It is bad programming. Specifically it is very bad security (especially setting a maximum length - that is just ridiculous). I think websites should not rely too much on passwords anyway. They should be designed under the assumption that attackers will fairly commonly get access to user passwords, and therefore not let someone do too much damage from simply being able to login to your account.
The best way to handle passwords IMO, is to have the browser compute a quick hash of the password, and then the server compute the hash of that. That way the "password" that is being sent to the server is always the same length.
Well we don't know how that website is actually storing the password. They may well be using a password hash. Also, you should use scrypt or argon over bcrypt IMO. And there should be no upper restrictions on password length. argon2 can handle hashing megabytes of data in about the same time as a short password, so there's never a need to limit the password length.
To potentially answer my own question: I believe the protocol I was looking for might have been the dat protocol which seems to have been replaced by something else.
Hello. I remember a long time ago I found some protocol that was boasted as a less out-dated version of bittorrent. I think one of its features was that you could update a whatever-their-equivalent-of-a-torrent-is with small changes and those changes could be seeded.
If this sounds familiar, and you know anything about this, I would really appreciate pointing me in the right direction. Thank you.
I do think they will essentially die. They will morph into completely different websites, but I think they will be around for a long time, and I think their userbase won’t shrink even a bit.
Big websites are slowly adopting the facebook model: All the content is hidden and requires you login to view it. Creating an account requires some sort of personally identifying information like a phone number, photo of ID, mailing address, etc.
The old model simply turned out to be unprofitable. It was always done under the motto of “bring the people and the money will come” and so they made it as easy as possible to build up a large user base, but it turns out that motto is false on the internet, and investors have finally realized it. There is no point in having a massive user base if they don’t actually generate a profit for you. Anonymous internet users do not do this. They are indistinguishable from bots. If they don’t use adblock, they don’t click on ads. They don’t donate money. Yet they use up the majority of the server resources.
It used to be that you at least needed anonymous users to generate content for you, but (in part thanks to facebok) non-anonymous usage of the internet has become normalized. If anything the best content will come from someone who has their real name, and profile picture attached to the content they submit. The anonymous nobody is much less likely to post anything valuable.
I think the internet as we know it is dead, and tbh I don’t even blame big corporations for this. I blame mass tech illiteracy, and people’s willingness to sacrifice their privacy for some dopamine hits.
The real problem was always a lack of alternatives imo. A "protest" can't work on the website you're literally using. What should have happened is those people all moved to another platform, but there isn't one. There isn't one canonical alternative to reddit, so they had to "protest" there.
and if we really want to keep growing then we can do so without Meta.
No we cannot. This website is barely usable. The average person doesn't want to use lemmy. They want to hear what their favorite musicians and athletes are up to. They want to use a service that has a massive user base so they can learn new things from experts in various niche fields, etc. They don't want to go to a website with 1000 people who all share the same unpopular political views.
By joining with threads, we make it easier for this average person to switch over to lemmy or mastadon. There is literally no downside to federating with them. They can't shut down smaller instances.
I don't want to give meta and instagram my phone number. Don't you want people using lemmy? Why are telling me to give my data to meta?
How will they destroy it if they are literally only making it larger and more useable. The average normie today has no reason to create a mastadon account, because almost no one uses it. But if they can use a major social media platform, and use a federated free service like mastadon, then that makes mastadon much more valuable to them.
The fact that a social media service is objectively good doesn't mean anyone is going to use it. Having backing from the biggest social media company in the world, might actually get people to use it.
I disagree with the prevailing sentiment here. Meta using ActivityPub is going to help ActivityPub grow an will be good for federated platforms like lemmy, and mastadon.
Lemmy should not block threads.net. Individual users can simply opt out of using threads, but it's good if we can communicate with people using it and they can communicate with us using a decentralized, free, standard.
c/Xporn when X is not sexual. Like r/foodporn, r/earthporn, or r/animalporn.
Reddit's database was pretty poorly designed. They designed it to be really flexible so they could make changes easily early on, but it was highly inefficient. I don't know if it's still like that, but the old website's source code is public and it is very inefficient.
Take my answer with a grain of salt, but I'm pretty sure if you have a GPU you can just run the same models and it should work more efficiently for you. The only difference for you is you can run some of the larger models.
Dumb question: Is GPT4All a specific model? Is it just the UI for other models? I thought it uses LLaMA under-the-hood, but I'm not sure.