He / They

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • 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.



  • 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.



  • 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.





  • 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)”.





  • There is definitely a spectrum of performativeness in public reading, with “Grimes sitting on the sidewalk in designer distressed clothing, reading the Communist Manifesto” at one end, and sitting in a chair at a coffee shop at the other.

    We’re performative every day; it’s not like the clothes we wear and how we style ourselves and the choices of people we hang out with in public aren’t also performances that we use to signal information to others. Whether that performance rises to the level of performativeness (derogatory) is mostly just in the eye of the beholder: A non-reader might see any public reading as performative. A non-activist might see any activism as performative. Etc.




  • 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.