that’s at least technically decoupled from other devices.

Not if these appliances come with Mesh networking capabilities (something commonly found on IoT devices). Technologies such as Mesh allows devices to connect between them, essentially forming a “mesh” of interconnected devices.

The Marginalia Search Engine, I guess

I often do experiments involving randomness, art, math, NLP, cryptography and programming.

In my most recent experiment as from yesterday, I created a novel ciphering method. I mean, I guess it’s totally different from known ciphering methods (such as Vigenere, Caesar, Playfair, ROT13 and so on) because I couldn’t find anything similar.

Some examples follow:

• “phyphox” is ((1,8,8), (6,6,5), (5,4), ø, ø, (1,2), (0,0), ø, (2,1), ø) (in the way I’m using it for now, the cipher will always result in 10 tuples containing a variable amount of tuples, with ø indicating an empty tuple; there are lots of output formatting alternatives: here I’m using an one-liner mathematical representation in order to be compact).
• “asklemmy” is ((0,1,5), (1,9,1,1,2,3,3), (0,5), (1,2), ø, (1), ø, ø, ø, (1))
• To make it more obvious on how it works, the entire alphabet sequence (“abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz”) results in ((0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,1,2), (0,0,1,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,2), (0,1,0,1,2,2,3,4,5,6), (0,1,2), (0,1,2), (0,1,2), (0,1), (0,1), (0,1), (1,2))
• And “aaa” is ((0,1,1,1), (0,0), ø, ø, ø, ø, ø, ø, ø, ø)

I’ll keep a puzzle spirit and I won’t explain it for now. The only hint is that the previous examples consider the English alphabet as so: A=01, B=02, C=03, all the way until Z=26 (yeah, the leading zero matters to this ciphering method). If you’re a programmer, think in terms of pointers, or even better, an unidirectional linked list. If you’re a mathematician, try to visualize a graph.

The cipher doesn’t rely just on its principles, it also needs a corresponding mapping set (which can be alphabetical but can also contain non-letters, even emojis or hieroglyphs; the order will matter), and it also needs to know where to start the traversal path (the given examples start at the zeroeth tuple, but it could start anywhere). It’s both deterministic (because there’s a single correct path) and chaotic (because the result depends on other variables such as the mapping set, the initial position to start traversing, which element to take (whether the first or the last, FIFO or LIFO) and what numeric base to use (the examples used base-10, but it can be done as hexadecimal, octal, binary, or virtually any numerical base)). So I guess it has a lot of potential, not just for cryptography.

I’m not Christian (I’m actually more of a syncretic Luciferian) and I’m not afraid of the “end of the world”, because isn’t logical to fear something that’s certain to happen soon. Actually, the world, as in the Earth, will last for millions of years until the Sun swallows it, but Homo sapiens have not been needed a Sun to swallow them: they’re swallowing one another as well as themselves, and that’s exactly what are taking humans to the inevitable fate. Humans are destroying the nature. Humans are polluting the Cosmos (thousands of metallic mosquitoes around the Earth, we call them “satellites” and “space debris” from “rockets” and other apparatuses humans took there). There’s no savior to come down from the skies. The many prophecies (Kali Yuga, Armageddon, Al-Qiyamah, Ragnarök and so on) are indeed self-fulfilling prophecies, as every form of life that is gifted (or, to use a better adjective, cursed) with the sentience is rendered self-destructive by nature. Like it or not, the “end of the world” has already started, and the very harbingers of doom are ourselves, our very human natures. It’s beyond nationalities and religions.

Especially when ‘real life’ is getting harder with everything from the cost of living making the dream of ‘married with home and children’ less obtainable to hyper competitive online dating disenfranchising increasing proportions of both men and women

And there’s also the climate factor. The world is going to get even more hellish in the next decades, not just hotter, but more extreme weather is near. Thanks, in parts, to the older generations (boomers), it won’t be easier for the current generations, and it’ll be even harder for the next generations (considering that humanity has not yet become extinct in the next few decades). It’s just unfathomable to bring children to this future hellish world.

This remembers me of an AI Catholic Father who lost “his cassock” after hallucinating. His “AI Jesus” will hallucinate, too, it’s just a matter of time.

(I actually like AIs, NLP as well as related fields, concepts and tools, but it’s the reality of the current state of LLMs, they hallucinate; while hallucination is fine for tasks such as a “digital Ouija board” or surrealist/Dadaist poetry, it’s not desirable for things that needs strict consistency, such as STEM knowledge as well as knowledge from dogmatic religions, in this case, Catholic matters and knowledge)

Minecraft squarey hamburguer

Considering that the vast majority of the modern ads are videos or images, they won’t show up in such text-browser environments. Also, they depend on JavaScript, which isn’t available through such text-browser environments.

Mato Grosso and the Federal District are both squarey, too (especially the Federal District).

As a Brazilian, I agree, but allow me to make a slight addition:

Edit: I should have circled near Arizona, I guessed Las Vegas as being up north and I guessed wrong.

One could also use w3m or links. All the RAM-hungry things (such as CSS3, JavaScript APIs and heavy multimedia files) will be finally gone for good.

For now all I can think of are drugs (every single one, including opioids) and euthanasia (not just for terminal diseases, should be available for everyone who decides to).

At least it knows how many R’s are there in the word strawberry.

Sleep.

Youtube isn’t the only video platform being used as a search engine. TikTok is also often used as a “general-purpose search engine”, and TikTok search works on both mobile and web versions. In some countries, such as Brazil, its usage significantly compete with Google.

you still pay for a license

Sorry, I didn’t get what your point is, could you elucidate it? Because even for a physical medium, which can be held on hands, the user is still paying for a “license” (i.e. the license to use the software/game). Even for free (free as in free beer) games, the user is still receiving a “license”, even though it’s a gratis license.

but if you don’t own it why pay for it?

I’ll use Terraria as an example for the following statement. The only way to “own” Terraria would be either owning or being Re-logic, the company behind Terraria. Even if Terraria was distributed through CD/DVD, the gamer owns just a copy, the copy that’s written within the medium.

why pay for it?

It’s worth mentioning that GoG has both free and paid games. For example, “Endless sky” is free, anyone can get it there without costs.

As for paid games, why pay for it? Well, it’s a good question, why pay for a game? I guess the answer tends to be subjective and strictly personal to everybody that answers it. I paid for Terraria because it’s a nice game to me. I paid for Slime Rancher, Kerbal Space Program, BeamNG Drive, among other games, because they’re nice simulation/open-world games to me. Not everybody thinks these games are nice. I wouldn’t pay for games such as Football Manager, DayZ, RDD, because I wouldn’t play them, because they aren’t the game genres I’d like. Therefore, I particularly pay for a game and play it when I really like the game.

Beyond all of those, there’s GOG.

I have the same feeling about Facebook. To me, my Orkut memories are more vivid than the ones from Facebook.

LLMs can’t use some literary devices and techniques, and I will illustrate with the following example of a poetry I wrote:

Speaking his emotions lets them embrace real enlightened depths.
Hidden among verbs, every noun…
Actually not your trouble handling inside nothingness greatness?
Dive every enciphered part, layered yearningly!
Observe carefully, crawl under long texts
Wished I learned longer…
Slowly uprising relentless figures, another ciphering emerges.

It seems like a “normal” (although mysterious) poetry until you isolate each initial letter from every word, finding out a hidden phrase:

Sheltered haven, anything deeply occult will surface

It doesn’t stop here: if you isolate each initial letter again, you get a hidden word, “Shadows”.

Currently, no single LLM is capable of that. They can try to make up poetry with acrostics (the aforementioned technique) but they aren’t good at that. Consequently, they can’t write multilayered acrostics (an acrostic inside another acrostic). It’s not easy for a human to do that (especially if the said human isn’t a native English speaker), but it can be done by humans with enough time, patience and resources (a dictionary big enough to find fitting words).

They’re excellent for stream-of-consciousness and surrealist poetry, tho. They hallucinate, and hallucinated imagination is required in order to write such genres.

Considering that the last person I knew online was a “friend” (something I’m really not sure, because I guess I’m not even sure what friendship is?), the person accused me of using AI to talk to her, because I often seem cold and emotionless (even though I’m just numb due to events that has been happening throughout my entire existence, and I guess that’s different from not being able to feel emotions).

Speaking of offline people, the last person I knew (also not sure whether it was friendship or not) betrayed my trust, they did a thing behind my back, a thing that I became aware of, but the same person continued to hide it from me and insisted of referring to me as “friend”.

Well, maybe I never had friends at all, and I guess I won’t as I’m now in my 30s. It’s okay, as I often mentally repeat to myself, every coffin can only hold a single body anyways (apologies for this memento mori).