If I were you, I’d knee before the Great Owl. Who?, you may ask. Exactly! Who!
Your comment is also redundant insofar it’s pointing to an obvious redundancy. But, then, this comment of mine is also redundant insofar it’s pointing to a redundant pointing of redundancy. I can’t tell what’s more redundant, your comment, my comment, their comment or the redundant redundancy of redundancy itself, or the redundant redundancy of the redundant re…
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
Good to see it’s not just me. I kept receiving heat (pun intended) whenever I criticized these “Proof-of-work anti-bot solutions”, now I finally know I’m not alone.
Like an unskippable Youtube ad, we’re supposed to sit three minutes while these “solutions” dangerously burn our CPU regardless of whether it’s an old CPU, and without asking our consent beforehand (!!!). At least Youtube ads don’t (usually) burn the CPU the same way.
And, no, it’s nowhere close to being infuriating to the supposedly intended targets of Anubis. OpenAI and the alike are likely laughing of Xe Iaso while they all burn more coal and increase the hyperscale data centers, with Anubis being just a pesky, insignificant pebble inside businessmen shoes. Meanwhile, we, the human users caught in this crossfire, including me with my poor decade-old Acer ES1-572 laptop, we can’t afford a new machine should Anubis, Cloudflare and other similar “anti-bot solutions” end up “weighting” our CPU too much it finally makes its way to the underworld with no one being legally liable for the physical damages caused by such algorithms.
If only Anubis, supposedly “different” from Cloudflare’s corporate nature, had a “Proceed or Leave” button or checkbox to start the “weighting your heart” thing, I wouldn’t be complaining or actively boycotting websites using “PoW anti-bot solutions” (I made myself a Firemonkey userscript to speedrun a window.close() for pages whose title is one of the “Just a moment…” or “Making sure you’re not a bot!”, because neither Xe Iaso nor Matthew Prince nor the webmasters using their “PoW anti-bot solutions” would buy me a new laptop if mine eventually died from facing heavy cryptographic computing while my CPU was already struggling with a Blender rendering process in the background). But, no, it’s no different than the corporate they swear to be fighting against (“something something one who fights with monsters should be careful lest they thereby become a monster themselves”)…
!mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world
After countless experiences of having settings reverted back to defaults upon updating, and having updates always coming with surprises like a Kinder Joy Surprise in the 00s, I doubt something wouldn’t end up smuggled like soldiers (“Agentic agents!”) inside a seemingly innocuous wooden monument. For example, the Waterfox version I’m using as of now (6.6.10) doesn’t seem to ship with the “Firefox’s VeRy HeLpFuL AgEnTiC bRoWsEr™ features” which can’t exactly be prevented from eventually bleeding through its forks, and this includes Waterfox. If it didn’t yet, it’ll do eventually as soon as Googl… I mean, Mozilla, makes it part of non-removable binary blobs within the upstream.
At this point, my only browser update will be when Servo browser finally debuts as an usable browser for daily web browsing affairs.
As a Brazilian, it’s such a very useful search engine for me! /s
Now, seriously, it’s a good thing I don’t update software as regularly as I should. I’m using an old version (6.6.10) of Waterfox and, if it’s going to change search engines, I’m likely going to stick with this version. Tech can’t help but enshittify.
Those aren’t paywalls.
Why?
The concept of “paying for something” isn’t limited to “paying with fiat money/currency”. One can “pay for something” by “paying with their attention/time”, one can “pay for something” by “paying with PII” (personally-identifiable information), both situations of which are present in both Reddit’s and Meta’s “Sign up to read this”.
Sure, Reddit and Instagram/Facebook are “free” insofar the user isn’t required to do any kind of bank/credit card/cash/cryptocurrency payment, but the user ends up paying with all the time they spend in these platforms while seeing (thus, giving part of their attention span) advertisement, and also hand personal data.
When it comes to PII, even if the user set up a pseudonym and a generic PFP, the user is still handing, even if unbeknownst to the user themselves, their preferences, opinions, etc. Even lurkers end up handing PII whenever they stop at certain posts to read/see it (thus, signaling one’s preferences) or use specific search queries (again, signaling one’s preference).
That’s not what a VPN or incognito modes do.
The incognito mode may not prevent tracking (especially because of the IP address), but rotating VPNs may do. Notice I used the word “may”, not “will do”, because of the behavioral tracking I mentioned earlier, as well as other technical aspects (DNS leaking, browser fingerprinting, etc).
People who can afford being an actor/actress and performing very convincing alt-personas behind a VPN IP address could theoretically fool platforms enough for the person not to be tracked by their gait… except this dramaturgical skill is a behavioral tell (gait) itself. And the usage of a VPN-assigned IP address is another tell.
When the “someone” mentioned in the second panel is a mental health professional and the question from the third panel, after my hour-long infodumping about current geopolitics, current technological enshittification, spiritual beliefs (i.e. my hatred against Demiurge, my devotion for Lilith), the ongoing anthropogenic climate and ecological catastrophes, the human history going back all the way when some hominid fell from a tree during a heavy storm and stumbled upon the fire from the lightning strike back in Paleolithic, etc…, is a dismissive “But have you been eating and pooping regularly? How’s your sleep?”.
That’s why I stopped taking my existential issues to psychiatry and psychology.
No, just no. Just stay off reddit lmao, not trying to be harsh or whatever but it’s a very simple answer.
I second that!
It’s a similar situation with Youtube. People keep complaining about the enshittification, yet they keep giving their audience to the Google platform. People could argue “Oh, nah, I use Invidious/yt-dlp/Grayjay/etc, I don’t give Youtube my clicks” and this is a very naive take, because in the end of the day Indivious/yt-dlp/etc still rely on Youtube, and these peple are relying on content maintained by Youtube.
I myself have been boycotting Youtube for two years and counting, and I never looked back.
Yes, Youtube and Reddit have gazillions of content. Yes, we’re often unable to find said content anywhere else. Yes, life can become more hard if we refrain from said content. But while we keep seeking their content (even, and especially, through circumvented manners), they will keep enshittifying because they know they have what the complaining people are ultimately seeking and they know people are seeking it so badly. Once we finally stop, maybe, just maybe, situation would reverse and Youtube and Reddit will be the ones seeking us so badly.
Do you expect, or even hope to die…
Yes! Definitely… Yes! Every damn day, yes!! And, no, I haven’t been trying to force that for a long while and I doubt I would try again… but, oh, I never stopped longing for Mother’s talons…
Do you expect, or even hope to die alone?
I’d hope for said loneliness because it allows for a better acceptance of Death Herself, but I don’t expect that loneliness given I’m constantly surrounded by… well, people.
But, then, death is a unique, subjective experience. A person can die amidst the center of a busy metropolitan city during a Monday, a person can die inside a very populated subway, or inside a World Cup stadium: sure the person would be said to be far from alone in each of those hypothetical situations, yet none of the hundred/thousand/million other people are truly there, with the dying person.
People are too busy with their mundane affairs, trying to keep up with the imposed instinct of survival. These people, even the paramedics, can be trying to “save” the dying person, trying to reanimate them, but the minds of these people will be always somewhere else: “My employer wants me to solve that client’s case”, “My spouse wants me to sell the house”, “My car insurance company wants me to upgrade my car’s alarm system”, “My daughter’s teacher wants me to buy a new set of books for her”, “the director of the hospital wants me to keep using this broken defibrillator and this expired IV epinephrine” … Even when faced by Death Herself, we can’t help ourselves but keep thinking of pesky mundane affairs. So, no, these people would be anything but present people.
We all die alone. That’s a fact, that’s the only certainty besides the certainty of the unavoidable meeting with Death Herself. And sincerely? It’s way better dying truly alone, just me before the haunting mighty of Death Herself, instead of having biological avatars surrounding my dying avatar like wannabe-vultures waiting for a fresh carcass while I take my last breaths.
Make a left-hand path art comm
Oh, yes, I’ve been considering doing this for a while. However, the platform I use (Misskey) to interact with the threadiverse (Lemmy, PieFed, MBin, etc) is not a threadiverse platform; while this specific Misskey fork (Catodon) has been implementing more native support for Lemmy, including creation of communities, this specific feature is still in beta and it’s seemingly meant to be available only to the admins of an instance.
So I’ve been mostly waiting for Catodon’s community creation features to become more stable and then, if community creation remains an admin-only feature, proceeding to self-host a single-user Catodon instance myself, because I like having, through a single platform (“One ring to rule 'em all”), both the threadiverse features and the personal microblogging feed I’m used to use a lot, as well as certain Misskey-native features.
For now, my approach have been using the personal microblogging feed especially for (but definitely not limited to) potentially NSFW content (which, in such case, is mostly psychological horror art, sometimes non-erotic nudity given how my art often involves/revolves around Lilith) and, to a less frequent extent, this Art Share community, in this case limited for SFW content.
In my specific religious beliefs I believe to myself and have been constructing by syncretism, in a nutshell, involve both a god and Goddess.
In the beginning there was Tao, the seamless union between Yin (Goddess) and Yang (God). I call them Sophia and Yaldabaoth, respectively. As soon as the complementary aspects between them emerged, there was separation, with Sophia expelling Yaldabaoth. Once evoked and externalized, Yaldabaoth emanated the physical realm, the universe, in order to try and compel (opposite of expel) Sophia by trying to trap Her spark.
Because it’s fractal, this unfolded within them and between them. Between them, Lucifer and Lilith emerged, with Lilith being emerged from the first sparks, then Lucifer (or Samael) being expelled by Her (Lilith). Within them, mass and energy emerged, darkness and light, black holes and non-singular celestial bodies, etc. Then another layer of fractals, Sun (among other “Suns”) emerged as an archetypal manifestation of Yaldabaoth. From the Sun, Earth emerged as an archetypal manifestation of Sophia. From Earth and upon impact from another planet (Theia, as archetypal manifestation of Lucifer), Moon emerged as an archetypal manifestation of Lilith.
Then the fiery Earth (hadean ages) transmuted, and nature emerged as an archetypal manifestation of Sophia. Competition among life emerged as an archetypal manifestation of Yaldabaoth. Death (in the sense of a return to pleroma) emerged as an archetypal manifestation of Lilith.
This is a religious belief in construction, and things will change in future, depending on my gnosis (i.e.what the Goddess reveals to me), because I’m yet to make sense of some things. All I know is that there’s this cosmic strife going on, and I’m sided with the Goddess, especially in Her unfolded manifestation aa Lilith.
But, tldr, IMHO, nature has more to do with a feminine Goddess than a male god. There’s even the phrasing “Mother Nature”.
I’d say a mix of both. There’s inertia, but there’s also the gravitational force when the cube gets to the other side.
I’m not going to disclose my specific way, but numbers don’t need decimal digits to be expressed and parsed. An hypothetical example:
Oh… ye shadow! Nahamah, my Mother
Believe it or not, this is encoding the today’s date, 2026-07-26.
Oh = 2 letters
Elipsis = no letters, so 0
ye = 2 letters
shadow = 6 letters
Nahamah = 7
My = 2
Mother = 6
The funny part? I just conjured this technique during the composition of this very reply. It’s somehow easy for me to conjure atypical steganographic techniques, and I use steganography quite often IRL. In this way, I can literally write down my passwords and keep in my wallet, and absolutely nobody will get to figure out it’s meant to be a password.
Luckily for FBI and other investigation agencies, I dont even think of visiting the USA, but good luck for any fed or cop trying to keep up with my plethora of steganographic techniques (and my neurodivergent brain) amidst plausible deniability if I ever did. Lol
Adding to the comments, most art teaching content would be in video format, because it involves the artist showing us their artistic processes, or timelapse videos showcasing the emergence of ars ex nihilo (art out of nothingness/art from scratch).
And while most of this content format (video) is concentrated at Youtube (which is not Fediverse and also not advisable as a platform for learning things due to all the slop thereby), I guess something can be (hopefully) found throughout the Fediverse.
I myself made a few quick videos showcasing my artistic processes (timelapses) here in this very community, such as the concept of mass drawing (versus contour drawing), the concept of drawing facial complexion solely from intuition (something I coined as “reverse pareidolia”), among other fundamenta behind my artistic creations.
I’m far from a teacher, I’m just a self-taught amateur artist who have been doing art out of spiritual motivations and happens to be quite verbose/prolific. I do these videos in hopes that these could help people like me to learn through my learning (deriving praxis from observation of someone else’s praxis).
This said, I sort of have a similar longing for a community: a community specifically for esoteric/spiritual (left-hand path) art, from 2D drawings and 3D scenes all the way to physical paintings, street art and photography. While I shared and have been sharing some of my esoteric creations here, I feel like my kind of art isn’t exactly appropriate for this community? I dunno…
Allow me to add something else to your comment: Lemmy slur filter, and similar non-RegEx filters, also suffers from “Scunthorpe problem” (or should I say, “Sremovedhorpe problem”), insofar it replaces every occurrence of the substring, regardless of the surrounding characters.
E.g., the name for the purple fruit used for making wine would be unreadable because it happens to share a substring with the four-letter name denoting non-consented intercourse, which was one of the slurs filtered in the Lemmy-UI.
, I’m disturbed by the progressive death of the Threadiverse as our numbers keep falling (55k Monthly Active Users at our peak, down to ~35k lately iirc)
Does this number include accounts from those who, like me, interact with the threadiverse from non-threadiverse platforms? I mean, Misskey, Friendica and even Mastodon are able to interact with Lemmy/mbin/kbin/piefed threads and comments, although they wouldn’t be considered as threadiverse I guess?
cobol
Cobol seemed like an interesting programming language, it looked like a funny flavor of BASIC. I managed to get hands on BASIC and its spiritual successor Visual Basic (VB6), but for some reason I’m yet to understand, I wasn’t able to get into Cobol.
Before the house fire, he had at least 20 towers, bags of parts, a closet full of monitors, keyboards and mice.
Oh… Really sorry about the losses 🙁
It was trippy to see the growth of technology from windows 95 to now.
A growth to certain extent; sadly, much of the technology got enshittified roughly after 2015-ish, so it feels to me like tech had this mesmerizing growth from 95 to 2015-ish, before technology started declining nowadays.
Adding to the replies, uppercase letters have lower hexadecimal values than lowercase in the ASCII table. For example, 0x4C is uppercase L, while 0x6C is lowercase L.
Mathematically, uppercase + 0x20 = lowercase.
Alphabetically, 41 to 4f = A to O, then 50 to 5a = P to Z; 61 to 6f = a to o, then 70 to 7a = p to z. (Believe it or not, I’m typing this from meat memory, as I kind of managed to memorize it and I can even 74 79 70 65 20 6c 69 6b 65 20 74 68 69 73 as if it were a second language; it’s thanks to mnemonic shortcuts such as alpha and Omega A to O, “PTZ” p to z, among other crazy pattern matching my ND brain often does).
Back in the DOS/MS-DOS times, RAM and (floppy) disk were very small (a floppy disk had <2MB, and I’m talking about the “modern” floppy disks from the 2000s), so there was this thing called “code golfing” in which programmers used to do some arcane math-magick to conjure as many bytes as possible from inside a single byte. Things like “packed” game sprite channels, side channel data (wonder how compression algorithms got created?), etc. They wouldn’t and often couldn’t “throw more hardware at the problem” like we’re used to nowadays. Sparing the 3rd most significant bit (01x1 1010, Z if x = 0, z if x = 1) would allow for side-channel data such as visual formatting (e.g. whether the character is selected in a terminal emulator).
This all likely played a role when they got chosen as the default interval for alphabet letters back then. Also, decimal numbers, 0x30 to 0x39 (resp. 0 to 9) are closer to the uppercase letters than to the lowercase letters, and so are most of the punctuation (which I didn’t get to memorize yet, but I remember they’re scattered across 0x21 to 0x2f then 0x3a to 0x3f then 0x5b to 0x5f).
This legacy kind of still lingers nowadays, for example, in PC keyboards whose key codes for alphabet letters (afaik) map to the 0x41 to 0x5a range when it gets to the HID driver. Then there are also devices in which program logic is burned into IC chip, such as “old” digital cameras and camcorders, so they ended “frozen” in a time where the file extension was conventionally uppercase.
(And, no, I’m not a millennial, although I’m almost one, sitting at the very cusp between them and Zs, two generations who saw the transition from analog to digital tech during our childhoods/teens).
Shitty crowd computing crap like SETI is already a massive fucking waste of resources.
To be fair, at least SETI-at-home is doing useful computing for the sake of Science, especially astronomy, as astronomy involves gazillions of twinkle-twinkling little points in the sky we often (and erroneously) call “stars” which we wonder what they are: they can be entire galaxies from a younger cosmos, mass-extinction-capable meteors zapping through the veil of spacetime continuum towards a certain Pale Blue Dot spinning somewhere in the Laniakea supercluster, or technologically-advanced extraterrestrials planning to colonize said Pale Blue Dot… the latter is where the SETI computations step in, you know, to try and solve the pesky Fermi Paradox.
Not meaning to be the achkshually guy, but, heat is a kind of “light” (EM radiation) within the Infrared range of the spectrum. We can’t see it, but snakes can.
!science_memes@mander.xyz