Daemon Silverstein

Do you know what the worst thing about being from Antarctica is? Those country lists rarely include it. Penguins should invade and conquer the world, for the greatness of the Penguin Country.🐧🇦🇶

I have the same feeling about Facebook. To me, my Orkut memories are more vivid than the ones from Facebook.

Considering that the last person I knew online was a “friend” (something I’m really not sure, because I guess I’m not even sure what friendship is?), the person accused me of using AI to talk to her, because I often seem cold and emotionless (even though I’m just numb due to events that has been happening throughout my entire existence, and I guess that’s different from not being able to feel emotions).

Speaking of offline people, the last person I knew (also not sure whether it was friendship or not) betrayed my trust, they did a thing behind my back, a thing that I became aware of, but the same person continued to hide it from me and insisted of referring to me as “friend”.

Well, maybe I never had friends at all, and I guess I won’t as I’m now in my 30s. It’s okay, as I often mentally repeat to myself, every coffin can only hold a single body anyways (apologies for this memento mori).

In Portuguese (especially Brazilian), there are singular and plural forms of “you”: “você” (singular) and “vocês” (plural). In English, “you” behaves like a plural because it’s followed by “are” instead of “is”. The only exception I can see is “yourself” and “yourselves” that refer to both singular and plural forms.

However, In Portuguese, even though we have “vocês” as plural form, we also use “vocês todos” or “todos vocês” (“you all”/“all of you”) sometimes.

Lots of them, all scattered across the body. And those tattoos should be investigated by the FBI agent whose name is one of the enigmatic tattoos. They’re also expected to be deciphered at the right moment by a brilliant FBI mathematician. (Spoiler: there are also tattoos using invisible ink that can only be seen when the person visits a place full of UV lights). It takes time.

UEFI is also affectable: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2024/08/windows-update-breaking-linux-dualboot-fix/amp

There are cases where Windows messes up with booting, rendering Linux unable to boot. There’s even a recent thing involving GRUB that stopped booting up after some Windows update.

Flying by brooms (Bro thel)

As a Brazilian nervously watching the unfolding of a potentially global mess, I bring you the best Brazil can offer: memes! Here’s a pretty relatable one (Original cartoon from Maurício de Souza, Turma da Mônica)

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.

Yeah, I totally relate. There’s this thing in introverts, social battery, that is used to deplete quickly.

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.

the US becomes a third world banana republic

As a Brazilian, living in a third world banana republic, I couldn’t agree more! US is somehow mimicking our past elections, particularly our most recent election.

Similar vibe:

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.

Yes. And there’s a younger generation (Gen Alpha) using slangs such as “👁️👄👁️” as a synonym for “😮” (if I understood correctly, because I’m not Alpha, I’m Zennial).

OpenIndiana (Solaris), OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Haiku, AROS (AmigaOS), GNU Hurd, MINIX, ReactOS, TempleOS and others: allow us to introduce ourselves…

Because of community and instance rules.

Ouch… Another project being Enshatterfied™ (I’m avoiding a swearing word). Starting from what version that the Audacity becomes so Enshatterfied? Here I have Audacity 2.4.1, before Audacity was bought.

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).