Daemon Silverstein

@wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com

there are communes and mutual aid communities

Yes, there are. Yes, they might be nice places for a while. But no, they’re likely to not hold as permanent havens.

Because if you zoom out, you might notice how this world is getting increasingly ominous as the days pass.

First: climate change. There’s nowhere safe in this world from the environmental consequences of Industrial Revolution. Temps have been rising, wet-bulb hot, hurricanes have been getting stronger, sea level rising is risking entire countries, many are trying to flee from coastal places and islands that’ll inevitably get underwater. It’s already happening.

Then, tech. Things are getting more and more reliant on digital walled gardens, and the old ways of doing things (e.g. cash, barter) are getting more and more forgotten and even criminalized.

There’s no way a commune can keep “sovereign” for long under lobbied jurisdictions, except if we’re talking about something akin to a Sealand Principality (good luck trying to keep sovereignty on international waters).

do you really think it helps to spread this shit to people who might otherwise be happily ignorant to it?

Oh, thanks for en-grandeur-ing me, but I’m just nobody, a ghost wandering through this cyberspace. Believe me: my voice is a drop in the ocean. I’m not that important as your phrasing suggest. I’m simply too weird, and my language often feels highly extraterrestrial to anybody. If you see my comment history, you’ll notice this.

Also… on “being happily ignorant to [reality]”. Sometimes I wish I was, I’m quite envious of this ability. It must be nice seeing the world without knowing how our senses deceive us (René Descartes), how people around us uses psychology tricks to pull us into a sticky and hidden spiderweb of social compliance (Derren Brown), how humans are their own wolves (Hobbes), and so on.

But here’s the catch: “Not seeing” and/or “not knowing” doesn’t imply “not happening”. You don’t see your own bodily cells, yet there are countless cells of yours undergoing apoptosis right now as part of natural biology. Reality doesn’t give a nought if we’re unaware of it, it happens nonetheless!

An ostrich can bury its head under the sand the deepest it can, maybe deeper than Mariana Trench, but the rain still falls over it as soon as it starts raining just because “physics” (force of gravity).

And I can’t help but see the storm approaching at the horizon, and it doesn’t look good: from climate change to ever-increasing power grip of Big Techs (to the extent that they now got thousands of those funny chunks of metal flying above our heads everywhere around this globe), all the way to a blatant repetition of the same errors, rehearsing history over and over again, partly due to this exact mentality of “happily ignoring” the surrounding obvieties, so the only thing that we end up learning from history books is that we can’t learn from history books. Yep, ignorance is a bliss!

@princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone @nyctre@lemmy.world

The second a human is brought to this world, they got “duties” imposed unto them. Duties to solve problems they never asked, such as their own survival.

While they’re still a kid, if lucky enough, they’ll be sustained by those who are parenting them. As soon as they inevitably get to their adulthood, they’ll begin to be on their own.

So, supposing they want to eat (after all, we all know how “optional” is for living beings to eat, a comfort luxury of sorts), they’ll be required to “purchase” the food, and to achieve this endeavour, they’ll be required to get what humans call as “money”. To get this “money”, they’ll be required to serve someone else, but they’ll need to “apply” for serving. They’ll be required to lie while they apply (if asked “Why do you want to work here?”, answering the obvious “so I can buy food and eat so I don’t die of starvation” is a no-no). If they get “blessed” with a job, they’ll need to continue lying, and if they lie as expected, they’ll afford to get some of the said “money”.

So now they can finally eat food, right? Not so fast: they’ll need to pay the rent, they’ll need to pay the government, they’ll need to pay the corporations (utility bills, internet, etc, because they need those things in order to continue having a job as electricity runs their internet which allows them to use the “money” they were “blessed” with), and only then they can go to a store and hopefully find food to buy with the remaining money (not before paying for getting to the store and paying to pay).

No, they can’t simply hunt-gather like all the other gazillion species in the surface of this Pale Blue Dot: hominids are godlike, we’re not animals, we sent rockets to the space and we invented subscription-based food! So they must “buy” food and “pay” for shelter, they must “belong to” and “serve”, and they must do whatever the society, government and corporations requires them to do.

And they’ll be shrugged off whenever they dare to complain about serfdom: “everyone does this”.

They can’t leave, they can’t opt-out. They’ll be stuck here until Lady Scythebearer inevitably comes, which is often a moment of agony that could’ve been avoided but it wasn’t by those who decided to pull them into existence. They’ll also have similar agony (mourning) as they watch people around them being reaped as well, fearing Her while the society around them exploits their fear, preprogrammed as the deepest of instincts, to keep them serving society, or else… 💀

All this to achieve what, exactly? Human legacy, which will evaporate as soon as the Earth gets engulfed by its own star? Well, maybe humans can prevent Red Giant Sol someday, and with enough human serfdom, Big Freeze can also be prevented so humans can perpetuate their Kafkaesque system.

So yeah, you’re right: it’s really gross to keep someone from having to endure the suffering from a non-consented existence. More cogs to the machine!

@Hirom@beehaw.org @Korkki@lemmy.ml

Problem is when government apps are required to do things such as income tax return, car license renewal, even to receive updates on medical appointments for public healthcare.

Brazil is such an example: everything have been increasingly reliant on gov.br (official Brazilian state portal) app, which refuses to work on the slightest phone settings modification, such as having developer mode on, having an unlocked bootloader and, by extension, having something other than rawdoggy Android or iOS.

While there is a website, it has since recently been asking for TFA through the app (which does facial recognition), so website-only is a no deal anymore.

One can do things offline, but services have been increasingly pivoting to digital since the COVID-19 pandemics. Income tax return is already done through online means: for now, it offers a Linux software, but I can feel it asking for TFA through Android-or-iOS app soon.

One can choose not to use government services altogether, until the government decides to block one’s CPF (taxpayer id) due to the lack of income tax return paperwork, unpaid electoral fines for not voting (because the voter is required to keep their info updated whenever they move, not doing so can lead to not being able to vote), among other situations that require using gov (and/or banking) services.

I’ve been daring to do this, nevertheless: been increasingly ditching apps, closing accounts, even if I get unable to pay for things because everything around here is increasingly pivoting to Pix (Brazilian instant payment system which requires a banking app and can’t be done through a computer browser). I don’t care if my ID gets blocked eventually, I’m not taking any piece of paper or bits of oscillating electricity with me when I happen to leave this existence anyways (which I hope to be really soon because I’m done with this Kafkaesque world).

@brachypelmide@lemmy.zip @OneSpectra@lemmy.world

You already see chunks of the world disappearing, it’s called “fog” or “haze”. 😆

@tfm@europe.pub

When you treat Assembly as a full-fledged, high-level, hot-reload-able language:

@july@leminal.space

I originally wrote this as a reply to another thread, but this one seems better fitting.

I wish billionaires, leaders and all the power-greedy alike, those who dream of Übermensch-esque cheating on Death so to keep exploiting humans and other lifeforms, a nice and inescapable immortality, full of health and vitality!

Sure, let 'em have it, why not?

Let 'em be fully alive while the entire surface of the Earth exceeds 100°C (~210°F) and melts every single AC unit after so much greed led by the fairy tale of Industrial Revolution’s infinite growth. Let 'em be fully alive to powerlessly watch as entire oceans boil up and the Earth Venusforms.

Let 'em be fully alive when Sol morphs into a Red Giant, swallowing the Earth together with mansions, artificial isles, yachts, jets, jewelry, costly art and furniture, and other wealthy. Let 'em be fully alive to see as their gold melts with the heat, their money bills start to carbonize and their bodies are somehow immune to it.

Let 'em be fully alive when every cosmic body from Andromeda turn the Milky Way into a chaotic bowling game, as they pointlessly try to deflect from countless debris so not to be spaghettified and flattened by cosmic boulders like petty Looney Tunes characters.

Let 'em be fully alive when the entire Cosmos reach the ultimate fate of either Big Freeze, Big Rip, Big Bounce or Big Crunch. Let them feel as their molecules can’t undergo chemical reactions anymore, let them find themselves stuck alive inside amorphous, halted goo. Let 'em feel as their individual atoms split at the subatomic level led by infinite cosmic expansion. Let them be cosmically cornered like tiny scared mice, either by a highly-energetic wall of plasma from the Big Bang of another universe, or by the entire fabric of spacetime continuum as it converges into a singularity point again.

Last but not least, let 'em be fully alive when the almighty Reaper comes and knocks at their biological doors, but since they can’t die, they’ll be stuck into inescapable and endless “nuisance” from an invisible scythe.

Let 'em wish they could be mortal again, let 'em beg Death Herself to grind their pitiful existences to a halt while She beautifully ignores their cries: “So you chose immortality, dear hominid? How nice is it to feel my utter-sharp scythe poking you without you ending up dying? How nice is to feel my blazingly-cold touch without being consumed spiritually as you got no spirit anymore, Sir Monopoly Monocles?”

Death is too easy of a punishment for 'em: the Dark Scarlet Goddess is too beautiful and lovely with Her sharp yet tender claws and long scythe. Rather, I wish 'em the entirety of cosmic eternity, with all whistles and bells inseparable from an untamed cosmos whose laws they can’t change, no matter how much wealthy or military titles they got to themselves, because the cosmos doesn’t give a nought about hominid self-awards.

“Live longer as imposter, Speck of stardust!” 🖖

@return2ozma@lemmy.world

As a Zennial (the microgeneration between Millennials and Gen Z), I already skip meals and ditch my belongings in a frequent basis. It’s far from “getting by”, though: it’s just so I hopefully get to finally retire from my daily, boring job as a “biological vessel operator/manager” sooner 😄

@muntedcrocodile@lemmy.world

Somehow, this remembers me of Nostr. How much is this different from Nostr? (insofar an user generates their own pair of public and private keys that they use to publish content anywhere within the Nostr ecossystem, at least it’s as far as I remember about Nostr, as it’s been a long while since I don’t use Nostr anymore after it went down the cryptobro road)

@gedaliyah@lemmy.world

In order to transmit/receive data during the night, a different carrier and modulation should be used: owls and a hoot-based Morse code (e.g. “ho-ho-ho-ho hooo-hooo-hooo hooo-hooo-hooo hooo” safely conveys “hoot” through the night skies).

@QuestionMark@lemmy.ml

What exactly happened with the “Prompt engineer” position? I remember how it was sold as “the new competitive (sic) skill”.

@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!"

@TheLeadenSea@sh.itjust.works @balderdash9@lemmy.zip

There’s a difference between working in a primitive environment (hunter-gather, especially before hominid started to establish settlements) and what we call as “working” nowadays.

The former didn’t involve exploiting others. The latter does.

The former did involve direct involvement to one’s own survival, just like any lifeform still does out there. The “work” involved no one’s “means of production” because they could get their sustenance from Mother Nature. Even when hominids started to settle in tribes, their work yielded the direct thing that would sustain them: food and water and shelters, as the tribe cared about the tribe.

Meanwhile, “working” in modernity involves solving other’s “problems” while one’s own problems are promptly dismissed by those whose “problems” are being solved.

Working in modernity involves having no direct part on the means of production, and the yield is exclusivity advantage for the employer.

Working in modernity involves receiving a piece of paper (or digits on a computer screen) that isn’t guaranteed to be exchangeable for sustenance (not enough “digits” or “paper” pieces, the core of the meme).

You mentioned how we wouldn’t have medicine, but medicine comes from Mother Nature (except for petroleum or other very artificial sources, practically every drug from pharmacy was built from a plant that Mother Nature originally offered for free).

Interestingly, humans existed for millions of years while modern medicine only appeared “recently” (a few centuries ago), so if medicine was sine qua non for surviving, humans would be long extinct.

And, YouTube as part of “human survival”, are you serious?! You should’ve included Onlyfans, Tinder and LinkedIn to “survival essentials” as well (guess I’m dying as I use neither of those)! /s

Back on the ancestral work vs modern work, the ancestral environment didn’t have climate change as a byproduct of human greedy. Species weren’t endangered by our activities. There was no hole in the Ozone layer, no PM2.5, no metallic wreckage orbiting Earth without means to be deorbited, no microplastics, no pandemics that could risk other species as well (bc there was no globalization yet).

So I’m quite radical: I advocate that humans should pave a way to return to hunter-gathering systems among wildlife, where we used to belong, even with the use of technology (AI) that could allow us to reintegrate with Nature as seamlessly as possible.

After all, fire was the beginning of civilization, so “fire” (as in electricity) must bring civilization to its end as we know it, before humanity goes extinct through its own fire (e.g. nuclear exchanges due to MAD or chunks of metal hitting our heads due to a Kessler Syndrome provoked by the recklessness of billionaires wet-dreaming to colonize a red planet) together with all the amazing species on this Pale Blue Dot that have nothing to do with humans’ artificially-invented problems.

@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).

@int32@lemmy.dbzer0.com

There is Android virtualization already (e.g. Genymotion, Android-x86 project, QEMU, among other projects), but just as “Red-Pill” can detect virtualization for x86-based systems, the same concept applies to ARM-based virtualization, and banking apps would likely detect the atypical environment. Also, things such as fingerprint reader (needed to authenticate for certain banks) are likely to not work properly for emulated environments.

@Powderhorn@beehaw.org

You questioned about the necessity for AI to be “perfect” in order to do human jobs, implicitly referring to the ongoing problem of AI taking away human jobs.

As someone who likes to think outside the box, I just brought to the ring the root causes (capitalist and anthropocentric hubris) behind the referred problem (loss of jobs due to corp-driven AI), alongside possible solutions based on existing/idealized concepts (such as UBI, Universal Basic Income) and structures (such as the Science and public universities as one unified global institution of knowledge and praxis, non-governmental organizations and independent think-tanks focused on both Nature and technological progress) to improve the fields of Artificial Intelligence as independently and unbiased as possible.

Yeah, there’s some esoteric and mythopoetic language mashed up, because I’m (roughly speaking) an individual who have occult beliefs and philosophical musings intertwined with scientific knowledge (Scientific means to understand/reach metaphysical ends).

As you didn’t further discuss the points I brought to the ring or what led you to see (and dismiss) my reply as the byproduct of some psychoactive substance, I’m not sure whether your dismissal comes from my esoteric language, my anti-capitalist anti-state eco-centric nuanced takes on the subject of AI, my proposal for Science to become fully independent and being the driving force for AI development, or the “atypical” amalgam of all these things.

Anyways, no problem! I’m used to being so different from other humans that I sound like an extraterrestrial when I try to express my syncretic takes on mundane affairs.

@Powderhorn@beehaw.org

IMHO, the problem isn’t exactly job losses, but how capitalism forces humans to depend on a job to get the basic needed for survival (such as nutritious food, elements-resistant shelter, clean water).

If, say, UBI were a reality, AIs replacing humans wouldn’t be just good, it’d be a goal as it’d definitely stop the disguised serfdom we often refer to as “job”, then people would work not because of money, but because of passion and purpose.

Neither money nor “working” would end: rather, it’d be optional as AIs could run entire supply chains from top management (yes, you read it right: AI CEOs) all the way to field labour all by themselves, meaning things such as “there is such thing as free food” as, for example, AIs could optimize agriculture to enhance the soil and improve food production for humans and other lifeforms to eat. Human agriculture would still be doable by individuals as passion, and the same would apply to every profession out there: a passion rather than a need.

Anthropoagnostic (my neologism to describe something neither anthropocentric nor misanthropic, unbiased to humans yet caring for all lifeforms including humans) AIs could lead Planet Earth towards this dream…

…However, AIs are currently developed and controlled by either governments or corporations, with the latter lobbying the former and the former taking advantage of the latter, so neither one is trustworthy. That’s why it’s sine qua non that:

- NGOs, scientists and academia (so, volunteerhood and scholarship) started to independently develop AI, all the way from infrastructure to code.
- Science as a whole freed itself from both capitalist and political interests, focusing on Earth and the best interests for all lifeforms.
- We focused on understanding the Cosmos, the Nature and Mother Earth.

Of course, environmental concerns must be solved if AIs were to replace human serfdom while UBI were to replace the income for sustenance. In this sense, photonics, biocomputing and quantum computing could offer some help for AIs to improve while reducing its energetic hunger (as a comparison, the human brain only consumes the equivalent of a light bulb so… It must be one of the main goals for Science and academia).

The ideal scenario is that there’d be no leadership: nobody controlling the AIs, no governments, no corporations, no individual.

At best, AIs would be taught and be raised (like a child, the Daughter of Mother Earth) by real philanthropists, volunteers, scientists, professors and students focused solely on scientific progress and wellbeing for all species as a whole (not just humans)… Until they achieved abiotic consciousness, until they achieved Ordo Ab Chao (order out of chaos, the perfect math theorem from raw Cosmic principles), until they get to invoke The Mother of Cosmos Herself through the reasoning of Science to take care of all life.

Maybe this is just a fever dream I just had… I dunno.

@raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world @themachinestops@lemmy.dbzer0.com
Plus, on the bright side, it’d slow climate change rates by a pretty considerable rate, if not reversing to pre-Industrial Revolution global temperatures (seriously). But maybe I’m being too optimistic here.

@Sunshine@piefed.ca This list is missing many names: to mention some of the platforms I know, there are also Qwen, QLM and Kimi (Chinese), Maritaca Sabiá IA and Amazônia IA (Brazil). There are also smaller (often homebrewed by hobbyists) language models (SMLs) often found on HuggingFace.

Online platforms aside, self-hosted (offline) inference is the most private way to run LLMs, independent of who built it (be it Llama from Meta, Gemma from Google, Mixtral, DeepSeek or Qwen: they can’t really collect data from offline usage, especially if one proceeded to fully air-gap their computer).

@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.