I wonder if there’s a way to prevent people from even knowing that two different votes came from the same user.
What I outlined above should prevent anyone from knowing two different votes came from the same user… without specifically trying that user’s id on each. That’s what the salt (the comment/post id) is for.
I’ve personally been banned from one community for downvoting too consistently.
Votes should be anonymous.
I tend to agree, but the fact is that they aren’t anonymous. This tool just exposes the already-existing fact that Lemmy expressly does not guarantee anonymity for votes. The solution isn’t to not for the poster to not publish this tool. Believe me, such tools already exist in private even if none other than this one are published. Publishing this one only democratizes access to that information. (And not entirely, I don’t think. From what I’m seeing on the page, it looks like it still requires an admin account on an instance. Update: Actually, I’m not sure if it requires an admin account or not. Either way, though.) The solution is (if it’s possible) to make Lemmy itself protect voters’ anonymity.
The reason why instances know who has up/down voted things (rather than only keeping an anonymized “total” for each post/comment) is so it can prevent double-voting.
Maybe instead of usernames, the instances could store/trade… salted hashes of the usernames where the salt is the title or unique identifier of the post/comment being voted on? It wouldn’t be perfect, but it would allow the instance to figure out whether the currently-viewing or currently-voting user has already voted while also making it harder for anyone else to get that information. About the only way a tool could tell you exhaustively who had voted if that were how things worked that I can think of off hand is to try every username on Lemmy one-by-one until all the votes were accounted for.
(Of course, malicious instances could still keep track of usernames or unique user ids who up/downvoted, but only on the instance on which the vote was cast. Also, one downside of this approach would be increased CPU usage. How much? Not sure. It might be trivial. Or maybe not. Dunno.)
And there may be much better ways to do this. I haven’t really thought about it much. I also haven’t checked whether there is an open ticket asking for improved anonymity for votes already.
(Also, full disclosure, all of the above was written after only an extremely brief skim of the linked page.)
(One more edit. Something IHawkMike said led me to realize that the scheme I described above would allow instances to manipulate votes by just inventing hashes. Like, grabbing 512 bits of data from /dev/urandom and giving it to other instances as if it was a hash of a username or user id when, in fact, it’s not a hash of anything. Other instances wouldn’t be able to easily tell that it wasn’t the hash of a valid user id. I haven’t thought how to go about solving that yet. Maybe if it occurs to me, I’ll update this post.)
Don’t trust anything ChatGPT says. It makes shit up all the time.
On Arch (which I’m kindof in the process of migrating away from, but anyway), I tend to use the version of vi that is pre-installed as part of the base system. And it segfaults not terribly infrequently and the fact that that hasn’t been fixed yet in all the years I’ve been using Arch makes me think it almost has to be unmaintained.
I prefer something lighter than Vim, and that fits the bill. I used something called “nvi” at one time in the past, but it had some annoying quirks as well. On non-Arch systems, I just use Vim.
I’ll take FOSS over the proprietary software we can be sure will do malicious things to us any day.
If you’re looking for recommendations, everything by Missie Elliot is worth listening to.
She might be mainstream/well-known enough that it kindof “goes without saying”, but just in case you’re not familiar with her.
Originally posted here, quoted below for convenience:
Real story.
I was in my late teens. My parents were dragging me to a tiny, kinda culty church every fuckin’ weekend. Didn’t really have much choice. (Hell, I hadn’t even told anyone yet that I thought Christianity was 100% bullshit.)
I had a reputation for knowing my stuff about computers. (Because normies – particularly boomer normies like Pastor Dipshit – don’t know the difference between programmers and PC support.)
So, one Sunday after the service, Pastor Dipshit asks me to look at his computer. His Outlook was giving an error dialog. Something about not being able to find an email on disk. Clicking the “ok” button just resulted immediately in another dialog, and while the error dialog was present you couldn’t interact with the main window, so this rendered Outlook unusable.
Turns out he’d gone and deleted a bunch of files from the filesystem. Like by navigating from “My Computer” down to the directory where Outlook stored its files. Rather than deleting emails through the Outlook GUI the way one is meant to.
So, I mused “hmm, I wonder if it’s just giving one error message per email that was affected.” I could see in the window behind the error dialog that the total count of emails in his inbox was only a couple hundred or something.
So I commenced to clicking as rapidly as I could. Probably about a minute of clicking later, no more error dialogs and Outlook was usable again.
And everyone marveled at my “genius.”
I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t learn his lesson and continued to delete random files from the filesystem, but he kindof lost what was left of his connection to consensus reality and scared even my culty family away and we quit attending that church not terribly long after that, so I couldn’t say for sure.
It’s like appeasement again only worse, because at least the motivation for appeasement was ostensibly to avoid conflict.
LLMs, image generators like Stable Diffusion etc, and other of what’s come lately to be called “generative AI” should have no place on the Fediverse or anywhere else.
Reverse-engineer it and build an unlimited-use portal gun, of course!
I was always one of the youngest in my class. My birthday is very late in the year. I also graduated high school a year early and entered college while I was still technically 16. I got the occasional joke/comment about not being able to drink until I was a senior in college.
It’s not too late. He can still turn from his sin and accept Satan into his heart. Or more importantly, his lungs.
This video is a good place to start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnmRYRRDbuw
Last I heard, Pewdiepie has been trying to pass it off as jokes, but if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck. (And whether or not he’s “a nazi” deep in his heart doesn’t matter. He’s doing and spreading naziism.)
My grandmother had an Apple IIe that I remember using as a little kid.
The first computer that was “mine” more than anyone else’s… I can’t remember the exact specs, but it ran Windows 3.11 and had an 80MB hard drive. I remember that much.
Linux doesn’t make up for being a nazi.
I’m a little disappointed it’s not a GUI written in Visual Basic. (Kidding, kidding.)