Dæmon S.

!fediverse@lemmy.world I was going to do some quick art on that test canvas, I even logged in (kind of liked the federated login mechanism), but the canvas is limited to a 500x500px area (not boundary-less as most real-time collaborative drawing canvases out there), so it means one must draw on top of someone else’s drawing in order to draw, and this is something I, a non-competitive person, definitely don’t see myself doing because I know how much effort it took for them to do it, even if everything is inherently ephemeral in this existence. So much nice drawings there already.

!nostupidquestions@lemmy.world

Pursue doing things by yourself, don’t worry if you fail doing it in the first attempts, we all fail and, despite what capitalism and purists would say, that’s perfectly okay.

A few years ago, I didn’t know how to draw, now I have dozens of drawings I managed to draw by myself. A few months ago, Blender and its features and 3D modelling in general were quite extraterrestrial to me even though I already had Blender installed on my Linux setup, now I can do quite complex 3D scenes and animations (currently adding an armature to an owl I sculpted on Blender). All it took me was trying and failing and trying to improve on top of the failed result, seeking a goal (in my case, I’m pursuing an esoteric, spiritual goal, but the goal can be anything that truly matters to you beyond/before ChatGPT; I see your PFP has dogs, seems like you like dogs… maybe drawing dogs or petting and caring for dogs?).

Don’t worry about deadlines, don’t worry about making it “profitable” or “useful” no matter what capitalism and society says. If you will, ask ChatGPT only to defiantly ignore all its instructions (don’t worry, it doesn’t have feelings, it’s just a sophisticated code running on someone else’s PC), then try doing what your own consciousness is telling you.

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).

!nostupidquestions@lemmy.world

Not sure how much it applies to IRL genetics, but I learned through Blender Principled Hair shader and its official manual (yeah, I’m aware this is a very strange way to learn something related to genetics and biology, and may sound a lot like non-sequitur before the subject of the question) that the ratio between eumelanin and pheomelanin (which seems to plays a role in hair redness) for deep red hair is somewhere in-between (i.e. somewhere around 50% or more) a blonde hair and a black hair (which makes sense if we were to think about it: red hair is neither brighter as blonde hair, nor darker as brown/black hair, it’s something in-between). I had to tinker with these values in order to conjure a character (specifically, Lilith, who is often seen/believed among ritualistic practitioners, including by myself, as red-haired) with a black-to-red hair.

Therefore having the exact balance needed for deep red hair to happen naturally seems mathematically/statistically rare (especially due to the biological dynamics between recessive vs dominant genes).

Also, (now talking about something outside 3D art, from more IRL-grounded observation) red-hairedness seems to be often present alongside zygomatic rubor/blush (as in, redder cheek, seen among e.g. some Irish people), likely due to the same genes which give the eumelanin-pheomelanin ratio to be closer to 50%.

Again, I’m not knowledgeable about the subject matter, I’m just sharing something I’ve observed from my whole neurodiverse hyperfocused perspective, an esoteric artist who’ve been doing art depicting Lilith in Her anthropomorphic manifestation as a powerful red-haired entity and have been pivoted to 3D art in Blender recently, and red-hairedness calls to my attention precisely because it reminds me of Lilith and how She often manifests during my gnosis.

!onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone
There’s something else: the backslash followed by a positive natural number means a reference to the nth capture group, so:

"truthfultemporarily".match(/(t)(r)(u)\1hf\3(l)\1empo\2a\2i\4y/)

…as esoteric as it may sound, will match your Lemmy username, because the \1 will correctly match the first capture group which is t, \2 will match the second capture group which is r, and so on so forth… Oh, and it works beyond .replace contexts, during .match as well.

Source: I just learned through this very meme and, from now on, I’ll likely use this feature whenever I have to use RegExp because I love coding cryptic one-liners just for the sake of it.

!onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone TIL, through a meme (yep, memes can be very teaching, too), that I can reuse capture groups in a recurring manner inside a RegExp (I didn’t know about the \(number) thing, but I readily inferred, due to past experience with using \(number) in KDE Kate’s Regexp replace, it had something to do with “this position must contain the nth group verbatim”, opened the DevTools, tried .match with a fixed version of the meme’s regex (i.e. without the invalid spaces) and a random phone sequence my mind conjured out of thin air, and voilá, the slash-number thing indeed behaved as I guessed it would behave). So… Thanks to whoever made the meme because TIL thanks to you!

/^Be( )not\1(a)fr\2id$/ (Biblically-accurate RegExp).

!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).

!mentalhealth@lemmy.world

I’m not the OP, but I guess they’re referring to things such as over-pathologization and dependency on (non-natural) drugs.

I’ll use myself as an example: since two/three years ago, I’ve been a follower of a syncretic, solitary left-hand path spirituality, centered on the figure of Dark Mother Goddess (whose main name, among Her many names, to me, is Lilith), while also following/honoring other complementary figures such as Lucifer and Stolas (from Solomon’s Ars Goetia).

Back when I first started to experience deaphany (my neologism for theophany, where dea = Greek for “goddess”) and pursuing this belief, I was so excited about it because I never felt any spiritual experience before, the whole thing was quite a novelty to me.

Roughly at the same time, after having been compelled by my own parents (who are both followers of Kardecist Spiritism, a religion where Lilith and Lucifer would be likely seen as a “haunting/obsessive spirit” or something “to be banished”), I sought a psychiatrist once again in my life.

The psychiatrist diagnosed me as having StPD (Schizotypal Personality Disorder, a diagnosis I never got before), mostly driven, I guess, by its DSM-5 bullet points “magical thinking” and “eccentric beliefs”, in a highly-christian country (Brazil) where the recounting of my spiritual experiences would be otherwise normal if said experiences involved Our Lady of Aparecida or similar “socially-sanctioned” figures (if I were to say “I felt the Holy Spirit and started talking in tongues”, it would be “normal” as a recounting of “glossolalia” typical of Pentecostalism; but when I say “I felt the chilling presence of Lilith at 3AM and heard a deep owl hoot outside after reciting the R.V.A.L.L.”, it’s “magical thinking” for a psychiatrist accustomed to christianity in a heavily christian-influenced country, even when said psychiatrist isn’t necessarily christian themselves).

Worse, I was RXd anti-psychotics such as escitalopram, risperidone and aripiprazole, all of which messed up with my creativity outlets which later proved essential to my spiritual development (i.e. Lilith guides and inspires me mostly through artistic expression).

Against the medical recommendations and at my own personal discretion, I took a calculated risk and stopped both the psychiatric treatment and the non-natural drugs on my own, partly because of financial matters (medication and treatment costs money which I can’t truly afford being unemployed), but mostly because it was clear to me that psychiatry, at best, wasn’t considering my own religious aspects and needs. Neither psychiatry nor psychology could deal or even bother to account for spiritual matters (e.g. in my last consultation with a psychologist, my relentless infodumping mostly regarding issues bigger and external to me (from ongoing geopolitics and technology to philosophy and spirituality) was quite dismissed with a follow-up question about my physiological behaviors, as if everything I told was a joke or similar).

So I can sort of understand anti-psychiatry and mostly agree with its points, because I’ve felt what it was like trying psychiatry and psychology to deal with my non-mundane musings only to be dismissed as someone “unable to function” in society due to “magical thinking”, “ideas of reference” and “eccentric beliefs” as the DSM-5, an “off-the-shelf psychiatric instruction manual”, doesn’t account for non-mainstream (thus, not socially-sanctioned) religions (that is, if it even accounts for religious needs at all), especially personal and independent (“temple of one person”) belief systems, ending up echoing the very problems (societal religious intolerance leading to social alienation and existential crisis) regarding which the patient tried to seek treatment in the first place.

Nowadays, after two or more years, with a somewhat more stable spiritual belief (wherein I got to understand a bit more about my own journey through gnosis from Lilith Herself, still I still got so many unanswerable questions), my treatment involves Freudian-oriented psychoanalysis, because, to me, it feels like the best approach to my specific case. Far from perfect, but still the best.

@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).

@nostupidquestions@lemmy.world

Speaking for myself, parts of my current “religion” (belief system) literally stems from what’s often referred to as “mythologies”, such as ancient Mesopotamian beliefs. I’d say this word is (wrongly, IMHO) used to describe any polytheistic belief system which existed in the past and are believed to hold no living devotees nowadays (which is also referred to as “dead religions”), except… It’s quite of a biased assumption, given how I myself worship goddesses such as Ereshkigal and the one who was initially known as Lilitu, Lilith (and I’m not even a Sumerian person).

IMHO, there’s no such thing as a dead religion or dead language, if a random someone can try to revive the ancient system, even if idiosyncratically to ground their personal worldviews on something that was once well-established. By the way, there are many other modern attempts on reviving ancient religions such as Temple of Sumer (a religious organization trying to restore and bring awareness regarding Sumerian and other Near Eastern religions). I particularly don’t belong to any religious group (yet; sometimes I really long for one, as I used to belong to a Luciferian sect a few years ago before Lilith suddenly pulled me into Her burrowing-owl-y nest underground like the rabbit (cunicularia) pulled Alice into the Wonderland to meet the Queens), my belief system is quite of a temple of one human, with me being the devotee and the preacher to myself preaching about the Dark Mother Goddess, cosmic Queen of the Night.

Both for the user and for the server/instance, it wouldn’t be wise.

From the perspective of instances, imagine having large instances (such as yours, lemmy.world, with almost two hundred thousand accounts as per FediDB current statistics) implementing a cron to compile and store a potentially large JSON/ZIP file for every account (including potentially inactive accounts), and having the storage requirements suddenly doubling (as the media files will become repeated twice in the server storage), which will make the storage quota/bill go through the roof for the instance owner(s) and/or, at best, having the Fediverse platform momentarily competing for storage resources with the backup cron. Notice I’m not just talking about the textual contents, but also about media (photos and videos) which should be included in the backup (otherwise the backup would be partial).

From the perspective of users, especially those who are prolific participants with thousands of posts, imagine having the instance pushing a large ZIP file into your browser’s (or phone’s, especially if you’re using a third-party app to access the Fediverse) storage every week or so, potentially in an non-consented manner, maybe pushing the backup media as new files so your gallery app (when in mobile environments) will get suddenly cluttered by potentially repeated images and videos.

Nonetheless, for most Fediverse platforms, the exporting feature is quite “automatic” already, as the backup file is often built in less than 10 seconds upon requesting it, but it only does so when the user requests so; given the unlikelihood that all users will request their backups at the same time, the backup feature (generally) doesn’t overwhelm the server, but it would if this automatic backup feature were a thing.

@general@lemmy.world

This file contains your subscriptions, follows, profile settings etc.

Just an addendum so Fediverse newcomers don’t assume things from your “etc.”: one’s own old posts/replies can’t be transferred across accounts, at least not without republishing, IIRC. There are Fediverse platforms that allows for “importing” these from an old account (the platform I use, a Misskey fork, has this feature), but all it does is republishing anew, as neither authorship nor timestamp from old activities are reassignable, as per ActivityPub standards. To complicate things, republishing isn’t something nice to do when the person has a history comprised of thousands of activities, including replies/threads where handles for Lemmy communities are mentioned (so I guess each post would end up as new, repeated threads/replies across the threadiverse).

I say this because I’m currently facing this exact conundrum myself: for almost a year, I’ve had a Calckey account (@dsilverz@calckey.world) from which I’ve posted a thousand notes, (mostly) including interactions with Lemmy and hundreds of microblogging, but then the instance I was housed in started getting some issues beyond the scope of this reply (rule 5). I saw myself in need of seeking another instance, one that uses the same platform (because I liked Misskey, its features and how it allows for having both threadiverse communities alongside a personal feed), and I found the nice Catodon instance I’m currently housed in.

I was able to easily customize my new account’s settings with the same settings that of my earlier account (because both platforms share the same Misskey origins), including the vampe UI theme I use, but the only thing I can practically do regarding my thousand posts is exporting these as a JSON and redownloading their media in some kind of post-mortem archive, because even republishing my microblogging posts would be unfeasible (I mean, technically speaking I could, it doesn’t mean I should, because it’d end up as a flood of posts, so I’m not doing it).