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[–] 84 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Deflock.me is absolutely depressing to see the amount of surveillance present.

Would be great to have a navigation app that could map routes that avoid or minimize the number of surveillance points.

Currently I just try to be diligent about marking any police or ice activity in waze but a FOSS option would be great.

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  • [–] 67 points 8 months ago (11 children)

    You can see Benn Jordan's videos (referenced in the article) here: https://peertube.gravitywell.xyz/w/5xhkuDuVsWZ2jbsVw32Una

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  • [–] 7 points 8 months ago (7 children)

    Sorry, it's off topic, but how do I subscribe to this guy from the instance I've signed up with? I searched his channel but nothing showed up. So that does that mean I'm SooL because my instance isn't federated with his?

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  • [–] 8 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    I went here: https://peertube.gravitywell.xyz/c/benjordan/videos

    Then I clicked the subscribe button.

    Then I entered the url to my peertube account.

    Then it opened the peertube app to my account and I had to hit subscribe again.

    Not painless but not bad for being federated.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    If you're a firefox person, there's an add-on called Peertube Companion which will convert peertube links to use your instance. So for me, that link takes me to peertube.wtf rather than peertube.gravitywell.xyz

    Apparently it will also redirect you to your peertube instance when you watch a video on YouTube that also exists on peertube (I've never had this happen though! Not sure how it does the comparision - hashes I suppose?)

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago

    For the redirect from YouTube to PeerTube, it just uses the video title. This sometimes results in a “false positive”, but it does work.

    You can try it with “The Linux Experiment”.

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  • [–] 52 points 8 months ago

    You might be surprised at how many Flock cameras there are in your community. Many large and small municipalities around the country have signed deals with Flock for license plate readers to track the movement of all cars in their city. Even though these deals are signed by local police departments, oftentimes ICE also gains access.

    This is so dystopian, even before ICE comes into play.

    Because of their ubiquity, people are interested in finding out where and how many Flock cameras are in their community. One project that can help with this is the OUI-SPY, a small piece of open source hardware. The OUI-SPY runs on a cheap Arduino compatible chip called an ESP-32. There are multiple programs available for loading on the chip, such as “Flock You,” which allows people to detect Flock cameras and “Sky-Spy” to detect overhead drones. There’s also “BLE Detect,” which detects various Bluetooth signals including ones from Axon, Meta’s Ray-Bans that secretly record you, and more. (...)

    There are several more examples of apps, sites, inventions and FOSS community efforts to deal with surveillance, just read the article. As bad as the circumstances leading to it are, it's good that such projects get more public attention.

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  • [–] 50 points 8 months ago (4 children)

    TL;DR From the article:

    But a few enterprising hackers have started projects to do counter surveillance against ICE, and hopefully protect their communities through clever use of technology.

    Further on the article goes in dept in what ways the ICE is monitoring communities and possible ways to counteract it.

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  • [–] 14 points 8 months ago (12 children)

    I wish I learned how to hack

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  • [–] 16 points 8 months ago (2 children)
  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago* (8 children)

    The online communities are typically great. If you get really stuck, LLMs can be nice for dealing with your specific confusion.

    Edit: ... but it's better to ask the community so others can benefit from the answer.

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  • [–] 11 points 8 months ago* (5 children)

    Please no. Absolutely not. LLM is absolutely not "nice for dealing with confusion" but the very opposite.
    Please do consider people effort, articles, attributions, and actually learning and organizing your knowledge. Please do train your mind, and self-confidence.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago (4 children)

    You can't rely on LLMs to get actual answers for technical things but it can help avoid a huge amount of wasted time and effort, back-and-forth, going in circles, talking around or past the issues etc. that is seen in threads everywhere in these types of expert niche communities. Besides, maybe my question has already been answered.

    When I don't know the specific terms or framing, am missing context or am trying to get from A to C, but have no idea that B even exists, nevermind how (or who) to ask about it. If I can accelerate the process of clearing that up, I can go to the correct human expert or community with a much better handle on what it is I'm actually looking for and how to ask for it.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    You mention wasted time and effort, going in circles, talking past and around issues/questions, I think a lot of people underestimate that this is why people go to AI in the first place, because asking for help can be genuinely unbearable sometimes

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago* (1 child)

    Thank you, but I do disagree. You cannot know the "result" of that LLM does include all the required context, and you won't re-clarify it, since the output does already not contain the relevant, and in the end you miss the knowledge and waste the time, too.

    How are you sure the output does include the relevant? Will you ever re-submit the question to an algorithm, without even knowing it is required re-submit it, since there's even no indication for it? I.e. The LLM just did not include what you needed, did not include also important context surrounding it, and did not even tell you the authors to question further - no attribution, no accountability, no sense, sorry.

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  • [–] 0 points 8 months ago

    I'm not sure we disagree. I agree that LLMs are not a good source for raw knowledge, and it's definitely foolish to use them as if they're some sort of oracle. I already mentioned that they are not good at providing answers, especially in a technical context.

    What they are good at is gathering sources and recontextualizing your queries based on those sources, so that you can pose your query to human experts in a way that will make more sense to them.

    You're of course in your absolute right to avoid the tech entirely, as it comes with many pitfalls. Many of these models are damn good at gathering info from real human sources, though, if you can be concise with your prompts and avoid the temptation of swallowing its "analysis".

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    that's hilarious. I remember the scene back in the day was more like, "if you don't know, get fucked because nobody is going to be responsible for your incompetent bullshit."

    oh how times have changed.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago

    They have lots of snobbish gatekeeping still, it just exists at a higher level. Entry level knowledge is abundant. But once you seek a community with more specialized expertise, the IRC channels will be private and have passwords, and you better have contributed something to a novel exploit or something...

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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago

    Yall are frickin heroes

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