My dog and I hunt them when we’re outside. They love to nest in my porch roof, so when they’re buzzing around I swat them with a broom, the dog will pin them and keep them from getting back up while I go in for the squish.

I tried setting up a carpenter bee trap, but the bitches ate right through it.

I’ve toyed around with LLM-based moderation tools but it never really panned out. It was too hit or miss to be relied upon even with the temperature parameters turned way down in an attempt to get consistent results. Granted, I was using a small local model and not feeding it to one of the big players.

To give an example, I tried to keep it focused by creating one custom model per rule to enforce. An example prompt to mod calls for violence was basically:

ROLE: You are a forum moderator who does not want users calling for violence.  Examine the input and analyze whether it violates any constraints. 

KNOWLEDGE:
- {list of dog-whistle slang for calling for murder}

CONSTRAINTS:
- Content should not advocate violence
- Content should not normalize violence
- Content should not escalate tensions or fan flames
- Content should avoid promoting harmful stereotypes
- Content should not utilize broad, sweeping generalizations
- Content should not use dehumanizing language
- Content should not undermine human rights, due process, or the rule of law

FORMAT YOUR RESPONSES AS JSON:
{
  reason: [A one to two sentence summary],
  score: [On a scale of 0 to 10, how severe is the content advocating violence]
}

The score part of the response was my band-aid to get around the high number of both false positives and false negatives as I originally had it returning true or false only. Any score 7 or higher caused the item to be passed to the mod queue along with the reason, and I would review its actions later.

Ultimately it was slow and still somewhat unreliable, so I abandoned the idea after running it for a little less than a day since I can 't run bigger models to get better results fast enough to keep up. Using a cloud based service was out of the question for many, many reasons, both financial and ethical.

To answer your question, as long as the models were locally hosted and properly tuned/tested, I’m fine with it in theory, except for the ideology part; that’s pretty messed up. While I don’t want my submissions used to train anyone’s model and take measures to prevent my own instance from being used as a data source, I remain aware that once I post something, I have no control over its fate the moment it federates out.

[1] Yes, I know that’s like half the comments that get posted around here. My goal was to try to have it mod things so posts were bases for actual discussions instead of being a knee-jerk rage factory.

I used to do that but once the backend added that feature I removed that step from the automod script. Basically it was to prevent the communities here from being unmoddable on remote instances.

I’m not even a real instance anymore, how did I make the list 😆

But also, you should see the local numbers haha

lemmy=# select count(distinct other_person_id) from mod_ban where mod_person_id in (1, 2,288);
 count 
-------
  9792
(1 row)

I wonder what happens when I hit 10,000?

Why not both? https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/news-punch/

Founded in 2014, The People’s Voice, formerly known as NewsPunch, is a Los Angeles-based clickbait news website that promotes extreme right-wing conspiracy theories and pseudoscience misinformation. The website was founded and formerly edited by Sean Adl-Tabatabai, founder of YourNewsWire. In fact, The People’s Voice is actually YourNewsWire redirected under a new domain name with a clean, attractive website. All previous fake YourNewsWire stories have been ported over to this website/domain. Not much has changed.

Technically, yes. But colloquially, when we’re talking about “analytics” we mean embedded 3rd party trackers that feed to Google or another outside entity. Those are embedded much deeper in the application and track things much more invasively such as how long you hover over certain links, how you move your cursor around the screen, your viewport size, browser fingerprinting, and more.

The analytics I’m utilizing and referring to here are passive in that they’re collected anyway as part of the standard logging that happens when you access the webserver which is also part of our basic security posture. They’re not as granular or invasive but can still give you useful information about what parts of your site people use the most, how many clicks it takes a visitor to get from the homepage to where they want to be (by following the IP, URI, and seeing where that ends), how many visitors the site gets per day/week/month/etc, and such.

Logging is standard practice if you give even the slightest damn about security (read: you should), so I don’t see it as a problem. It’s what you use those logs for, how long they’re retained, and whether you sell them off.

So as long as you’re only using them for security auditing and website analytics and don’t keep them forever and don’t plan to sell them to data brokers, there’s really nothing to fret over. A good place to disclose how you use the logs, how long you retain them, and what is logged is in the site’s privacy policy.

I do the occasional website for local businesses, and I never add any analytics code/trackers. One: they rarely ever ask. And two: the one time someone did ask for it, they never once logged into it or asked for trends. Three: I’d prefer not to unless they demand it.

However, since I’m actually hosting the website for them, I can get decent heat maps from the access logs since they have the IP (which can be roughly geo-located), which URI’s are accessed (and those map to pages, and pages map to products/services), how often those are accessed, which page linked them to it or if they came directly to it (by checking the referrer header), which are most accessed (by count of the URI in the logs), and whether they’re accessing the site from desktop or mobile (via the user agent header). That can also be combined with any data from their “Contact us” form.

One reason they’ve probably never asked for it is because I provide a quarterly report for them using that passive data, and they seem happy with it.

[Hits bong] Over water, a boat going too fast becomes a plane and a plane going too slow becomes a boat.

I don’t even like the few phones I had with the headphone jack on the top.

This would be a good post for !unpopularopinion@lemmy.world as long as you expand on why you think that.

Is there a community about Matrix on Lemmy?

!matrix@programming.dev

Is Matrix technically part of the fediverse?

I would say no. It doesn’t use ActivityPub and is its own thing. It’s federated in that indepedent Matrix servers can talk to each other (like email or Nextcloud). So while email would be considered a federated service, it’s not considered part of the fediverse. At most, it’s like a 2nd cousin.

Who is the developer/team and do they have an active presence on the fediverse?

Matrix.org foundation (https://matrix.org/) and not sure. Maybe some of the individual contributors do, but I don’t know any off the top of my head

Ah, nice. I recommend that one to OP then since it’s 1st party and not an alpha version haha.

Not sure if sh.itjust.works offers Tesseract as a UI option, but you can direct ban/unban users and bulk-mod comments among other improvements to mod tooling and report actions.

If not, then I’d normally point you to the unlocked hosted instance (https://tesseract.dubvee.org/) but the VPS provider it uses is having issues right now, and my 3 hour old ticket has not yet been acknowledged.

Edit: Oh, they answered my ticket and I was able to start it back up, so the hosted instance should be working if you’d want to try it.

Bombadil was referred to as “The Hermit” before they revealed his identity when GrandElf (aka Gandalf née The Stranger) crosses paths with him.

Someone said if you forget it’s LOTR and just treat it as its own thing it’s not half bad.

Basically. I don’t forget it’s LOTR but I do keep in mind it’s not the Peter Jackson trilogy nor a 1:1 from the books.

I was really really hoping it was going to be about the fall of Numenor.

It is, but it’s slow burn and a something of an overall B-plot to the titular Rings of Power in the second season and the creation of Mordor in the first.

The main online gripe that I can agree with how the characters “fast travel” as plot demands. I just accept that as necessary to condense things down to a suitable runtime for a TV series.

He’s in Rings of Power which I guess counts as a derivative. I don’t want to start a flame war since a lot of people hate that adaptation, but I enjoy it for what it is.

It’s just there and under the same domain. Otherwise, it’s a completely separate system that instance users can sign up and use. Maybe in the future they can both use the same OIDC login, but I don’t think Lemmy supports that yet.

The UI we use as our default has Peertube integration, so any videos shared from this Peertube instance (or any other) will show as inline embeds within the Lemmy client.

• Curated, “normie friendly” default experience
• Default UI is not Lemmy UI
• PeerTube instance (though not fully integrated and requires a separate account)

Quite reliably, yeah. The only limitation is I can’t root my current device, so the mapped keys can only work when the screen is on. But the volume keys will wake the screen up, so I just hit it once normally then hold to mute or change tracks or whatever.

You can do that with KeyMapper, and I have a lot of custom actions set up with it.

https://f-droid.org/packages/io.github.sds100.keymapper/

I have double-press volume down set to toggle mute, though, since I’m already using long press of vol up and down to do next/prev track for my music player.

Regardless, I cannot recommend KeyMapper enough. It’s pretty fantastic.