A generative AI company ripping everyone off? Say it ain’t so!

Then the correct answer is ‘the one you won’t screw up’, honestly.

I’m a KISS proponent with security for most things, and uh, the more complicated it gets the more likely you are to either screw up unintentionally, or get annoyed at it, and do something dumb on purpose, even though you totally were going to fix it later.

Pick the one that makes sense, is easy for you to deploy and maintain, and won’t end up being so much of a hinderance you start making edge-case exceptions because those are the things that will 100% bite you in the ass later.

Seen so many people turn off a firewall or enable port forwarding or set a weak password or change permissions to something too permissive and just end up getting owned that have otherwise sane, if maybe over-complicated, security designs and do actually know what they’re doing, but just getting burned by wandering off from standards because what they implemented originally ends up being a pain to deal with in day-to-day use.

So yeah, figure out your concerns, figure out what you’re willing to tolerate in terms of inconvenience and maintenance, and then make sure you don’t ever deviate from there without stopping and taking a good look at what you’re doing, what could happen if you do it, and coming up with a worst-case scenario first.

What’s your concern here?

Like who are you envisioning trying to hack you, and why?

Because frankly, properly configured and permissioned (that is, stop using root for everything you run) container isolation is probably good enough for anything that’s not a nation state (barring some sort of issue with your container platform and it having an escape), and if it is a nation state you’re fucked anyways.

But more to your direct question: I actually use dns scopes and nginx acls to seperate public from private. I have a *.public and a *.private cname which points to either my external or internal IP, and ACLs in the nginx site configuration to scope where access is allowed.

You can’t access a *.private host outside the network, but can access either from inside it, and so (again, barring nginx having an oopsie somewhere) it’s reasonably secure and not accessible, and leaves a very clear set of logs (and I’m pulling those logs in and parsing them for anything suspicious and doing automated alerting if I find anything I would not otherwise expect) so I’m happy enough with the level of security that this is, when paired with the services built-in authentication options.

Regarding the video platforms, the only way is everyone hosts their own content and distribute via RSS… But then where is the money in it

The same place a lot of it is now: patreon, merch, and in-video sponsors.

Sure you lose the Google adsense money, but really, that’s pretty minimal these days after constant payout cuts (see: everyone on youtube complaining about it every 18 months or so) but the bigger pain is reach.

If I post a video on Youtube, it could land in front of a couple of million people either by search, algorithm promotion, or just random fucking chance.

If I post it on my own Peertube instance, it’s in front of uh, well uh, nobody.

That’s probably the harder solution to solve: how can you make a platform/tech stack gain suffient intertia that it’s not just dumping content in a corner and nobody ever seeing it.

I’m going to go with ‘not dying’ as the achievement of the year.

Sounds easy but boy, has it not been.

Had heart failure in 2022, and at some point in early 2023 it turns out I had a stroke and that seriously fucked up my head and destroyed my vision (I went meme-levels of cross-eyed).

2024 was recovery and uh, was not the smoothest. But fuck it, I’m almost normal and I didn’t completely torch anything and so, yay.

Uhm, you can buy dildos at Walmart?

Why has nobody told me before now?

AI generated video ideas, AI generated thumbnails, AI generated comments from the viewers, AI generated comments from the creators…

I mean, AI already gave me the ick but this is super extra ick.

Youtube is going to be 100% over-run with absolute garbage, and there’s going to be zero way to determine which content is human and not and it’s going to completely make the platform utterly worthless.

It feels like the most urgent things to figure out how to make viable are things like Loops and Peertube, even over 160-character hot-take platforms or link aggregation or whatever, since the audience is SO much larger, and SO much more susceptible to garbage.

When you say you ‘can’t access local devices’ is it just via the browser, or can you also not ping/telnet/ssh/whatever?

100% this: the sole owner of the foundation, trademark, and primary web portal has come across as absolutely unhinged, vengeful, and petty as all hell.

If I had any wordpress sites that I relied on professionally/ran a business on/made money with I’d be SERIOUSLY investigating any option that didn’t involve wordpress since the last thing I want is my business on software beholden to someone who is perfectly willing to be visibly nuts online.

Not a good thing for stability in general, you know?

Historically speaking, it’s rare that one killing actually causes meaningful change.

Usually, it requires killing a whole bunch of the rich and making them good and scared that they’ll be next before they’ll give up one ounce of, well, anything.

So don’t fret: if things get as bad as they might, there’ll be more and maybe improvements will start happening.

Uh, jesus christ, also what the fuck.

Computers were a mistake, and the internet just made it worse.

Can you tell me how to get to that universe?

I fucking loved Windows Phone and was horribly mad that Microsoft bungled it, bought Nokia, bungled it further, then eventually gave up.

It was years ahead of the shit Apple and Google were doing, but good lord Microsoft just couldn’t manage to figure out how to sell the thing, even with super amazing hardware, like the Nokia 1020.

Can’t wait to see Matt’s next weird and unhinged reaction, considering how this has gone so far.

100% agree: I’m just saying that the guy at Funko might not have been aware of what these farms do, at least the first time because the sales powerpoints and what they actually do aren’t even in the same universe.

The next time though? Fuck 'em, they’re complicit.

The worst thing I ever read about the issues about destroying sexual education is that it also leaves children unable to actually describe any abuse, because they don’t know what’s going on, what anything is called, and what is and isn’t a “good” touch.

I’m not saying Florida Republicans are in any way wanting that outcome, but you have to at least wonder why they’re so concerned about this.

Are content creators we already know expected to start their own servers? Or will there be a general mega instance for everyone to post to.

Honestly - both?

Good examples are going to be Floatplane and Nebula for the single-content-creator platform and the group of creators platforms.

There’s no real reason you can’t build a platform and require someone to pay you to have access, and it seems to have been successful for both groups.

Video hosting is expensive, but it 's not prohibitive and a group of creators could certainly come up with a useful platform and self-host it and still be profitable.

Now, the question is, of course, if peertube is the right choice for that and if it offers anything they’d need, but that’s a different discussion.

If you don’t read the man pages, we’re going to ban you from the chat.

They did it at their general direction, but almost certainly not at their explicit instructions.

These takedown factories use ‘how much shit we got taken down’ as a metric, regardless of what it actually was, and LOVE spamming out thousands and thousands of reports at providers until providers do what they want and take shit down.

My personal favorite one was a bunch of morons who didn’t understand how IPFS gateways worked, and would send literal, actual, we-counted thousands of reports over pirated ebooks that were “hosted” on the gateway.

Except, of course, this isn’t how any of this works and while we did push back and argue over months and months about this, not every provider is willing to invest the time it takes to fight these shits.

Also, if you want super giggles, you should look up the standard text that Web Sheriff sends, which claims all sorts of human right volations and human slavery offenses when someone infringes a trademark for their customers. Absolutely unhinged, and there’s dozens and dozens of these companies filling up your average provider’s inbox every day knowing full well that just being annoying ENOUGH will get them a +1 in the takedown metrics.

It’s really got nothing to do with what Funko might actually really be after, and everything about how they can bill Funko more while just using automated scrapers, automated webforms, and people in the Philipines or similar making pennies to just reply to providers with pretty much the same script until the hosting provider gives up fighting and does what they want just so they’ll go away.

Better performance, but only for gay games, such as uh, well uh and um…

Of course, Elon isn’t worth $100,000,000,000, so this site is horribly inaccurate.

He’s worth $350,000,000,000.

This is quite a lot worse.