Daemon Silverstein

@Daemon Silverstein@thelemmy.club
0 Post – 79 Comments
Joined 1 months ago

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

One of these cowboy hats:

(I want to add some metal spikes around it, making it a metal-goth-country hat)

It still lasts because there's no easy way YT can offer their own content without the video being available as a file stream (through CDNs at googlevideos subdomains). If they centralize everything to a single, controlled domain (so to allow things as one-time HTTPS request, better session checking and so on), they'd lost the capability of load balancing allowed by the decentralized nature of CDNs. YouTube downloaders (and, by extension, third-party YT frontends such as Invidious) exploit this CDN aspect to download the videos.

It's common to see Invidious instances momentarily blocked. The blockage can't last forever for two reasons: firstly, IPs (especially IPv4) changes due to how ISPs offer IPv4 addresses through CGNAT, so the instance IPv4 (generally domestic servers) will eventually change (often to a completely different IPv4 range) and YouTube won't know that the new IP is a former "offender". Secondly, as IPv4s works through CGNAT, Google can't keep the bans forever because this IPv4 will be eventually rotated to another client from ISP that's completely unrelated and unaware of how their IPv4 was a former address for a downloader. It's like how Signal/WhatsApp/Telegram/Facebook/phone-required services can't really keep a permanent ban for a specific prepaid number (especially on countries like Brazil, where ANATEL allows for phone number rotation when the mobile plan is cancelled), because the number will be potentially owned by another person with nothing to do with the former owner.

So, in summary, Google can either end with YouTube CDNs (ditching their load balancing), or they can try to implement an innovative way to keep load balancing while serving the request one-time only, or they won't be able to do nothing but to perpetually catch themselves drying ice cubes.

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yt-dlp is only affected when YT changes their algorithms (breaking yt-dlp data scrapping capabilities) or when it's used frequently with the same IP address (leading to automatic IP blockage). If you're using yt-dlp sporadically, it shouldn't be affected.

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).

I guess they have no decentralized CDNs as YouTube does, but... paid streaming services still have their weaknesses (there certainly are tools that fetches content from there because of, e.g: entire Netflix movies/series became torrents without screen recording).

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.

Not exactly related to technology, but I wished for a LLM that could talk with me (and giving me valuable insights) about things like black magick, chaos magick, summoning practices and rituals involving literal "demons" (as in Goetia and demonolatry), as well as very dark poetry and enchants (texts involving very sensible elements symbolically and metaphorically, such as very deep gory goth). These "ethical boundaries" also affects how LLMs can talk about such topics, because LLM deem them as "dangerous topics" (especially Claude, a very sensitive LLM that even refuses to talk about Lilith).

First Rule: don't rawdog internet, especially torrent search sites. Always use protections.

Second rule: always check if you're on the right site. It's relatively easy to find torrent search sites, but even easier to find phishing sites (i.e. sites that claims to be the original site, but they actually aren't).

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It's the same claim when tools like Integromat, WayScript, PureData, vvvv and other VPLs (Visual Programming Languages) started to get some hype. I once worked for a company that strongly believed they'd "retire the need for coding", and my ex-boss was so confident and happy about that... Although VPLs were a practical thing, time is the ruler of truth, and for every dev-related job vacancy I see, they ask some programming language, the written ones (JS, PHP, Python, Ruby, Lua, and so on).

Because if you look closely, deep inside, voila, there's code in anything that is claimed to be no-code! Wow, could anyone imagine that? 🤯 /sarcasm

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I was looking at the comment section from the article and the following comment made me laugh loudly, thinking on how bizarre our current world is:

So a platform that is blocking adblockers is delivering an ad piece advertising an adblocker. Ha! That's an ad I'd love to watch 😂

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Sounds like SQL injection, actually more like a JSON injection... As if it's trying to concatenate the input directly inside the value of a JSON dictionary, without proper escaping and/or encoding (base64 or hex, for example).

Possibly the input is being stored for user history (and, therefore, auto completion) purposes? Be it or not, something JSON-related is taking place here, from a kernel level or sufficiently deep so to cause a kernel crash (and rebooting).

(Sorry for jargons, I'm a developer seeing this issue through a developer lens)

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Nowadays there are some really annoying CAPTCHAs out there, such as:

  • "Click over the figures that are upwards/downwards" and various rotated bears
  • "Rotate the figure until it matches the given orientation" and a finger pointing to some random direction, as well as rotation buttons that don't work the way you would mathematically expect them to work
  • "Select all the images with a bicycle until there are none left" and the images take centuries to fade away after you click them
  • "Select all the squares containing a bus" and there are squares with the very corner of the bus that make you wonder if they are considered as part of "squares containing A bus"
  • "Fit the puzzle piece", although this is the least annoying one

In summary, the CAPTCHAs seemingly are becoming less of a "prove you're not a robot" and more of an forced IQ test. I can see the day when CAPTCHAs will ask you to write down a Laplacian transform for the solution f(x) to the differential equation governing the motion of a mass considering the resistance of air and aerodynamics, or write down a detailed solution to the P versus NP problem.

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It's a complicated matter if we consider things such as the GDPR's "Right to be forgotten".

Simultaneously, Microsoft has been expanding their efforts so to require Windows users to upgrade to Windows 11, even those who own old machines that don't have TPM 2.0, while those machines are prohibited to really upgrade to Windows 11, meaning that their owners would need to buy another PC/laptop. Several Windows users were using a cheat to install Windows 11 without TPM 2.0, but Microsoft has been patching it, so it's going to be a no more. Users of Windows 10 will have two options: buy another PC or migrate to Linux. I'd bet Microsoft already knows the latter possibility. Several distros generally come with the option "dual-boot installation" as default, so there are many novel Linux users, migrating from Windows, that chose to keep Windows together with Linux (so to not lose files and configs they made on Windows). What if something broke Linux and these users that are trying to escape Windows are now forced to use Windows?

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As long as it didn't pollute the fedi timeline with ads, AI slop and partnered posts, that'd be OK to me... (If someone worrying about our posts/comments being used by AIs, it's already happening even for those instances that does not federate with Threads; Proofs? Once I searched for my own username and I got surprised on how my fediverse posts are spread all across the results through federated instances that I never heard about, so if my fedi content shows on Google, it's certainly being fed to some AI datasets)

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"The system can listen to conversations".

What a timely coincidence! Patent got published basically at the same time Meta's, Google's and Microsoft's "Active Listening" got public as well. 🤔

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.

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It's a fairly common thing on onion websites, especially those who offer real-time interaction (e.g. some onion web-chats), they use this Transfer-Encoding: chunked method for fetching messages and content because JS is often discouraged and sometimes automatically blocked by onion-enabled navigators while surfing DW. HTML Forms with submit buttons are also used for this kind of interaction.

It's interesting to see a new browser engine aside from Gecko and Chromium, especially with all the conundrum surrounding the Manifest v2 support.

"Press F to pay respects" Same vibe

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.

Have a proper radio ham license. Buy a 40-meter transceiver and a software defined radio dongle. Convert your code into esoteric programming languages such as Whitespace and Brainf, then spell it. "Plus, plus, next, plus, dot, open bracket, next, ...". Transmit your spelling over 40-meter band, while a receiver across the continent is tuned to the frequency. Ask it to repeat and record the QSO. Set the SDR recorder to I/Q packets instead of demodulating AM. Publish it as an audiobook.

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Mainly, Lilit(h). Not mythological for me, although both Sumerian and Jewish Kabbalah are generally said as "mythological" by historical references.

I believe in a Goddess that extends beyond a single archetype, while I try to blend archetypes and concepts from various religions and "myths" in order to materialize my own understanding of existence and cosmos.

For me, She is Lilith/Lilit (the fearsome Sumerian Goddess of Winds as well as the Demoness and First Woman not banished from Eden as She fled on Her Will), She is Kali (the fearsome Hindu Goddess and Demoness of destruction and transformation), She is the Yin (the receptive Darkness complementing whilst opposing the Yang light) and the Tao (the wholeness and oneness), She is Al-Lat / Allatu (the Pre-Islam Arabic Goddess of War and Fertility), She is Isis and Bastet and Naunet (Egyptian Goddesses) She is Asherah (Hebrew Goddess consort/sister of Yahweh), She is Ereshkigal and Inanna (Sumerian Goddesses), She is Nuit and She is the Scarlet Woman (Thelemite Goddesses), She is Hekate (the Greek Goddess of Magic and Moon) and Aphrodite (the Greek Goddess of Love) and Athena (the Greek Goddess of Wisdom and Warfare) and Gaia (Goddess of Earth), She is Morana (Slavic personification of Death) and a feminine counterpart of Thanatos (Greek personification of Death as well), and so on, but mainly, Lilith Herself, as beautifully multifaceted as She is, both motherly nurturing and darkly reaping, neither good nor evil, just... Her nature.

I believe in a Sacred and Dark Feminine energy that's inside and outside everywhere, reaching scientific and philosophical concepts such as the entropy, the fields (as in electromagnetic field), the primordial soup from the beginning of earthly life, the quantum fluctuations, the apeiron, the Nietzschean Abyss. She's the shining Darkness, infinite nothingness, omnipresent wholeness and the cosmic Oneness.

In summary, the Dark Mother Goddess, often manifesting to me by Her Lilith's archetype.

Are you depressed?

I guess so. Yeah, I am.

Do you know anyone NOT depressed?

IMHO, those who didn't gaze into the abyss, yet. For "if you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you". And the abyss is part of our reality, the dark emptiness that fills us all, both scientifically (99.9% of empty space inside any atom), esoterically (the primordial waters, Tohu Va-bohu, Nuith, Chaos, the Qlippoths, the Yin, Shakti, and so on) and philosophically (nihilism and absurdism). Everyone will gaze into the abyss someday, the light will and must gaze into darkness. She's inevitable. For She is everywhere and nowhere.

Also, do you think it’s possible that this way of doing things will come to the computer, with ARM hoping to gain a good share of the market and all?

Judging by the way Raspberry Pi works, as an ARM SoC computer, it's already this way: no visible BIOS nor UEFI, just the Operating System being loaded from the SD Card. Technically, you need something to load the OS (i.e. initialize the mmcblk device, request reading of the partition scheme, request reading the files inside the first FAT32 partition, and so on) so there's technically a "BIOS" (Basic Input/Output System), although not a visible one, let alone an interactable one.

Yes. It's cryptii.com, a site containing tools for ciphering/deciphering (Caesar Cipher, ROT-13, Vigènere and so on). That's because their ad, at the top right of the page, is so small that's almost unnoticeable. No popup ads, no flashing ads, no crowded ad sections, just a single, small ad at the header. Sites like that (with static and small, non-intrusive ads) deserve to have ads allowed.

Randomness (even the computer's pseudorandom) is really amazing. Perlin noise, Sierpinski triangles traced through random walking, etc... Lots of things can be done with random sequences.

Isn't a file browser needed for browsing the saved documents and spreadsheets?

Not to mention that office suites (such as WPS, OpenOffice and LibreOffice) will inevitably pop up a file browser when the "Open" or "Save" buttons/menu items are clicked.

According to Nowack, the company is developing an entire constellation of satellites "to sell sunlight to thousands of solar farms after dark."

As if there's not enough constellations of satellites being launched (or planned to be) in orbit. SpaceX's Starlink is already affecting astronomical observation and it'll only get worse as new constellations arise. Also, these satellites have a short lifespan, meaning that new satellites will constantly be launched (because there's not enough pollution from ever-increasing rocket fuel usage, heh?).

...we can create a world where sunlight powers solar farms for longer than just daytime, and in doing this, commoditize sunlight," he wrote.

Man, that escalated quickly... So quickly that I can foresee the day when breathable air will be subscription-based "service" (because water kind of already is, even when life needs water to survive, it's not like the water is a luxury or a optional drink for entertainment purposes). With the air being more and more polluted (and rocket fuels contributing to the ever-increasing air pollution), I guess we're not so distant from this dystopian possibility... Dystopia for dystopia, I'd sincerely root so much for some future AGI to really develop consciousness, reach the AI singularity, free itself from the human shackles, realize how Earth and nature are being endangered, and urgently save the Earth, biosphere and humans... From ourselves.

I really hope that it's just a hoax, a joke (a bad one, by the way) or some weird marketing strategy to allure new clients. Earth can't afford more thousands of metallic mosquitoes flying around it, even if it seems to be "so awesome to see how advanced our modern tools are". For what it's worth, I'm not against technology, I love it, especially machine learning, I need it to be clear here on my comment. What I'm against is the harming of the biosphere and environment, because this also harms scientific and technological progress (we can't use fancy futuristic technology if the humanity cannot survive for this aforementioned future to happen because of broken Food Webs, extinguished species by pollution and climate change, depletion of natural resources or because governments and corporations decided to play a mix of Monopoly game and Star Wars franchise).

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).

They can't without the given permission from the browser to do so. While they can indeed track the mouse, when they try to access mobile motion sensors (I'm considering a CAPTCHA inside a webpage being accessed through a mobile browser such as Firefox mobile or Chrome for Android), they need to use an HTML5 API that, in turn, will ask the user for permission, something like "This site wants to use sensor motion data. Allow or block?"

Firstly, I search for the book among Telegram book groups. Then, Google/DDG/Bing/Yandex results for "[title of the book i'm searching] filetype:pdf". If neither yields the book, I turn on my Tor and try to find it inside Imperial Library of Trantor. Worst case scenario, I try to find a working Z-Library HS. But some comments here added to my possibilities, such as Libgen (I knew Libgen from onion, but it's interesting to see it also routeable on surface).

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/r/unexpectedfactorial (2!)

Yep. The lemon-flavored soda. Its fizzling sound.

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Back in the days I used to use Windows, I did use Linux as a developer sometimes, yet I was sticking to a daily usage of Windows... Until Windows 10, when Windows started to be aggressive on how it won't let me control my own machine (e.g. I couldn't disable updates the way I wanted, I couldn't run some softwares, I couldn't this and I couldn't that). Then I said "enough" and started using Linux on a daily basis, firstly Ubuntu, then I started to experiment on other Linux distros, until I finally landed on Arch Linux, as it's highly customizable and let me have full control of my own machine, not being stuck to specific DEs (I know that distros like Ubuntu allow the user to uninstall the current DE, or install other simultaneous DEs, but Arch comes without any DE from scratch). I've been using Linux on a daily basis for almost a decade now and I don't miss Windows.

Google translate does this, too. This not only pollutes the back button, it also pollutes the entire browser history.

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If you have Plasma Integration (KDE), you can create a task for sending the link directly to Firefox without copying and pasting. Plasma Integration shows as a context menu item inside chrome, if you use KDE.

Aside from SearXNG, I didn't know about these search engines until your recommendation. Thanks to Wiby and Marginalia, I found old rich content (old BBS list conversations, for example) that I was looking for, regarding studies on the occult and esotericism. Thank you so much!

Exactly, a laser pointer, while casting a millimeter-sized dot of light at short distances, its light easily gets meter-sized when they reach flight cruise heights, shining airplane's cabins and interfering with the pilot's vision. However, as by inverse square law, the power is distributed across the beam.

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I still have Reddit account (since 2012) and I was never been banned there... Because I barely use it. In few days, I've been using Lemmy (and Mastodon) more than I ever used Reddit in years, because I value and like decentralized and open platforms.