doing something wrong is worse than doing nothing.

Is this a general statement right? Try to forget about context then and read that again 😅

I actually think the moments when AI goes wrong are the moments that stimulate you and make you realize what you’re doing and what you want to achieve better. And when you do subsequent prompts to fix the issue, you essentially do problem solving on figuring out what to ask to make it do the exact thing you want. And it’s never going to be always right, simply because most of cases of it being wrong is you not providing enough details about what you actually want. So step-by-step AI usage with clarifications and fixes is always going to be brain-stimulating problem solving process.

I’m in the same boat with many things I’m using AI for. I would never write natpmpc port-forwarding demons, I would never create my own DIY VPN, etc, if I had to do this all by myself. Not because I can’t, but because I don’t enjoy spending my time diving into tons of manuals for various utilities, protocols, OS level stuff, networking, etc. I would simply give up and use some premade solutions. But with AI, I was able to get it all done while also quickly getting to know some surface-level things about all of this stuff myself.

I think they meant it doesn’t return to non-AI-user levels when you do the same task on your own immediately afterwards. But if you keep doing the task on your own for some time, I’d expect it to return to those levels rather fast.

My understanding is that it’s for tracking/reporting purposes, and to mitigate future offenses by banning those IPs. You can report an IP to an ISP for CSAM violations, but it’s not as useful when the user’s on a VPN.

Don’t think even the most extreme actors go that far, link could be opened accidentally, etc…

Anyway, from what another poster here linked, it looks like Catbox might actually not be banning any VPNs at all on its own, this might be some kind of middleware/routing infrastructure issue.

With CSAM, you want to block uploading and downloading, because both are problematic for a host.

At that point, if such content is already posted there and available for download, it doesn’t matter if it is only allowed to be downloaded via clearnet or VPNs as well. Blocking VPNs doesn’t make any difference here.

I’m 99% sure it doesn’t work that way. The Lemmy instance caches a preview image for posted links. But scrolling past without clicking a link will not expose your IP to Catbox unless you have an auto-preview setting enabled that opens/caches every link you scroll past automatically, which I don’t believe is enabled by default.

I’ve seen a debate regarding lemmynsfw with some people asking to turn off caching/proxying for images. I don’t know what’s their current status on this, but on my instance even thumbnails were not visible for catbox images. I’m not sure if it’s disabled or it’s the instance server itself having trouble accessing catbox.

Thanks, this is surprising! I assumed my VPN wouldn’t ever block anything, because I’ve never seen that before, and thus the block was Catbox’s fault, but from what they write in their FAQ I start to question this. Maybe there is some large scale intermediary/middleware/mitm that make this happen. Idk, this is the first time I see anything like this. The server I’m currently using is in Switzerland, but I’ve also had those blocks with multiple VPN servers in other EU countries.

but they also have illegitimate uses that (what I understand to be) a one-man team is likely not prepared to deal with

This would be somewhat believable excuse if they only blocked uploading/posting under VPNs. But they block viewing under VPNs as well, which you only do if your sole purpose is logging IP addresses of viewers. In this scenario catbox images posted to Lemmy for example, they don’t only reveal your IP the moment they are loaded when you scroll your feed, they also associate it with the site from where the request was initiated (your Lemmy instance).

I hate catbox. I can’t see images posted via catbox because for some reason catbox is very actively and aggressively bans VPNs. Yeah, you heard that right: they ban VPNs, not only for posting, even for viewing! I managed to find one VPN server that worked well… for few weeks. Until it got banned as well. Someone once said catbox is a honeypot. Idk about that, but their VPN policy is definitely honeypot-tier.

Added: What’s even more funny - imgur also used to ban VPNs, but my current server, at the moment I picked it I choose by criteria that both imgur and catbox and some third service should work, and few weeks later imgur still works while catbox don’t, which means catbox bans VPNs more aggressively than imgur! Really makes you hmmmm.

Added: After reading SatyrSack reply I’m not sure anymore. Maybe it was too rash to blame Catbox. It’s unclear who or what is responsible for the block, maybe neither the source nor the destination.

torrents

So studies have shown that something is true that was never true for me in practice. Well, maybe I did something wrong. Those who never tried taking handwritten notes in their lives should definitely try, maybe it works for them. Or maybe they will simply enjoy it. Doesn’t hurt to try.

What we did in school and uni never required processing and summarizing anything. Teacher/lecturer would simply dictate and we had to write down anything that what explicitly preceded by “write this down”. I’d agree processing and summarizing helps with learning, but that’s totally irrelevant and doesn’t have anything to do with writing,

I disagree that writing by hand is magically improving information absorbtion/retention. Source: I’ve been doing it through all of my school and all of my uni. Being half-asleep, pondering something completely irrelevant, and in general course material flying completely over my head while I write it down was a norm most of the time. And lecturers dictating their stuff at high speeds didn’t help either. Maybe there is some temporary novelty effect after you switch from one way of writing to another, but I wouldn’t expect that last long.

It can, but it’s not built-in into the system and shown to every moderator in their UI.

I feel like tape fans were always there, just like vinyl fans. There are some special subcategories of them like Sony Walkman fans for example. Or those who like tape saturation/distortion. In music production it’s even used as an effect sometimes: people pass their whole audio output through tape record and immediate playback just to introduce some of that saturation. Also I’ve always seen niche cassette limited edition releases here and there.

That it’s good at following requirements and confirming and being a mechanical and logical robot because that’s what computers are like and that’s how it is in sci fi.

They’re good at that because they are ANNs.

In reality, it seems like that’s what they’re worst at. They’re great at seeing patterns and creating ideas but terrible at following instructions or staying on task. As soon as something is a bit bigger than they can track context for, they’ll get “creative” and if they see a pattern that they can complete, they will, even if it’s not correct. I’ve had copilot start writing poetry in my code because there was a string it could complete.

Get it to make a pretty looking static web page with fancy css where it gets to make all the decisions? It does it fast.

Give it an actual, specific programming task in a full sized application with multiple interconnected pieces and strict requirements? It confidently breaks most of the requirements, and spits out garbage. If it can’t hold the entire thing in its context, or if there’s a lot of strict rules to follow, it’ll struggle and forget what it’s doing or why. Like a particularly bad human programmer would.

This is why AI is automating art and music and writing and not more mundane/logical/engineering tasks. Great at being creative and balls at following instructions for more than a few steps.

My experience is opposite.

You can call that conformity or whatever but that’s what makes code easy to read and maintain.

I agree, and this is why I think code doesn’t need to be manually written by humans (unless it’s for training AI or providing it examples). It’s a great thing that AI evolves so fast in this area.

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It depends. If it’s difficult to maintain because it’s some terrible careless spaghetti written by person who didn’t care enough, then it’s definitely not a sign of intelligence or power level. But if it’s difficult to maintain because the rest of the team can’t wrap their head around type-level metaprogramming or edsl you came up with, then it’s a different case.

The fact that I dislike it that it turned out that software engineering is not a good place for self-expression or for demonstrating your power level or the beauty and depth of your intricate thought patterns through advanced constructs and structures you come up with, doesn’t mean that I disagree that this is true.

Why though? I think hating and maybe even disrespecting programming and wanting your job to be as much redundant and replaced as possible is actually the best mindset for a programmer. Maybe in the past it was a nice mindset to become a teamlead or a project manager, but nowadays with AI it’s a mindset for programmers.