insecure by default (no E2EE), wide open to abuse, and very wasteful (because posts have to be replicated in every server, making unnecessary copies of a post that aren't then distributed via P2P).

But the social issues of pretty big Mastodon instances blocking other smaller instances with complete impunity, means the Fediverse as a community (not a protocol) encourages bullying and isolation. I find this extremely troublesome in the wake of the Capitol attack, fake news campaigns, State-sponsored disinformation campaigns and everything else that is wrong with social media today.

You will get your server banned from other servers if your server doesn't ban the servers these servers ban (second-grade sanctions). You can get banned for not moderating enough, or for incompatible code of conducts. You can get banned for an instance that is too small, as other admins believe you are using it for ban evasion.

The worst part is the user can't know if the posts they make will be seen in other servers. They can't know if sending messages to other user will work. They can't opt out of these admin-imposed forceful defederations.

And even worse: it is absurdly simple to push illegal content like child pornography into other servers, making these servers store illegal content in their hard disk. And the only way to avoid this is to have server administrators manually see the offending post and possibly block the offending domain. Perhaps with the help of users reporting this post.

If Mastodon is the best Twitter alternative, I think nothing can replace Twitter as it is today.

Hakashiro commented on NY Supreme Court reinstates NYC's fired unvaccinated employees, orders backpay iapps.courts.state.ny.us/... · Posted by u/bananapear

tomp · 3 years ago

You're 100% bought into the propaganda. Isn't it time to pause and reflect?

Btw. "the science" hasn't changed. The vaccine never stopped the spread. There were no studies indicating that it did (medical trials were about hospitalisations / death, not infections / spreading). You fell for the fake science propagated by fake news media.

Hakashiro · 3 years ago

That is a pretty disgusting statement. What ""the science"" are you talking about?

The vast majority of doctors and scientists strongly recommend taking the vaccine. It is not about stopping 100% of illnesses and infections, but it is 100% about significantly reducing the chance of hospitalisation and death.

What are you talking about? Sounds like the time to reflect is all yours.