Daemon Silverstein

Portuguese has no different word for them as well. Both raven and crow are translated as “corvo”.

In Portuguese we have the word “venenoso” for “poisonous” and “peçonhento” for “venomous” (i.e. something with a “peçonha”, any toxin substance produced and injected on another animal). But we often use “peçonhento” e “venenoso” interchangeably (e.g. “cobra venenosa”).

I’m a 10+ (cumulative) yr. experience dev. While I never used The GitHub Copilot specifically, I’ve been using LLMs (as well as AI image generators) on a daily basis, mostly for non-dev things, such as analyzing my human-written poetry in order to get insights for my own writing. And I already did the same for codes I wrote, asking for LLMs to “Analyze and comment” my code, for the sake of insights. There were moments when I asked it for code snippets, and almost every code snippet it generated was indeed working or just needing few fixes.

They’ve been becoming good at this, but not enough to really replace my own coding and analysis. Instead, they’re becoming really better for poetry (maybe because their training data is mostly books and poetry works) and sentiment analysis. I use many LLMs simultaneously in order to compare them:

• Free version of Google Gemini is becoming lazy (short answers, superficial analysis, problems with keeping context, drafts aren’t so diverse as they were before, among other problems)
• free version of ChatGPT is a bit better (can keep contexts, can issue detailed answers) but not enough (it does hallucinate sometimes: good for surrealist poetry but bad for code and other technical matters when precision and coherence matters)
• Claude is laughable hypersensitive and self-censoring to certain words independently of contexts (got a code or text that remotely mentions the word “explode” as in PHP’s explode function? “Sorry, can’t comment on texts alluding to dangerous practices such as involving explosives”, I mean, WHAT?!?!)
• Bing Copilot got web searching, but it has a context limit of 5 messages, so, only usable for quick and short things.
• Same about Bing Copilot goes for Perplexity
• Mixtral is very hallucination-prone (i.e. does not properly cohere)
• LLama has been the best of all (via DDG’s “AI Chat” feature), although it sometimes glitches (i.e. starts to output repeated strings ad æternum)

As you see, I tried almost all of them. In summary, while it’s good to have such tools, they should never replace human intelligence… Or, at least, they shouldn’t…

Problem is, dev companies generally focus on “efficiency” over “efficacy”, wishing the shortest deadlines while wishing some perfection. Very understandable demands, but humans are humans, not robots. We need our time to deliver, we need to cautiously walk through all the steps needed to finally deploy something (especially big things), or it’ll become XGH programming (Extreme Go Horse). And machines can’t do that so perfectly, yet. For now, LLM for development is XGH: really fast, but far from coherent about the big picture (be it a platform, a module, a website, etc).

On my laptop, Brave for non-“personal” things (such as fediverse, SoundCloud, AI tools, daily browsing, etc) and Firefox for “personal” things (such as WhatsApp Web, LinkedIn, accessing local govt. services, etc). On my smartphone, Firefox for everything (I disabled the native Chrome).

I’ve been using Brave in a daily basis because it’s well integrated with adblocking tools, especially considering the ongoing strife regarding Chromium’s Manifest V2 support, where Brave nicely stands keeping its Manifest V2 support independently of what Google wishes or not.

Firefox is also good, but I noticed that, for me, it has been slightly heavier than Brave. So I use it parallel to Brave, for things I don’t need to use often. For mobile, it’s awesome, as it is one of the few browsers that support extensions, so I use Firefox for Android, together with adblocking extensions.

Have a proper radio ham license. Buy a 40-meter transceiver and a software defined radio dongle. Convert your code into esoteric programming languages such as Whitespace and Brainf, then spell it. “Plus, plus, next, plus, dot, open bracket, next, …”. Transmit your spelling over 40-meter band, while a receiver across the continent is tuned to the frequency. Ask it to repeat and record the QSO. Set the SDR recorder to I/Q packets instead of demodulating AM. Publish it as an audiobook.

Regarding privacy, PGP is far better than out-of-the-shelf IM-embedded encryption, if used correctly. Alice uses Bob’s public key to send him a message, and he uses his private key to read it. He uses Alice’s public key to send her a message, and she uses her private key to read it. No one can eavesdrop, neither governments, nor corporations, nor crackers, no one except for Alice and Bob. I don’t get why someone would complain about “usability”, for me, it’s perfectly usable. Commercially available “E2EEs” (even Telegram’s) aren’t trustworthy, as the company can easily embed a third-party public key (owned by themselves) so they can read the supposedly “end-to-end encrypted” messages, like a “master key” for anyone’s mailboxes, just like PGP itself has the possibility to encipher the message to multiple recipients (e.g. if Alice needs to send a message to both Bob and Charlie, she uses both Bob’s and Charlie’s public keys; Bob can use his own private key (he won’t need Charlie’s private key) to read, while Charlie can use his own private key to do the same).

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever” (1984 - George Orwell).

A mix between the last one and the previous. The key error should be set in order to indicate the presence of an error, while status and code represents, respectively, the error numerical code and the error type, while the error message is supposed to be concatenated to an human-friendly error text.

Speaking of disappearing dialects, this reminds me of what’s currently and gradually happening with Portuguese.

Although both Brazil and Portugal speak Portuguese, the Brazilian Portuguese is way different from European Portuguese spoken by the latter country, in a similar fashion on how American English is somewhat different from British English (cab vs taxi, color vs colour, spoken “computeRR/wateRR” vs “computAH/watHAH” (here I’m exaggerating for illustration purposes), and so on). Portuguese examples include “moço” vs “gajo” (both are words for “young adult man”, respectively Portugal’s and Brazil’s ), “moça” vs “rapariga” (both words for “young adult woman”; the latter, the European Portuguese variation, while being a common word in Portugal, is often seen as a swearing by Brazilian Portuguese) and so on.

However, with the international popularization of Brazilian influencers (such as Lucas Neto), Portugal is complaining about their kids starting to sound and speak Brazilian Portuguese instead of European Portuguese. Seems like Portugal is facing a reshape of their own Portuguese variation due to Brazilian influence.

Brazil itself has many dialects and accents. South uses “bergamota” while southeast uses “tangerina” to refer to tangerine. Northeast uses "macaxeira " and southeast uses “mandioca” to refer to cassava. Minas Gerais uses “trem” and São Paulo uses “coisa” to refer to “thing” (e.g. “could you please reach me that thing over there?”, a “mineiro” (people from Minas Gerais) would speak “ocê pega esstrem fazenofavô?” as a vocalized shortening for “você pega esse trem fazendo o favor?” while the paulista (São Paulo) would say “cê poderia pegá pra mim aquela coisa ali?” as shortening for “você poderia pegar pra mim aquela coisa ali?”). As you can notice, Brazilian Portuguese itself is so broad and multifaceted across the country. Even the same state has its differences (e.g. the capital city of São Paulo says “sinal” while the interior of the state says “semáforo” for “traffic lights”; also, São Paulo says “lotação” while the interior says “circular” for “shuttle bus”).

Internationally, non-brazilians learning Brazilian Portuguese often tend to learn the Carioca (Rio de Janeiro) dialect, because there are many influencers and internationally famous Brazilian people that are from Rio (also, IIRC, both Brazilian Olympics and Brazilian World Cup happened in Rio).

There are other countries that speaks Portuguese as well, such as Moçambique (Mozambique) and Angola. Their Portuguese variation is slightly different from both the European and the Brazilian, but I guess the same Brazilian cultural influence is also happening with Mozambican and Angolan kids.

They can’t without the given permission from the browser to do so. While they can indeed track the mouse, when they try to access mobile motion sensors (I’m considering a CAPTCHA inside a webpage being accessed through a mobile browser such as Firefox mobile or Chrome for Android), they need to use an HTML5 API that, in turn, will ask the user for permission, something like “This site wants to use sensor motion data. Allow or block?”

Nowadays there are some really annoying CAPTCHAs out there, such as:

• “Click over the figures that are upwards/downwards” and various rotated bears
• “Rotate the figure until it matches the given orientation” and a finger pointing to some random direction, as well as rotation buttons that don’t work the way you would mathematically expect them to work
• “Select all the images with a bicycle until there are none left” and the images take centuries to fade away after you click them
• “Select all the squares containing a bus” and there are squares with the very corner of the bus that make you wonder if they are considered as part of “squares containing A bus”
• “Fit the puzzle piece”, although this is the least annoying one

In summary, the CAPTCHAs seemingly are becoming less of a “prove you’re not a robot” and more of an forced IQ test. I can see the day when CAPTCHAs will ask you to write down a Laplacian transform for the solution f(x) to the differential equation governing the motion of a mass considering the resistance of air and aerodynamics, or write down a detailed solution to the P versus NP problem.

I’m Brazilian so I generally use public Brazilian (Portuguese) groups, publicly available through Telegram searches such as “Livros grátis” (“Free books” in Portuguese) or “livros pdf” (“pdf books”). There probably are similar anglophone groups as well.

PGP/GPG encryption. It works with any IM, social network, anything (at least if the platform/program/app/medium allows for sufficiently lengthy messages so to carry the encrypted payload). There are some IMs that bring PGP/GPG natively, as well as extensions for existing IMs that also adds PGP/GPG feature, but PGP/GPG doesn’t need to be native to the app to convey encrypted messages, it’s a base64 text. It’s really an E2EE.

Firstly, I search for the book among Telegram book groups. Then, Google/DDG/Bing/Yandex results for “[title of the book i’m searching] filetype:pdf”. If neither yields the book, I turn on my Tor and try to find it inside Imperial Library of Trantor. Worst case scenario, I try to find a working Z-Library HS. But some comments here added to my possibilities, such as Libgen (I knew Libgen from onion, but it’s interesting to see it also routeable on surface).

It’s a fairly common thing on onion websites, especially those who offer real-time interaction (e.g. some onion web-chats), they use this Transfer-Encoding: chunked method for fetching messages and content because JS is often discouraged and sometimes automatically blocked by onion-enabled navigators while surfing DW. HTML Forms with submit buttons are also used for this kind of interaction.

hot spring for hate content

As with every platform, even Youtube. Bc even the most advanced algorithmic moderation has its limits (i.e. they can’t pick up steganography nor subtle/creative language; in best case scenario, YT algorithms can barely understand a Caesar ciphered text), so it’d need manual reviewing, but there’s the catch: a platform can’t have strict manual reviewing AND be free, because human moderators have their costs. When a platform gets troublesome with excessive ads or oversensitive filters (Tom Scott has an excellent video regarding the problem with “vulgarity filters” when they’re set to pick up any “forbidden” words amidist a text without considering their context; e.g. a content that says about “cumulative sum” (a mathematical and statistical concept) gets blocked because how the three initial letters form a vulgar word, and this could get worse if one’s talking about NumPy’s method), two kinds of people will tend to migrate platforms: those who simply have zero patience with intrusive ads/excessive filtering (imagine a PHP developer not being able to upload/search for a video that uses the PHP function that breaks a string into array, because the function name is “explode()” and it could be seen by filters as “violence”), and those who want to distillate their hatred. If there’s a sufficiently well-known alternative platform, both kinds of people will tend to migrate there, until hate content becomes a gigantic problem and the platform starts to employ human moderators, turning the service into a costly service that’ll either need to be paid or need to have ads (except if they somehow manage to work the services through volunteering, such as GNU). Odysee is one of a myriad of video platforms where anyone can create an account and upload any video. Odysee is not the first only containing “dangerous contents” and neither will be the last.

What if a bot/crawler Puppeteers a Chromium browser instead of sending a direct HTTP requisition and, somehow, it managed to set navigator.webdriver = false so that the browser will seem not to be automated? It’d be tricky to identify this as a bot/crawler.

This reminds me that Microsoft and Google have been intensely “collaborating” with code for Linux kernel as well… Too good to be true good-hearted actions from those corporations…

Because the ads constantly change across the websites. Adblocking is naturally a cat-and-mouse dynamic. However, the “remotely hosted code” Adblockers use is not exactly “code” (as in a JavaScript code, for example), it’s more a Regex code containing patterns for the different websites and different behaviors (for example, the pattern for the pesky HTML element containing the ad, or the pattern for some ad-serving domain). Google is extrapolating their meaning of “remotely hosted code” purposely, so they can “justify” their measures.