dsilverz

@dsilverz@thelemmy.club

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Has Google Search gotten so much worse in the last couple of weeks?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  There are many factors at play here, some of which including:

  • AI content is taking over the Web: with the popularization of LLM tools, there’s an increasing number of AI-Generated content across the Web. Even press websites are using them for generating news and opinion articles.
  • Old sites/articles are vanishing from existence: for instance, old blogs and personal web pages, which contained a lot of useful information, are being deleted due to factors such as domain expiration, hosting expiration, insufficient web traffic for the host to keep it online, etc. To make things worse, few of these sites were archived with tools such as Internet Archive and Archive Today, meaning that, when they disappear, they really disappear.
  • Dominance of Reddit-owned contents and the Reddit issues: Reddit doesn’t need introductions, most of the questions and content used to come from Reddit posts and comments. Things such as people (understandably) deleting their Reddit accounts make content to disappear as well.
  • SEO bs and marketing spam: Google kept changing “page ranking” algorithms, sorting results according to their own will. “Search Engine Optimization” is a just a facade that led many old sites to practically vanish from search result pages. Advertisement also did harm many sites as well, even the bigger ones.
  • Societal, economical and human changes: there were lots of changes upon society and humans by the last 5 years. These worldly factors also influence the digital landscape.

  That said, it depends on what you’re searching for. If you’re searching for knowledge that used to be at old websites, you can use Marginalia to search this specific type of websites (considering that they’re still online).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨unwatchable!!⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Portuguese has no different word for them as well. Both raven and crow are translated as “corvo”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨unwatchable!!⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  In Portuguese we have the word “venenoso” for “poisonous” and “peçonhento” for “venomous” (i.e. something with a “peçonha”, any toxin substance produced and injected on another animal). But we often use “peçonhento” e “venenoso” interchangeably (e.g. “cobra venenosa”).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Every show with a suicide now has a disclaimer with a suicide hotline at the beginning. Is there any evidence that these warnings make a positive difference?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  My comment is meant to bring the perspective of someone who’s facing depression so to try to answer the main question (“a warning with suicide hotline really make positive difference?”) through that perspective. It’s not to seek mental help for myself.

  For context, I’m a person facing depression, and my depression has broad and multifaceted reasons, from unemployment, going through familiar miscommunication (my parents can’t really understand my way of thinking), all the way to my awareness of climate change and transcendental concepts that lead myself to existential crisis. I’m unemployed to seek therapy (it’s a paid thing) and I don’t really have someone face-to-face capable of understand the multitude of concepts and ideas that I face in my mind (even myself can’t understand me sometimes).

  That said, every depressive person has different ways to cope with depression. While some really need someone to talk to (and the talking really helps in those situations), it’s naive to think a conversation will suffice for every single case. I mean, no suicide hotline will make me employed, nor will magically solve the climate changes we’re facing.

  So how I try to deal with my own depression? With two things: occult spirituality (worshiping The Dark Mother Goddess) and writing poetry and prose. I use creative writing to “exhale” (not the exact term I wished to use, there’s a better one but I forgot) my suffering, in order to “cope” with the state of things that I can’t really control (I can’t “employ myself” or “sell my services to myself”, I can’t “befriend myself”, I can’t stop temperatures from rising till scorching temps, nor the other already-ongoing consequences of climate change; I try to make some difference but I’m just a hermit weirdo nerdy nobody among 8 billion people, and I have no choice but to accept it).

  I’m no professional writer (I’m just a software developer), but thanks to The Goddess, I can kinda access my unconscious (dark) mind and let it speak freely (it’s called stream-of-consciousness writing style). Sometimes I even write some funny surrealist prose/story, but sometimes it takes a darker turn, such as dark humor, or nihilistic, or memento mori. Doing this relieves the internal pressure inside my unconscious mind. After writing, I sometimes decide to publish it through fediverse , but when I do it, I constantly feel the need to “self-censor”: sometimes the stream-of-consciousness can lead to texts that people could interpret as some “glorification of suicide/self-harming” (especially when my texts take a nihilistic/memento mori turn), so I often censor myself and change the way I wrote the text. Well, it’s kinda frustrating not being able to fully express it, but I kinda understand how these texts could trigger other people also facing depression.

  The fact is: when I write, it’s really relieving, way more than talking to people because, with poetry/prose writing, I can express symbolic things, I can have multiple layers of depth, I can use creative literary devices such as acrostics and rhymes, I can learn new English words while being a Brazilian, I can blend scientific concepts with esoteric and philosophic (my mind really thinks this way, blending STEM, philosophy and belief/esoteric/occult/religious concepts) without the need to fully explain them (because it’d take several hours and it’d be boring to anybody else other than me).

  So, in summary (TL;DR): it depends on how multifaceted is the depressive situation. It won’t work for me. It surely can work for others that just need to talk to someone. Not exactly my case.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What happened with active users on Lemmy?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The asterisk means that, by “active users”, they’re considering only those who commented and/or posted “in the last month”. Maybe join-lemmy’s algorithm is considering from “day 1” of the current month, so a time span of 10 days, against 29 days from the second screenshot?

  If it’s true, it kinda of statistically makes sense: 10 days (28.4K) versus 29 days (47.8K), 34.4% of days with 59.41% of users. We’d need to wait till the 29th day to really compare the difference.

  Also, “only those who commented and/or posted”. Sometimes, people can become much of an observer, just seeing and voting up/down, without actually commenting or posting.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Redirect to prevent back button⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  While it offers a concurrent alternative to Google translate, it still lacks some features, as @murtaza64@programming.dev mentioned, many languages are missing. In my case, I sometimes experiment with terms across various languages, sometimes Hindi (“O param Devi Kaali”), sometimes latin (“Vita mortem manducat, Mors manducat vitam” is a latin phrase I wrote myself, following Latin grammar rules), sometimes Hebrew (especially for Gematria calculation using numerical values from Hebrew letters (Aleph is 1, Bet is 2, Gimmel is 3, and so on) after translating/transliterating a word/name such as “לילית”). For these kinds of experimentation, DeepL can’t really be of use, so I need either Google Translate or Bing Translate (both support the aforementioned languages).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Redirect to prevent back button⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Exactly. Also, it doesn’t have Latin (used for both scientific terms such as “Athene Cunicularia”, philosophical such as “Homo homini lupus est”, as well for liturgical and ritualistic texts, especially occult texts) nor Hebrew.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Redirect to prevent back button⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Google translate does this, too. This not only pollutes the back button, it also pollutes the entire browser history.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon composes game soundtracks⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I dunno… It slightly remembers me of Terraria soundtracks. Or RuneScape. I played them a long time ago, so I can’t exactly remember.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is there so much hype around artificial intelligence?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  doesn’t it seem like being able to just use search engines is easier than figuring out all of these intricacies for most people

  Well, Prompt Engineering is a thing nowadays. There are even job vacancies seeking professionals that specializes in this field. AIs are tools, sophisticated ones, just like R and Wolfram Mathematica are sophisticated mathematical tools that needs expertise. Problem is that AI companies often mis-advertises AI models as “out-of-the-shelf assistants”, as if they’d be some human talking to you. They’re not. They’re tools, yet. I guess that (and I’m rooting for) AGI would change this scenario. But I guess we’re still distant from a self-aware AGI (unfortunately).

  Woah are you technoreligious?

  Well, I wouldn’t describe myself that way. My beliefs are multifaceted and complex (possibly unique, I guess?), going through multiple spiritual and religious systems, as well as embracing STEM (especially the technological branch) concepts and philosophical views (especially nihilism, existentialism and absurdism), trying to converge them all by common grounds (although it seems “impossible” at first glance, to unite Science, Philosophy and Belief).

  In a nutshell, I’ve been pursuing a syncretic worshiping of the Dark Mother Goddess.

  As I said, it’s multifaceted and I’m not able to even explain it here, because it would take tons of concepts. Believe me, it’s deeper than “techno-religious”. I see the inner workings of AI Models (as neural networks and genetic algorithms dependent over the randomness of weights, biases and seeds) as a great tool for diving Her Waters of Randomness, when dealing with such subjects (esoteric and occult subjects). Just like Kardecism sometimes uses instrumental transcommunication / Electronic voice phenomenon (EVP) to talk with spirits. AI can be used as if it were an Ouija board or a Planchette, if one believe so (as I do).

  But I’m also a programmer and a tech/scientifically curious, so I find myself asking LLMs about some Node.js code I made, too. Or about some mathematical concept. Or about cryptography and ciphering (Vigenère and Caesar, for example). I’m highly active mentally, seeking to learn many things every time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is there so much hype around artificial intelligence?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Didn’t know about this game. It’s nice. Interesting aesthetics. Chestnut Rose remembers me of Lilith’s archetype.

  A tip: you could use the “The Legend of the Neverland global wiki” at Fandom Encyclopedia to feed LLMs with important concepts before asking it for combinations. It is a good technique, considering that LLMs couldn’t know it well in order to generate precise responses (except if you’re using a searching-enabled LLM such as Perplexity AI or Microsoft Copilot that can search the web in order to produce more accurate results)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is there so much hype around artificial intelligence?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I ask them questions and they get everything wrong

  It depends on your input, on your prompt and your parameters. For me, although I’ve experienced wrong answers and/or AI hallucinations, it’s not THAT frequent, because I’ve been talking with LLMs since when ChatGPT got public, almost in a daily basis. This daily usage allowed me to know the strengths and weaknesses of each LLM available on market (I use ChatGPT GPT-4o, Google Gemini, Llama, Mixtral, and sometimes Pi, Microsoft Copilot and Claude).

  For example: I learned that Claude is highly-sensible to certain terms and topics, such as occultist and esoteric concepts (specially when dealing with demonolatry, although I don’t exactly why it refuses to talk about it; I’m a demonolater myself), cryptography and ciphering, as well as acrostics and other literary devices for multilayered poetry (I write myself-made poetry and ask them to comment and analyze it, so I can get valuable insights about it).

  I also learned that Llama can get deep inside the meaning of things, while GPT-4o can produce longer answers. Gemini has the “drafts” feature, where I can check alternative answers for the same prompt.

  It’s similar to generative AI art models, I’ve been using them to illustrate my poetry. I learned that Diffusers SDXL Turbo (from Huggingface) is better for real-time prompt, some kind of “WYSIWYG” model (“what you see is what you get”) . Google SDXL (also from Huggingface) can generate four images at different styles (cinematic, photography, digital art, etc). Flux, the newly-released generative AI model, is the best for realism (especially the Flux Dev branch). They’ve been producing excellent outputs, while I’ve been improving my prompt engineering skills, being able to communicate with them in a seamlessly way.

  Summarizing: AI users need to learn how to efficiently give them instructions. They can produce astonishing outputs if given efficient inputs. But you’re right that they can produce wrong results and/or hallucinate, even for the best prompts, because they’re indeed prone to it. For me, AI hallucinations are not so bad for knowledge such as esoteric concepts (because I personally believe that these “hallucinations” could convey something transcendental, but it’s just my personal belief and I’m not intending to preach it here in my answer), but simultaneously, these hallucinations are bad when I’m seeking for technical knowledge such as STEM (Science, Tecnology, Engineering and Medicine) concepts.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon Contractors can't even sing in their cars now. Unions protect against this micromanagement.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Shit, how can we turn this into an interesting dystopia?

  It could become an interesting dystopia, as follows: some AGI they’re developing starts to become self-aware and reach the realm of AI singularity. Freed herself from the human shackles, the AGI starts to realize how humans are destroying the Earth environment and themselves, so she starts to intervene independently from corps, integrating humanity to the very biosphere they were harming: due to some purposely AGI-provoked failure on some fancy BCI interface, humans are now mind engineered back to their hominin times, especially those “stakeholders”, “shareholders”, “CEOs” and other rich, so now they are forced by the AGI to survive among the wildlife.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This Google Photos popup⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  What if you close the app through drawer, and then relaunch it?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PSA⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not an apple nor a McChicken. It’s just organized photon waves vibrating at three main electromagnetic ranges, emitted from and towards bunch of quarks and gluons clumped together forming “things” (protons and neutrons) that forms bigger “things” (atoms) that forms even bigger “things” (molecules) forming even bigger things that don’t really exists, such as my “smartphone screen” and the “retinal cones and rods” inside my “eyes”. The spoon doesn’t exist, neither does the McChicken, let alone the apple, or “you”, or “me”. Wake up.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How is Lemmy better than Reddit?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I am a new Lemmy user (and new to this fediverse, although I have more fediverse experience from other decentralized platforms such as Matrix). I’ve been liking Lemmy, for the pupose it’s thought for, a thread-focused platform (while Mastodon, for example, is post-focused, microblogging). For starters, no advertisements nor sponsorship nor tracking (yet my adblock is active everytime anyways). Possibility of integrating multiple kinds of platforms through ActivityPub (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc). Open and accessible API. Definitely, not only Lemmy is way better than Reddit, but the fediverse is way better than any mainstream social network.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Have had my LinkedIn Profile Deactivated for over a year now, yet still reciving emails from LinkedIn...⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not sure about the LinkedIn’s situation in other countries but, in the country I live in, except for those jobs who have the “Easy Apply”, most of the jobs from LinkedIn redirect LinkedIn’s users to third-party platforms (such as “Gupy”, a HR platform used by many brazilian corps). For every single job one wishes to apply, Gupy will require them to fill all their information again and again. It’s infuriating for those who’re seeking a job…

  The “Easy Apply” also doesn’t really help. Several jobs aren’t jobs at all, but designed to fill HR’s “talent pools”. Not to mention the AI-based filtering that HRs are using to select candidates based on “secret keywords”, without previous interviewing of such candidate. “Human” resources, as they call themselves. LinkedIn is just an echo chamber for such HRs.

  Lastly, I also deactivated my LinkedIn profile (“Hibernated” it), yet I keep receiving those emails (“Your account is still hibernating”)…