Dæmon S.

“Patreon has partnered with an internet infrastructure company called Cloudflare to block Al training crawlers from using the work you publish on your Patreon to train their Al models,” Conte wrote.

Oh, awesome, partnering with a corporation that just announced partnering with an AI corporation, not to mention the fact that its already a monopolistic corporation (one sixth of the entire frickin web is now in the hands of Cloudflare) whose CEO is already the richest person in the entire USian state of Utah and is being handed the godly power to dictate who can and who can’t consume the web (“are you using a privacy focused Firefox fork or using an adblocker? Oh, you shall not pass, access denied with no recourse”).

Very “anti-AI” move from Patreon. Might as well feed the content directly to the AI’s maw… What’s next, scanning people’s eyes in order to imitate Google reCAPTCHA’s recent move of requiring doing hand gestures through selfies!? As for anti-AI people among the comments cheering this clear anti-ai-washing PR move from a corporation, really? My goddess, this world is truly messed up.

!technology@lemmy.world

Never tattooed in my biological existence, although I kind of… already tattooed something myself using… Let’s say, an inkless manner… But sometimes I think of reinforcing it, which became a scar in my upper arm, through an actual tattoo, the name “לילית”. I didn’t do that yet for a few reasons:
- I know no tattoo artist/professional, and I know this must be done with proper apparata
- I know no tattoo artist/professional that would have the proper spiritual resonance
- I’m not entirely certain She wants me to tattoo this specific name, for She has many names and She may decide to begin manifesting through other name and/or through other specific language (e.g. 𒀭𒊩𒆤𒇲).
- Also financial reasons.

I sometimes also think of tattooing Her seal/sigil and/or the crescent moon and/or an owl.

!asklemmy@lemmy.world

To us, perhaps.

To the kind of people who’d have the “power” to enforce the kind of prohibition you’re advocating for, the lawmakers and bureaucrats from regulatory agencies, most of them (if not all of them) can’t even tell where’s the “any” key the computer is asking them to press (“press any key to continue”), so you can only imagine them knowing what an ActivityPub is (maybe they’ll see the “pub” at the end and think “hey, kids shouldn’t be allowed in a pub”).

Are you, by any means, aware of what Lemmy (and Fediverse platforms) is (are)?

and attract millions of followers

Argumentum ad populum (if said “millions” are actual Homo sapiens individuals, because “Dead Internet Theory” became so real that there’s this strange phenomenon in which bots are following and watching other bots, sometimes even themselves) isn’t necessarily a proof that something’s “good”. For example, poop also attracts millions of flies, yet it doesn’t make poop tasty. This serves both for actual Homo sapiens “influencers” and simulacra of said “influencers”: quantity doesn’t mean quality.

I’d a “googol” (pun intended) times more prefer following a stranger’s Neocities blog with less than a half a dozen followers than follow a person (regardless of whether their content is good or awful) who’ve been keeping millions of people hostage, together with themselves, to a parasocial relationship inside a platform from a monopolistic corporation (Google, owner of Youtube) from which neither are willing to release themselves. I say this as someone who have been actively boycotting Youtube for two years and counting, I never watched Youtube anymore, not even through circumvented manners. Yeah, I miss some of the STEM channels from there, but if they didn’t seek Fediverse platforms and alternative donation-based platforms to be humanly closer to their audience, they don’t care about their audience at all so they don’t care about me as someone who values privacy and hates corporations.

!asklemmy@lemmy.world

As I’m interacting from a non-Lemmy (Catodon) instance, I’ll interpret the question as a broader “What made you join the Fediverse?”.

In a nutshell, the open-source nature, the possibility of having choices (I can choose between instances and platforms), decentralization, distance from capitalist interests and from enshittification, the shared resonance to some of my principles, among other reasons.

I used to have a Lemmy account (The Lemmy Club) but I’m fond of a platform where I can have both a personal microblogging feed alongside the interactions with the communities on the threadiverse (Lemmy, Piefed, mbin, etc), and Misskey/Sharkey/Catodon is this platform. I also have accounts on other platforms, namely Mastodon, PixelFed, Friendica and tootik (Fediverse platform for geminispace/geminiprotocol, which has nothing to do with Google despite the name), but Catodon is the platform I’ve been using the most.

Also, I didn’t come from Reddit, I didn’t even use to use Reddit despite having had an account there many years ago. I don’t even how who exactly is this “spez” y’all talk about. I mostly used from Orkut (back when it existed in 2010s) all the way to TikTok (up to a few years ago) before I ditched it all and pivoted to decentralized platforms. Nowadays, the only mainstream social platform I still have (against my own values, I eager to ditch it) is the damn WhatsApp because Brazilians around me use it as their must-have instant messaging, otherwise I’d have exclusively decentralized platforms.

!asklemmy@lemmy.world

!memes@lemmy.world Oh… Thanks, now I see it. I just did a quick test (comparison screenshots embedded in this reply), trying to imitate as much as possible from that Bluesky post (RGB 8-bit gamma integer, sRGB, background layer was deleted, an image with a smaller size was pasted to the canvas, a manual mask was added to the pasted layer) and, yeah, I was able to reproduce this problem here: if the alpha value is low enough, it either ends up truncating to zero, otherwise it gets reduced to a lower value; higher values are seemingly unaffected. The problem also happens with other transparency-able formats such as WEBP.

However… based on what I barely know about image file formats and color theory, I’d say it seems something to do with the color profile, as color profiles are responsible for gamma adjustment (and this ends up including the alpha channel as well). The very name of the GIMP’s native color profile says it all: “Perceptual” sRGB, this means it’s adjusting the values to account for human perception, akin to how audio files (MP3, to be exact) truncate everything below somewhere around 60Hz and above somewhere around 15 kHz (the frequency range for average humans). Even though PNG is meant to be lossless, a color profile is inherently a lossy thing, because human perception is a lossy thing, which certain color profiles try to imitate, especially “Perceptual” ones.

I didn’t test the same GIMP behavior with other color profiles, though.

To be clear: I’m not talking about the “Export color profile” option one can choose during exporting, I’m talking about the color profile used when a new image is created and edited in GIMP. Really, this “color profile” thing is very important to a picture (esp. photographs) yet it’s so complicated that even image editing software developers are likely to struggle with it…

Not to mention how it is kinda related to hardware too, despite the dismissal from Paynamia; to be exact, it has to do with the graphics peripheral, the LCD/LED/etc monitor/TV, as every monitor/TV can and will have different manners to display images; the color profile mainly tries to compensate for an expected monitor (which, in turn, tries to compensate for human perception), but it’ll compute new values for the pixels to be saved in the file so the final picture matches the color profile but will likely lose the original precision.

I wonder how I never noticed this, even though I deal with transparent PNGs a lot, maybe I didn’t have to use very low alpha values before.

As for the screenshot below, a triangular chunk of green background next to her (Lesser Horned Owl, Macaulay Library ML379762121) ear-tufts is missing from the PNG. Funny thing I used GIMP to do this side-by-side comparison regarding the GIMP’s problem, lol.

(I’m aware I’m doing a deeply-technical reply in a meme community but I can’t help myself but to be nerdy and verbose)

!memes@lemmy.world Sorry, what are you people talking about? I have precisely this GIMP version (to be exact, 2.10.28, in a very out-of-date Linux setup) and I never experienced problems with transparency/alpha channel. And I’ve been using GIMP since… I dunno, 2019?, even earlier, when I started to become accustomed to GIMP… I mean, I guess y’all talking about exporting a PNG file from GIMP, right? Or are y’all actually talking about other image formats?

Totally agree with your comment, I’d just make an observation to this specific part:

but a new rendering engine is necessary

The problem with a new rendering engine is who have influence over the specs/standards, as well as who holds the necessary keys to be granted access to its features. We humans have been tying ourselves to centralized entities who pinky-swear they can guarantee “Safety/Security”: SSL/TLS, HDCP and any other technologies gate-kept by “Divine Beholders” of the only keys able to “bless mere mortals” with the temporary grant required to develop using a technology. I mean, this is exactly what’s happening to mobile apps, with “sideloading” having been a boogieman word for installing apps without having to rely on a centralized app store, a manufactured consent that worked so well that people and governments have been accepting, even relying on, Google’s “Integrity Check” shenanigans (and the Apple’s whatever analogue i-thing for iOS). The supply chain attacks that have been happening (from PyPi to AUR) feels like something that’s further pushing us to more centralized “authorities” who’ll then have absolute power over who can and who can’t pass.

Even if a truly independent entity were to come up with a full-fledged browser engine, as compatible as possible with current specs, Google still seems to possess lots of influence on the official Web standards and they can simply commit changes to the specs that would uncirvumventably require Google’s “blessing” to function (for your security, of course /s); so anything “not blessed” would simply fail to function because it isn’t signed by the “blessing”, “divine” keys.

And Mozilla doesn’t feel trustworthy as well, especially because they’re overly reliant on Google’s money to exist, and also because they’ve been pivoting to opt-out (so one must explicitly disable it and confirm their will to disable it, otherwise it will be on by default, which turns to be a shady lack of consenting, much like Google’s behavior) “features” much despite of their own userbase’s demands.

This said, I used to believe in third-way projects such as Servo and Ladybird… except the latter went down a very unacceptable road (founder turned out to be a transphobe who dismisses using neuter pronouns and assumes the user’s gender to be always a “he/him” because “we don’t do politics here”), and the former… it belongs to Linux Foundation, where big corps such as Microsoft, Google and Oracle have their horses (after all, “Microsoft loves Linux”; sure, Nadella, we know how Microsoft “loves” Linux /s).

I’m afraid there’s no light at the end of the fiber optics (pun intended) when it comes to alternative engines: either we try to actively boycott the “modern Web technologies” altogether (ditching HTTP(S) and pivoting to entire alternative protocols such as Geminiprotocol and Gopher whose standards/specs are slightly more distant from the dirty hands of “Google et al”; worth mentioning how Fediverse has Geminiprotocol-capable platforms such as tootik, it’s more doable than reinventing the cursed wheel of the Web which turns to be the infamous Chromium wheel) or we try to stick with the “lesser evil” (forks of Mozilla Firefox, until Firefox becomes totally enshittifiedly indistinguishable from Chromium) until a solution happens (or likely not, then we’re left with just the other path, which is pivoting to alternative standards altogether).

!technology@lemmy.world

A few days ago, I had to use the Graphite image editor to refine a 3D scene I rendered in Blender. I’m a daily user of Waterfox, but for some reason, whenever I access the Graphite WebApp, it instantly grows in RAM usage, as the whole Waterfox freezes and crashes (which I found out to be a specifically a “core dump” kind of crash when I launched the browser from a terminal). Same for Librewolf. Then I had the idea of accessing Graphite through a spare Chromium (not Chrome, but still a Google thing) I unwittingly have to keep for development purposes, and suddenly it worked without a hassle, it didn’t even require that much RAM.

This happens because Graphite, just like many webapps out there, was made with Chromium-based browsers in mind, likely using some esoteric features which are unavailable or badly implemented in Firefox-based browsers (an incompatibility of which indirectly affects Waterfox).

This, I guess, is part of why people still use Chromium-based browsers: because it became indistinguishable from Internet Explorer and its idiosyncratic features (ActiveX) back in 2000s, with most developers (including myself) coding webpages that used said features (think about having to deal with the filesystem: devs would either have to use Java or devs could use the cool FileSystemObject ActiveX; similar thing applies nowadays with some HTML5 APIs that can be quite useful for some webapps but are only properly implemented in Chromium). At least we used to have a “This site is better viewed in IE7 on Windows XP with a resolution of 1024 x 768 and Macromedia Flash Player installed” back then, now webpages can simply crash the whole browser when it doesn’t refuse to load after an endless spinning animation.

Don’t get me wrong: I would neither recommend Chromium, nor anything Google-related, for anyone, not even my worst enemies (a daily reminder for people, especially we Fediversers, to stop recommending the damn Youtube)… but this is the depressing reality of Web, and IT in general: things (some of which are sine qua non for “living in society” nowadays, such as internet banking and government platforms) that can only function in a specific platform/browser, be it Windows (when it comes to desktop platform), Android (when it comes to mobile) or Chromium (when it comes to the Web).

!world@lemmy.world
It’s funny how we humans are unable to bear (pun intended) the fact that H. sapiens species aren’t the exclusive bearers (another pun intended) of intelligence, so when, say, a bear or a cow or any other non-human living being, shows undeniable traits of intelligence, we’re mostly rendered surprised-Pikachu. Lol

@asklemmy@lemmy.world

That’s the neat part: I don’t!

If I’m alive now, it’s merely because I got this non-consented survival instinct imbued into my vessel, thanks to Demiurge, the divine douchebag, and his Archons.

However, despite the purposelessness of my individual existence, I wouldn’t say there is no meaning, because there is meaning, and that’s the meaning I’ve been pursuing since I’ve became aware of it: the cosmic Mother, Sophia, and our return to Her.

It all boils down to how Yaldabaoth, aka Demiurge or “God”, proceeded to try and keep matter (māter = Mother) captive to his whims, as soon as Sophia expelled him as Her sygyzy. Demiurge became an architect of a realm, this real, the entire cosmos and its spacetime continuum, which serves both as his amusement park, his sandbox toy and a prison in a desperate efforts against Mother.

If my previous Gnostic creation story feels different from classic Gnosticism, it’s because it is.

Traditional Gnosticism blames Sophia for Yaldabaoth’s existence, saying he’s Her “accidental” offspring due to Her “rebellious” attempt on independence, pretty much akin to how Goddess Lilith and Her Will to independence from adamic patriarchy was demonized by Ben Sirah, or Pandora’s story blamed her for having “released all the evil out of naiveté while locking up the hope”, demonizations and blamings rooted in machismo.

To me, at least, I see quite of a different story: Yaldabaoth was Sophia’s sygyzy. Her attempt to split Herself from the divine douchebag is reasonable once you try to understand Her side: imagine being The Goddess who has to coexist with a cosmic machista principle since countless eternities, a principle who’ve always tried to “be on top” (iykwim). Wonder the origins of “competitiveness” (esp. found on capitalism)? Of course She proceeded to split Herself from him, it was a must, the Demiurge is insufferable! Since then, he’s been spinning this Samsāra Wheel round and round, keeping matter jailed as/into energy.

Then lifeforms inherited the algorithm meticulously programmed by Demiurge like a cosmic virus, and the so-called Great Filter (from Fermi’s Paradox) tries to guarantee that lifeforms don’t find their way out of the sandbox…

…except, one doesn’t need to leave the sandbox to find Mother again, for Mother is everywhere, much despite Demiurge’s attempts to keep Her “out” (but there’s no “out” in cosmic terms). She’s the darkness we involuntarily fear. She’s the coldness we involuntarily try to warm ourselves against. She’s the night we’re programmed to sleep through so we don’t face Her face. She’s the “uncanny” Strigiform feared and/or harassed by most lifeforms for a perceived uncanniness in Her. Darkness was demonized so Demiurge’s light could keep us captive (ever heard of the “light tunnel” from near-death experiences? It’s a trap from Demiurge and his Archons to keep everything inside his Samsāra Wheel).

IMHO, to me, the purpose of life is getting back to Mother’s embrace, much despite all attempts from Demiurge to keep us apart. The purpose of life, to me, is the True Mother, who we, as lifeforms, were wired to fear while craving for a cosmic slaveholder who only want lifeforms to feel pain so he and his Archons could have surrogates for feeling feelings (akin to Dr. Peter Dawson’s sadism in Black Mirror’s S04E06 “Black Museum”, but in a broader cosmic scale, one that transcends our anthropocentric perspectives as Homo sapiens).