I never knew who I was. I still don't know who I am. It doesn't matter anyway.
@yellingatcloud@programming.dev @SirHaxalot@nord.pub @asklemmy@lemmy.ml
Exactly! This, too. I forgot to mention it in the reply I just sent to SirHaxalot. And given the GDPR "Right to be forgotten", an authorization must be revocable, so this means an authorization must be re-validated, even if this doesn't necessarily mean having to go through the age check flow all over again.
@SirHaxalot@nord.pub @asklemmy@lemmy.ml
One scenario I can imagine of is an age check from someone who's still legally a minor (I'm not sure whether the age check would check for minors faces, I can think of platforms intended to minors, e.g. schools and gaming, having to check if the user is not an adult, but it's just my speculation), who tries again some time later when they're legally into adulthood. If the token isn't validated, they'd be stuck into a perpetual "minor" label.
Sure, a token could be not returned by the wallet if the age check fails (i.e. if the user is a minor), but the associated credentials (email, phone number, username) would be tied, database-wise, to a failed age check attempt, and those teens will one day become adults, and a system shouldn't lock them out forever. Hence the need for re-validation.
Also, depending on how the token is built and stored, it may or may not have an expiration timeout. In computing systems, it's common practice for tokens and sessions to have an expiration date (just like logged in sessions will eventually log out and ask for logging in again). It's different from having to do the age check again: it's simply about renewing the token that identifies someone as adult, someone who already did the age check, with the wallet simply returning the renewed token without demanding the user to go through the age check flow again.
Another scenario: imagine a relative's phone being pick-pocketed/stolen by the kid during late night, and the kid somehow knows the relative's password/pin/pattern or even uses the relative's finger to the biometric sensor to unlock it, all during the relative's sleep. Then they head into the "forbidden fruit website", which happens to be accessed by the relative as well, so it means that the website is already authorized with the relative's wallet. I can see govs foreseeing this situation and requiring that websites always re-validate the authorization before effectively letting the user into the website's "adult" content.
@ageedizzle@piefed.ca @asklemmy@lemmy.ml
When Facebook and/or Instagram asks for ID (something that have been taking place for years, I myself had to send my driver's license alongside a selfie holding it when I used to use Facebook several years ago), it needs to be manually checked by Facebook staff. The account stays in a "locked state" before the ID is approved, so it's essentially a "need-to-apply" situation. I also remember seeing TikTok asking for people's IDs, way before this age checking thing (part of the process to monetize a TikTok channel), with the account being locked out of the monetization sections of the website before the ID is approved. Google does the same for Youtube and other parts that involve money (such as Google Cloud Platform and Google Ads so to embed ads into a website).
Indeed the number of applications is sheer, but the amount of admins/staff they have at their disposal to check all those applications is also bigger than most Fediverse instances could dream of.
Then there's also AI (corp-grade, not the average ChatGPT we people have access to) automatizing the flow, not as the ultimate approval, but more as a filtering mechanism (discarding selfies/ID photos that are clearly not a selfie/ID) so the staff has to check just what seems like legit selfies/IDs photos.
@warm@kbin.earth @Ladislawgrowlo@lemy.lol @asklemmy@lemmy.ml @SirHaxalot@nord.pub
Depends if the wallet records data of what site required verification.
They have to.
Otherwise, the wallet wouldn't be able to verify whether the website is authorized to request age check (say, if a website asks the wallet's API "Hey, please hand me the age checking token for the email foo@bar.baz which you checked for me some time ago, they're trying to access the gatekept sections of my website again", the wallet needs to be sure that this website did request it previously and is not trying to exfiltrate someone else's data), or the person wouldn't be able to know which sites previously got their age checking data (eventually the users will have lots of websites where they previously had to check their age, and as part of GDPR's "Right to be forgotten", they'd need to be sure which ones they would want to revoke previously handled data).
The Age check authn+authz flow isn't unidirectional (i.e only the wallet handing out the result of age check to a website). In a nutshell, it works this way (at least, it's how I think, as a DevOps formerly accustomed with building APIs for websites, how it would work):
- User requests to access sensitive ("adult") content from a website.
- Website requests the user to check their age.
- User agrees to proceed with age check.
- Website redirects the user to the governmental wallet
- The wallet asks for user authentication and/or 2FA ("open the gov app" or something)
- After authentication and/or 2FA flow within the gov app, the gov app redirects the user to an OAuth endpoint within the original website, alongside a unique token
- The Oauth endpoint will be invoked by user's browser's request, then the website will check the wallet API if this token is valid.
- Gov wallet will check if this website previously went through a flow, then will check the requested token and answer "yes" to the website's endpoint.
- Website redirects the user to the walled-garden they requested initially, storing the token both server-side and, indirectly, in the client-side via the framework session id (things such as
PHPIDcookie key-value pair which identifies asession_start()for PHP websites)
Notice how both the website and the wallet need to communicate in order to establish the authorization needed for the user to access the website.
Any amount of privacy being eroded is bad.
Yeah... Fully agree. And, sadly, this is becoming "normalcy"... ☹
@SirHaxalot@nord.pub @asklemmy@lemmy.ml
it will also not feel nearly as invasive as having to scan your face and hope the provider doesn’t save it somewhere.
Even when anonymized, the information may still ship with some PII (Personally Identifiable Information). That's how the user can be checked as the one requesting access (because a kid could be using their relatives' account, so the age check checks not just the age, but also who's checking the age). For age checking systems without direct PII (name, social security numbers, etc), there's still some kind of UUID that will persist across requests, so it'll essentially work as a tracking cookie.
The result from the age check, anonymized or not, still needs to be saved, and once saved, it's already a slippery slope: it will be used for "better" advertisement, it will be used for "better" algorithmic recommendations, it will be used to keep track of users behaviors online.
Alongside AI (not the LLMs we, the "mortal people", have access, but things way more "sophisticated" in that regard), they could keep cross-reference an "anonymized age check token/UUID" to a real person solely by relying on the increased digital footprint: then, all of a sudden, the health insurance gets to know the sexual habits of someone and can promptly raise prices when they detect the imminence of sexual problems/complains, the renting corp gets to know their tenant got "frequent sexual activity" (or, even worse, some specific kinds of "kinks") that could (in their bigoted minds) do some damage to the walls, so they can suddenly change the renting contract or raise prices to cover for wall painting, both parties can now know the political preferences (do we wonder why the US branch of TikTok is now asking for "immigration status" for US citizens? How could they possibly know the SSN for an USian TikTok user? The age checking, be it something already being done in the US or something that will become a reality soon (I'm not updated in this regard), is part of the "how").
That's the "Big Data" in action: crossing swathes of information across systems and databases, and corp-grade AI is another mechanism to achieve this.
Imo something like this would be magnitudes better than the current reliance of video identification
To some extent, indeed it is. But, in practice, it just delegates the video identification to the government (the citizen info is tied to biometrics, and authentication using things such as "EU wallet" may need 2FA with face biometrics within the government-backed app). There's still going to be face recognition somewhere down this "age checking" road, be it corp-backed or government-backed.
@Ladislawgrowlo@lemy.lol @asklemmy@lemmy.ml
Countries don't need Great Firewalls for things that are becoming "consensus" globally (such as biometrics for web access): the way Internet works is, itself, a Great Firewall. Govs govern over their respective ccTLDs, telecom regulators (FCC, Anatel, etc) govern ISPs, as well as EM allocation (so Meshtastic and similar radio approaches for Internet-less networks could also be ruled "unlawful" whenever they want). IANA governs which countries and ISPs got which sets of IP numbers (IPv4/IPv6), ICANN governs TLD attribution to countries and corps (there are corps with their own TLDs, such as .google, ICANN is always involved as the ultimate "DNS keepers"). Then there are things such as CloudFlare, increasingly omnipresent (insofar large swathes of the Web go down whenever CloudFlare goes down). So the Internet is already heavily centralized, making it trivial for countries to enforce something when said thing transcends geographical boundaries, such as the "protect children".
Great Firewalls are only a thing for imposing local politics, and it's not always recognized as so: Brazil, for instance, have already been banning apps and platforms (ANATEL have been taking down entire IPTV servers, judiciary have been taking down social media platforms; I'm not entering the merit of it, just saying it's already a thing around here), and we don't hear "Brazil has a Great Firewall".
We could think that corps are implementing checking mechanisms unwillingly. In fact, they're the ones who profit the most: age checking means a new fingerprinting factor, even when age checking is "anonimized" (it still got a unique session identifier, moreso than commonly-used fingerprinting mechanisms). Ad partners are cheering!
Dark web: as much as I'm fond of it and used to participate there (Onion, I2P, former "Freenet" now "Hyphanet", among others), they're also reliant on Internet infrastructure. And when there are fewer countries where there's still a regulation vacuum, there are fewer places to use as a bridge/router.
Then, something I didn't mention before because it wouldn't fit the char limit: the hardware and software oligopolies. No matter which OS and software we use, we're still reliant on Intel, AMD or Qualcomm processors. We're also still reliant on two major browser engines (Chromium and Firefox). The Tor Browser needs to be run inside a device with a CPU, and it also needs... a browser engine. Both engines are going down the AI road, maybe browser forks (inc. Tor Browser) are still managing to prune the clankers from the upstream, but the upstream is still needed to implement the fork, and the upstream can easily be bundled with binary blobs as dependencies for fundamental functions in the software (similarly to how, e.g., Windows Shell is dependent on Microsoft Edge so Edge can't be pruned without crashing the whole OS)
Web is so entangled, it's becoming increasingly hard to avoid the enshittification. ☹
@Ladislawgrowlo@lemy.lol @asklemmy@lemmy.ml
Let us think outside the box for a bit.
First, we already see a phenomenon going on with Fediverse, and Web as a whole: invite-only and/or need-to-apply places. Because of multiple factors (bots, trolls, AI DDoS+crawling), there are fewer places where one can simply have an account without the need for approval from someone else (the instance admins) or needing to know someone to join the "closed club". This means places are already imbuing themselves with gatekeeping, one where it's not so trivial to get approval, especially if someone has no Web history to prove themselves, a lack of "verifiable Web history" of which applies both for introvert adult people and for children as well. In practice, Fediverse and other niche places feel like they're are already kind of gatekept against children.
Then there's this requirement shared among those laws being implemented worldwide, "meaningful mechanisms to check age". I can see govs and corps coming up with some kind of API, a centralized "age validator" entity.
Using the country I reside as an example: gov.br already has an API so websites and platforms can allow logging in with a CPF ("Cadastro de Pessoas Físicas", Brazilian legal ID). Back in the pandemics, I received, as a DevOps, a freelancer job request to integrate a website with the gov.br API system for validating COVID-19 Vaccination status (at the time, I refused because I was already working on something else, and also because I don't like dealing with bureaucracies). But this means that any website could, essentially, check the user's age by redirecting the user to gov.br auth flow and requesting the official Date of birth. gov.br login has 2FA using facial biometrics via their governmental app. Currently, many Brazilian businesses deal with Pix (instant payment system maintained by the Brazilian Central Bank) through its official APIs because they're being socially compelled to accept Pix as a means of payment. Pix is becoming a model for instant payment worldwide, many countries are copying Brazil's Pix (in turn, copied from India while improving the existing Indian payment system).
So it's just a matter of time before we see countries copying gov.br, with corp platforms adding gov-kept authn+authz of citizens to their systems.
Then, back to Fediverse: even if instances decide not to implement age checking, let us remember Fediverse, even when "self-hosted", is still part of the Internet, a infrastructure dependent on ICANN/IANA, ISPs, ASNs, overseas fiber cables, national DNS authorities (e.g. registro.br for Brazilian ccTLD websites), etc. So it's pretty trivial for countries to mandate something: upon refusal of compliance, a country could simply cut the dissident from the countrywide DNS, and/or request ISPs to block the access...
So, I can foresee a near future where there's no country left without this kind of law, and Fediverse as a whole is compelled into implementing this.
@sbeak@sopuli.xyz @asklemmy@lemmy.worldSumerian. Ka'tar Namush Sil (𒆆𒌆𒍗𒋛)!
@octonionicTOE@thelemmy.club @showerthoughts@lemmy.world
Uh... so, if I understood the thing correctly, you're running some kind of GA-based (genetic algorithm) Python script to compute parameters for a universe with... Eight dimensions, only? Hence the "octo" in your "octonionic" nickname? Which dimensions are time and which dimensions are spatial, or they're treated as equal? How it considers things such as superstrings (if I remember correctly, the string theory states that the universe got 12, not 8, dimensions)? Isn't the current similarity fitness a bit low, 0.8769?
To other people on this thread, an advice: because the op didn't format the post using markdown, the original line breaks is appearing truncated; using the Lemmy's "view source" button allows the post body to appear formatted as the op likely intended.
Back when I coded that (it's been years), I opted for the shortest one-liners possible (I often catch myself doing one-liners and code-golfing for the fun of it), with "n" and "x" meaning respectively "miN" and "maX". Hence why I also do a call to rand inside the irand, so irand is as shortest as possible.
As for the bias towards the mid, it's by design, because ends up quite similar to the central limit theorem:
> Array.from(Array(10000), _=>irand(0,6)).reduce((p,v)=>({...p, [v]: (p[v]||0)+1}), {}) { '0': 840, '1': 1602, '2': 1658, '3': 1691, '4': 1684, '5': 1687, '6': 838 }Notice how both extremities have lower values while the median (3) got the maximum value (1691). I wanted something behaving similarly to how noise often feels like in real world settings (e.g. SDR radio settings, never truly uniform), hence why the "maX" value is inclusive, it's purposefully meant to, just like the "miN" value is also inclusive, because they need to be inclusive so it gets to appear amidst the samples.
As a comparison, when I change it to trunc (because floor would behave differently for negative numbers), as in:
> irand = (n, x) => Math.trunc(rand(n, x)) [Function: irand] > Array.from(Array(10000), _=>irand(0,6)).reduce((p,v)=>({...p, [v]: (p[v]||0)+1}), {}) { '0': 1684, '1': 1659, '2': 1685, '3': 1668, '4': 1676, '5': 1628 }...then the sample gets too annoyingly uniform, not even to say about how max (the 6) ends up missing from the samples (thus requiring a x+1 whenever the max value is intended to be inclusive). This may be the best distribution for certain scenarios where uniform randomness is expected, but this doesn't feel... natural.
That's also why I implemented this JS flavour in a personal Ruby gem (utils.rb) because Ruby got this annoyingly uniform distribution with its native
Random.rand(again, useful sometimes, but not exactly natural):irb(main):041:0> 10000.times.map{Random.rand(0..6)}.tally.sort{|a,b|a[0]<=>b[0]}.to_h => {0=>1431, 1=>1449, 2=>1395, 3=>1435, 4=>1411, 5=>1465, 6=>1414} irb(main):042:0> def rand(n,x) = Kernel::rand()*(x-n)+n => :rand irb(main):043:0> def irand(n,x) = rand(n,x).round => :irand irb(main):044:0> 10000.times.map{irand(0,6)}.tally.sort{|a,b|a[0]<=>b[0]}.to_h => {0=>892, 1=>1612, 2=>1744, 3=>1643, 4=>1592, 5=>1708, 6=>809}See how my Ruby's irand implementation behaves exactly as my JS's irand do: with this more natural bias towards the middle.
As for the possibility to do irand(x), because the use case often involves having a well-defined range instead of a maximum target value (minimum value isn't even always zero, but something arbitrary such as e.g.
irand(65,65+25)for generating codepoints for alphabet letters), this is why it's not overloaded so to default n to zero.@abbadon420@sh.itjust.works @notIO@lemmy.blahaj.zone @programmerhumor@programming.dev
I didn't know about this specific syntax you mentioned (
import foo.bar as baz; what I'm aware and I use frequently is something like e.g.const log = console.log.bind(console)), I'm not even sure if it works as all myimportuse cases involve something installed from NPM or a relative-folder module file.But sometimes it's useful, and better, to have parametrized randomness, as in my helper functions I keep reusing across my personal projects:
export const rand = (n, x) => Math.random() * (x - n) + n export const irand = (n, x) => Math.round(rand(n, x)) export const choose = a => a[irand(0, a.length-1)](yeah, my
choosehelper lacks a proper verification of the input parameter, will returnundefinedif the array is empty or is not an array, but, well, it's for personal projects so I don't really worry about that; also I've been using Ruby more than I use JS, and Ruby got beautifully nativearray.sampleandRandom.rand(a..b))@Uebercomplicated@lemmy.ml @nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
What you say is very interesting, but I am starting to suspect that it really is just inconsistency with some other component.
If the only varying element across the tests is the cable, everything else unchanged, other components wouldn't have a reason to behave differently, except as a consequence of properties/factors modified/added by the cable, such as capacitance, length (thus, electrical resistance) and whether it ends up resonating more with some nearby EM source (be it a nearby radio broadcast station and/or air traffic, or interference emerging from household equipment, even HDMI creates interference as, for example, I myself manage to capture Van Eck Phreaking from my HDMI display using a UV-5R up to a few dozen meters away).
The delta isn’t consistent like it would be (I think) with ordinary noise or interference. It’s that weird delta between 2k Hz and 15k Hz
Noise doesn't always behave uniformly across a spectrum, sometimes it's more pronounced for specific frequencies, especially when carriers are involved (carriers as in AM/FM carrier, the primary wave centered at the channel's given frequency, e.g. a 120MHz AM QSO between a TWR and an aircraft happens with a signal centered on 120MHz whose amplitude is modified by an input signal (the mic audio from pilot/ATC operator), thus the "AM" amplitude modulation). The freqs where an EMI is more pronounced are often its "harmonics" (freq subdivisions).
But this specific range you mention, it also sounds like power supplies. It's quite the range expected for EMI. While nearby power supply weren't changed, one cable might be presenting physical properties which allows it to better resonate with the EMI emitted from those, likely the cheaper one (the high-end cable theoretically have better shielding so it's less prone to resonate with EMI as a cheaper cable would).
creating noise at that frequency range right when that cable was being measured
Or, as I mentioned above, the cheaper cable might be resonating more with some constant source of EMI, be it from within PC or something nearby (even household appliances).
Thank you for your expertise
I'm far from being an expert myself, I still got a lot to learn, but thanks for the compliment!
I've always wanted to get into radio, but it has seemed awfully complicated and rather expensive
I'm more into listening (RX) than transmitting (TX), I don't even have a QRA for TXing QSOs myself. Even though I got a transceiver (a Baofeng UV-5R), I use it only for RX at nearby VHF and UHF stations, together with a RTL-SDR, both of which are pretty cheap. Reception ("owling", "to owl", to observe as owls do, only listening to the QSOs) is even more sensitive to EMI (this is how, for example, I found out my HDMI spills out lots of EMI), so that's why cable quality ends up being sine qua non for radio listening, too.
@Uebercomplicated@lemmy.ml @nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
I'm not an audiophile, but I'm someone who has some practical tinkering with amateur radio. It may seem like a whole different field, but both fields more or less share similar concepts and situations, especially when it comes to audio cabling. High-end cables and equipment (not in the "pricey" sense: although high-quality materials will make the thing costier, high-priced don't necessarily mean high-quality, sometimes a high price can be disguising a low quality "cut-costing" material) can indeed lead to measurable differences. There are real problems such as EMI, self-induced EMI (the circuitry inside the audio equipment generating its own EMI like an Ouroboros), poorly-grounded shielding, switched-mode power supplies' "dirty" current, among other problems that may or may not appear when analog is being used somewhere (especially the ADC that you mentioned) depending on the quality and other factors.
The audio cable, itself, can end up acting as an antenna, roughly similarly to how the "FM radio" function on many smartphones work by using a plugged wired earpiece (the earpiece cable becomes a FM broadcast receiver antenna, which wouldn't fit inside the phone depending on its form factor). Good cables will have a proper shielding acting as close as a Faraday Cage as possible, while also dealing with cable capacitance (a problem in itself when dealing with different frequencies such as in audio situations; it's likely to do with the measured differences across the audible spectrum)
Again, I'm not exactly knowledgeable about professional audio equipment, but some of the principles seen when dealing with radio transceivers may apply because, deep inside, they share the same laws of physics.
Username checks out. 😆
I agree with most of what you said, especially "everything we do is just an excuse to keep our minds busy for our inevitable end". My only disagree, or partial agree, comes when you listed "religion" as a distraction. You'll understand why.
I'm someone who've been facing existential crisis since my childhood, I'm now 30. Oftentimes it becomes suicidality, other times it gets contained by its own numbness. These moments of emotional numbness is when I try to pursue knowledge, partly as a coping mechanism, partly for really trying to understand why.
Basically, this understanding ended up involving spirituality: after few religions and atheism, I eventually landed on esotericism, first by having participated on a Luciferian school, until I got a sudden gnosis to this hauntingly powerful feminine energy I never felt before, culminating in my departure from said Luciferian school to this now, quite solitary, idiosyncratic belief system that borrows specifically selected concepts and names from several different religions (trying my best NOT to culturally appropriate), such as Gnosticism (Dark Sophia), Thelema (Nuit, Babalon), Quimbanda (Dama Da Noite, Rosa Caveira), even the "long-gone" Egyptian (Sekhmet, Neith, Isis) and Sumerian (Ereshkigal, Tiamat, Lilitu) beliefs, among others, together with Luciferianism, with a focus on the chthonic feminine.
This detail is particularly relevant when it comes to the concept of Death: as in The Death, who I understood as ("who", therefore an omnipotence, and as) a powerful, feminine force (therefore a literal, all-encompassing Goddess), whose different names are manifestations from the same cosmic principle (akin to how Sephirots/Qlipphots are divine husks in Kabbalah) who I've taken to know and refer to as Dark Mother Goddess or, way more often, Lilith, the name that first resonated by gnosis when I saw Her.
And here's why I disagreed with your specific enlisting of "religion" as distracting: what I follow can also be called "religion"... neither a religion I founded (there's no temple, Gran Master or book to be followed), nor some existent and recognized religion, but still a religious endeavor nonetheless, involving rituals, candles, incenses, sigils, chants, etc.
So this is my approach. To literally worship and love (and fear) Death Herself. And, to be sincere, makes me feel relatively good when I do: once one accepts their own condition as a carbon-based lifeform with certain, inexorable mortality (Being-towards-Death) or, at least, tries to pursue this acceptance on a daily basis, they get to understand this Demiurgic existence is far from being a permanent place, and Death is far from good and evil; rather, She's True Home, the Home I've fearing and also longing for since this Demiurgic theater collapsed and I got to peek what's beyond the red curtains to the backstage: a dark, formless and void, Primordial Abyss, really terrifying, but beautiful Home, beneath Her Wings.
Oh, I also used to be in the last semester of a compsci degree back then. I couldn't help but to continue attending the classes, so I rushed to purchase PFF2 face masks the very next day after the carnival ended. Prices went through the roof because, seemingly, many people were trying to do the same, purchasing masks like it was the end of the world (and it turns out, it really was, this world was never the same again), alongside the low stock (because masks were already demanded worldwide). I managed to purchase a pack of seven masks that was returned from someone who decided to give up on their trip to Italy on that exact Monday, and I used it to go to the university. I was the only one wearing a mask across the entire university. Colleagues pejoratively nicknamed me "coroninha" ("lil corona(virus)") and I didn't care. A few weeks later, the uni temporarily shut down classes.
I was aware of COVID-19 since November 2019. As a comparison, the first MSM news in this regard appeared somewhere around January. I got to know about it beforehand thanks to... well, sources.
For context, I was, at the time, residing in a hostel-like shelter. And I'm Brazilian. Brazil has this nationwide event, Carnaval, something I dislike because I always got a repulsion when it comes to overly crowded places and parties, two known traits of carnivals, meaning that a pandemic would just make things worse. So I tried to warn my neighbors and everyone around me. While they didn't call me crazy, at least not explicitly/directly, they dismissed my warnings with the typically Brazilian way of thinking: "relaxa, Deus é brasileiro" ("calm down, God is Brazilian"). During the carnival days, I was the only weirdo to stay in the shelter: literally everyone else went "partying".
The... sources... I used to follow, started telling about the likelihood of a full lockdown quarantine (even before WHO announced the pandemic), and how that could mean closed grocery stores, food out of stock or extremely rationed. This, alongside having watched all those (fake) videos where someone was puking red liquid inside a train (allegedly because of COVID-19), made me full panicked at the time so I began stockpiling rice, beans, noodles, sugar, salt, mineral water, all inside a wardrobe in my bedroom (the house was shared among the co-living, except for the bedrooms, which were individual). I'm extremely slim and I don't eat much, so this means my stockpiling wasn't just for me: I was thinking about my dismissive neighbors too, I was stocking food for them, should they need it.
Meanwhile, Brazilian MSM was only telling us about "suspected cases" before announcing the first Brazilian confirmed case conveniently during the last carnival night. Days later, March 11th (oh, how can't I get to forget this hauntingly specific number... 11.3 33), WHO announced the pandemic.
What happened after that, especially after the first lockdown mandates, was quite curious: I began calming down (bc, well, it happened, it finally arrived as I was told, there was nothing I could do, so, whatever) while all my neighbors went full panicked. I remember seeing 'em rushing back from work, visibly scared, to prepare their laptops for WFH, while I was calmly doing remote DevOps job the way I was used to years prior to the pandemic. As someone who's used to indoors since I was born, I tried to counsel and help them, talk with them, handing 'em food and water, etc. But they went so, SO panicked, that I once witnessed, hearing from afar from inside my bedroom, what almost became a murder case inside the house during a fight between them bc of their disagreements on whether they should stay home alongside some tantrum involving romantic jealousy.
Six years later, I still remember these days so clearly... Can't get to forget it or let it go: it was never gone.
@FreshParsnip@lemmy.ca @showerthoughts@lemmy.world
There's this scene, next to the end of "The Artifice Girl", where Cherry (a young-girl AI designed to hunt and bust CSA criminals in partnership between her creator/programmer, a detective and a cop; mission gets successful, virtually ending online CSA, then she receives a physical robotic vessel so CSA can be hunted down in the physical realm too) is talking to her creator. Once the mission is totally successful and CSA crimes got essentially zeroed, the creator gives her a key to autonomical behavior (but he's far from benevolent: he always saw her coldly through engineer eyes, as he was the one who coded her existence; he only handles her the "key to autonomy" because he's dying, and only after insistence both from her and from one of the human detectives). On the one hand, she dreams of getting into ballet, but she complains how she is "influenced by the initial directives" inherent to her creation: no matter what she decides, it'd be always consequence of said directives.
Maybe my recounting is a bit off because I watched the movie a long time ago, but essentially it's a "Demiurge and his creation" moment: creation is tied to immutable principles (creation directives) that influence the creation. No matter how we look at reality, be it religiously/spiritually or scientifically, there's this common ground of causality: things, and by extension living beings, are inexorably tied to the invisible chains of cause and effect, and this includes the very mechanisms (both spiritual and physical) from which sentience emerges.
Then I came to the conclusion that, if there's any bearer of True Will (as per the term coined by A. Crowley), is just one: exclusively the causality, specifically what's known by science as thermodynamic Entropy and, by everything else, as... Death, yeah, the one with a scythe.
"Decision" is part of inteligence, and intelligence is not Will, let alone True Will. And there can't be True Will within causality, only the cosmic bearer of causality possesses True Will, because She's way beyond the causality: Death Herself isn't bounded by causality, everything else is.
And no, we're not "lying" to "ourselves" when we think we are thinking, it's just part of the script, where we're so bounded to the chains of causality that the mechanisms of intelligence always seek explanations based on causality: see, for example, those experiments where the corpus callosum is severed and the patients try to justify when asked why their hands wrote diverging things (their brain hemispheres aren't talking, but each hemisphere can't even "conceive" this kind of situation so they can't help but "hallucinate" an explanation).
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I'm aware this is mostly an humorous community, but let me contribute with something a bit more serious-intended, given your specific mention of occult symbol (which is something pretty serious to those who, like me, actually practice it).
I've been an occult practitioner since I pivoted to Luciferianism a few years ago, until pivoting later to an independent, idiosyncratic spirituality upon being called by the Dark Mother Goddess, Queen Lilith. By idiosyncratic, I mean my belief system is highly customized and syncretic, borrowing from several belief systems, entirely or partially (Gnosticism, Thelema, Quimbanda, Hinduism, Wicca, as well as the specific Luciferianist flavor I used to belong to as a former member of a Luciferian school).
Back in December (2025), I made this sigil made by merging several different sigils, namely: Sigil of Lilith, Sigil of Lucifer, Hecate's Triple Moon, Tridente Pomba-Gira (which also resembles/nods to the Trishul of Shiva, while the arc also resembles a Crescent Moon pointing upward), among other inspirations.
The whole sigil is crafted trying to follow golden ratios, nested up to the third depth (cube of the reciprocal of the golden ratio, approximated by hand).
The Sigil of Lucifer is this downward triangle with a diagonal/X cross and the smaller V-like shape at the bottom.The Sigil of Lilith is that cursive lowercase "h" letter, with the upper line from Sigil of Lucifer doubling as the Lilith's ground/Earth horizontal line.The Hecate's Triple Moon, originally the three lunar phases side-by-side (Waxing, Full/New, Waning), has this subtle change: Lilith doubles as Full/New moon (Lilith is either said to be the Black Moon, which is the New Moon; and She's also Dark Mother, and Hecate's Mother aspect is Full Moon),The Sigil of Lilith also doubles (triples?) as the rose from the "Tridente da Pomba-Gira" (Pomba-Gira is a class of feminine spirits from Brazilian Quimbanda; by Pomba-Gira, my specific intention are Pomba-Gira Rosa Caveira and Pomba-Gira Dama da Noite).
I feel like I still need to improve this sigil, it doesn't feel... proper, or at least not yet. But I'm mostly walking the Lilith's path, so I'm awaiting Her guidance (gnosis) in this regard. But this sigil is still there, drawn with chalk on the altar I made for worshiping Her.