robryk @robryk@qoto.org
I enjoy things around information theory (and data compression), complexity theory (and cryptography), read hard scifi, currently work on weird ML (we'll see how it goes), am somewhat literal minded and have approximate knowledge of random things. I like when statements have truth values, and when things can be described simply (which is not exactly the same as shortly) and yet have interesting properties.
I live in the largest city of Switzerland (and yet have cow and sheep pastures and a swimmable lake within a few hundred meters of my place :)). I speak Polish, English, German, and can understand simple Swiss German and French.
If in doubt, please err on the side of being direct with me. I very much appreciate when people tell me that I'm being inaccurate. I think that satisfying people's curiosity is the most important thing I could be doing (and usually enjoy doing it). I am normally terse in my writing and would appreciate requests to verbosify.
I appreciate it if my grammar or style is corrected (in any of the languages I use here).
Joined Nov 2020
I know approximately nothing about internals of that plugin. From what you're saying ("couldn't generate a valid URL" is very vague and doesn't tell me what context did that happen in) I would wager that there's some confusion around the domain that should be represented by the blog (i.e. the domain in the blog's @something@domain address).
@SalivaGlance WDYM by respectability? Something from the same area as savoir vivre?
@kuba I'm wondering about the case of processing someone's name or photo (that's shown to staff), because e.g. this fellow is too troublesome to serve. (Does gdpr make this qualitatively different from doing face recognition to do the same thing automatically?)
I think the most important part of that is agreeing on what escalations are fine. It's both very useful, and there's actually a reasonable discussion to be had: usually the escalations have to be fine, because they are composed of pieces exercised in normal operations, strung together. If we want to declare that not to be fine: which of these do we break up and how?
I agree about anything that tries to assign likelihoods that can be quantitatively operated.
I think it's useful to specify where we expect boundaries to be (i.e. which "escalations" are escalations that are supposed to be prevented and which are totally fine), and what aspirational assumptions we are making (e.g. that we assume that a particular escalation is going to be fixed, and assume it already is when thinking about things we want to be doing that will only bear fruit in a more distant future).
I've found many cases of mostly wasted effort due to lack of knowledge about where boundaries could be, or due to disagreements about where they are. I've also experienced lots of frustration caused by people's refusal to express these in _very precise_ terms.
@msbrumfield That's written in a very confusing way. IIUC there were two separate altercations, and 3 (or maybe 4?) people in total involved.
Similarly (mainly because a large instance is going to have many problems caused by size and lack of shared expectations), but I hope that this might also cause Mozilla to do interesting things to Firefox (e.g. start developing a fedi client as an extension? not a mastodon client, but something that can display activitypub posts/activitystreams collections with user-chosen UI?).
There's one more source of confusion here: the app-to-instance API.
Everyinstance uses Activitypub server-to-server to talk to other instances. On the client(app)-to-instance side the story is more complicated:
Many instances use "Mastodon API" to let apps(clients) talk to it. This is (IMO sadly) the default.
There's an ActivityPub client-to-server API. It's very rarely supported (in particular, Mastodon doesn't support it, but Pleroma does). That API is slightly underspecified (attachments, authentication), so usually it's used in combination with Mastodon API.
Also, there is no reason to use a single application to access your instance.
In particular, if you mostly deal with public posts, you can do lots of low-effort scripting to read them. (I'm keep meaning to make a bridge to nntp to be able to use something with better filtering/categorization engine~~.)
But do make it obvious how that's achieved!
I am regularly frustrated by statements that "X/new version of X allows one to do Y", where the way that works (and caveats) cannot be easily found. This is most frustrating when the statement is not true when read literally, because "Y" is imprecise.
Also, estimating that 99% figure is hard, esp. if you want estimates that take into account various specific things about this particular instance. For many activities, I don't think anyone's trying to do that with any amount of rigor.
I once wanted to compare risks of scuba diving and freediving (for depths up to ~20m) in general. What I gathered from a few afternoons of looking up literature was that risk of dying per day is equal within an order of magnitude (I don't remember the absolute values anymore) and that scuba risk is dominated by accidents preventable by not panicking[1], while freediving risk is dominated by accidents preventable by better planning[2]. If I wanted to learn what are the risks conditioned on e.g. weather (or, more importantly, how weather changes the risks), I would probably be guessing. Similarly, if I wanted to take into account anything about me in those estimates.
In semi-professional situations where one is expected to estimate risk (to determine whether it's acceptable) the accepted ways of doing that are quite far from quantitative, because doing that quantitatively wouldn't work for lack of sources. And not doing it quantitatively makes it harder to notice that the estimates are off, and doesn't make it easier to do it more quantitatively in the future~~~
[1] something like 30~50% of scuba diving fatalities are directly caused by lung barotrauma
[2] some large percentage I can't remember anymore of accidents appeared to be situations where basic buddy observation rules were not followed and contributed to the fatal outcome
A comparison that shows very conspicuously that repetition count really matters is that a single wingsuit flight has same order of magnitude of risk of death as a single pregnancy.
If you like thinking about things in terms of how they work:
Fedi has a concept of a "post". A post always has an html representation, which is what gets disseminated (and which your Mastodon client will display). It also has a canonical URL that you can visit to see it (if the post is publicly visible). What you see there can be richer than the disseminated representation.
(The disseminated representation also contains various ancillary bits of data: some of them standard (e.g. "this is a reply to post X", "this mentions users A, B, and C") and some nonstandard (e.g. "this quotes post Y").)
If you want to see the disseminated representation, add `.json` to the post's URL (technically you should do something more involved, but this seems to also work with all instance software I've seen).
@kuba WDYM by purpose? Isn't purpose in all cases "nor serving a person we desire not to serve"?
@kuba
Examples (multiple because I expect the answer might differ):
a) "we don't serve these people" in a butcher shop
b) "these people cannot attend our performances" in a theatre,
c) "these people cannot buy anything from us" for an online retailer.
(Motivation for the question is https://www.nbcnewyork.com/investigations/face-recognition-tech-gets-girl-scout-mom-booted-from-rockettes-show-due-to-her-employer/4004677/)
How do client blacklists work with gdpr?
Do you mean that the set of people increased, the individuals started doing more harassment, or both?
I enjoy things around information theory (and data compression), complexity theory (and cryptography), read hard scifi, currently work on weird ML (we'll see how it goes), am somewhat literal minded and have approximate knowledge of random things. I like when statements have truth values, and when things can be described simply (which is not exactly the same as shortly) and yet have interesting properties.
I live in the largest city of Switzerland (and yet have cow and sheep pastures and a swimmable lake within a few hundred meters of my place :)). I speak Polish, English, German, and can understand simple Swiss German and French.
If in doubt, please err on the side of being direct with me. I very much appreciate when people tell me that I'm being inaccurate. I think that satisfying people's curiosity is the most important thing I could be doing (and usually enjoy doing it). I am normally terse in my writing and would appreciate requests to verbosify.
I appreciate it if my grammar or style is corrected (in any of the languages I use here).
Joined Nov 2020
