As a Brazilian nervously watching the unfolding of a potentially global mess, I bring you the best Brazil can offer: memes! Here’s a pretty relatable one (Original cartoon from Maurício de Souza, Turma da Mônica)
I’m just a spectre out of the nothingness, surviving inside a biological system.
As a Brazilian nervously watching the unfolding of a potentially global mess, I bring you the best Brazil can offer: memes! Here’s a pretty relatable one (Original cartoon from Maurício de Souza, Turma da Mônica)
Throughout all my jobs, I’ve been always systematic in not creating any friendship or relationship. That’s because I feel like workplace problems could affect the relation, or vice-versa, when personal disagreements could affect the workplace, because the humans involved would the same, me and my coworker. Imagine dating a coworker and then, eventually, falling into some disagreement (every relationship has one), then one of you (you or them) decides it’s better to temporarily go apart so to settle things, but you both will need to see each one face to face tomorrow. You’ll look in their eyes and you’ll find a hard time distinguishing between your love and your coworker, because they’re the same person (you still love them). There’s also the presence of falsehood within workplaces, people that seems nice until they’re at your back conspiring against you, trying to push you to the cliff. I faced lots of falsehood throughout my jobs. Careers sometimes involve competing against others and there are lots of people that takes this competition spirit too far, diminishing your job and your life for them to get some advantage (i.e. a better position within the company, a better wage, or even “for sadistic fun” of seeing others to be fired).
Maybe I’m wrong, but that’s how I ever felt about workplace relations, I always tried to keep the workplace restricted to my professional persona. I’ll be kind and helpful, but I’ll kinda “robotic” to my coworkers and bosses. You could correctly guess that this led me to being a solitary person, something I actually always was, because I’m the typical former nerd colleague back at the high school, the shy, social awkward kind, never had real true friends, and love seems like some extraterrestrial fictional thing to me (not that I’m not capable of feeling love for someone because I once felt, but externalizing it and turning it into a relationship only happened in dreams, I guess).
So, in my opinion, it’s not a trustworthy thing to make friends at work, especially if it involves possibilities of higher positions and/or higher wages, or a narcissistic boss that wants to be worshiped. But, as I said, maybe I’m wrong.
The problem is beyond social media accounts. Modern life makes us to have digital things, “apps”. As much as I’d benefit from it (I’m a programmer), I can’t help but recognize how dangerous is this digital dependence and requirement. Not only our entire lives become bits and bytes across gazillions of platforms, they’re out of our real control: from advertising platforms to hackers, the online information kind of awaits to fall on third-party hands.
How many of our information is now inside the training data from major AI models (as much as I like some aspects of AIs, that’s a fact), such as GPT-4, Claude Somnet and, especially, Google’s Gemini, whose company is responsible for more than 90% of the search engine market while also responsible for our smartphones’ brains, not just Android but things embedded on Apple’s ecosystems as well?
But people only notice how far our digital footprint goes when there’s some serious thing such as the risk of persecution from the government. People decide to delete their accounts hoping that it’ll lead to their data being magically erased and, as a programmer, I say: no, our data remains, there’s no DELETE * FROM users WHERE id = your_id
, there’s actually a UPDATE users SET deleted=CURRENT_TIME() WHERE id = your_id
that’s not the same thing (it just marks your account as deleted, but all the data remains for whatever time period they wish, not even mentioning periodic database backups that’ll preserve your data in the hands of that platform)… not even mentioning how your data could’ve already been assimilated through platform integrations (API) by third-party partners such as advertisers. There’s no way to force the erasure.
Yeah, there’s the law such as GDPR’s “Right to be forgotten”, but there’s a Brazilian saying “O que os olhos não veem o coração não sente” (What the eyes can’t see, the heart can’t feel). A platform can “confirm the account deletion” but they can keep the data without anyone’s knowledge. It’s worse: there are laws that require the companies to keep the data for some time (here in Brazil, for example, companies need to keep data for five years, because the justice could need the data in order to solve some investigation).
So, I don’t like to be a harbinger of doom, but our digital traces will never actually entirely disappear from the Internet… especially if you guys are thinking of avoiding the incoming persecution from a new government. Online data remains as far as we couldn’t tell. And this includes way beyond social media platforms: it also includes your apps such as, I dunno, your Starbucks accounts? Your Amazon accounts? Everything is data that can be analyzed among a big data and traced back to each one’s preferences, including political preferences… I’m sorry to say that, but I need to transmit this knowledge as a developer.
the US becomes a third world banana republic
As a Brazilian, living in a third world banana republic, I couldn’t agree more! US is somehow mimicking our past elections, particularly our most recent election.
Similar vibe:
Baphomet is an occult archetype for the Supreme Deity, composed by both the male and female principles. The commonly found art/statue of Baphomet has both a phallus and breasts, representing the interconnectedness between these principles, just like Yin and Yang from Taoism are complementary to each other.
The same duo happens across various belief systems, such as Ancient Egypt (Isis and Osiris, Nun and Nunet), Brazilian Tupi-guarani indigenous people faith (Tupã e Jaci), some esoteric branches of Islam (Alaat or Al-Lat, the female principle of Allah), and so on. And there’s also Luciferianism, where there are Lucifer and Lilith sometimes seen as complementary, sometimes seen as “enemies”.
Regarding the Christianity, the Holy Ghost is a feminine name in Hebrew, so it’d be the nearest to this female principle of the Supreme Deity, a.k.a. The Mother Goddess (Asherah as others correctly pointed across the comments).
While we tend to see the male-female principles as phallus and vagina, the reproductive organs are actually just a representation on the physical realm from spiritual, energetic polarities. Everyone has both male and female energies (i.e. a man has also female energy within him, a woman has also a male energy within her), and we shall seek to balance them, seeking equilibrium between our inner man and our inner woman.
The patriarchal society tried to erase the figure of the Mother Goddess across the centuries, trying to make us forget how the first belief systems worshipped a Goddess instead of a God (Venus figurines, for example) but it seems like that this knowledge is being rediscovered nowadays.
OpenIndiana (Solaris), OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Haiku, AROS (AmigaOS), GNU Hurd, MINIX, ReactOS, TempleOS and others: allow us to introduce ourselves…
Basically, as far as I read, different kinds of transformers serve different kinds of purposes:
A Decoder-only is used for generative word output (auto-completion), when the model receives an input prompt and outputs generated words based on it.
An Encoder-only is used for things such as classification and sentiment analysis, when the model receives an input text and outputs a classification vector.
An Encoder-Decoder is used for translating texts from one language to other, because it firstly encodes (hence, it classifies) then decodes (hence, it generates words).
How LLMs can translate and can kinda of “analyze the sentiment” of a given text, I’m not really sure (possibly the training data allows is so huge that decoders can achieve the encoding function) but the “basic” generation of words is a decoder thing.
As for data science using Python, something tells me that this has to do with memory heap capacities. I’m not sure about Python’s max memory heap, but Javascript through Node.js seems to have only 512MB. I’ve been using Node.js to deal with big datasets and my most recent experimentation stumbled across the need of loading 100 million numbers to the RAM: while my PC has a fair amount of physical RAM (12GB) and a great part of it was available, it’ll simply error when filling an array. I needed an additional parameter, --max-old-space-size
, so Node.js could deal with such amount of data. I didn’t try the same task with Python because I’m used to Javascript (yet I’m done some things in Python), but I wonder how much memory can Python hold until an error like “out of memory” happens, because ML models (for example, those hosted and served in HuggingFace) loads training weights with dozens of GBs
Because of community and instance rules.
Ouch… Another project being Enshatterfied™ (I’m avoiding a swearing word). Starting from what version that the Audacity becomes so Enshatterfied? Here I have Audacity 2.4.1, before Audacity was bought.
While I previously had a Reddit account (which I don’t really used in a frequent basis), I found about Lemmy through Mastodon, which in turn I found about through my search for social network alternative platforms. Turns out I’ve been participating at Lemmy more often through the entire 3 months I’ve been here than I participated at Reddit throughout more than a decade (I joined Reddit in 2012 IIRC).
As a Brazilian, not much. Throughout my entire lifetime, I saw some Brazilians there and there wearing Halloween costumes but it’s not as popular here as “quermesses” (kirmess, church fairs, happening mostly on Brazilian’s interiorian towns), Carnival, Christmas or some “important” soccer game (such as Corinthians vs Palmeiras, or Flamengo vs Fluminense).
To me, particularly, no holiday (nor soccer games) holds any importance or meaning. In the end of the day, it’ll be just capitalism mesmerizing people to spend money on temporary things.
It depends.
When the VGA socket I’m plugging the VGA cable has a screwing hole (for example, tower PCs as well as some HDMI-To-VGA adapters) , and I’m intending to let it plugged, I generally do screw them in, not entirely, but sufficiently to don’t let it escape due to VGA cable’s weight (especially if the cable has dozens of meters as well as those cilindrical magnetic thingies that reduces electromagnetic interference).
But one of my laptops have no screwing holes at the sides of the VGA socket so it’s impossible to screw the VGA cable.
The difference is that the Linux distros won’t force the user to upgrade with annoying popups or similar. The difference is that the newer versions of Linux distros won’t have hardware requirements that will force the user to buy a new Pc altogether and contributing to e-waste.
It’s nice. Just as a suggestion, consider adding itch.io too. There are lots of good and free games, too.
It’s a concept I’ve been thinking about for months or even years, the concept of non-existence. In my mind I can sorta visualize it, but I’m not able to transcribe it to words, I’m not able to start explaining it because whenever I try to start writing something, it starts morphing into existence. For example: a phrase I can think of is “Light needs a darkness to shine unto”, it sounds like it can describe the concept, but then science comes out of nowhere to slap me in my face with the understanding of how matter emits radiation and how there’s no such place as “completely absent from any radiation”.
In my mind, the complementary makes sense, substance needs substrate which needs the substance, light needs darkness which needs the light, Hadit needs Nuith which needs Hadit (the infinitesimal point needs the infinite circumference which needs the infinitesimal point), and so on. See, human language is made to conceptualize what can be conceptualized, and non-existence is not conceptualizable in essence. However, the existence needs a counterpoint, a counterpart, something to contrast with its conceptualization, because if there was only existence, there’d be no existence at all (how can we conceptualize a thing if it’s the only thing wherever you look, wherever you go?). We can conceptualize the fabric of spacetime because “it’s there” and, by “there”, I mean “there” as in “where the fabric of spacetime sits on”, just like the shine of a spotlight illuminating a place where it was shadowy and dark.
There are things that we do know, there are things that we don’t know yet but we can know, and there are things that can’t be known. Who is the first Sumer person to ever write, what was his name, when he/she was born and when he/she died? What about the person who discovered the fire, who exactly were he/she? We don’t know, we can’t know, but they existed because now we have fire and writing systems. The impossibility of determining them doesn’t rule them out of existence, just like the non-existence itself. I mean, it’s the very essence of the non-existence to “don’t exist” but that somehow makes it “existent”, somehow the state of non-existence is a state, therefore, it exists as a state of being (as in “not being”).
To make matters worse, the human language is made to describe things within the realm of existence, time and space, when and where, while transcendental concepts can’t really be described through it without losing its transcendental essence. Non-existence is such a concept, a non-conceptualizable concept, so paradoxical in its nature.
Internet Archive (sued by publishers, then sued by music labels), now Wikipedia being sued… I’m just saying… Sounds like there’s a declared war against historical archives and freedom of information.
Ave Cæesar, ave memervm imperivm!
There was a similar question at another community. I’ll verbatim my reply:
As a syncretic Luciferian currently, I’d say esoteric and occult books/grimoires as well. Everything that’s deemed “demonic” by christianity should be safely archived.
There are many, many authors and books that hold importance for esoteric and occult studies and practices.
An example that comes to mind are the books written by Anton LaVey, especially the The Satanic Bible. As he was american, so are his books’ first copies from, so a greater risk of those copies being seized or something.
While this risk wouldn’t be the same for all corpora written by Aleister Crowley, as he was English so the first copies aren’t at american soil (if I guessed correctly), I’m not sure how far a christotyrannical regime would go for “serving God’s will”.
So, in summary, I’d say everything should be archived. Both physically and digitally. It’s worth mentioning how Internet Archive is being attacked: the Internet Archive holds many digital copies of important esoteric and occult knowledge as well. If Internet Archive goes permanently down, it’d ripple to other sites such as sacred-texts.