Daemon Silverstein

@[email protected]

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

@[email protected]

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.

@[email protected]

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.

@[email protected] this is nothing new. Back when the COVID-19 pandemics was at its peak, a state-owned Brazilian bank Caixa Econômica Federal created an app named “Caixa Tem”, where people could apply for and receive a governamental aid. The app had a “queue” akin to that one.

@[email protected] @[email protected]

Technically speaking, the joystick involved analog voltages to be converted to digital signals… And what else have ADC (analog-to-digital converters) chips? Soundcards, because ADCs are used to convert mic input, alongside the “line in”, both of which are analog voltages, into PCM signals, which are discrete (as in “non-continuous”) streams of bits. Something inverse happens for “headphone”, “speakers” and “line out” pins: a PCM stream coming from the sound driver is converted to analog voltages using a DAC.

While other ports also happened to deal with analog<->digital conversion, a soundcard was particularly specialized at this job, alongside graphic (VGA) cards (VGA has lots of analog signals), but graphic cards were already too busy with thousands/millions of pixels and, well, with computation of graphics.

Other boards aren’t so fitting for analog-digital job. For example: a NIC (Network Interface Card) already deals with digital signal so, theoretically, no conversion is necessary from/to analog. Parallel ports (those for printers) also natively deals with digital signals. Expansion cards with USB ports, same thing. And so on…

(Apologies for my blank reply if my deletion didn’t federate due to insufficient Sharkey-Lemmy federation, I mistyped enter as I was getting ready to write my message)

@[email protected]

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.

@[email protected]

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.

@[email protected] Given enough time and a computational cluster containing countless Darwin monkeys replicated, would some of those Darwin monkeys end up writing the entire corpus of Shakespeare’s works?

@[email protected] [email protected]

Yeah, unfortunately. I’m aware of that… However, it’s both a Catch-22 situation and a self-fulfilling prophecy: content isn’t there, so people refrain from using it, but this leads to the very situation where the content isn’t there because they refrain from using it.

It seems curious to me how corporate solutions miraculously have the content, but open alternative haven’t. It’s not just the first-mover effect because TikTok also “have the content” and it came decades after YouTube. In fact, PeerTube first appeared in 2018, the same year when TikTok began to rank first in app stores.

This can be referred to as “The Cassandra Curse” seemingly inherent of open-source alternatives: people prefer migrating to corporate-owned Bluesky instead of going to Mastodon or Sharkey, because “Mastodon doesn’t have the content/people”. Sooner or later, the same people goes full SurprisedPickachu.jpg complaining when their favorite corporate platform eventually and inexorably goes rogue against their userbase.

And, even then, people prefer to pull the algorithmic Sisyphean boulder (Invidious, Grayjay just for accessing Youtube instead of the many other platforms it supports, etc) and mental gymnastics (“Google is evil but, hey, look, there’s a new Youtube video from Rossmann about how Google is evil” then proceeds to share some Youtube link that either requires logging in or requires one to find some working VPN/Invidious instance) instead of letting it go from a product sold by an company that explicitly calls themselves as “advertisement company” (Google). Both viewers and content creators continue to put their efforts and data inside a Walled Garden they often complain about.

That’s why the modern dystopia is getting worse as the time passes, because corporations noticed how easy it is to lure people into their Walled Garden and, once people are well-established inside, corps can do as they please: raise prices and/or starting to charge users, adding more ads, taking away or paywalling features (nods to +2K and 60fps videos) and content, and people will continue to sustain the abusive relationship… because the alternatives “don’t have content”.

I’m not against solutions such as Invidious or Grayjay (and I have nothing against Rossmann, much to the contrary), but to me, using Youtube through technical workarounds is just drinking the Kool-aid with extra steps.

Also… Vi que você faz parte da instância brasileira do Lemmy, também sou brasileiro. Devo apontar também à necessidade do Brasil ter uma plataforma própria/nacional de vídeos, seja pública ou não, principalmente pelo fato da Google (e por extensão Youtube) ser estadunidense e pelo fato de como os EUA têm tentado influenciar no cenário nacional (e o Brasil continuar dependendo de plataforma estadunidense como Google/Youtube e Meta/WhatsApp-Facebook definitivamente não ajuda na soberania brasileira).

@[email protected] [email protected]
IMHO, it’s better to boycott and abandon Youtube (and other mainstream platforms) altogether, either prioritizing open alternatives (PeerTube) and/or prioritizing the consumption (and production) of static content (text and images).

Regarding the open alternatives, it baffles me how Fediverse users often can recall of Invidious (and other workarounds) but can’t recall of a Fediverse platform, even when there are many PeerTube instances available out there, both general-purpose and niche instances.

Alongside the adoption of PeerTube and other open alternatives, the abandonment or de-prioritization of video formats is also interesting as a mentally-healthy option because video can’t help but deceive our brains into perceiving “something” that isn’t there (to better understand this, I recommend the René Magritte’s art “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” a.k.a. “The Treachery of Images”, as well as the René Descartes’s philosophy on the human senses). To make matters worse, YT and other corp video platforms are dopaminergic casinos, trapping users inside an ouroboric addiction of video feeds while creating the illusion of parasocial relationships (i.e. as if the gazillion-subscribers “influencer” were a personal friend/colleague/lover, when they’re not: each user is just another bitstream they both think they “see” amidst an unstoppable digital rain generated by a grid of three LEDs tailored to deceive our trio of retinal cones… but, well, this is a very bleak and digressing statement of mine).

Personally, It’s been a long while since I stopped accessing YouTube/TikTok videos. I used to publish my own videos, I used to be subscribed to hundreds of “channels” and I was even a paid “member” to specific YT channels. I abandoned it all and I rarely put myself into watching videos.

Yes, there’s a myriad of knowledge and content available only in motion picture format, and there is also the kind of knowledge that cannot be written as text or represented as a static image, and this is where open video platforms can thrive, but people, especially us Fediverse users, should advocate more for these alternatives such as PeerTube.

Of course, even PeerTube doesn’t solve the fact of how video unfortunately are perfect smoke-and-mirrors deceiving our naïve biological senses and making us overly used to fast and/or shallow content as we lose our own ability to read and write deep and lengthy texts such as this one. At the end of the day, humans are gradually ceding the ability to write, once extremely valued and valuable among humans, to Markov chain algorithms (a.k.a. LLMs), in part due to us getting more and more used to media formats. But, at least, PeerTube doesn’t try to trap us into an endless feed and doesn’t try to extort us or sell our personal data to countless partners/sponsors, so it’s way better than YouTube or any workarounds to continue accessing the Google’s dopaminergic casino.

@[email protected] @[email protected]

I receive bots from just about every Brazilian consumer ISP.

Greetings. Brazilian here.

I can confirm that a lot of websites unexpectedly block my access with a pretty opaque “403 Forbidden”. No Captchas, no Anubis-like man-in-the-middle, just an invisible and ruthless Gandalf digitally yelling “you shall not pass”.

I have read similar stories about how Brazilian IP addresses seem to be infested with bots. It’s often Brazil: it’s odd how people rarely complain about other countries on this matter… Not pointing fingers towards you, specifically, but I wonder how much of geofencing against Brazilian IP addresses stems from prejudice and xenophobia of foreign webmasters.

It’s worth mentioning that bots have no borders and aren’t restricted to a specific country, but the vast majority of Brazilians (myself included) are restricted to an entire biological existence within Brazilian territory, with hundreds of millions of people never having set foot on an airplane or cruise ship.

Webmasters of the world should think about this before geofencing entire countries. Not just Brazil, but any country out there. Because living beings can’t choose where they’re born and humans often can’t even afford to travel and/or reside elsewhere.

(My sincere apologies for my outburst, but it resonates with the community’s name: being blocked from websites just because of nationality is not just Mildly Infuriating: it can be totally infuriating sometimes, and this exact phenomenon happened earlier today while I tried to access a psychology website)

@[email protected]

private bool isEven(int number){
    	bool result = true;
    	while (number > 0){
    		number = number - 1;
    		if (result == true)
    			result = false;
    		else
    			result = true;
    	}
    	return result;
    }

(P.S.: Only works for positive numbers)