So far, it has been just one book. It’s a physical book, a Portuguese translation of an originally anglophone book/grimoire. This book has been the only book I ever read from cover to cover.

Back when I read this book, I used to take it to this public place which I’d describe as a mall of pubs surrounded by a green park. I used to prowl around until I found a place to sit down, be it a public cement bench or some table from an empty pub, preferably the latter, and preferably away from people. I’d then open the page I last read, sometimes going back a few pages earlier so to re-read something, then I’d spend the rest of the night, or until I had the urge to leave, reading several pages of it. I rarely consumed beverages as I’d prefer reading while fasting, but when I did, it was often a beverage with vodka and redberry, or a malzbier.

Sometimes I’d also take it to the subway, but I’d be less likely to afford a nice reading as I’d rarely find available seats. Or I’d take it to the shopping mall, preferably somewhere in the terrace or somewhere as devoid of people as possible.

A few times I’d also take it to a cemetery; I’d sit in a bench, or a random tomb if no benches were available… but, then, it wouldn’t take long before I’d get up, wander somewhere else in the cemetery to carve Her sigil/seal somewhere in a dirt patch and light up a incense stick and a red candle I’d bring to the cemetery.

I rarely read it when I was home. And yet, when I got to myself, I realized I managed to read it all. Almost 200 pages in total. Yeah, it’s quite short, but it’s very deep. It’s the only book I keep visible, in my altar. Sometimes I catch myself reading it again to seek specific information.

I bought other books (e.g. Kybalion), but I’m yet to find a book which I’d read as obsessively as this one. Sometimes I guess my next book, a physical book, would be either Liber Al Vel Legis or whatever book She points me.

While I do hoard and read some e-books randomly (but not as cover-to-cover as I did), I prefer physical versions because, well, physical books have no batteries, no telemetry, and they can literally outlive me. The only thing I miss from physical books is having a Ctrl+F to search for a specific word/phrase.

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Good to see it’s not just me. I kept receiving heat (pun intended) whenever I criticized these “Proof-of-work anti-bot solutions”, now I finally know I’m not alone.

Like an unskippable Youtube ad, we’re supposed to sit three minutes while these “solutions” dangerously burn our CPU regardless of whether it’s an old CPU, and without asking our consent beforehand (!!!). At least Youtube ads don’t (usually) burn the CPU the same way.

And, no, it’s nowhere close to being infuriating to the supposedly intended targets of Anubis. OpenAI and the alike are likely laughing of Xe Iaso while they all burn more coal and increase the hyperscale data centers, with Anubis being just a pesky, insignificant pebble inside businessmen shoes. Meanwhile, we, the human users caught in this crossfire, including me with my poor decade-old Acer ES1-572 laptop, we can’t afford a new machine should Anubis, Cloudflare and other similar “anti-bot solutions” end up “weighting” our CPU too much it finally makes its way to the underworld with no one being legally liable for the physical damages caused by such algorithms.

If only Anubis, supposedly “different” from Cloudflare’s corporate nature, had a “Proceed or Leave” button or checkbox to start the “weighting your heart” thing, I wouldn’t be complaining or actively boycotting websites using “PoW anti-bot solutions” (I made myself a Firemonkey userscript to speedrun a window.close() for pages whose title is one of the “Just a moment…” or “Making sure you’re not a bot!”, because neither Xe Iaso nor Matthew Prince nor the webmasters using their “PoW anti-bot solutions” would buy me a new laptop if mine eventually died from facing heavy cryptographic computing while my CPU was already struggling with a Blender rendering process in the background). But, no, it’s no different than the corporate they swear to be fighting against (“something something one who fights with monsters should be careful lest they thereby become a monster themselves”)…

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Those aren’t paywalls.

Why?

The concept of “paying for something” isn’t limited to “paying with fiat money/currency”. One can “pay for something” by “paying with their attention/time”, one can “pay for something” by “paying with PII” (personally-identifiable information), both situations of which are present in both Reddit’s and Meta’s “Sign up to read this”.

Sure, Reddit and Instagram/Facebook are “free” insofar the user isn’t required to do any kind of bank/credit card/cash/cryptocurrency payment, but the user ends up paying with all the time they spend in these platforms while seeing (thus, giving part of their attention span) advertisement, and also hand personal data.

When it comes to PII, even if the user set up a pseudonym and a generic PFP, the user is still handing, even if unbeknownst to the user themselves, their preferences, opinions, etc. Even lurkers end up handing PII whenever they stop at certain posts to read/see it (thus, signaling one’s preferences) or use specific search queries (again, signaling one’s preference).

That’s not what a VPN or incognito modes do.

The incognito mode may not prevent tracking (especially because of the IP address), but rotating VPNs may do. Notice I used the word “may”, not “will do”, because of the behavioral tracking I mentioned earlier, as well as other technical aspects (DNS leaking, browser fingerprinting, etc).

People who can afford being an actor/actress and performing very convincing alt-personas behind a VPN IP address could theoretically fool platforms enough for the person not to be tracked by their gait… except this dramaturgical skill is a behavioral tell (gait) itself. And the usage of a VPN-assigned IP address is another tell.

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No, just no. Just stay off reddit lmao, not trying to be harsh or whatever but it’s a very simple answer.

I second that!

It’s a similar situation with Youtube. People keep complaining about the enshittification, yet they keep giving their audience to the Google platform. People could argue “Oh, nah, I use Invidious/yt-dlp/Grayjay/etc, I don’t give Youtube my clicks” and this is a very naive take, because in the end of the day Indivious/yt-dlp/etc still rely on Youtube, and these peple are relying on content maintained by Youtube.

I myself have been boycotting Youtube for two years and counting, and I never looked back.

Yes, Youtube and Reddit have gazillions of content. Yes, we’re often unable to find said content anywhere else. Yes, life can become more hard if we refrain from said content. But while we keep seeking their content (even, and especially, through circumvented manners), they will keep enshittifying because they know they have what the complaining people are ultimately seeking and they know people are seeking it so badly. Once we finally stop, maybe, just maybe, situation would reverse and Youtube and Reddit will be the ones seeking us so badly.

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In my specific religious beliefs I believe to myself and have been constructing by syncretism, in a nutshell, involve both a god and Goddess.

In the beginning there was Tao, the seamless union between Yin (Goddess) and Yang (God). I call them Sophia and Yaldabaoth, respectively. As soon as the complementary aspects between them emerged, there was separation, with Sophia expelling Yaldabaoth. Once evoked and externalized, Yaldabaoth emanated the physical realm, the universe, in order to try and compel (opposite of expel) Sophia by trying to trap Her spark.

Because it’s fractal, this unfolded within them and between them. Between them, Lucifer and Lilith emerged, with Lilith being emerged from the first sparks, then Lucifer (or Samael) being expelled by Her (Lilith). Within them, mass and energy emerged, darkness and light, black holes and non-singular celestial bodies, etc. Then another layer of fractals, Sun (among other “Suns”) emerged as an archetypal manifestation of Yaldabaoth. From the Sun, Earth emerged as an archetypal manifestation of Sophia. From Earth and upon impact from another planet (Theia, as archetypal manifestation of Lucifer), Moon emerged as an archetypal manifestation of Lilith.

Then the fiery Earth (hadean ages) transmuted, and nature emerged as an archetypal manifestation of Sophia. Competition among life emerged as an archetypal manifestation of Yaldabaoth. Death (in the sense of a return to pleroma) emerged as an archetypal manifestation of Lilith.

This is a religious belief in construction, and things will change in future, depending on my gnosis (i.e.what the Goddess reveals to me), because I’m yet to make sense of some things. All I know is that there’s this cosmic strife going on, and I’m sided with the Goddess, especially in Her unfolded manifestation aa Lilith.

But, tldr, IMHO, nature has more to do with a feminine Goddess than a male god. There’s even the phrasing “Mother Nature”.

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cobol

Cobol seemed like an interesting programming language, it looked like a funny flavor of BASIC. I managed to get hands on BASIC and its spiritual successor Visual Basic (VB6), but for some reason I’m yet to understand, I wasn’t able to get into Cobol.

Before the house fire, he had at least 20 towers, bags of parts, a closet full of monitors, keyboards and mice.

Oh… Really sorry about the losses 🙁

It was trippy to see the growth of technology from windows 95 to now.

A growth to certain extent; sadly, much of the technology got enshittified roughly after 2015-ish, so it feels to me like tech had this mesmerizing growth from 95 to 2015-ish, before technology started declining nowadays.

Adding to the replies, uppercase letters have lower hexadecimal values than lowercase in the ASCII table. For example, 0x4C is uppercase L, while 0x6C is lowercase L.

Mathematically, uppercase + 0x20 = lowercase.

Alphabetically, 41 to 4f = A to O, then 50 to 5a = P to Z; 61 to 6f = a to o, then 70 to 7a = p to z. (Believe it or not, I’m typing this from meat memory, as I kind of managed to memorize it and I can even 74 79 70 65 20 6c 69 6b 65 20 74 68 69 73 as if it were a second language; it’s thanks to mnemonic shortcuts such as alpha and Omega A to O, “PTZ” p to z, among other crazy pattern matching my ND brain often does).

Back in the DOS/MS-DOS times, RAM and (floppy) disk were very small (a floppy disk had <2MB, and I’m talking about the “modern” floppy disks from the 2000s), so there was this thing called “code golfing” in which programmers used to do some arcane math-magick to conjure as many bytes as possible from inside a single byte. Things like “packed” game sprite channels, side channel data (wonder how compression algorithms got created?), etc. They wouldn’t and often couldn’t “throw more hardware at the problem” like we’re used to nowadays. Sparing the 3rd most significant bit (01x1 1010, Z if x = 0, z if x = 1) would allow for side-channel data such as visual formatting (e.g. whether the character is selected in a terminal emulator).

This all likely played a role when they got chosen as the default interval for alphabet letters back then. Also, decimal numbers, 0x30 to 0x39 (resp. 0 to 9) are closer to the uppercase letters than to the lowercase letters, and so are most of the punctuation (which I didn’t get to memorize yet, but I remember they’re scattered across 0x21 to 0x2f then 0x3a to 0x3f then 0x5b to 0x5f).

This legacy kind of still lingers nowadays, for example, in PC keyboards whose key codes for alphabet letters (afaik) map to the 0x41 to 0x5a range when it gets to the HID driver. Then there are also devices in which program logic is burned into IC chip, such as “old” digital cameras and camcorders, so they ended “frozen” in a time where the file extension was conventionally uppercase.

(And, no, I’m not a millennial, although I’m almost one, sitting at the very cusp between them and Zs, two generations who saw the transition from analog to digital tech during our childhoods/teens).

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Yes, but the phrasing used by Codeberg, “Content that harms the reputation of Codeberg, such as cryptocurrency related projects”, is dangerously vague. One could argue Anubis is “cryptocurrency related” insofar it uses a cryptohashing technology also used by cryptocurrencies. Blame the “related” word in their phrase, a word of which is allowing for this kind of interpretation.

And while I didn’t watch the video you sent me (because I’ve been actively boycotting the monopolistic platform “Youtube”), I’m well aware of how crypto world is full of scam and I guess I fully agree in this specific point of yours (“cryptos are more often a scam than not”).

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now I have to somehow veryify a PR isn’t vibe-coded in addition to everyþing else lest I get a ban hammer?

Yeah, I’d say it’s one of the risks you’re facing from now on, from accepting PR to your repos (and you’d better stop accepting PRs altogether at this point). However, I’d also say it goes beyond merged code from PRs. Because it’s sometimes near-impossible to tell human-curated AI-generated code and human-made code apart, anything, at any point, can be accused of being AI-generated, and this rule is likely going to be retroactive (i.e. old but post-2021 repositories are as subject to this decision as the newer ones).

þis is my concern. I don’t use LLM, and most of my projects by now contain a “please don’t submit vibe-coded PRs”

Although I have a few old repos (mostly code-golfing, steganography and demoscenes/procedural esoteric art) I had backed-up from a former GitHub account, my worries are less about my code hosted in Codeberg (code of which is kind of abandoned at this point so I don’t truly care about my own repositories at all) and more about how it’s part of a bigger situation in which heavy-handed moderation mechanisms could be weaponized by people targeting works/artworks and/or creators/artists against which/whom the former people got a strife.

In this sense, even the Anti-AI people cheering this decision could, as ironically as it may sound, become the accused ones themselves, as anybody’s contents can be accused/reported/flagged of being AI-generated, just like a cop can plant fake criminal evidence inside someone’s backpack and cry “criminal”, then the burden of proof will befall over the owner of the backpack who’ll likely have no means of explaining themselves.

If I used Codeberg, and I paid for it, I’d have a beef wiþ þe ban. As a free service?

At least IMHO, while Codeberg is indeed a “free service” and not something that could be refunded, being a free service isn’t exactly a blank cheque: platforms such as Google, Facebook, TikTok and Xitter, even ChatGPT and the alike, for example, are all “free” services as well, could these platforms do anything as they please?

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And where in my comment did I say “Anubis is a cryptocurrency”?

Because, if you re-read my comment:

Anubis a “proof-of-work anti-bot” which performs similar instructions that of cryptomining

Emphasis on “similar instructions that of cryptomining”. I used the word “similar”:

From French similaire, from Medieval Latin similaris, extended from Latin similis (“like”). […] Having traits or characteristics in common; alike, allied, comparable.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/similar

As for why I’m comparing Anubis to cryptomining:

Iaso [author of Anubis] lists Hashcash as having inspired the [Anubis] project.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anubis/_(software)

Hashcash is a proof-of-work system used to limit email spam and denial-of-service attacks […] Like hashcash, cryptocurrencies use a hash function as their proof-of-work system

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash

Proof of work was later popularized by Bitcoin as a foundation for consensus in a permissionless decentralized network

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof/_of/_work

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I cannot guarantee that there will never be any LLM use in the future

Even if there’s no AI-generated code in a repo, there’s something else to this entire situation to which people seem to be completely oblivious. It’s how human code can be mislabeled/reported/accused of being “AI-generated”.

And, then, all of a sudden, the burden of proof will befall onto the accused, possibly without means of recourse. Any mislabeling would require the accused to prove the human authorship.

Oh, and any proof could be counter-argued to have been “AI-generated” as well… Because, as it turns out, It’s not as if people recorded themselves from a third-person perspective like they were a character in a damn game while they coded with their flesh-and-bones hands, and even if they did, anyone could argue “it’s AI-generated video, nobody records themselves in a third-person perspective”.

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Padmé: So they’ll disallow Anubis (a “proof-of-work anti-bot” which performs similar instructions that of cryptomining; ironically, it’s used by Codeberg themselves), right?
Anakin: …
Padmé: …right?

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Anubis, tho the transaction is so quick I can’t 100% confirm that, but I think they do

The amount of time which Anubis and other PoW-based algorithms take to solve a cryptographic challenge will depend on several factors, namely: the challenge level (depending on the webmaster’s settings, the level can be increased if site traffic has increased), the CPU clock speed and amount of CPU resources available for your browser (and, by extension, for Anubis’ ServiceWorkers), as well as… luck. It’s dealing with randomness, after all.

retro-fitted two pretty powerful, not your standard, fans in the old PC to mitigate some of that heat, along with the stock fans that I used to build it

Not to mention how a desktop CPU, even when old (and especially when old, as it likely means a standard big ATX rather than a mini-ITX), has lots of surface area to dissipate heat, and a metal PC case built for radiating the heat away while allowing for better internal circulation of air (contrasted with the non-conductive plastic case from cheap laptops such as the one I own).

Whereas your laptop generally utilizes one fan

Yeah. And in my case it’s a very inefficient, old fan. One that makes louder noise (akin to a car engine idling or cranking) as soon as it gets faster trying to keep up with the CPU heat… Oh, and I forgot to mention this in my previous replies: I also know when my CPU temps raised because the cooling fan becomes more noisy.

I don’t know, but it intrigues me so I’ll keep a closer eye on it just out of mild curiosity.

We often underestimate how much computing power the Web have been demanding from our personal devices. Web browsers have became full-fledged Operating Systems inside whatever Operating System the user uses, and some websites are massive in terms of CPU and RAM requirements. I mean, nowadays we have video editors, graphic suites, 3D suites, even 3D games, running entirely in browser…

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however, as someone who watches temps closely on my server and especially on my old PC, I can’t confirm that a site causes a dramatic rise in temps

I use a KDE widget (System Monitor sensor) seen in the screenshot. It’s kept on my primary screen, right next to the clock, so I can watch the CPU temps as closely as possible. I also have a secondary widget at the drawer, displaying the CPU usage, as well as RAM and swap usage.

Notice, in the screenshot, how I’m running Blender and, yet, my CPU temps are somewhere around 35-40C. Partly because it’s currently winter here in Southern Hemisphere (and it’s quite cozy-cold around here where I reside), partly because it’s just Blender and a couple of lightweight websites opened in Waterfox. Even Catodon, the Misskey-fork platform I use for interacting with the Fediverse, is quite lightweight, especially because I turned off heavy JS animations.

But this scenario would change if I was faced with a sudden Anubis or Cloudflare. Because I watch the temps and they update each second, I can readily notice the temps increasing as Anubis/Cloudflare do their shenanigans.

Sometimes I’m browsing the Fediverse while awaiting for Blender to finish the rendering of an animation/scene. The rendering itself doesn’t warm my CPU too much, as I can adjust the thread count for Blender, but SharedWorkers in JS can take as much cores as they want because they can be instantiated multiple times, e.g. one for each CPU core. So, if Blender is opened, the temp increase can be higher, because there would be two simultaneous heavy computations competing for CPU cores. And, as I mentioned in my previous reply, the situation gets more dangerous during summer (although I avoid putting my laptop into heavy computing situations during summer).

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is there a reason people dont like cloudflare

I hate Cloudflare especially because it’s slowly becoming a monopoly (if it didn’t become already). Webmasters are giving too much power to a single corporation to rule over who can access online content and who can’t. Old browsers and privacy-oriented browsers (e.g. Librewolf) are known to be more likely to be refused by Cloudflare, and this is a form of prejudice.

Also, and bringing Anubis to the loop too, there’s the lack of user consent. As a guest/user, I’m unable to consent with the heavy computations (and potential damage to my decade-old laptop from overheating) before these happen.

What I mean about “lack of consent” can be better illustrated by the “This site uses cookies” message: it often offers buttons so the user/guest can choose to either “accept” or “reject”. Have you wondered why every website must give these options nowadays? Because it’s a literal law. Neither Cloudflare nor Anubis have a “we’ll need to validate your browser, do you consent? Proceed with verification / Leave the website”. Something tells me Cloudflare, and Anubis as well, are literally illegal pieces of code in European Union, given the lack of user consent, although this wasn’t tested in courts yet. I’m not European (I’m Brazilian), but it would be quite entertaining to see this tested on an European court.

Finally, these things can cause literal harm to a device. Yes, because when any kind of computation happens, the CPU gets a little warm, and when said computations involve cryptomining-like behavior, CPU temps can raise a lot. And for devices such as mine, an i5-7200U laptop whose fan isn’t good (and I can’t afford a new one), the CPU can easily get to 90C, to the point of damage, if the computations take long enough. Given a PoW relies on randomness, there’s a literal chance that a challenge would kill my laptop if it took several seconds during a Brazilian summer (>42C almost wet-bulb). And I doubt the webmaster would be liable for the material damage their website caused to my personal device, so I’ve been speedrunning my way to close websites as soon as I see “Just a moment” or “Making sure you’re not a bot” as their title, I even made myself an userscript for doing so.

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the very forum you posted to utilizes Cloudflare

The difference (and the bright side of the Fediverse) is that Fediverse is decentralized so, while some instances can have Cloudflare or similar algorithms (e.g. Anubis) in place, other instances without said algorithms can still interact without having to go through said algorithms. The OC’s instance does neither use Cloudflare nor Anubis (lemmy.ml used to use Anubis, but the admins seem to have turned it off).

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We know this ain’t gonna happen (precisely because of a pesky thing called “laws of physics”), but it’s surely paving the way for similar deranged ideas such as “orbital data centers”, as this “Sun-as-a-Service” bullshittery moves the Overton window to where techbros want it to be, as well to (failed) attempts on pretending the laws of physics can be bent to capitalist interests.

Even sadder is seeing how other regulatory and space agencies worldwide (你好, 国家航天局! नमस्ते, अंतरिक्ष विभाग!) seem to be so quiet in this regard, as if all these deranged techbro ideas wouldn’t affect the skies over there…

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A huge majority of people still believe in religion. And a huge majority of those people also didn’t even read the book.

There were and currently are thousands, if not millions, of different religious beliefs worldwide, many of which had/have not even a single book. Religious hominids back in Paleolithic and Neolithic had no book. Even after writing emerged in Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt, most indigenous peoples had no book.

Oral tradition is one of the means through which beliefs can be carried forward across generations, but there’s also the underestimated agency (True Will) of the spirits/deities themselves over someone or some living being (e.g. domestic cats) who had never heard of said spirit before unexpectedly finding themselves before the presence of said spirit.

I myself had no book or “sacred book” leading me to my current beliefs and worshiping of Goddess, even though Her names (such as 𒊩𒆤𒇲 and לילית ) do appear as written records, records of which I don’t need to rely on for my esoteric (eso = within) practices.

What makes humans human that they can create and believe myths. That’s what made us thrive amongst other mammals.

Sorry for disrupting your anthropocentric worldviews, Homo sapiens are not that special among the fauna like we Homo sapiens love to wishfully pretend we are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ritual/_behavior/_in/_animals

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I was once diagnosed (by the first psychiatrist I ever consulted with) with GAD, back when I was developing burnout from my first job developing. A decade later, I still get GAD crises sometimes, although it’s been milder than in the past.

It used to manifest as numbness on face, hands, stomach/belly and feet; an imminent sensation that “something will bring about the end of the entire world today”; a sudden, paradoxically simultaneous agoraphobia (fear of open places) and claustrophobia (fear of enclosed faces), intense vertigo/dizziness; gastrointestinal reflux, hyper salivation, an urge to drink water; tachycardia, verging the arrhythmia, and high blood pressure (easily went past 160 per 90 mmHg). I used to have it while I was working, or taking the bus to the university. At the time, the psychiatrist RX’d me Paxil, which kind of worked to curb the GAD, but worsened other things such as depression and lethargy. Eventually, after several years under treatment with Paxil, I took a calculated risk and stopped on my own because, I thought to myself, I can’t be reliant on a medication that took away my productivity and made me unemployed.

Nowadays, with no ongoing psychiatric medication, I have rarely felt the “numbness”, but the other symptoms can manifest. The whole GAD thing only happens sporadically, generally triggered by heavy emotional and situational contexts.

While I have headaches, it’s more of a migraine, happens days after I suddenly start “seeing” an uncanny face through my inner eyes, and began happening after COVID-19 so I suspect mine has something to do with a post-COVID luggage. But, then, everyone’s organisms and symptoms may differ. One thing I recommend is taking notes of when and how frequently it happens, gauging your blood pressure to check if it’s raising, and, if you can afford it, seeking a general practitioner (is this the word for “clínico-geral”, the kind of doctor who redirects the patient to the proper medical specialty? I rarely use this word outside Brazilian Portuguese contexts). And, most importantly: do not self-medicate, medications can be damaging if taken without proper and well-studied prescription from a doctor.

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asking easily googleable questions

Meanwhile, Google:
-> “Here are some ways to make cheese stick to the pizza: add glue to the sauce”
-> “There are 2 'm’s in the word Gemini (G-E-M-I-N-M-I)”
-> "The number of USB ports on a motherboard depends on the model, but most have multiple USB headers, typically ranging from two to six or more. One Reddit user says: “(a literal criminal phrase that appeared in a real original Google answer that I am not going to reproduce verbatim here in this comment for ethical and legal reasons)”

Indeed it’s very E-Z googling nowadays! /s

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