I’m surprisingly level-headed for being a walking knot of anxiety.
Ask me anything.
I also develop Tesseract UI for Lemmy/Sublinks
No clue if that’s what OP was referring to, but for the longest time I thought that story about the ribbon was just a fever dream. I could only vaguely recall it, could never find the story when I searched what I could remember, but what you replied is definitely it.
What if he could be fine with more support and money, should I give him back to animal rescue?
That’s as tough a call to make as “the call” about his life. When I was in that spot with my last dog, it was during COVID so I was working from home and could be there for him. Thankfully, I got to go full time WFH after that, and I’m here for my senior dog currently as well (though she’s got several good years ahead of her, and the puppy she wanted 2 years ago keeps her plenty active lol).
My only hesitation about surrendering to animal rescue is that sometimes senior dogs are hard to re-home. Whoever adopts them has to expect medical bills for their care and have time to care for them. Or, worse, they end up in a “bad” home where the new owner doesn’t treat them as well or punishes them for things that have been fine all their life. Sadly, a lot of senior dogs can and do spend the rest of their days in a kennel at the rescue center which breaks my heart to think about (especially if they’re currently in a loving home).
I don’t know your situation well enough to give any advice (merely things to think about), but if at all possible, I’d say he’s better off in your care than going back through the rescue system. If for no other reason than the shock of re-homing and losing what he considers his best friend (you). Personally, I would only consider surrendering as a last resort if I’m completely unable to care for him financially or otherwise.
It just converts the raw binary data into character encoding, so it doesn’t matter what the source is (image, video, database file, etc). The source binary data is taken 6 bits at a time, then this group of 6 bits is mapped to one of 64 unique characters.
The decoding process is just the reverse of that: mapping the data back to binary form.
If you’re on Linux, you can convert that to something more human readable by piping it to base64. It works with any file, but I’ll use an image here:
cat image.webp | base64
Which yields: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Copy that into a text file and pass it to base64 with the decode flag, and you’ll get the original binary:
cat data.txt | base64 -d > data.bin
Inspect it to see what kind of file it is:
file data.bin
-> data.bin: RIFF (little-endian) data, Web/P image
Rename it so you can just double-click it to open it:
mv data.bin data.webp
Enjoy the surprise.
You can also print files like that, scan them using OCR, and then restore them. A very inefficient way to do backups, but it works.
www.creedthoughts.gov.www\creedthoughts
Those are delicious.
Used to make something very similar, but we used a pancake for the “shell” instead of a tortilla.
Ah, okay. I haven’t really messed with Jerboa for a good while since it still seems to have issues with AOSP keyboard (last I checked in on that bug, anyway).
I was thinking of implementing a non-standard way of doing it in Tesseract (basically it would lookup the user’s instance admins and send a DM). Perhaps that’s what Jerboa is doing?
Shame, I was hoping there was an API feature for that now.
Huh. I’ll have to check that out. Unless it’s new in 0.19.4 or 5,I wasn’t aware the API would let you report users (just their content).
Thanks for the follow up.
Yep, seems manual or at least only partially automated based on feedback from other admins.
Also yeah, unfortunately, Lemmy doesn’t have the ability to report users to their home admins, just content they post. Not sure if that’s a moderation feature that’s in the pipeline or not (haven’t checked for a bit).
That would definitely work for rooting out ones local to an instance, but not cross-instance. For example, none of these were local to my instance, so I don’t have email or IP data for those and had to identify them based on activity patterns.
I worked with another instance admin who did have one of these on their instance, and they confirmed IP and email provider overlap of those accounts as well as a local alt of an active user on another instance. Unfortunately, there is no way to prove that the alt on that instance actually belongs to the “main” alt on another instance. Due to privacy policy conflicts, they couldn’t share the actual IP/email values but could confirm that there was overlap among the suspect accounts.
Admins could share IP and email info and compare, but each instance has its own privacy policy which may or may not allow for that (even for moderation purposes). I’m throwing some ideas around with other admins to find a way to share that info that doesn’t violate the privacy of any instances’ users. My current thought was to share a hash of the IP address, IP subnet, email address, and email provider. That way those hashes could be compared without revealing the actual values. The only hiccup with that is that it would be incredibly easy to generate a rainbow table of all IPv4 addresses to de-anonymize the IP hashes, so I’m back to square one lol.
Lol, that sounds like a Randall Munroe unit of measurement, and I love it. If there’s not already an xkcd for that, there should be.
Some instances do, but I think it’s more of an automod configuration. AFAIK, Lemmy doesn’t have that capability out of the box. Not sure about other fed platforms.
I used to think so, but it’s barely even that.
I’ve had 3 instance admins confirm anonymously that these were using a throwaway email service. sharklasers.com
specifically.
Possibly. I don’t think I’ve been in or active in it for a while. With check it out.
Yep. Also, aren’t there already celebrities on Mastodon? I know George Takei is. Granted, you’d have to know he was @mastodon.social
versus mstdn.social
so that could complicate things for those unfamiliar with the platform.
OP’s definitely got a point, though.
I hope this post doesn’t tank the monthly active users stats lol. Mostly that’s me hoping this problem isn’t as big as I fear.
True. But it uses a threshold ratio. They’d have to give out a proportional number of upvotes to “fool” it, and at that point, they’re an average Lemmy user lol. That script isn’t (currently) setup to detect targeted vote brigading, just ones that are only here to downvote stuff. I’ve got other scripts to detect that, but they just generate daily/weekly reports.
It takes time to detect them, but it does prevent most false positives that way (better to err on the side of caution and all that).
Lol I didn’t either.