Daemon Silverstein

I’m just a spectre out of the nothingness, surviving inside a biological system.

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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: August 17th, 2024

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  • Somehow it reminded me of The Angel Problem:

    The Angel-Devil game is played on an infinite chess board. In each turn the Angel jumps from his current position to a square at distance at most k. He tries to escape his opponent, the Devil, who blocks one square in each move. It is an open question whether an Angel of some power k can escape forever.

    The mechanics are obviously different from it, but the theory kinda of still applies: if we limit the pieces to the maximum of K squares, could it lead to a checkmate?




  • Websites from alternative networks such as Onion, Freenet, I2P and GNUnet, where speed and privacy are a must-have. Onion webchats, for example, uses neverending-loading with iframes/HTML frames (and another frame/iframe with a standard HTML form), so to not depend on JS.

    At the surface web (clearnet), however, it’s harder to find. Even the remaining old sites, from blogosphere and personal tilde websites (those whose URL contained a tilde “~” followed by an username) have some degree of JS.


  • A dev here. Not a reddit dev, but a dev. Deleting thing online doesn’t necessarily mean real deletion of the content. For instance, every post and comment is a row of a “big notebook” (a table on a database) and every row is split by columns for specific data: who’s the author, where it was posted (which community), what’s the content and, sometimes, a yes/no column called “is it deleted?”. When you delete such post, you are writing a “yes” inside that column, without actually replacing the content. It’s an oversimplified explanation of how platforms register posts, sometimes there’s a “version” table (think of it as multiple notebooks keeping track of different things simultaneously) that will keep the different versions of an edited post/comment, so they will remain intact inside such table.

    Tl;dr: once on the internet, always on the internet (unfortunately). Especially if we’re dealing with a corporation that profits over user’s data. Rare cases where a thing on the internet finds real oblivion.


  • People playing and hearing songs with looped beats and vulgar lyrics through a bass boosted sound system which costed them several months worth of minimum wage to pay for having it on their cars. They generally drive slowly through streets near beaches in order to exhibit their “fancy sound systems” while all the vulgarity plays repeatedly. I guess it’s unique from this green-and-yellow country where I live.

    I could also say wearing flip-flops and bermudas on a daily basis, or one of the highest usage and dependency of Meta’s WhatsApp worldwide, or the country with the most welcome (often too nosy) people. Or, through a more positive lens, the richest land where crops easily grow when you sow something, the highest ecological diversity (especially plants, it’s so common to find exotic plants here), the highest climate diversity (you can travel south to meet snow, then travel north/northeast to meet hot climates, without leaving the same country), etc.



  • There’s a third one, too, it’s a funny one: you stare at countless (mostly fake) job vacancies expecting to be hired so to “deserve to survive”, while bills can’t stop arriving. You resign from your 10-yr IT career and try to apply for a simpler, factory vacancy, just to hear from HRs that your CV is “too good to be applied for our simpler jobs”. In the meantime, you catch yourself selling your soul and autonomy (constantly forced to accept the circumstances) to these people that share the same blood lineage as yours (some call them “familiars”) because you can’t see another option, except for going homeless, where you’ll be constantly assaulted by cops and people saying “go get a job” to you because you got nothing. By the way, you also inhale toxic fumes from air pollution from cities. And you stare at a Word document, your own CV, thinking “what did I do wrong?”.




  • General American rendering of “butter” as [bʌɾɚ] uses it.

    Nice example! I couldn’t think of “butter”, thanks! Indeed, the “tt” sound from “butter”.

    often don’t share features with each other but do it with non-Brazilian varieties

    Exactly.

    You’re probably a Sulista speaker*,

    I’m “paulista” (Ribeirão Preto) currently living in Minas Gerais (a branch of my family is from Minas). I copied the IPA from Wiktionary focusing on the “R” sounding, but I didn’t pay attention to the IPA’s ending sound (indeed, sulistas* sound something like “arauTÔ” while, as caipira, I speak something like “aRAUtu”).


  • Non-native English speaker (Brazilian, whose native language is Brazilian Portuguese): sometimes my pronounce of “Data” sounds like the Portuguese word “Data” (“date” as in date of calendar, IPA: /ˈda.tɐ/), but sometimes the “T” sounds like “R”, a specific kind of “R” (I have no English examples on mind, but it’s a similar R sound as in “Arauto” (“herald”) IPA: /aˈɾaw.to/ or Spanish “Toro” (“bull”) IPA: /ˈtoɾo/ )), resulting in something like “Dah-rah”