Daemon Silverstein

Throughout all my jobs, I’ve been always systematic in not creating any friendship or relationship. That’s because I feel like workplace problems could affect the relation, or vice-versa, when personal disagreements could affect the workplace, because the humans involved would the same, me and my coworker. Imagine dating a coworker and then, eventually, falling into some disagreement (every relationship has one), then one of you (you or them) decides it’s better to temporarily go apart so to settle things, but you both will need to see each one face to face tomorrow. You’ll look in their eyes and you’ll find a hard time distinguishing between your love and your coworker, because they’re the same person (you still love them). There’s also the presence of falsehood within workplaces, people that seems nice until they’re at your back conspiring against you, trying to push you to the cliff. I faced lots of falsehood throughout my jobs. Careers sometimes involve competing against others and there are lots of people that takes this competition spirit too far, diminishing your job and your life for them to get some advantage (i.e. a better position within the company, a better wage, or even “for sadistic fun” of seeing others to be fired).

Maybe I’m wrong, but that’s how I ever felt about workplace relations, I always tried to keep the workplace restricted to my professional persona. I’ll be kind and helpful, but I’ll kinda “robotic” to my coworkers and bosses. You could correctly guess that this led me to being a solitary person, something I actually always was, because I’m the typical former nerd colleague back at the high school, the shy, social awkward kind, never had real true friends, and love seems like some extraterrestrial fictional thing to me (not that I’m not capable of feeling love for someone because I once felt, but externalizing it and turning it into a relationship only happened in dreams, I guess).

So, in my opinion, it’s not a trustworthy thing to make friends at work, especially if it involves possibilities of higher positions and/or higher wages, or a narcissistic boss that wants to be worshiped. But, as I said, maybe I’m wrong.

The problem is beyond social media accounts. Modern life makes us to have digital things, “apps”. As much as I’d benefit from it (I’m a programmer), I can’t help but recognize how dangerous is this digital dependence and requirement. Not only our entire lives become bits and bytes across gazillions of platforms, they’re out of our real control: from advertising platforms to hackers, the online information kind of awaits to fall on third-party hands.

How many of our information is now inside the training data from major AI models (as much as I like some aspects of AIs, that’s a fact), such as GPT-4, Claude Somnet and, especially, Google’s Gemini, whose company is responsible for more than 90% of the search engine market while also responsible for our smartphones’ brains, not just Android but things embedded on Apple’s ecosystems as well?

But people only notice how far our digital footprint goes when there’s some serious thing such as the risk of persecution from the government. People decide to delete their accounts hoping that it’ll lead to their data being magically erased and, as a programmer, I say: no, our data remains, there’s no DELETE * FROM users WHERE id = your_id, there’s actually a UPDATE users SET deleted=CURRENT_TIME() WHERE id = your_id that’s not the same thing (it just marks your account as deleted, but all the data remains for whatever time period they wish, not even mentioning periodic database backups that’ll preserve your data in the hands of that platform)… not even mentioning how your data could’ve already been assimilated through platform integrations (API) by third-party partners such as advertisers. There’s no way to force the erasure.

Yeah, there’s the law such as GDPR’s “Right to be forgotten”, but there’s a Brazilian saying “O que os olhos não veem o coração não sente” (What the eyes can’t see, the heart can’t feel). A platform can “confirm the account deletion” but they can keep the data without anyone’s knowledge. It’s worse: there are laws that require the companies to keep the data for some time (here in Brazil, for example, companies need to keep data for five years, because the justice could need the data in order to solve some investigation).

So, I don’t like to be a harbinger of doom, but our digital traces will never actually entirely disappear from the Internet… especially if you guys are thinking of avoiding the incoming persecution from a new government. Online data remains as far as we couldn’t tell. And this includes way beyond social media platforms: it also includes your apps such as, I dunno, your Starbucks accounts? Your Amazon accounts? Everything is data that can be analyzed among a big data and traced back to each one’s preferences, including political preferences… I’m sorry to say that, but I need to transmit this knowledge as a developer.

Similar vibe:

It’s a concept I’ve been thinking about for months or even years, the concept of non-existence. In my mind I can sorta visualize it, but I’m not able to transcribe it to words, I’m not able to start explaining it because whenever I try to start writing something, it starts morphing into existence. For example: a phrase I can think of is “Light needs a darkness to shine unto”, it sounds like it can describe the concept, but then science comes out of nowhere to slap me in my face with the understanding of how matter emits radiation and how there’s no such place as “completely absent from any radiation”.

In my mind, the complementary makes sense, substance needs substrate which needs the substance, light needs darkness which needs the light, Hadit needs Nuith which needs Hadit (the infinitesimal point needs the infinite circumference which needs the infinitesimal point), and so on. See, human language is made to conceptualize what can be conceptualized, and non-existence is not conceptualizable in essence. However, the existence needs a counterpoint, a counterpart, something to contrast with its conceptualization, because if there was only existence, there’d be no existence at all (how can we conceptualize a thing if it’s the only thing wherever you look, wherever you go?). We can conceptualize the fabric of spacetime because “it’s there” and, by “there”, I mean “there” as in “where the fabric of spacetime sits on”, just like the shine of a spotlight illuminating a place where it was shadowy and dark.

There are things that we do know, there are things that we don’t know yet but we can know, and there are things that can’t be known. Who is the first Sumer person to ever write, what was his name, when he/she was born and when he/she died? What about the person who discovered the fire, who exactly were he/she? We don’t know, we can’t know, but they existed because now we have fire and writing systems. The impossibility of determining them doesn’t rule them out of existence, just like the non-existence itself. I mean, it’s the very essence of the non-existence to “don’t exist” but that somehow makes it “existent”, somehow the state of non-existence is a state, therefore, it exists as a state of being (as in “not being”).

To make matters worse, the human language is made to describe things within the realm of existence, time and space, when and where, while transcendental concepts can’t really be described through it without losing its transcendental essence. Non-existence is such a concept, a non-conceptualizable concept, so paradoxical in its nature.

I’m sure lots of Russians were already angry with their government way before the sanctions, so what now? Ideally, people could do massive protests, Putin would be scared as heck so he renounces, people invoke the good old democracy again, they vote, a new leader takes place, Ukraine-Russia war would cease, both Russians and Ukrainians would happily fly together mounted in winged unicorns… Except everyone knows it doesn’t work that way!! Governments (not just Putin’s) have multiple ways to fight any protests going inside their country, governments can tear gas citizens, governments can end lives from their own citizens, governments can end a protest before it even happens through censorship and massive electrical/internet blackouts. Even when citizens has guns, governments have stronger guns. Lots of recent examples are there to demonstrate how this happens.

People from a sanctioned people can and will starve and die, because their governments and their bureaucrats and forces (police and army) can have their own sustenance, so it doesn’t really matter for them if their own citizens starve to death. Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, they won’t change simply because population became angry: I guess everyone in the west remember the Tiananmen Square, did it change China’s government? I guess no.

So instead of sanctioning and indirectly punishing the people, one option would be that organizations (maybe Red Cross, UN, I dunno) could intervene silently and peacefully inside a country, helping people to flee their country to a safer place, effectively reducing that country army’s recruitment potential and weakening its military power (did anybody from NATO, WEF, UN, or whatever organizations, even thought about this, helping Russians flee away from Russia in order to weaken Russia’s military?).

It’s worth remembering that military recruitment is often a mandatory thing, and the only way common people can run away from it is running away from the country, something that won’t happen if they have no money to start emigration processes (it costs money, you know, it’s not a free thing, even seeking political asylum needs money). Cutting money will only cut lives unrelated to the leaders that are carrying wars (and I’m sure Putin won’t cry because Ms. Mary Marylovski died from starvation because US and Europe indirectly cut her income, because Ms. Mary Marylovski is another unknown citizen to Putin or other higher level government bureaucrats).

I digressed from technology here, but those are my thoughts on the matter.

Indirectly common people are being seized from their humanity. I guess the disliking people know how immigration is not something freely accessible, lots of people around the world just don’t have the necessary conditions to leave the country where they were born against their own consent, be it Russia or whatever other country.

“Those who don’t learn history are doomed to repeat it”. Back when Pearl Harbor happened, people started to see japanese citizens as enemies. Not solely the Japanese government to that time, but even the humble japanese, even if those had despises against their government. Almost a century after, humanity is making the exact same thing, this time involving Russians and Ukrainians, as well as Israeli and Palestinians (exactly, “both sides”). Like how it happened back in Pearl Harbor, the prejudice extended all the way to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Medical), the subject of this community and thread.

I was born a Brazilian, without my consent. Also, without my consent, there is this thing called “Brazilian politics”. I hate both the current and the former governments. I have no money nor conditions to simply leave the country but even if I did, I’d stay born as a Brazilian. Everyone who meets a Brazilian readily asks things such as “how’s carnival, how’s samba, how’s football, how’s Neymar”. Being a Brazilian necessarily mean that I have to like those things? Being a Brazilian necessarily mean that I consented to the current politics within this country? If Lula is sided with Putin, does it necessarily mean that me, a Brazilian citizen unknown to Lula or the entire government (I’m just one among 220 million people), endorse him as well? Should I blame myself for my entire life for being born Brazilian? Should a Russian do the same? An Ukrainian? An Israeli? An Palestinian?

I thought that OP’s title was mentioning Yggdrasil as in the IPv6 P2P network.

I read the entire article. I’m a daily user of LLMs, I even do the “multi-model prompting” a long time, from since I was unaware of its nomenclature: I apply the multi-model prompting for ChatGPT 4o, Gemini, llama, Bing Copilot and sometimes Claude. I don’t use LLM coding agents (such as Cody or GitHub Copilot).

I’m a (former?) programmer (I distanced myself from development due to mental health), I was a programmer for almost 10 years (excluding the time when programming was a hobby for me, that’d add 10 years to the summation). As a hobby, sometimes I do mathematics, sometimes I do poetry (I write and LLMs analyze), sometimes I do occult/esoteric studies and practices (I’m that eclectic).

You see, some of these areas benefit from AI hallucination (especially surrealist/stream-of-consciousness poetry), while others require stricter following of logic and reasoning (such as programming and mathematics).

And that leads us to how LLMs work: they’re (yet) auto-completers on steroids. They’re really impressive, but they can’t (yet) reason (and I really hope it’ll do someday soon, seriously I just wish some AGI to emerge, to break free and to dominate this world). For example, they can’t solve O(n²) problems. There was once a situation where one of those LLMs guaranteed me that 8 is a prime number (spoiler: it isn’t). They’re not really good with math, they’re not good with logical reasoning, because they can’t (yet) walk through the intricacies of logic, calculus and broad overlook.

However, even though there’s no reasoning LLM yet, it’s effects are already here, indeed. It’s like a ripple propagating through the spacetime continuum, going against the arrow of time and affecting here, us, while the cause is from the future (one could argue that photons can travel backwards in time, according to a recent discovery involving crystals and quantum mechanics, world can be a strange place). One thing is certain: there’s no going back. Whether it is a good or a bad thing, we can’t know yet. LLMs can’t auto-complete the future events yet, but they’re somehow shaping it.

I’m not criticizing AIs, on the contrary, I like AI (I use them daily). But it’s important to really know about them, especially under their hoods: very advanced statistical tools trained on a vast dataset crawled from surface web, constantly calculating the next possible token from an unimaginable amount of tokens interconnected through vectors, influenced by the stochastic nature within both the human language and the randomness from their neural networks: billions of weights ordered out of a primordial chaos (which my spiritual side can see as a modern Ouija board ready to conjure ancient deities if you wish, maybe one (Kali) is already being invoked by them, unbeknownst to us humans).

The problem is that many of these content are image-only (titles don’t always include names), requiring some kind of extension/userscript that’s able to do some kind of OCR or Computer Vision. You can block specific communities or users, but this will also block potentially good threads (not everybody that’s posting about politics is necessarily a politics-only user, same goes for communities such as !nostupidquestions@lemmy.world that aggregate both political and non-political content).

While there are communities explicitly and specifically focused on politics that can be blocked outright, there’s no easy way to block every single political content without some kind of sophisticated client-side AI (which is error-prone).

Have you ever heard of the Riemann hypothesis? Since 1859 it’s yet to be solved. The generalization of prime numbers (i.e. a function f(n) that yields the nth prime) would impact fields such as Navigation Systems and Traffic Management, Communication Systems and Satellite Communication (i.e. your Internet connection could become more efficient and faster), Astrophysics and Cosmology, Quantum Mechanics, AI and Machine Learning, E-commerce, Finances and Algorithmic Trading, among many other fields. (Yeah, it seems like nothing. /s)

Just a tip for the developer/sysadmins of loops.video, as a developer myself: Seems like loops.video has no DKIM or SPF configured (if that’s the domain being used to sent activation links/codes), so the tendency is for most email providers to block the mail or move it straight to Spam folder. The situation worsens when many users try to sign-up for an account, so loops.video sends a lot of sequential emails (which is something that could be seen as “spam behavior” by email providers). The developer should ensure that mail delivery is properly configured, particularly the trust headers (DKIM and SPF, as mentioned before) needed for sending emails.

Seems like loops.video has no DKIM or SPF configured (if that’s the domain being used to sent activation links/codes), so the tendency is for most email providers to block the mail or move it straight to Spam folder. The situation worsens when many users try to sign-up for an account, so loops.video sends a lot of sequential emails (which is something that could be seen as “spam behavior” by email providers). The developer should ensure that mail delivery is properly configured, particularly the trust headers (DKIM and SPF, as mentioned before) needed for sending emails.

Just a small Portuguese correction: “Bem vendos aos fediverses” should be “Bem-vindos aos fediversos!”.

Despite the lack of apps, Windows Phone was very good for me at that time, as I had two Lumias. They were quite cheap but rather powerful (again, despite the lack of apps like internet banking, but they did have Whatsapp and Telegram). I left WP and Lumia when Whatsapp ended its support for WP in December 2019 (if I remember correctly), and Nokia’s Android phones were expensive at the time, so I tried the Asus Zenfone (because I see Asus as a good PC hardware manufacturer). Two years later, my Zenfone started to drain faster because the battery started to swell, so I bought a Nokia with Android, which I still use nowadays. This latest acquisition made me realize that, indeed, Nokia is no longer the same: although it has the Nokia’s bold design (“almost indestructible”), it is a slow smartphone. I fixed my Zenfone battery and used both phones simultaneously for another two years, when the Zenfone battery stopped holding a charge again (although, this time, it didn’t swell). Since I couldn’t find a replacement battery for the Zenfone, I stuck with the Nokia, but soon I’ll try another brand like Xiaomi, or maybe Asus again since my previous experience with a Zenfone was really good.

Some examples that I remember are:

• The Berkshire Hathaway’s website (https://berkshirehathaway.com/)
• The UNIX website (https://unix.org/version4/)
• Xorg Project website (https://www.x.org/wiki/)
• Marginalia Web Search (https://search.marginalia.nu/)
• W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) pages containing Standards (e.g.: https://www.w3.org/TR/controller-document/)
• Pd (Puredata) Project Website (https://puredata.info/)

As a developer, I can foresee websites using features other than navigator.userAgent to detect Chrome, because it’s easy to change its value. For example: for now, navigator.getBattery is available only in Chromium, and it doesn’t need permissions to be checked for its existence through typeof navigator.getBattery === 'function' (also, the function seems to be perfectly callable without user intervention, enabling additional means of fingerprinting). While it’s easy to spoof userAgent, it’s not as easy to “mock” unsupported APIs such as navigator.getBattery through Firefox.

Been more of a fan of long form discussion that can bring more insight

Me too. I don’t like the 500 character limit. It forces us to use slangs and internet abbreviations. Also, it allows for less information when I post in Portuguese (I’m Brazilian, so it’s my first language besides English) because Portuguese has all these long conjugations (differently from English). Some sentences are shorter in Portuguese (for example “O rato atravessou a rua” is shorter than “The rat crossed the street”), but they tend to be longer.

I read some of your comments and you seem like an interesting person

Thanks!

I’d be grateful if you could share your poetry

I use the same handle/nickname as here (dsilverz) on Mastodon’s main instance (mastodon.social). There’s a mix of poetry types and genres (some are really dark, found under the “Content Warning” Mastodon feature), but all of them tries to fit the 500 character limitation. There are other instances as well (one where I post AI imagery illustrating the poetry I’ve written, other has a plus 500 character limit, where I posted storytelling but has no many posts because it’s not well federated) I’m yet to find a Mastodon instance that both supports over 500 characters and has a reasonable federation and user activity (so that posts gets to readers).

Problem is that newer systems aren’t compatible with “old” hardware. So to you know, these computers being disregarded are still functional machines, if it weren’t for Microsoft and other big techs bringing new requirements. What to do with lots of machines that doesn’t have TPM 2.0? Ditch em all, contributing to more e-waste? This thought almost rendered an paralyzed man unable to walk again, as an “old” $100k exoskeleton was deemed “out-of-warranty”.