dsilverz

@MazonnaCara89 @Excrubulent I'm unable to reply your reply directly (for some reason, the Friendica instance I use can't see the Lemmy instance you're in; I'm suspecting it's because Solarpunk instance uses Anubis CAPTCHA and Friendica could be operating in a different manner from how Lemmy operates hence triggering Anubis for a server-to-server communication, but I'm not sure).

I'm replying through this reply to my reply.

Facebook has had a strategy for a long time of monopolising the internet of countries that previously had very little internet. They essentially subsidise internet infrastructure and make that subsidy dependent on facebook being a central part of the network.

Exactly. And many carrier operators over here (Tim, Claro, Vivo) offer "rate-less access" (i.e. won't count as consumed bytes) to Facebook, WhatsApp, among other mainstream platforms (sometimes TikTok).
Also, there are "Captive portals" (web-based Wi-Fi authentication for passwordless Wi-Fi networks) from many "free Wi-Fi hotspots" out there which uses "Facebook login" as a means of getting accessing to their "free Wi-Fi". Facebook (and, by extension, Meta and its platforms) is deeply ingrained into Brazilian's daily lives and I'm frequently told to "have a Facebook profile" for me, it's deeply annoying.

They obviously have found ways to inveigle themselves into key infrastructure in lots of places, even if they couldn’t build it in from the ground up.

Exactly!

@joel_feila:

jesus that some dystopian shit

Yeah... it's a deeply boring dystopian world. The world has been indistinguishable from Cyberpunk.

@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.

@otacon239 I didn't know about the movie Waking Life, thanks for mentioning and recommending it! I just read about it (both on Wikipedia and IMDB) and it seems deep and well-written, particularly due to its references to "hard determinism". I'll try to watch it eventually (it's been a while since I've watched a movie, I've been leaning toward textual works).

@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.

@WhyJiffie

oh, I too often do this, with emails, where I compose it for a long time, all the while it changes a lot

Curiously, there seems to be a psychological factor behind this: when we're compositing emails, we are focused on a single mail. Email composition boxes are often bigger and wider than those from social networks, and they often appear as fullscreen textareas (separated from the mail being replied, if there's any). That's possibly why it seems easier to do this with email composing. A tip? Notepad apps (such as Noto, Sketchbook, Joplin or even mainstream ones such as Google Keep) can mimick a composition box from emails. My previous reply to you was initially written in Noto, until I transferred it to PC. Perhaps this could help if you wish to apply the same habit for fediverse.

that, or what reddit does: replace the username with “deleted”

In a sense, yeah, "deleted" username placeholdering (automatically, when a person chooses to delete their own account) is also an interesting solution. However, there are some things I forgot to mention in my previous replies, one of which is GDPR's "Right to be forgotten", which could pose a legal obstacle for such a solution if, like Reddit, the content is restored against the user's will (as a context: when people left Reddit to come to fediverse/Lemmy, Reddit undid many of the deletions, so they could both astroturf the Reddit platform (make it appear like they have a large userbase when they don't anymore) AND train corporate AI with all posts and comments, and this probably led to legal issues or will lead in the future if people eventually find a Reddit's legalese contradiction inside their ToS and decide to sue Reddit based on GDPRs rights).

In the end of the day, it's a complicated matter, because it feels like there's no easy solution that could both respect community AND the user behind the content while complying with certain laws out there, especially when things can unexpectedly change in the future (e.g. corp AI managing to haunt the fediverse) and leading people to decide on nuking entire posts.

@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...

@WhyJiffie Disclaimer: I'm not sure if Friendica is respecting the thread format from Lemmy, in my first attempt, Friendica sent this reply as a whole new sub-thread instead of part of the previous sub-thread. Sorry if this is being sent outside the sub-thread, it's a glitch from Friendica.

I’m sorry for your bad experiences

Thanks

sometimes the person is just in a hurry or something

On the one hand, it makes sense. Hurry is perfectly understandable, given how "modern life" often vampirizes human time (while also vampirizing our attention span, which also corroborates with, and exacerbates, the phenomenon you described as severe attention deficit).

However, the hurry to reply is just another symptom/phenomenon brought by online activities: we're often expected to act "now", reacting to real-time information, prioritizing action over (deep) thought... and there's a Brazilian saying "a pressa é inimiga da perfeição", roughly translating to "hurry is the enemy of perfection"; things don't need to be as fast, at least not immediately (not that we need to seek perfection: here, "perfection" it's just euphemism for well-thought interactions).

For example (a meta-example): this reply to your reply wasn't written so recently. I saw your reply when it had been 10 minutes since you had sent it (11 hours ago). Then I read it, then I read it again, and again... I read it several times so I could understand all the points you shared. Even though I wasn't going to reply immediately (i.e. as soon as I saw), I began to gather fragments from my thoughts-replies (which started to pop up inside my head as soon as I began reading), writing these fragments as notes so I could further develop and compile them, only effectively sending when my reply was complete and ready. It's an old habit of mine, gradually writing and preparing a text/reply/post over hours or days.

Maybe I got this habit through literature, where I often write down and compile my thoughts as they pop up. Maybe I got this habit from Geminispace (a cyberspace within the so-called smallweb/smolweb) where its protocol prefers and encourages raw text over media. Maybe it's a fundamental part of archetypal traits from ND and/or PDs... In any case, it can be reflected as a proof-of-concept of how interactions can happen without needing such a hurry from the modern web, allowing for better interaction depth.

Also, it can be pointed out how developing a response gradually over hours, in a way, helps with both attention deficit and anxiety. Of course, there are no simple one-size-fits-it-all solutions because each person is different, but it seems like an useful approach (saving/bookmarking what is going to be replied and developing the reply gradually over the day or over a few days, without a hurry to do that so immediately; IMHO, the Web would be slow-paced, but richer and deeper in content than it is nowadays).

brainrot platforms like tiktok really don’t help with this worldwide issue.

Exactly. This is also why I mentioned Geminispace in my previous paragraph: there's a jarring contrast between its raw text format and the fast-consumption media (not that much of a difference from "fast-food": readily available, but unhealthy) from TikTok and other mainstream "social" networks, with the former prioritizing brains and the latter prioritizing gains.

very short, meaningless comments, which also have other properties I don’t know how to put into words.

Another word I would think of is superficiality.

The cases where I find deletion problematic always had something useful in them, either the post or the threads.

Losing useful information/knowledge is frustrating, especially in a world that is becoming increasingly scarce of purposeful knowledge.. Although I'm not sure how much the things I ever wrote and sent on Lemmy were that much useful for people, I guess there were possibly helpful contents (explanations, tips, etc) among hundreds of personal entries that got deleted. That's because I deleted my Lemmy account as a whole, so I had no means to keep certain entries I wished I could keep.

One solution could be ActivityPub allowing for a departing user to update its own actor from given posts, replacing it with a community/instance-wide actor (thus a "de-actorification" of sorts), so the activity would effectively become part of a public domain (given explicit consent from both the actor, the community and the instance, of course). But it's not an easy thing to implement nor to fully achieve in practice, unfortunately.

@WhyJiffie I'll try to reply using this platform (Friendica... I had no success with Mastodon, Tootik and Pixelfed). I tried to reply to a reply in this thread but my answer failed to federate (and Friendica doesn't return their reply in the search box). I'm replying with the following intent: to remind about neurodivergence. I am ND myself (I'm not autistic, but I was diagnosed with schizotypal PD, and I suspect I could actually have Geschwind syndrome; in any case, I'm certainly ND because I can't think/express nor see/perceive/feel things in "typical ways"). ND people express themselves in non-typical ways (my reply is hopefully an example of that). ND people are often mistaken as AI (and this can further deepen the alienation ND people often feel and suffer from). People often downvote content without further try to engage/explain _why_ they downvoted, and ND content is more prone to downvotes due to sincericide (exacerbate sincerity) and seemingly lack of "emotional resonance" (i.e. "cold-sounding" texts) with NT (neurotypicals). Or, ND content is simply ignored, ghosted, relegated to the void, either because NT people don't know how to further engage with such a content, or because NT people couldn't even bother to try and read it in the first place (people are becoming accustomed with short texts, fast content, and ND texts can be looooong). Best case scenario, ND people are replied back with superficial replies because their content couldn't communicate what they intended to communicate. And this can be pretty infuriating/frustrating, especially because ND people often face the lack of belonging, feeling like they can't fit anywhere... and this often leads to resigned departure, which you referred to as "permanently deleted posts". This is something I did: I left Lemmy many months ago, partly because of the many phenomena I described: it feels frustrating to be yourself and being drown into either ghosting, downvoting, superficiality or prejudice, even though I tried not to bother... but what we write is fragments deep from our souls. I can understand the feeling of watching a reply vanishing with an entire post, it's frustrating... just as it's frustrating to watch a post being misread or ghosted because I was born akin to an extraterrestrial trying to communicate with fellow humans to no avail. That's why I often find myself "nuking" my own content: because there's no reason to keep a communication attempt that led to no meaningful and deep communication. I hope this clarifies one of the reasons why "Permanently deleted" could happen.