A software developer and Linux nerd, living in Germany. I’m usually a chill dude but my online persona doesn’t always reflect my true personality. Take what I say with a grain of salt, I usually try to be nice and give good advice, though.

I’m into Free Software, selfhosting, microcontrollers and electronics, freedom, privacy and the usual stuff. And a few select other random things as well.

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Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: August 21st, 2021

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  • hendrik@palaver.p3x.detoFediverse@lemmy.worldAnti-AI fedi pact?
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    17 hours ago

    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.


  • I think it’s a great idea. Why the Athens way with a lottery, though? Is that to address some specific thing, or just because you’d like to see how it goes? Because we kind of moved away from that in modern democracy, and now we do elections instead of a lottery. Likely because of …reasons.

    Time slots etc also good ideas. We already have to factor that in because the userbase lives in vastly different timezones. And it’s great if spam etc gets removed in a timely matter and we don’t always have to wait until it’s 5pm in the States. Some good mod and admin teams already do it.


  • I have a suggestion and an explanation…

    We software developers tend to send that kind of information anyway. We tend to get bug reports “I didn’t get a message” or “The button XY doesn’t work properly” and now it’s massively helpful information whether to look for the bug in Lemmy’s codebase, or in Summit. Or any of the other 5 clients. It’s also not what people usually complain about. I mean you’re sending your entire username to the server, so you’re 100% identifiable. And then the server operator knows when you’re awake and scrolling, based on when you send requests to the server. What exactly you like to click on and read… So you pretty much have to trust your server admins anyway. A user agent string is more information. But sending it or not sending it both leaves you 100% identifiable once you log in.

    And Tealk is right as well. We’ve now come to use it in the war against the AI scrapers. They’ve nearly brought several Fediverse servers to their knees. It’s only due to patterns in the traffic like this (and JavaScript to burn CPU cycles on your device) that still allows us to distinguish you from the AI companies so we can fulfill your requests instead of letting the bots use up all the bandwidth. The current situation is real bad. And turned out the user agent string, while technically not being essential for the servers, they’re a real good telltale sign for this. It’s my first line of defense, since blocking IP ranges got meaningless.

    As a suggestion: If it’s not in any of the existing Apps: Request it. Find the one or two App(s) you like the most. Navigate to their bugtracker and feature requests. And ask politely whether they’d like to add that feature for you. Maybe other people are interested as well. Include a bit of info: what you’d like the app to do. why. and a few words about your specific use-case. Maybe you can get a conversation going.