Daemon Silverstein

@[email protected] @[email protected]

As a sidenote, I remember that UK has an odd and ancient “law” stating something in the lines “The Crown must not be offended” (i.e. being anti-monarchy and advocating for the end of monarchy, even without any violent language/means but a pacific defense of anti-monarchy). I couldn’t find it, nor I can remember the exact phrasing, but such a “law” threatens prison time for those who “dare” to “offend” the crowniness of UK Crown. Also, I’m not sure to what extent this law is applied in practice.

Even though I’m Brazilian (so the UK supposedly “have no power over here”, and I say it with the Gandalf’s voice), I see these international situations with some worry: there are needed laws (such as laws against noise pollution) and there are laws whose reach ends up going way too far from their “seemingly well-intentioned” puritan scope (such as the aforementioned laws).

If countries are capable of passing draconian laws against their own citizens, don’t expect that those same countries couldn’t go further to impose these laws beyond their own lawns, especially in times of interconnectedness.

And Fediverse platforms from everywhere around the entire globe end up being caught in the crossfire, due to that same interconnectedness.

In the end of the day, the world is increasingly bleaker, as the history is being repeated (maxims “One thing people can learn from history books is that people can’t learn from history books”, and “history doesn’t just repeat, it rhymes”).

@[email protected] @[email protected]

site:domain.tld does work, as an and x constraint. I often use it.
It seems to me like the OP’s specific and (not x) usage of site:domain.tld is the reason why it isn’t working. While the negation prefix (-) does work for tokens/words (e.g. mercury -freddie), it’s probably transforming site into a token not to be included in the results (i.e. "any results that don’t contain the word “site”) which, disconnected from the rest of the sentence (:quora.com), turns the latter into part of what the results should include, so the query ends up being something like:

Filter all the indexed Web results where its contents don’t include the word “site”, possibly do include “quora.com”, possibly do include “Molten”, possibly do include “boron”, possibly do include “oxide”, possibly do include “attacks”, possibly do include “silicates”

The negation prefix has a similar effect to that of positive (+) prefix (e.g. “mercury +periodic +table”) as it turns the word into a required condition (must be present for “+”, must be absent for “-”) rather than an optional condition (i.e a search for “mercury periodic table”, without quotes, will contain pages with all three words in any order, pages with just two of the three words (such as “mercury periodic” in any order) and pages with only one of the three words (such as “mercury” which would include pages talking about the singer, and pages talking about the planet and pages talking about the Roman deity), ranked by “relevance”).

As Quora pages do include “quora.com” somewhere within the page body, the first results will be from Quora because it’s part of the parsed condition (which is to optionally include “quora.com” as part of the result while discarding results containing the verbatim word “site”).

@[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] [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]

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] 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] 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.