The change

SO are going to let any registered user vote on content. Until now that "privilege" has required 100 points, a near-impossible task for a new user these days because no one ever upvotes questions and powerusers rush to answer all easy questions before anyone else can get to them (and will flag/close any other question as being off-topic).

The reasoning behind this change makes sense:

It's been a while since we last talked about the one-reputation voting change. We are still pursuing this because stagnating participation on the network is a concern for all of us, and we want to think about ways to grow the active community on the network. We have, by design, utilized rep as a threshold to award privileges and prevent bad behavior. While this has been effective in creating the current status quo, it has made participating on the network in some of the most basic ways difficult.

The response

But the post is on -143. Let's see what SO's (unpaid) jannies have to say.

Zoe (before you ask, yes she is):

The company has already been made aware of the many ways this can be abused, and the significant workload increase this will lead to when people notice, and that the tooling we have is nowhere close to capable of dealing with the kinds and volume of abuse this will cause. They have not responded to our concerns, and many mods (including multiple SO mods) have objected to the change from allowing sites to volunteer for the test to shoving it on SO. They did not care about the objections.

This response is ridiculous because:

• Jannies are always welcome to not do it for free and let SO pay someone to do it. No one is giving you more work - you're unpaid, you don't have to do anything.

• Oh and did I mention that Zoe's username is "Zoe is on strike"? That's right, a striking janny is still actually doing it for free and even giving feedback on new features. Good strike!

Someone else (who used to work for SO, left and yet still comments says:

Fraud: your approach is "disable association bonus and hope for the best?" Seriously? Im an r-slur but you've never done fraud before. Go out and sin, and come back when you know how to recognize it.

And a current non-striking mod says:

We did not volunteer for this experiment. It has been opposed by the SO moderators and other sites did step up to volunteer.

You're literally all volunteers lmao

Tooling does not scale for the concerns we have. It's mentioned that this is launching with new tooling, but they aren't being shared "at this junction". For moderators, that means the tooling does not exist at this point then.

Maybe if you were a paid employee then you'd be able to see this tooling.

CM [community manager] time is limited, and with focus split on new initiatives, AI content, and now this, the time they have to allocate to investigate vote fraud will decrease.

Maybe leave fraud investigations up to paid employees, like every other company.

By the way the three users who I've quoted here - all powerusers - haven't answered a single SO question between them in three years.

Stuff like this infuriates me because SO's powerusers and jannies are completely detached from the core purpose of the site yet they spend all their time stinking the place up and squabbling about meta shit. Stack Overflow is almost entirely self-moderating, these people aren't needed. If I worked for SO and had to interact with these idiots every day then I'd . SO needs to start just doing things and stop cucking themselves to the jannies.

Let's end with an r-slurred Jeff Atwood tweet:

Nope, the goal of SO is to answer my question.

I usually don't game on this laptop, and even when I do, it seems like the games I am interested in are available on there. The only thing I can think of is that I have multiple tabs open in my browser that I plan to one day read. I would lose them if I did it.

The recently-enacted European Digital Services Act (DSA) gives the Dublin-based body substantial enforcement powers over social media and video platforms in the area of policing illegal and hateful content.

The Irish regulator has been seeking to recruit trusted flaggers on three-year terms, with specific conditions and rules against conflicts of interest attached. It says that while experience in reporting hateful and illegal content is an advantage, it's not a pre-requisite.

“Approved Trusted Flaggers will have a fast lane when reporting suspected illegal content, where online platforms will be legally obliged to give their notices priority, and to process and decide on these reports without undue delay,” the regulator says on its ‘flaggers' application form

Areas to be policed include illegal speech such as discrimination and hate speech, non-consensual behaviour, online bullying and “negative effects on civic discourse or elections”. It also includes scams, offences to minors, sexual-based abuse, incitement to self-harm and other topics.

@lain @LinuxShill idk who else to ping but I'm starting to learn these things and she'd absolutely wipe the floor with me. She even mentions bloat, at this rate I wonder if she shitposts on /g/ in between making tutorials

Torn because he would be like omg ai

Self-Taught Optimizer (STOP): Recursively Self-Improving Code Generation

This is the repo for the paper: Self-Taught Optimizer (STOP): Recursively Self-Improving Code Generation

@article{zelikman2023self, title={Self-Taught Optimizer (STOP): Recursively Self-Improving Code Generation}, author={Eric Zelikman, Eliana Lorch, Lester Mackey, Adam Tauman Kalai}, journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.02304}, year={2023} }

Abstract: Several recent advances in AI systems (e.g., Tree-of-Thoughts and Program-Aided Language Models) solve problems by providing a "scaffolding" program that structures multiple calls to language models to generate better outputs. A scaffolding program is written in a programming language such as Python. In this work, we use a language-model-infused scaffolding program to improve itself. We start with a seed "improver" that improves an input program according to a given utility function by querying a language model several times and returning the best solution. We then run this seed improver to improve itself. Across a small set of downstream tasks, the resulting improved improver generates programs with significantly better performance than its seed improver. Afterward, we analyze the variety of self-improvement strategies proposed by the language model, including beam search, genetic algorithms, and simulated annealing. Since the language models themselves are not altered, this is not full recursive self-improvement. Nonetheless, it demonstrates that a modern language model, GPT-4 in our proof-of-concept experiments, is capable of writing code that can call itself to improve itself. We critically consider concerns around the development of self-improving technologies and evaluate the frequency with which the generated code bypasses a sandbox.

4chan explains it better

!nooticers you need to nootice harder

Donald Trump's social platform Truth Social trades at a slight premium to other social cos

• Truth Social 1860.3x
• @Reddit 9.8x
• @Meta 9.2x
• @Pinterest 7.7x
• @Snap 4.1x
• @tiktok_us 1.9x (parent: Bytedance)

If this valuation holds up, Elon will be happy pic.twitter.com/7hEx2YCdkh

— Anand Sanwal (@asanwal) March 30, 2024

Any tips on getting a job right now?

Could you hire me?

For my last post on this see "You turned Stack Overflow into a nuclear test site" - StackOverflow opens up voting to all registered users; jannies revolt (again).

Basically the SO staff announced that they were going to let all users be able to vote, in order to reverse the site's participation issues and problems with engaging new users. The jannies (many of whom are still on strike) hated this and downvoted the shit out of the announcement.

Today the staff announced that the decision has been reversed and the trial won't be rolled out.

I acknowledge the feedback shared by community members and by moderators. We felt that this experiment was important because it allowed users to participate and engage in a low-effort core action on the site. We believe a healthy community involves encouraging participation from new and existing users, among other aspects. We understand there are ways to engage with new users and to further de-risk the experiment other than how it is currently designed.

also

we would like to apologize for the concern, stress, and tension caused by this experiment

lol

The SO powerusers and jannies still shit on the wagies anyway:

However, I am a bit disappointed that it has been paused only after the general disagreement from the community on Meta, and not after all the moderators told you how terrible of an idea this is.

and a particularly enormous post from Catija who used to work as an employeed SO employee and has hung around just to shit on her former colleagues. I'll not even paste 10% of her screed but it includes subtitles and subsubtitles.

It's unclear to me (and to many others, it seems) what you actually want from SO—and SE. What are the goals of this or any other change?

Subtitles include:

Content Quality as a KPI

Step 2—Review and reward curation of old content

Voting as the key activity metric

Activity as a KPI

Someone makes the mistake of saying they wished that the trial would go ahead, and they end up on -4:

I support having experiments like this, even I don't like them. I share the gratitude shown on comments by some people so far. I'm glad to know that what I thought will happen regarding the user experience when the experiment was shared privately with Stack Exchange Network moderators and when volunteer sites were required, was right.

I haven't made an effort post in forever so here is me being about Apple.

I asked ChatGPT to give me the top 20 complaints about Apple and I went through and collated a list from there

Apple is expensive

Models

In general I find the price discussion a weird "gotcha" when discussing iPhones in particular. You can find a smartphone to match just about every price bracket you want to and the iPhone is no exception with the current gen SE as low as $429 or the a max spec'd iPhone Pro Max going for $1600. Of course these numbers aren't through a cell provider which offer discounts for a ton of models. This is also excluding used phones which are always a great idea in $CURRENT_YEAR if you're not a huge smartphone person or just want to get a deal.

Laptop-wise I feel the M1 MacBook Air is still an excellent choice at it's $650-$700 price point - clearly not a bargain laptop but the experience of using it is very solid and a great gateway into the Mac ecosystem.

The M2 Mac Mini is a very easy sell at $599 to for an ultra-slim desktops.

Storage and Memory upgrades

This is my biggest complaint with Macs.

The storage and memory upgrades are highway robbery. It's clearly a tool in their "price ladder" strategy and simply used to get you to work your way up to the next highest model.

While I feel like the base model M1 MacBook Air is an excellent machine for a lot of people, it's crazy they're shipping much higher priced models with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.

The copium you hear from Mac fanboys about macOS running fine 8GB RAM because the "storage is so fast" makes no technical sense - NAND used in storage is measured in microseconds and DRAM is measured in nanoseconds. The latency differences we are talking about here are an order of magnitude different.

Privacy / Security Concerns

Privacy and security inspire the most religious fervor out of any IT topic. It's extremely hard to have discussions about privacy and security in a logical manner with nerds because they'll often see glowies that aren't there and ignore the glowies in front of them.

The most important question to ask for any security question is what is your threat model?

Are you trying to avoid nation state actors? Good news, you can stop worrying because they will win! Stop using computers for anything that will get Israel after you, they have an unlimited budget and carte blanche to ignore the law.

If you are expecting the glowies to lack the ability to infiltrate GrapheneOS or Tails supply chain, I have a bridge to sell you.

If your threat model is "I don't want my smartphone data to be cracked in a few minutes", good news - both Android and iOS are fully encrypted and your data is safe. The most important thing there is choosing good passwords (passphrases).

If your threat model is more privacy focused I think there's a better case to be made for custom Android ROMs but if you're anything approaching normie I think it's self-explanatory why Apple is easier than a custom ROM more trustworthy than an advertising company.

Apple is lacking repairability front

Planned Obsolescence

The planned obsolescence take is easily taken down by the fact of Apple's software support on iOS devices. Apple released the iPhone SE (1st Gen) in March 2016 and released a security update last month.

"Battery Gate"

The entire saga of battery gate I think I've argued about on here multiple times so I'll recount what I've argued before:

Lithium ion batteries degrade over time, they also are reduced in performance if they're too hot or too cold.

If old enough or cold enough lithium ion batteries can reach levels where they won't supply enough power for your device to function at all.

To support this let me quote, not Apple, but Sammy:

If you're experiencing frequent shutdowns, visit your nearest service center.

It may be time for a battery check-up, as batteries are consumables, which naturally wear out over time.

https://www.samsung.com/us/support/galaxy-battery/care-and-maintenance/

Apple of course outlines this on their own page too

https://support.apple.com/en-us/101575

The takeaway then is your can either 1.) let a phone shutdown when it can't get enough juice or 2.) reduce the amount of juice being used.

Apple chose to do two and, clearly communicated this poorly hence the lawsuit , but the act itself is the obvious correct choice. This is due to the nature of lithium ion batteries not the jews of planned obsolesce.

Overheating

Overheating was an issue of MacBooks in the past, my theory is that Apple simply believed Intel's roadmap which had them getting past the 14nm process much sooner than they ever did. I also think this was what finally pushed them to go Apple Silicon as the headache of transitioning to an entirely new architecture would be worth it if they could get chips that actually worked at their listed thermal specs.

I think that Apple Silicon has been a resounding success in this regard.

https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib

This is a recording from an official conference/workshop/whatever for xorg- something that is used by most Linux distributions for their desktop environment, so it's not some small or unknown project by any means.

I won't mention anything else, just skip around the video and tell me if you notice anything

They are prohibited by law from adding functionality to download DRM protected content

And that's not the scope of the software. The scope of the software is to make it easier and faster to download shit from the web, not to specifically download shit protected by Widevine. If you assumed that JD2 is a piracy program you're a fricking r-slur. Plus, it's pretty clear that JD devs would absolutely love to add such functionality to their software, but because they are from a country with draconian laws they cannot do so, and to move to a freer country just to appease a few users that want to download shit from a few websites with DRM is just stupid.

JDownloader2 is great for many other things, including downloading pirated content. For example, you know those shitty download sites with multiple fake download buttons, waiting times and other bullshit like that? JDownloader2 is there so that you paste in a link, it figures out the right download link for you, and if there is a captcha, it'll automatically click it for you so it's as painless as possible.

One complaint I have is that in the recent years all those sites are getting protected by Matthew Princess and JD2 still hasn't figured out how to bypass Cuckflare's cockblock with shared browser cookies or something like that, so a lot of sites no longer really work in JD2.

However, another fantastic use for JD2 is the ability to add accounts and to do inline downloading. You can add a Google account and do 20 simultaneous inline downloads of a file from Google Drive that needs an account to download.

Or, and this is my favorite function, you know how Internet Archive is a safe haven for software piracy because of their DMCA exemption? And how their download speeds are painfully slow? And how their torrents are useless as they never contain all the files and no one ever uses them? And how some collections require you to have an account and direct download anyway?

With JDownloader2 it's actually feasible to grab shit from there by direct download, because you can add your IA account to JD2 to access those login only collections, and then you can start an inline download, so if normally you have that horrendous download speed of 700Kbps, now you have that, but multiplied by 20 times, so you can hit 14Mbps download speeds. Now it takes a few minutes to download a multi-gigabyte ISO instead of a few hours, because you're simultaneously downloading it 20 times. You could try and bop this up even further with advanced options, but JD2 limits it to 20 by default to not overly stress various servers when people use the software out of the box.

There are also other useful functions of JD2, like scanning links so you can grab all the images from a website with a gallery to easily batch download those, or the aforementioned YouTube downloader that's a good way to download and archive YouTube videos if you're a BIPOC, fear the command line and therefore cannot use yt-dlp like a white man, or you're just lazy. But JDownloader2 is not all-encompassing, and yeah, for different sites you'll want different tools, maybe even purpose written.

That is not to say that JDownloader2 is shit and gay because jewish chads and g*rmans and hurr durr they do not appease to my neurodivergent standards. It's irreplaceable for many things, but there are also many things that other software does better or simply do something that cannot be done in JD2. I still use it for inline downloading large files because I don't know other downloaders that let me do so and use site credentials to bypass login restrictions.

Personally, I fail to see where the issue with this image is. This is clearly an Asian man with his Caucasian (Kalmykian) wife.

Alright so I have a cheap laptop that I loaded debian / plasma onto.

Keyboard cover is wonky and sometimes when I hold left or right arrow it self-inserts a '4', which is fixed with turning off the num pad.

So any time I switch to another window, any time I try to upload something and the popup comes up for me to select a file, the left or up arrow is automatically pressed. Right now it's doing it with the up arrow.

You'd think "you just said your keyboard is messed up why is this shocking" well to that I say here's the weird part.

It doesn't happen randomly, it happens specifically when I change to another window, or a window is popped up like when saving or uploading a file. As soon as I press any arrow key it stops.

For example I'm on my browser now.. if I click to groomercord it will try to edit my last message (up arrow is held), and will keep scrolling up unless I press a random arrow key. When I click back to the browser where I'm writing this post, it begins to scroll up (up arrow held) and again I have to press a random arrow key to stop it.

WTF is going on? Why is me clicking another window triggering an arrow key?!!?! It won't ever happen randomly either. It will never do it again until the window is changed.

To add a weird cherry on top, if I click my terminal (Konsole) it won't scroll up my command history. It won't trigger this weird shit, but as soon as I click to another window it'll trigger the up arrow. First half of today was the left arrow, abot an hr ago it started doing the up arrow.

Pls help solve.

Do you we think Zuck paid for this article to counter his awkward UFC experience?

https://www.mensjournal.com/news/mark-zuckerberg-ufc-meme

Zuck bought astroturf from - 17 votes

👀

Hearing credible whispers about a certain hot young extremely-online journalist enjoying a romance with Sam Bankman-Fried while covering him.

— Alice (@AliceFromQueens) March 29, 2024