Dæmon S.

What when dark humor is self-deprecating instead of deprecating others? For example, this drawing I made, in which there’s humor from mixing esoterica/occult (alchemical transmutation/metamorphosis) with ornithological behaviors (owls eat rodents) being read by my self-avatar (i.e. a projection of my self) in self-loathe (imagining oneself as a rat/mouse to become dinner for owls). Perhaps one would call this “grim humor” because it’s a subtle Memento Mori, but it seems more of a dark humor piece, a piece I had some legit laugh back when I made. Drawing pieces like this is my attempt to stay sane while trapped into an insane existence.

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There’s also a social factor in play: yes, I could refrain from having “smart” apparata (and face the crushing social ostracism stemmed from this choice), but if one of my neighbors have a “smart” apparatus, depending on which one it is, it could technically be used to spy on me. I mean, the whole polemic involving Meta’s Creep-Glass has to do exactly with how those things can be used and are being used to spy on others, unbeknownst to said others who never ever purchased a Creep-Glass.

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Even before the arrival of ChatGPT, Ashley Madison, for example, was using bots to catfish their users. So it’s definitely not a new thing coming from Western corporations.

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…in the “MAGA Way” Galaxy, about to merge with Androamerica to form the new America Galaxy, all part of the Laniamerica Supercluster…

(Spaceballs? Oh, shit, there goes the planet)

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Sometimes I wondered if there’s Supernatural fandom on Fediverse (because I’ve seen more Star Trek references when I doomscroll Lemmy’s All feed, but practically no Supernatural references, as if people went on a hunting trip and hasn’t been home), and seeing the comments on this thread, yep, there’s Supernatural fandom on Fediverse.

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Are you sure we’re talking about the same Lil-la? As in, 𒊩𒆤𒇲?

The guy learning Web Ontology Language:

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Machine translation is also pre-ChatGPT tech, yet Google have been outsourcing their Translate to their Gemini, as in, Google Translate became yet another Gemini interface, just like many Google “products” nowadays.

But I’m aware of and I agree that “protoclankers” such as Image Classifier models (e.g. MobileNet) are lightweight enough to run on low-end devices like the one (Nokia 5.4) I use… although, even in this case, when protoclankers are employed in place of clankers, one of my main points stays the same: the steps being performed whenever there’s a (false) positive for a pre-instructed pattern.

A false positive is particularly likely for protoclankers due to their higher compression. If even full-fledged clankers such as Mistral can misread my owl drawings as “a cat” or (because we’re talking about Google) Google Lens/Gemini can misread my digital art of a solar eclipse silhouetted by a Bubo virginianus as “a viral photo showing a Spanish professional skateboarder Danny León performing a mid-air trick perfectly aligned with the August 12, 2026 total solar eclipse” (when it’s far from being a photo), I can only imagine how awfully a million-parameter Image Classifier protoclanker can perform with deeply-symbolic and carefully-drawn art which even humans can struggle to understand.

There’s no magic when it comes to how much data can fit within a mathematical representation of a dataset larger than the representation itself, especially when Zipf’s law gets applied to said dataset in order to try and remove hapax legomena while also accounting for repeated data.

And what happens after a false positive happens? Even if it’s a locally-ran image classifier, the whole thing isn’t fully local; if the locally-running protoclanker detects something matching the pre-instructed pattern, then a set of online tasks will likely be performed: uploading the file(s) to Google servers or, if the pattern being searched for is criminal imagery, preemptively filing a report to the authorities.

In the latter case, if the protoclanker is filing reports without humans in the loop doing the due-diligence of double-checking (which is very likely what’s happening due to how employees cost money and how Google et al have been prioritizing their budget to the ongoing AI hype), then Google, legally responsible for their protoclanker, would be committing the crime of false accusation (e.g. misreading my derivative mashup between Burney Relief and Éliphas Levi’s Baphomet as “CSAM” as it incorrectly labels the flanking owls as “minors”).

And given how my artistic content is anything but criminal (the most shady aspects being the psychological horror and the depictions of blood in vampire contexts, aspects of which, given how there are Hollywoodian horror movies depicting the same, are perfectly legal), stemmed from a legitimate religious expression which (at least on paper) is protected by law (Article 5, item VI from Brazilian Federal Constitution as I’m someone under the umbrella of Brazilian laws) and done in a private space, the potentially unsupervised filings of false criminal accusations by Google’s protoclanker, be it against me or any other law-abiding person, will hopefully result in Google shooting themselves in the foot.

The guerrilla tactic here is me being bold enough not to care about the consequences of using a surveillance device (a phone running stock Android) to register, record and manifest my faith in a very verbose and unfiltered, artistic manner, fully aware that the phone will phone home (pun intended; I don’t even bother to use VPNs and PiHole, I’m raw-doggin their surveillance when I’m not on my Linux laptop); and in the meantime, hoping Google will hoard fragments of my dark psyché to train their Gemini (thus poisoning the well in the process; it would be fun to see Google Search/Gemini, out of nowhere, randomly spitting invocation texts written in Akkadian/Sumerian cuneiform, infodumping owl taxonomy and their diet, spitting random ramblings against the Demiurge, quoting pessimist philosophers such as Phillipp Mainlander, and/or having Nano Banana to produce images with glitched artifacts resembling the Seal of Lilith).

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As I said to borari, when stuff involves lots (GiBs) of nonindexed files (my private art) and a smartphone whose hardware can barely make a distilled Llama/Gemma to spit out a “The sum of the squares of the sides is the square of the hypotenuse” (yes, I did try local LLMs so I’m aware of my hardware limits), they would have no choice other than phone home, and thus carrying haunting voices through the ongoing call.

Also, they have some inner desire to hoard people’s data for training their clanker. Except the data can (and will) be poisoned, thus poisoning the well.

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That’s the thing: they’re looking for something, and in order to look for something, they must look, and lots of computation (AI inference) must happen, especially when it involves nonindexed files (my own private art, from digital drawings and handmade sketches, going through photos of my own ritualistic installations, all the way to Blender 3D renders and animations, all of which is yet to be crawled). And if this involves gibibytes of data, on a smartphone whose hardware can barely run 1B parameter clankers locally without hiccuping, I can see my private files going to Google’s servers for “efficient inference”, files of which will likely end up seen by (and sowing some interesting inspirations for nightmares in the subconsciousnesses of) Google’s employees during server maintenance/audits or, mainly, end up training their clanker.

As for the latter, hopefully Google Gemini would end up “seeing” enough of my digitized psyche to randomly start silly infodumpings about, for example, different owl taxonomies and their diets down to the very gory microdetails about how owls make a tasty dinner out of mice, and/or the different interpretations by historians and archaeologists regarding the figure (Ereshkigal or Lilith) depicted in the Burney Relief, a Mesopotamic plaque of which, by the way, is part of the phone’s gallery too (including my own artistic works inspired on it) and seemingly an efficient trigger for nudity detection algorithms, which will likely put the rest of the gallery under automated scrutiny (because there was a positive, albeit a false one) and, thus, serving as the semantic Trojan Horse for my dark artistic private content to make its way to their servers.

I mean, how else Google Gemini would’ve taken the “inspiration” to suddenly start telling people to “eat rocks” and “add glue to pizza”? Its training data is crowdsourced so there’s nothing much Google can do to avoid sources poisoning the well (and I must nod at the Nephentes algorithm which I praise as way more efficient than Anubis to hurt the western AI corps) other than:

1. Adding said poisoned sources to their .gitignore equivalent if they know they’ll likely find poison they don’t want messing up with their expensive AI training.
2. Doing manual curation of people’s personal files, which is time-consuming and potentially unfeasible when dealing with billions of phones.
3. Trying to improve the detection algorithms to avoid poisoned sources (which requires training data, which requires them to rely on potentially poisoned sources, which defeats the whole purpose of improving the algorithms in the first place).
4. Stopping to put everything else into scrutiny when the detection algorithms stumble upon (potentially false) positives, risking false negatives, which will likely attract some heat from regulatory agencies worldwide and fines for failing to comply with things such as age checking laws (and there it goes the GOOG stocks, together with the entirety of NASDAQ, like a Titanic as investors realize they’re paying for fines not theirs; be it GOOG or other stock, the popping of the ongoing AI bubble will inevitably be something in this regard, Western corporations having their clankers failing on them).

At best, this will consume some portion of Google’s resources (including but not limited to human resources), albeit as infinitesimal as my silly existence can get to a worldwide corporation, but it’s still something I guess…

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I once stumbled upon this app automatically installed on the phone I happen to have paid for (because at this point I doubt I could call this piece of metallic tile “my phone” and suing Google Inc. for them to refund me this phone would be as successful as if I tried to push and move a certain Mountain View building from its place with my own muscles). Shortly after that, it seems to have vanished from the list of apps as mysteriously as it initially appeared, either it uninstalled itself or it was changed names.

In any case, as soon as I realized that presence and realized I wouldn’t have an “uninstall” option without turning on options that would straightforwardly break banking apps and government apps (gov.br the Brazilian app for everything citizen-related) I was compelled to use, I started filling the phone’s gallery with all sorts of potentially-triggering stuff I either find online or (mainly) make myself: dark art including FNAF-like jump scares, haunted/cursed artifacts and occult/ritualistic imagery, photos and videos depicting snakes and scorpions, lots of Memento Mori including photos of cemeteries and tombstones, archaeological skeletons, buzzards eating animal carcasses in the wilderness, as well as media of my own cut wr… I mean, uhm, media of my own cute wrathful owl I sculpted on Blender. Yeah, several different 3d rendered scenes and short animation videos as well, especially scenes in which she’s performing chases and huntings… Not to mention the plethora of owl photos and videos, many of which are birdwatching of them catching and eating prey on nature, in potentially gory settings (i.e. the unfiltered, untamed nature who doesn’t care about our anthropocentric definitions of good and evil).

So if Google decides to start “protecting me from (my own) sensitive imagery”, their clanker is essentially going to have a hard time having to go through gibibytes of media and potentially wiping the whole device as I made sure to fill the entire storage (even non-media things too, such as using provoking nicknames for fictional contacts like a contact card for “Inanna”, as well as odd descriptions for bank transactions such as “my soul belongs to Ereshkigal”) with purposefully sensitive content. If they do that, I’ll then have something more concrete to sue them for: religious intolerance, as it’s all representing of my left-hand path spirituality.

And with all this I leave this one absurdist idea on how to try and boycott the corporate nanny (and surveillance). A phone gallery full of sensitive items (not nudes, but dark/provocative art purposefully built to trigger similar nannying responses) will hopefully overwhelm their servers, shall they offload the computing to their data centers. If this doesn’t overwhelm their servers, at least the techbros and their clankers are going to have an interesting time when scrolling through legal-yet-disturbing content they hoarded from Android users’ phones.

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Here, lemme fix some things with the help of my personal AI (Awkward Imagination):

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Also, given how telephones like the one from the photo were the main way out of the simulation in The Matrix, the cry/screech was from someone outside The Matrix. Whoever was crying/screeching, was trying to warn about how computers, simulation within the simulation, would be further trapping us inside The Matrix. Now the telephones are gone, and so is our only line to whoever was trying to warn.

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Sincerely? I hope not, or at least it must be an opt-in thing rather than something forcefully imbued into the platform.

Languages that I don’t know may pose a language barrier to me, but at the same time there’s something magic in getting to recognize (and even trying to spell/write) certain words and symbols once I put myself into trying to figure out what’s written and how it’s written.

This is how I managed to learn (albeit imperfectly and in a fragmented manner) the ideographs I mentioned earlier, among several other languages, including the so-called “dead languages” such as Sumerian and Akkadian (e.g. whenever I see “𒆤”, I know it’s “lil” meaning wind/spirit)… And this is how I learned, to give broader examples, what a “bumat” (البومة) is in Arabic and which letters are involved in its writing, or what’s the difference between a “búho” and a “mochuelo” and a “lechuza” in Spanish, or what a “fukurou” (フクロウ) is in Japanese, or what a “chouette” is in French, or what an “oehoe” is in Dutch (especially how one was able to enfrighten two Dutch villages years ago, the cute yet fierce “terror-oehoe”), or “Eule” in German, or more symbolic words such as “lila” (לילה) “night” in Hebrew or “Лилит” as the Russian transliteration for Hebrew “לילית”… I was able to learn, or at least memorize, a ton of things across languages… Without AI.

Any kind of automatic translation, especially when AI-powered and fused into the UI, would hardly let me learn a language, because it’d bring the whole thing chewed up and translated, with no means for me to break the sentence down to its constituent words and letters/symbols and how much the surrounding context changes their meanings… not to mention how it ends up wiring our brains to expect the machine to do the reading for us, then we become dependent on machines to do what’s essentially part of being a living being (humans and whatnot).

Also, translation often involves nuance, tone, sarcasm, emotions. AIs can be able to do “sentiment analysis” and connect words together in order to derive an assessment, but it’ll be devoid of the attempted connection from whoever wrote the text being translated.

That said, Bilibili does have an automatic translation for titles and comments, turned on by default. I deliberately turned it off, because I want to see the Chinese ideographs, even though I’m not able to truly understand what I’m reading there. I expect to learn them from context and repetition, from trial and error… And when I get to see one of the ideographs standing out before my vision as something I know, getting to see them and yelling “hey, I know these two symbols, these are baxi 巴西 and together they mean Brazil”… Oh, there’s a whole fun to it, a fun that’s virtually non-existent when a clanker is doing all the heavy lifting.

Don’t get me wrong, I do use translators, I’m not against translators, but I personally prefer using them manually, under my own pace and command while also being able to isolate certain words from surrounding sentences, this way getting to expand my vocabulary a little bit through a research of my own (e.g. looking it up on Wiktionary or other dictionaries out there), because I want to be able to learn something, anything, from it.

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As soon as I saw this news, I signed up there in order to see how it is like. I’m yet to find non-Chinese-language content, as I don’t really know Chinese. I mean, I do know from memory some very specific Chinese ideographs (given my special interests) such as maotouying (猫头鹰 lit. “Cat-headed eagle”, which is one of the words for “owl”, aside from xiao 鴞) which was, unsurprisingly, my first search in Bilibili. (I also know words and ideographs such as hong 红 red, ni hao 你好 greetings, ren 人 person/people, among others that wouldn’t suffice for me to, say, buy 500g of bread in a bakery during some trip to China, lol)

The platform quite of reminds me of xiaohongshu (Red note), including the same emoji pack.

Then I tried to search for words with Latin alphabet (e.g. “Ereshkigal” and “Pomba-gira”) and the results were nothing directly related to my search query, with Bilibili returning me a list of recommended videos based on my watch history (owl videos) instead.

One thing I liked is the lack of notifications (TikTok used to push notifications a lot) and the (momentary) lack of advertisements, maybe because there aren’t companies from my geographic region (Brazil) buying ad placement there yet.

As a Brazilian, I’m sincerely wishing to see more Chinese and nonwestern alternatives to things, including but not limited to video platforms. I’ve been boycotting YouTube for two years and counting, for example, and it would be interesting to see a Chinese alternative to it other than the westernized TikTok (which is nowhere near to Chinese-only Douyin and its likely better/educational content). And, of course, I’m also rooting for PeerTube to gain traction, because it’s native to Fediverse.

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As a neurodivergent (possibly AuDHD), I wonder and worry if this wouldn’t end up increasing false positives when it comes to neurodivergent way of speaking.

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“Generalized Anxiety Disorder carefully helping one kid win his little league game while giving a different kid bone cancer”.

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I expect these restaurants, pubs and theatres to have no CCTV, either, otherwise it’d quite a hypocritical take if they prohibited non-consensual surveillance glasses while keeping non-consensual surveillance cameras. The same way I feel unsafe before someone wearing Duckerberg’s glasses, I also feel unsafe before a surveillance camera whose footage Goddess-knows-who is getting access to (not to mention how most “modern” CCTV feeds their images to AI; wonder why most AI video generators get to generate, e.g., “doorbell camera footage” so easily?).

Also, IMHO, the prohibition on Meta glasses should be targeting the manufacturers (corporations such as Meta, but also Google and other companies developing similar aberrations) instead of just the users. Because, when users are the only ones to blame, society risks missing the forest for the trees, as the corps behind these aberrations would be left unbothered enough for them to work on “thinner frames for smartglasses” which would further pave the way for people like me, who have to wear high-myopia prescription glasses, to be lynched for my thin-framed dumbglasses just because human society would be so blinded by their (understandable) rage that they’d be judging me for the pair of glasses in front of my eyes I got no choice but to wear to live in said society (if I had to remove my prescription glasses in order to be allowed in, I wouldn’t be able to watch your theatre play or getting to read your damn beverage menu, for example).

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10yr+ DevOps career (the entirety of it having been dedicated to creation and maintenance of NDA-wrapped systems that don’t even exist anymore (so the “proof” became “poof!” thanks to legalese prohibiting me from having it as “live portfolio”) because corporations don’t GAF about how much of our own soul we put upon coding something as programmers), incomplete bachelor degree for reasons too long to get into detail, started coding during my late childhood, 2 yrs (and counting) of unemployment and, sincerely, utter disillusionment with the winds of all fields of human endeavors, especially the enshittification of tech… Even though I’m not a junior, sometimes I widened my search to include junior positions as well (“you shouldn’t be too picky” as I heard a few times, as if job positions were the only ones granted the divine right to be “picky” about who they should hire), so I can quite relate…

It’s been some time since I gave up doing pointless searching, and all of this makes me wonder if my next job will be “in-situ quality test inspector of six-feet-under diggings”, “afterlife consultancy” or “personal secretary of Ms. Rosa Caveira”, because I have no expectations (nor the will) of being “repositioned” within the “job market”, especially because I don’t want to be a ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini nanny, which seems to be the case for most, if not all, DevOps jobs nowadays.

At least Ms. Caveira doesn’t require experience, the job requires no paperwork, it’d be instant start, and I feel like She’d the best employer ever (e.g. I wouldn’t be a fungible number in Her spreadsheet).

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Rent your phone so you can rent an app that’ll allow you to access your internet banking and pay for all the rents, including the rental of payment services for rental paying?

No, thanks, I’ll cut through this whole Rube-Goldberg machinery of “living in society”, straight into applying for a leasing for my next six-feet-under wooden house instead. I’d love the view, grass and chrysanthema at my roof, buzzards as my faithful company (whether it’ll be part of the legalese leasing terms or not, Mother Nature doesn’t care about that, and neither do I as I’d be long gone (or should I say, long bones) at that point).

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