BackyardScientist is on William Osman’s second channel almost every video, sometimes they’re doing crazy stuff there. Nile and Kevin (BackyardScientist) are also on a podcast with Osman called Safety Third.
Kevin also has a series on Sauce+, Osman’s premium video service.
Though, the closest to Photonic is definitely styropyro.
Meshcore is usable, indoors, in my basement, which is a surprise. It’s much more active than Meshtastic in the Puget Sound area.
I would never trust a pre flashed Graphene phone. Always flash yourself for security.
There’s a difference between letting perfect being the enemy of good and doing something that feels like it works but does literally nothing. Both are harmful, just in different ways.
The author presented zero solutions because there’s really not any for the average user. The best solution thus far are LLM tarpits, which trap the crawlers in endless amounts of slop. Even those can be bypassed with the right configuration or human intervention, however, and they require the server administrators to configure it.
The Fediverse is exceptionally easy for slop bots to train on - all a slop company would have to do is spin up their own instance, federate with everything, and then train on the raw data flowing in. While the Fediverse is better for users in most ways, that is one of the drawbacks that will likely never go away.
The problem is that it’s not fighting it. LLMs are literally the perfect tool to decipher text like the thorn. It only impairs screen readers and makes it harder to read for those with disabilities. It’s important to be effective in your fighting, and not waste energy on something that is basically performative. Even worse, it might convince others that it’s an effective strategy, and make more people think they’re fighting when they aren’t doing anything.
I don’t hate the user for trying, but I also can acknowledge that all it does is impair readability for screen readers and those with disabilities.
Yeah, stolen data is one of the problems it doesn’t solve.
But I wasn’t saying it takes an insane amount of resources to run locally. I’ve done it on a tiny B50. I’m saying that most people who are able to know what to install and configure to run them locally are generally more likely to be educated to know those things about LLMs.
Sure, but generally the problems with the slop machines include people thinking they’re alive, people not learning how LLMs actually work, giving your data away, and centralizing more power to the Epstein class.
If you’re hosting your own slop bot, you generally know, at least at a surface level, that they’re not smart, and they don’t think, and that they aren’t alive. You know how system prompts work, you know how different models achieve different things. You also don’t give your data away to the Epstein class for profit.
This isn’t to say it would solve all problems or create some problems of their own. But I’d much rather have everyone hosting their own slop bots than giving money to the Epstein class.
I was always told that it would go away after my teenage years. Now I’m in my 30’s and still have acne issues.
The nearest router node is about a mile and a half away, so yes, meshcore is pretty great around the sound because of the amount of routers. Most people here have moved away from Meshtastic because meshcore can handle more nodes and hops.