• 2 Posts
  • 18 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • The Forum Login is in the top right of every page (if the menu is not expanded, it will simply be an icon

    The way to expand the right vertical bar is in the bottom left corner… not particularly intuitive. I would recommend to have login and register in the top row line. I can’t remember ever seeing another site where I literally did not notice the login / register options even though they were there, as in this site. 🙄

    it felt like there was too much room for abuse or issues There will be people and entities that will try to abuse, not matter what the policy is

    closed licensed projects could also cause legal issues Not sure what you are referring to, but open source software can also cause legal issues. Someone could take code from work and try to open source, someone could take another open source project’s code and try to pass it as their own, etc… etc…


  • companies will no longer publish the source code for their projects

    100%

    Whereas, before a company may contribute something they created for internal use and they may have put something to try and stop direct competitors from using it (like restrictions only for cloud providers) now they probably will just not publish at all.

    Im not a big fan of fake open source, but source available is better than closed source.

    To be fair, some of the “fake open source” was a result of some projects seeing their projects taken by a cloud provider, charging for it and not contributing ANYTHING back to the original project. Can’t really say I blame them.


  • Quick observation. I think would be helpful to have a login button somewhere instead of one having to get all the way down to a topic. Also, what if I wanted to see everything new for a category instead for a single topic? Anything like that supported yet?

    Are you writing anywhere about how you are doing this? Tech stack, team members, etc…

    New project submissions, such as https://unfinishedprojects.net/wiki/Special:FormEdit/Submit_Project, should be behind login. Otherwise, eventually, you will get lots of spam registrations.

    Lastly, when I see this “The Libre Community” makes me think that this would be even nicer if it was for all creators… think solopreneurs who may be trying to create a SAAS. Those are a group of people who may be primarily consumers of open source, but they can provide great feedback and also be early adopters of anyone trying to create a new open source software.


  • require the training data to be shared to prove it was never exposed to the original source

    I believe there have been lawsuits which have already proven these models stole, and can reproduce verbatim, copyrighted material yet there has been little to no real consequences for the AI companies. So, if they can get away with that from companies that actually have the means to present a strong lawsuit, the chances of some open source author to defend their code are slim (very slim in my opinion)



  • Copyright law only has teeth when it’s owned by corporations,

    100%. It is funny how any individual can be sued for copying a handful, of pretty much anything copyrighted, yet these AI companies copy literally thousands upon thousands of copyrighted materials.

    cleanroom reimplementing technique does still seem to create a derivative product

    Will likely have to wait for a case to go to trial, but in theory at least, it is possible these clean room implementations may pass a legal challenge. The youtube video I was watching about this topic had phoenix technologies as an example (for those of us old enough to remember what that company was). In their case it was even more so; they took a commercial piece of software and reverse engineered. If that is possible, then doing similar to an open source software may be considered legal, but again we probably won’t know until something like this comes to courts. Different countries may also treat this differently so we will have to wait and see.

    The “good” news is this is pretty rare these days.

    Sadly yes. But even those that don’t make money, or much money, must feel demoralized when someone steals their code.



  • People do not even notice things more complicated than buttons “join”, “login”, or “post”. They are lost on join-lemmy.org because >they don’t know why they should choose a server, read description, understand whatever is federation, and they’ll prefer going back >to their comfort zone.

    Agree on this 100%. When I first found Lemmy I had no idea what instance to join, why it matter, or… why it really didn’t matter all that much… It was just confusing… and the first instance I joined ended up closing… which was less than an ideal experience as it was without notice and the instance just disappeared. Took me days to even find out why they had closed. Then took me several more days to find the next instance to join.

    Federation is both a weakness and a strength in that there may be people who get turned off by that initial complexity.

    Then, some people who join may see low volumes on communities they care about and end up not joining.


  • I think the ideal would be not how to make it “like Reddit”, but how to help niche and smaller communities have more members. Unfortunately, I think the easiest way is just to get more users to Lemmy in general.

    It is not just niche topics, I find quite a bit of things that are not (in my opinion) niche, yet there is very little participation in Lemmy. Take for for example Postgresql. By now it is one of the most widely used databases yet there is a minuscule number of posts and users in the related communities.

    Another example. Just did a search for largest communities in Reddit… One of them is music with an estimated 38 million redditors. In Lemmy the largest two music communities seem to be 9.9K (!music@lemmy.world) and 18.9K (!music@hexbear.net). That is an astronomical difference for something that is as mainstream as it gets given the broad topic.

    I think the best each one of us can do is to participate and post as often as possible in the communities we would like to see grow.


  • I would say that you may consider first getting a clearer idea of what you want. For example

    • You want some side work to generate some income?
    • You want to explore doing consulting for a living?
    • You want to find a project, or projects, that you can work on that produce revenue?

    From what you wrote I think the fact that you work on so many things may be keeping you from been good at any of them. I recently saw an interview of the founder of Vercel. By the time he was in high school he was already getting job offers because he became know for been good at what he was doing.

    I would suggest to try and get clarity on what you want and also remember that this is not a once in a lifetime decision… you can say “hey I want to try X…” and then after you actually try it realize is not what you wanted and then move to something else; the may takeaway is that trying to do lots of unrelated things likely will not help you achieve your goals… unless you could use all those contributions in open source as reference when applying to a job.


  • The issue is that anyone who looks objectively at the technology knows that AI / LLMs can’t replace knowledge workers in a large set of tasks, yet you see week after week… month after month the pattern

    • Some new company says going to replace x% of employees with AI…
    • X weeks / months later… said company reports the attempt was a failure and are having to hire people back

    It is as the thought of saving the money of firing all those people is too much to resist for “top management”.

    You would think after the first batch of companies go through the same, other companies would learn, yet I just keep seeing the same happen again and again.

    There is also the potential backslash. Specially if “management” is dumb enough to try and present firing hundreds / thousands of people like a a good thing… for example Duolingo’s case



  • I use it to track everything…

    Quick notes knowledgebase Follow up (personal and work)

    The great thing about Obsidian is how flexible it is. The bad thing about Obsidian is how flexible it is… 😀

    I have seen may people comment, or outright leave, Obsidian because because there was too much to learn… or too many plugins to explore…

    Personally, I only look for plugins if I need something specific. Don’t see the point of trying random plugins. Is like spending time finding solutions to a problem you may not have…

    Also, I work on tech and many documents are in markdown. Obsidian makes it easier to read those. Specially the collapse / expand functionality is really great for exploring large docs… as long as the creators properly used sections (basically # for level 1, ## for level 2…and so on)





  • Some of the ways abuse can happen

    • Crawling false data / misinformation on a topic
    • Putting info on search as part of a scam / spam campaign
    • Putting false news about events that are happening, or have not happened at all
    • Putting false information about a business competitor
    • Putting fake reviews about a product

    Just a few that I can think off… existing websites have the issues too, but what is different is how existing sites decide relevance and how often said algorithms weed out the bad content . In my opinion a distributed search engine will have a harder time at combating those, and other potentials for abuse, because there is less control about what is getting scanned there is an open policy of who can join the distributed scanning.


  • I think we will need a few more lawsuits such as Apple has agreed to pay $95 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that its virtual assistant, Siri, recorded users’ conversations without their consent before this is no longer treated as confirmation bias or people been paranoid.

    My wife used to tell me that her adds would change after discussing something and at first I did not believe her, but it just kept happening again, and again. It reached the point that we would put our phones away, discuss something and there is no change in ads about the topic. If we had our phones near adds would change.This would happen on things that we would not see adds for normally. For example we would discuss a trip to a place we have never been and she would start seeing adds about the destination after that.