Daemon Silverstein

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

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Joined 1 month ago
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Cake day: August 17th, 2024

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  • A sincere question: why they don’t place some relay/repeater for the robot’s signal so they could control it from anywhere in the world through internet (or even some very private wireless communication network, outside internet due to security concerns)? The fact that they have to switch personnel every 15 minutes is a sign that they’re doing this in situ, rather than remotely.

    Drones with mobile network connectivity are already a thing, for example. If you consider that internet exposure is dangerous (connection could be hacked, etc), ham transceiver repeaters are also a thing, and you can even chain many of them across many kilometers. It’s called mesh network.



  • It seems utopia/dystopia, but some things get discovered/invented by accident. The more companies and organizations (and even individuals) fiddle with AI improvement, the more the “odds” of a sentient AI (AGI) being accidentally created increases. Let’s not forget that there are lots of companies, organizations and individuals (yeah, individuals, people outside organizations but with lots of computing power and knowledge) simultaneously developing and training AIs. Well, maybe I’m wrong and just very optimistic for such thing to appear out of nowhere.


  • I’m not supporting conspiracy theories (they don’t even matter to me anymore), but people fiercely attacking conspiracy theories generally are unbeknownst to how some few conspiracy theories became facts (not every crazy-fetched theory, but a little few): back in 2012, I was aware of the existence of an annual meeting called “Bilderberg Meetings”. Around 2014, an official website popped up, finally listing matters and subjects being discussed at their secret meetings, as well as its attendees, but the group existed since 1954, so decades of talking about global matters behind closed doors. It took a journalist (now deceased) nicknamed as “Big Jim” to disclose the topic list, attendees, meeting dates (beginning and ending) and location (such as which 5-star hotel to be paid with taxpayers money), before the site finally became to disclose such things.

    I remember being called “crazy” when I pointed to the fact that such meetings existed, now it’s simply normal and well-accepted (but it doesn’t take back the offenses I received that time). That’s OK for me, because I moved on. As I said, it doesn’t matter to me anymore, now I’m really numb to it all. There are worse things than rich people and politicians gathering behind closed doors, such as impending weather disasters and scorching temperatures due to the now irreversible climate change (in parts, some of the corporations that attended such meetings to be blamed, but not only them; if they were transparent about their discussions about climate change, maybe people opened their eyes earlier about how impending were the now climate disaster, uniting and charging companies and governments to earlier actions with the needed transparency).

    TL;DR: For a fun, I tried the mentioned bot. I talked to it about the former secrecy of Bilderberg meeting (before 2014, when their official website got online).

    He “agreed” but pointed on how “this level of privacy is not uncommon in high-level discussions” and regarding “media spotlight and pressure, which is a reason why the meetings are private”. I counter-argued by pointing out how the phrase “If you got nothing to hide, you got nothing to fear” does not only apply to “mortal citizens” but also to CEOs and politicians, but it insisted on how such meetings needs “discretion”.

    One thing it pointed is valid, tho: “correlation doesn’t imply causation”. Indeed, the fact that such meetings were undisclosed doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re criminal or conspiratory. But does the same rule apply for citizens? The same rules should apply for both the “powerful” and the citizens.

    As I said, time passes, really bad things happened so far (climate change, rise of bigotry and inflation worldwide, COVID-19 with seven million fatalities reported but up to 30 million estimated deceases including one of my uncles, etc) and I became really, really numb, so I don’t care anymore. Humanity (even the richest men) is deadwalking towards extinction, anyways. Unfortunately. Sorry for my sadness and numbness.


  • 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).








  • There is absolutely no saint in this whole story. Musk is a billionaire trying to play god, while the supreme court is also trying to play god. Both consider themselves “above the rule of law”, while an entire population (composed of 200 million people) is divided between “Musk is right, let’s impeach Moraes” and “Moraes is right, let’s jail Musk”. There’s no good or evil here, for me, it’s the grand-old classic Divide et impera. It’s so obvious!

    The good side of all this is that people are slowly learning about decentralized platforms, getting a little closer to tech-savvy. People are discovering fediverse, even if it’s through a not-so-good fediverse instance (Threads from Meta, or Bluesky). When people really literate themselves about the decentralization, it’ll be harder for both state bureaucracies as well as for corporations. The mastodon in the room which neither corps nor govs want to talk about (pun intented).



  • A not-so-recent fediverse Brazilian user here, before all the X incident in Brazil. I joined Mastodon exactly 1 month ago. Since the beginning, I was only interacting with non-brazilian Mastodon users. In the last few days, however, I’ve been noticing more and more brazilian posts emerging inside Mastodon feeds, even in my home feed (where I follow hashtags such as #poetry, #poems, #occult, #hermeticism, #art and #aiart, as well as non-brazilian users that I’ve been following). Seems like brazilians are spreading across the many existing alternatives, not just Threads or BlueSky. It’s exactly what happened when WhatsApp or Telegram got temporarily blocked here: people started spreading across Discord, Signal, Matrix and so on.



  • Daemon Silverstein@thelemmy.clubtoLinux@lemmy.mlProblems with Arch upgrade
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    17 days ago

    You didn’t specify which problem or which thing that broke. However (and based on my previous experiences on that matter), one could face a problem regarding package PGP/GPG signatures upon trying to update. This is because archlinux-keyring is not being updated before the signature checking. That said, a better approach is to always update archlinux-keyring (sudo pacman -S --needed archlinux-keyring) before anything else (sudo pacman -Syu). This way, you guarantee to be up-to-date with developer signatures, needed for pacman to check the validity for every package to be updated/installed. There’s also a pacman-key command, but I never had to use that.


  • Apparently VPNs are also not allowed to access it but I dunno how that would even work

    That’s the point: they can’t. However, based by the judge’s inquiry, the VPN apps are to be removed from app marketplaces, every single one of them. He asked Google and Apple to remove VPN apps altogether. This extrapolates the boundary of “blocking X”, because VPNs aren’t solely used for “bypassing ISP blocking”, VPNs are also used to link two or more devices into the same LAN over ther Internet, but this will be affected as soon as these apps vanish from Brazilian marketplaces.


  • There is something that most news articles aren’t paying attention to: the judge requested Google and Apple to remove VPN apps from their marketplaces. Not just apply fines to those who dare to use VPNs in order to access X, but removing the VPNs altogether. I mean, I use OpenVPN Client for making a LAN to connect my smartphone and my laptop together (so, for example, I can use KDE Connect between a smartphone over mobile network and a laptop over cable internet). I don’t even have an X account, but a decision focused on that platform is extending its reaches beyond the intended target, affecting those who use VPN for professional and technical purposes.