Daemon Silverstein

It seems like alarms can trigger Google Assistant routines. Alarm sounds can either use local ringtones or YouTube Music. These things, Google Assistant and YouTube Music, they are cloud services. I imagine that the clock’s privacy policy is there due to the usage of these cloud services (along with the rule from Play Store that requires every app to have a privacy policy).

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 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 [email protected] 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/)

I’ve been using it on Android because of its seamlessly crossfade feature (i.e. the next music/replay gets faded in as the current music is approaching the end). I made some loops with Audacity and it’s the only music player that manages to play them endlessly with no gaps.

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”.

Ubuntu isn’t as paid as Windows. Also, newer Ubuntu versions don’t need the user to throw their machine away because TPM 2.0 or NPUs are missing. Maybe these are two of the main reasons why nobody is complaining about its EOL.

I’ve been engaging with Lemmy more than Mastodon. Lemmy allows for more interactions through discussions. To me, it seems like Mastodon is slower to get interactions (for context, I have accounts on three different instances and used to post dark/gothic/satirical/surrealist poetry written by me daily, but I haven’t posted in days because no one seems to be really engaging with it). Mastodon has a lot of potential, but I think few are really committed to stick to the fediverse and all its potential.

As for why people don’t come back, maybe they’re confused about which instance to use since there are thousands of different instances for different purposes, I’m not exactly sure.

Dead Internet Theory all over again.