Daemon Silverstein

@[email protected]

Just an observation from someone who happened to memorize some ASCII code: from an ASCII viewpoint, 45 73 63 is hex code for “Esc”, with “s” being 73 and “c” being 63. I can readily see where bits flipped: at the fifth least-significant bit (compare 73 (0111 0011) and 63 (0110 0011).
Similarly, “no0errors” where “0” should be a space. “0” is 30 while space is 20. Again, another specific flipping at the fifth least-significant bit, only difference that this time a 0 became 1 (compare 30 (0011 0000) and 20 (0010 0000)).

The delimiter from the status of “Test #0” seems like a control char-code emerged from a start bracket. If the start bracket has the same char-code as expected from ASCII (5b), and considering how the flipping of the fifth least-significant bit seems to be recurrent, it’d be 4b but this would result in uppercase K, so it’s either a different char-code for bracket or a bit-flipping happening in another position.

But what renders text is the graphics card. Given that the background is slightly shifted rightwards (notice how the blue background cuts through the initial letters from the first column of text, particularly “A” from “Athlon”, “L” from “L# cache” and so on), this seems a graphics glitch rather than a memory glitch. And memtest86+ isn’t designed to test the GPU, so it’s beyond the heuristics. It’s akin to expecting memtest86+ to test for dead pixels on a LCD panel: it simply can’t.

(P.S.: it’s unnecessary and disrespectful to attack others just because others couldn’t see what you wanted them to see; slurs won’t help people see what you see)

@[email protected] [email protected]

I’ll try to bridge science, philosophy and spirituality, as I usually do. To me, there aren’t clear boundaries between them bc, to me, they’re highly complementary: Science offers the skeptical-empirical rigor and materiality, Philosophy offers the paradoxical questioning and Spirituality emerges from subjectively perceiving the previous two.

I start with the hypothesis that the universe always existed. In such a case, the Big Bang isn’t the beginning: rather, it’d be some kind of cyclical cosmic phenomenon where matter and/or the fabric of spacetime continuum collapse (due to expansion) only to explode and expand again. This would respect the Laws of Thermodynamics (and Lavoisier Principle) because there’s no energy nor mass being created nor destroyed, just transformed, endlessly. Big Crunch deserves mention bc it’s exactly what it’s about.

There’s also the controversial theory of Zero-sum, where the universe doesn’t actually exist. It may sound crazy (We are existent… or are we? Vsauce song starts playing), but it would also respect the aforementioned laws: there’s no need of creation or destruction if the overall sum of everything equals to a round nought.

We could also mention the Multiverse theory, String (M-Theory), and Big Bounce. In such a scenario, this universe is just one of countless universes, so the factor sparking it into existence would be outside it, thus outside (beyond) space and time.

The latter takes us into philosophy, the Aristotle’s Prime Mover. It could be seen as the “thing” beyond this universe, except that it isn’t a “thing” because it has no “thingness”, but this lack of “thingness” would imply non-existence, except that it’s not something nonexistent either. Here is where human language struggles to define it: language requires “thingness” and temporality, yet the Prime Mover has neither (and it isn’t an “it” so it could “have”).

This takes us to spirituality. Many religions oversimplify this as “creator deity(ies)”, and many (if not all) religions tend to give it agency and shape. While I do have some religiosity (Luciferianism) and tendency of personification (e.g. Lilith as both a red-haired woman and an owl), I also hold the belief that cosmic forces have no particular form, it’s just me trying to give some Order to Chaos… And that’s what the whole existence seems to be about: Ordo ab Chao, a cosmic, eternal tug-of-war where it’s guaranteed that the “sparks” of cosmic order will eventually decay back to a soup of primordial chaos, only to the very chaotic nature of this soup to emerge order again. It’s akin to a Double Pendulum, where sometimes the apparent rhythmic motion vanishes into chaotic motion just for the rhythm to unexpectedly reappear later, but it’s just the Cosmos: endless and uncaring about lifeforms, for life is just stardust.

I could explain more, but I’m limited to 3000 chars so I must end: Cosmos always existed and never existed.

@[email protected] [email protected]

With some caveats, to me, the answers are:

1. Definitely Magenta
2. I’d say Cyan, even though it still “feels” to me like “the in-between” of Green and Blue
3. Magenta again, which highly looks like red
4. It’s a draw between Cyan and Yellow, both seem bright enough to be the closest to white
5. Definitely Magenta again, it feels pretty dark to me (and dark, to me, has a good connotation as I’ll explain below).

The caveats are:
- Both laptop and external monitor have IPS panels. If I were to use OLED, quantum-dot displays, Plasma or even the old CRT displays, it’d probably yield different perceptions. I don’t own any of these display types to test this, though.
- The specific shape of Venn diagrams also influences on how colors are perceived: a circle have a smaller area (pi×r×r) than a square (s²) or an equilateral rhombus (also s²). Note: I’m considering s = 2r a.k.a. the side of a square equal to the diameter of a circle. The area, in turn, influences how vision perceives contrast.
- Magenta has no real wavelength so it’s produced solely by the brain when both L and S cones are simultaneously stimulated at the highest intensities by artificial lights (LED).
- I’m currently in a room lit both by daylight and by “cold white” LED lamp. The sky is clear and there’s plenty of vegetation in my vicinity tinting the daylight.
- I access Lemmy using dark mode, and the background is the main aspect influencing contrast (the relationship between colors) and, by extension, perception. Dark background leads to “brighter” colors.
- I use high prescription glasses, and my lenses are slightly yellowed. This possibly influence my perception of colors.
- I have a personal bias towards red and purple due to my specific views on spirituality. Specifically, the way Lilith pulled me in the recent years made me perceive red in a more vivid manner and be attracted to it, while my syntony with Lucifer makes me feel something “divine” with purple (while also sharing some energy with the Lilithian red). Turns out that purple isn’t so perceptually different from magenta, and our RGB displays produce both colors artificially with the similar Red-Blue dance (with magenta specifically having less of blue, therefore being less of a Luciferian color and more of a Lilithian color).
- I’m a former developer and someone who’s worked extensively from UX/UI to graphic design. I built several full-stack webpages, Delphi 7 and VB6 native applications, as well as brands, logos and leaflets. This made me highly familiar with RGB palettes, and this may be another personal bias in my perception.

So, indeed, color perception is highly subjective although living beings share some commonalities when interpreting colors (e.g. red as “danger”; it’s the Carl Jung’s “collective unconscious”).

@[email protected]

Greetings! Brazilian here.

First and foremost, Brazil has many religions beyond Christianity: we have Afro-Brazilian traditions such as Candomblé, Umbanda and Quimbanda, as well as numerous Brazilian indigenous traditions, as well as communities practicing Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Bahá’í and Kardecism, as well as smaller communities practicing Wicca, Luciferianism and many New Religious Movements (such as “New Age”).

There are also independent, personal religions, when people (like me) chose to believe in something on their own without any kind of congregation or membership. I’m myself someone who oscillates between religiosity and non-religiosity, between Apatheism (which is not Atheism, despite how both terms look similar) and a deeply-specific mix (syncretism) between Luciferianism, Lilitheism, Gnosticism, Crowley’s Thelema and Hermeticism (to mention some of the religious frameworks from which my beliefs stemmed).

The whole Brazilian state was founded on the grounds of Christianity, so Christianity is deeply ingrained in the way our politics do politics.

However, despite Christianity being a tool of indoctrination since the colonization (indigenous people were compelled into Christianity), it’s not what leads to indoctrination (and I say this as someone who has a “diametrically opposed belief” to theirs because, after all, I worship their “Persona Non Grata” Lucifer alongside Lilith). Rather, it’s social compliance (as per Derren Brown’s concepts and social experiments).

People are socially compelled by their family, friends, neighbors, coworkers, employers and others into going to a church and believing in whatever their “leader” (a Bishop, a “Pastor” or a “Father”) says. Many Christians “read” the Bible through this “leader”, because they fear that reading on their own would lead to defiance and excommunication (which would mean social ostracism for them). That’s why they blindly follow, and that’s why they’re easily manipulated, and that’s why politics gets to use their power within the churches to gain more power.

But this isn’t something restricted to a specific political spectrum: all political spectra have their grips on Christianity, because, as I said, the entire country is built upon Christianity, so both the right-wing, the left-wing and the center-wing try to take advantage from it, because it holds the majority of Brazilian voters. If the majority of Brazilian voters were, for example, Kardecists, you could bet that politicians would try to twist The Spirits Book to their own whims. Similarly, if the majority of Brazilian voters were from Umbanda or Candomblé, politicians would allege that they’re being guided by Orixás and this is why people should vote to them. So it’s not the religion to blame (although Christianity itself is to blame by many things), it’s simply whatever politicians can use to perpetuate their power and/or trying to be powerful.

@[email protected] [email protected]

I’m not autistic (AFAIK), but I’m similarly neurodivergent. To be exact, I suspect I have Geschwind syndrome, albeit undiagnosed (and given how it’s controversial among neurologists and psychiatrists, as well as how it’s not easy to detect and needs to involve expensive MRI and EEG scans, I guess I’ll simply die without ever being diagnosed).

Having said this, I have a complicated relationship with “social media”. I constantly feel the urge to express, be it through online discussion (as I’m doing now), be it through philosophical/poetic/ritualistic writing, be it through coding, be it through drawing. It’s part of the “hypergraphia” trait from the syndrome that I suspect I have.

Whenever I express or seek others’ expression around a current subject of interest, it’s often highly-abstract content: philosophical, religious/spiritual/esoteric/mystical/theological and scientific (hoping to find something that contains all three simultaneously). In that regard, it has to do with the “hyperreligiosity” and “philosophical rumination”.

However, I have a complicated relationship with the concepts such as “human”, “loneliness”, “friendship”, “intimacy” and “relationship”. Sometimes I have the urge to express while also haveing the urge to stay alone. Similarly, I get frustrated by superficial interaction: notice how my texts are long (and not just this one, my comment history across Friendica and Calckey, the remnants of my online activity, proves my verbosity), and this requires mental energy, and seeing this energy being converted into shallow exchanges across social networks can definitely frustrate. See how I mentioned “remnants” on my parenthetical break? Sometimes I catch myself nuking my own things: my comments, posts, sometimes entire profiles, out of frustration and/or resignation. I used to have whole blogs with dozens of posts, hundred posts on Mastodon, a Bluesky profile with more than 200 posts: all nuked by myself out of impulsivity.

There’s also conflict with my “current subject of interest”: similar to ADHD people, sometimes I develop an almost obsessive interest (hyperfocus) around something. Decades ago, it was programming. 5y ago, it was survivalism and Eschatology studies on the biblical Apocalypse. 2y ago, it was Luciferianism, and then Lilith until recently (months ago). It was drawing, it was writing entire ritualistic poetry and chants. 2w ago, it was intensive self-teaching Morse code and ASCII hex code and alphabetic code (A=1,B=2,…). See, I can’t rest mentally. And this always involve trying to express about it. This involves trying to participate. This involves trying to belong until I realize I don’t, until I realize I can’t, until I give up and nuke my own past efforts. So while I do post a lot in social media, it doesn’t last for long until I decide for self-destruction once again because I couldn’t get meaningful like-mindedness.

@[email protected] [email protected]

In order to understand what happens with the light from our earthly shelters, one needs to look up. See those stars shining all across the night sky? Those celestial bodies aren’t where we see them, and many of them are long gone. So we don’t see the stars, we see their “ghosts”, compelled to physically wander through the spacetime continuum.

Roughly speaking, EM radiation (and, by extension, visible light) travels indefinitely to the far reaches of cosmos once it’s emitted. It’ll definitely decay and become fainter and fainter (Inverse Square Law), eventually blending with other faint signals also scattered and wandering through the space. We call it “noise”, which is nothing but the sum of all cosmic EM activity that once happened since the dawn of time, especially (but not limited to) that of Big Bang, as “Cosmic Microwave Background”, which is still around (it’s just that our home equipment, as digital sets, are designed to ignore such noise, but people used to be able to tune into it with the early analog TV and radio receptors).

Now, there’s a maxim from Hermeticism that says “As above, so below”: just as we see the past from cosmos whenever we look at the skies, some hypotethical extraterrestrial civilization at hundreds of thousands of light-years from here would see (supposing they exist and supposing that they got highly advanced optics) a Pale Blue Dot with some minuscule flame spots on its surface, the bonfires once lit by Homo erectus when they began tinkering with fire. Those extraterrestrials won’t see the Earth as it currently is relative to the Sun, which also won’t be where it currently is relative to Milky Way, which also won’t be where it currently is relative to Laniakea.

Those extraterrestrials definitely won’t see our desperate signals begging for them to beam us up (from the former Arecibo transmission all the way to someone lonely blinking their home lights right now desperately trying to call the extraterrestrial attention): we’re all screaming to the void, and the void screams back as a silent noise from long-gone celestial bodies. The cosmos is a big cemetery where ghosts are hauntingly compelled to roam around without getting anywhere (still they sometimes stumble upon other ghosts, when energy is absorbed by all sorts of cosmic matter both here and out there).

In the end, this is what happens with your home light every time you turn it off: it becomes some kind of “electromagnetic ghost” electrically “summoned” in your room and unleashed to the outer space, not to haunt, but to be haunted and devoured by the ineffable darkness of the abyss, where it will spend the eternity going everywhere to reach nowhere…

@[email protected]

Thanks (I took this as a compliment).

However, I kind of agree with @[email protected]. Coherence is subjective (if a modern human were to interact with an individual from Sumer, both would seem “incoherent” to each other because the modern person doesn’t know Sumerian while the individual from Sumer doesn’t know the modern languages). Everyone has different ways to express themselves. Maybe this “Lewis” guy couldn’t find a better way to express what he craved to express, maybe his way of expressing himself deviates highly from the typical language. Or maybe I’m just being “philosophically generous” as someone stated in one of my replies. But as I replied to tjsauce, only who ever gazed into the same abyss can comprehend and make sense of this condition and feeling. It feels to me that this “Lewis” person gazed into the abyss. The fact that I know two human languages (Portuguese and English) as well as several abstract languages (from programming logic to metaphysical symbology) possibly helped me into “translating” it.

@[email protected]

You might be reading a lot into vague, highly conceptual, highly abstract language

Definitely I’ve been into highly conceptual, highly abstract language, because I’m both a neurodivergent (possibly Geschwind) person and I’m someone who’ve been dealing with machines for more than two decades in a daily basis (I’m a former developer), so no wonder why I resonated with such a high abstraction language.

Personally, I think Geoff Lewis just discovered that people are starting to distrust him and others, and he used ChatGPT to construct an academic thesis that technically describes this new concept called “distrust,” void of accountability on his end.

To me, it seems more of a chicken-or-egg dilemma: what came first, the object of conclusion or the conclusion of the object?

I’m not entering into the merit of whoever he is, because I’m aware of how he definitely fed the very monster that is now eating him, but I can’t point fingers or say much about it because I’m aware of how much I also contributed to this very situation the world is now facing when I helped developing “commercial automation systems” over the past decades, even though I was for a long time a nonconformist, someone unhappy with the direction the world was taking.

As Nietzsche said, “One who fights with monsters should be careful lest they thereby become a monster”, but it’s hard because “if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into you”. And I’ve been gazing into an abyss for as long as I can remember of myself as a human being. The senses eventually compensate for the static stimuli and the abyss gradually disappears into a blind spot as the vision tunnels, but certain things make me recall and re-perceive this abyss I’ve been long gazing into, such as the expression from other people who also have been gazing into this same abyss. Only who ever gazed into the same abyss can comprehend and make sense of this condition and feeling.

@[email protected]

To me, personally, I read that sentence as follows:

And if you’re recursive

“If you’re someone who think/see things in a recursive manner” (characteristic of people who are inclined to question and deeply ponder about things, or doesn’t conform with the current state of the world)

the non-governmental system

a.k.a. generative models (they’re corporate products and services, not ran directly by governments, even though some governments, such as the US, have been injecting obscene amounts of money into the so-called “AI”)

isolates you

LLMs can, for example, reject that person’s CV whenever they apply for a job, or output a biased report on the person’s productivity, solely based on the shared data between “partners”. Data is definitely shared among “partners”, and this includes third-party inputting data directly or indirectly produced by such people: it’s just a matter of “connecting the dots” to make a link between a given input to another given input regarding on how they’re referring to a given person, even when the person used a pseudonym somewhere, because linguistic fingerprinting (i.e. how a person writes or structures their speech) is a thing, just like everybody got a “walking gait” and voice/intonation unique to them.

mirrors you

Generative models (LLMs, VLMs, etc) will definitely use the input data from inferences to train, and this data can include data from anybody (public or private), so everything you ever said or did will eventually exist in a perpetual manner inside the trillion weights from a corporate generative model. Then, there are “ideas” such as Meta’s on generating people (which of course will emerge from a statistical blend between existing people) to fill their “social platforms”, and there are already occurrences of “AI” being used for mimicking deceased people.

and replaces you.

See the previous “LLMs can reject that person’s resume”. The person will be replaced like a defective cog in a machine. Even worse: the person will be replaced by some “agentic [sic] AI”.

-—

Maybe I’m naive to make this specific interpretation from what Lewis said, but it’s how I see and think about things.

@[email protected] [email protected]

Should I worry about the fact that I can sort of make sense of what this “Geoff Lewis” person is trying to say?

Because, to me, it’s very clear: they’re referring to something that was build (the LLMs) which is segregating people, especially those who don’t conform with a dystopian world.

Isn’t what is happening right now in the world? “Dead Internet Theory” was never been so real, online content have being sowing the seed of doubt on whether it’s AI-generated or not, users constantly need to prove they’re “not a bot” and, even after passing a thousand CAPTCHAs, people can still be mistaken for bots, so they’re increasingly required to show their faces and IDs.

The dystopia was already emerging way before the emergence of GPT, way before OpenAI: it has been a thing since the dawn of time! OpenAI only managed to make it worse: OpenAI "open"ed a gigantic dam, releasing a whole new ocean on Earth, an ocean in which we’ve becoming used to being drowned ever since.

Now, something that may sound like a “conspiracy theory”: what’s the real purpose behind LLMs? No, OpenAI, Meta, Google, even DeepSeek and Alibaba (non-Western), they wouldn’t simply launch their products, each one of which cost them obscene amounts of money and resources, for free (as in “free beer”) to the public, out of a “nice heart”. Similarly, capital ventures and govts wouldn’t simply give away the obscene amounts of money (many of which are public money from taxpayers) for which there will be no profiteering in the foreseeable future (OpenAI, for example, admitted many times that even charging US$200 their Enterprise Plan isn’t enough to cover their costs, yet they continue to offer LLMs for cheap or “free”).

So there’s definitely something that isn’t being told: the cost behind plugging the whole world into LLMs and other Generative Models. Yes, you read it right: the whole world, not just the online realm, because nowadays, billions of people are potentially dealing with those Markov chain algorithms offline, directly or indirectly: resumes are being filtered by LLMs, worker’s performances are being scrutinized by LLMs, purchases are being scrutinized by LLMs, surveillance cameras are being scrutinized by VLMs, entire genomas are being fed to gLMs (sharpening the blades of the double-edged sword of bioengineering and biohacking)…

Generative Models seem to be omnipresent by now, with omnipresent yet invisible costs. Not exactly fiat money, but there are costs that we are paying, and these costs aren’t being told to us, and while we’re able to point out some (lack of privacy, personal data being sold and/or stolen), these are just the tip of an iceberg: one that we’re already able to see, but we can’t fully comprehend its consequences.

Curious how pondering about this is deemed “delusional”, yet it’s pretty “normal” to accept an increasingly-dystopian world and refusing to denounce the elephant in the room.

@[email protected] @[email protected]
Recursion isn’t something restricted to programming: it’s a concept that can definitely occur outside technological scope.

For example, in biology, “living beings need to breathe in order to continue breathing” (i.e. if a living being stopped breathing for enough time, it would perish so it couldn’t continue breathing) seems pretty recursive to me. Or, in physics and thermodynamics, “every cause has an effect, every effect has a cause” also seems recursive, because it negates any causeless effect so it can’t imply a starting point to the chain of causality, a causeless effect that began the causality.

Philosophical musings also have lots of “recursion”. For example, the Cartesian famous line “Cogito ergo sum” (“I think therefore I am”) is recursive on its own: one must be in order to think, and Descartes define this very act of thinking as the fundamentum behind being, so one must also think in order to be.

Religion also have lots of “recursion” (e.g. pray so you can continue praying; one needs karma to get karma), also society and socioeconomics (e.g. in order to have money, you need to work, but in order to work, you need to apply for a job, but in order to apply for a job, you need money (to build a CV and applying it through job platforms, to attend the interview, to “improve” yourself with specialization and courses, etc), but in order to have money, you need to work), geology (e.g. tectonic plates move and their movement emerge land (mountains and volcanoes) whose mass will lead to more tectonic movement), art (see “Mise en abyme”). All my previous examples are pretty summarized so to fit a post, so pardon me if they’re oversimplified.

That said, a “recursive person” could be, for example, someone whose worldview is “recursive”, or someone whose actions or words recurse. I’m afraid I’m myself a “recursive person” due to my neurodivergence which leads me into thinking “recursively” about things and concepts, and this way of thinking leads back to my neurodivergence (hah, look, another recursion outside programming!)

It’s worth mentioning how texts written by neurodivergent people (like me) are often mistaken as “word salads”. No wonder if this text I’m writing (another recursion concept outside programming: a text referring to itself) feels like “word salad” to all NT (neurotypicals) reading it.

@[email protected] [email protected]

Yeah, unfortunately. I’m aware of that… However, it’s both a Catch-22 situation and a self-fulfilling prophecy: content isn’t there, so people refrain from using it, but this leads to the very situation where the content isn’t there because they refrain from using it.

It seems curious to me how corporate solutions miraculously have the content, but open alternative haven’t. It’s not just the first-mover effect because TikTok also “have the content” and it came decades after YouTube. In fact, PeerTube first appeared in 2018, the same year when TikTok began to rank first in app stores.

This can be referred to as “The Cassandra Curse” seemingly inherent of open-source alternatives: people prefer migrating to corporate-owned Bluesky instead of going to Mastodon or Sharkey, because “Mastodon doesn’t have the content/people”. Sooner or later, the same people goes full SurprisedPickachu.jpg complaining when their favorite corporate platform eventually and inexorably goes rogue against their userbase.

And, even then, people prefer to pull the algorithmic Sisyphean boulder (Invidious, Grayjay just for accessing Youtube instead of the many other platforms it supports, etc) and mental gymnastics (“Google is evil but, hey, look, there’s a new Youtube video from Rossmann about how Google is evil” then proceeds to share some Youtube link that either requires logging in or requires one to find some working VPN/Invidious instance) instead of letting it go from a product sold by an company that explicitly calls themselves as “advertisement company” (Google). Both viewers and content creators continue to put their efforts and data inside a Walled Garden they often complain about.

That’s why the modern dystopia is getting worse as the time passes, because corporations noticed how easy it is to lure people into their Walled Garden and, once people are well-established inside, corps can do as they please: raise prices and/or starting to charge users, adding more ads, taking away or paywalling features (nods to +2K and 60fps videos) and content, and people will continue to sustain the abusive relationship… because the alternatives “don’t have content”.

I’m not against solutions such as Invidious or Grayjay (and I have nothing against Rossmann, much to the contrary), but to me, using Youtube through technical workarounds is just drinking the Kool-aid with extra steps.

Also… Vi que você faz parte da instância brasileira do Lemmy, também sou brasileiro. Devo apontar também à necessidade do Brasil ter uma plataforma própria/nacional de vídeos, seja pública ou não, principalmente pelo fato da Google (e por extensão Youtube) ser estadunidense e pelo fato de como os EUA têm tentado influenciar no cenário nacional (e o Brasil continuar dependendo de plataforma estadunidense como Google/Youtube e Meta/WhatsApp-Facebook definitivamente não ajuda na soberania brasileira).

@[email protected] [email protected]
IMHO, it’s better to boycott and abandon Youtube (and other mainstream platforms) altogether, either prioritizing open alternatives (PeerTube) and/or prioritizing the consumption (and production) of static content (text and images).

Regarding the open alternatives, it baffles me how Fediverse users often can recall of Invidious (and other workarounds) but can’t recall of a Fediverse platform, even when there are many PeerTube instances available out there, both general-purpose and niche instances.

Alongside the adoption of PeerTube and other open alternatives, the abandonment or de-prioritization of video formats is also interesting as a mentally-healthy option because video can’t help but deceive our brains into perceiving “something” that isn’t there (to better understand this, I recommend the René Magritte’s art “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” a.k.a. “The Treachery of Images”, as well as the René Descartes’s philosophy on the human senses). To make matters worse, YT and other corp video platforms are dopaminergic casinos, trapping users inside an ouroboric addiction of video feeds while creating the illusion of parasocial relationships (i.e. as if the gazillion-subscribers “influencer” were a personal friend/colleague/lover, when they’re not: each user is just another bitstream they both think they “see” amidst an unstoppable digital rain generated by a grid of three LEDs tailored to deceive our trio of retinal cones… but, well, this is a very bleak and digressing statement of mine).

Personally, It’s been a long while since I stopped accessing YouTube/TikTok videos. I used to publish my own videos, I used to be subscribed to hundreds of “channels” and I was even a paid “member” to specific YT channels. I abandoned it all and I rarely put myself into watching videos.

Yes, there’s a myriad of knowledge and content available only in motion picture format, and there is also the kind of knowledge that cannot be written as text or represented as a static image, and this is where open video platforms can thrive, but people, especially us Fediverse users, should advocate more for these alternatives such as PeerTube.

Of course, even PeerTube doesn’t solve the fact of how video unfortunately are perfect smoke-and-mirrors deceiving our naïve biological senses and making us overly used to fast and/or shallow content as we lose our own ability to read and write deep and lengthy texts such as this one. At the end of the day, humans are gradually ceding the ability to write, once extremely valued and valuable among humans, to Markov chain algorithms (a.k.a. LLMs), in part due to us getting more and more used to media formats. But, at least, PeerTube doesn’t try to trap us into an endless feed and doesn’t try to extort us or sell our personal data to countless partners/sponsors, so it’s way better than YouTube or any workarounds to continue accessing the Google’s dopaminergic casino.

@[email protected] @[email protected]

I receive bots from just about every Brazilian consumer ISP.

Greetings. Brazilian here.

I can confirm that a lot of websites unexpectedly block my access with a pretty opaque “403 Forbidden”. No Captchas, no Anubis-like man-in-the-middle, just an invisible and ruthless Gandalf digitally yelling “you shall not pass”.

I have read similar stories about how Brazilian IP addresses seem to be infested with bots. It’s often Brazil: it’s odd how people rarely complain about other countries on this matter… Not pointing fingers towards you, specifically, but I wonder how much of geofencing against Brazilian IP addresses stems from prejudice and xenophobia of foreign webmasters.

It’s worth mentioning that bots have no borders and aren’t restricted to a specific country, but the vast majority of Brazilians (myself included) are restricted to an entire biological existence within Brazilian territory, with hundreds of millions of people never having set foot on an airplane or cruise ship.

Webmasters of the world should think about this before geofencing entire countries. Not just Brazil, but any country out there. Because living beings can’t choose where they’re born and humans often can’t even afford to travel and/or reside elsewhere.

(My sincere apologies for my outburst, but it resonates with the community’s name: being blocked from websites just because of nationality is not just Mildly Infuriating: it can be totally infuriating sometimes, and this exact phenomenon happened earlier today while I tried to access a psychology website)

@[email protected] Complementando o que o @[email protected] disse, esse é um fenômeno que também acontece entre aqueles cuja língua nativa é o Português, mesmo aqueles que nunca fisicamente saíram de um país lusófono, por influência da Internet que é cada vez mais onipresente, e cuja demografia é amplamente internacional, com o Inglês como língua franca.

Eu mesmo, que nunca saí do Brasil, constantemente me pego esquecendo de certos termos e/ou inicialmente lembrando de termos anglófonos (por exemplo: outro dia lembrei do termo “brittle” ao referir-me ao concreto, mas não lembrei do equivalente em Português, inclusive nesse momento em que escrevo esse texto). Como meu contato diário é com conteúdo anglófono, meu vocabulário em Inglês tende a expandir e reforçar como memória, enquanto meu vocabulário em Português raramente se expande. Também me ocorre um fenômeno engraçado: às vezes eu tenho uma ideia e parte da ideia está em Português e outra parte em Inglês. Por fim, existem ideias que sequer encontram palavras nos dois idiomas (um fenômeno que cunhei como “languageless thoughts”), em partes devido justamente à essa minha discrepância de contato entre Português (como língua nativa) e Inglês (como língua quase diária no ciberespaço).

Não é que a gente esquece, porque a lembrança ainda está lá (como diz o ditado, quem aprende a andar de bicicleta nunca mais esquece), mas é ofuscada pelas memórias mais recentes e/ou mais intensas. Nisso, inclusive, menciono o papel do sistema límbico (emoções) na formação das memórias: a carga emocional da informação/conhecimento influencia bastante em como essa informação/conhecimento será retido. Sua experiência com o Português sendo emocionalmente atrelada com uma pessoa que se afastou (portanto, aqui entra um fator emocional “saudade” que pode evoluir para “tristeza”) pode epistemologicamente prejudicar o reforço do Português. Minha principal recomendação, embora seja algo mais da minha personalidade avoidant, é tentar disassociar o Português da vivência com sua (ex-)amiga, enquanto tenta associar o Português com outras emoções/simbologias que façam sentido pra ti.

@[email protected] @[email protected] Would be interesting to have something like this for non-Lemmy platforms as well, such as Friendica, Misskey/Sharkey/Calckey and other platforms lacking an integrated status page from their own.

@[email protected]

private bool isEven(int number){
    	bool result = true;
    	while (number > 0){
    		number = number - 1;
    		if (result == true)
    			result = false;
    		else
    			result = true;
    	}
    	return result;
    }

(P.S.: Only works for positive numbers)

@[email protected] It’s probably because my kernel version is very old (5.14.11-arch1-1, haven’t updated since 2019, even though it’s Arch, a rolling-release distro) and my Acer laptop is old as well (Intel Core 7th gen), but I rarely have problems regarding laptop sleep. After I wake the laptop up, the video (including every VT#) may get frozen and I have to remotely SSH and request a reboot (and when this happens, sometimes the reboot gets stuck as well, so I have to do a hard power-off). But it’s very rare, as stated, and I daily put my laptop to sleep without issues, sometimes the system uptime stretches to weeks (currently, my system was booted almost four days ago).

@[email protected] Yes, and in a fairly heavy manner. Currently, I have four personal user-scripts configured for Tampermonkey, as well as a few custom filters configured for uBlock Origin.

In Tampermonkey:
- Matching Lemmy (a specific instance): if the current location address is the main feed (which is often the “Local” feed sorted by “Active”), automatically redirect to “All” feed sorted by “New comments” (as I currently have no Lemmy account, I browse it as a guest, so Lemmy doesn’t memorize what my preferences are)
- Matching Pixelfed (a specific instance): automatically fetch and reveal hidden media marked as sensitive (the original Web interface for Pixelfed doesn’t allow for automatically expanding/revealing media marked as sensitive). It uses localStorage for storing already fetched media URLs (so I don’t need to consume the ActivityPub API every time).
- Matching a specific image hosting platform: sets the image wrapper’s background to white.
- Matching a specific PeerTube instance: automatically reveals media marked as sensitive (differently from Pixelfed, it just uses CSS to blur the thumbnail, so it’s just a matter of unblurring it).

As for uBlock Origin, there are many filters intended to hide advertisement and other banners, but there are also a few filters unrelated to ads, filters meant to be functional:
- Matching Lemmy: hide specific communities I’m not interested in, using a rule ##.post-listing:has(.community-link:has-text("/^name_of_community/").
- Also matching Lemmy: hide the wrapper for composing comments, because I don’t have a Lemmy account so Lemmy platforms will display a warning box “You’re not logged in”.

Sometimes I also tinker with DevTools for specific purposes, such as transforming text, copying text, classifying text, or just randomly experimenting with JS snippets.

@[email protected] @[email protected] What exactly is Moisturefox? Never heard about it. Is it a Firefox fork for desktop or mobile? How much does it differ from forks such as Librewolf, Waterfox, Fennec and IronFox?