@dsilverz@catodon.rocks

Dæmon S.

If I were you, I'd knee before the Great Owl. Who?, you may ask. Exactly! Who!

member since 12 May 2026 09:33

comments

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.

!technology@lemmy.world
on A Chinese company used Claude Code to build over 20 dating apps with 4,700 AI personas that held conversations with at least 25,000 users who thought they were talking to real people. in c/technology@lemmy.world · 12 Sep 2026
The guy learning Web Ontology Language:

!programmer_humor@programming.dev
on def hssss(): in c/programmer_humor@programming.dev · 28 Aug 2026
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).

!technology@lemmy.world
on Android users can't remove nude-scanning app as Google opens the feature to app developers in c/technology@lemmy.world · 27 Aug 2026
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.

!technology@lemmy.world
on Android users can't remove nude-scanning app as Google opens the feature to app developers in c/technology@lemmy.world · 27 Aug 2026
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...

!technology@lemmy.world
on Android users can't remove nude-scanning app as Google opens the feature to app developers in c/technology@lemmy.world · 27 Aug 2026
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.

!technology@lemmy.world
on Android users can't remove nude-scanning app as Google opens the feature to app developers in c/technology@lemmy.world · 26 Aug 2026
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.

!programmer_humor@programming.dev
on We ignored the signs. in c/programmer_humor@programming.dev · 25 Aug 2026
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.

!technology@lemmy.world
on Chinese video platform Bilibili is going global to challenge Youtube in c/technology@lemmy.world · 21 Aug 2026
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.

!technology@lemmy.world
on Chinese video platform Bilibili is going global to challenge Youtube in c/technology@lemmy.world · 21 Aug 2026
(Because I'm unable to edit my earlier reply, I'm doing a second one) Oh, and speaking of who works for AI companies...

!privacy@lemmy.ml
on Question: searching and browser randomly injecting Cloudflare etc. "checks" in c/privacy@lemmy.ml · 20 Aug 2026
Have you ever seen a "This site uses cookies, accept / reject"? This has a name, it's called CONSENT.

I'll repeat: there's something called CONSENT. I.e. the ability (and the right) for someone to CONSENT.

Could one fight a non-consensual relationship, AI crawlers DDosing the hell out of the whole Web, by pushing non-consensual relationships, injection of third-party JS code programmed to solve cryptographic challenges without prior consent of the user?

Because this is precisely my point when I criticize Cloudflare, Anubis, Google Recaptcha and whatever other "Proof-of-work anti-bot solution" out there.

NONE of the mentioned solutions ask for user consent before proceeding with the challenge (e.g. "this site needs to check your browser through heavy computation, proceed / leave"). The "challenge" starts as soon as the page is accessed, as in, zero clicks required for them to start using the CPU (thus, my apologies, I called these things simply as "malware", I should've called these things "zero-click attack").

To make things worse, the "challenge" can accommodate itself across multiple CPU cores by using JS SharedWorkers, thus effectively getting to using 100% of the CPU, regardless of any other parallel uses of CPU (e.g. other tabs opened at the background, or other software doing jobs). Using a 100% of CPU for a couple seconds, potentially minutes depending on the current difficulty level, WILL increase temp. Laptops are particularly sensitive to CPU temp due to lack of proper cooling, so it can easily get to 90C, which is a dangerous temp.

And I'm unable to know beforehand if a website injects "anti-bot challenge" when I stumble upon a link on social media.

My only PC is an Acer ES1-572, it got an Intel i5-7200U; if you look it up, you'll realize it's a decade-old laptop. I'm fucking unemployed so I can't afford a new laptop. And if my laptop dies upon being literally fried by a long session of "checking your browser", neither the webmasters nor the owners of the anti-bot solutions are going to give me reparation for the damage they indirectly inflicted onto my personal device. It's, thus, on me. And still I'm the evil one? REALLY?!

But, hey, don't worry! If you didn't read this part, I'll repeat it again: I'm CLOSING every website that uses one of these tools. Differently from the non-consented push of a third-party JS, I AM NOT FORCING my way into websites. If you're a webmaster, you just need to put something like "Cookie monster!" in your document.title and my userscript will auto close your website and I'll never visit it anymore. Unless you're going to buy me another laptop, you stay with your sacred website while I stay with my good ol' laptop.

Oh, and there's the irony: those whirling machines at hyperscale data centers are designed for heavy computations such as those involved in PoW cryptographic challenges, and the AI techbros got "infinite money cheat" to spin up new ones... Techbros are likely laughing at the naivete of Anubis; Cloudflare, a corp with an AI suite of their own (another sweet irony; fight AI crawlers by feeding your content directly to another AI corp) are laughing at all the power and content being handed freely to them (sometimes webmasters are even paying for Cloudflare to be given content for their AI suite!). Meanwhile, me, an unemployed Brazilian, am compelled to avoid the so-called "modern web" if I don't want my only old laptop to unwittingly become a dead weight... and I'm even accused of working for AI companies!

!privacy@lemmy.ml
on Question: searching and browser randomly injecting Cloudflare etc. "checks" in c/privacy@lemmy.ml · 20 Aug 2026
While Cloudflare, as well as Anubis and other "anti-bot solutions", do behave like MitM, they only become a MitM in two situations:

- When the webmaster injects one of those third-party malware into their website.
- Very unlikely, when the network administrator (e.g. the wi-fi from a library or university) is deliberately acting as a MitM through a transparent proxy, and it's somehow using Cloudflare.

As for me, personally, I don't see these anymore. I built myself an userscript (FireMonkey), targeted at every domain, programmed to do a window.close() (close the tab) if the title is one of the strings "Just a moment..." (Cloudflare), "Making sure you're not a bot!" (Anubis), "Cookie monster!" (also Anubis), "Checking you are not a bot" (some Anubis fork) or "One more step" (Google recaptcha). If the title matches, the tab is closed before any non-consented cryptographic challenge (i.e. those "solutions" don't even dare to ask for user consent before "checking the browser", therefore it's a non-consented relationship and a behavior indistinguishable that of a malware) starts to overwhelm my decade-old laptop CPU.

Yes, this means I'm not having access to whatever content is behind the wannabe-cryptojacking tool, but if the webmaster does not respect my personal device and my right to consent (i must emphasize: all those "solutions" start straining the CPU with cryptographic challenges as soon as the user accesses the page, without asking for user consent beforehand, therefore it's a non-consented relationship and a malware-like behavior), I can't help but speed-run my search for the exit door. I'm not submitting myself and my personal device to malware (the webmaster pushing CF/Anubis/etc to non-consentedly run on my laptop ain't gonna buy another laptop for me if mine died so I'm better as far as possible from their website).

!privacy@lemmy.ml
on Question: searching and browser randomly injecting Cloudflare etc. "checks" in c/privacy@lemmy.ml · 20 Aug 2026
So sorry I’m new still, I’ll keep the links of YouTube off Lemmy from now on.
Oh.. I'm the one who must beg pardon, upon re-reading our exchange I noticed I sounded harsh, I truly didn't mean to. It was intended as an advice, not just to you but to everyone reading as well. Please take the time you need, migration across platforms is never easy, and like I'm going to say in the following paragraphs, it's definitely not a 1:1 migration.
It would suck to stop following my favorite creators but it’s worth it if there are decent alternatives
Yeah... that's unfortunately a problem 🙁

I used to watch hundreds of channels, including but not limited to ElectroBoom, Veritassium, Technology Connections, Practical Engineering, and similar STEM channels. I also used to produce some content myself (mostly technical experiments with steganography and novel ciphers, but also some esoteric content), even though my channel was very small and with the content often using Creative Commons licensing.

As I was faced by increasing enshittification from Youtube, including but not limited to stumbling upon advertisement pitches verging the dangerous (malware, scam/bets, etc), I took this decision that was far from easy, especially due to how I used to enjoy the aforementioned channels.

But then, it's partly on those science communicators to keep themselves and their audiences captive of a monopolistic platform. If people migrated to something else en masse, similarly to how it happened regarding Twitter (people mostly migrated to Bluesky; not the perfect choice, considering there's Mastodon right at the corner of the street, but at least people went from a monopoly on microblogging, to something "less monopolistic").

I, the one viewer less in their daily numbers, am mere dust in the wind, but if other people started doing the same, then it'd be a phenomenon that couldn't be ignored; content creators often are where the audience is, and when (if) the audience makes this hard decision of going somewhere less monopolistic, either they follow their audience to the new place, or they'd be left with the "audience" from Google Gemini. Hence my active campaign to advise people to start boycotting Youtube, even though most of the valuable content is still kept hostage within Youtube hosting; content creators would likely follow if this exodus happened in a significant number.

!privacy@lemmy.ml
on Is Craigslist purposefully being attacked? in c/privacy@lemmy.ml · 15 Aug 2026
It really pisses me off that people abandoned it in favor the evil that is Facebook. Support the good ones
(... then proceeds with a Youtube, a Google's platform, link)

I mean, please don't get me wrong, I definitely agree with everything you said. It's just... we should also be doing a similar thing (supporting the good ones) when it comes to video platforms.

PeerTube, for example, is part of the Fediverse we're currently on. It really pisses me off whenever I see a Youtube link being shared through the Fediverse (and especially in a Lemmy community whose name is Privacy), given we do have alternatives.

It's been a little more than two years since I stopped using Youtube altogether (I don't even use the alternative front-ends). My boycott against Youtube isn't enough, because Youtube links keep popping up in Lemmy threads oftentimes. And because Lemmy would go a step further and try to embed the Youtube player in place of the hyperlink (therefore phoning Google automatically) when it's a thread (not your case, yours appears as a hyperlink because it's a comment), I had to manually add youtube.com and youtu.be iframe domains to my uBO network filtering.

Goes without saying, I don't have a Facebook, either.

!privacy@lemmy.ml
on Is Craigslist purposefully being attacked? in c/privacy@lemmy.ml · 14 Aug 2026