Dr. Moose

Chat bots are real fun to make and are really useful.

Unsurprisingly .ml is a shithole everyone thinks it is.

You conveniently miss out all the awful stuff they do lol so bye

Still overall net negative on the society. They’d have to raise billions to check out not a half of 1990s Honda civic

US is full of companies that publicly claim to manipulate reddit threads as PR protection. They all do it exactly like you’d expect - people with dozens of phones going through threads writing shit. Even if users are banned and their phone fingerprinted they just dump the phones for new ones.

Reddit knows could actually sue them and very likely to win but that would be a lot of attention at them.

The best part of this is - if commercial PR companies can afford to run this then what China, Russia and such are doing must have absolutely bonkers. There’s very little internet actually left organic.

I’m confused - this seems like idiomatic way to add new features in activity pub? What’s actually missing here?

I really don’t understand the point of packs when Mastodon has hashtag follows. Mastodon is already winning in terms of discovery here and in fact I still don’t use Bluesky because its impossible to discover content there.

On Bluesky you get a pack of people but in linear timelines the power spammers just take over and then you have to do all that personal curation anyway but it’s often even a worse starting point than just blank slate. With hashtag following I just subscribe to #fediverse and discover new content and creators organically.

Instead I’d like to see Mastodon commit more to organic discovery rather than consolidation of power users by expanding post classification system like using AI classification that attaches topic hashtags to posts etc to help users discover content they actually want to see not follow personalities.

Ive been a pirate since the late 90s and it’s a service problem for the most part. So saying a song name on Spotify and getting what you want 99.9% of the time is an unbeatable experience. Not to mention curated and generate playlists. No piracy setup matches this that I’ve seen.

And where do I get the music? Every time I want to listen to something I’m spending 20 minutes searching for it on some forsaken pirate websites? I’m way too old and not poor enough for this.

I’ve tried to get away from Spotify for years and the reality is the competition still sucks. I still have Tidal and YT music subscriptions but 90% of my music is on Spotify. I don’t know why is it so hard to match this.

Self hosting music is absolutely not worth it though it seems like that’s the only way to match Spotify quality of the experience.

US states are turning into legal trolls - that’s how you know the empire is done for.

It launched wayyyy too early and basically killed the project.

UK has always been a nanny state. Surprised it took them so long.

If you want to be part of a bot net sure.

I don’t think this precedence will ever get set because we don’t have universal global IP protections. The west will never set it due to fear of China winning the AI race.

In their opinion (which I agree with) this is the greater good and someone’s mastodon posts or similar being fed to AI training machine is a lesser evil compared to losing technological advantage to the biggest authoritarian state in the world.

Listen man I’ve been working with web scraping for years though now I do the exact opposite (anti bot tech) and robots.txt is absolutely meaningless and there’s zero precedent in the US or elsewhere of it doing anything but providing web crawlers a map of your web site.

I can tell you the thing we tell to all of our clients - the only way to sue bots is to sue for direct damages not for automation. This has always been true and will continue to be true for foreseeable future in the US because you its impossible to set a precedent here as there are just too many players involved that benefit from web automation.

You can actually check out:

• Meta v. Bright Data
• hiq labs v. inkedIn

These cases are very recent and huge in web automation community and went all the way to the Ninth Circuit and settled at Supreme Court in favor of bots.

I’m telling you man copyright is so ruined that it’s really just a machine for feeding middle managers and lawyers. But hey it gives me a great job security and I can afford to work on actual free software which as you might know is invredibly hard to fund otherwise!

Well it depends on the use. If its a movie that I copied then I can watch it, if it’s a picture I can print it and put it on a wall at my home. Even AI training currently its considered to be entirely legal to train on copyrighted data. You can even parse copyrighted data for analytics which is entirely legal as well.

So you can do a lot with copyrighted data without breaching the copyright, including AI training as it’s the article topic.

Those are entirely different laws you’re thinking about like DMCA, EUCA, database protection laws (yeah lol it’s a real thing) etc. Copyright on its own is about distribution.

That being said data law is really complex and more often than not turns to damage proof rather than explicit protections. Basically its all lawyer speak rather than an actual idealistic framework that aims to protect someone. This is primary argument why copyright is a failed framework because it’s always just a battle of lawyers and damages.

No, there are several types of legal agreements on the web in this particular case there’s:

• click wrap where the visitor must explicitly agree with terms of service by clicking a button - that’s what you see when you register an account.
• browse wrap where the visitor implicitly agrees with ToS by just browsing the web.

The former is enforcable while the latter is almost impossible to enforce in free western countries because you just cannot agree with something just by browsing a public space as that’d be crazy.

No that’s not how copyright works. Copyright prohibits distribution not copying.