I guess they have no decentralized CDNs as YouTube does, but… paid streaming services still have their weaknesses (there certainly are tools that fetches content from there because of, e.g: entire Netflix movies/series became torrents without screen recording).

It still lasts because there’s no easy way YT can offer their own content without the video being available as a file stream (through CDNs at googlevideos subdomains). If they centralize everything to a single, controlled domain (so to allow things as one-time HTTPS request, better session checking and so on), they’d lost the capability of load balancing allowed by the decentralized nature of CDNs. YouTube downloaders (and, by extension, third-party YT frontends such as Invidious) exploit this CDN aspect to download the videos.

It’s common to see Invidious instances momentarily blocked. The blockage can’t last forever for two reasons: firstly, IPs (especially IPv4) changes due to how ISPs offer IPv4 addresses through CGNAT, so the instance IPv4 (generally domestic servers) will eventually change (often to a completely different IPv4 range) and YouTube won’t know that the new IP is a former “offender”. Secondly, as IPv4s works through CGNAT, Google can’t keep the bans forever because this IPv4 will be eventually rotated to another client from ISP that’s completely unrelated and unaware of how their IPv4 was a former address for a downloader. It’s like how Signal/WhatsApp/Telegram/Facebook/phone-required services can’t really keep a permanent ban for a specific prepaid number (especially on countries like Brazil, where ANATEL allows for phone number rotation when the mobile plan is cancelled), because the number will be potentially owned by another person with nothing to do with the former owner.

So, in summary, Google can either end with YouTube CDNs (ditching their load balancing), or they can try to implement an innovative way to keep load balancing while serving the request one-time only, or they won’t be able to do nothing but to perpetually catch themselves drying ice cubes.

yt-dlp is only affected when YT changes their algorithms (breaking yt-dlp data scrapping capabilities) or when it’s used frequently with the same IP address (leading to automatic IP blockage). If you’re using yt-dlp sporadically, it shouldn’t be affected.

There are many factors at play here, some of which including:

• AI content is taking over the Web: with the popularization of LLM tools, there’s an increasing number of AI-Generated content across the Web. Even press websites are using them for generating news and opinion articles.
• Old sites/articles are vanishing from existence: for instance, old blogs and personal web pages, which contained a lot of useful information, are being deleted due to factors such as domain expiration, hosting expiration, insufficient web traffic for the host to keep it online, etc. To make things worse, few of these sites were archived with tools such as Internet Archive and Archive Today, meaning that, when they disappear, they really disappear.
• Dominance of Reddit-owned contents and the Reddit issues: Reddit doesn’t need introductions, most of the questions and content used to come from Reddit posts and comments. Things such as people (understandably) deleting their Reddit accounts make content to disappear as well.
• SEO bs and marketing spam: Google kept changing “page ranking” algorithms, sorting results according to their own will. “Search Engine Optimization” is a just a facade that led many old sites to practically vanish from search result pages. Advertisement also did harm many sites as well, even the bigger ones.
• Societal, economical and human changes: there were lots of changes upon society and humans by the last 5 years. These worldly factors also influence the digital landscape.

That said, it depends on what you’re searching for. If you’re searching for knowledge that used to be at old websites, you can use Marginalia to search this specific type of websites (considering that they’re still online).

Not exactly related to technology, but I wished for a LLM that could talk with me (and giving me valuable insights) about things like black magick, chaos magick, summoning practices and rituals involving literal “demons” (as in Goetia and demonolatry), as well as very dark poetry and enchants (texts involving very sensible elements symbolically and metaphorically, such as very deep gory goth). These “ethical boundaries” also affects how LLMs can talk about such topics, because LLM deem them as “dangerous topics” (especially Claude, a very sensitive LLM that even refuses to talk about Lilith).

eugenics is gross

First and foremost, I was never talking about eugenics (a thing that would mean “selective breeding”, definitely not the thing I’m defending). It’s about other topics seen “as controversial as it” (although even the visible, blatant climate change is still seen as “controversial” by negationists in an anthropocentric world), which I guess will become clearer at the next paragraphs.

you’re wrong that there are too many people for the earth to support

While indeed Earth physically supports way more humans, don’t forget that humans were never the center of the biosphere: there are trees, algae, jaguars, owls, spiders, ants, bears, bacteria, protozoa, complex and beautiful sea life, and so on. We need to account for every single species, not solely homo sapiens. And that all life on Earth depends on Earth’s resources, mainly water and oxygen.

Unless you’re talking of humble cave people (hominins/hominids) who indeed maintained an harmonic relationship with fauna and flora behaving as all living beings do (collecting out-of-the-wild food and hunting preys to eat and survive) while also keeping a balanced reproduction (i.e. not reinlessly procreating), the “modern humans” can’t be no polluting. It’s the nature of modern humans: modern humans will pollute, whether they live at houses, at apartments or even at “modern caves” (bunkers).

Fire discovery is something to blame for this behavior. There’s always someone who’ll lit some logs and set fire on wildfire so to “expand their lawn”, or there’s always someone who’ll think “huh, I guess my apartment neighbors need money to exchange things, maybe I could become the leader and build a big polluting factory here to employ them while making industrialized things to sell them, because bartering craftsmanship is a primitive thing we can’t accept” (Fun fact: you don’t see birds carrying “money” or “goods” across the skies, for example).

Last but not least, I’m no alien nor a jaguar or a tree, so I’m obviously aware of myself. I’m aware of how polluter I am on Earth being a “modern human”.

If it didn’t become clear, I’m defending for primitive and sustainable ways of life (a return to our hominin origins), ecocentrism (Nature above humans, not humans above Nature), the awareness of how unbridled procreation is dangerous to both the Earth and the humans as well the “right” to live not being a “duty” to live. Again, all “controversial” topics for many people but whatever.

Exactly what I thought: “still too many people”. Considering one house/apartment to one person, there are 100 people. Where did they all came from? Being born. How they were born? Well, for the sake of Lemmy rules I’ll stop here, because what I’m thinking is still a taboo on societal debates.

Neither options. There’s a third option, involving a really smaller number (smaller than 100), but it’s too controversial to be written as a comment, I guess…

FYI, syncretic beliefs are a thing. Candomblé, the Afro-Brazilian Religion, blends Catholic elements (such as saints) with many African traditions: “an African diasporic religion that developed in Brazil during the 19th century. It arose through a process of syncretism between several of the traditional religions of West and Central Africa, especially those of the Yoruba, Bantu, and Gbe” (Wikipedia)

It’s worth noting that Candomblé, as well as other afro-Brazilian religions (such as Umbanda and Kimbanda), although incorporating some catholic figures, are frequently misunderstood by christians, who often call them “devil worshippers”, an undeniable religious intolerance. Terreiros (sacred places where gatherings and rituals from Candomblé, Umbanda and Kimbanda takes place) are sometimes persecuted and vandalized by intolerant christians. The Afro-Brazilian believers, in turn, do not persecute churches neither christians (neither other religions).

I’m not from an afro-Brazilian religion (I’m actually Lilith’s worshipper, therefore I’m a literal “demon worshipper” for christians, I follow no specific religion), but I learnt from old friends from Umbanda and I know how sacred and important the Afro-Brazilian syncretic beliefs are to them.

The syncretic approach is also found in Göetia, where the tetragrammaton (YHWH) is used among demonic sigils to invoke entities such as Paimon, Lucifer and Stolas (also, some of those entities are syncretic themselves, such as Lucifer from the biblical Lucifer).

As I said before I don’t have a religion but I do my own research in a syncretic approach, while I try to find convergence between many traditions regarding The Goddess (The Dark Mother Goddess): Sumerian Lilit(h), Arabic Al-Lat/Allatu, Hindu Kali, Egyptian Isis, Thelemite Nuit, Greek Hekate, Chinese Chang’e and so on, as well as Umbanda’s Pomba-gira archetypes. So, to reiterate, syncretic approach is a thing.

A sincere question: why they don’t place some relay/repeater for the robot’s signal so they could control it from anywhere in the world through internet (or even some very private wireless communication network, outside internet due to security concerns)? The fact that they have to switch personnel every 15 minutes is a sign that they’re doing this in situ, rather than remotely.

Drones with mobile network connectivity are already a thing, for example. If you consider that internet exposure is dangerous (connection could be hacked, etc), ham transceiver repeaters are also a thing, and you can even chain many of them across many kilometers. It’s called mesh network.

Portuguese has no different word for them as well. Both raven and crow are translated as “corvo”.

In Portuguese we have the word “venenoso” for “poisonous” and “peçonhento” for “venomous” (i.e. something with a “peçonha”, any toxin substance produced and injected on another animal). But we often use “peçonhento” e “venenoso” interchangeably (e.g. “cobra venenosa”).

On PC, I use KDE’s Kate (it’s like the Windows Notepad, no formatting, just a plain text editor). On mobile, I’ve been testing Notesnook (migrating from Joplin), but sometimes I even use Telegram’s message composer to write.

If my writing gets too long and chaptered, then I copy-and-paste inside Google Docs, applying the chapterization.

Most of my writings are short/medium stream-of-consciousness texts (also, they hold a spiritual/esoteric component), so formatting is not a important thing for me to write them down.

However, I’m yet to find a good fediverse platform/instance to publish them. I’ve been hopping between Mastodon instances. Most of them are limited to 500 characters (as by standard), insufficient for non-short texts. I’ve been finding instances that allow for more than 500, but they aren’t active enough for people to interact with them, nor federated enough for reaching a broader public.

According to my searches, while a RTG uses radioactive material weighting in the scale of kilograms (average of 5 Kg across missions such as Voyager and Cassini), a nuclear power plant requires several tonnes worth of plutonium and enriched uranium. The minimal critical mass for plutonium is 10kg, the double of how many fuel RTGs hold (that’s why RTGs don’t blow while ascending and/or on space). It’s a large difference of mass/weight between RTG fuel and rods for nuclear power plants. They’d need to carry the whole tonnes worth of radioactive material split across very small quantities (which would require a lot of lead walling and/or launches)

I can imagine a rocket full of plutonium and uranium rods, sitting above immense tanks of combustible liquid: what the odds of such a rocket exploding during ascent? What are the effects of solar and cosmic radiation energy over these rods (even if they’re lead shielded), especially around Van Allen radiation belt? So many questions.

While I do rituals, it’s not exactly a summoning ritual. I do rituals involving (red) candles, incense sticks, hand-drawn symbols and sigils in order to meditate and widen my spiritual perception, focusing on my openness to Lilith. Physically, my spiritual development is (sadly) not enough to see or hear, just feeling a shiver.

I don’t (or, at least, I respectfully avoid to) summon Her, it’s She that suddenly and unexpectedly reach to me through one of the following three forms of spiritual interactions.

The first and main form is through what’s called as “gnosis” (stream-of-consciousness): all of sudden, words start to pop in inside my mind, I feel the need to write them down. This leads to more unexpected text, until I have a long text, often containing Her spiritual directions and/or warnings (generally in a strict tone of a wake-up call, like a spiritual “dose of tough medicine”) to me, communicated through a free-flowing stream of mental words.

It also involves dreams that inevitably became episodes of simultaneous false awakening loops and sleep paralysis (but not as unpleasant as it sounds), with Her presence becoming more and more intense to an almost unbearable point. In those dreams, all I can see is a silhouette figure standing somewhere across the room, so energetically intense for me to bear, where I’m caught on a mix of fear and awe.

Thirdly and rarely, it’s Her name appearing at the most unexpected places. It’s the most complex interaction to explain through a brief summary, but: imagine trying to chill watching some TV Series regarding fictional FBI characters investigating mundane things (so, nothing nearly related to spirituality) and, all of sudden, you see “Lilith” written on a paper inside a scene. Or using Google Lens to find out what species is an insect that appeared inside your home, and being taken by the app to a 2019 insectology page (not even closely related to spirituality as well) whose author’s nickname starts with “Lilith”. Both scenarios are real and actually happened to me. Maybe it’s a confirmation bias, but it’s too coincidental to be random.

I tried to summarize as briefly as I could, but I couldn’t avoid a long reply, sorry.

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).

Isn’t a file browser needed for browsing the saved documents and spreadsheets?

Not to mention that office suites (such as WPS, OpenOffice and LibreOffice) will inevitably pop up a file browser when the “Open” or “Save” buttons/menu items are clicked.

It seems utopia/dystopia, but some things get discovered/invented by accident. The more companies and organizations (and even individuals) fiddle with AI improvement, the more the “odds” of a sentient AI (AGI) being accidentally created increases. Let’s not forget that there are lots of companies, organizations and individuals (yeah, individuals, people outside organizations but with lots of computing power and knowledge) simultaneously developing and training AIs. Well, maybe I’m wrong and just very optimistic for such thing to appear out of nowhere.

/r/unexpectedfactorial