Daemon Silverstein

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

  • 0 Posts
  • 204 Comments
Joined 3 months ago
cake
Cake day: August 17th, 2024

help-circle

  • 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.


  • 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.


  • 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.





  • 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.




  • 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


  • 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).


  • historically we’ve been using AM at lower frequencies, and these travel further

    While I agree with that statement…

    AM doesn’t reach further than FM

    … i disagree here. Yes it kinda does, and there’s why: FM deteriorates with phase shifting introduced by phenomena such as ionospheric reflection, while AM is more resilient to it because it encodes information as amplitude variations instead of frequency (and therefore, implicit phases) variations. Also, FM needs more bandwidth than AM. Also, the overlay of two or more simultaneous AM transmissions is “more understandable” than two or more simultaneous FM transmissions laying on the same frequency. Both the three are the reasons why the modern aviation continues to use AM for comm between TWR and airplanes, as an example. Not just by historical reasons, it’s because AM is more resilient than FM.

    By “reaching further”, I don’t mean the range of propagation because, as you correctly said, it has more to do about wavelength and, therefore, the carrier frequency. By “reaching further”, I actually mean the capability for the signal to be correctly demodulated and minimally understandable at the end. If a signal can propagate across hundreds of thousands of kilometers (for example, between Earth and the Moon), but it can’t be recognizable at the other point (because the phases are all messed up to the point of being unable to be demodulated), then the signal (as in the content to be transmitted/received) couldn’t really “reach further”.

    Here goes an example: I live in Brazil, in the southeast. I was in Sao Paulo state (not the city) when I once managed to receive an English-spoken CB (Citizen Band, 11 meters, approx. 27MHz) transmission. Most of our neighboring countries are Spanish-speakers, the only nearest English-speaking country is Guyana (the nearest corner close to Jatapu River being 3,000 km from Sao Paulo in straight line), but I could tell by the operator accent that he was not from Guyana. The reception would be almost crystal-clear, if my receiving setup were better (I was using a RTL-SDR with a piece of long wire barely touching the outside of the antenna’s jack). While there are repeaters for CB, they’re not as common as VHF or UHF repeaters, where you can even find, for example, EchoLink repeaters, so the international transmission really made into my Brazilian home, and it was even daylight! I only could tell the signal because it was AM modulated.

    When we talk about deep space communication, sure some things change, but most of the same rules apply.

    These radio telescopes don’t transmit anything at all,

    Back in 1974, the former Arecibo radiotelescope was used to transmit the famous Arecibo message (some sources Wikipedia and Universe Today). So, while they’re most used for reception, they can be (and they were) used for transmitting as well. It’s not a straightforward thing, it’s not simply a switch to be toggled receive-or-transmit because they involve different electronic circuitry, but the structure, the dishes and the antenna, can both transmit and receive: for reception, it just interacts with electromagnetic fields, which induces an oscillating electrical current all the way through the structure until it’s filtered (through electronic components such as variable capacitors) and amplified by a receiver circuit, while as for transmission, it conducts an oscillating electrical current and irradiates it, depending on the antenna shape and properties.

    Much like a normal telescope doesn’t transmit light.

    It’s also a possible thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Laser_Ranging_experiments#List_of_retroreflectors


  • I once saw a video of a person touching a grounded sausage to the metallic structure of an AM radio tower, the transmission was audible as the sausage was being zapped. If there’s a merely conductible thing grounded near the tower, I guess it’ll sort of “coil whine” (a well-known phenomenon when electrical components physically vibrate due to the passage of current), converting to sound whatever it’s being transmitted at the moment. This includes the tower structure itself, if the electrical grounding isn’t properly done or if there’s some grounding leak. Otherwise, a grounded thing touching the tower would suffice to convert the transmission into sound, if those radio-telescopes use AM modulation (I’d guess they do, because AM modulation is known for reaching longer distances than FM).


  • Let S be an endless string which is a concatenation of every binary counting in succession, starting from zero all the way to infinity (without left zero-padding):

    S = 01101110010111011110001001101010111100110111101111…
    (from concatenating 0, 1, 10, 11, 100, 101, 110, 111, 1000, 1001, and so far)

    Let S’ be a set of every sequential group of octets (8 bits) from string S, which can be represented as a base-10 number (between 0 and 255), like so:

    S’_2 = [01101110, 01011101, 11100010, 01101010, 11110011, 01111011, …]
    S’_10 = [110, 93, 226, 106, 243, 123, …]

    I’d create an audio wave file whose samples are each octet from S’_10 as 8-bit audio samples, using a really low sampling rate (such as 8000 Hz or even 4000 Hz).
    That sound, that particular sound, is what I’d transmit to the cosmos: the binary counting, something with a detectable pattern (although it’d be not so easily recognizable, but something that one could readily distinguish from randomness noise).


  • Darker doesn’t always mean blacker. Symbolically, a blood moon is “darker” (as in “ominous” and “eerie”) than a new moon. The red color has many meanings, ranging from passion to wrath. Even after science emerged to explain such phenomena (the red color being just the longest wavelength part of visible electromagnetic spectra, the blood moon being just a combination of physical and astrophysical factors such as Rayleigh scattering and planetary alignment, etc), the blood moon still gets a “bad omen” vibe nowadays, a vibe that’s absolutely not present during new moons (it’s worth mentioning that they happen once or twice every month, differently from a blood moon which is a somewhat-rare event).


  • 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.