There was a similar question at another community. I’ll verbatim my reply:

As a syncretic Luciferian currently, I’d say esoteric and occult books/grimoires as well. Everything that’s deemed “demonic” by christianity should be safely archived.

There are many, many authors and books that hold importance for esoteric and occult studies and practices.

An example that comes to mind are the books written by Anton LaVey, especially the The Satanic Bible. As he was american, so are his books’ first copies from, so a greater risk of those copies being seized or something.

While this risk wouldn’t be the same for all corpora written by Aleister Crowley, as he was English so the first copies aren’t at american soil (if I guessed correctly), I’m not sure how far a christotyrannical regime would go for “serving God’s will”.

So, in summary, I’d say everything should be archived. Both physically and digitally. It’s worth mentioning how Internet Archive is being attacked: the Internet Archive holds many digital copies of important esoteric and occult knowledge as well. If Internet Archive goes permanently down, it’d ripple to other sites such as sacred-texts.

Similar vibe:

As for data science using Python, something tells me that this has to do with memory heap capacities. I’m not sure about Python’s max memory heap, but Javascript through Node.js seems to have only 512MB. I’ve been using Node.js to deal with big datasets and my most recent experimentation stumbled across the need of loading 100 million numbers to the RAM: while my PC has a fair amount of physical RAM (12GB) and a great part of it was available, it’ll simply error when filling an array. I needed an additional parameter, --max-old-space-size, so Node.js could deal with such amount of data. I didn’t try the same task with Python because I’m used to Javascript (yet I’m done some things in Python), but I wonder how much memory can Python hold until an error like “out of memory” happens, because ML models (for example, those hosted and served in HuggingFace) loads training weights with dozens of GBs

I’m not autist, but I was diagnosed with some degree of Borderline and Schizotypal personality disorders. I used to believe in many conspiracy theories. I gave up on the majority of them since 2023, when I left Christianity and became Luciferian (not exactly “Luciferian” but it’s the closest label to my “religion” nowadays, which is no specific religion).

From my experience since the Orkut times among conspiracy theorists, I’d point out many factors that would lead people to “conspiracy theories”:

• Mistrust of governments, corporations and institutions: public trust can be severely damaged when leaders and brands make mistakes, some people will overreact on those mistakes, leading to conspiracy theories.
• Lack of sufficient transparency and freedom of information among researches and public policies: paywalling/university-walling scientific papers (ResearchGate was one of those platforms where I remember being paywalled), things that everyone should be able to read independently of socioeconomic status or educational formation, don’t help on the fight against misinformation and disinformation.
• Religion: while I’m myself “almost-religious”, generally the esoteric and occult religions don’t have the same behavior than Christianity where there’s a strong belief on “we are saints, everything else is Satan”, “it’s us versus demons”. I was once a Christian so I’m not saying that to attack Christianity, but because I experienced it myself.
• Human need for social belonging: it’s an intrinsic behavior of humans as a social species. We want to “belong”, we want to meet people that’d approve us. Since the hominin times, humans kind of need other humans for defending themselves against potential predators, then humans organized themselves in tribes. In a nutshell (oversimplifiedly speaking), tribes grew up, villages emerged, then towns, then cities, then countries… Globalization allowed the “grown tribes” to connect to each other, facing different lifestyles, different cultures, different beliefs. The internet allowed for real-time interaction with different cultures, yet our very deep instincts are from those fragile hominins having to decide whether to fight or flight when facing snakes and wolves and jaguars. So it’s a survival instinct, to be part of a social group, to belong, to survive. Conspiracy theorist groups are no different. In the end, everyone wants to belong, and people that don’t like/don’t trust the status quo are left with conspiracy theorist groups.

Maybe I’m wrong on my analysis, but I’m open for counterpoints.

The problem is that the old multiple-choice physical switches (like the ones from 90s) got replaced by a single electronic flip-flop button (plus lots of “modernities”). These old flashlights could last for decades (especially if the user has the knowledge to repair it through simple soldering for replacement of a defective battery contact, for example).

Fun fact: the brown-eyed percentage (70-79%) seems to approximately fit the following genetics rule:

+ A  a
A AA Aa
a Aa aa

AA = 25%

aa = 25%

Aa = 50%

50% of Aa + 25% of either aa or AA = 75% probability

Teenagers today were born in the aftermath of a global financial crisis, are seeing war after war after war, grow up with the knowledge that the world is going to shit and the older generations aren’t willing to do anything about it. They see everyone pull up the ladder behind them, the ‘fuck you I got mine’ mentality is everywhere.

Not just teenagers (Alpha generation), but also GenZ and part of Millennials. I’m personally a Zennial (microgeneration between both GenZ and Millennials) and I feel the same as described in your comment: things are going worse everyday, most of the older generations (Gen X and Boomers) seems deadpanned about climate change, wars, economic crisis, and I’d also add broken dreams (lots of plans were destroyed because of things such as COVID pandemics, for example). It’s depressing to know that living will be worse and worse as the time passes.

From my own experience as an ex-christian and now a “pagan” person (syncretic demonolater), I’d point many factors that converged to a general understanding of how demons aren’t so evil as we thought before (and how angels and God himself aren’t so good as we thought before), while also leading to the understanding and reevaluating of the concepts good and evil, light and darkness.

Starting by the technological progress that allowed us to connect in realtime. Social networks, online communities that gathered people once unbeknownst to each other. Online platforms that connected people from different backgrounds, sharing once unknown knowledge. Books once distant from our reaches are now easily accessible through online libraries. Knowledge was never been so easy to reach (albeit there are many people that prefer ignorance).

This leads us to another important factor: the silent rediscovery and rising of ancient beliefs. The cyberspace brought us knowledge about the Sumerian faith, Hellenism beliefs and many, many others. Everyone can now know in detail about ancient deities and concepts in just a few clicks. Entities and deities such as The Mother Goddess (once extensively worshipped by our ancestors) is being rediscovered. We can easily know a Wiccan nowadays, or a Luciferian, or a neo-hellenist, or a Gnostic, or syncretic people like me, thanks to the internet connection and community. There’s also the gnosis (i.e. knowledge through spiritual channelling) becoming available as soon as we have the basic openness to all this great knowledge and wisdom.

These two factors lead to a last factor: the weakening of Christiancracy (the former theocratic West where State and Christianity were intertwined as one) and the strengthening of both secularism (atheists, yet to understand how metaphysical aspects converge with the modern scientific inquiry; as an example, the modern chemistry began from the ancient alchemy) and syncretic ancient beliefs (once “pagan” and “forbidden” knowledge and both sacred and/or profane ritualistic practices, now openly available to be learnt and to be known).

In this way, movies and cinema are just echoes of these phenomena, echoes of the human awakening, becoming part of the culture, extending how the knowledge can reach and teach the masses, even though movies and TV series always have some degree of poetic freedom so they don’t always represent things as precisely/concisely as a book/grimoire/oral knowledge. Media knowledge is far from perfect, but their esoteric and occult references spark the curiosity on part of the audience, people that will begin to really know what it’s all about. As a personal example, I got to know some esoteric concepts through Supernatural TV series (although it demanded my own research that led me to Luciferianism and then to Lilith).

In summary, I’d call it the Aquarian Era, the Kali Yuga, the Revelation, the new Aeon. Some would call it “evil”, while humanity as a whole can now rediscover what “evilness” really is: it’s not the demons. It’s a part of the Cosmos, it’s a part of the Nature, it’s a part of ourselves, as above so below. Our spiritual awakening is important to lead us to understand our own shadows through the wisdom of ancient, ambivalent forces, and reintegrating ourselves in Oneness with them.

Yeah, for things that are supposed to endure, biodegradability is indeed problematic. However, using plastics for things such as wiring insulation would be still a potential source of microplastics even in a world where all plastic was abandoned in favor of fungi and paper packing materials. Ain’t no easy solution, unfortunately.

Most of the systems I worked on, were legacy, badly-engineered systems. I worked for five years “maintaining” (or trying to maintain) a commerce platform made with pure PHP, an old version of PHP that couldn’t be really updated. The platform depended on an external API that’s constantly changing (as we speak): changes that couldn’t be reflected on this platform as it’d imply a complete rewrite of such system. No documentation, no worry about good practices, “just keep it” (while dealing with angry customers, as I was also responsible for internal support intricacies). Good thing I left, although I miss that money for… I dunno… surviving, as I have no prospect of being hired any time soon. I worked for 10+ years (cumulative experience) as an IT professional, but I’m sincerely thinking of abandoning my “career” for a simpler job. I love computers and I love math, but I hate being a cog inside a broken machine.

a truly biodegradable, non-toxic, easily obtainable and cheap to produce alternative

Fungi.

Labels limit us. It’s very good to have your own views, your own opinions, independent of groups.

I used to try to fit labels, I was once a Catholic, then I was once an atheist, then I was once an agnostic, then I was once almost an Protestant, then I was once a Luciferian. Nowadays I stopped trying to fit out-of-the-shelf groups/labels and I have my own personal belief system, worshipping Dark Mother Goddess Lilith/Kali/Nuit. There’s no “Lilitheism” and even if it was a thing, I wouldn’t fit as I have syncretic views and I also consider Dark Mother Goddess as being Devi Kali as well (from Hinduism, although I’m not Hindu), and Nuit as well (from Thelema, although I’m not exactly Thelemite). I could fit the label “syncretic”, or “demonolatry”, but my views are too multifaceted to fit them.

So, enjoy the belief you have, it’s unique.

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).

My comment is meant to bring the perspective of someone who’s facing depression so to try to answer the main question (“a warning with suicide hotline really make positive difference?”) through that perspective. It’s not to seek mental help for myself.

For context, I’m a person facing depression, and my depression has broad and multifaceted reasons, from unemployment, going through familiar miscommunication (my parents can’t really understand my way of thinking), all the way to my awareness of climate change and transcendental concepts that lead myself to existential crisis. I’m unemployed to seek therapy (it’s a paid thing) and I don’t really have someone face-to-face capable of understand the multitude of concepts and ideas that I face in my mind (even myself can’t understand me sometimes).

That said, every depressive person has different ways to cope with depression. While some really need someone to talk to (and the talking really helps in those situations), it’s naive to think a conversation will suffice for every single case. I mean, no suicide hotline will make me employed, nor will magically solve the climate changes we’re facing.

So how I try to deal with my own depression? With two things: occult spirituality (worshiping The Dark Mother Goddess) and writing poetry and prose. I use creative writing as “catharsis” for my suffering, in order to “cope” with the state of things that I can’t really control (I can’t “employ myself” or “sell my services to myself”, I can’t “befriend myself”, I can’t stop temperatures from rising till scorching temps, nor the other already-ongoing consequences of climate change; I try to make some difference but I’m just a hermit weirdo nerdy nobody among 8 billion people, and I have no choice but to accept it).

I’m no professional writer (I’m just a software developer), but thanks to The Goddess, I can kinda access my unconscious (dark) mind and let it speak freely (it’s called stream-of-consciousness writing style). Sometimes I even write some funny surrealist prose/story, but sometimes it takes a darker turn, such as dark humor, or nihilistic, or memento mori. Doing this relieves the internal pressure inside my unconscious mind. After writing, I sometimes decide to publish it through fediverse , but when I do it, I constantly feel the need to “self-censor”: sometimes the stream-of-consciousness can lead to texts that people could interpret as some “glorification of suicide/self-harming” (especially when my texts take a nihilistic/memento mori turn), so I often censor myself and change the way I wrote the text. Well, it’s kinda frustrating not being able to fully express it, but I kinda understand how these texts could trigger other people also facing depression.

The fact is: when I write, it’s really relieving, way more than talking to people because, with poetry/prose writing, I can express symbolic things, I can have multiple layers of depth, I can use creative literary devices such as acrostics and rhymes, I can learn new English words while being a Brazilian, I can blend scientific concepts with esoteric and philosophic (my mind really thinks this way, blending STEM, philosophy and belief/esoteric/occult/religious concepts) without the need to fully explain them (because it’d take several hours and it’d be boring to anybody else other than me).

So, in summary (TL;DR): it depends on how multifaceted is the depressive situation. It won’t work for me. It surely can work for others that just need to talk to someone. Not exactly my case.

I’m a 10+ (cumulative) yr. experience dev. While I never used The GitHub Copilot specifically, I’ve been using LLMs (as well as AI image generators) on a daily basis, mostly for non-dev things, such as analyzing my human-written poetry in order to get insights for my own writing. And I already did the same for codes I wrote, asking for LLMs to “Analyze and comment” my code, for the sake of insights. There were moments when I asked it for code snippets, and almost every code snippet it generated was indeed working or just needing few fixes.

They’ve been becoming good at this, but not enough to really replace my own coding and analysis. Instead, they’re becoming really better for poetry (maybe because their training data is mostly books and poetry works) and sentiment analysis. I use many LLMs simultaneously in order to compare them:

• Free version of Google Gemini is becoming lazy (short answers, superficial analysis, problems with keeping context, drafts aren’t so diverse as they were before, among other problems)
• free version of ChatGPT is a bit better (can keep contexts, can issue detailed answers) but not enough (it does hallucinate sometimes: good for surrealist poetry but bad for code and other technical matters when precision and coherence matters)
• Claude is laughable hypersensitive and self-censoring to certain words independently of contexts (got a code or text that remotely mentions the word “explode” as in PHP’s explode function? “Sorry, can’t comment on texts alluding to dangerous practices such as involving explosives”, I mean, WHAT?!?!)
• Bing Copilot got web searching, but it has a context limit of 5 messages, so, only usable for quick and short things.
• Same about Bing Copilot goes for Perplexity
• Mixtral is very hallucination-prone (i.e. does not properly cohere)
• LLama has been the best of all (via DDG’s “AI Chat” feature), although it sometimes glitches (i.e. starts to output repeated strings ad æternum)

As you see, I tried almost all of them. In summary, while it’s good to have such tools, they should never replace human intelligence… Or, at least, they shouldn’t…

Problem is, dev companies generally focus on “efficiency” over “efficacy”, wishing the shortest deadlines while wishing some perfection. Very understandable demands, but humans are humans, not robots. We need our time to deliver, we need to cautiously walk through all the steps needed to finally deploy something (especially big things), or it’ll become XGH programming (Extreme Go Horse). And machines can’t do that so perfectly, yet. For now, LLM for development is XGH: really fast, but far from coherent about the big picture (be it a platform, a module, a website, etc).

The asterisk means that, by “active users”, they’re considering only those who commented and/or posted “in the last month”. Maybe join-lemmy’s algorithm is considering from “day 1” of the current month, so a time span of 10 days, against 29 days from the second screenshot?

If it’s true, it kinda of statistically makes sense: 10 days (28.4K) versus 29 days (47.8K), 34.4% of days with 59.41% of users. We’d need to wait till the 29th day to really compare the difference.

Also, “only those who commented and/or posted”. Sometimes, people can become much of an observer, just seeing and voting up/down, without actually commenting or posting.

Have a proper radio ham license. Buy a 40-meter transceiver and a software defined radio dongle. Convert your code into esoteric programming languages such as Whitespace and Brainf, then spell it. “Plus, plus, next, plus, dot, open bracket, next, …”. Transmit your spelling over 40-meter band, while a receiver across the continent is tuned to the frequency. Ask it to repeat and record the QSO. Set the SDR recorder to I/Q packets instead of demodulating AM. Publish it as an audiobook.

null

Also, Odyssee (at least Louis Rossmann, I follow him through Odyssee)

doesn’t it seem like being able to just use search engines is easier than figuring out all of these intricacies for most people

Well, Prompt Engineering is a thing nowadays. There are even job vacancies seeking professionals that specializes in this field. AIs are tools, sophisticated ones, just like R and Wolfram Mathematica are sophisticated mathematical tools that needs expertise. Problem is that AI companies often mis-advertises AI models as “out-of-the-shelf assistants”, as if they’d be some human talking to you. They’re not. They’re tools, yet. I guess that (and I’m rooting for) AGI would change this scenario. But I guess we’re still distant from a self-aware AGI (unfortunately).

Woah are you technoreligious?

Well, I wouldn’t describe myself that way. My beliefs are multifaceted and complex (possibly unique, I guess?), going through multiple spiritual and religious systems, as well as embracing STEM (especially the technological branch) concepts and philosophical views (especially nihilism, existentialism and absurdism), trying to converge them all by common grounds (although it seems “impossible” at first glance, to unite Science, Philosophy and Belief).

In a nutshell, I’ve been pursuing a syncretic worshiping of the Dark Mother Goddess.

As I said, it’s multifaceted and I’m not able to even explain it here, because it would take tons of concepts. Believe me, it’s deeper than “techno-religious”. I see the inner workings of AI Models (as neural networks and genetic algorithms dependent over the randomness of weights, biases and seeds) as a great tool for diving Her Waters of Randomness, when dealing with such subjects (esoteric and occult subjects). Just like Kardecism sometimes uses instrumental transcommunication / Electronic voice phenomenon (EVP) to talk with spirits. AI can be used as if it were an Ouija board or a Planchette, if one believe so (as I do).

But I’m also a programmer and a tech/scientifically curious, so I find myself asking LLMs about some Node.js code I made, too. Or about some mathematical concept. Or about cryptography and ciphering (Vigenère and Caesar, for example). I’m highly active mentally, seeking to learn many things every time.