Alaknár

AFAIK, still no conclusive studies that show microplastics having an overly adverse affect on the human body

The problem is that we’ll never know because there’s no control group. Everybody has them, even fetuses still in the womb. You would have to build bunkers with perfect air filtering, and then go through, like, four generations of humans to breed microplastics-free specimen, which you could then use a the control group for the rest… Only them never leaving the bunker would already invalidate the tests… So, yeah…

I’m glad they did this because it finally gave me the push to move all my stuff to Codeberg.

It’s really weird to me how literally anything they say or do is immediately interpreted in the worst possible way here, on Lemmy.

Let’s get real for a second.

Is there a bot problem on the Internet in general? That’s a resounding “yes”.

Do we want to do something about it?

According to OP - no, not at all.

I mean, if OP considers malicious everything that Spez listed, the only remaining course of action is inaction and hoping for the best.

by your claim, the field can have any series of numbers, that there is no way to determine if it is accurate, and the law that this was done to appease is bad, as in not able to obtain its expected result. and so the data is useless.

Yeah, so this tells me you have no clue what you’re actually talking about.

You don’t even stop to think for a second that maybe some enterprise setting requires such fields. Maybe they have software that populates account information based on their HR systems’ data, auto-creating user accounts? Maybe they can find a DoB field useful? Zero clue, zero thought, just “I don’t use it, therefore it’s useless”.

No point in continuing this discussion, I guess.

Again: what authority do you have to decide which data fields are useful, and which aren’t?

How do you personally differentiate between “useful” and “useless”? Is it: “I have no need for it therefore it needs to be removed”, by any chance?

Why hasn’t the discussion started when realName was introduced?

Someone may find these data points useful, for whatever reason. No point in being angry at a date field, mate.

because it’s too late at that point, which is the whole point and issue!

A PR is when the discussion is supposed to happen. It’s an open source project, nothing happens “too late” to discuss. You see that change in the pull request, you can start moaning about it.

if the field is necessary, but the data is useless, then it shouldn’t be there

Who defines what’s “useless”? You? On what authority?

So, how about we start freaking out when someone starts making these fields required, instead of right away?

However, once this field exists, it enables later reference and/or mandatory dependencies

Yeah, this is a devious plan that has been going on for years, when they added the realName field!

The human is smarter

So, you want to hire hundreds of thousands of moderators? The human is smarter, yeah, but not the bot doing the detection.

If they tune them, you use the methods and knowledge learned and adapt

You say it like “tuning them” is a magic trick, where they wave their hands a couple of times, and now the detection algorithms are smarter than the bots writing the comments. SOMEONE has to go in, and figure out the maths to make the detection algorithms smarter and better at detecting. That takes time and resources.

You’re also forgetting that “tuning them” works both ways. The people writing the shit-post bots also work on improving their tools, to make them indistinguishable from human posts.

Also: how can you tall that “lol, kys noob” is written by a human, or by a bot? The vast majority of comments online are these short shit-comments.

I’m just saddened by the state of things and how much better everybody else is at things I always thought the left was good at

1. 4chan is not “magically” “good” at “OSINT”. They fuck up a lot of things too. It just so happens that what they’re most famous for required one dude who wrote a script, a bunch of kids with bandwidth to spare.
2. Their OSINT is super iffy, hit-and-miss. Much like Reddit’s. Or any other large enough community’s.
3. What @AnotherUsername@lemmy.ml said.

Mate, it’s an optional field on your local OS. If a paedo has access to this, it also means they have access to everything else, so there are plenty other opportunities for them to check whether or not they’re interested in you.

Think of it this way: there are billions of types of online interactions where detection is either impossible (an image or link post) or extremely difficult (general conversation where sometimes even humans don’t sound like humans due to slang/education/etc).

Not only that, you’d end up with a “tug of war” where the existence of such detectors would power the improvement of the bots, which would require the improvement of the detector (which is always more difficult).

And the other option is an anonymous token that defines you as a human user. Which is simpler and cheaper to implement?

I thought the one in the OP was a breaded chicken breast…

A username field isn’t for your real name, it’s for a username and it has always been for that. Stop being intentionally obtuse.

I’m not talking about the “username” field.

I’m talking about the “Full name”, or “User name”, or “Name” field in the OS - name depends on the language version and the OS itself. Stop being intentionally obtuse.

What’s to stop them from using all of the required user fields and then running a background fingerprinting check and then using that fingerprint every single time you visit a site?

What…?

First of all: the OS username is not shared with the website.

Secondly: websites already do fingerprinting, what are you talking about?

People are defending this with such fervor, too

Yeah, “stop overreacting” is such incredible fervour!

but why would someone care so much about defending a date of birth field?

I could not care less. I just find it weird that you guys panic about it so much, to the point of there being dozens of new systemd forks, just because a new optional field was added.

Are you saying that you’re putting your real name in the “user name” field? And feel that you have to?

What’s the difference between inputting a bogus name or a nickname in the “user name” field and selecting 1970-01-01 as your DoB?

You need some kind of username to converse to fellow engineers

On your OS?? No, you don’t. You select a username on whatever system you pick for said comms, has nothing to do with the OS account’s “user name” field.

I mean, requiring FaceID is a horrible idea, but there maybe might be a better alternative (I’m talking about the general idea of a “proof of humanity” online, not specifically using this solution).

The fact of the matter is that bots are a massive issue online. When russia got sanctioned and cut off from the western Internet, r/Conservative went radio silent for a couple of days - until they figured out how to VPN through the Netherlands. There are whole communities where bots discuss bot-posted content. And I have no doubt in my mind that it will also happen on Lemmy as soon as there’s even a hint of profit* to be found.

* “profit” not as in “monetary gain”, but as “any kind of gain, be it money, influence, propaganda, chaos”, etc., etc.

Do you feel the same about the “user name” field? Do you consider that to also be the end of privacy and the road to totalitarianism?

This is nonsense. Do you feel like having a “user name” field brings “real ID one step closer”? Just don’t fill that field or enter some bogus data - nobody is checking this.

Do you also feel compelled to provide your true name on the “user name” field?

It has very nearly got a majority several times. I’m sure that with some media manipulation (eg milking an incident) it will be easily pushed through.

“Several times”? There were two votes to date.

The only “majority” we’ve been hearing about were the “these governments support this idea” maps, which have minimal bearing on how the EU Parliament actually votes.

Correct me if I’m wrong.