What they’re doing is publicly signaling that they’re going to spend a lot of money in those districts if these reps vote for Jim Jordan. They’re already swing districts, so anyone who wants to keep his seat is going to have to raise and spend even more money. The Dems are betting that the pressure of having to fundraise and fight a contested election is more of a problem than just making up an excuse to not vote for Jordan.
RotaryKeyboard
joined 2 years ago
For me it was playing Life is Strange for the first time. I bought it because it had been listed on Steam as “Overwhelmingly Positive” for ages, and at the time I was really enjoying the story-based games that companies like Telltale were producing. So, knowing nothing about the game, I picked it up and started playing it.
The first act was slow. What I didn’t realize at the time was that the writers were establishing Arcadia Bay, a city in the Pacific Northwest, as a character. All the people in it needed to be recognizable, so it took time for them to teach the player about who they were, what mattered to them, how they fit in to the city, and what their flaws were. I actually stopped playing for a while after the first act. But, luckily, I picked it back up over the holiday season.
I still remember playing it in my living room. I was so thoroughly absorbed into the story that when something tense happened in the second act and I couldn’t stop it the way I normally could, I was literally crushing the controller as if I could make things work by pulling the triggers harder.
I am decidedly not the demographic that Life is Strange was written to appeal to, but they did such a good job writing a compelling story that it didn’t matter. I got sucked in, the characters became important to me, and I could not. put. it. down. I played straight through a night until I finished it.
(If you’ve played it and you’re wondering, I chose the town the first time I played it.)
I’ll never forget that game. I’ll also never forget the communities that spawned around it. I read the accounts of people who had just played it for the first time for about a year because it helped me relive the experience I had when I played it. It was incredible.
Star Trek celebrates the diversity of humanity. The extremes of genetic engineering and (on the other side of the spectrum, perhaps) the Borg are symbolic of the corruption of that diversity.
For an in-universe explanation, I suppose you could just look at the degree to which cybernetics are tolerated. Rutherford-level cybernetics? No problem! Borg Queen-level cybernetics? Helm, warp nine, full reverse!
This is a great resource! Thanks!
Wow, the world is a small place! I recently faced this challenge when I was writing a script that needed to store rich text in a CSV. It just so happens that I was a technical writing student at the right time to have learned the conventions that were used before word processors. (This was a weird fluke, since word processors were had been in wide use for many years before I got to college.)
What you need are the style rules that were used when typewriters were in use. If you find one, let me know! Below is an excerpt from ChatGPT that I vetted based on what I remember.
-
Headers and Titles: Typically rendered in all caps to distinguish them from the rest of the text.
-
Spacing:
- Two carriage returns after a paragraph or section to visually separate content.
- Double-spacing between lines was often used to make manuscripts easier to edit by hand.
[I was taught to write papers with two carriage returns between paragraphs so that there’s an empty line space between every paragraph. The exception was the end of a section before a header, where we were taught to use three carriage returns for a double linespace. Headers had a linespace between them and the first paragraph of their section.]
- Emphasis: Since typewriters couldn't italicize or bold text, underlining was the main method for emphasizing text.
[I never learned an alternative for emphasis. It was used all the time for citations, so I always used underlining. Since I’ve never seen a text file that supports this, I don’t know what you should do here.]
-
Indentation: A standard of five spaces (or one tab on some typewriters) was common for the start of new paragraphs. [Indentation depended heavily on what style your document called for. I almost always used block style or modified block style, so I never bothered with indentation.]
-
Page Numbers: Often manually typed, either centered at the bottom of the page or in the top right corner.
-
Footnotes and Endnotes: Numbered manually and typically indicated by a superscript numeral. The actual note would appear either at the bottom of the page (for footnotes) or at the end of the document/chapter (for endnotes).
-
Tables and Columns: Creating tables was tedious. Writers had to carefully count spaces to align columns. Some typewriters had a tab setting feature to help with this.
-
Citations: Followed standard style guidelines of the era (like APA, MLA, or Chicago), but were manually typed and often double-spaced.
-
Bullet Points: Since typewriters didn't have a bullet point function, a dash (-), asterisk (*), or number might be used to indicate list items.
—— —— ——
Numbered lists: I solved this by using this numbering format:
- One
1.1. One sub one
1.2. One sub two
1.2.1. One, sub two, sub one.
etc.
For some modern things like links and tables, just borrow from Markdown.
This is Wyoming we're talking about. Wyoming is where Matthew Shepherd was brutally tortured and murdered. I wouldn't stop, either.
Not beta, gamma, and delta?
It took me a lot longer than I'd like to admit for me to figure out that this was a reference to SNW, and not someone trying to push a far-right conspiracy theory. I think I need to take a break from the internet for a while.
Maybe it's time for a DS9 rewatch....
I am so torn on this. On the one hand, this is sorely needed. Not everyone in an organization is aware that information they feed to an LLM is often fed back into the LLM to train it, or that the LLM reflects bias in its training material, or even that an LLM might return false information. A strong policy is important to help communicate these things.
On the other hand, LLMs have had the biggest impact on my productivity, well, ever. The speed with which I can write complex documents, write code, or help someone else solve a problem has been increased by an order of magnitude. My organization recently enacted something similar to this executive order, prohibiting the use of LLMs. Now I can't get those advantages at work anymore. I'm afraid a heavy-handed policy would effectively strip government workers of the same capabilities.
This has been going on forever. Decades ago, it was common to be charged more on travel websites if you were using a Mac then if you were using windows. These days they use a lot more profiling to try to squeeze more money out of the people they think are willing to pay.
That title makes me chuckle. He should go set up a fresh install of Windows and see what the default security experience is like. Mac OS makes it smooth and fast, and relatively unobtrusive in comparison.
47
I'm an admin on lemmy.ninja, a month-old Lemmy instance. Users are required to validate their emails, but the email sent to them to do this always ends up in the spam folder. There's nothing we can do about that. We've found, however, that if the users are told to go get it, they can find the mail and validate just fine.
What's the best way to get this message to users while they're creating their new account? Is there a file we can edit to add instructions about checking their spam folder while they're creating the "create" button?
I'm hoping someone has a creative solution. I know it won't be a 100% fix, but any little bit helps.
87
A tale of a new Lemmy instance, a bot infestation, the fallout, and how we dealt with it
(lemmy.ninja)
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ninja/post/30492
Summary
We started a Lemmy instance on June 13 during the Reddit blackout. While we were configuring the site, we accumulated a few thousand bot accounts, leading some sites to defederate with us. Read on to see how we cleaned up the mess.
Introduction
Like many of you, we came to Lemmy during the Great Reddit Blackout. @MrEUser started Lemmy.ninja on the 13th, and the rest of us on the site got to work populating some initial rules and content, learning how Lemmy worked, and finding workarounds for bugs and issues in the software. Unfortunately for us, one of the challenges to getting the site up turned out to be getting the email validation to work. So, assuming we were small and beneath notice, we opened our registration for a few days until we could figure out if the problems we were experiencing were configuration related or software bugs.
In that brief time, we were discovered by malicious actors and hundreds of new bot users were being created on the site. Of course we had no idea, since Lemmy provides no user management features. We couldn't see them, and the bots didn't participate in any of our local content.
Discovering the Bots
Within a couple of days, we discovered some third-party tools that gave us the only insights we had into our user base. Lemmy Explorer and The Federation were showing us that a huge number of users had registered. It took a while, but we eventually tracked down a post that described how to output a list of users from our Lemmy database. Sure enough, there were thousands of users there. It took some investigation, but we were eventually able to see which users were actually registered at lemmy.ninja. There were thousands, just like the third-party tools told us.
Meanwhile...
While we were figuring this out, others in Lemmy had noticed a coordinated bot attack, and some were rightly taking steps to cordon off the sites with bots as they began to interact with federated content. Unfortunately for us, this news never made it to us because our site was still young, and young Lemmy servers don't automatically download all federated content right away. (In fact, despite daily efforts to connect lemmy.ninja to as many communities as possible, I didn't even learn about the lemm.ee mitigation efforts until today.)
We know now that the bots began to interact with other Mastodon and Lemmy instances at some point, because we learned (again, today) that we had been blocked by a few of them. (Again, this required third-party tools to even discover.) At the time, we were completely unaware of the attack, that we had been blocked, or that the bots were doing anything at all.
Cleaning Up
The moment we learned that the bots were in our database, we set out to eliminate them. The first step, of course, was to enable a captcha and activate email validation so that no new bots could sign up. [Note: The captcha feature was eliminated in Lemmy 0.18.0.] Then we had to delete the bot users.
Next we made a backup. Always make a backup! After that, we asked the database to output all the users so we could manually review the data. After logging into the database docker container, we executed the following command:
select
p.name,
p.display_name,
a.person_id,
a.email,
a.email_verified,
a.accepted_application
from
local_user a,
person p
where
a.person_id = p.id;
That showed us that yes, every user after #8 or so was indeed a bot.
Next, we composed a SQL statement to wipe all the bots.
BEGIN;
CREATE TEMP TABLE temp_ids AS
SELECT person_id FROM local_user WHERE person_id > 85347;
DELETE FROM local_user WHERE person_id IN (SELECT person_id FROM temp_ids);
DELETE FROM person WHERE id IN (SELECT person_id FROM temp_ids);
DROP TABLE temp_ids;
COMMIT;
And to finalize the change:
UPDATE site_aggregates SET users = (SELECT count(*) FROM local_user) WHERE site_id = 1;
If you read the code, you'll see that we deleted records whose person_id was > 85347. That's the approach that worked for us. But you could just as easily delete all users who haven't passed email verification, for example. If that's the approach you want to use, try this SQL statement:
BEGIN;
CREATE TEMP TABLE temp_ids AS
SELECT person_id FROM local_user WHERE email_verified = 'f';
DELETE FROM local_user WHERE person_id IN (SELECT person_id FROM temp_ids);
DELETE FROM person WHERE id IN (SELECT person_id FROM temp_ids);
DROP TABLE temp_ids;
COMMIT;
And to finalize the change:
UPDATE site_aggregates SET users = (SELECT count(*) FROM local_user) WHERE site_id = 1;
Even more aggressive mods could put these commands into a nightly cron job, wiping accounts every day if they don't finish their registration process. We chose not to do that (yet). Our user count has remained stable with email verification on.
After that, the bots were gone. Third party tools reflected the change in about 12 hours. We did some testing to make sure we hadn't destroyed the site, but found that everything worked flawlessly.
Wrapping Up
We chose to write this up for the rest of the new Lemmy administrators out there who may unwittingly be hosts of bots. Hopefully having all of the details in one place will help speed their discovery and elimination. Feel free to ask questions, but understand that we aren't experts. Hopefully other, more knowledgeable people can respond to your questions in the comments here.
1
Released in 1986, TradeWars was among the earliest multiplayer online games. As of 2013, TradeWars has been hosted on over 21,000 different sites in 59 different countries, with some sites hosting the game continuously for over 25 years.
Biden can be an instant king-maker. All he has to do is hold a press conference where he endorses another Democratic candidate, along with an announcement that he is bowing out of the race to protect the country from Donald Trump. It would be the most potent endorsement ever made.