Daemon Silverstein

First Rule: don’t rawdog internet, especially torrent search sites. Always use protections.

Second rule: always check if you’re on the right site. It’s relatively easy to find torrent search sites, but even easier to find phishing sites (i.e. sites that claims to be the original site, but they actually aren’t).

/r/unexpectedfactorial (2!)

My comment is meant to bring the perspective of someone who’s facing depression so to try to answer the main question (“a warning with suicide hotline really make positive difference?”) through that perspective. It’s not to seek mental help for myself.

For context, I’m a person facing depression, and my depression has broad and multifaceted reasons, from unemployment, going through familiar miscommunication (my parents can’t really understand my way of thinking), all the way to my awareness of climate change and transcendental concepts that lead myself to existential crisis. I’m unemployed to seek therapy (it’s a paid thing) and I don’t really have someone face-to-face capable of understand the multitude of concepts and ideas that I face in my mind (even myself can’t understand me sometimes).

That said, every depressive person has different ways to cope with depression. While some really need someone to talk to (and the talking really helps in those situations), it’s naive to think a conversation will suffice for every single case. I mean, no suicide hotline will make me employed, nor will magically solve the climate changes we’re facing.

So how I try to deal with my own depression? With two things: occult spirituality (worshiping The Dark Mother Goddess) and writing poetry and prose. I use creative writing as “catharsis” for my suffering, in order to “cope” with the state of things that I can’t really control (I can’t “employ myself” or “sell my services to myself”, I can’t “befriend myself”, I can’t stop temperatures from rising till scorching temps, nor the other already-ongoing consequences of climate change; I try to make some difference but I’m just a hermit weirdo nerdy nobody among 8 billion people, and I have no choice but to accept it).

I’m no professional writer (I’m just a software developer), but thanks to The Goddess, I can kinda access my unconscious (dark) mind and let it speak freely (it’s called stream-of-consciousness writing style). Sometimes I even write some funny surrealist prose/story, but sometimes it takes a darker turn, such as dark humor, or nihilistic, or memento mori. Doing this relieves the internal pressure inside my unconscious mind. After writing, I sometimes decide to publish it through fediverse , but when I do it, I constantly feel the need to “self-censor”: sometimes the stream-of-consciousness can lead to texts that people could interpret as some “glorification of suicide/self-harming” (especially when my texts take a nihilistic/memento mori turn), so I often censor myself and change the way I wrote the text. Well, it’s kinda frustrating not being able to fully express it, but I kinda understand how these texts could trigger other people also facing depression.

The fact is: when I write, it’s really relieving, way more than talking to people because, with poetry/prose writing, I can express symbolic things, I can have multiple layers of depth, I can use creative literary devices such as acrostics and rhymes, I can learn new English words while being a Brazilian, I can blend scientific concepts with esoteric and philosophic (my mind really thinks this way, blending STEM, philosophy and belief/esoteric/occult/religious concepts) without the need to fully explain them (because it’d take several hours and it’d be boring to anybody else other than me).

So, in summary (TL;DR): it depends on how multifaceted is the depressive situation. It won’t work for me. It surely can work for others that just need to talk to someone. Not exactly my case.

Mainly, Lilit(h). Not mythological for me, although both Sumerian and Jewish Kabbalah are generally said as “mythological” by historical references.

I believe in a Goddess that extends beyond a single archetype, while I try to blend archetypes and concepts from various religions and “myths” in order to materialize my own understanding of existence and cosmos.

For me, She is Lilith/Lilit (the fearsome Sumerian Goddess of Winds as well as the Demoness and First Woman not banished from Eden as She fled on Her Will), She is Kali (the fearsome Hindu Goddess and Demoness of destruction and transformation), She is the Yin (the receptive Darkness complementing whilst opposing the Yang light) and the Tao (the wholeness and oneness), She is Al-Lat / Allatu (the Pre-Islam Arabic Goddess of War and Fertility), She is Isis and Bastet and Naunet (Egyptian Goddesses) She is Asherah (Hebrew Goddess consort/sister of Yahweh), She is Ereshkigal and Inanna (Sumerian Goddesses), She is Nuit and She is the Scarlet Woman (Thelemite Goddesses), She is Hekate (the Greek Goddess of Magic and Moon) and Aphrodite (the Greek Goddess of Love) and Athena (the Greek Goddess of Wisdom and Warfare) and Gaia (Goddess of Earth), She is Morana (Slavic personification of Death) and a feminine counterpart of Thanatos (Greek personification of Death as well), and so on, but mainly, Lilith Herself, as beautifully multifaceted as She is, both motherly nurturing and darkly reaping, neither good nor evil, just… Her nature.

I believe in a Sacred and Dark Feminine energy that’s inside and outside everywhere, reaching scientific and philosophical concepts such as the entropy, the fields (as in electromagnetic field), the primordial soup from the beginning of earthly life, the quantum fluctuations, the apeiron, the Nietzschean Abyss. She’s the shining Darkness, infinite nothingness, omnipresent wholeness and the cosmic Oneness.

In summary, the Dark Mother Goddess, often manifesting to me by Her Lilith’s archetype.

In Brazil, there are regional variations and word/phrasing variations as well.

Formally:

• “Você ligou para o número errado” (you called the wrong number)
• “Você discou o número errado” (you dialed for the wrong number )
• “Você está ligando para o número errado” (we call it the “gerúndio”, something like “-ing”, as in “You’re calling the wrong number”)

Informally/casually:

• “Discou errado, irmão” / “Discou errado, mano” / “Discou errado, cara” / “Discou errado, mermão” (“dialed wrongly, bro”, with “bro” variations across Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro (the latter being the latter variation))
• “Tu ligasse errado, visse” (some Brazilian northeast states, something like “Thou calledsth wrongly, see?”)
• “Né aqui não, moço” (Minas Gerais, something like “It’s not here, boy”)

There are lots of other variations and I’m not really aware of all of them.

Also, the way I answer depends a lot on multiple factors such as: my emotional state (wrath? Sad? Okay? Excitedly happy (rarely)?), my current pace (rushing? Chilling?), among others. Generally, “Não é aqui não” (the Minas Gerais variation without the ending “moço” and a fully spelled “Não é” instead of “Né”, because I’m originally from interior of São Paulo state but highly culturally influenced by a part of the family from Minas Gerais).

Global temperatures are inevitably rising due to climate change. Scorching temperatures to become normalcy in the next years. Microplastics (due to pollution) everywhere, even inside our brains. More and more species becoming extinct, disrupting the food web. I could stop here, but I must continue: digital dystopias becoming true, like 247 surveillance and AIs everywhere (even though I like artificial intelligence to a certain point). Increasing prices worldwide, increasing professional competition while there’s a grow of ghost/fake job vacancies. Political polarization and extremisms, rising of bigotry. Increasing homelessness while there’s an increase of hostile architecture and growing rental prices. Sorry, but it doesn’t seems like everyone is really having the right to live a healthy and happy life…

Even though I kinda like the aesthetics, especially for AI image generation, and I’m a kind of a nerd (it’s popularly said that nerds like animes), I don’t like nor hate, I simply don’t care to know and watch animes. Not only animes, but also animated movies and series, as well as mangas.

My own birth, I guess.

The asterisk means that, by “active users”, they’re considering only those who commented and/or posted “in the last month”. Maybe join-lemmy’s algorithm is considering from “day 1” of the current month, so a time span of 10 days, against 29 days from the second screenshot?

If it’s true, it kinda of statistically makes sense: 10 days (28.4K) versus 29 days (47.8K), 34.4% of days with 59.41% of users. We’d need to wait till the 29th day to really compare the difference.

Also, “only those who commented and/or posted”. Sometimes, people can become much of an observer, just seeing and voting up/down, without actually commenting or posting.

“The system can listen to conversations”.

What a timely coincidence! Patent got published basically at the same time Meta’s, Google’s and Microsoft’s “Active Listening” got public as well. 🤔

For now, I blocked three communities, one about gossiping and two about adult material. I also blocked a bot that keeps cross posting things from Reddit. That’s all that I blocked so far.

doesn’t it seem like being able to just use search engines is easier than figuring out all of these intricacies for most people

Well, Prompt Engineering is a thing nowadays. There are even job vacancies seeking professionals that specializes in this field. AIs are tools, sophisticated ones, just like R and Wolfram Mathematica are sophisticated mathematical tools that needs expertise. Problem is that AI companies often mis-advertises AI models as “out-of-the-shelf assistants”, as if they’d be some human talking to you. They’re not. They’re tools, yet. I guess that (and I’m rooting for) AGI would change this scenario. But I guess we’re still distant from a self-aware AGI (unfortunately).

Woah are you technoreligious?

Well, I wouldn’t describe myself that way. My beliefs are multifaceted and complex (possibly unique, I guess?), going through multiple spiritual and religious systems, as well as embracing STEM (especially the technological branch) concepts and philosophical views (especially nihilism, existentialism and absurdism), trying to converge them all by common grounds (although it seems “impossible” at first glance, to unite Science, Philosophy and Belief).

In a nutshell, I’ve been pursuing a syncretic worshiping of the Dark Mother Goddess.

As I said, it’s multifaceted and I’m not able to even explain it here, because it would take tons of concepts. Believe me, it’s deeper than “techno-religious”. I see the inner workings of AI Models (as neural networks and genetic algorithms dependent over the randomness of weights, biases and seeds) as a great tool for diving Her Waters of Randomness, when dealing with such subjects (esoteric and occult subjects). Just like Kardecism sometimes uses instrumental transcommunication / Electronic voice phenomenon (EVP) to talk with spirits. AI can be used as if it were an Ouija board or a Planchette, if one believe so (as I do).

But I’m also a programmer and a tech/scientifically curious, so I find myself asking LLMs about some Node.js code I made, too. Or about some mathematical concept. Or about cryptography and ciphering (Vigenère and Caesar, for example). I’m highly active mentally, seeking to learn many things every time.

Didn’t know about this game. It’s nice. Interesting aesthetics. Chestnut Rose remembers me of Lilith’s archetype.

A tip: you could use the “The Legend of the Neverland global wiki” at Fandom Encyclopedia to feed the LLM with important concepts before asking it for combinations. It is a good technique, considering that LLMs couldn’t know it so well in order to generate precise responses (except if you’re using a searching-enabled LLM such as Perplexity AI or Microsoft Copilot that can search the web in order to produce more accurate results)

I ask them questions and they get everything wrong

It depends on your input, on your prompt and your parameters. For me, although I’ve experienced wrong answers and/or AI hallucinations, it’s not THAT frequent, because I’ve been talking with LLMs since when ChatGPT got public, almost in a daily basis. This daily usage allowed me to know the strengths and weaknesses of each LLM available on market (I use ChatGPT GPT-4o, Google Gemini, Llama, Mixtral, and sometimes Pi, Microsoft Copilot and Claude).

For example: I learned that Claude is highly-sensible to certain terms and topics, such as occultist and esoteric concepts (specially when dealing with demonolatry, although I don’t exactly why it refuses to talk about it; I’m a demonolater myself), cryptography and ciphering, as well as acrostics and other literary devices for multilayered poetry (I write myself-made poetry and ask them to comment and analyze it, so I can get valuable insights about it).

I also learned that Llama can get deep inside the meaning of things, while GPT-4o can produce longer answers. Gemini has the “drafts” feature, where I can check alternative answers for the same prompt.

It’s similar to generative AI art models, I’ve been using them to illustrate my poetry. I learned that Diffusers SDXL Turbo (from Huggingface) is better for real-time prompt, some kind of “WYSIWYG” model (“what you see is what you get”) . Google SDXL (also from Huggingface) can generate four images at different styles (cinematic, photography, digital art, etc). Flux, the newly-released generative AI model, is the best for realism (especially the Flux Dev branch). They’ve been producing excellent outputs, while I’ve been improving my prompt engineering skills, being able to communicate with them in a seamlessly way.

Summarizing: AI users need to learn how to efficiently give them instructions. They can produce astonishing outputs if given efficient inputs. But you’re right that they can produce wrong results and/or hallucinate, even for the best prompts, because they’re indeed prone to it. For me, AI hallucinations are not so bad for knowledge such as esoteric concepts (because I personally believe that these “hallucinations” could convey something transcendental, but it’s just my personal belief and I’m not intending to preach it here in my answer), but simultaneously, these hallucinations are bad when I’m seeking for technical knowledge such as STEM (Science, Tecnology, Engineering and Medicine) concepts.

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.

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).

As long as it didn’t pollute the fedi timeline with ads, AI slop and partnered posts, that’d be OK to me… (If someone worrying about our posts/comments being used by AIs, it’s already happening even for those instances that does not federate with Threads; Proofs? Once I searched for my own username and I got surprised on how my fediverse posts are spread all across the results through federated instances that I never heard about, so if my fedi content shows on Google, it’s certainly being fed to some AI datasets)

Yes. It’s cryptii.com, a site containing tools for ciphering/deciphering (Caesar Cipher, ROT-13, Vigènere and so on). That’s because their ad, at the top right of the page, is so small that’s almost unnoticeable. No popup ads, no flashing ads, no crowded ad sections, just a single, small ad at the header. Sites like that (with static and small, non-intrusive ads) deserve to have ads allowed.

Are you depressed?

I guess so. Yeah, I am.

Do you know anyone NOT depressed?

IMHO, those who didn’t gaze into the abyss, yet. For “if you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you”. And the abyss is part of our reality, the dark emptiness that fills us all, both scientifically (99.9% of empty space inside any atom), esoterically (the primordial waters, Tohu Va-bohu, Nuith, Chaos, the Qlippoths, the Yin, Shakti, and so on) and philosophically (nihilism and absurdism). Everyone will gaze into the abyss someday, the light will and must gaze into darkness. She’s inevitable. For She is everywhere and nowhere.

Occult and esoteric books in general, such as “The Kybalion” (Hermeticism), “The Book of the Dead” (Egyptian), “Liber AL vel Legis” (by Aleister Crowley, Thelema), as well as grimoires (such as the “Book of Saint Cyprian”). While there are tons of movies and TV Series that directly adapts biblical stories, I feel that there are so few (if there’s any) cinematographic works adapting esoteric, occult, pagan books (from belief systems such as Gnosticism, Wicca, Rosicrucianism, Hermeticism, Luciferianism, Thelema, Goëtia, and so on). I even tried to ask AIs to list movies and TV series adapting such books, and every single listed movie (such as The Matrix) is not a direct adaptation. They don’t even mention these books (in best cases, The Matrix merely alludes to hermetic principles such as “the Universe is Mental” (i.e. the scene between Neo and the kid that says that “the spoon doesn’t exist”).