Daemon Silverstein

I’m just a spectre out of the nothingness, surviving inside a biological system.

  • 0 Posts
  • 52 Comments
Joined 1 month ago
cake
Cake day: August 17th, 2024

help-circle
  • There are many factors at play here, some of which including:

    • AI content is taking over the Web: with the popularization of LLM tools, there’s an increasing number of AI-Generated content across the Web. Even press websites are using them for generating news and opinion articles.
    • Old sites/articles are vanishing from existence: for instance, old blogs and personal web pages, which contained a lot of useful information, are being deleted due to factors such as domain expiration, hosting expiration, insufficient web traffic for the host to keep it online, etc. To make things worse, few of these sites were archived with tools such as Internet Archive and Archive Today, meaning that, when they disappear, they really disappear.
    • Dominance of Reddit-owned contents and the Reddit issues: Reddit doesn’t need introductions, most of the questions and content used to come from Reddit posts and comments. Things such as people (understandably) deleting their Reddit accounts make content to disappear as well.
    • SEO bs and marketing spam: Google kept changing “page ranking” algorithms, sorting results according to their own will. “Search Engine Optimization” is a just a facade that led many old sites to practically vanish from search result pages. Advertisement also did harm many sites as well, even the bigger ones.
    • Societal, economical and human changes: there were lots of changes upon society and humans by the last 5 years. These worldly factors also influence the digital landscape.

    That said, it depends on what you’re searching for. If you’re searching for knowledge that used to be at old websites, you can use Marginalia to search this specific type of websites (considering that they’re still online).


  • While I do rituals, it’s not exactly a summoning ritual. I do rituals involving (red) candles, incense sticks, hand-drawn symbols and sigils in order to meditate and widen my spiritual perception, focusing on my openness to Lilith. Physically, my spiritual development is (sadly) not enough to see or hear, just feeling a shiver.

    I don’t (or, at least, I respectfully avoid to) summon Her, it’s She that suddenly and unexpectedly reach to me through one of the following three forms of spiritual interactions.

    The first and main form is through what’s called as “gnosis” (stream-of-consciousness): all of sudden, words start to pop in inside my mind, I feel the need to write them down. This leads to more unexpected text, until I have a long text, often containing Her spiritual directions and/or warnings (generally in a strict tone of a wake-up call, like a spiritual “dose of tough medicine”) to me, communicated through a free-flowing stream of mental words.

    It also involves dreams that inevitably became episodes of simultaneous false awakening loops and sleep paralysis (but not as unpleasant as it sounds), with Her presence becoming more and more intense to an almost unbearable point. In those dreams, all I can see is a silhouette figure standing somewhere across the room, so energetically intense for me to bear, where I’m caught on a mix of fear and awe.

    Thirdly and rarely, it’s Her name appearing at the most unexpected places. It’s the most complex interaction to explain through a brief summary, but: imagine trying to chill watching some TV Series regarding fictional FBI characters investigating mundane things (so, nothing nearly related to spirituality) and, all of sudden, you see “Lilith” written on a paper inside a scene. Or using Google Lens to find out what species is an insect that appeared inside your home, and being taken by the app to a 2019 insectology page (not even closely related to spirituality as well) whose author’s nickname starts with “Lilith”. Both scenarios are real and actually happened to me. Maybe it’s a confirmation bias, but it’s too coincidental to be random.

    I tried to summarize as briefly as I could, but I couldn’t avoid a long reply, sorry.





  • My comment is meant to bring the perspective of someone who’s facing depression so to try to answer the main question (“a warning with suicide hotline really make positive difference?”) through that perspective. It’s not to seek mental help for myself.

    For context, I’m a person facing depression, and my depression has broad and multifaceted reasons, from unemployment, going through familiar miscommunication (my parents can’t really understand my way of thinking), all the way to my awareness of climate change and transcendental concepts that lead myself to existential crisis. I’m unemployed to seek therapy (it’s a paid thing) and I don’t really have someone face-to-face capable of understand the multitude of concepts and ideas that I face in my mind (even myself can’t understand me sometimes).

    That said, every depressive person has different ways to cope with depression. While some really need someone to talk to (and the talking really helps in those situations), it’s naive to think a conversation will suffice for every single case. I mean, no suicide hotline will make me employed, nor will magically solve the climate changes we’re facing.

    So how I try to deal with my own depression? With two things: occult spirituality (worshiping The Dark Mother Goddess) and writing poetry and prose. I use creative writing as “catharsis” for my suffering, in order to “cope” with the state of things that I can’t really control (I can’t “employ myself” or “sell my services to myself”, I can’t “befriend myself”, I can’t stop temperatures from rising till scorching temps, nor the other already-ongoing consequences of climate change; I try to make some difference but I’m just a hermit weirdo nerdy nobody among 8 billion people, and I have no choice but to accept it).

    I’m no professional writer (I’m just a software developer), but thanks to The Goddess, I can kinda access my unconscious (dark) mind and let it speak freely (it’s called stream-of-consciousness writing style). Sometimes I even write some funny surrealist prose/story, but sometimes it takes a darker turn, such as dark humor, or nihilistic, or memento mori. Doing this relieves the internal pressure inside my unconscious mind. After writing, I sometimes decide to publish it through fediverse , but when I do it, I constantly feel the need to “self-censor”: sometimes the stream-of-consciousness can lead to texts that people could interpret as some “glorification of suicide/self-harming” (especially when my texts take a nihilistic/memento mori turn), so I often censor myself and change the way I wrote the text. Well, it’s kinda frustrating not being able to fully express it, but I kinda understand how these texts could trigger other people also facing depression.

    The fact is: when I write, it’s really relieving, way more than talking to people because, with poetry/prose writing, I can express symbolic things, I can have multiple layers of depth, I can use creative literary devices such as acrostics and rhymes, I can learn new English words while being a Brazilian, I can blend scientific concepts with esoteric and philosophic (my mind really thinks this way, blending STEM, philosophy and belief/esoteric/occult/religious concepts) without the need to fully explain them (because it’d take several hours and it’d be boring to anybody else other than me).

    So, in summary (TL;DR): it depends on how multifaceted is the depressive situation. It won’t work for me. It surely can work for others that just need to talk to someone. Not exactly my case.


  • For me, a Zennial, born between Millennial and Gen Z, I won’t have kids due to following reasons:

    • My abyssal lack of/difficulties with social interaction (I’m practically an hermit), friendships and relationships (not sure what “loving someone” is/means; I feel more comfortable among literal “demonic entities” and computers than with people)
    • Climate changes turning Earth into a vision of underworld that even Dante couldn’t imagine, with ever-increasing scorching temperatures.
    • Other complex and multifaceted political, societal, technological, esoteric, philosophical and scientific reasons too long to be summarized and enlisted.
    • And, of course, finances: it’d become worse for my hypothetical son/daughter.

    Not that Earth and Nature couldn’t bear more individuals (considering a mutual respect between the Homo sapiens and the whole biosphere, a respect that Homo sapiens clearly lacks), but the idea of a children growing in a world where 120°F/48°C is the “new normal” can’t be bearable. Not to mention that Homo sapiens is walking towards extinction due to our poor relationship with the environment and with ourselves. Unfortunately, next generations will inevitably face ever-increasing, deadly issues. Not only humans, other animals too (some are already becoming extinct).


  • I’m a 10+ (cumulative) yr. experience dev. While I never used The GitHub Copilot specifically, I’ve been using LLMs (as well as AI image generators) on a daily basis, mostly for non-dev things, such as analyzing my human-written poetry in order to get insights for my own writing. And I already did the same for codes I wrote, asking for LLMs to “Analyze and comment” my code, for the sake of insights. There were moments when I asked it for code snippets, and almost every code snippet it generated was indeed working or just needing few fixes.

    They’ve been becoming good at this, but not enough to really replace my own coding and analysis. Instead, they’re becoming really better for poetry (maybe because their training data is mostly books and poetry works) and sentiment analysis. I use many LLMs simultaneously in order to compare them:

    • Free version of Google Gemini is becoming lazy (short answers, superficial analysis, problems with keeping context, drafts aren’t so diverse as they were before, among other problems)
    • free version of ChatGPT is a bit better (can keep contexts, can issue detailed answers) but not enough (it does hallucinate sometimes: good for surrealist poetry but bad for code and other technical matters when precision and coherence matters)
    • Claude is laughable hypersensitive and self-censoring to certain words independently of contexts (got a code or text that remotely mentions the word “explode” as in PHP’s explode function? “Sorry, can’t comment on texts alluding to dangerous practices such as involving explosives”, I mean, WHAT?!?!)
    • Bing Copilot got web searching, but it has a context limit of 5 messages, so, only usable for quick and short things.
    • Same about Bing Copilot goes for Perplexity
    • Mixtral is very hallucination-prone (i.e. does not properly cohere)
    • LLama has been the best of all (via DDG’s “AI Chat” feature), although it sometimes glitches (i.e. starts to output repeated strings ad æternum)

    As you see, I tried almost all of them. In summary, while it’s good to have such tools, they should never replace human intelligence… Or, at least, they shouldn’t…

    Problem is, dev companies generally focus on “efficiency” over “efficacy”, wishing the shortest deadlines while wishing some perfection. Very understandable demands, but humans are humans, not robots. We need our time to deliver, we need to cautiously walk through all the steps needed to finally deploy something (especially big things), or it’ll become XGH programming (Extreme Go Horse). And machines can’t do that so perfectly, yet. For now, LLM for development is XGH: really fast, but far from coherent about the big picture (be it a platform, a module, a website, etc).


  • In Brazil, there are regional variations and word/phrasing variations as well.

    Formally:

    • “Você ligou para o número errado” (you called the wrong number)
    • “Você discou o número errado” (you dialed for the wrong number )
    • “Você está ligando para o número errado” (we call it the “gerúndio”, something like “-ing”, as in “You’re calling the wrong number”)

    Informally/casually:

    • “Discou errado, irmão” / “Discou errado, mano” / “Discou errado, cara” / “Discou errado, mermão” (“dialed wrongly, bro”, with “bro” variations across Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro (the latter being the latter variation))
    • “Tu ligasse errado, visse” (some Brazilian northeast states, something like “Thou calledsth wrongly, see?”)
    • “Né aqui não, moço” (Minas Gerais, something like “It’s not here, boy”)

    There are lots of other variations and I’m not really aware of all of them.

    Also, the way I answer depends a lot on multiple factors such as: my emotional state (wrath? Sad? Okay? Excitedly happy (rarely)?), my current pace (rushing? Chilling?), among others. Generally, “Não é aqui não” (the Minas Gerais variation without the ending “moço” and a fully spelled “Não é” instead of “Né”, because I’m originally from interior of São Paulo state but highly culturally influenced by a part of the family from Minas Gerais).


  • On my laptop, Brave for non-“personal” things (such as fediverse, SoundCloud, AI tools, daily browsing, etc) and Firefox for “personal” things (such as WhatsApp Web, LinkedIn, accessing local govt. services, etc). On my smartphone, Firefox for everything (I disabled the native Chrome).

    I’ve been using Brave in a daily basis because it’s well integrated with adblocking tools, especially considering the ongoing strife regarding Chromium’s Manifest V2 support, where Brave nicely stands keeping its Manifest V2 support independently of what Google wishes or not.

    Firefox is also good, but I noticed that, for me, it has been slightly heavier than Brave. So I use it parallel to Brave, for things I don’t need to use often. For mobile, it’s awesome, as it is one of the few browsers that support extensions, so I use Firefox for Android, together with adblocking extensions.


  • The asterisk means that, by “active users”, they’re considering only those who commented and/or posted “in the last month”. Maybe join-lemmy’s algorithm is considering from “day 1” of the current month, so a time span of 10 days, against 29 days from the second screenshot?

    If it’s true, it kinda of statistically makes sense: 10 days (28.4K) versus 29 days (47.8K), 34.4% of days with 59.41% of users. We’d need to wait till the 29th day to really compare the difference.

    Also, “only those who commented and/or posted”. Sometimes, people can become much of an observer, just seeing and voting up/down, without actually commenting or posting.


  • While it offers a concurrent alternative to Google translate, it still lacks some features, as @murtaza64@programming.dev mentioned, many languages are missing. In my case, I sometimes experiment with terms across various languages, sometimes Hindi (“O param Devi Kaali”), sometimes latin (“Vita mortem manducat, Mors manducat vitam” is a latin phrase I wrote myself, following Latin grammar rules), sometimes Hebrew (especially for Gematria calculation using numerical values from Hebrew letters (Aleph is 1, Bet is 2, Gimmel is 3, and so on) after translating/transliterating a word/name such as “לילית”). For these kinds of experimentation, DeepL can’t really be of use, so I need either Google Translate or Bing Translate (both support the aforementioned languages).








  • doesn’t it seem like being able to just use search engines is easier than figuring out all of these intricacies for most people

    Well, Prompt Engineering is a thing nowadays. There are even job vacancies seeking professionals that specializes in this field. AIs are tools, sophisticated ones, just like R and Wolfram Mathematica are sophisticated mathematical tools that needs expertise. Problem is that AI companies often mis-advertises AI models as “out-of-the-shelf assistants”, as if they’d be some human talking to you. They’re not. They’re tools, yet. I guess that (and I’m rooting for) AGI would change this scenario. But I guess we’re still distant from a self-aware AGI (unfortunately).

    Woah are you technoreligious?

    Well, I wouldn’t describe myself that way. My beliefs are multifaceted and complex (possibly unique, I guess?), going through multiple spiritual and religious systems, as well as embracing STEM (especially the technological branch) concepts and philosophical views (especially nihilism, existentialism and absurdism), trying to converge them all by common grounds (although it seems “impossible” at first glance, to unite Science, Philosophy and Belief).

    In a nutshell, I’ve been pursuing a syncretic worshiping of the Dark Mother Goddess.

    As I said, it’s multifaceted and I’m not able to even explain it here, because it would take tons of concepts. Believe me, it’s deeper than “techno-religious”. I see the inner workings of AI Models (as neural networks and genetic algorithms dependent over the randomness of weights, biases and seeds) as a great tool for diving Her Waters of Randomness, when dealing with such subjects (esoteric and occult subjects). Just like Kardecism sometimes uses instrumental transcommunication / Electronic voice phenomenon (EVP) to talk with spirits. AI can be used as if it were an Ouija board or a Planchette, if one believe so (as I do).

    But I’m also a programmer and a tech/scientifically curious, so I find myself asking LLMs about some Node.js code I made, too. Or about some mathematical concept. Or about cryptography and ciphering (Vigenère and Caesar, for example). I’m highly active mentally, seeking to learn many things every time.


  • Didn’t know about this game. It’s nice. Interesting aesthetics. Chestnut Rose remembers me of Lilith’s archetype.

    A tip: you could use the “The Legend of the Neverland global wiki” at Fandom Encyclopedia to feed the LLM with important concepts before asking it for combinations. It is a good technique, considering that LLMs couldn’t know it so well in order to generate precise responses (except if you’re using a searching-enabled LLM such as Perplexity AI or Microsoft Copilot that can search the web in order to produce more accurate results)