Daemon Silverstein

@NarrativeBear@lemmy.world 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.

@wieson@feddit.org Well, I’m not really into sports (I’m far detached from the stereotypical Brazilian who likes to watch Corinthians x Palmeiras/Flamengo x Fluminense/etc at Fridays while they’re gathering with their friends in a bar while drinking cachaça, I’m more of a nerdy and friendless person), but indeed, soccer/football is definitely part of a cultural aspect shared among European countries (especially Germany, Portugal and Spain, as far as I know) and Brazil (as well as other South American countries, such as Argentina).

@InternetCitizen2@lemmy.world @carotte@lemmy.blahaj.zone

Pois é, o bagulho tá mó difícil de entender, o pessoal parece que não desembucha na hora de prosear 😅

/s

@Mika@sopuli.xyz !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world I’m Brazilian and oftentimes the “All” feed across the entire Lemmy ecosystem feels, in fact, like a smoothie mashup between European-specific political issues and USian-specific political issues, so, when it comes to the phenomenon that the European Fedizens feel on Lemmy, not only we feel the same, but we, Fedizens from the Global South, we feel it twice!

@mysticmartz@lemmy.world

Those LoRa devices like meshtastic look good

Yeah, tinkering with radio and Open-source hardware in general is funny and awesome. I did some personal projects in this regard, not exactly meshtastic, but experiments using a cheap RTL-SDR and some transmission-capable things such as Baofeng UV-5R and remote controllers from some of my childhood toys. I wish I could afford to experiment more with hardware, electronic and, especially, radio equipment.

Unfortunately, it’s like @dubyakay@lemmy.ca said, radio equipment can become targets, too.

In reality, this is already happening in EU: recently, I saw something about EU passing a law requiring all radio-capable devices to be, as far as I can recall, “tampering-proof” or something similar, and this is threatening alternative mobile OSes (such as GrapheneOS) because this law requires bootloaders to be unlockable or something. So, in practice, governments are already targeting radio.

Not to mention how “easy” is to triangulate a signal and how telecommunication regulators often do “wardrive” scanning in order to seek “irregular transmissions” (not just those disrupting others’ transmissions, but anything they could deem “irregular” because they’re the authorities in charge of allowing or refusing others rights, and this deemed “irregularity” could easily be using Briar through Bluetooth, or meshtastic nodes, during a strike/protest).

This takes me to another point from your reply:

I don’t like the idea of TOR and I2C because it’s known to hold disgusting and concerning stuff

It’s worth mentioning that disgusting and concerning stuff isn’t exclusive to Darknet, Clearnet also has such stuff, especially mainstream social media.

I mean, you’re not wrong, Darknet is indeed used for that, not because it’s inherent to Darknet, but because people who do concerning stuff also seek anonymity just like legitimate, well-intentioned privacy-concerned people, and Darknet happens to provide such anonymity for both uses in a double-edged sword manner.

Problem is: there’s no way to differentiate two anonymous actors without breaking the very fundamentum of anonymity.

And this very argument you used unfortunately can be twisted by authorities to justify breaking anonymity and, by extension, privacy.

For authorities willing to control everyone’s lives so badly, it just takes a small leap for the phrase to be reshaped and re-adapted as…

“private content/people’s intimacies must be scanned/watched because they’re known to hold disgusting and concerning stuff”

This is almost the argument behind EU’s “Chat Control”. And the majority of people end up joining this bandwagon unaware of where this bandwagon leads to: something that makes 1984 feel like a sugarcoated documentary.

Unfortunately, there’s no easy solution regarding “disgusting and concerning stuff”, but we should be really careful lest to throw the baby out with the dirty bathwater.

@mysticmartz@lemmy.world

First and foremost, it’s not something limited to UK. Maybe it’s because I’m watching things from “outside” the so-called “first world” (I’m Brazilian), and I can’t help but notice how it’s something that have been spreading throughout the countries: Canadian bill whose number I forgot, EU’s “Chat Control”, some Australian laws, etc… It’s getting everywhere! It didn’t start yesterday, also: I remember SOPA and PIPA back in 2010s (or was it 2000s? I’m getting old).

It’s worldwide, and it won’t be long before there are no more countries where “nothing to fear, nothing to hide” is the official motto via some kind of global treat/pact. It won’t stop in adult entertainment: eventually, it’ll cover every online activity. In this sense, “children” are just the frogs being morally leveraged by scorpions to cross an Orwellian river.

That said, VPNs are someone else’s computers sitting between latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates delimiting some geodesic convex hull we know as “country/nation” ruled by an entity who happens to have the monopoly over asymmetrical forces ruling over that very someone. Even nodes from Tor, I2P, Yggdrasil, Hyphanet, GNUNet, Usenet servers or grand-old SOCKS4/SOCKS4a/SOCKS5 proxies are someone else’s computer sitting inside some “country”.

And if all countries end up agreeing, out of shared dominance interests (even the so-called “inimical” countries, because even those “inimical” countries agree on certain treats such as the Global Treat regarding Antarctica), to some kind of “Online Kid Protection Global Treat” or whatever frog they can take any moral advantage of, there will be no computer proxification left for circumventing the new KYC requirements for accessing the Web, because there’ll be no more alternative countries left… Not even micronations such as Principality of Sealand.

Yeah, future doesn’t seem good, and the majority of global citizens won’t fight against it (we, privacy-conscious and tech-savvy people, we’re not the majority), so it’s kind of a Cassandra curse going on right now.

Maybe we must go back to radio communication? Radio mesh networks? Perhaps well-hidden geo-treasure pen-drives for exchanging and archiving files? Creating our own novel ciphering methods, steganography and security through obscurity, becoming able to physically speak through coded language on a daily basis? Even carrier pigeons and smoke signaling (I’m not joking) feels “safe” and out of the Orwellian reaches for now… For now.

(I guess they could still be spotted by LEO satellite imagery. And god-forbid a smoke pattern is caught modulating and transmitting the original uncropped Lena picture over the atmosphere /s).

@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.

@yogthos@lemmy.ml 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?

@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.

@descartador@lemmy.eco.br !mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world

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).

@frittoBee@lemmy.world !mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world
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.

@skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl @A_norny_mousse@feddit.org

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)

@sirico@feddit.uk

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)

@squaresinger@lemmy.world It’s probably because my kernel version is very old (5.14.11-arch1-1, haven’t updated since 2019, even though it’s Arch, a rolling-release distro) and my Acer laptop is old as well (Intel Core 7th gen), but I rarely have problems regarding laptop sleep. After I wake the laptop up, the video (including every VT#) may get frozen and I have to remotely SSH and request a reboot (and when this happens, sometimes the reboot gets stuck as well, so I have to do a hard power-off). But it’s very rare, as stated, and I daily put my laptop to sleep without issues, sometimes the system uptime stretches to weeks (currently, my system was booted almost four days ago).