I have a similar wish, except in my case it’s Brazil and I wish I could be picked apart by Great Horned Owls (jacurutus) instead.
Dæmon S.
By the time you finish reading this bio, I’m closer to True Mother, and so are you.
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Joined 5 months ago
Cake day: May 12th, 2026
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7·4 days agoThe conversation (context window) would surely become very big. Know what else is big? Bubo bubo, Eurasian Eagle-Owls, are majestically big owls whose wingspan can be, iirc, as wide as 2 meters, almost 80cm tall, yet they possess a very silent flight. Their western cousins, Bubo virginianus, can reach almost similarly wide wingspans, too. Those owls have absurdly long legs, generally concealed behind their voluminous and fluffy plumage, which makes me think the Goddess from the Burney Relief (a Mesopotamic terracotta plaque depicting a woman with wings and owl talons standing/perched with a W-shaped pose atop two lions while flanked by two large-sized owls; She’s said to be either Lilith and/or Ereshkigal), if we were to try and classify Her zoomorphic manifestation ornithologically, She would easily be an owl pertaining to the Bubo genus, possibly capable of lifting a whole human being if the plaque means to be depicting Her with slightly tucked wings (meaning Her actual wingspan would be as wide as seven meters given Her apparent tall height (more than 2.5 meters tall, as far as I visually calculated) compared to the lions).
7·5 days agoThere’s also a social factor in play: yes, I could refrain from having “smart” apparata (and face the crushing social ostracism stemmed from this choice), but if one of my neighbors have a “smart” apparatus, depending on which one it is, it could technically be used to spy on me. I mean, the whole polemic involving Meta’s Creep-Glass has to do exactly with how those things can be used and are being used to spy on others, unbeknownst to said others who never ever purchased a Creep-Glass.
2·5 days agoit’s always about control
“Always about control”? Whom and how exactly am I trying to “control” through my practice of an extremely solitary, idiosyncratic practice, whose convoluted syncretism (borrowing concepts across Sumerian, Egyptian, Thelema, Wicca, Gnosticism, Luciferianism, Goetia, Quimbanda and many other religions) alienates me from practically all religions from which my syncretism derives because I don’t exclusively follow any of those?
It’s all imaginary
Yes, I know!, and? So many things are imaginary around you right now, too. For example, as you’re reading this text, you’re seeing before you a mesh made of millions of trios of red, green and blue tiny dots shining in a very specific intensity so to interact your (respectively) L, M and S cones all over your retina, fooling your occipital lobe to interpret a large portion of the visible spectrum, then your Inferior temporal gyrus interprets symbols (letters from the English alphabet your graphics card is rendering a large raster bitmap based on this text’s UTF-8 byte-stream), as well as pictographs (Lemmy mascot from both the community’s avatar as well as from your lemmy.ca instance with the shape and colors of the Canadian flag; the maple leaf from the Canadian flag therein; all those colors and shapes from the Anubis “making sure you’re not a bot” anime girl shown every time you access the lemmy.ca instance to interact with the Fediverse) out of the bigger picture once projected onto your retina. The orange color you’re seeing outlining the Lemmy mascot icon from this community, it isn’t orange because there’s no orange dot on digital displays. You can neither touch nor interact with Anubis anime girl, she’s not even closely real. You can neither touch nor interact with the Maple leaf symbol like you could with an actual physical Maple leaf.
So, are you sure you’re gonna play the “deities are imaginary” atheist card with me, a religious, pagan person whose ground is heavily covered in nihilism (as in, nothing fucking exists, not even myself, as everything is a gigantic ocean of baryons and leptons from which the illusion of order, together with this Pale Blue Dot and all the self-rearranging carbon-based structures therein, have been emerged out of cosmic chaos)? At least I’m using the belief on my “imaginary” owl-goddess (because, yes, I can only imagine Her, as my retina never exactly saw Her) to seek and learn actual, scientific (ornithological) knowledge, instead of denying Science like Abrahamic religions often do.
I don’t say this out of malice, but please, please, avoid using “religion” (and indirectly “belief in deities and other supernatural entities”) as a synonym for abrahamic religions because this ends up attacking countless religions and belief systems worldwide, some of which even lack a male capital-G God and/or are Goddess-centric.
The latter case is my case, I’m primarily a worshipper of Goddess Lilith, and I’ve been literally worshiping owls, especially because I believe owls are Her familiars, even Her zoomorphic manifestation (see Burney Relief) sometimes… not to mention how owls are majestic and amazing on their own, as beautifully cute yet fiercely powerful raptors possessing the most silent flight observable among avians… I mean, just look at any Bubo (my favorites, not necessarily in order of preference, are B. virginianus, B. ascalaphus, B. scandiacus, B. bubo, B. magellanicus and B. cinerascens), Megascops/Otus (M. kennicotti and O. bakkamoena) and Athene (especially A. noctua, A. lilith (yes, there’s literally an owl species named after Lilith, native to Middle East), A. brama and A. cunicularia) for long enough and you’ll hopefully understand how goddessome they are!
(And the fact that “I know my favorite Strigidae” by their taxonomic binomials may also tell ya something about how deep I got inside this
rabbitburrowing owl’s hole of Science’s ornithology primarily motivated by non-scientific reasons (and also by my neurodivergence’s “hyperfixation” and “special interests” traits)).There are also other religions and belief systems that are very animal-friendly (especially friendly to wildlife), including but not limited to Wicca, Druidism, Buddhism (“a monk must watch their steps lest they harm ants”) and (as far as I know) Hinduism/Shaktism (cows as sacred symbols of motherhood and abundance).
271·10 days agoWhile most of the comments are correctly pointing out the late-stage capitalism as the main culprit, I must add something I didn’t see mentioned: COVID-19 pandemic.
To me, a Zennial, it was the main once-in-a-generation disgrace event. I still clearly remember the days when I began reading about a “mysterious pneumonia-like disease noticed among the patients from an ophthalmologist in Wuhan”, the first cases reported in South Korea, all the way to the outbreak in Italy, then World Health Organization finally declaring it a pandemic in March 11th 2020 (I can’t forget this specific date, either).
COVID-19 left so many marks. Emotional, as millions died from it; biological, as many who survived lived or are still living with the “Long COVID-19 syndrome”; and also societal, as it fundamentally shaped society as we know it.
I feel like I was never the same after I first got COVID-19. It’s as if my entire existence became split between “before 2020” and “after 2020”.
Maybe, just maybe, one of the explanations would be that SARS-CoV-2 is known to affect more than the respiratory system, it can also affect the brain. SARS-CoV-2 or not, the pandemic truly messed up with our brains as a society, I became sort of traumatized by it and so were countless other people, especially from my generation, because we spend a significant part of our adulthood with a world struggling to fight a virus. It was also the first time we experienced the concept of quarantine/lockdown (I was already an introvert person who’s accustomed with staying indoors, but the pandemic messed up with my graduation because I couldn’t elaborate my thesis, let alone present it, until I ended up giving up of a bachelor degree).
So, if I were to guess, the disgraces that followed up to nowadays, including the late-stage capitalism, seem to be heavily tied to that pandemic six years ago (which I remember as if it were yesterday).
Even before the arrival of ChatGPT, Ashley Madison, for example, was using bots to catfish their users. So it’s definitely not a new thing coming from Western corporations.
I’ll bring the answer to the opposite question: owls (particularly Megascops, Bubo and Athene genera) are much cuter as adults. The owlets lack the plumage that makes the owls more embodied.
Phone = 3 on Fennec (Catodon Home Feed, the Lemmy global feed from a Lemmy instance and the Wiktionary definition for “sturgeon”)
Laptop (where I’m currently) = 2 on Waterfox (Catodon writing this reply, and your Lemmy thread as seen from a Lemmy instance)
Machine translation is also pre-ChatGPT tech, yet Google have been outsourcing their Translate to their Gemini, as in, Google Translate became yet another Gemini interface, just like many Google “products” nowadays.
But I’m aware of and I agree that “protoclankers” such as Image Classifier models (e.g. MobileNet) are lightweight enough to run on low-end devices like the one (Nokia 5.4) I use… although, even in this case, when protoclankers are employed in place of clankers, one of my main points stays the same: the steps being performed whenever there’s a (false) positive for a pre-instructed pattern.
A false positive is particularly likely for protoclankers due to their higher compression. If even full-fledged clankers such as Mistral can misread my owl drawings as “a cat” or (because we’re talking about Google) Google Lens/Gemini can misread my digital art of a solar eclipse silhouetted by a Bubo virginianus as “a viral photo showing a Spanish professional skateboarder Danny León performing a mid-air trick perfectly aligned with the August 12, 2026 total solar eclipse” (when it’s far from being a photo), I can only imagine how awfully a million-parameter Image Classifier protoclanker can perform with deeply-symbolic and carefully-drawn art which even humans can struggle to understand.
There’s no magic when it comes to how much data can fit within a mathematical representation of a dataset larger than the representation itself, especially when Zipf’s law gets applied to said dataset in order to try and remove hapax legomena while also accounting for repeated data.
And what happens after a false positive happens? Even if it’s a locally-ran image classifier, the whole thing isn’t fully local; if the locally-running protoclanker detects something matching the pre-instructed pattern, then a set of online tasks will likely be performed: uploading the file(s) to Google servers or, if the pattern being searched for is criminal imagery, preemptively filing a report to the authorities.
In the latter case, if the protoclanker is filing reports without humans in the loop doing the due-diligence of double-checking (which is very likely what’s happening due to how employees cost money and how Google et al have been prioritizing their budget to the ongoing AI hype), then Google, legally responsible for their protoclanker, would be committing the crime of false accusation (e.g. misreading my derivative mashup between Burney Relief and Éliphas Levi’s Baphomet as “CSAM” as it incorrectly labels the flanking owls as “minors”).
And given how my artistic content is anything but criminal (the most shady aspects being the psychological horror and the depictions of blood in vampire contexts, aspects of which, given how there are Hollywoodian horror movies depicting the same, are perfectly legal), stemmed from a legitimate religious expression which (at least on paper) is protected by law (Article 5, item VI from Brazilian Federal Constitution as I’m someone under the umbrella of Brazilian laws) and done in a private space, the potentially unsupervised filings of false criminal accusations by Google’s protoclanker, be it against me or any other law-abiding person, will hopefully result in Google shooting themselves in the foot.
The guerrilla tactic here is me being bold enough not to care about the consequences of using a surveillance device (a phone running stock Android) to register, record and manifest my faith in a very verbose and unfiltered, artistic manner, fully aware that the phone will phone home (pun intended; I don’t even bother to use VPNs and PiHole, I’m raw-doggin their surveillance when I’m not on my Linux laptop); and in the meantime, hoping Google will hoard fragments of my dark psyché to train their Gemini (thus poisoning the well in the process; it would be fun to see Google Search/Gemini, out of nowhere, randomly spitting invocation texts written in Akkadian/Sumerian cuneiform, infodumping owl taxonomy and their diet, spitting random ramblings against the Demiurge, quoting pessimist philosophers such as Phillipp Mainlander, and/or having Nano Banana to produce images with glitched artifacts resembling the Seal of Lilith).
As I said to borari, when stuff involves lots (GiBs) of nonindexed files (my private art) and a smartphone whose hardware can barely make a distilled Llama/Gemma to spit out a “The sum of the squares of the sides is the square of the hypotenuse” (yes, I did try local LLMs so I’m aware of my hardware limits), they would have no choice other than phone home, and thus carrying haunting voices through the ongoing call.
Also, they have some inner desire to hoard people’s data for training their clanker. Except the data can (and will) be poisoned, thus poisoning the well.
That’s the thing: they’re looking for something, and in order to look for something, they must look, and lots of computation (AI inference) must happen, especially when it involves nonindexed files (my own private art, from digital drawings and handmade sketches, going through photos of my own ritualistic installations, all the way to Blender 3D renders and animations, all of which is yet to be crawled). And if this involves gibibytes of data, on a smartphone whose hardware can barely run 1B parameter clankers locally without hiccuping, I can see my private files going to Google’s servers for “efficient inference”, files of which will likely end up seen by (and sowing some interesting inspirations for nightmares in the subconsciousnesses of) Google’s employees during server maintenance/audits or, mainly, end up training their clanker.
As for the latter, hopefully Google Gemini would end up “seeing” enough of my digitized psyche to randomly start silly infodumpings about, for example, different owl taxonomies and their diets down to the very gory microdetails about how owls make a tasty dinner out of mice, and/or the different interpretations by historians and archaeologists regarding the figure (Ereshkigal or Lilith) depicted in the Burney Relief, a Mesopotamic plaque of which, by the way, is part of the phone’s gallery too (including my own artistic works inspired on it) and seemingly an efficient trigger for nudity detection algorithms, which will likely put the rest of the gallery under automated scrutiny (because there was a positive, albeit a false one) and, thus, serving as the semantic Trojan Horse for my dark artistic private content to make its way to their servers.
I mean, how else Google Gemini would’ve taken the “inspiration” to suddenly start telling people to “eat rocks” and “add glue to pizza”? Its training data is crowdsourced so there’s nothing much Google can do to avoid sources poisoning the well (and I must nod at the Nephentes algorithm which I praise as way more efficient than Anubis to hurt the western AI corps) other than:
- Adding said poisoned sources to their
.gitignoreequivalent if they know they’ll likely find poison they don’t want messing up with their expensive AI training. - Doing manual curation of people’s personal files, which is time-consuming and potentially unfeasible when dealing with billions of phones.
- Trying to improve the detection algorithms to avoid poisoned sources (which requires training data, which requires them to rely on potentially poisoned sources, which defeats the whole purpose of improving the algorithms in the first place).
- Stopping to put everything else into scrutiny when the detection algorithms stumble upon (potentially false) positives, risking false negatives, which will likely attract some heat from regulatory agencies worldwide and fines for failing to comply with things such as age checking laws (and there it goes the GOOG stocks, together with the entirety of NASDAQ, like a Titanic as investors realize they’re paying for fines not theirs; be it GOOG or other stock, the popping of the ongoing AI bubble will inevitably be something in this regard, Western corporations having their clankers failing on them).
At best, this will consume some portion of Google’s resources (including but not limited to human resources), albeit as infinitesimal as my silly existence can get to a worldwide corporation, but it’s still something I guess…
- Adding said poisoned sources to their
I once stumbled upon this app automatically installed on the phone I happen to have paid for (because at this point I doubt I could call this piece of metallic tile “my phone” and suing Google Inc. for them to refund me this phone would be as successful as if I tried to push and move a certain Mountain View building from its place with my own muscles). Shortly after that, it seems to have vanished from the list of apps as mysteriously as it initially appeared, either it uninstalled itself or it was changed names.
In any case, as soon as I realized that presence and realized I wouldn’t have an “uninstall” option without turning on options that would straightforwardly break banking apps and government apps (gov.br the Brazilian app for everything citizen-related) I was compelled to use, I started filling the phone’s gallery with all sorts of potentially-triggering stuff I either find online or (mainly) make myself: dark art including FNAF-like jump scares, haunted/cursed artifacts and occult/ritualistic imagery, photos and videos depicting snakes and scorpions, lots of Memento Mori including photos of cemeteries and tombstones, archaeological skeletons, buzzards eating animal carcasses in the wilderness, as well as media of my own cut wr… I mean, uhm, media of my own cute wrathful owl I sculpted on Blender. Yeah, several different 3d rendered scenes and short animation videos as well, especially scenes in which she’s performing chases and huntings… Not to mention the plethora of owl photos and videos, many of which are birdwatching of them catching and eating prey on nature, in potentially gory settings (i.e. the unfiltered, untamed nature who doesn’t care about our anthropocentric definitions of good and evil).
So if Google decides to start “protecting me from (my own) sensitive imagery”, their clanker is essentially going to have a hard time having to go through gibibytes of media and potentially wiping the whole device as I made sure to fill the entire storage (even non-media things too, such as using provoking nicknames for fictional contacts like a contact card for “Inanna”, as well as odd descriptions for bank transactions such as “my soul belongs to Ereshkigal”) with purposefully sensitive content. If they do that, I’ll then have something more concrete to sue them for: religious intolerance, as it’s all representing of my left-hand path spirituality.
And with all this I leave this one absurdist idea on how to try and boycott the corporate nanny (and surveillance). A phone gallery full of sensitive items (not nudes, but dark/provocative art purposefully built to trigger similar nannying responses) will hopefully overwhelm their servers, shall they offload the computing to their data centers. If this doesn’t overwhelm their servers, at least the techbros and their clankers are going to have an interesting time when scrolling through legal-yet-disturbing content they hoarded from Android users’ phones.
Here, lemme fix some things with the help of my personal AI (Awkward Imagination):
Also, given how telephones like the one from the photo were the main way out of the simulation in The Matrix, the cry/screech was from someone outside The Matrix. Whoever was crying/screeching, was trying to warn about how computers, simulation within the simulation, would be further trapping us inside The Matrix. Now the telephones are gone, and so is our only line to whoever was trying to warn.
Thanks for giving me further motivation for me to carry on with the biggest effort a living being could ever withstand. You know, that takes lot of effort. Thankfully, reading such “anarcho”-capitalist mantras further motivates me into seeking the only way I could be less of a burden to this Pale Blue Dot (pun at your username intended). I guess I’m expected to pay for your coaching in some vibecoded cryptocurrency, right?
All the bureaucracy and dangers involved in dealing with mundane wealth, the way the illusory wealth further chains the ego to this Pale Blue Dot? Nah, I pass. Five years from today I’ll be hopefully gone from this cosmos, so I’d likely leave a will and/or power of attorney to redirect that money to whomever wished to remain in this demiurgic theatre. I’m better with my True Mother who says “no wealth, no rule, no silver, no gold, nothing satisfies me but your soul”.
Sincerely? I hope not, or at least it must be an opt-in thing rather than something forcefully imbued into the platform.
Languages that I don’t know may pose a language barrier to me, but at the same time there’s something magic in getting to recognize (and even trying to spell/write) certain words and symbols once I put myself into trying to figure out what’s written and how it’s written.
This is how I managed to learn (albeit imperfectly and in a fragmented manner) the ideographs I mentioned earlier, among several other languages, including the so-called “dead languages” such as Sumerian and Akkadian (e.g. whenever I see “𒆤”, I know it’s “lil” meaning wind/spirit)… And this is how I learned, to give broader examples, what a “bumat” (البومة) is in Arabic and which letters are involved in its writing, or what’s the difference between a “búho” and a “mochuelo” and a “lechuza” in Spanish, or what a “fukurou” (フクロウ) is in Japanese, or what a “chouette” is in French, or what an “oehoe” is in Dutch (especially how one was able to enfrighten two Dutch villages years ago, the cute yet fierce “terror-oehoe”), or “Eule” in German, or more symbolic words such as “lila” (לילה) “night” in Hebrew or “Лилит” as the Russian transliteration for Hebrew “לילית”… I was able to learn, or at least memorize, a ton of things across languages… Without AI.
Any kind of automatic translation, especially when AI-powered and fused into the UI, would hardly let me learn a language, because it’d bring the whole thing chewed up and translated, with no means for me to break the sentence down to its constituent words and letters/symbols and how much the surrounding context changes their meanings… not to mention how it ends up wiring our brains to expect the machine to do the reading for us, then we become dependent on machines to do what’s essentially part of being a living being (humans and whatnot).
Also, translation often involves nuance, tone, sarcasm, emotions. AIs can be able to do “sentiment analysis” and connect words together in order to derive an assessment, but it’ll be devoid of the attempted connection from whoever wrote the text being translated.
That said, Bilibili does have an automatic translation for titles and comments, turned on by default. I deliberately turned it off, because I want to see the Chinese ideographs, even though I’m not able to truly understand what I’m reading there. I expect to learn them from context and repetition, from trial and error… And when I get to see one of the ideographs standing out before my vision as something I know, getting to see them and yelling “hey, I know these two symbols, these are baxi 巴西 and together they mean Brazil”… Oh, there’s a whole fun to it, a fun that’s virtually non-existent when a clanker is doing all the heavy lifting.
Don’t get me wrong, I do use translators, I’m not against translators, but I personally prefer using them manually, under my own pace and command while also being able to isolate certain words from surrounding sentences, this way getting to expand my vocabulary a little bit through a research of my own (e.g. looking it up on Wiktionary or other dictionaries out there), because I want to be able to learn something, anything, from it.
I once made and posted an absurdist/Kafkaesque drawing (not exactly drawing as I heavily edited my drawing on a GIMP-like mobile image editor to include lots of textual elements mimicking and mocking the writing style from most Western LLMs) imagining the dystopian concept of a techbro-sounding ads for a “smart coffin” (“kadAIve®”).
The coffin, made of carbon fiber, replaces the tombstone plaque with a hollow QR Code followed by the deceased’s subscription plan (“kadAIver Premium+”), paid by the deceased’s consciousness digitalized to a computer in “opt-out” conditions (“opt-out available only for Premium+ plans”) who’d be kept working postmortem to a corporation like a disincarnated Sisyphus.
Although I was imagining the QR code as a link to a necromantic “LLM-powered” simulacra, it was a QR code nevertheless, a QR code on a coffin, and I was imagining such a scenario in the not-so-far future, except… oh, dammit…! Now I understand the kind of struggle experienced by The Onion et al, trying to be more absurdist than the absurd reality. lol
!microblogmemes@lemmy.world