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jyrkeshon A Web UI for Stable Diffusion

I've also been using this one (wasn't sure at first, they just migrated from the /hlky/ namespace on GitHub), but I have no idea at first glance what the differences are.

I will say that this one has had REALLY active development as new features have been coming out, and is pretty polished at this point (albeit I'm using it more as a toy than anything, but it's awesome to have a quick way to use the new features that have been shipping out).

jyrkeshon Blocking Kiwifarms

Proving the negative is impossible. The internet is too vast. Proving that it exists is effectively impossible, because there's always bar-moving on

But between the volume of what I've seen myself, and the high likelihood of SOME crazies existing in almost any kind of group that exists (not just politics, but companies, churches, courts, etc.).

Now is there a literal leftist equivalent of Kiwifarms out there doing exactly the same stuff? I genuinely have no idea, I'm not making that claim. It certainly helps, though, that people on the left are a LOT more technically inclined, and probably smarter in general, on average. They're all on Signal or Discord.

Again, I'm NOT right-wing, or defending KF. I'm just saying that violent rhetoric on the internet isn't an "us vs. them" problem.

jyrkeshon Blocking Kiwifarms

>> But I do tend to peruse extremist circles on both sides to understand the radicalism a little better

> Genuinely curious about what "extremist circles" you're perusing on the left that seem to fit into this category?

>> ...far left filter bubbles--with calls for violence, personal attacks, doxxing, and all the rest of it

...

> But... you brought it up

Did I? It seemed like a minor throwaway aside as part of an argument I was making that didn't need the "both sides" part to be true that you said you were "genuinely curious" about.

I maybe did a poor job of elaborating that I've personally witnessed a non-trivial amount of people claiming to be from all corners of the political sphere who engaged in internet speech that most of us would find unacceptable, including violent rhetoric. Hell, I just saw a whole Twitter thread full of (maybe/maybe not) leftists on whether or not it was okay to counter-SWAT to some KF people (because ALLEGEDLY some were trying to organize it).

Of course, there's no way I'm going to be able to pull it up now, it was in the infinite scroll, and there's a good chance it's been deleted or moderated by now. Am I going to become some full-time forensic screencapper of all these things? No, I'm just doing it half for fun and to half to try and understand the mindset of people that I actually deal with in real life. Which, by the way, I have close personal friends who have said stuff like what I'm describing out loud in the past, with varying levels of irony. I don't think they're bad people for it, they're just...passionate.

Plus, screencaps would be worthless...I mean, at this point we're all trading AI-generated Dall-E stuff, even photos are basically worthless at this point. (I ALSO just saw a bunch of "insignia" CLEARLY photoshopped onto a rally photographs, and I'd bet good money your first guess was wrong on which way it went. Except it was also totally working, with both sides taking the bait, Photoshop callout was hidden in "Load more tweets".)

Oooh, but now that I think about it, you should check out r/StormfrontorSJW. That one's a good ol' time.

jyrkeshon Blocking Kiwifarms

Left some more comments on this down-thread, but I really meant it neutrally. I don't know if I agree with you that it's how things SHOULD work, but it certainly is how they DO work.

jyrkeshon Blocking Kiwifarms

I totally understand that reading, and I completely agree with you that it's consistent with their business goals and operating principles. I was just calling it out to the (admittedly minority) of folks in these comments that seem to view them as some sort of moral savior who's making these calls for the good of society.

jyrkeshon Blocking Kiwifarms

I was really hoping I wouldn't get this kind of response because I'm really not trying to be combative or make any kind of point about the relative volume of calls for violence on different sides of the political spectrum. And I have no interest in screencapping a zillion messages over years of having been an internet degenerate to try and prove to you that some non-zero amount of it exists, via a tit-for-tat conversation on what's fake, what's an isolated instance, what's a false equivalence blah blah blah. It's tiresome, and I've watched it play out more times than is probably good for my mental health.

Plus, none of it is relevant anyway because there are so many people poisoning the well with fake personas that are misrepresenting their political enemies for more "evidence" that their group is in the right.

(Ugh, this is bringing to mind a Reddit rabbithole where some person claimed to be ex-AHS-ingroup, and that AHS people were posting CP under fake conservative accounts on conservative boards, and then AHS people claimed that this person was never in the AHS Discords, or that they didn't exist, or the screenshots were fake, and that ACTUALLY it was conservatives posting CP under fake leftist accounts on leftist boards, and OMG HOW DO THESE PEOPLE SPEND EVEN MORE TIME ON THE INTERNET THAN ME I NEED TO STEP BACK FROM THE COMPUTER. And no, I didn't walk away feeling like I had any idea what had actually happened.)

In any case, it's my belief that all ingroups have people within them that aren't operating under their purported values (religion, politics, public servants, etc.). I also believe that the people who have the most power to effect change are the people willing to call out those within their own ingroups who are violating their group's purported principles. E.g. cops gotta call out cops, men gotta call out men, Israelis gotta call out Israelis and Palestinians gotta call out Palestinians. And yes, leftists gotta call out leftists.

I ALSO think that we need more coalition between groups with overlap on certain high-value beliefs and initiatives, and that it's easier to form that unity when people aren't using bad faith arguments to defend the more toxic members of their ingroup.

jyrkeshon Blocking Kiwifarms

Yeah, this is basically what I meant. Even Discords on TG groups that are "public" but still require your identity to attached and therefore "doxxable" in some respect are still off the radar in the sense that they're not included in research datasets.

I sometimes wonder if online and violently oriented extremism is indeed on the rise, or even completely mainstream at this point. Or if it's actually a very small, isolated problem that gets amplified and magnified through the clickbait media cycle. Or anywhere in between (like e.g. the common claim that these ideas are laundered into the mainstream, potentially with some amount of watering down, dogwhistling, or code switching that obfuscates the source).

At this point, I really think very few people, if anyone, even know the order of magnitude of the problem. Certainly, there's been some academic studies done on the topic, but most of them focus on fully public content on e.g. Twitter or TikTok, as opposed to the "dark circles" like KF, TG groups, and Discords.

There are also technically public boards that are somehow blocklisted on more mainstream social media that exist in a sort of grey area. I probably can't post any of them here without the risk of getting this comment moderated, but many of them were formed in the wake of exoduses from banned subreddits, and then popularized by advertising on those subreddits in the small window between getting quarantined or admin-moderated and getting banned.

Idk, this comment wasn't very cohesive, even after some edits, but yes, there's a big difference between a public subreddit and a semi-public Discord server in terms of monitoring certain kinds of speech. And I think most people here at least somewhat buy into the legitimacy of the Streisand Effect, and I think a lot of this is just that but with nastier people.

jyrkeshon Blocking Kiwifarms

I'll quote myself from this comment where I explain a little more about my social media habits in that space. I think you're right that a ton of them are on Twitter, I'd add Reddit, and also say I've never dared try and dip into the shitstorm of private Discord channels: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32156760

> ...far left filter bubbles--with calls for violence, personal attacks, doxxing, and all the rest of it--absolutely exist on Twitter and Reddit (among other places, I'm sure). In particular, just pop over to subs like /r/GenZedong, /r/COMPLETEANARCHY, /r/Anarchism, /r/AnarchismZ, /r/196, /r/2624, /r/JusticeReturned, or many many others.

jyrkeshon Blocking Kiwifarms

> I don’t believe you have the same information as cloudflare and assuming good faith I believe them when they say there are legitimate threats to body and person.

I don't believe that Cloudflare gathered the same volume of info that many others have about KF. OP's point is that behavior as bad or worse than what's been going on (yes, including super detailed doxxing, swatting, death threats, and the like) have all been going on for YEARS on KF, and Cloudflare paid no mind until a larger campaign got going.

Full disclosure: I'm actually disappointed that they made the decision to cut them off. Not because I'm pro-KF at ALL, it is absolutely abhorrent. But I do tend to peruse extremist circles on both sides to understand the radicalism a little better, and generally think that keeping these folks relegated to unseen areas is net-negative.

But to the original point, I think it's disingenuous to suggest that this decision wasn't primarily catalyzed by the PR calculus of more people being in the "shut it down" camp than the "leave it up" camp (which makes sense to me, as soon as the spotlight is cast, most people are going to say it's disgusting and should be taken down).

jyrkeshon Stable Diffusion is a big deal

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32573523

All this is super, super interesting to me. I don't think anybody really knows how it will play out, there's a lot of good arguments floating around.

jyrkeshon Ask HN: Is there a developer laptop that does not suck and is not a Mac in 2022?

Nah, I had an older X1 Carbon as a PM for work, 2nd or 3rd gen. It one of the periods that Intel was screwing up thermal management: between the fan, the coil whine, and the CPU clock throttling, it was a _terrible_ laptop. And by no means did I need a hardcore machine, (too) much of my job was email, docs, spreadsheets, and GitHub. So it really had no excuse.

It also coincided with some _terrible_ decisions that Lenovo made as a half-assed response to the touch bar, among other things. The "touch bar" was essentially just backlit capacitive buttons hardcoded to a couple different functions, they nerfed the red mouse pointer thing in the middle to the point that it was too squishy to use with any accuracy; and they merged the click buttons into the touchpad and used terrible software heuristics to try and figure out what you wanted. Oh, and it would wake up and burn its battery out for no reason.

BUT I played with a 5th-ish gen a couple years later, and they'd rolled everything back. The owner really liked it, I expect in large part because Intel tocked back to a CPU that wasn't overheating by design.

On paper, they're spec'd out pretty well, but if you need the "real juice" I still know people that swear by their older T series. But I don't know how much the newer ones have sacrificed the vision.

jyrkeshon Ex-Twitter exec blows the whistle, alleging reckless cybersecurity policies

But part of what this article calls out from the whistleblower's POV is that the logging and auditing systems that would be needed to do that don't exist at Twitter. That users can activate God Mode or get into production systems without any logging or accountability

jyrkeshon Ex-Twitter exec blows the whistle, alleging reckless cybersecurity policies

> John Tye, founder of Whistleblower Aid and Zatko's lawyer, told CNN that Zatko has not been in contact with Musk, and said Zatko began the whistleblower process before there was any indication of Musk's involvement with Twitter.

jyrkeshon Our Roadmap for Nix

I cheated and did a stateful thing (because I couldn't figure out flakes): sudo nix-channel --add https://nixos.org/channels/nixos-unstable nixos-unstable

and then I added this blurb to my Nix config:

nixpkgs.config = { allowUnfree = true; packageOverrides = pkgs: { unstable = import <nixos-unstable> { config = config.nixpkgs.config; }; }; };

jyrkeshon It wasn't for nothing

> well, I've nothing to say actually.

That's definitely better than "go fuck yourself". "If you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything at all" and all that.

Tbh, I've seen the "go fuck yourself" attitude in almost every Free Software community I've spent time around. It's really just a matter of whether it's encouraged, tolerated, or actively rejected by the project maintainers and influencers.

I would hope that someone writing a blog post this positive would be one of the "actively rejecting" folks, but I really don't know anything about Guix (hadn't heard of it until this post).

I will say that I run NixOS on my primary home server, and while there's definitely a learning curve there, the community I've experienced is largely very helpful, friendly, and positive. Now that I've got most of it working the way I want, I don't see myself moving to something else any time soon (it's absolutely rock solid).

jyrkeshon The Zoom installer let a researcher hack his way to root access on macOS

Sounds like Administrator vs. LOCALSYSTEM on Windows. Oh, and TRUSTEDINSTALLER.

I know Windows has its issues, security and otherwise, but they actually did have some insightful prescience on this class of problems.

jyrkeshon Our Roadmap for Nix

> Another big thing, Nix has Flakes, which make it trivially to turn all your Git repositories into Nix packages.

I have no doubt that this is true, but I still feel dumb about it. I run a Plex server (among a few other workloads) on a NixOS box, and just figuring out how to update the Plex binaries off of the official master branch was a multi-hour back-and-forth endeavor between StackOverflow suggestions and compiler errors.

I really do love Nix though. And once I got it working I felt a LITTLE bit smarter, AND it's worked flawlessly for months.

jyrkeshon FBI is hiding details about a raid on Americans’ safe deposit boxes

Unless I'm fundamentally misunderstanding the concept of due process, I would think that the warrant's explicit language around _not_ searching the contents of the deposit boxes would be a violation of the 4th Amendment's warrant requirements (and therefore due process):

"Nests of safety deposit boxes and keys, and documents and records referring or relating to them since 2019. This warrant does not authorize a criminal search or seizure of the contents of warrant does not authorize a criminal search or seizure of the contents of the safety deposit boxes. In seizing the nests of safety deposit boxes, agents shall follow their written inventory policies to protect their agencies and the contents of the boxes. Also in accordance with their written policies, agents shall inspect the contents of the boxes in an effort to identify their owners in order to notify them so that they can claim their property;"

They were allowed to "inspect" the contents, but literally only with the goal of returning the property (which they still haven't done).

jyrkeshon Show HN: I built a self hosted recommendation feed to escape Google's algorithm

(I should start by saying that I don't identify with the far left or the far right: even if my ideas are outside the mainstream, I have a hard time aligning myself strongly with anyone that identifies with the major "radical" camps)

First, I 100% agree with you that what the mainstream right categorizes as the "far left" is really anyone "center left" that they disagree with (or even slightly right, as many mainstream neoliberal Democrats fall on the "political compass" (though take that with a grain of salt)).

However, there are absolutely folks on the far left advocating for violence as a means to their goals. I see more of them online, obviously, than in real life (though I do know folks who do black bloc, destroy property, etc.), but it's really hard to know to what extent that's an artifact of their tactical differences with the far right. Many on the far left (including anarchists, out-and-out communists or AnComs, and even some DSA types) embrace anonymity, decentralization, and _not_ documenting their efforts as core tenets of achieving their goals.

On the other hand, the far right's strategy is to beat their chest and embrace highly visible patriotic pride, which they then use to create associations between say, the flag, and their more extreme political beliefs. Then, they dog whistle and gaslight the other side about the full extent of their own and their opposition's goals as they move the goalposts towards the right to distort the mainstream view of the center.

Theoretical unknown numbers aside, I believe the latter tactical posture has been significantly more successful in the far right achieving their goals in the political mainstream. I also believe the far left's tactics have hurt them significantly in being accepted by the mainstream (and in talking to many of them privately, they often see this as a point of pride, that they're unwilling to compromise with the "normie" Democrats who e.g. sold them out throwing Bernie under the bus during Clinton's ascent to nomination). E.g. even as a small minority of the overwhelmingly peaceful BLM protests in 2020, just a few guys in black bloc throwing molotovs enabled the mainstream and far right to immediately write BLM off as a violent, communist, antifa movement that was a threat to democracy, capitalism, and the American way of life. So why throw them at all? What good did that do? (And could it have ever been enough to offset the negative PR?)

Even the slogan that many on the mainstream left embraced--defund the police--was a terrible messaging position that AFAICT almost always required immediate clarification of why that didn't mean "we want to abolish the police, all criminal statutes, and let society run wild doing whatever they want". I think it would've been a lot harder for the right to attack them if they'd have gone with something like "fund community outreach [for POC and mental health]". And then they could have even found their $$$ in the police budget later (a trick Republicans use all the time). Hell, they might have even found alignment with Republicans in the wake of mass shootings to actually address mental health on a national scale (something I'd argue is critical to our long-term well being as a country, regardless of your stance on their relation to mass shootings).

ANYWAY, I got a bit off the rails there, but far left filter bubbles--with calls for violence, personal attacks, doxxing, and all the rest of it--absolutely exist on Twitter and Reddit (among other places, I'm sure). In particular, just pop over to subs like /r/GenZedong, /r/COMPLETEANARCHY, /r/Anarchism, /r/AnarchismZ, /r/196, /r/2624, /r/JusticeReturned, or many many others. (I'd also argue that these transgressions are largely tolerated on those platforms in a way that the far-right is not, leading to an increase in demand for an increasingly fractured of ecosystem of "alternative" platforms where extreme ideas evolve and grow, rather than being diminished and ridiculed in the light. But that's a debate for another time.)

jyrkeshon Show HN: I built a self hosted recommendation feed to escape Google's algorithm

I'm going to go out on a good faith limb here, and postulate that OP may have added Gab, Odyssee, et al because they're not yet completely walled gardens, and it's easy to integrate with their APIs for discovery without hitting API limitations.

If I was building something like this, I'd start with something I use a lot (like Youtube), even if it required screen scraping, and then I'd move on to everything that had a dead simple API without low limits.

BUTTTT looking at the code, it would appear that they're screen scraping everything. But maybe it just so happened that the shape of Twitter's DOM is really really close to Gab's and it was super easy to add.

Or maybe this is a totally trojan horse approach to getting HN users on Gab. Who knows? But at least there's an easy way to turn it off. Not going to stop me from trying the extension, at least. (And as someone who tries to expose themselves to content bubbles that I consider insanely off-base, whether for education or entertainment, maybe I'll leave it on to see what kind of insanity is going on over there.)

jyrkeshon Show HN: I built a self hosted recommendation feed to escape Google's algorithm

As someone who hangs out in /r/selfhosting a fair amount, I get what you mean. But I also see it used frequently in the vernacular to distinguish between a managed/hosted web service (which may simply be a web "application" as far as the user is concerned), and software you can run on your own machine. To extend your analogy, running Word locally is in some sense "selfhosted" as opposed to using Word Online in a browser. (Though I'd argue that this isn't a great example because of how much the Word desktop app increasingly uses cloud services in order to work.)

IMO, selfhosting here was descriptive in that the Chrome extension is storing all data and generating all recommendations locally, without the use of a managed service that would presumably be storing all of my history in someone's cloud instance. (I'm sure you're a great person, OP, but I wouldn't want to give you my entire browser history.)

Yes, it's shipped in the Chrome web store, so OP could theoretically ship different code than what's showing in the open-source repo, but you actually _can_ selfhost even "further" by building the extension yourself (even if installing unsigned extensions in Chrome is harder than ever, I think it's still possible, and certainly Edge still allows it via Developer Mode).

jyrkeshon Supreme Court Overturns Roe vs. Wade

> This is exactly the same as how prohibition required an ammendment [sic] to ban alcohol.

Can't wait for SCOTUS to apply the same logic to drug prohibition, which is also not at all an enumerated federal power (assuming the same logic that alcohol regulation isn't one either).

jyrkeshon The Comprehensive List of Window Managers for Unix

I loved back in my Slackware/Gentoo days. But the last time I tried to run Linux on the desktop (on bare metal, in particular), I wanted to play with CentOS (just before the big changes). I ended up having to compile it from scratch, when was a fun challenge given that I was used to everything but RHEL-based distros.

But a bunch of stuff was broken, and it was clear that Enlightenment had tried to reimplement a bunch of apps a la KDE/Gnome, and that development had stalled out. And that running a complex WM like that without a blessing from your package manager was a pain in the ass.

So I installed GNOME.

Nowadays, I just run Windows...

jyrkeshon If OpenSSL were a GUI

> ffmpeg

You mean like this? https://iangetz.com/projects/ffmpeg-builder/

I'm a CLI guy, but `openssl` is insanely complex and I think it would benefit the ecosystem immensely if someone built a wrapper CLI that made it easier to complete the small handful of popular use cases that 90% of us have to go to Google to remember.

jyrkeshon Safari Technology Preview Release Notes

I completely agree, but as someone who's owned publishing for changelogs on large-ish, often super technical OSS projects, it can be very difficult to explain some of the concepts needed to grok a bugfix or low-level design change even in the span of a couple paragraphs. And more importantly, that context needs to be written by the engineer involved in the change, which means more context == less code work.

That being said, I think some projects do it extremely well. My gold standard for a while has actually been the OSS Dolphin emulator for Gamecube/Wii. They write incredible progress reports[1] every 1-2 months that give phenomenal context on how they found the bug, why it matters, how it works, and what they did to fix it.

Another great example is VS Code[2]. Their context tends to be around changes that are more UX-oriented, but it's still a great way to understand what new value you're getting on every new release.

[1]: https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2022/02/08/dolphin-progress-rep...

[2]: https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_67

jyrkeshon 2022 Pulitzer Prizes

Can't speak for OP, but it was interesting for me in that it points to either:

a) speculative reporting that turned out to have less basis in reality than was initially thought (to the point that top-tier award-winning journalism wasn't actually true), or

b) a disconnect between facts on the ground as reported by journalists, and our individual, societal, or governmental inability to effect change based on those facts

My personal take is that it's probably a combination of the two. A bunch of anonymous sources cited by the press throughout Trump's presidency were either never corroborated by public sources, or were flatly proven to be incorrect as more facts came out. But there was also a TON of totally credible, well-sourced journalism in that era that the US federal and state governments have completely ignored, often with the support of their constituents who dismiss even the absolute best reporting as "fake news."

Looking at the 2022 winners, it's personally disheartening for me to think how much of what's listed there will just continue on as the status quo. Though as a counterpoint, it also looks like there's some wins that were already corrected, like the Florida battery plant exposé that (if I take the Pulitzer description here at face value) resulted in new safety measures to protect workers.

jyrkeshon Snap launches its first drone

Yeah, because you defined a line where the vast majority of people would agree.

But you can slide the line over to a point where people would be more split on the issue. E.g. say you're alone on a public beach playing your music, and one other person walks up to also enjoy the beach and who doesn't want to hear your music. Should you turn off the music? Is there a db level that's acceptable? Should the other person be required to find a quieter spot further down the coast? Or should you have to relocate to an empty spot?

jyrkeshon Snap launches its first drone

Without necessarily supporting it, there's a property-based take as well, in which you have complete rights over the air, water, light, noise, etc. within your private property boundaries. As a society, we've largely agreed that there are too many logistical challenges and societal benefits to take a hardline stance here, but you _could_ make a case that any unwanted pollution into your property (without agreed upon compensation, which do exist today in the form of easements) would be equivalent to trespassing.

jyrkeshon Debian and firmware

> Switched to Windows server (and was blown away by how polished that was, but that's another story.)

Have you told this story anywhere else already? I'd love to read it. In a past life I worked very close to Windows Server, but I mostly selfhost Linux at home now.

What is it mostly identity related? I miss AD sometimes...or maybe storage? The SMB stack is pretty good too.

jyrkeshon Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?

Probably not many, but you're probably not going to have much luck changing the minds of people on net neutrality. Judging from your comments, you and I probably agree on the issue, but I think technical folks in particular have pretty well-entrenched opinions on the topic.