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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: October 20th, 2023

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  • Except that a tablet sized screen is not accomplishing the same goal as proper visibility

    I never said that I was specifically advocating for that as the only solution. All that matters is if the same end is accomplished. If it is indeed true that the safety of a vehicle is only maximized when objects are directly visible to the driver, then so be it. If not, that is an unnecessarily specific and restrictive regulation. And, in any case, regulating a limit, and letting the market work within it, accomplishes the same end with the benefit of freedom of choice. An equivalent example would be regulating the maximum allowed emissions for a vehicle rather than mandating a specific design of the engine, exhaust system, etc.










  • Kalcifer@sh.itjust.worksOPtoPrivacy@lemmy.mlPSA: Git exposes timezone metadata
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    19 days ago

    Any given time zone there are going to be millions if not billions of people.

    One more bit of identifying information is still one more bit of identifying information.


    Git also “leaks” your system username and hostname IIRC by default which might be your real name.

    This is only part of a fallback if a username and email is not provided [1].

    References
    1. Git. Reference Manual. git-commit. “COMMIT INFORMATION”. Accessed: 2024-08-31T23:30Z. https://git-scm.com/docs/git-commit#_commit_information.

      In case (some of) these environment variables are not set, the information is taken from the configuration items user.name and user.email, or, if not present, the environment variable EMAIL, or, if that is not set, system user name and the hostname used for outgoing mail (taken from /etc/mailname and falling back to the fully qualified hostname when that file does not exist).


    A fake name and email would pretty much be sufficient to make any “leaked” time zone information irrelevant.

    Perhaps only within the context where one is fine with being completely unidentifiable. But this doesn’t consider the circumstance where a user does want their username to be known, but simply don’t want it to be personally identifiable.


    UTC seems like it’s just “HEY LOOK AT ME! I’M TRYING TO HIDE SOMETHING!”

    This is a fair argument. Ideally, imo, recording dates for commits would be an optional QoL setting rather than a mandatory one. Better yet, if Git simply recorded UTC by default, this would be much less of an issue overall.


    if you sleep like most people, could be defeated by doing an analysis of when the commits were made on average vs other folks from random repositories to find the average time of day and then reversing that information into a time zone.

    I mentioned this in my post.


    It’s better to be “Jimmy Robinson in Houston Texas” than “John Smith in UTC-0”

    That decision is contextually dependent.












  • Imo, it likely was/is due to the voting system — and, in a similar sense, awards. Redditors want to increase their Karma scores and seem to, at least subconsciously, view it as clout. So, they’ll create posts with the intent of farming these points — ie they post things that they know will get a specific response from the masses. What also doesn’t help, and is something that Lemmy similarly suffers from, is that there generally is no established consensus on how votes should be used. An upvote could mean agreement, or that a post is funny, or that it’s good quality, or that it’s on topic for a community, etc. A downvote could mean that the person disagrees with the post, or that they think that it isn’t relevant or they simply don’t like the OP. In reality, all that votes do, at the fundamental level, is tell the algorithm where it should place posts (a personalized recommendation algorithm changes this a bit, but the effect is essentially the same) — a post with a large upvote to downvote to ratio gets shown higher up and, by extension, more than one with a smaller ratio. This creates a sort of feedback loop where the posts that get farmed for upvotes get shown more. People don’t want their post to be buried, so they’ll only post what they think will get upvotes. And since upvotes are usually used for things that illicit an “agreement” response, only posts that people agree with will be shown.

    The solution to these issues, imo, is to create an obvious standard for how votes are used and change how they’re interpreted by the algorithm. Imo, Facebook was on the right track with how they were using emojis as the voting method. People generally react to posts with emotion, and an emoji is a good representation of that. You could potentially still have an up/down form of vote (alongside the emotional voting options), but it would be standardized to only be used as a metric for relevance/importance/correctness. This could be enforced by moderation, if votes were publicly viewable, by allowing moderators to remove people that are vote brigading (not including emotional votes). Emotional votes probably shouldn’t be considered by the algorithm so that emotional bias can be avoided. Or, at the very least, there should be different algorithms that take these voting types into account I’m different ways (eg if you only want funny posts, you could sort to primarily get posts with a laughing reaction). In addition to this, also removing the gamification aspect (not showing (at least not publicly) total scores on profiles).