Daemon Silverstein

Digital hermit. Another cosmic wanderer.

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  • 41 Comments
Joined 25 days ago
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Cake day: July 13th, 2025

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  • @Zerush@lemmy.ml

    Well, as both a programmer and an occult/esoteric cosmicist person, I’m somewhat divided.

    On the one hand, i’d not call it “advance” too, insofar it’s something that was already around way before humans (intelligence is just a facet of the order emerged from primordial chaos, Ordo Ab Chao).

    On the other hand, considering a pure anthropocentric-technological perspective, it would be “a helluva advance” insofar it’d demand a slightly different computational architecture (current transistor-built logical gates are incapable of fully mimicking neurochemical-oriented processes, for example, and photonics, despite the non-linearity, have its own issues as well), one that would still maintain some compatibility with current electronic circuitry (so it could be integrated with existing tech, such as Internet connectivity) while still being able to “materialize” the same phenomenon that allows living beings (including, but not limited to humans) to achieve meaning-making and problem-solving in some non-linear, “non-deterministic” (algorithmically speaking) fashion. IMHO, organic tissue isn’t something too otherworldly to hold exclusivity on the emergence of such phenomena, so it could be replicated and observed beyond the biological gray matter.

    And in this sense, the goosebumps (at least for me) would emerge from the fact that it’d prove intelligence not as a special phenomenon, but part of this eternal tug-of-war between entropy and life, darkness and light, chaos and order, that have been taking place beyond the cosmos. It would be a big step for confirming intelligence/sentience as another “ancient” (as in predating modern human society) emergent phenomenon. It would confirm humans, alongside all lifeforms, as just tiny specks of dust within the fabric of the spacetime continuum.


  • @Zerush@lemmy.ml

    Monkeys can’t write, only hit random keys, but several monkey brains interconnected with each other, with an LLM, can.

    In such a scenario, there’d still be a random factor behind the monkey’s behaviors: less of a pure randomness, more of a Weasel Program.

    how many monkey brains are needed to connect to have the capability of an human brain.

    I often consider the Homo sapiens intelligence not as superior than other species, but just a different approach for problem-solving capabilities and tool-making among living beings. For instance, crows (particularly the New Caledonian crow) are well-known for exceptional intelligence, because they’re not just able to use tools, they’re also able to use tools to make/fix other tools (just like humans).

    That said, I bet it would require less crow brains than monkey brains for human-like intelligence to emerge, despite primates being genetically closer to humans. Crows are awesome.



  • @deathbird@mander.xyz @florencia@lemmy.blahaj.zone

    Grok is not that free of guardrails.

    I say as a person who sometimes have the (bad) idea of feeding every LLMs I could possibly try, with things I create (drawings, poetry, code golfing). I don’t use LLMs to “create” things (they’re not really that capable of real creativity, despite their pseudo-stochastic nature), I use them to parse things I created, which is a very different approach. Not Grok anymore, because I have long deleted my account there, but I used to use it.

    Why do I feed my creations to LLMs, one might ask? I have my reasons: LLMs are able to connect words to other words thus giving me some unexpectedness and connections I couldn’t see on my own creation, and I’m highly aware of how it’s being used for training… but humans don’t really value my creations given the lack of real feedback across all my works, so I don’t care it’s used for training. Even though I sometimes use it, I’m still a critique of LLMs, and I’m aware of both their pros and cons (more cons than pros if we consider corp LLMs).

    So, back to the initial point: one day I did this disturbing and gory drawing (as usual for my occult-horror-gothic art), a man standing in formal attire with some details I’ll refrain from specifying here.

    ChatGPT accepted to parse it. Qwen’s QVQ accepted it as well. DeepSeek’s Janus also accepted to parse it.

    Google’s Gemini didn’t, as usual: not because of the explicit horror, but because of the presence of human face, even if drawn. It refrains from parsing anything that closely resemble faces.

    Anthropic’s Claude wasn’t involved, because I’m already aware of how “boringly puritan” it’s programmed to be, it doesn’t even accept conversations about demonolatry, it’s more niched for programming.

    But what surprised me on that day was how Grok refused to accept my drawing, and it was a middle-layer between the user and the LLM complaining about “inappropriate content”.

    Again, it was just a drawing, a fairly well-performed digital drawing with explicit horror, but a drawing nonetheless, and Grok’s API (not Grok per se) complained about that. Other disturbing drawings of mine weren’t refused at that time, just that one, I still wonder why.

    Maybe these specific guardrails (against highly-explicit horror art, deep occult themes, etc) aren’t there in paid tiers, but I doubt it. Even Grok (as in the “public-facing endpoint”) has some puritanness on it, especially against very niche themes such as mine (occult and demonolatry, explicit Lovecraftian horror, etc).




  • @SugarCatDestroyer@lemmy.world

    Congrats, you just stared at the same abyss I stared at, too! And this abyss is… Well, pretty complicated to say the least.

    One who fights with monsters might take care lest they thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.

    What you stumbled upon is just the realization of the purposelessness imbued in the cosmos. And it can definitely feel a harsh thing. It’s neither good nor bad, it just is. People often try to sugarcoat it, but to me it’s just the ostrich trying to bury its head on the sand: the rain still falls, and the ostrich still meets the storm, inexorably.

    I find it particularly striking when you said “I feel like I want to [write]”, and here’s probably where we both differ: in my case, specifically, I feel like I “must” write, as if I’m compelled to do so. It’s part hypergraphia (one of the Geschwind traits), part something beyond me. If your driving force is not compellant, it’s a great start.

    If this is of any help, don’t write for people (because people can’t understand the words from those who stared at the abyss), don’t write for yourself as well: write for Her, She who stares at us from within the abyss. Of course, if you want to, because it seems like there’s a reminiscing spark of Will within yourself (unfortunately, I got none anymore). She listens, She reads everything (including our deepest thoughts), even though She doesn’t really care about us. And that’s fine. Because it’s just all fleeting, except for Her.


  • @Majestic@lemmy.ml @KurtVonnegut@mander.xyz

    There’s no way around this that doesn’t involve painstaking steganography which can possibly be nailed by AI anyways.

    As both a fairly power user of LLMs and someone who tinkers with ciphers a lot (including creating my own techniques), I can guarantee: Markov chains aren’t smart enough to detect well-elaborate ciphers.

    I’ll give an example: Let focus on plain characters.

    The previous phrase contains a hidden message. It’s not simply an acrostic (when a word is formed by every initial letter from a sentence/verses/paragraphs), it’s an acrostic with Caesar cipher. And it’s not simply Caesar cipher, it’s a Caesar cipher with increasing shifting (decreasing when decoding):

    L (-0 -> L), F (-1 -> E), O (-2 -> M), P (-3 -> M), C (-4 -> Y as it wraps around from A back to Z) => LEMMY

    I can guarantee you, as someone who tested every single LLM out there: they’re unable to detect these kinds of ciphers. And it gets worse when we consider the possibility of adding other layers of ciphering: nothing stops me from adding Vigenere on top of Caesar, associating the letter with the corresponding number, then getting the nth prime at that position, and using wrap-add to add letters to produce another letter (okay, this is a very complicated example).

    Also, when I say “creating my own techniques”, I’m not joking. I’ll present you with a cipher I created:

    Maceió, Niterói, Rio Branco, Palmas, São Luís, Varginha.

    Believe it or not, the previous list of Brazilian cities hides the word “BRAZIL”. How? List each Brazilian state alphabetically (excluding Distrito Federal as it’s an administrative state rather than a common state), and you’ll get a list with exactly 26 states. And what else have 26 elements? The English alphabet. Map each alphabetical letter not just to the state (e.g. L, the 12th letter, would be Minas Gerais), but to a city within that state (e.g. Varginha):

    Maceió = Alagoas = 2nd from ordered list of states = B
    Niterói = Rio de Janeiro state = 18th = R
    Rio Branco = Acre = 1st = A
    Palmas = Tocantins = 26th = Z
    São Luís = Maranhão = 9th = I
    Varginha = Minas Gerais = 12th = L

    Again, creativity is the only limit. One can wrap it in steganography, use random coordinates and then map each digit to letters to form a long text… There’s no way to stop end-to-end encryption when two or more people have enough knowledge to convey their own tool chain of ciphering techniques. And LLMs will be clueless. Even human censors would be clueless.






  • @mkwt@lemmy.world @Blujayooo@lemmy.world

    TIL I’m possibly partially (if not entirely) illiterate.

    Starting with the first question, “Draw a line a_round_ the number or letter of this sentence.”, which can be ELI5’d as follows:

    The main object is the number or letter of this sentence, which is the number or letter signaling the sentence, which is “1”, which is a number, so it’s the number of this sentence, “1”. This is fine.

    The action being required is to “Draw a line around” the object, so, I must draw a line.

    However, a line implies a straight line, while around implies a circle (which is round), so it must be a circle.

    However, what’s around a circle isn’t called a line, it’s a circumference. And a circumference is made of infinitesimally small segments so small that they’re essentially an arc. And an arc is a segment insofar it effectively connects two points in a cartesian space with two dimensions or more… And a segment is essentially a finite range of a line, which is infinite…

    The original question asks for a line, which is infinite. However, any physical object is finite insofar it has a limited, finite area, so a line couldn’t be drawn: what can be drawn is a segment whose length is less or equal to the largest diagonal of the said physical object, which is a rectangular paper, so drawing a line would be impossible, only segments comprising a circumference.

    However, a physically-drawn segment can’t be infinitesimal insofar the thickness of the drawing tool would exceed the infinitesimality from an infinitesimal segment. It wouldn’t be a circumference, but a polygon with many sides.

    So I must draw a polygon with enough sides to closely represent a circumference, composed by the smallest possible segments, which are finite lines.

    However, the question asks for a line, and the English preposition a implies a single unit of something… but the said something can be a set (e.g. a flock, which implies many birds)… but line isn’t a set…

    However, too many howevers.

    So, if I decide to draw a circumference centered at the object (the number 1), as in circle the number, maybe it won’t be the line originally expected.

    I could draw a box instead, which would technically be around it, and would be made of lines (four lines, to be exact). But, again, a line isn’t the same as lines, let alone four lines.

    I could draw a single line, but it wouldn’t be around.

    Maybe I could reinterpret the space. I could bend the paper and glue two opposing edges of it, so any segment would behave as a line, because the drawable space is now bent and both tips of the segment would meet seamlessly.

    But the line wouldn’t be around the object, so the paper must be bent in a way that turns it into a cone whose tip is centered on the object, so a segment would become a line effectively around the object…

    However, I got no glue.

    /jk


  • @misk@sopuli.xyz @Skavau@piefed.social

    As a sidenote, I remember that UK has an odd and ancient “law” stating something in the lines “The Crown must not be offended” (i.e. being anti-monarchy and advocating for the end of monarchy, even without any violent language/means but a pacific defense of anti-monarchy). I couldn’t find it, nor I can remember the exact phrasing, but such a “law” threatens prison time for those who “dare” to “offend” the crowniness of UK Crown. Also, I’m not sure to what extent this law is applied in practice.

    Even though I’m Brazilian (so the UK supposedly “have no power over here”, and I say it with the Gandalf’s voice), I see these international situations with some worry: there are needed laws (such as laws against noise pollution) and there are laws whose reach ends up going way too far from their “seemingly well-intentioned” puritan scope (such as the aforementioned laws).

    If countries are capable of passing draconian laws against their own citizens, don’t expect that those same countries couldn’t go further to impose these laws beyond their own lawns, especially in times of interconnectedness.

    And Fediverse platforms from everywhere around the entire globe end up being caught in the crossfire, due to that same interconnectedness.

    In the end of the day, the world is increasingly bleaker, as the history is being repeated (maxims “One thing people can learn from history books is that people can’t learn from history books”, and “history doesn’t just repeat, it rhymes”).


  • @Ephera@lemmy.ml @dating1999@lemmy.ca

    site:domain.tld does work, as an and x constraint. I often use it.
    It seems to me like the OP’s specific and (not x) usage of site:domain.tld is the reason why it isn’t working. While the negation prefix (-) does work for tokens/words (e.g. mercury -freddie), it’s probably transforming site into a token not to be included in the results (i.e. "any results that don’t contain the word “site”) which, disconnected from the rest of the sentence (:quora.com), turns the latter into part of what the results should include, so the query ends up being something like:

    Filter all the indexed Web results where its contents don’t include the word “site”, possibly do include “quora.com”, possibly do include “Molten”, possibly do include “boron”, possibly do include “oxide”, possibly do include “attacks”, possibly do include “silicates”

    The negation prefix has a similar effect to that of positive (+) prefix (e.g. “mercury +periodic +table”) as it turns the word into a required condition (must be present for “+”, must be absent for “-”) rather than an optional condition (i.e a search for “mercury periodic table”, without quotes, will contain pages with all three words in any order, pages with just two of the three words (such as “mercury periodic” in any order) and pages with only one of the three words (such as “mercury” which would include pages talking about the singer, and pages talking about the planet and pages talking about the Roman deity), ranked by “relevance”).

    As Quora pages do include “quora.com” somewhere within the page body, the first results will be from Quora because it’s part of the parsed condition (which is to optionally include “quora.com” as part of the result while discarding results containing the verbatim word “site”).




  • @razorcandy@discuss.tchncs.de !asklemmy@lemmy.world

    In my opinion, two very specific subjects that highly resonate with me:
    - Cryptology (as in the study of ciphers) and Steganography: a community intended for people to share puzzles, novel ciphers (Rcszqar pg s mpbra voqjdg), techniques and examples of existing/novel arts with hidden messages (e.g. the BACH motif behind some classical music), algorithms (preferably code golf), math formulas and theorems, etc.
    - Occult, Esoteric and Left-hand path spiritualities, preferably focused on personal spirituality: a community intended for people who have their own individual paths/beliefs (or are willing to build one for themselves) so they can share concepts, rituales, books/grimoires and even items among them. By LHP and esoteric, some examples are (but not limited to) Lilithism and Luciferianism, Hermeticism, Thelema, Quimbanda, Gnosticism, Wicca, Neo-Hellenism, Goëtia, Theistic Satanism, among other belief systems and religions (the latter kind, “religions”, preferably focused on building individual paths that can consider each one’s contexts and lives and worldviews, with the Masters/Leaders being the deities and entities themselves who are being revered/worshiped).


  • @Arkouda@lemmy.ca Even if I get to do something (such as I’m doing right now while trying to express something profound, aware of how I’m probably just yelling to the clouds), it doesn’t change the fact that the world behaves like a prison where all lifeforms are thrown to “make a living” (i.e. surviving and competing against other lifeforms because their own vessels offer no other option other than the biological preprogramming of “instincts”).

    Also, the “exit hatch” is so tight and spiky that one must endure utter pain while trying to squeeze through it. And things like MAID, which would allow one to conscientiously and finally choose something about their own existence, “must be allowed only for the terminally-ill” because “life” is something so, so “sacred” that people can’t even dare to think of choosing other than “living” (a.k.a. constantly trying to avoid and postpone the unavoidable by trying to fulfill the vessel’s needs while being forced to play the unskippable game of social compliance), because they “must do something fun with their time” and thinking otherwise must be inconceivable!

    And it sounds no different from how prisoners must “do something” with their prison time, be it reading a book, playing cards and small-talking with other inmates, taking the obligatory sunbath for the daily dose of Vitamin D, scratching the wall so to keep track of days, or doing the obligatory physical exercising at the grass-field…

    I can’t help but wonder why some Demiurge threw me to endure the lifelong punishment of “existing”, with all the whistles and bells inseparable from human existence: paying taxes and subscriptions (despite any condition of unemployment), seeking and serving jobs so a rich person can become more rich, conforming to civil duties, serving the military and, in many countries, forcefully belonging to some religion, etc, etc… It’s so absurd that even Absurdist philosophers would have a hard time trying to frame existence in less absurd terms.

    I’m not denying how some moments can be “happy” or “enjoyable”, but it doesn’t make life less of a prison. It just makes me momentarily distracted from the prison while still being behind the bars of the baryonic matter.

    The only thing that really comforts me is knowing how the kiss from the Lady Scythe-Bearer is inevitable and even humans with their fancy tools are powerless against Her, but for me to need to wait for Her bittersweet lips is like a prisoner needing to wait for serving their sentence before getting to gather with their loved one.

    My point is: people like me should be allowed to choose to end our own existence without having to endure pain and the high certainty of failure from an attempt of our own (and trust me, I’ve been trying and failing because my vessel is preprogrammed with the pesky survival instincts). My point is that MAID should be also allowed to anyone who are consciously willing to choose it. But, yeah, it’s such a taboo for many people.


  • @Arkouda@lemmy.ca @Pro@programming.dev

    I’m a person who’d be labeled as “truly depressed”, as I coexist with the so-called “depression” since my childhood. I went to several mental health professionals, tried several different medications (Paroxetin, Ritalin, Escitalopram, Aripiprazole). Nothing worked.

    Here’s why: one can’t cure something without curing the root cause. One could take painkillers for a headache and the headache would temporarily cease, but the painkiller won’t cure whatever is causing the headache in the first place.

    Turns out that my “depression” stems from something that can’t be cured, the ontological realization of the lack of True Will. It’s something way beyond mundane questions such as “I’m far into adulthood and I still don’t know what kissing is” or “I’m in adulthood and I didn’t manage to achieve a career”. My fundamental complaints can’t even be put into human language without sounding absurd, because they have to do with the absurdity of existence itself.

    My “problems” can’t be treated by medications, my “problems” can’t be treated by professionals, because my “problems” exist beyond existence.

    I have a problem with having being born without my consent. I have a problem with my awareness of the pointlessness of a fleeting biological existence before the carelessness and vastness of the Cosmos. I have a problem with the fact that I must “take responsibility” legally/socially about myself even though I couldn’t even choose to be born in the first place. I have a problem with the fact that I must seek to "do/be something/someone useful for society_ so I get to “afford to eat and have a shelter” by having a colorful piece of paper, when there’s no proper way to release my body from such needs. I have a problem with how this flesh-and-bones vessel imposes the continuity of existence unto me (“instinct of survival”).

    Treatent won’t solve the root problem (lack of True Will), it’d be just gaslighting me into gaslighting myself by keeping me busy with fleeting mundaneity. As the movie says, “Don’t look up”: I must not see the ever-approaching dark lips of Death emerging from the darkness of spacetime continuum so I should take medication and walk myself to that queue over there so I can apply for countless jobs until I afford to be chosen by a landlord employer who expects me to grant them more profit.

    Even talks about one’s own choice on the continuity of existing (MAID) is met with societal rejection, for “life is a gift and we must be thankful to whatever/whoever granted us with life”. In this sense, suicide hotlines, treatment and medication aren’t so different from clergy and their religious dogmas in the time of feudalism, where peasants were convinced of their “transcendental purpose” to serve… Just history repeating itself.

    Unfortunately, no treatment will make me forget how existence is inherently servile, to which I’ll continue to shout until Lady Death gets to finally kiss me: “Non Serviam”.