You can set it up as a “public” instance with closed registrations, and basically just use it as a self-host but have a lot more visibility and control. Or, you could probably play around with the nginx config and make it so that only the federation endpoints are accessible to the world and the actual web app is limited to just you. It will need to be “public” in some sense in order to be reachable to receive the content from other instances though.

Honestly ot only need to be done once and we could spin up this kind of an instance just to explore the data on Lemmy. I bet it can be a ‘temporary’ instance without a static ip or domain and spin it up every time. You can also probably have that as an ordinary instance running from your local with ngrok or something. Probably even block requests from unknown users. I’ll think about it once I get some free time

I personally don’t use or like docker, partly just from inexperience with it

Drop me a line sometime in case you wish to discuss docker and I can show you how I use it. My line of work is around Kubernetes and been working with containers for years.

and partly because I like to have more hands-on control over the deployment than I’m able to get with docker.

Can you elaborate? What type of control don’t you have when using docker?

Yeah, no admin is going to give you access to their database. Even if it is supposedly read-only or something, you would be able to read private messages and other things you really shouldn’t be able to read. There is also a theory that things like who voted for what are “supposed to” be private even though they are not.

I guess we should keep an open mind about it. I mean, the main point of Lemmy is not private messaging. And I kinda like the idea of a social network where everything is public and read only except for the parts a user is allowed to write/edit. Even if it’s not, I treat it as such. Meaning I don’t expect my data to be private and the platform doesn’t push for stepping out of anonymity so for me it’s perfect.

I don’t subscribe to that theory but that’s the prevailing view among Lemmy people I think. You would have to set up your own full instance which requires a fair investment of time and knowledge at this stage however you are doing it.

I mean, it does require some work. But if you are a person that can xonverse with me on such topics, its probably not that much for you or any real barrier. But I should look into it more deeply. It would be awesome to be able to spin up some instance which is only for data exploration and is read only.

Hmmm very interesting and I appreciate the info. Thank you!

I agree with you. Although, I’ve seen that there are docker compose files ready with all the needed services and it can run locally(not tested it yet). Will that be enough(running locally)? Or does a public instance is required?

I do understand why it’s a limit. Nobody will host a database that will accept connections from anywhere. It’s not hard to execute a query that will chock the entire db. Thoughts?

Sorry I’m not on topic but am really curious about how you query the database directly

I stand corrected. So sorry to hear that and for your loss. I’ll be more thoughtful in the future

Saying ‘no questions asked’ is weird saying in most situations.

Honestly if anyone I’m in good terms with came to me and was like 'can I have 10$? ’ I would just give it to them and resume my things cause I probably don’t even want to know or care what they’ll do with it.

I mean, whats the worst you could do with 10$

Never understood that phrasing. A spare? As in a cigarette I carry but don’t need/don’t plan to use? And borrow? As in youre going to take it and bring it back to me later?

I know I’m being too literal but damn it so stupid

Edit thanks for the good chuckle btw

Honestly, OOP should’ve broadcast that fact. It is a lot easier sell than letting people think they changed the code somehow.

Not sure why they are trying to show it as a seperate project.

I very much agree with your conclusions and general approach.

LLMs are great for certain tasks that are programming related and it does it very well. I, too, often find myself needing scripts that as long as they did what they were suppose to, I really didn’t care how.

Another thing I’ve noticed(which is probably related to amounts of training data) is that it can help better with simple Python tasks as opposed to how it handles simple rust tasks.

But you mentioned one of my main issues with. Ice been programming for 15 years or so, and still learning. All the available llms did crucial errors about fundamental tabd complex topics and got the answer so very wrong but also sounding very convincing. Couple it with lack of proper linking to the sources of the response, you might see why having it explain code might cause your learn wrongly. Although it is also possible to say this about randoms internet tutorials. I always try to remind myself that it’s a tool that produces output that always needs to be verified.

I only found it useful doing trivial chores such as converting between data structures, maybe create a test for a function, parsing and some regex. Anything deeper than that was full of errors or the it offered was suboptimal at best. It also fails a lot of times in fetching the relevant docs/sources for the discussion. I gave up trying after so many times it basically told me " go search for yourself"

The real question in my opinion is how does a pro truly benefit from it other than being a different type of a search engine