patrick.net

Patrick says

richwicks says

Brand new users have their posts in quarantine for 24 hours.

Thanks for the suggestion. This is probably the best solution so far.

If you want to be a little evil, and somebody DOES spam, you can just shadow ban all their posts. I mean, google does this all the time, and when it's NOT spam, just something they don't want you to communicate.

I was just thinking that. I could show them their own post, but not show it to others for 24 hours.

That seems OK as long as I tell them what's going on.

Patrick says

I was just thinking that. I could show them their own post, but not show it to others for 24 hours.

That seems OK as long as I tell them what's going on.

When it finally is visible to everybody else, it should got to the top of the page.

Here's another idea - I knew a guy working on something like a Facebook competitor - the idea was a "drunk email" thing. You could send out an email, but a timer could be put into it to make you rethink of what you just wrote. He didn't flesh it out entirely, but you get the idea.

I've heard that idea before somewhere. I think people won't go for it because they prefer instant gratification, but you never know.

Patrick says

I've heard that idea before somewhere. I think people won't go for it because they prefer instant gratification, but you never know.

What happened to the image post thread? I liked that. Maybe remove the reply button in that thread, and just let people skim the memes.

I still think that whenever a video is posted, that should show up as a "post", where people can just comment on it. Replace the ability of the other sites to censor and allow discussion on the video. Under the video post, you wouldn't be able to add another video, but you could make a link to one.

That's what Facebook was, before it went to suck.

Still have another idea for you, but you won't log into my pi. I'm not going to share it publicly. Next time we meet up. Basically, it will obviate the need to police any site but that might require quite an overhaul to implement.

richwicks says

What happened to the image post thread? I liked that.

It's in the footer as "latest images".

Patrick says

richwicks says

What happened to the image post thread? I liked that.

It's in the footer as "latest images".

I'm no website designer, but over this weekend, I might take time to make a mockup of a better interface.

I hardly EVER scroll to the bottom of the page, and I doubt I'm the only one like that. I expect the top and the bottom of the page to have the same links.

Frames are now frowned upon though, but I don't know why.

Some people on here may have a law background, why not give legal advice (purely informational with disclaimer) to get the micropayments going. I would pay for that if needed, I often have specific questions since I'm familiar with the rest of the matter and would like pointed advice. I am also planning on doing stock reviews for small cap bio trades as soon as I find some time

@Blue I remember you wanted the ability to edit or delete your own comments which are more than two weeks old.

Now you can do that.

I had blocked that in the past because it seemed like altering history, but maybe it's too restrictive of a policy.

I've started calling threads "threads" instead of posts.

So now there are just threads and comments. I won't use the term post anymore.

Patrick says

@Blue I remember you wanted the ability to edit or delete your own comments which are more than two weeks old.

Now you can do that.

I had blocked that in the past because it seemed like altering history, but maybe it's too restrictive of a policy.

@Patrick, can't you just set it up so that one post replaces the original, but a button can be clicked to see the previous post?

I'm of the mindset that it is altering history. Maybe a post should be editable for up to 10 minutes, but after that, it's just archived and the default that is shown is latest revision. This prevents shenanigans.

Say I wrote something that was reasonably popular and got 10 votes, then edited 10 days later to say "Hitler is the best, and kill all the Jews", because I could do that.. I wouldn't but it's possible to do.

richwicks says

Patrick, can't you just set it up so that one post replaces the original, but a button can be clicked to see the previous post?

I could, but I'd need to keep a revision history for comments, and that's a can of worms.

On the other hand, it might nice for threads so that an author could open up a thread for edits and everyone could pitch in to correct things, as on non-locked Wikipedia articles. Maybe the author should then have the ability to revert changes, but the whole history of edits and reversions would be accessible.

In fact, maybe I should repost all the locked wikipedia articles here so that patrick.net users could edit them!

An unforeseen benefit of the "save as draft" feature of composing a new thread: as long as the thread is a draft, it is not visible except to the author as a note on the home page.

This means that if you want to remove one of your threads from visibility, you can just edit it and click "save as draft".

Thanks, I must have broken something. I'll take a look.

@Patrick

There is something wonky going on with quoting: when I post a reply to one one message with a quote in a thread and then try to reply to another in the same thread the first one gets quoted again instead of the second one. (MacOs 12.5.1, Firefox 104.0.2)

UPD. Tried to make a screen recording of this behaviour and of course it works normally now. =))

If any text is selected, the quote link assumes you want to quote that text.

So if you want to quote two people, make sure you unselect before making the second quote. Or maybe I can do that automatically...

Patrick says

If any text is selected, the quote link assumes you want to quote that text.

So if you want to quote two people, make sure you unselect before making the second quote. Or maybe I can do that automatically...

I'm aware of this behavior. That wasn't it.

Finally got image upload progress indicator working as well. Just text percentage uploaded, but good enough for now.

A suggestion for users: for additional privacy when pasting URLs, try to delete as many of the GET parameters (the stuff after the ? mark).

You can just try deleting all of them, and if that works, paste that URL. Otherwise, you may have to keep some to get the page to work.

The goal is to prevent any identifying parameters which websites sometimes tack on to track which user a URL came from. Patrick.net never does that, btw.

fb_id=nnnn or anything like that is clearly Facebook adding on who you are.

Now images in quotes will be reduced to half size. Huge images get in the way of quoting.

Dan8267 says

Trolls do well not to piss off admins. This must be a new species of troll: suiciders.

Patrick says

Finally got image upload progress indicator working as well. Just text percentage uploaded, but good enough for now.

Looks like Ireland to me. There's only one kind of green grass like that.

Patrick says

@AmericanKulak

Yes, Cliffs of Moher. Crazy beautiful and dangerous to walk along. Look how close the path goes to the cliff. And the wind was gusting back and forth.

Patrick says

Yes, Cliffs of Moher.

They resembles to Channel Islands National Park.

@citTits I don't remember putting that in, but must have.

I see now it's 7 new threads per day. I kinda remember that someone was trying to spam the forum with new threads at some point.

Sorry about that.

I think I've got image tagging working.

Below any image wider than 300px, you will see an "add tag" button.

You can click it, enter a tag, and then that image will be tagged with your tag, which allows much easier search of images (if you know the tag to search by).

All the tags will start with _ because:

1. # does not work in urls, being reserved for within-page links
2. _ will add some uniqueness so that you can search otherwise common words and get a limited set of relevant result images

The tags are stored in the "alt" property of the image, so the author of the comment or post with an image can go in and manually add, change, or delete a tag on any image he or she posted.

Combine all the different Paul Pelosi hammer attack threads into one master thread.

https://patrick.net/post/1377465/2022-10-28-mr-pelosi-attacked
https://patrick.net/post/1377480/2022-10-29-depape-entered-rear-door
https://patrick.net/post/1377463/2022-10-28-pelosi-s-husband-threatens-to-release
And probably this one as well:
https://patrick.net/post/1377481/2022-10-29-pelosi-attack-suspect-was-a-psychotic

@zzyzzx OK, did it.

Now this is the definitive thread for the Pelosi attack:

https://patrick.net/post/1377463/2022-10-28-pelosi-s-husband-threatens-to-release

@patrick

I tried out tesseract today (an ocr lib) and it was easy to use. I was thinking maybe you could use it to make the text in images searchable. Tags still fill the void when the image doesn't contain any relevant text, but many images on here contain headlines, and so might be useful if they were searchable.

// npm install tesseract
// fyi I used node 18.12.0
const Tesseract = require('tesseract.js')
let filename = 'npr.png'

Tesseract.recognize(filename)
    .catch(err => console.error(err))
    .then(function (result) {
        console.log(result)
        console.log(result.data.text)
        process.exit(0)
    })

result of console.log(result.data.text)

m K@su L SIGNIN i NPR SHOP
[E] NEWS X CULTURE J MUSIC () PODCASTS & SHOWS  Q SEARCH >
TECHNOLOGY
4] . .
Elon Musk said Twitter wouldn't become
v a 'hellscape.’ It's already changing
E October 31}, 2022 - 4:'?9 PMET
‘v‘ gs Considered
fl SHANNON BOND

from



I think it worked pretty well out of the box w/ default settings! It still worked w/ my network cable unplugged, so they aren't calling some web spyware service to accomplish it - its done locally.

Maybe an implementation could be something like

CREATE TABLE image_words (
    post_id INT,
    file_name VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL,
    words VARCHAR(20000),
    created_at DATETIME DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP NOT NULL,
    most_recent_ocr_attempt DATETIME,
    most_recent_ocr_success DATETIME,
    FULLTEXT KEY (words),
    -- I'm not sure which of the following indexes would work best w/ mysql for the query, but one of them should work well I think.
    INDEX dates1 (most_recent_ocr_success, most_recent_ocr_attempt, created_at),
    INDEX dates2 (most_recent_ocr_attempt, created_at)
);

-- Have a background worker run this query and process the results every X minutes.

-- Find rows that have not been successfully processed yet. 
-- If an attempt was made on a row, but it failed, we try to process it again but not for at least a week. 
-- The reason we process newest first is a similar reason for why we wait 1 week before reattempting 
-- a failed row - this query+table is basically a queue, and we want to make sure we don't eventually clog the head of the queue up 
-- with stuff that keeps failing over and over, which might prevent the worker from ever consuming fresh work that it
-- can succeed with. Let it try the new stuff first, and then if it has spare time, it can reattempt failed stuff.
select * 
  from image_words 
 where most_recent_ocr_success is null
   and (
        most_recent_ocr_attempt < CURRENT_TIMESTAMP - interval 1 week
        or
        most_recent_ocr_attempt is null
   )
 order 
    by created_at desc
 limit 100

Hircus says

I tried out tesseract today (an ocr lib) and it was easy to use. I was thinking maybe you could use it to make the text in images searchable. Tags still fill the void when the image doesn't contain any relevant text, but many images on here contain headlines, and so might be useful if they were searchable.

I will try this. Thanks @Hircus

"npm install --save tesseract" failed:

npm ERR! gyp info spawn make
npm ERR! gyp info spawn args [ 'BUILDTYPE=Release', '-C', 'build' ]
npm ERR! ../src/tesseract_bindings.cc:7: warning: "BUILDING_NODE_EXTENSION" redefined
npm ERR! 7 | #define BUILDING_NODE_EXTENSION
npm ERR! |
npm ERR! : note: this is the location of the previous definition
npm ERR! In file included from ../src/tesseract_bindings.cc:9:
npm ERR! ../src/tesseract_baseapi.h:10:10: fatal error: baseapi.h: No such file or directory
npm ERR! 10 | #include
npm ERR! | ^~~~~~~~~~~
npm ERR! compilation terminated.
npm ERR! make: * [tesseract_bindings.target.mk:125: Release/obj.target/tesseract_bindings/src/tesseract_bindings.o] Error 1
npm ERR! gyp ERR! build error
npm ERR! gyp ERR! stack Error: `make` failed with exit code: 2
npm ERR! gyp ERR! stack at ChildProcess.onExit (/usr/lib/node_modules/npm/node_modules/node-gyp/lib/build.js:194:23)
npm ERR! gyp ERR! stack at ChildProcess.emit (node:events:390:28)
npm ERR! gyp ERR! stack at Process.ChildProcess._handle.onexit (node:internal/child_process:290:12)
npm ERR! gyp ERR! System Linux 5.10.0-14-amd64
npm ERR! gyp ERR! command "/usr/bin/node" "/usr/lib/node_modules/npm/node_modules/node-gyp/bin/node-gyp.js" "rebuild"
npm ERR! gyp ERR! cwd /home/patrick/webfam.net/server/node_modules/tesseract
npm ERR! gyp ERR! node -v v17.2.0
npm ERR! gyp ERR! node-gyp -v v8.4.0
npm ERR! gyp ERR! not ok

Could this have caused this?
https://patrick.net/post/1377561/2022-11-04-patrick-net-was-down-for-a-minute

Good suggestion. I didn't consider that.

Periodically, I'm unable to post replies, and receive an "Invalid Nonce" error message. If I try the better part of a day later, I'm able to eventually post my reply. Is this the result of an intrinsic or an external cause?

@stereotomy

It's because of a poorly thought out system for stopping XSS. Mostly it happens when people start to edit a post or comment, and then submit it more than two hours after they started it.

I will fix it so that never happens. Thanks for the reminder to do that.

Patrick do you have a way to aggregate all of the individual posts on Politicians, that you have been posting in the past year or so?
They could use their own section like Memes, Latest Images, ect. It would be nice to have a repository on the internet, that keeps the score of politicians as they rise through the ranks, then try to sell themselves as champions that their track record says otherwise. The media then hides or misrepresents those politician's track record, depending on if they are trying to bolster or destroy them.

Thanks @Tenpoundbass

I got a list of all 535 Congressmen and created a thread for each of them on May 31. You can add images, memes, or whatever to any of those as usual.

You can search for any of them by name, but you'd like some kind of search that lists them all at once, right?

It might be on my end, but I notice now I'm getting automaticly logged out every week or so. Not the biggest deal, more a minor inconvenience.

@GreaterNYCDude Huh, that should not happen and I have not noticed it myself.

Being logged in on patrick.net just means having a cookie in your browser that is an encrypted version of your password.

Sometimes people have their browser set to erase all cookies when they quit the browser. Could that be it?

@cisTits @GreaterNYCDude

Can you look at the cookie expiration date in your browser's dev tools? For me, it looks like this:



(Don't paste the actual value of your cookie here or others can see it and become you.)

So the expiration date for the cookie in my browser is about 6 months from now.

Patrick says

You can search for any of them by name, but you'd like some kind of search that lists them all at once, right?

Yes a searchable section dedicated to politicians, by office and party.
Perhaps on down the road, then I would like to be able make api calls to your Critter Catcher, you could become the go to source for such crowd sourced repository. Like the Craigslist, Wiki, or Facebook of who's who elected officials and would be candidates.

I would like to make a precinct map, and an aide for people to navigate their elected vermin vs heroes getting geo data for that is easy, getting info on the polls records on issues is not.