Daemon Silverstein

Digital hermit. Another cosmic wanderer.

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  • 42 Comments
Joined 1 month ago
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Cake day: July 26th, 2025

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  • @toomanypancakes@piefed.world

    Is “a chimera mascot hybrid between a goat and an owl” a valid answer for the question’s constraint of “an animal”? I could even imagine a plot:

    "(Luci appears holding a book, an apple and wearing glasses, inside an improvised classroom at the corner of a cemetery)
    Greetings, little earthlings! It’s Professor Luci, your friendly teacher from a whole other world!

    (Plays intro where Luci gleefully jumps and wanders through a cemetery while a modified and funnier version of “Masked Ball” song plays, then Luci opens wide black wings and starts flying upwards until disappearing from view for a couple of seconds, then Luci suddenly appears climbing from an open grave and starts walking cluelessly until stumbling and falling back into the grave in a funny manner)

    Today we’re learning a funny play: we’re going to sing numbers!

    On the nineteenth night, the Moon is bright,
    Can’t you wait for the twenty-one?
    Crows are soaring, thirteen are cawing,
    Unknown to heavens, the thirteen ravens
    Let the fifteenth crow caw, too!
    Tell the fourteenth to join us, too!

    (A crow mascot appears and perches above Luci’s goat horns) Hi, little friend! I can talk just like you! Be not afraid! We crows are smart and we can play, too!"


  • @vfreire85@lemmy.ml

    What you’re describing happened a lot, both with me and from me.

    You know, communication has this inherent paradox of needing a transmitter and a receiver at a given moment, and the transmitter must send the right code sequence so the receiver takes over the communication and roles get swapped, but there are rules that can’t be communicated explicitly (humans call this “social cues” or “tells”), so the transmitter can only guess what the correct sequence is for the receiver to act upon that, and the receiver can only guess what the transmitter is telling behind their audible spectrum.

    Humans often rely on “body language”, such as gestures (indicating a plethora of things, from discomfort to excitement and enjoyment), vocal pitch (sobbing voice compared to the base spectra inherent to their voice gait? It’s likely sadness or anger) and facial expressions (AU5 + AU26 + AU38? The person is likely expressing fear)… Until the many means of telecommunications emerged, especially the former ARPANET which increasingly became the “extension of the world”, becoming not just a Third Place, but all Places (it’s “Home”, it’s “Work”, it’s “Commerce”, it’s “Library”, it’s “Pub”, the trichromatic Matrix can morph into many shapes and forms).

    Then, whole generations (such as mine) grew in a world where telecom were already more frequent than in-person communication, so they’re (we’re) likely to prefer taking through this RGB curtain, because their (our) brains were wired that way.

    But telecom sucks at conveying social cues. People try to rely on /s /jk and other tags, people try to rely on emojis, but it’s not enough. I mean, even body language isn’t really enough, but at least that’s how species have been communicating for billions of years.

    And telecom apparata made us used to receiving rather than transmitting (e.g. doomscrolling, passively watching hours of a movie, etc), until our ability to transmit atrophies, so we start to react rather than to act: one is more likely to reply to a DM than to send a DM in the first place.

    Add that to all the crap that’s been happening in the world, and how we’ve been constantly dredged and drained by the system, and how Turing test failed on us, and people start to get afraid or tired to talk to other people for a plethora of reasons.

    Those who transmit with ease get annoyed upon realizing they’re not getting feedback (that’s what happened with you as soon as you realized your friendship was, actually, some kind of lecturing), and those who receive with ease get annoyed by “verbosity”.

    Earlier in my human existence, I was often ghosted. Then I also started to ghost some people as well, as soon as I realize I’m the only one effectively investing on sharing and/or there are blatant second intentions behind the person’s reasons to talk to me (e.g. trying to convert me to their religion, or abusing my willingness to help/teach people).




  • @mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works

    I’m Brazilian and many Brazilian banks require apps, be it for generating a unique code (e.g. Itaú’s iToken) to authorize/authenticate, to scan a QR code every time the Web client requests an action (e.g. Mercado Pago and Santander), or even to do mobile-only transactions such as Pix (Brazilian instant payment/transfer) because our Central Bank (BACEN, who created and maintains Pix nationwide) requires banks to limit Pix in a per-device basis. The latter is crucial because Pix became the main payment method around here, and it can’t be done through Web browsers.

    Then, there are the “safety measures” inherent to these banking apps, so they refuse to work outside rawdogged Android/iOS. Even enabling “Developer mode” or having some apps installed (such as Termux; apps can see which other apps you have installed) is enough for some banks to refuse logging in (and certain banking apps won’t even tell why, just some generic error message).

    Also, depending on where a person works, the employer may require the employee to receive their paycheck at a specific bank, which in turn will require an app if the employee is willing to use their own paycheck to pay their bills. Banks have been trying to push their mobile internet banking to their customers, with many banks (such as Bradesco) closing many of their physical branches so people have no nearby ATMs to do banking things.

    Finally, even browser-based internet banking (e.g. Caixa Econômica Federal) sometimes require the installation of software akin to kernel-level anti-cheat because “muh security”, and some will support neither Linux nor virtualized Windows (most (if not all) virtualization hypervisors can be easily detected by techniques such as the Red-Pill).

    So it’s not as easy as “use the browser versions”, unfortunately.


  • @Sailor88@lemmy.world @ComradePedro@lemmy.ml

    I’d really love a Linux phone (personally, I have a Linux PC and I use Arch, btw) so don’t get me wrong when I question: what about the banking and government apps? Yeah, because finance systems are getting increasingly digital around the world and every payment will eventually need to involve banking apps, and you guessed it: just Android (Google) and iOS (Apple), no Linux, no KaiOS. One will eventually need apps to pay for rent and consumer bills, even for buying groceries, as fiat currency will get more digital and less physical.

    And, no, European Union won’t fight against it because, in fact, the same European Union is seeking to digitalize EUR (see “ECB publishes third progress report on the digital euro preparation phase”, published by European Central Bank on 16 July 2025). It’s not a matter of if, but when physical currencies will become ruled out, and “For Our Security™”, Linux (alonside other alternative OSes) will either be ruled out from internet banking altogether or it’ll be forced to comply with “security requirements” that, in practice, would turn Linux indistinguishable from Android and iOS.

    And this seems to be where everywhere is headed, it’s not just an European or USian phenomenon. The future is bleak.


  • @paraphrand@lemmy.world

    Yeah, exactly!

    Also, it’s highly dependent on the “prompt”, similarly to how HR companies are filtering resumes through prompts specifically written to ignore “undesirable resumes”. People who believe any sort of feedback will “let (name of a corporation) know what you think about (some enshittification event/feature)” aren’t just naive, but blatantly unaware of how enshittification got “meta” (pun intended) as in “enshittify all means of reversing any enshittification”, and this includes “user feedback”.

    People try to argue how some past collective user feedback “did take effect”, pointing to things such as Apple’s real-time scanning of messages. They think Apple gave up of that, and they think this was due to strongly-worded collective feedback, as if corporations ever bothered themselves to carefully consider every user feedback and serve the wishes of their users, not their shareholders. I find this wishful thinking very cute and naive. In reality, corporations don’t give a nought about user feedback because they know people will be compelled to use their products.

    For example: need banking to pay rent and groceries? Soon you’ll need their apps which will only work in Android or iOS, as offline banking and offline methods of payments is increasingly scarcer due to global digitalization of financial systems. As a Brazilian, I’ve been watching as Brazil already got “Pix” (a digital instant payment system) everywhere and fiat currency is increasingly difficult to withdraw from ATMs as more and more physical banks close their doors, other countries already have their own Pix-like systems of digital payment, and it’s just a matter of time before EU, USA, Australia and other “first-world countries” got (and enforce) their own as well.

    tl;dr: The enshittification is broader than we think, and strongly-worded Unicode texts won’t change the course of global technofeudalism.




  • @nonBInary@thelemmy.club

    Excelente, já é um ótimo começo! Porque, nesse caso, você já tem o conceito linguístico das conjugações (que, pro pessoal que ainda há de aprender Português/espanhol/etc, geralmente é o mais complexo passo do aprendizado), então daí seria mais aprender as especificidades do francês e do italiano.

    Ao menos pra mim, o italiano soa um tanto mais fácil de de começar que o francês, mas é como eu falei, aqui existe um aspecto mais de contextos pessoais e de bagagem de vida, talvez no seu caso o francês fosse mais interessante como próximo idioma devido ao fato que você relatou de estar nas proximidades do Canadá (embora, como foi falado por alguém nos comentários, só Quebec que foca em falar francês, porque Quebec tem certo “orgulho francófono” que não está presente em outras províncias canadenses)


  • @nonBInary@thelemmy.club

    ¿Por que no los dos?

    Each language make it easier to learn the other because they share characteristics not present in English, characteristics of which are found not only in Italian and French, but also Spanish and Portuguese.

    For example, conjugation of verbs: English is quite “simple” (I talk, she talks, we talk, they talk, I will talk, she will talk, I talked, she talked, I would talk, she’d talk, etc) whilst the so-called Romance languages (languages whose common ancestor is Latin, which includes French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese) have a more complicated system of conjugation, e.g. in Portuguese present tense “eu falo, tu falas, ela fala, nós falamos, vós falais, eles falam”, past tense “eu falei, tu falastes, ela falou, nós falávamos, elas falaram”, and many more conjugation forms.

    As for which one should be the first, I’d personally likely pick Italian, but it’s more of a personal choice depends on one’s contexts and current set of knowledge/experiences (to me, Italian feels closer to my native Portuguese than French so it’s what driving my answer when having to choose between the two).

    There’s also the Interlingua worth mentioning, which aims to be understandable across all Romance languages. I don’t know how exactly to speak it, but I do get to understand when I hear/read it somehow.





  • @josefo@leminal.space @JoMiran@lemmy.ml

    Technically speaking, the joystick involved analog voltages to be converted to digital signals… And what else have ADC (analog-to-digital converters) chips? Soundcards, because ADCs are used to convert mic input, alongside the “line in”, both of which are analog voltages, into PCM signals, which are discrete (as in “non-continuous”) streams of bits. Something inverse happens for “headphone”, “speakers” and “line out” pins: a PCM stream coming from the sound driver is converted to analog voltages using a DAC.

    While other ports also happened to deal with analog<->digital conversion, a soundcard was particularly specialized at this job, alongside graphic (VGA) cards (VGA has lots of analog signals), but graphic cards were already too busy with thousands/millions of pixels and, well, with computation of graphics.

    Other boards aren’t so fitting for analog-digital job. For example: a NIC (Network Interface Card) already deals with digital signal so, theoretically, no conversion is necessary from/to analog. Parallel ports (those for printers) also natively deals with digital signals. Expansion cards with USB ports, same thing. And so on…

    (Apologies for my blank reply if my deletion didn’t federate due to insufficient Sharkey-Lemmy federation, I mistyped enter as I was getting ready to write my message)


  • @AnonomousWolf@lemmy.world I guess it would be more fairer if we were to mention DeepSeek as being “not bad for the environment”. From all LLMs, seems like it’s the one who did their homework and tried to optimize things the best they could.

    Western LLMs had/have no reason to optimize, because “Moar Nvidia Chips” have been their motto, and Venture Capital corps have been injecting obscene amounts of money into Nvidia chips, so Western LLMs are bad for the environment, all the way from establishing new power-hungry data centers to training and inference…

    But DeepSeek needed way less computing and it can run (Qwen-distilled versions) even in a solar-powered Raspberry Pi with some creativity… it can run in most smartphones like if it were another gaming app. Their training also needed less computing, as far as we know.


  • @moe90@feddit.nl I’ve found a better workaround, which is to tell YouTube to go pound sand. I definitely don’t miss YouTube since I stopped accessing it more than a year ago (actually, I don’t even remember when I stopped, it’s really been a long while). Okay, maybe I miss one or other content (Technology Connections, Electroboom and Numberphille to mention a few I used to watch), but this didn’t stop me from stopping using YouTube altogether. Sad thing Alec, Mehdi as well as the people behind Numberphille either don’t know or aren’t willing to use alternatives (e.g. PeerTube) to share their knowledge with the Internet.

    There’s a Portuguese maxim “Falem bem ou falem mal, mas falem de mim” (roughly translatable to “Talk goodly or badly, but talk about me”) and this is perfectly fit for YouTube vs Premium vs AdBlockers: people (both content creators and their consumers) are understandably enraged with YouTube and its enshitification, yet they continue to access it instead of boycotting it to, hopefully, reduce the power and monopoly that Google have with YouTube.


  • @mysticmartz@lemmy.world

    Those LoRa devices like meshtastic look good

    Yeah, tinkering with radio and Open-source hardware in general is funny and awesome. I did some personal projects in this regard, not exactly meshtastic, but experiments using a cheap RTL-SDR and some transmission-capable things such as Baofeng UV-5R and remote controllers from some of my childhood toys. I wish I could afford to experiment more with hardware, electronic and, especially, radio equipment.

    Unfortunately, it’s like @dubyakay@lemmy.ca said, radio equipment can become targets, too.

    In reality, this is already happening in EU: recently, I saw something about EU passing a law requiring all radio-capable devices to be, as far as I can recall, “tampering-proof” or something similar, and this is threatening alternative mobile OSes (such as GrapheneOS) because this law requires bootloaders to be unlockable or something. So, in practice, governments are already targeting radio.

    Not to mention how “easy” is to triangulate a signal and how telecommunication regulators often do “wardrive” scanning in order to seek “irregular transmissions” (not just those disrupting others’ transmissions, but anything they could deem “irregular” because they’re the authorities in charge of allowing or refusing others rights, and this deemed “irregularity” could easily be using Briar through Bluetooth, or meshtastic nodes, during a strike/protest).

    This takes me to another point from your reply:

    I don’t like the idea of TOR and I2C because it’s known to hold disgusting and concerning stuff

    It’s worth mentioning that disgusting and concerning stuff isn’t exclusive to Darknet, Clearnet also has such stuff, especially mainstream social media.

    I mean, you’re not wrong, Darknet is indeed used for that, not because it’s inherent to Darknet, but because people who do concerning stuff also seek anonymity just like legitimate, well-intentioned privacy-concerned people, and Darknet happens to provide such anonymity for both uses in a double-edged sword manner.

    Problem is: there’s no way to differentiate two anonymous actors without breaking the very fundamentum of anonymity.

    And this very argument you used unfortunately can be twisted by authorities to justify breaking anonymity and, by extension, privacy.

    For authorities willing to control everyone’s lives so badly, it just takes a small leap for the phrase to be reshaped and re-adapted as…

    private content/people’s intimacies must be scanned/watched because they’re known to hold disgusting and concerning stuff

    This is almost the argument behind EU’s “Chat Control”. And the majority of people end up joining this bandwagon unaware of where this bandwagon leads to: something that makes 1984 feel like a sugarcoated documentary.

    Unfortunately, there’s no easy solution regarding “disgusting and concerning stuff”, but we should be really careful lest to throw the baby out with the dirty bathwater.


  • @mysticmartz@lemmy.world

    First and foremost, it’s not something limited to UK. Maybe it’s because I’m watching things from “outside” the so-called “first world” (I’m Brazilian), and I can’t help but notice how it’s something that have been spreading throughout the countries: Canadian bill whose number I forgot, EU’s “Chat Control”, some Australian laws, etc… It’s getting everywhere! It didn’t start yesterday, also: I remember SOPA and PIPA back in 2010s (or was it 2000s? I’m getting old).

    It’s worldwide, and it won’t be long before there are no more countries where “nothing to fear, nothing to hide” is the official motto via some kind of global treat/pact. It won’t stop in adult entertainment: eventually, it’ll cover every online activity. In this sense, “children” are just the frogs being morally leveraged by scorpions to cross an Orwellian river.

    That said, VPNs are someone else’s computers sitting between latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates delimiting some geodesic convex hull we know as “country/nation” ruled by an entity who happens to have the monopoly over asymmetrical forces ruling over that very someone. Even nodes from Tor, I2P, Yggdrasil, Hyphanet, GNUNet, Usenet servers or grand-old SOCKS4/SOCKS4a/SOCKS5 proxies are someone else’s computer sitting inside some “country”.

    And if all countries end up agreeing, out of shared dominance interests (even the so-called “inimical” countries, because even those “inimical” countries agree on certain treats such as the Global Treat regarding Antarctica), to some kind of “Online Kid Protection Global Treat” or whatever frog they can take any moral advantage of, there will be no computer proxification left for circumventing the new KYC requirements for accessing the Web, because there’ll be no more alternative countries left… Not even micronations such as Principality of Sealand.

    Yeah, future doesn’t seem good, and the majority of global citizens won’t fight against it (we, privacy-conscious and tech-savvy people, we’re not the majority), so it’s kind of a Cassandra curse going on right now.

    Maybe we must go back to radio communication? Radio mesh networks? Perhaps well-hidden geo-treasure pen-drives for exchanging and archiving files? Creating our own novel ciphering methods, steganography and security through obscurity, becoming able to physically speak through coded language on a daily basis? Even carrier pigeons and smoke signaling (I’m not joking) feels “safe” and out of the Orwellian reaches for now… For now.

    (I guess they could still be spotted by LEO satellite imagery. And god-forbid a smoke pattern is caught modulating and transmitting the original uncropped Lena picture over the atmosphere /s).