Daemon Silverstein

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).

According to my searches, while a RTG uses radioactive material weighting in the scale of kilograms (average of 5 Kg across missions such as Voyager and Cassini), a nuclear power plant requires several tonnes worth of plutonium and enriched uranium. The minimal critical mass for plutonium is 10kg, the double of how many fuel RTGs hold (that’s why RTGs don’t blow while ascending and/or on space). It’s a large difference of mass/weight between RTG fuel and rods for nuclear power plants. They’d need to carry the whole tonnes worth of radioactive material split across very small quantities (which would require a lot of lead walling and/or launches)

I can imagine a rocket full of plutonium and uranium rods, sitting above immense tanks of combustible liquid: what the odds of such a rocket exploding during ascent? What are the effects of solar and cosmic radiation energy over these rods (even if they’re lead shielded), especially around Van Allen radiation belt? So many questions.

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 as “catharsis” for 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.

“Press F to pay respects” Same vibe

Actively criticizing how both USSR and US secretly gave citizenship and hired nazi-fascists (and history is there to be checked) (therefore actively positioning myself against nazi-fascists and against everybody who “sits at a table with nazis and stays at the table”) is “carrying water for nazi-fascists”? WTH?!

Reeducation won’t revive nazi victims. USSR and US were no necromancers.

Indeed, but even hiring and giving citizenship for such people (nazi scientists, military and engineers), especially considering how they got their “knowledge” isn’t an “ok” thing. Neither for US’s Paperclip.

Both US and USSR secretly hired nazi personnel, such as scientists and engineers. Later, both operations were disclosed respectively as Operation Paperclip and Operation Osoaviakhim. USSR didn’t destroy nazi-fascism, they secretly incorporated it (that is, if I correctly understood the reference from the meme, maybe I’m needlessly “ranting”).

What about Operation Osoaviakhim?

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.

Have a proper radio ham license. Buy a 40-meter transceiver and a software defined radio dongle. Convert your code into esoteric programming languages such as Whitespace and Brainf, then spell it. “Plus, plus, next, plus, dot, open bracket, next, …”. Transmit your spelling over 40-meter band, while a receiver across the continent is tuned to the frequency. Ask it to repeat and record the QSO. Set the SDR recorder to I/Q packets instead of demodulating AM. Publish it as an audiobook.

A marker point for geodetic marking. Also known as triangulation station or trigonometrical point, it’s fixed to the ground with its known coordinates.

Randomness (even the computer’s pseudorandom) is really amazing. Perlin noise, Sierpinski triangles traced through random walking, etc… Lots of things can be done with random sequences.

Yep. The lemon-flavored soda. Its fizzling sound.

It’s half empty and half full, at the same time, in some quantum overlapped state. The actual state, either half empty or half full, collapses as soon as it’s open.

As a programmer, I see lots of null characters going on (AA is the base64’s starting sequence for 00s).

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.

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 the LLM with important concepts before asking it for combinations. It is a good technique, considering that LLMs couldn’t know it so 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)

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.