tal

I haven’t blocked anyone on this account, but it’s new.

On my last one, I think I blocked three users. I believe all were basically trying to flood a community so that it was unreadable (one, IIRC, was just posting the same large Simpsons or Futurama image repeatedly throughout a thread to try to stop people from talking).

After all, enterprise clients soon realized that the output of most AI systems was too unreliable and too frequently incorrect to be counted on for jobs that demand accuracy. But creative work was another story.

I think that the current crop of systems is often good enough for a header illustration in a journal or something, but there are also a lot of things that it just can’t reasonably do well. Maintaining character cohesion across multiple images, for example, and different perspectives — try doing a graphic novel with diffusion models trained on 2D images, and it just doesn’t work. The whole system would need to have a 3D model of the world, be able to do computer vision to get from 2D images to 3D, and have a knowledge of 3D stuff rather than 2D stuff. That’s something that humans, with a much deeper understanding of the world, find far easier.

Diffusion models have their own strong points where they’re a lot better than humans, like easily mimicking a artist’s style. I expect that as people bang away on things, it’ll become increasingly-visible what the low-hanging fruit is, and what is far harder.

While I’d personally rather have more users over here producing comments and posts and such, I’d point out that unless something has changed, you can browse Reddit without an account or logging in, from a Web browser. You just can’t post, comment or vote.

Specifically for subreddits flagged as NSFW, Reddit’s “new” Web UI will demand that mobile users install their app, but you can bypass that by using the “old” Web UI.

goes to check to see if that still works

Huh. Actually, there is a change, but not the way I’d expected. It looks like at least where I am, California, now even the new Reddit Web UI lets anonymous users into NSFW subreddits using a mobile web browser, just by clicking on an “I declare that I am 18+” button. That definitely had not been the case. Maybe these countries declaring age restriction laws basically made them review their policy, and some of the changes have actually made it more-permissive, based on geolocation of IP.

e.g.

https://reddit.com/r/nsfwcyoa

https://old.reddit.com/r/nsfwcyoa

Now both are accessible. I will bet that that’s not what people in the UK see, though (well, not unless they’re on some sort of VPN with an exit node in a place with different laws).

Just an occasion glance every like 15 minutes…like a little drip

“Not like those people with a check-every-three-minutes habit that are fiends for the stuff.” :-)

How else do you even find a community to sub to?

Hit lemmyverse.net, or check and see what people you talk to and find interesting are commenting in. Every subscription to a remote community had to start with at least one user on your home instance doing that.

There’s also !communitypromo@lemmy.ca and !newcommunities@lemmy.world (the latter specifically for those communities just starting out) that will have a list of communities actively seeking new users.

I also try to recommend communities that I’ve found interesting when they’re relevant and come up in my comments with the !communityname@instance syntax. Lile, the other day someone posted a question about dice on !asklemmy@lemmy.world, and I mentioned !clacksmith@lemmy.world, which is devoted to people making dice (and has pretty pictures of them). That last one obviously relies on people actually sticking those recommendations in their comments though!

Long run, my thinking is that the best approach is to have something like “user curation lists” and let other users subscribe to them. Could be posts, users, communities or whatever. Then you find something that approximates your preferences, subscribe to “Bob’s community whitelist” and/or “Jim’s community blacklist”, and that reduces some of the human-time load to try to identify interesting content. My understanding is that BlueSky has something vaguely along these lines.

But I think that there are probably more-immediate problems on the Lemmy/PieFed/Mbin developer plates right now, like dealing with the scraper-bots that are severely loading all of the instances that permit anonymous access.

In general, I’d suggest browsing by “Subscribed” rather than “All”.

First, “All” doesn’t actually show you everything out there, because your home instance doesn’t know about everything out there. It only shows you communities that at least one user on your home instance (lemmy.cafe, for you) has subscribed to. You’re seeing content from communities on “.moe” TLD instances because at least one user on your home instance is subscribing to those communities. On very large Threadiverse instances, like maybe lemmy.world, with many users, this is closer to seeing everything, since odds are better that someone on your home instance has subscribed to it. But it’s not everything.

But secondly, I’ve seen a number of posts from people who invariably don’t like one type of content or another — yours isn’t one, to be fair — complaining that lemmy defaults should exclude X from the All feed, for some X, because they don’t like X and find it difficult to exclude X. And the problem is that there’s no global X that fits everyone.

The Internet as a whole is a firehose, and invariably, there’s stuff out there that people aren’t going to want to see, and people who are going to create communities that someone doesn’t like. Might be spam or just noise, might be test material, you name it.

If you really want to see everything out there, you’re probably going to want a script anyway. You’re probably going to want to pull down https://lemmyverse.net/communities or something similar — they spider the Threadiverse, and do actually build a list of all communities out there — which actually does list everything out there, then filter by whatever criteria you want, then subscribe to everything left.

EDIT:

on “.moe” TLD instances

Sounds like, from the other comment, that it’s not “.moe” TLD instances that you’re thinking of, but rather communities that end in “moe”. Though in general, if the objection is to sexed-up young anime girls, I expect that it’s most-likely inclusive of both.

Well…

From an evolutionary standpoint, we’re basically the same collection of mostly-hairless primates that, 20,000 years ago, hadn’t yet figured out agriculture and were roaming the land in small groups of maybe 100 or so at most, living off it as best we could.

From that standpoint, I think that we’ve done pretty well with a brain that evolved to deal with a rather different environment and is having to navigate a terribly-confusing, rather different situation.

I mean, you see any other critters that have been outperforming us on improving their understanding of the world?

The Russian government, at least as it exists in 2025, isn’t going to run around killing every random person who publicly criticizes the government. In terms of political repression, it’s gotten worse, but it’s still not that bad.

Willing to assassinate people on grounds that that most other governments would not? Yes. But that’s not “the government sucks, I’m leaving -> execution” territory.

At least some of this is due to the fact that we have really appallingly-bad authentication methods in a lot of places.

• The guy was called via phone. Phones display Caller ID information. This cannot be trusted; there are ways to spoof it, like via VoIP systems. I suspect that the typical person out there — understandably — does not expect this to be the case.

• The fallback, at least for people who you personally know, has been to see whether you recognize someone’s voice. But we’ve got substantially-improving voice cloning these days, and now that’s getting used. And now we’ve got video cloning to worry about too.

• The guy got a spoofed email. Email was not designed to be trusted. I’m not sure how many people random people out there are aware of that. He probably was — he was complaining that Google didn’t avoid spoofing of internal email addresses, which might be a good idea, but certainly is not something that I would simply expect and rest everything else on. You can use X.509-based authentication (but that’s not normally deployed outside organizations) or PGP (which is not used much). I don’t believe that any of the institutions that communicate with me do so.

• Using something like Google’s SSO stuff to authenticate to everything might be one way to help avoid having people use the same password all over, but has its own problems, as this illustrates.

• Ditto for browser-based keychains. Kind of a target when someone does break into a computer.

• Credentials stored on personal computers — GPG keys, SSH keys, email account passwords used by email clients, etc — are also kind of obvious targets.

• Phone numbers are often used as a fallback way to validate someone’s identity. But there are attacks against that.

• Email accounts are often used as an “ultimate back door” to everything, for password resets. But often, these aren’t all that well-secured.

The fact that there isn’t a single “do this and everything is fine” simple best practice that can be handed out to Average Joe today is kind of disappointing.

There isn’t even any kind of broad agreement on how to do 2FA. Service 1 maybe uses email. Service 2 only uses SMSes. Service 3 can use SMSes or voice. Service 4 requires their Android app to be run on a phone. Service 5 uses RFC 6238 time-based one-time-passwords. Service 6 — e.g. Steam — has their own roll-their-own one-time-password system. Service 7 supports YubiKeys.

We should be better than this.

should have been a red flag for someone who literally works in an authentication role.

Maybe. But the point he was making is that the typical person out there is probably at least as vulnerable to falling prey to a scam like that, and that that’s an issue, and that sounds plausible to me. I mean, we can’t have everyone in society (a) be a security expert or (b) get scammed.

The first comment in response is probably the most important bit:

In addition: trust no inbound communications. If something is in fact urgent, it can be confirmed by reaching out, rather than accepting an inbound call, to a number publicly listed and well known as representative of the company.

I recall reading that one application of sentiment analysis in voice recognition — like, determining what a speaker’s mood is — is that if someone gets upset on a call talking to a computer, the system will route them to a human.

I remember reading someone on some service…maybe it was Steam?..saying that some wildly disproportionate percentage of their users had January 1 as their birthday. As in, people didn’t even want to bother setting the month and day, which defaulted to January 1, just cranked the year back to whatever was required to avoid age-restriction hurdles.

Altman said in a statement accompanying the announcement, adding that the company is “building an age-prediction system to estimate age based on how people use ChatGPT.”

I suppose our theoretical teenager could get an account on, say, Grok and ask it to rephrase all of his prompts as if they were written by a 30-year-old and then send the output of that to ChatGPT. Let the models fight it out based on their profiles of what constitutes an adult.

I’m sure that you could use MetaPost to procedurally generate a frame, then merge them into an animation.

A newer, similar language is Asymptote, and it looks like it has animation support.

This might be too far into the “watching gameplay” side of things or not up your alley, but I remember watching through some Arma II videos by Jester814 on YouTube and enjoying them.

He was one of a number of members who play in a group that tries to stay in-character, act as if it were a real Marines operation.

https://www.506thir.net/

The 506th Infantry Regiment Realism Unit was founded in late 2014 by former members of the 15th MEU(SOC) Realism Unit. Many of our members are veterans and active duty military from around the world. The primary focus of the unit is light infantry combat in Arma Reforger utilizing real to life tactics, techniques, protocol, and communication.

While I do like some military history, I’m not really all that interested in light infantry tactics, so the content itself wasn’t an immediate draw…but I wound up finding it fun to watch through the videos.

One of his ArmA II playlists:

• ArmA 2 - 15th MEU Official

He’s also done ArmA III videos, which are obviously graphically-prettier, but at least in the few I watched — and I haven’t gone back and looked recently — he didn’t have larger numbers of coordinating players acting as larger, hierarchical military units, just a squad or maybe a couple of squads, and I didn’t find it as interesting.

That being said, it’s not something like Red vs Blue, which is content scripted purely for the viewer, not the people involved.

EDIT: Actually, I do remember a couple of large-scale ArmA III operations that he did. Just that there was a lot of smaller-scale stuff mixed in. That being said, could have been that when he was recording them, people hadn’t switched to ArmA III yet — it was still a pretty new game then. I should really go back and see what the situation is now.

Not exactly what you’re asking for (specifically episodic) but relevant, and might be that this tweaks someone’s memory if they’re familiar with such a series and it’s listed here:

Wikipedia: List of machinima works

Red vs Blue (their channel is locked behind some kind of ‘join’ thing… wtf…),

I think that they went commercial at some point, stopped just being a for-fun project on YouTube, and I assume that that’s what happened. Wikipedia doesn’t have anything clearly indicating the transition, though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_vs._Blue

Although it is distributed serially over the internet, Red vs. Blue is also one of the first commercially released products made using machinima, as opposed to a product merely containing machinima. DVDs (and later Blu-rays) of every completed seasons are sold through Rooster Teeth’s official website, as well as at several retailers in the United States, such as Target and Wal-Mart. Rooster Teeth claimed in 2017 that Red vs. Blue has sold more than 1 million DVDs of individual seasons and box sets.[76]

kagis more

Hmm.

https://old.reddit.com/r/RedvsBlue/comments/1ct84yj/rooster_teeth_shutdown_red_vs_blue_and_where_to/

With the final closure of the Rooster Teeth website, and RTs insistance on removing much of their content from YouTube, many may be wondering where you can watch that once popular web-series: Red vs. Blue.

I intend to keep this post as a repository, cataloguing public archives of RvB and RT content. There are of course still legal ways to acquire the show via YouTube, Amazon, Apple. However with that money no longer supporting RT, I can only recommend them on a convenience basis and instead offer some free alternatives.

The most comprehensive and accessible is: https://archiveofpimps.com/ which contains all of the main series and mini-series in both its original and remastered states. It appears to lack some PSAs but with tonnes of other RT content and a strong interface it’s currently the strongest contender.

Additionally, there is a Google Drive: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1NHnQK7-BgwaJiKJOYA7CkRQemKjTQ8Nd This also contains all of the main series and mini-series in both original and remastered formats. Individual episodes and movie edits, PSAs, Behind the Scenes, trailers and bonus material. For Red vs. Blue specifically this is the place to go.

*Our subreddit wiki also has a detailed watchlist order to help new viewers https://www.reddit.com/r/RedvsBlue/wiki/watch_order/

I urge people to maintain their own archives and if you are hosting your own public archives and wish to advertise them, let me know and I’ll add them to the post.

Thank you Rooster Teeth for 21 years of laughs. Let’s try and preserve their legacy. ❤️💙

That post was dated a year ago, so I assume that there was some change that happened around that point in time.

Honestly, it might not be a terrible idea to give them a bogus date, if you’re concerned about privacy and want to encourage poisoning data that data-miners are using.

If they require some sort of actual validation, like an ID document, then I get you.