r00ty

To be fair, I bought a really good mini pc for a home server. The problem is, it was marketed as a gaming pc. But with the on chip Intel HD graphics.

I can understand why this would upset people. For my uses though it was perfect. Sits in the TV cabinet, is quiet yet still quite powerful (intel 12900).

It’s not how ActivityPub (at least Lemmy/*bin servers) works. There isn’t so far as I’ve ever seen an API that allows for this within ActivityPub (now specific to Lemmy/*bin implementations there’s the API the browser/apps use that must provide this, but that’s not ActivityPub). It actually looks to be cleverly designed to prevent it. It might look like backfilling is happening because old stuff appears, but there are reasons for this.

How it works from my experience (I did some work on the federation in kbin a year or so ago).

• Instance A subscribes to community B hosted on Instance C.
• Instance C notes this and does nothing. No previous content is sent, only future activities will be.
• User on Instance D already subscribed to community B upvotes a comment on a post in community B.
• Instance D sends the activity to Instance C.
• Instance C sends the activity to Instance A.
• Instance A gets the notice of the upvote, but realises it has no context for the upvote. But luckily the upvote has the comment ID of the comment that it was related to. So, now Instance A makes a request for the comment from Instance C.
• Instance A receives the response from Instance C. But it turns out that comment was in reply to another comment. But the comment contains the ID of the parent comment. So Instance A requests that comment (and any parent comments until it gets the parent post).
• By now Instance A has the information about the like, all comments from the liked comment to the post. These are saved to the database and will appear on the local system.
• For each of the likes, comments and posts. If the user isn’t known locally the profile will also be fetched from their instance and stored locally.

And so old posts and comments will begin to appear as activities linked to them happen. But there isn’t a method to ask for “all the posts in community X” using activity pub. I remember because I was specifically looking for this a year or so ago. It let’s you see the parent object but not any children.

Maybe Mastadon etc does it different? No idea.

And all of this is moot because if I block a User Agent, or I block an AS number/IP block. They’re not getting anything either by ActivityPub or scraping unless they change User Agent, AS number, or both.

I don’t think they’re optimising much at all. I think it’s likely just a modified web crawler but without the kind of throttling normal search engine crawlers use. They’re following links recursively. Then probably some basic parsing or even parsing with AI to prepare the data to make another AI model.

But, they aren’t. They’re not after Activitypub specifically. They’re scraping the whole internet, most of them using clear bot User Agents. So, I routinely block their bots because the AI ones are usually hitting you multiple times a second non-stop. If they started making fake Activitypub nodes they would not be scraping as a bot, and they would want specifically fediverse data. Important to note here though, an Activitypub node doesn’t “collect” data, they subscribe (to mastadon users/hashtags or communities) and then get new data delivered to them. So they wouldn’t get the old stuff.

Having said that, I’ve seen some obvious bots using genuine browser user agents on IP addresses from certain very large Chinese companies. For those I just blocked their whole AS number.

I mean personally I did block all the AI scrapers I could find on my instance, around a month or so ago. There were a lot, mostly unscrupulous, some big names included. Probably should look at the logs to see what’s new.

The amount of traffic was quite significant too. I have a theory that they expect legislation soon, so are not playing nice and slow like crawlers do, but are vacuuming as fast as they can.

But you’re right. Everyone would need to do it, to make a difference.

Yes, instead use rozzers, bacon or filth!

God damn it Lrrr. You just had to keep off it for two weeks, TWO WEEKS!

What about Omicron Persei 8? Surely they got some medal in the human eating contest?

Sync process? The other comment was talking about the old receivers for the atomic clocks on SW/MW frequencies. It was a one way thing.

Now in theory if a receiver also had GPS they could account for the distance. But, then they’d get far more accurate time from the GPS receiver so…

Yeah, but you need to factor in the distance to the transmitter. Going to add at least a few microseconds to your time accuracy!

Right! Just to prove a point, I am going to make an NTP enabled rolex, and sync it to my microsecond accurate local NTP server! :P

Also on the 7800X3D. I think I switched at just the right time. I’ve been on Intel since the Athlon XP. The next buy would have been 13/14th gen.

I find anything with that coated plastic over time gets crappy. I still have an old X52 pro I’ve had for probably around 15 years now. In the end I just completely took off the flaking rubber style coating they put over it and it’s now shiny plastic and still going strong.

I also have a G502 that’s 6 years old. It has some worn areas where it’s actively held and on the buttons. I replaced the skates last year and have a spare set. Otherwise, still going strong.

Really not sure why I’d subscribe for something that lasts so long and isn’t THAT expensive to replace.

I’m going to blame the cloud for this. SaaS has got pretty much most software companies into the idea that they can have their cake and eat it with recurring revenue from cloud hosting their services.

This seems to have overflowed into every other market, where they want a piece of that pie.

I’m hoping it’s a fad that goes away. You know how we can make it a fad that goes away? Don’t buy into this shit.

I remember moving to mumble from teams peak because it allowed pretty cool levels of configuration.

Back in the late 00s and early 00s I was doing world of warcraft raiding. I had the server setup to have one key for main raid and another to talk to only officers. Quite useful especially in bigger raids.

Also as I recall for any remotely large ts server you needed to pay. The self hosted one was always gimped. Mumble you could self host with no limits.

Damn, I was hoping for the verge video.

It can help draw a line I’d agree, but I’ve gotten used to it now I think. I used to have it worse. I operated out of the bedroom for the first few years I was remote and that wasn’t good at all. The new house had a bedroom that was really too small to be a bedroom. So it became an office room.

Why do you need all that? I have my work laptop sitting at the back of my desk. Most monitors have two inputs. I’ve got an older 1080 with HMDI+DVI and a newer 1440p with DP/2xHDMI.

So I have the laptop in HDMI on both screens (it needed a USBC to HDMI cable for one of the outputs), and a simple USB3 switch for the mouse+keyboard.

So when I’m working I fire up the laptop, switch the USB over to that and swap the screens to the HDMI inputs. When I’m done working I can fire up the desktop, swap inputs and USB and in seconds I’m switched over.

I’ve been doing it this way for years and years now.

I’ve been working from home for over 15 years now. One thing I do not miss is the “social” aspect of the office.

You can’t fool me. I’ve seen the IT Crowd. The internet is connected by Wifi and has a red light!