It depends on what you’re trying to do on your computer. No command line is needed for web surfing, checking emails, writing office documents, playing games, watching videos… It’s not too dissimilar to Windows in that regard. Windows also has the command line and the power shell. You can use it if you like, but you don’t have to. There’s other tasks for which you need it, though. For example fixing your computer might involve the command line. Or software development.

There will be a trace. First of all, the way the Fediverse it set up, the instances all cooperate from distributing posts and comments, to deleting them. There’s no guarantee every instance does it (correctly). And as the Fediverse is made up of different software, it also depends on the specific implementation.

And then we also have AI scrapers, the Wayback Machine and other internet archives. It’ll end up there as well.

So better treat everything as easily traceable which you post in public. And it’s notoriously difficult to really remove stuff from the internet anyway.

Plus the US has some absurdly large datacenters for surveillance. Idk if it’s clever to lie to them about your social media history. They certainly have the capacity to scrape posts and store them forever.

Idk. That’s a bit of a treacherous point in itself. I mean first of all life isn’t supposed to be just the bare essentials. But than that argument gets abused a lot, the usual stuff being “a bit of beating didn’t harm me”… but it probably did. At least I’ve rarely seen it been used in a good context. I’d say it depends. Some things used to be better, or simpler back in the days. Some weren’t. I think a lot of things (in society) improved in the 20 years or so since I’ve finished growing up. I don’t think the internet did. All the social media stuff got way worse. But it’s complicated. I don’t see any reason to be on 4chan at 13yo. But at the same time we also don’t want some “clean” dystopian society like in the dark sci-fi movies. Sexuality is part of life. And so is making mistakes, experiences…

Awesome!

Hmmh. Is there good Free Software to do these things with a Linux server at home?

Yeah, I mean they do have to be able to communicate with their friends, listen to audiobooks… Do their homework assignments, look up the bus schedule or text/call mom to pick them up, read/watch stuff if they like… Learn about the world. So there needs to be some sane way to do these things.

But it’s not like anyone needs to send in their ID to Google to accomplish that.

Huh. And how do these age checks work? Is that something you’d call your internet service provider to remove for you? Or is it just the average “Are you over 18? Y/N” popup?

But doesn’t sound too different from what we got. My ISP here in Germany has some secret list of forbidden piracy sites. So I switched to a different DNS server and I’m all good. Is that what they do in the UK as well? Sorry I’m lacking a bit in first hand experience. Haven’t been there in a while. An when on vacation, I rarely try to watch porn or read about automatic rifles 😅

Hmmh, sure. That’s usually 300% of what this is about. Though they have some “genuine” attempts at filtering the internet over in the UK. From what I gather, ISPs are supposed to filter pornography, copyright violations, gambling, weapons and violence and all sorts of stuff (Edit:??) per default. So there seems to be some wish for a “family safe” internet mixed in with the usual exploiting children to manifest some surveillance dystopia… Which definitely is the major reason why this is pushed all around the globe.

Yeah, since it’s the UK, I have a hunch that will include scanning your ID and uploading it to 5 different “international parners” aka American companies. To be tied to all online activity… Why not simply mandate parental controls be implemented in all phones and tablets, and we can do it without all the privacy invasion?

How about you have a look at some public instances, scroll through some content, watch a few videos and see which one you like better from a user perspective? I mean technically, they both work. Setup of an instance is just done once, and I guess uploading videos has about the same complexity… So it’s down to what interface you like, and where you’d find your audience.

Uh. I kinda dislike all these closed-source additional moderating systems flange-mounted to the Fediverse. I think in the long-term, we should come up with a good system with good effectiveness, plus (/despite of) transparency, and share it amongst the entire Fediverse.

The thing is, a link to a Wikipedia article isn’t structured data either. It could very well link to the article about The Little Mermaid. Or the List of fictional pirates. So in that regard, both approaches are about on the same level. The hashtag just cuts off the unnecessary “https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…”

I’m afraid if the idea is something like that, it won’t allow users to search for content nearby. That’d require some coordinates to calculate distance. If it’s just names, it’s closer to the concept of hashtags. You could as well add #Melbourne in the text (on Mastodon for example). And people would then be able to click on #Melbourne or maybe subscribe to the hashtag once/if that feature is ready on Lemmy.

Really hard to tell. I mean there are situations in which people think they’re doing someone a favour. But they’re really not. Upside of doing it individually is: affected people get to pick the model they like best. And they can prompt it however they like. Depends a bit on your expertise on the matter if your pre-generated stuff is on the same level or more a disservice. Upside of pre-generating it once is: maybe a bit less CO2 in the atmosphere and a few less trees killed. But that certainly depends on how many people read those descriptions. If there’s just 2 people with screenreaders out there, who don’t even click on all the images, you might very well be wasting compute. And have a negative balance on the environment.

I’d ask someone who needs these transcriptions first. I tend more towards “Nay”. I mean if they want AI transcriptions, I guess they could just run their own AI. And that way they get to choose between human and AI ones. I’m kind of against flooding the internet with AI content as long as the recipients can do it themselves.

Uh sorry, is there a good way to tell RAM usage on a different phone with more RAM? I didn’t find any usage number in the settings. It’s a ~50MB app. So at leat they didn’t include as much bloat as other apps do… You can try it. It allows you do watch videos right away, without signing up.

https://joinpeertube.org/

There’s good and bad tools out there? Most free internet services that pop up on the first page of Google are in fact rubbish. But that doesn’t mean there’s good ones. I once tried tools for detecting AI text for a different reason and there were one or two who didn’t have any false positives with the 20-30 example texts I tried. Schools and universities have come to use the same tools. Seems they also look at how people are typing, that’s pretty much 100% accurate, but people do both.

There’s also crazy different approaches out there. Like looking at the probability distribution of the vocabulary and see if that matches ChatGPT. And it’ll be a certain unique probability distribution since that’s what ChatGPT is. It has to leave a fingerprint, since it’s picking the words based on probability. And there’s more good strategies. We have one or two open-source tools which demonstrate how it can be done without AI. There’s of course also the option to train another AI model / classifier to figure out what constitutes AI text and what isn’t. That also works.

And @cinoreus@lemmy.world : Another democracy idea I recently wrote down somewhere, was the idea of German clubs / organizations I’m familiar with. That can be anything from a few people do sports once a week, maybe your boy scouts, or KDE e.V. or the Free Software Foundation Europe e.V.

That’s a legal status. Comes with minimum standards. But I think one clever thing about it is how it tends to push democracy down to the members / people involved. Like: you have to come up with your individual statute, you’re responsible to appoint your management board. And your highest body is the general assembly. The people in power are more in a role to execute what the organization wants. Specifics are down to what the members like to implement.

And the authorities don’t care too much(?!). There’s standards on how clubs have to operate. Like your group needs to follow a purpose and write it down. Simple majority rule for regular decisions in the general assembly, 75% majority votes to change the statute. But you do it as a community, you do your statute, assemblies, subgroups and elections and then you get to identify with it. Government doesn’t hold your hands too much from my perspective. They’ll read the statue and care if it meets the requirements. And later on they’ll simply need to (occasionally) check whether your organization is up to their own statute. Especially once there’s complaints. (And Germans love to complain, so you can be sure there will be feedback once something remotely goes wrong.)

And in practice, you’ll get things like a regular general assembly. You can come as a member, listen to the board explain what they did, what issues they faced, what they spent your membership fee on… Maybe you’re in a position to vote on something or elect the next board. Or give your opinion on whether you’re alright with what your old board did. Sometimes you can send in ideas as a member and make people decide on it. And someone is going to write a summary so there’s accountability for third parties in case they’re interested.

My idea was to push people towards something more like a grassroots democracy. Maybe as an admin I don’t care too much with making exact rules that fit for every community. Maybe democracy should be done and be alive / lived by the involved people themselves. That’ll strengthen their group cohesion. And they need to live it anyway. Make them come up with an idea for a community along with goals and rules, the first board of moderators, signed by 7 people and off they go. After that you (as an admin) just check on them. See if they do general assemblies at regular intervals, if those meet your minimum democratic requirements. But other than that they get to live democracy and the community put in the work to make it happen. And what they have to do is send back some accountability to retain their status as a democratic entity.

(And depending on the minimum requirements set, this might even include an Athens style democracy, if a communitiy likes to come up with a statute like that.)

Hmmh. Good point. One remark I have: That’s kind of made for councils. So you get a representative sample of the population. And than you have like 501 individuals to discuss and make policy. I’m not entirely sure, but it feels to me there’s a lower boundary with group size. Once you randomly sample just 3 individuals, I’d be surprised it works as I expect you more to end up with randomness (in the decisions as well). Not with representation.

But also doesn’t feel like a new problem to me. For example the US Americans sample their juries in a court. On the other hand they don’t randomly sample the sheriff. Looks to me someone already put in some thought. And there’s extra things. Like extra steps when sampling the jurors. It’s not …here’s your jury, off you go… But there’s an entire complicated extra process to it. I suppose that might be related to something like the comparatively small group size of such a jury.