So this bit here:

Populate a public list of other users with whom such user shares a social connection within such service or application

seems like the easiest way to circumvent this law, with the least effort. Just hide connections for users in VA, and now you’re not a social media site. You could even give them their own domain like facebookva.com that only they route through, in case the VA govt try to claim all users on the site have to work the same way. Tie them up for years.

I think Anubis is really focused on scraper-bots feeding AI models, rather than posting bots. It’s based on requests to non-standard endpoints in your own app, which you specify for Anubis in a couple places (e.g. leaving out of /robots.txt or /.well-known).

If you’re using e.g. a python bot that uses headless chromium executing JS to post stuff, you’re probably going to code in known-good endpoints for comments and posts, rather than hitting random ones like a scraper bot would.

Anubis is good for stopping the n-request-per-second spamming of scrapers, but not so much for just blocking non-human bots that post at normal rates.

My last employer was a Fortune 50, and we did automation detection through behavioral mapping, like posting locations, times, and even word patterns (a very cool experimental project that I got to work on, which used a database of normalized English word frequency to detect bots based on language that was too-similar across users, or even too “perfect”, though this was only used as an indicator and never considered definitive). It is extremely difficult to detect human-impersonating bots based on raw network traffic alone.

Nope, just been learning and speaking it for a long time. :)

Good luck with your studies, and you can always dm me if you have any other questions!

By the way, is there a rule to how these short forms are formed?

Yep! Most Japanese verbs (with a few exceptions like ‘shimasu’ becoming suru) use one of the ‘i’ variants (‘i’, ‘ki’, ‘ni’, ‘mi’, or ‘ri’) after the kanji, that indicates they are verbs.

Yakimasu (to burn/ cook), shirimasu (to know), arukimasu (to walk), arimasu (to be), shinimasu (to die), yogimasu (to read).

Ki will become ku in the shortened version, ri will become ru, ni -> nu, etc:

yaku, shiru, aruku, aru, shinu, yomu

I believe the verbs that don’t end in one of those like tabemasu (to eat) will default to ‘ru’ (taberu), but I don’t know if that’s a rule off the top of my head, or if I just can’t think of any others right now.

In the cases where rendaku applies, such as oyogimasu (to swim), the end kana will also have rendaku applied, e.g. oyogu. Ki -> ku, gi -> gu.

The radical for water is actually derived from the standalone kanji. It’s basically an extremely short-stroke version of the kanji.

Ikimashou is just the ‘formal’, full-length version. No difference in meaning. Just as “iku” is the casual version of “ikimasu”.

Ikimasu -> iku

Ikimashou -> ikou

I don’t use streaming at all, I buy every song I own on iTunes or other services that give you DRM-free files. I have a thing (call it a compulsion) about not using “other peoples’ things” when there’s an alternative.

As with all AI, I’m not intrinsically opposed to AI music as a concept, but I don’t want to use it now when the services that make it are leeching off of artists without paying them. I don’t get “into” bands (e.g. I can’t tell you the names of almost any musicians in the bands I listen to), and I don’t usually like concerts, so it’s not like I’ll be missing out on those like some fans would be.

I’m sure “AI” can produce perfectly milquetoast music, but are you ever going to want to listen again? I have tracks I’ve listened to hundreds of times because they mean something to me emotionally (and often have a temporal element wherein I remember where I was living and what I was doing the first time I heard it) – and most of my tracks do not have lyrics.

Layering nonsensical lyrics atop forgettable melodies sounds more like torture than a service providing any value.

I suspect this is mostly an artifact of our current early AI music models. Just like we got past the days of 8-finger monstrosities in newer image models, we’ll get more ‘context-aware’ and sensical lyric models for music. We just won’t be getting there ethically.

Hold onto it in case it’s needed.

Or take half, and have the admins/ mods choose 4-6 charities, and the community vote on which to donate it to.

Holy shit. Somehow it’s both exactly what you expect, and completely shocking. Literal dehumanization and genocide, played as jokes.

Who’s ‘we’? xD

Yes, 君 is ‘kun’ when used as an honorific.

海 is ‘umi’, or sea/ocean. You are correct that the second half of the kanji (母) is the same as the standalone character for mother, but it’s base radical is ⽏, which also just means mother. The first radical, ⺡, means water/ liquid, so you can sort of infer that “water mother” = ocean. Not all kanji work out this nicely with their radical structure, though.

Last part is spot on, ikou (行こう) is the shortened (conjugation?) of iku or ‘to go’ that expresses a suggestion to do, i.e. “let’s (go)”.

I have to since my partner doesn’t speak Japanese, but half the time I end up having to correct lines for them once or twice, to make things make sense. The non-egregious stuff I don’t even bother with. It’s crazy how amateurish some of the mistakes are, or even what are clearly choices to omit entire sentences, for no reason.

おい、ゆうじ君、海行こうぜ

“Hi Yuji!”

The actions of an employee, when reviewed and released by a company, are the actions of that company. A company is just the sum of its employees’ actions.

The idea is to create fear. Make Palestinians scared to go to aid centers, so you can look ‘good’ on the world stage by allowing in a minute amount of aid, but minimize how many people it actually gets to.

Going with a Bond that young gives too much of a Kingsman, action Mary Sue vibe, for me. Bond is supposed to be an ex-British Navy Commander, iirc, which would be late 30s to 40s. Not under 30.

It will make it extremely risky from a liability standpoint to operate any platform that allows user content.

The EFF has a bunch of writeups on these types of laws. This is the last of a 4-part series on them: Link

Fediverse operators would for example be extremely vulnerable to lawsuits, because almost none of them can afford teams of lawyers to deal with claims, true or not, that they failed to enforce content policies.

Depending on how the laws are written, anyone who could find a piece of objectionable content (which will vary by jurisdiction) could sue the platforms. This makes it very appealing as a route to shut down platforms you dislike, especially if they’re niche.

It consolidates power under large corporations like Meta and Xitter, who can afford to handle legal threats.

If I had the self control to not just unblock the sites or uninstall the extension, I’d have the self control to not go to them in the first place. :P

I understand it’s a slippery slope argument, which is why I didn’t find it particularly convincing.

And if you’ve done bugfixing of software, you know that the data that users give you in reports is 90% of the time less useful than what you get out of crash reports or telemetry (yes, there are rockstar testers out there, but they’re the vast minority of users). Not all beta programs are there solely for the developers’ sake (some are there for e.g. third party devs to update integrations, etc), but this one seems to be, and that isn’t evidence of malice.

Forking Firefox means it isn’t Firefox - yes, this means that the original was OSS, but you really need to be an expert to get at all the OSS code running on your machine. I mean that it is literally not Firefox, since your fork doesn’t have permission to use the trademarked name.

This is only relevant if you are planning to redistribute it after you make changes. You can make any and all changes you want to FF on your machine to remove telemetry, and you do not have to remove the branding.

If we think of the enabling functionality in Firefox as a virtual lock, breaking that lock is illegal under the DMCA. That seems very weird for code that is ostensibly open source.

Extending this argument would mean that it’s potentially illegal under DMCA to remove any protection mechanism that it would be ‘hacking’ to bypass during usage (e.g. SSL, authentication, etc) from any OSS project. Thats not the case, because an OSS license gives you explicit permission to modify the application.

I am 100% on board with the author until they question it being open source, immediately after noting that users can take the source code and remove the telemetry function from it. They try to reconcile that contradiction by seemingly saying that since Firefox has the telemetry, a non-telemetry Firefox wouldn’t be Firefox, and that somehow makes FF not open-source?

Is Firefox really open source if we have to submit to data collection to access features distributed under an open source license?

Yes, ordinary end users can create a patch set to enable these features without needing to submit data to Mozilla - but that would clearly no longer be Firefox.

Plenty of OSS licenses have rules baked into them about how you can use the code, or lay out obligations for redistribution. That does not negate their OSS-ness.

“Is it really open source if I have to edit the source code I was given to remove a feature I don’t like?”

I mean, yeah? What a program does is completely orthogonal to the rights granted by its source code license, which determines whether something is open-source.

I am also not sure why they seem to think that this move either is meant to or is likely to push away technical users in favor of some supposed group of non-technical users who will go into the settings to manually enable a beta testing feature (Labs).

Yes, (as the author notes) the purpose of a system is what it does, but the author isn’t presenting any evidence of what it’s doing vis a vis their claim of making technical users quit FF.

Mozilla has plenty of issues, but I just don’t see “forces you to agree to telemetry if you want to participate in beta testing” as some canary in the coalmine of enshitiffication.

Netanyahu is insisting that Iran is only months away from having nukes. Experts disagree. My personal opinion is this is another ploy of his to stay in power, since the “war” in Gaza has been winding down.