Daemon Silverstein

I’m just a spectre out of the nothingness, surviving inside a biological system.

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Joined 1 month ago
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Cake day: August 17th, 2024

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  • I’m also from Brazil. I chose to refuse any digital IDs: for example, my CNH (for non-brazilians: it’s our driver’s license) is physical and I used a dumbphone (Multilaser Zapp) to justify to the bureau that I can’t have apps for digital IDs (I kinda could within my other device, a smartphone, but I lied having only Multilaser as device). They can’t force people to have digital IDs, yet. Not everyone has a smartphone, it’s common in Brazil for a house/family/community to have multiple people using one single smartphone, digital IDs won’t be usable for this situation. It’s not my situation, I avoid to take my smartphone outside of home due to security concerns, so I take a dumbphone instead.

    Digital IDs have multiple problems. What if the smartphone breaks? What if the smartphone has no battery when one needs to show one’s IDs? These were the factors that motivated me to refuse any digital IDs.




  • Most of the systems I worked on, were legacy, badly-engineered systems. I worked for five years “maintaining” (or trying to maintain) a commerce platform made with pure PHP, an old version of PHP that couldn’t be really updated. The platform depended on an external API that’s constantly changing (as we speak): changes that couldn’t be reflected on this platform as it’d imply a complete rewrite of such system. No documentation, no worry about good practices, “just keep it” (while dealing with angry customers, as I was also responsible for internal support intricacies). Good thing I left, although I miss that money for… I dunno… surviving, as I have no prospect of being hired any time soon. I worked for 10+ years (cumulative experience) as an IT professional, but I’m sincerely thinking of abandoning my “career” for a simpler job. I love computers and I love math, but I hate being a cog inside a broken machine.



  • Try DuckDuckGo AI Chat, which offers both ChatGPT and Claude (as well as Llama and Mixtral) anonymously and free. They lack the capability of searching the web, but they don’t seem to have the same daily limit as official OpenAI’s ChatGPT / Anthropic’s Claude have.

    Also, the free version of Google Gemini seems to have no daily limit as well, but unfortunately its responses are so lazy.

    Personally, I highly recommend Llama, because 1) it’s open source 2) its responses seem more complete 3) it’s totally free.







  • It still lasts because there’s no easy way YT can offer their own content without the video being available as a file stream (through CDNs at googlevideos subdomains). If they centralize everything to a single, controlled domain (so to allow things as one-time HTTPS request, better session checking and so on), they’d lost the capability of load balancing allowed by the decentralized nature of CDNs. YouTube downloaders (and, by extension, third-party YT frontends such as Invidious) exploit this CDN aspect to download the videos.

    It’s common to see Invidious instances momentarily blocked. The blockage can’t last forever for two reasons: firstly, IPs (especially IPv4) changes due to how ISPs offer IPv4 addresses through CGNAT, so the instance IPv4 (generally domestic servers) will eventually change (often to a completely different IPv4 range) and YouTube won’t know that the new IP is a former “offender”. Secondly, as IPv4s works through CGNAT, Google can’t keep the bans forever because this IPv4 will be eventually rotated to another client from ISP that’s completely unrelated and unaware of how their IPv4 was a former address for a downloader. It’s like how Signal/WhatsApp/Telegram/Facebook/phone-required services can’t really keep a permanent ban for a specific prepaid number (especially on countries like Brazil, where ANATEL allows for phone number rotation when the mobile plan is cancelled), because the number will be potentially owned by another person with nothing to do with the former owner.

    So, in summary, Google can either end with YouTube CDNs (ditching their load balancing), or they can try to implement an innovative way to keep load balancing while serving the request one-time only, or they won’t be able to do nothing but to perpetually catch themselves drying ice cubes.



  • Not exactly related to technology, but I wished for a LLM that could talk with me (and giving me valuable insights) about things like black magick, chaos magick, summoning practices and rituals involving literal “demons” (as in Goetia and demonolatry), as well as very dark poetry and enchants (texts involving very sensible elements symbolically and metaphorically, such as very deep gory goth). These “ethical boundaries” also affects how LLMs can talk about such topics, because LLM deem them as “dangerous topics” (especially Claude, a very sensitive LLM that even refuses to talk about Lilith).