@QueenHawlSera Warning: long and verbose reply ahead.

If my computer's power supply was on the fritz and stopped working for a second yet my computer remained just as functional as ever during the few moments the PSU wasn't working. I'd consider that an oddity. I wouldn't say "Oh the PSU still kinda works, the fact that it completely tapped out for a solid three-minutes yet my PC stayed on is not weird at all."

While this exact scenario is highly unlikely to happen for a computer, the phenomenon behind it happens with many electronic devices (e.g. USB chargers) and it's well-known in electronics. I'm not an electric/electronic engineer (I tinkered with electronics but I'm just a DevOps), but I'll try to explain it below.

In a nutshell, electricity isn't just "inside" the wire: a field emanates around it due to the flow of electricity, the electromagnetic (EM) field. A wire conducting electricity will emanate an EM field, while the EM field can be absorbed by a wire, inducing a current through it.

This is how, for example, voltage transformers work: there are two coils (spiralling wire), labelled primary and secondary, electrically insulated from each other and wrapped around a ferromagnetic piece (the iron core). As alternate-current electricity goes back and forth through the primary coil, an EM field is emanated, which is then "chanelled" by the ferromagnetic piece to the secondary coil, where the EM field will induce another alternated current.

A "similar" thing happens inside DC (direct current) motors and loudspeakers: there's a coil around a permanent magnet, and the coil gets repelled or attracted by the magnet whenever a current passes through the coil, depending on the electric current's direction/flow (Right-Hand Rule), and this happens because the flow of electricity makes the coil to emanate an EM field, roughly speaking.

Inductors, a type of electronic component, will emanate EM fields, and they will absorb their own EM field back when current stops flowing through them, and that's the principle behind LC oscillators. Similarly, capacitors can hold plenty of charge because they're roughly "fast batteries", and that's why people were advised not to disassemble CRT televisions, because their capacitors used to hold high-voltage even after a long period of being unplugged... Similar risks and advices are found for UPSes and computer PSUs as well.

Why am I explaining this? See, powering off a device isn't something instantaneous, it takes time before all capacitors get depleted by the circuit and before all EM fields disappear. Energy can't be created nor destroyed (First law of thermodynamics), so it must be transformed, and it's often a gradual transformation, sometimes taking a few nanoseconds, sometimes taking hours to weeks (e.g. gigantic industrial apparata).

As I said initially, a PC is highly unlikely to hold enough charge to continue functioning after being cut from its main source of electricity, but it will have some charge for up to a couple of seconds due to dozens-to-hundreds of capacitors and inductors across the circuitry, as well as the EM fields emanated from its DC motors (coolers / computer fans, HDD spindle for computers with mechanical HDDs).

I'm probably digressing and ackchuallying in my explanation, but the phenomenon you described does have a fundamentum.

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As for NDEs, I can't offer much of a scientific point about it, because I hold plenty of beliefs and uncertainties when it comes for death and The Death. I mean, while I personally believe in a "metaphysical realm" through syncretic spiritual concepts (Luciferian, Gnostic, "Thanathoeism" and "Lilitheism"), I've been leaning towards a Cosmicist Pessimistic/Nihilistic Apatheism lately: not Atheism, but "Apatheism", when the existence of deities, even when believed, doesn't really matter. I've been leaning (or trying to lean) towards the rationality and scientific explanation lately, even though I still hold some beliefs deep inside.

Deep down, I personally want to think there's nothing but ultimate darkness and nothingness after the bittersweet kiss of Death's dark-red lips, I personally want to believe in non-existence and annihilation after the last synaptic activity from my biological brain, even though I sometimes feel (and fear) that my consciousness might linger for a bit (seconds? minutes? aeons?) against my own will. Because "energy can't be created nor destroyed, so it must be transformed, and it takes time", and both the synaptic activity and biochemical reactions, interactions from which sentience and consciousness emerges, are energy (electrical and chemical, respectively).

Couple this with concepts like Quantum Superposition, Quantum Entanglement, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, among other concepts, and you end up with a fairly creepy uncertainty on whether a dead brain is definitely gone or if there are some "reverberation" from its past synaptic activity across the spacetime continuum, akin to how we can still hear the echoes of Big Bang nowadays or how many "stars" we see on the night sky are just light from past celestial bodies now long gone. I'm not justifying "spirits" or "haunting ghosts", but more of expressing some personal anxiety regarding the residual energy that could be interacting enough to keep some complexity inherent to the very phenomenon we refer to as "consciousness", one that couldn't even "manifest" as a living being, one that couldn't help themselves but watch and "experience" as they're still undergoing the process of dying.

(Edited to fix and clarify some of my previous statements).

@gerryflap @bytesonbike

many men are reluctant to make that step

Sometimes it's not the patient to blame. I made the step, countless times since my childhood... I sought help... Result? Got several, diverging diagnostics, several medications that didn't work, until the most recent psychiatrist and psychologist some months ago: the psychiatrist said I got "nothing" (even when I had a fresh cut on my wrist) and the second "struggled to find any complaints from me". So I simply gave up on seeking medical care (and "care" in general, human or whatnot). I don't use AI for therapy because, as a former programmer, I'm deeply aware of their underlying Markov chain and NN algorithms, but sometimes their probabilistic outputs lead me to insights I couldn't get from any living Homo sapiens beings (such as the possibility that I have "Geschwind Syndrome", a condition of which will probably stay undiagnosed).

@Fletcher Not only it is a golden mine for scrappers (AI-purposed or whatnot), but even deleted things from fediverse (and, by extension, Lemmy) continue to appear out there (e.g. Google Search), be it through federated instances, be it through direct scrapping.

I feel like a personal example of that: I deleted my Lemmy account. Still, many of my content still linger on Google and other search engines through instances I never saw before.

However, it's not because fediverse is open: it's because of how Web (or, at least, Clearnet) works. If someone can access it, it can become available for others to access. When even DRM-protected, pay-walled content still ends up being openly accessible somewhere, it's no surprise fediverse content can, too. Everything done on Clearnet will end up on many places simultaneously, lasting any deletion: Internet Archive is a common place to find digital ghosts.

While it seems ominous, it is thanks for this very nature that many important and/or useful content can still be accessed (e.g. certain scientific papers and studies that were politically removed by a government, certain old/ancient games that fell into corporate/market oblivion, certain books from long-gone publishers).

To quote Cory Doctorow: "Scraping against the wishes of the scraped is good, actually". The problem isn't scrapping, but the intentions behind who use the scraped content, particularly if such a "who" is a corporation (such as Google and Microsoft).

Problem is: to the eyes of a webmaster, well-intentioned scraping isn't distinguishable from corporate scrapping. They're all broad GETs (i.e. akin to the "all the things" meme), perhaps differing in scale, distribution and frequency, but broad GETs nonetheless. People have been setting up Anubis (the libre PoW CAPTCHA solution) or CloudFlare (the MitM corporation) to avoid AI-crawling, but they're also becoming prone to oblivion when, say, their servers ends up disappearing forever one day, taking all their content to the realms of /dev/null: many of which are unique contents, useful contents, gone as no archiving tool (e.g. Internet Archive) could reach them.

IMO, you're not wrong, but scraping isn't wrong per se, either.

@BalakeKarbon Content warning: this reply will be long.

What I'm about to say will be probably controversial, but I'll dive deeper into it nonetheless. Whenever we worry about some "Artificial General Intelligence", we are starting from a deeper anthropocentric pretense that only we Homo sapiens have the "exclusivity" of something like "intelligence", when it's not.

Take crows for instance: Corvus moneduloides (a.k.a. New Caledonian crow) is known to be extremely intelligent. They're capable of meta-tool usage, using tools for building/improving other tools (1)

(1): For scientific/academic reference: "Direct observations of pandanus-tool manufacture and use by a New Caledonian crow (Corvus moneduloides)", published in 2004 by University of Auckland authored by Gavin R. Hunt and Russell D. Gray, DOI 10.1007/s10071-003-0200-0.

Sure, no crows sent probes to sidereal space, and crows don't seem to tinker with fire, either. But what is intelligence, exactly? How intelligence can be defined and measured? And, most importantly, how intelligence/sentience can be distinguished from mere neurological activity driven by highly-complex (yet pretty deterministic) chemical-physical phenomena and, thus, distinguished as "True Will" (okay, this term is far from scientific, it's actually a Thelemic term)?

Because when you look both deep up and deep down, respectively at the cosmic level and molecular level (As above so below), we're not that better than biological automatons, ruled by strict laws of physics and biological programming (a.k.a. autonomic nervous system) which is also driven by genetic, environmental, and societal constraints.

Specifically, "societal constraints" gets even more interesting. Derren Brown can be controversial (especially due to how he describes himself as illusionist), but some of his documentaries (especially The Push) perfectly depict how individuals can be easily influenced by a collective of individuals.

Then there's this interesting scene from the movie The Artifice Girl where Cherry talks to a elder Gareth (her creator) about how she's constrained by her initial directives: even though she could choose to do something else (ballet), it's something driven by that very initial programming.

Then there's a myriad of thinkers who once philosophized about the subject, such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Camus (especially Myth of Sisyphus), Cioran, among others. Yeah, I mentioned the possibly "top pessimistic" ones and my list is biased in that regard.

My musings are fatalistic and deterministic, but that's part of what Science currently knows to this day: that we're made of star stuff (Carl Sagan, Cosmos TV Series) and, just like stars and other celestial bodies, we're bound to cosmic constraints, such as entropy and passage of time, fundamental forces, chemical reactions, and so on.

Finally, back to neuroscience: what we refer to as "intelligence" seems to be a mere byproduct from synaptic interactions between gazillions of neurons, again, highly influenced by inner and outer factors through the lens of biological senses (and, to quote René Descartes, "our senses deceive us", pink doesn't exist as electromagnetic wavelength yet our eyes seem to "see" pink, a VR headset quickly trick our senses into perceiving motion pictures as "reality", we see faces (Belmez Faces) out of pareidolia as a byproduct of biologically pre-programmed pattern-matching, among other examples I could point out).

So what's so different between humans and the so-called "AGI"? Especially if such AGI becomes "embodied" just like an Artifice Girl, becoming a physical part of cosmic constraints and transience from spacetime continuum (both things define living beings as beings; currently, AI is "timeless" in the sense that these Markov Chain algorithms have no embodied beingness, but "AGI" would imply something akin to Major Mira Killian from Ghost in the Shell with a "shell")...

It's uncanny for Homo sapiens to realize we're not exclusive as intelligent living beings (that's why humans constantly crave for trying to control Nature, Cosmos and other humans), and the so-called "AGI", if such a thing would came into being, would be the ultimate, undeniable realization: our "mind" is a physical illusion (just biological smoke and mirrors) and there's no such thing as "free will", for we're condemned to obey cosmic constraints, from the vastness of continuum all the way down to atomic interactions.

I'm so sorry to sound pessimistic and highly-verbose. I once tried to believe in something out there, but I've been long since out of faith as I realized my deterministic nature. As Science allows us to understand the cosmic mysteries, existence itself feels more and more devoid of anima, for whenever we stare at the cosmic abyss, the vast and dark abyss stares back at us and remembers us about our fleeting and deterministic nature as living beings.

@Turd_Ferg PC (Linux): Librewolf for some things (fediverse, news outlets, mail providers, etc), Waterfox for other things (especially sites/platforms where I need to write Portuguese, because Librewolf's "Resist Fingerprinting" breaks accent keys), upstream Firefox for more mainstream things (government services), as well as Lagrange for Gopher and Geminispace.

Smartphone (Android): Fennec, with native Chrome active against my will for WebViews from certain apps (governmental and banking apps, for example) that require Chrome For My Security™.

It's been a while since I ditched Chromium-based browsers, although Firefox has some Chromium things inside its code. I'm waiting for whatever browsers that could bring third-party browser engines besides Chromium and Firefox-engine (yeah, there are Pale Moon, Basilisk, Safari/Webkit, among other browsers which are neither Chromium nor Firefox-based, but I'm talking about a browser as compatible as possible with features such as WebBluetooth, WebGL, WASM and other things as they can prove useful for personally-developed projects/self-hosted services).

@MazonnaCara89 The country I live in (Brazil) overly uses and depends on WhatsApp. From government departments to businesses and transactional relations, all the way to social and family affairs, people is addicted to it, forcing other people (e.g. me) to either have a WhatsApp account or ending up far beyond mere social ostracism (beyond mere loneliness): effectively, the inability to buy, sell, rent or even resolve citizen matters with certain government/state departments (such as receiving medical appointment schedules from Brazilian's public health system (Sistema Unico de Saude/SUS (Unified Health System) via their "postinhos"/"Unidades Basicas de Saude" (neighborhood public health centers)). They don't even use the grand old phone calling and SMS anymore: even "calls", when performed, are made by people/departments/businesses via Whatsapp VoIP functionality.

That said, it's worth mentioning that WhatsApp has been running ads for a long time: the "Channels" section lists seemingly random "channels", many of which are businesses with "verified" "blue badges". So it's effectively advertisement disguised as veiled "recommendations" from Meta. It seems like it'll just become worse (to the surprise of no one who understands what Meta is).

I really want to leave WhatsApp, but I'm socially compelled to stay (it's the only mainstream platform where I still have an account, against my will)... the raw, grotesque distillation from social compliance, worse than depicted in Derren Brown's documentaries...

@Strawberry Governments and corporations are powerless to E2EE employed by the users themselves, such as GPG/GnuPG/PGP. What could/will UK gov do against GPG and similar tools, especially those which are open-source and freely available?

I'm rooting for British people to defy their government and create their own pair of public and private keys using GPG/PGP or similar suite (preferably open-source, because they can be easily forked, adapted to easier UX/UI to any end-user, etc), sharing their public keys with each other so they can send enciphered messages, rendering useless such anti-E2EE British law.

@mighty_orbot @misk I'm using Friendica. From here, the links are normal. As it's also not Lemmy, I guess it's a Mastodon-specific (or even instance-specific) problem.

@cyrano The "problem" (actually, the feature) with those censorship algorithms is that they rely a lot on the "exact contents" of the message ("Scunthorpe Problem"), so X is probably programmed to detect the Signal's domain and block due to the presence of such link (similar to how Facebook was/is blocking links to the largest PixelFed instances, and then they also decided to block links to DistroWatch and official websites from various Linux distros), so it's not programmed (yet) to censor just the "hexadecimal/base64/whatever" portion of the link alone. And there's where Tox could shine: a handle is literally a hexadecimal sequence, without Tox's domains, without URI Schemas, just a bunch of digits and letters from A to F.

I don't know why Tox isn't mentioned as a "instant messaging platform for whistleblowers": it got Onion (Tor) tunneling possibility (as well as tunneling it through I2P outproxies because it actually accepts any kind of SOCKS5 proxy), it's registration-less (even Matrix needs registration) so it's effectively anonymous IMO.

SimpleX seems to be that, too, although I didn't have the opportunity to use it more than I used Tox. But from the little I've used it, it's similar to Signal in the sense that it's a link (and a large link) and not simply a hash/hex sequence.

@rimu @Bronzebeard On the one hand, when Deep Seek "doesn't know" about a thing (i.e., something not present the training data), it'll state it clearly (I'm not sure if the image will be sent as I'm not using Lemmy directly to reply this):

The context of the image is the following: I asked DeepSeek about "Abnukta", an obscure and not-so-much-known Enochian term that is used during one of the invocations of Lilith, and DeepSeek replied the following:

"Abnukta is a term that does not have a widely recognized or established meaning in mainstream English dictionaries or common usage. It could potentially be a misspelling, a neologism, or a term from a specific dialect, jargon, or cultural context. If you have more context or details about where you encountered the term, I might be able to provide a more accurate explanation. Alternatively, it could be a name or a term from a specific field or community that is not widely known".

So, the answer that the user Rimu received is not regarding something "unknown" to the LLM (otherwise it'd be clearly stated as that, as per my example), but something that triggered moderation mechanisms. So, in a sense, yes, the LLM refused to answer...

However... On the other hand, western LLMs are full of "safeguards" (shouldn't we call these as censorship, too?) regarding certain themes, so it's not an exclusivity of Chinese LLMs. For example:
- I can't talk about demonolatry (the worshiping of daemonic entities, as present in my own personal beliefs) with Claude, it'll ask me to choose another subject.
- I can't talk with Bing Copilot about some of my own goth drawings.
- Specifically regarding socio-economics-politics subjects, people can't talk with ChatGPT and Google Gemini about a certain person involved in a recent US event, whose name is the same as a video-game character known for wearing a green hat and being the brother of another character that enters pipes and seeks to set free a princess.
- GitHub Copilot refuses (in a blatant Scumthorpe Problem) to reply or suggest completion for code containing terms such as "trans" or "gender" (it's an open and known issue on GitHub, so far unanswered why or how to make Copilot answer).

But yeah, west is the land of the freedom /s