I’m not trying to be overly self-promotional, but rss.ponder.cat + piefed.social’s “feeds” could probably do this very well. I actually really like the combination of having aggregated RSS feeds I can control, along with other people voting on them so particularly interesting stuff from them get surfaced more than other stuff.

I think it just feels more comfortable and “professional” also. I’ve talked with people for whom the jank associated with decentralized services is a total deal-breaker. They started a Mastodon account, but they picked the wrong instance and it got defederated because it had Nazis, they got annoyed and moved to a different instance, and then a few months later the admin for that instance evaporated without warning and rather than find a third one they turned their back on the whole endeavor as a hopeless kids-lemonade-stand waste of time.

I do not know if deliberately or accidentally, but Bluesky seems to me to be very obviously positioned as a trap into which someone might fall into on their way from Twitter to Mastodon.

In virtually all modern games, the core design is not driven by professional designers, but by “managers.” If you’re lucky, it will be one manager only, instead of a dizzying cycle of higher-ups giving “input” which you are required to accept, and that one person will at least be open to good sense even if not professionally trained in the art.

Usually you will not be lucky.

Dump every single schema, paste the whole thing to claude.ai, ask it to generate graphviz markup showing the whole thing as you requested. Give the result to graphviz, see what happens.

It might not work or might not work perfectly, but that is what I would try and it definitely has the potential to be better than staring at the text trying to make sense of it all. Depending on the size of the beast, you might have to do it in pieces with a defined mapping of table names to graphviz node names so that piecing it out works smoothly.

The guy certainly did, who said “Don’t bring anything with a modem and you’re good to go,” ignoring quite a bit of additional advice that the article gives that could really help some people out and explicitly implying that they don’t need to read it as long as they don’t bring their phone.

Maybe it’s not fair for me to ascribe that to all of lemmy.ml just because that one person did it. There are plenty of people in all corners of the internet who are sure they’re instant experts on everything, y’all don’t have a monopoly. What I was actually trying to say was that “being a community of privacy enthuiasts” and a history of communism doesn’t give anyone a pass on ignoring advice from the EFF and instead offering their own 2-second take on it as an expert opinion. I think that’s a foolish habit of thought to get into.

If you had responded with, “Hey, don’t blame this guy on lemmy.ml, we’re concerned with US state power and of course we take seriously what the EFF has to say about this topic” then I probably wouldn’t have been snarky about it. But I do apologize about being snarky about it, I think it was a little un called for.

The EFF might know a thing or two about OPSEC as pertains to activities against US state power. They know more than you do.

You don’t automatically absorb all the knowledge of “communists” and a century of real-world experience simply because you’re on lemmy.ml. Again: EFF knows more than you do, on this topic. If that kind of thing is a confusing concept, you need to get out more, and stop looking at lemmy.ml as conferring a special type of power that the EFF isn’t privy to.

A lot of people are still coordinating their protest activities through Facebook. Recommending signal or matrix is a step up, full stop.

Thank you. I don’t know what I was thinking, posting this on lemmy.ml where any useful advice will immediately be countered with “no no don’t pay attention to that, I just thought about it for 3 seconds and I’m pretty sure I have a better answer than whatever the people whose whole job and organization is this.” I won’t repeat the mistake.

I bought my transit ticket with a credit card, and they picked me up. Can I give them your number, will you be my lawyer now?

Ah, I got it. Yeah, it makes sense, WP.com is moderately likely to keep working fine probably, it’s just that it would make me nervous at this stage. I just don’t think he can do anything to really “punish” Bluehost if they’re using his software in some way that displeases him. WPEngine’s mistake was getting tangled up into a business relationship where they were depending on listings and APIs and things. Although, it probably seemed like a good idea until their business counterpart went off the deep end.

Yeah but why would the company run by the crazy person be the only safe place?

It’s open source. Just find a different host that isn’t run by a known unstable human. Literally any other. That would be my feeling on it, at least.

Yes yes this is a very good point, stay well clear of Wordpress.com, Automattic, or any similar nonsense. All I meant by “Wordpress hosting” was managed hosting from some third-party place like Bluehost or Hostinger. The software is fine, it’s all open source and the worst that will happen is 6 months from now, it’s not getting a lot of feature updates because the core company that was making it has imploded completely, and someone from the community has taken over security updates.

But yes you need to stay clear of the clusterfuck while it’s going on. Don’t use Wordpress.com or anything adjacent to it.

Edit: Wait, I didn’t even read closely enough. Why would Wordpress.com be safe? I had some vague impression it was connected with Automattic in some way, although I’m not sure, maybe it is just one of the third-party companies. I just feel like anything that’s in any way adjacent to Automattic or anything “official” about Wordpress would be best avoided for a while.

Yeah. I’ve run plenty of services from a computer sitting in someone’s office, or in my living room, while they’re in-production-while-in-development. Sometimes it makes sense. But it’s just not something you want to deliberately aim for as the solution. What if the power goes out? What if your motherboard dies? What if the toilet overflows when you’re not there, and floods the place?

Just get a dedicated service and pay them their $10/month and have them worry about all that crap for you.

It’ll be vastly cheaper and easier to just get hosting somewhere.

Wordpress hosting (edit: THIRD PARTY Wordpress hosting, Bluehost and Hostinger are decent I think, see below) is fine for most small businesses and starts at about $10/mo. You can go fancier and more reliable and go up to $30/mo or something, or if you really need your own VPS you can go with Vultr or Hostinger and get a pretty similar price range for pretty much whatever you want to do.

I think the only reason to self-host is if you have some crazy special hardware or legal issue, or your own dev stuff that you don’t want/need to push to “the cloud” to put it online. Otherwise it’s such a buyer’s-choice market that it’s hard to justify.

There was a mixed ruling at the US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit as the appeals court affirmed a jury’s finding that Cox was guilty of willful contributory infringement but reversed a verdict on vicarious infringement “because Cox did not profit from its subscribers’ acts of infringement.”

That ruling vacated a $1 billion damages award and ordered a new damages trial. Cox and Sony are both seeking a Supreme Court review. Cox wants to overturn the finding of willful contributory infringement, while Sony wants to reinstate the $1 billion verdict.

Cox has said that letting the piracy ruling stand “would force ISPs to terminate Internet service to households or businesses based on unproven allegations of infringing activity, and put them in a position of having to police their networks.” Cox said that ISPs “have no way of verifying whether a bot-generated notice is accurate” and that even if the notices are accurate, terminating an account would punish every user in a household where only one person may have illegally downloaded copyrighted files.

Record labels urged the court to reinstate the vicarious infringement verdict. “As the District Court explained, the jury had ample evidence that Cox profited from its subscribers’ infringement, including evidence ‘that when deciding whether to terminate a subscriber for repeat infringement, Cox considered the subscriber’s monthly payments,’ and ‘Cox repeatedly declined to terminate infringing subscribers’ Internet service in order to continue collecting their monthly fees,'” the record labels’ petition said.

So, current precedent is that the ISPs do have to terminate, but there’s no penalty if they don’t. Is November recent enough that the ruling has actually had any impact? Did the Supreme Coury decide to take up the case or not yet? How much does it means that the ISPs “have to” terminate users, but there doesn’t seem to be a penalty if they don’t? Is the fact that there was no ruling until recently, confirmation that they were doing it voluntarily for their own reasons before November? Or were they doing it “voluntarily” because they didn’t want to defend lawsuits like this, except Cox which was refusing to do it apparently? I have no sure idea of the answer to any of those questions. That’s why I said “I think.” But, unlike some people on the internet, I don’t just make up some bullshit and then decide that’s what I “think” and go spouting off about it. I’m just relaying my best guess, reasons for it, and being honest about the fact that it’s a guess.

I don’t think that it’s actually true that ISPs are liable if they don’t take down users. I think they go along with it because (1) it’s easier than arguing (2) those users are using a lot of bandwidth and the piracy forms a handy excuse.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/11/supreme-court-may-decide-whether-isps-must-terminate-users-accused-of-piracy/

I actually kind of like that the stock UI is just web pages, and you click things, and the things you click take you to new pages.* I may be in the minority in this, but I don’t feel that everything needs to have a whole new UI that has to “boot up” while it loads its libraries, and then takes over the browser area with its own special little UI with all kinds of different scrolling behaviors for different columns, and little animations when you do things, and copying the URL from the browser doesn’t really work.

(* Some service worker fuckups aside)

I don’t love that visually, it looks like a circa-2005 student web page project, and it has “themes” which just change to a differently unappealing set of colors, but life is like that, it is fine.

I wouldn’t be so sure. China is at the world’s forefront of automated techniques to be able to spy on and manipulate people through their own devices at massive scale. If they had some semi-workable technology to fingerprint individuals through their typing patterns, in conjunction with fingerprinting the devices they were using through other means, that would make perfect sense to me.

I don’t think it is especially a concern for Deepseek specifically, for reasons discussed elsewhere in the comments. That one particular aspect of the privacy issue is probably being overblown, when there are other adjacent privacy and security concerns that are a lot more pressing. Honestly, that one particular detail isn’t really proven simply because it’s in the privacy policy, and even if they are doing something like that, its inclusion or not in this particular privacy policy or this app isn’t the particularly notable part about it.

No, but they can manipulate the public’s perception of political reality to the point that someone gets elected who will bust your door down and kill you, because a bunch of people who don’t have time to make figuring out the news into a part-time job decided that that person would be able to make eggs cheaper and the other guy’s son was really into hookers or something, and also he was old and wasn’t “fixing the border.”

Just as a random example.

(To be clear, I don’t have any reason to think specifically that TikTok or China was involved in getting Trump elected. I’m just saying that allowing any adversary, whether that’s China or that’s the GOP’s social media psyop department, to have control over American’s social media landscape, will absolutely have an impact on you personally, and already has.)