Piefed contributor and part of the piefed.social admin team.

  • 27 Posts
  • 460 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Aquileo | cake
Cake day: November 20th, 2024

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  • The modlog has a bunch of issues and, frankly, I think creates more problems than it solves (but I know I am in the minority in this way). The lack of a modlog hasn’t seemed to hurt other fedi projects any, just look at Mastodon. Anyway, I had originally tried to structure this comment a bit more, but it ended up kind of rambly, so I apologize.

    When looking at content removals, it is especially problematic currently when it comes to comments. Lemmy includes the full text of the comment being removed in the modlog (piefed truncates the comment contents iirc). So, if the comment has doxxed info or something else where simply existing as text is an issue, then even removing the comment doesn’t solve the problem since that now just lives in the modlog, permanently, across hundreds of federated instances. At least for posts, it will just have the post title in the modlog and the link to the post won’t be accessible unless you are a mod/admin. So, just having a local way of removing that content from the modlog doesn’t necessarily solve the problem, since it will live across every other federated modlog still.

    All of that happens even if the community mods and admins are all acting in good faith and doing their best to remove this content. This doesn’t even begin to broach the issue of mods/admins abusing their ability to write to the modlog (however you want to define abuse). If a mod were to do something like doxx somebody or put a malicious link in the reason field of a modlog entry…how can you handle that? Once it is in the modlog, that’s it. That has now spread to every other federated instance.

    A local way of removing problematic modlog entries makes a lot of sense in some cases. As I pointed out on matrix and you have included above, certain jurisdictions might have different requirements on what is allowed speech. So, giving admins the ability to remove content in the modlog that contravenes local regulations is helping admins do their legally obligated duty. I agree that it shouldn’t just be deleted without a trace though. Having a remaining entry with placeholder text to indicate what has happened helps keep some level of transparency.

    However, the local modlog removal doesn’t fix the underlying federation problem. I don’t really have a solution if I am honest. I think that you could do something like give mods the ability to mark a removal as being sensitive in some way and that hides the actual content from the modlog…but that gives an awful lot of power to mods. Also, I know some people really value the current transparency of the modlog, even if its main use by normal users (non-admins) seems to be generating drama.






  • I work professionally in the field of pharmaceutical manufacturing, though mainly with liquid and lyophilized presentations. The issue talked about in this video, polymorphism and isomerization, would primarily just be an issue with drugs that are considered small molecules. Historically, that is most drugs…but that is changing as more and more other modalities are hitting the market.

    Small molecules, especially in a dry powder, undergo lots of processes that would make cleaning with enough rigor to completely eliminate a polymorph extremely difficult. Things like milling, mixing, spray drying, and pressing are extremely energetic and intentionally disperse powder like crazy. The cleaning cycles for all this equipment are already extremely rigorous, often reducing contaminants to levels too low to measure and then undergoing sterilization cycles with vaporized hydrogen peroxide (VHP) between batches. However, when you are talking about autocatalysis like this, it only takes ppb-level contamination to propagate through the whole batch.

    When you are talking about large molecules like biologics (antibodies, most vaccines, etc.), there are a whole bunch of other things that can go wrong, but not this. The most analogous thing I can think of would be a persistent viral contamination. Current good manufacturing practices (cGMP) should be able to alleviate this though, and it wouldn’t impact tech transfer to a different site like what happened in the video. Alternatively, I have worked on mAbs where each batch would measure the glycosylation state because it impacted activity. That is a post-translational modification process for that drug that some batches worked better than others, but we never really tracked down a root cause (before the program was killed).

    Another case study that happened on a program I was working on was that we had a series of batches where the active ingredient (a mAb) was oxidized at a much higher rate than normal. Nothing about our process had changed, but it was a clear night/day difference that happened all of a sudden. After lots of testing and ruling things out, we managed to figure out that there were elevated levels of iron in our product. By sampling at each step of our process, we figured out that the iron was being introduced during two steps called bioburden reduction filtration and sterile filtration. You might notice that these are both unit operations where our drug passes through filter membranes (they were in fact the same filters). Ultimately, it turned out that the supplier of our filters had a contamination issue that impacted their filters from a certain lot and later. So, we were ultimately able to fix it, but I remember those reports being literally hundreds of pages of ruling stuff out before we finally figured out the root cause.

    Hope that helps you feel better!


  • Translation is one of the things that LLMs and other deep learning models are actually pretty good at and has been at the core of just about every mainstream translation engine for years now (since before ChatGPT and the “AI” bubble was a thing - 2020 for Google Translate as an example).

    This is an area where the technology could help us, the developers, communicate with users and other potential developers. There are multiple contributions and features that have been added to PieFed that have come from non-English speakers already. Some examples would be allowing things like furigana (ruby) notation in markdown and making post slugs nicer in some non-English laguages. Being able to communicate those kinds of issues to us and even work collaboratively on fixes is worth it in our opinion to allow for machine-assisted translation.





  • wjs018@piefed.socialtoPieFed Meta@piefed.social*Permanently Deleted*
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    3 months ago

    I just checked in the admin panel and your user isn’t banned. It’s possible that you might be quite unlucky with a VPN exit node or something and are now on an IP that was previously subject to a ban. We tend to not use IP bans except in egregious cases, but those users also tend not to connect via their home connection.

    Things you can try:

    • Try clearing your browser cache for piefed.social. You want to remove any cookies that might be left in your browser from the site.
    • If you are using a VPN try turning it off and clearing your browser cache. Basically trying to start fresh with a new IP address.
    • If you aren’t using a VPN, try from a mobile device, third-party app, or one of our alternative frontends (photon, blorp)





  • Just to be clear, I think Skavau is proposing an idea, not talking about a feature that currently exists within PIeFed.

    Overall, more fine-grained roles and permissions are a recurring topic that has come up in discussions. That is both among the developers and with other instance admins. I think being able to make some users be able to take some actions like clean up/assign flair or edit wiki pages without being given all the moderator powers would be a big improvement.

    The really hard part of this comes when you introduce federation. You both need to give a user the ability to do the thing and also allow other instances to recognize that they have the permission to do that thing, or else their actions will not federate.


  • wjs018@piefed.socialtoPieFed Meta@piefed.socialBug: quotation marks get garbled
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    4 months ago

    Edit: Seems like this is a lemmy problem in general with quotation marks in the spoiler summary block. If you are on a lemmy instance and put this into the markdown, it will render the same way:

    ::: spoiler "Quotes" get garbled  
    That summary above is messed up.  
    :::  
    

    So, this isn’t a PieFed issue at all, but something to do with lemmy’s markdown to html conversion improperly url-escaping quotes when it is in a <summary> tag.

    Ok, I was really confused about this since I couldn’t reproduce this at all. However, this seems to only apply to quotes that are in a spoiler header. I made a codeberg issue for this.


  • wjs018@piefed.socialtoNewcomers@piefed.zipJust a simple hello!
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    4 months ago

    Subscribing to a feed is basically just a quick way to get subscribed to all the communities within that feed. Functionally, there is no difference when it comes to subscribing to the feed vs. subscribing to each community individually.

    The only place there is a difference is if you go to unsubscribe. If you were subscribed to a community only because it was part of a feed you subbed to, then when you unsub from the feed, it will unsub you from that community. However, if you subscribed to the community prior to subscribing to the feed, then that community subscription will persist even if you unsub from the feed.