In case you’re interested in (co-)moderating any of the communities that I created, you’re welcome to message me.

I also have the account @Novocirab@jlai.lu. Furthermore, I own the account @daswetter@feddit.org, which I hope to make a small bot out of in the future.

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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: February 27th, 2025

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  • ffmpeg is usually the tool of choice.

    An example for batch converting of all AVI videos in a folder:

    for i in *.avi; do ffmpeg -i "$i" "${i%.*}.mp4"; done

    Source & further reading here on StackOverflow. The comments to the answer provide examples of how to explicitly tweak the quality level. Inverting what this specific comment suggests, conversion from H264 to H265 could be done by something like this, assuming all your videos’ names end on .mkv:

    for f in *.mkv; do ffmpeg -i "$f" -map 0 -movflags faststart -c:v libx265 -c:a copy -c:s copy "${f/x264/x265}"; done

    I wonder: if one wants to make things run in parallel, would that be as easy as adding " & " before the last semicolon here? I suspect this could work as long as there are only a few handful of files, but lead to troubles once there’s more.




  • Besides finding better ways to positively recognize bots, we also need to invent ways that make it quicker to realize “false alarm, this user is actually legit”.

    For example, users should have an option to pin posts and comments to their profile, and I suggest to provide at least two different ‘tabs’ for this in the public profile: One tab just for the usual “posts and comments you would like the world to see”, but another tab for “some recent, complex interactions between you and other (established) users that in your eyes prove quite well you’re not a bot”. The purpose is simply to save others, worried that you could be a bot, some time of going through your posts in search of signs for humanity. Yes, this can be gamed to some degree (what can’t?). However, at a technical level, the feature is little more than a copy of the “pin” feature that would be very nice to have anyways, so we can get an appreciable improvement in our ability to tell users from bots for very little programming effort.












  • In case anyone wonders about the context, this is the paragraph:

    In April, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale got into a brawl with former Coinbase chief technology officer and Network State advocate Balaji Srinivasan. It wasn’t on a prominent stage or even Twitter/X; it happened in a Signal group chat that’s become a virtual gathering place for influential tech figures. Srinivasan wasn’t going along with the tech right’s aggressive anti-China rhetoric, so Lonsdale accused him of “insane CCP thinking.” “Not sure what leaders hang out w you in Singapore but on this you have been taken over by a crazy China mind virus,” he wrote.



  • Novocirab@feddit.orgtoScience Memes@mander.xyzBlack Mirror AI
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    2 months ago

    Thanks. Makes sense that things roughly along those lines already exist, of course. CrowdSec’s pricing, which apparently start at 900$/months, seem forbiddingly expensive for most small-to-medium projects, though. Do you or does anyone else know a similar solution for small or even nonexistent budgets? (Personally I’m not running any servers or projects right now, but may do so in the future.)


  • Novocirab@feddit.orgtoScience Memes@mander.xyzBlack Mirror AI
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    2 months ago

    There should be a federated system for blocking IP ranges that other server operators within a chain of trust have already identified as belonging to crawlers. A bit like fediseer.com, but possibly more decentralized.

    (Here’s another advantage of Markov chain maze generators like Nepenthes: Even when crawlers recognize that they have been served garbage and they delete it, one still has obtained highly reliable evidence that the requesting IPs are crawlers.)

    Also, whenever one is only partially confident in a classification of an IP range as a crawler, instead of blocking it outright one can serve proof-of-works tasks (à la Anubis) with a complexity proportional to that confidence. This could also be useful in order to keep crawlers somewhat in the dark about whether they’ve been put on a blacklist.