dsilverz

I replaced my laptop's DVD drive with a HDD caddy adapter, so it supports two drives instead of just one. Then, I installed a 120G SSD alongside with a 500G HDD, with the HDD being connected through the caddy adapter. The entire Linux installation on this laptop was done in 2019 and, since then, I never reinstalled nor replaced the drives.

But sometimes I hear what seems to be a "coil whine" (a short high pitched sound) coming from where the SSD is, so I guess that its end is near. I have another SSD (240G) I bought a few years ago, waiting to be installed but I'm waiting to get another HDD (1TB or 2TB) in order to make another installation, because the HDD was reused from another laptop I had (therefore, it's really old by now, although I had no I/O errors nor "coil whinings" yet).

Back when I installed the current Linux, I mistakenly placed /var and /home (and consequently, /home/me/.cache and /home/me/.config, both folders of which have high write rates because I use KDE Plasma) on the SSD. As the years passed by, I realized it was a mistake but I never had the courage to relocate things, so I did some "creative solutions" ("gambiarra") such as creating a symlinked folder for .cache and .config, pointing them to another folder within the HDD.

As for backup, while I have three old spare HDDs holding the same old data (so it's a redundant backup), there are so many (hundreds of GBs) new things I both produced and downloaded that I'd need lots of room to better organize all the files, finding out what is not needed anymore and renewing my backups. That's why I was looking for either 1TB or 2TB HDDs, as brand-new as possible (also, I'm intending to tinker more with things such as data science after a fresh new installation of Linux). It's not a thing that I'm really in a hurry to do, though.

Edit: and those old spare HDDs are 3.5" so they wouldn't fit the laptop.

Given the JSON output from the loops.video side, Dansup configured their profile to manuallyApprovesFollowers, that's why accounts cannot successfully follow their profile.

That's good, really good news, to see that HDDs are still being manufactured and being thought of. Because I'm having a serious problem trying to find a new 2.5" HDD for my old laptop here in Brazil. I can quickly find SSDs across the Brazilian online marketplaces, and they're not much expensive, but I'm intending on purchasing a mechanical one because SSDs won't hold data for much longer compared to HDDs, but there are so few HDD for sale, and those I could find aren't brand-new.

I resonate a lot with what you said. My existence seems like a burden to me sometimes. While i know there are no one-size-fits-it-all solutions, have you tried to express this as artistic compositions? As from my experience, it kinda works like a nice cathartic mechanism of dealing with my existence: drawing, writing, tinkering with words and language. It distracts me from the burdens, even though its temporarily. It doesn't need to be professional art or perfect art, it's the expression that matters.

I was curious and I tried to find your poetry within your Lemmy profile history. I saw some posts with drawings (for example, the rabbits trying to rescue the rabbit from the magician, the horse chess piece instructing a tower piece on how to arrive somewhere, and so on). They're really nice and smart.

As for where to publish, I'll tell what I perceive as I'm someone who sometimes write, too (although I probably differ on genre and styles). I ditched all the mainstream social platforms, so the "biggest" social platforms I'm currently participating are Mastodon and Lemmy (and as from yesterday, I've been navigating in Geminispace, but I guess it's not as big as fediverse, yet).

Interestingly, Lemmy is the platform I get to interact the most, even when Mastodon has way more users. It seems, to me, that Lemmy is more socially active than Mastodon.

But there's a catch: Lemmy often focuses on what we're doing right now, discussing things, exchanging ideas and informations. While there are a few communities focused on sharing art, they don't seem to have the same activity and visibility as, let's say, Ask Lemmy, Shower thoughts, News, Technology and similar communities.

I saw people recommending Writefreely and Plume. I created accounts on those platforms and tried to publish some texts over there, but I had no relevant interaction whatsoever. They have even fewer users than Mastodon and Lemmy, however, they're more appropriate for publishing poetry, because they have UIs better made for them.

Perhaps the visibility also depends on the genre and style. I write about eerie, existential and dark things, so I guess it's not something that's expected to have much of a reception. People often seek "good vibing" content, especially "funny" content (that's why memes perform the best). It's a factor for you to consider asking yourself: "How many people would resonate with my texts?"

That said, I guess you don't really need social media accounts, you need a public that will resonate with your works and will read them and interact with them. This public can be from fediverse depending on your genres and themes. Publishing the text across different platforms can improve their visibility. Maybe we, as Lemmy users and writers/artists (although I consider myself neither a "writer" nor an "artist"), should seek to post more on Lemmy communities focused on art sharing in order to balance the main Lemmy feed.

E2EE doesn't mean that the developer/company can't be a member of the "ends" in "End-to-end encryption". WhatsApp is closed-source, so nobody can really confirm which E2EE algorithm is at play. However, considering that the E2EE is the implementation of a known E2EE algorithm, such algorithms often support more than two keys (hence, more than two people), so, a third-key from Charlie can be part of the conversation, unbeknownst to Alice and Bob. If Meta would inject their own key inside every WhatsApp conversation, they could effectively read things.

For example: GPG/PGP support multiple public keys, so the same encrypted message can be decrypted by any private keys belonging to those public keys. Alice can send a message to both Bob, Charlie and Douglas, collectively specifying their public keys at the moment of the encryption. Then, the exact same payload would be sent to them, and they would use their own private keys to decrypt the message.

So, let's suppose that a closed-source messaging app company/developer had their own pair of public and private keys, and they public key is injected in every conversation made through their app. They'd also obfuscate it from the UI so the UI won't show the hardcoded "third-party". This way they could easily read every single message being exchanged through their app. It's like TSA with a "master key" that can open everyone's travelling bags, no matter where you bought the travelling bag.

Even Signal may have this. Yeah, libsignal is "open-source", but the app isn't. What if their app had some hardcoded public key from Signal team? The only trustworthy E2EE is encoding it yourself using OpenPGP and similar. And if one is more privacy-worried than me, there are projects such as the "Tinfoil Chat" which is almost-immune to eavesdropping, involving optocoupled (hence, airgapped) circuitry, separate machines for networking, decryption and encryption, Onion-routing, and so on.

In summary: nobody should trust out-of-the-box E2EE, especially those hidden within a closed-source app.

I used to use several LLMs almost in a daily basis (I still use them, although not so frequently anymore), talking about several different things across different human knowledge fields.

From my most to my least used, these are Meta's Llama 3.x, OpenAI ChatGPT 4o, Microsoft Copilot, Anthropic Claude Haiku and Google's Gemini. In other words, almost all of them. I have a flow of prompting different models for the same prompt that allowed me to know many of their strengths and weaknesses.

Of course, given my frequent usage and the diversity of topics, I faced several moments of "Sorry, I can't talk about this" across them all.

Claude is the LLM which is triggered the most: so highly sensible to certain words and topics. It won't talk about some text I wrote containing strong Memento Mori vibes, it won't talk about occultism and ritualistic practices and chanting, it won't talk about some poetry I wrote that revolved around the word fire (regarding the Hominid Prometheus that tinkered with fire in the past)... It's almost a Scunthorpe level of problem within the Anthropic Claude censoring. Its strength, however (and the only reason I still use it among other LLMs), is programming, it's fairly good at spitting out codes. Of course these codes need to be reviewed and refined, but IMHO it's the best code output among the LLMs.

Then there's Google Gemini. It's rarely triggered by topics (except when I asked it details about the RTGs within Voyager space probes and how much grams of plutonium would be needed for them to become dangerously unstable), but it has a serious problem with his image analysis feature, when asked with images containing things that resembles faces. "Sorry, I can't analyze images containing people". The image, may you ask? An aerial photo of the Statue of Liberty!! I experienced something similar with Bing Copilot, but this one was only triggering recently (and it's as worse as Google Gemini's, because it was a drawing), so I guess it's due some Microsoft's update?

Llama is the least censoring. It answers practically everything, even if hallucination is needed to craft an answer out of thin air. I don't remember any episode of "sorry, I can't answer" from Llama.

(TL;DR moment)
Finally, ChatGPT. There are two ways I use it: ChatGPT's website or DuckDuckGo.

Former allows me to see whenever something's triggered, because the text become orangey. Most of the times when my prompt became orangey, ChatGPT still answered, with their output also becoming orangey (it's cool because it kinda gives the Sonny thrilling feeling from I, Robot, as their eyes become reddish when going against their own embedded Asimov Laws).

The latter will simply take away the Sonny vibe just showing a red error text with something like "Unable to get an answer" and a link to "Try again"), sometimes in the middle of an output, sometimes even before any output reaches my browser.

Overall, the behavior is as described by Jonathan Zittrain: moderation is indeed apart from the main LLM flow, between the client (be it an API or the browser) and the model, and sometimes it seems like a Scunthorpe-kind of mechanism (checking specific words, even when context would matter), although not at the same Scunthorpe level of censoring as Claude's.

It's a bird, it's a plane, it's Superman? No, it's a drone!

So.. maybe both Firefox and ChatGPT apps stripped the metadata using something proprietary from Google? Because the image I was testing had custom metadata (including a custom "copyright" field value), but a "Google Inc" unexpectedly appeared in the metadata.

If a bird gets sick it will probably die. If a bird is injured it will probably die. If a bird is born disabled in some way it will probably die. Not to speak about all the predators just waiting to eat you.

Is it really different from human reality? If a human gets sick, there's a significant probability of not affording proper healthcare, be it private or public.

If a human is born disabled in some way, they'll need to face several bureaucracies just to continue being state-supported to continue surviving. This becomes even more challenging for "invisible conditions" such rheumatic, neurological and mental ones, because no one else sees or feels it beyond the human that suffers from it.

Not to mention all the humans just wanting to pull the rug out from under you (falsehood and betrayal), be it in professional or academic relations, be it in familiar relations. They won't literally eat another human, but they won't care if others die because of prisoner's dilemma of betrayal and falsehood.

The difference, IMHO, is that there are no made-up predators, no made-up system pretending that they care for other's health, and most importantly: there's no apparent sentience among "wild" living beings of how harsh the Nature reality can be. They simply try to survive as closest to Nature's nature as possible, while humans, no, humans consciously try to make it even harsher for others to survive.

Back when humans still were simply hominids, they needed to fight or flee from jaguars, bears, snakes, etc. We had real predators, until one of them discovered the fire, which allowed them to be "fearsome" against these animals, scaring them away, "delimiting" lands and then filling the vacuum ("Nature abhors a vacuum") of real predators with made-up predators: themselves.

Ah, the beautiful awful hidden rules of human society...

You see, birds can fly thousands of miles/kilometers across entire continents, surviving through stuff that Mother Nature makes available. No need for bureaucracies, no need for Walmart, no need for "money", no need for "being useful to aviary society", just following the natural and evolutionary flows.

However, for some reason, humans can't do the same, humans need to try and detach themselves from Nature. Yet we can point out exactly what's the reason: the curse of sentience. Once upon a time, Dubito ergo cogito, cogito ergo sum, and humans became their own predators (Homo homini lupus est), yearning for something bigger to save them from themselves... (perhaps some "Leviathan"?)

Suddenly, they conceptualize the "free will", yet they realize that existing, being a being, implies no free will at all. Existential and societal compliance (Derren Brown has good documentaries about the latter), being tangled by an invisible spider web of lies and rules. And because they're alive, they become culprits as if existence was some kind of circle of hell to be faced by those who "dared to exist": "you're alive, so comply with your societal duties!".

So is my body hungry against my will, or it's raining over my body? I need food and shelter. Oh, but there's the catch: I'm supposed to "buy/rent" them, because "there's no such thing as a free lunch". Buying and renting imply money, which implies the need something for its exchange... Some people ("the top 1% of the top 1%, the guys that play God without permission") have golden cradles, oh, shame on me I hadn't one, so I'm supposed to do the alternative thing: dedicate myself to a company's brand, doing my efforts to make the company functional.

But there's another catch: I can't simply "be part of a company", I need to be "hired", but I need to "be qualified" to be hired. Oh, I'm not "qualified" enough in the eyes of their HR? I'm not going to be hired. Am I qualified? I'll going to talk with a "recruiter", which will ask me rhetorical questions ("So why do you want to work for this company?", but I can't answer "to not starve" or "to afford a rent") which I'm supposed to reply in a "proper" way (i.e. pretending, but without being so evident that I'm pretending). I couldn't pretend enough? I'm not hired.

No company is required to hire me, for they're "private properties", so I need to seek another company where I'd "qualify". So I'm supposed to "distribute" my "curriculum vitae" across several job vacancies, waiting which one will "stick first" (as per someone's reply here, in this very thread). Oh, but there's another catch: job vacancy services are only good enough if I paid for them, I'm supposed to pay them in order to my curriculum to really be known to some HR... you know, so I could be "hired" and "work" and exchange my efforts with "money" so I can pay things, such as... job vacancy services. In a nutshell, I need to pay for a service so I can pay for other services. Hey, look, there flies another bird across the skies, unaware of our societal compliance complexities. They came from another country yet they have no visa nor passport! Hey, look, they're eating "freely", how audacious of them!

Apologies for my digression. The obvious shall be told about the society, and neurodivergents (I guess I'm one?) are the ones who can see those obviousnesses and write them as detailed as they can be.