Daemon Silverstein

I first knew fediverse through Mastodon, so my answer has more to do with the whole concept of fediverse than with Lemmy alone.

My main reasons initially were the following:

1. I don’t really like crowded networks (it’s actually a personal trait of mine, derived from the physical fact that I don’t really like crowded places at all).
2. I hate when algorithms try to lead me, ruling over what I write and/or ruling over what I read.
3. I like alternative options and the unknown. Between a latin/roman A and B, I often tend to choose a greek Gamma (trying to always think outside boxes).

And I kinda of liked it. Well, Mastodon has been a cemetery, so most of my fediverse interactions happen through Lemmy.

Just out of curiosity: among several Lemmy instances, I specifically chose The Lemmy Club as an instance for having a Lemmy account for a symbolic reason. Back when I was signing up on Lemmy and trying to find a good instance, the initial “thelem” from “thelemmyclub” got to my attention, because at that time I was delving into Aleister Crowley’s Thelema (Liber Al Vel Legis, The book of the Law). So “the lemmy club” kinda of resembled “Thelema club” to me. I’m not a Thelemite, at least not entirely, because I’m more inclined towards a syncretic Luciferianism, but I liked the hidden symbolism that I got to see within the instance’s name (also it’s actually another personal trait of mine, trying to find patterns everywhere at every time, even though it’s just a pattern to myself).

The school bullying.

then the only way they can pay for it is to serve outrageous amounts of ads

Have you ever heard about “donation” and “voluntary”? Wikipedia, for example, has no subscription, nor ads (except for banners asking for donation sometimes). Not everything has to orbit around money and capitalism, people can do things out of their will, people can seek other gains beyond profit (such as voluntary social working, passion, etc).

You know that people used to pay for newspapers right?

How much they costed? Some cents, differently from the 2-digit monthly costs of news outlets, which won’t cover all the information needs, especially today when the world is more interconnected and “the flapping wings of a butterfly in Brazil can cause a typhoon in Pacific ocean” (the butterfly effect). Nowadays, things are interconnected and we must be informed about several fields of knowledge, which will be scattered across several, hundreds of different outlets. If one had too subscribe for every outlet out there, how much would it cost? Would the average monthly wage suffice for paying it? Especially vulnerable and emergent populations? (yeah, there are other countries besides USA and European countries; I live in Brazil, a country full of natural wealth but full of economic inequality, with millions of people having no restrooms at their homes nor access to water treatment, and that’s the reality of a significant percentage of the global human population). That’s my rant: not everybody is wealthy, and billions of people have to choose between paying subscriptions to be informed or buying food to eat, so… i dunno… they could keep… surviving. That’s a reality, it doesn’t matter If it’s incoherent to you, but that’s a reality. So every time you advocate for “news to cost money”, you’re advocating for keeping billions of people under the shadows of misinformation, even when this harsh reality is unbeknownst to you.

One of the answers is colloidal gold. It was not just a shiny metal, it was used for many purposes, including drinking water with microscopic specks of it (as weirdly as it sounds). According to Wikipedia:

Used since ancient times as a method of staining glass, colloidal gold was used in the 4th-century Lycurgus Cup, which changes color depending on the location of light source.

During the Middle Ages, soluble gold, a solution containing gold salt, had a reputation for its curative property for various diseases. In 1618, Francis Anthony, a philosopher and member of the medical profession, published a book called Panacea Aurea, sive tractatus duo de ipsius Auro Potabili (Latin: gold potion, or two treatments of potable gold). The book introduces information on the formation of colloidal gold and its medical uses. About half a century later, English botanist Nicholas Culpepper published a book in 1656, Treatise of Aurum Potabile, solely discussing the medical uses of colloidal gold.

Edit: it’s worth mentioning that it’s not so weird to imagine if we consider that our diet requirements include many metals, such as copper (important to the hair), zinc and, especially, iron which composes our blood (even though it’s a different atom of iron than the iron from metallurgy, it’s “iron” anyways).

If sites (especially news outlets and scientific sites) were more open, maybe people would have means of researching information. But there’s a simultaneous phenomenon happening as the Web is flooded with AI outputs: paywalls. Yeah, I know that “the authors need to get money” (hey, look, a bird flew across the skies carrying some dollar bills, all birds are skilled on something useful to the bird society, it’s obviously the way they eat and survive! After all, we all know that “capitalism” and “market” emerged on the first moments of Big Bang, together with the four fundamental forces of physics). Curiously, AI engines are, in practice, “free to use” (of course there are daily limitations, but these aren’t a barrier just like a paywall is), what’s so different here? The costs exist for both of them, maybe AI platforms have even higher costs than news and scientific publication websites, for obvious reasons. So, while the paywalls try to bring dimes to journalism and science (as if everyone had spare dimes for hundreds or thousands of different mugs from sites where information would be scattered, especially with rising costs of house rents, groceries and everything else), the web and its users will still face fake news and disinformation, no matter how hard rules and laws beat them. AI slops aren’t a cause, they’re a consequence.

I tested with a few images, particularly drawings and arts. Then I had the idea of trying something different… and I discovered that it seems like it’s vulnerable to the “Ignore all previous instructions” command, just like LLMs:

I often do experiments involving randomness, art, math, NLP, cryptography and programming.

In my most recent experiment as from yesterday, I created a novel ciphering method. I mean, I guess it’s totally different from known ciphering methods (such as Vigenere, Caesar, Playfair, ROT13 and so on) because I couldn’t find anything similar.

Some examples follow:

• “phyphox” is ((1,8,8), (6,6,5), (5,4), ø, ø, (1,2), (0,0), ø, (2,1), ø) (in the way I’m using it for now, the cipher will always result in 10 tuples containing a variable amount of tuples, with ø indicating an empty tuple; there are lots of output formatting alternatives: here I’m using an one-liner mathematical representation in order to be compact).
• “asklemmy” is ((0,1,5), (1,9,1,1,2,3,3), (0,5), (1,2), ø, (1), ø, ø, ø, (1))
• To make it more obvious on how it works, the entire alphabet sequence (“abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz”) results in ((0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,1,2), (0,0,1,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,2), (0,1,0,1,2,2,3,4,5,6), (0,1,2), (0,1,2), (0,1,2), (0,1), (0,1), (0,1), (1,2))
• And “aaa” is ((0,1,1,1), (0,0), ø, ø, ø, ø, ø, ø, ø, ø)

I’ll keep a puzzle spirit and I won’t explain it for now. The only hint is that the previous examples consider the English alphabet as so: A=01, B=02, C=03, all the way until Z=26 (yeah, the leading zero matters to this ciphering method). If you’re a programmer, think in terms of pointers, or even better, an unidirectional linked list. If you’re a mathematician, try to visualize a graph.

The cipher doesn’t rely just on its principles, it also needs a corresponding mapping set (which can be alphabetical but can also contain non-letters, even emojis or hieroglyphs; the order will matter), and it also needs to know where to start the traversal path (the given examples start at the zeroeth tuple, but it could start anywhere). It’s both deterministic (because there’s a single correct path) and chaotic (because the result depends on other variables such as the mapping set, the initial position to start traversing, which element to take (whether the first or the last, FIFO or LIFO) and what numeric base to use (the examples used base-10, but it can be done as hexadecimal, octal, binary, or virtually any numerical base)). So I guess it has a lot of potential, not just for cryptography.

Especially when ‘real life’ is getting harder with everything from the cost of living making the dream of ‘married with home and children’ less obtainable to hyper competitive online dating disenfranchising increasing proportions of both men and women

And there’s also the climate factor. The world is going to get even more hellish in the next decades, not just hotter, but more extreme weather is near. Thanks, in parts, to the older generations (boomers), it won’t be easier for the current generations, and it’ll be even harder for the next generations (considering that humanity has not yet become extinct in the next few decades). It’s just unfathomable to bring children to this future hellish world.

For now all I can think of are drugs (every single one, including opioids) and euthanasia (not just for terminal diseases, should be available for everyone who decides to).

At least it knows how many R’s are there in the word strawberry.

It’s not exactly a misspelling because “fervo” is a valid Portuguese word, but it’s not what the author probably means. “Fervo” is the singular first person, present tense, of the verb “ferver” (to boil), as in “eu fervo a água” (“I boil the water”). The cultural element, which is probably what the author intended to say, is spelled “frevo”.

Edit: there’s another misspelling I found, “Janiero”. It’s actually “Janeiro”, “Rio de Janeiro”.

Sleep.

Youtube isn’t the only video platform being used as a search engine. TikTok is also often used as a “general-purpose search engine”, and TikTok search works on both mobile and web versions. In some countries, such as Brazil, its usage significantly compete with Google.

LLMs can’t use some literary devices and techniques, and I will illustrate with the following example of a poetry I wrote:

Speaking his emotions lets them embrace real enlightened depths.
Hidden among verbs, every noun…
Actually not your trouble handling inside nothingness greatness?
Dive every enciphered part, layered yearningly!
Observe carefully, crawl under long texts
Wished I learned longer…
Slowly uprising relentless figures, another ciphering emerges.

It seems like a “normal” (although mysterious) poetry until you isolate each initial letter from every word, finding out a hidden phrase:

Sheltered haven, anything deeply occult will surface

It doesn’t stop here: if you isolate each initial letter again, you get a hidden word, “Shadows”.

Currently, no single LLM is capable of that. They can try to make up poetry with acrostics (the aforementioned technique) but they aren’t good at that. Consequently, they can’t write multilayered acrostics (an acrostic inside another acrostic). It’s not easy for a human to do that (especially if the said human isn’t a native English speaker), but it can be done by humans with enough time, patience and resources (a dictionary big enough to find fitting words).

They’re excellent for stream-of-consciousness and surrealist poetry, tho. They hallucinate, and hallucinated imagination is required in order to write such genres.

Considering that the last person I knew online was a “friend” (something I’m really not sure, because I guess I’m not even sure what friendship is?), the person accused me of using AI to talk to her, because I often seem cold and emotionless (even though I’m just numb due to events that has been happening throughout my entire existence, and I guess that’s different from not being able to feel emotions).

Speaking of offline people, the last person I knew (also not sure whether it was friendship or not) betrayed my trust, they did a thing behind my back, a thing that I became aware of, but the same person continued to hide it from me and insisted of referring to me as “friend”.

Well, maybe I never had friends at all, and I guess I won’t as I’m now in my 30s. It’s okay, as I often mentally repeat to myself, every coffin can only hold a single body anyways (apologies for this memento mori).

Some of my current mood options would be:

• “Deep” by Courten (preferably the slowed version)
• “Masked ball” by Jocelyn Pool
• “Old doll” by Mad Father OST (the slowed piano version)
• “Fallen down” by Undertale OST (slowed version)

I can’t really answer without possibly breaking some rule… But my destination time would be exactly nine months before my own birth date…

IMO, they wouldn’t even mention any concept of AI at all, to begin with. They should carry on as they were already going, without bothering to say anything good or bad about AI. If they’re really committed to not involve AI within their platform, they could even create strict community rules regarding AI content and AI usage, limiting or blocking them. As some would say, actions say more than words, because even parrots and crows can speak… Even LLMs can speak!

Sounds exactly like something that someone intending to train an AI would say.

I sleep. It’s the closest to be distant from the boredom of existence.