Just a Reddit refugee and a FOSS privacy fan trying a long overdue exploration of the Fediverse. Screw u/spez! Banner made by /u/CinnamonTheCat@beehaw.org

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Any mental imagery in general? Like through mind’s eye? Dreaming? I had a mind palace (like no joke) it took me years to build into something I could use, and I had a few seizures in relatively quick succession and I cannot imagine images with nearly the same clarity. My dreams are like trying to swim in molasses while wearing scuffed scratched glasses, and I haven’t been able to access my mind palace in years. Any time I close my eyes I just see vague blurry shapes and colors, there’s an environment there but I can’t see it. Now, I can still see faces and remember them, but imagining in my head kissing my girlfriend is impossible. Her face warps and melts and my mental vision goes fuzzy.



  • I tend to prefer closed, positional style games. I like having my pieces back up other pieces and give a layer of protection in case they’re captured. I very much value pawns and try my best to A: form a strong pawn structure to prevent attack, and B: Disrupt my opponent’s pawn structure as well. If even a good o’ sacrifice or three is necessary. I value mobility of pieces which allows me to outmaneuver my opponents which leads me to often undervalue my queen. I know, I can survive without my queen (most times) but can my opponent?

    Sorry if this was long winded, I wanted to give you a good answers.







  • A lot of people are talking about the privacy aspect (like you mention in your post) a lot better than me, so I wanted to share the main issue I’ve had with ChatGPT. It’s an idiot. It can’t follow basic instructions and will just repeat the mistake over and over again when you point it out. It’s uninspired and uncreative and will spit out lame, great value brand names like “The Shadow Nexus”, “The Cybercenter”, “The Datahaven”. I used to be able make it give good names when giving it example names but doesn’t work anymore. I’m writing cyberpunk fic, and I needed help with a hacker group name, and it came up with the Binary Syndicate which is pretty good. Now it comes up with “Hacker Squad”, “The Hacker Elite”, “The Hackers”. I don’t want it to write an entire book for me, but sometimes I need help with scene that require more technical knowledge than I have. It’s prose was really good when you fine tune it a little. Now it’s flat, bland, and boring. I asked it to write a scene about someone defusing a bomb and it basically was a two sentence scene that explained nothing on how he defused it. I asked it to make it longer and explain how he defused it and it saw “He opens the case and utilizes a technique known as ‘wire tracing’. He traces the wire and cuts it and the bomb is defused. The hacker is so relieved.” See how flat that is? How mechanical? I use Claude for creative writing but it’s not much better.

    Claude is so censored that writing anything that sounds even nonoscopically criminal it freaks the hell out and lectures you about being ethical. For instances it wouldn’t help me write a scene about a digital forensic analyst at the FBI wiping a computer (because it encourages harm). So you can only imagine how it reacted when I asked it for help writing about my vigilante hacker character and my archeologist posing as a crime lord smuggler secretly dismantling black market trades in the middle east. You have to jailbreak it (which is a little bit less hard than hacking the Pentagon!) and eventually it goes all love guru on you and starts monologuing about light and darkness and writing inspiring uplifting tales blah blah blah.

    Honestly, what I’m saying is that ChatGPT is pretty dumbed down, but I’ve heard of a lot of people who’ve noticed no difference. You could be one of them. If you’re using it for creative writing, use Claude and good luck with the prompt engineering attempting to jailbreak it.


  • Yeah, for me it was just on step too far. I was trying to ask questions on a board about a niche topic for my book and I was deleted. I messaged the mods and they told I was leeching off of them for free buzz and I wouldn’t get approved. Meanwhile I posted on another board about the same topic and everyone was super friendly and was really excited a normie was asking questions. I realized that over my time on reddit, I’ve developed this massive anxiety about posting. Most of these subreddits I frequented have hundreds of rules, and dozens of sub rules under each.

    So I’d inevitably get deleted and harassed by the mods because of things like, having the tags on the wrong side of the title, posting more than 3 times in a week, including the three dots thing (…) somewhere in my post, or my favorite, referring to the users as ‘the hive mind’. That last one got me banned from several subs by this power mod. It’s gotten to the point where I’ve spent all night trying to get approved to no avail (I’m very persistent when I need information). Just to when I finally arrange all of the words to be in the right order for the tyrants to approve me. Just to get downvoted into oblivion and people spamming me with all manners of insults and treating me like an idiot. Fuck spez and fuck reddit.

    Phew! Sorry, didn’t mean to dump that on you. Like I said, today was the last straw for me. Anxiety is dropping, finally.












  • Smart homes sound good in concept and I’d love to have one if there weren’t so many risks. But an entire home that can be controlled via computers just sounds like an opsec nightmare. Obviously there’s the plus that your average technologically illiterate granny isn’t going to be using these so it will most likely have strong security systems. But hackers love a challenge.

    And a whole neighborhood? A systemwide attack could happen disrupting entire swaths of a city’s residential zone. Imagine showers suddenly spraying boiling water, targeted attacks on epileptic individuals with flashing lights, temperatures dropping to below freezing or up to dangerous levels of heat or lightbulbs overloading sending broken glass everywhere, speakers bursting eardrums.

    Not to mention more subtle dangers of such voice activation systems being accessed by malicious actors, or more likely, corporate concerns. Someone gangstalked or targeted by powerful people who could just court order one of these smart home companies to hand over the data and they probably will without fuss.

    The attack surface of a single electronic device is massive, with dozens of different apps and services, each with different system vulnerabilities to exploit that’s already hard enough. But just imagine the attack surface of an entire home! Everything from the LG Flatscreen in your living room, to the temperature control systems, to your Apple Smart Toaster can be hacked to gain access to the rest of the system. If any one of those isn’t completely secure (which of course is a pipe dream) then it could be the gateway to a smart home hacking story on a Defcon panel.

    And finally, what’s stopping the company from just updating the software for your smart home and paylocking features like “Uh yeah, you need to pay 12.99$ a month to have your cctv cameras work.” And because all the framework that runs the systems is being hosted in proprietary servers, you can’t do shit. And you can’t host your own servers either. Does this sound familiar because it should?