Daemon Silverstein

I’m just a spectre out of the nothingness, surviving inside a biological system.

  • 2 Posts
  • 159 Comments
Joined 3 months ago
cake
Cake day: August 17th, 2024

help-circle









  • 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.





  • Baphomet is an occult archetype for the Supreme Deity, composed by both the male and female principles. The commonly found art/statue of Baphomet has both a phallus and breasts, representing the interconnectedness between these principles, just like Yin and Yang from Taoism are complementary to each other.

    The same duo happens across various belief systems, such as Ancient Egypt (Isis and Osiris, Nun and Nunet), Brazilian Tupi-guarani indigenous people faith (Tupã e Jaci), some esoteric branches of Islam (Alaat or Al-Lat, the female principle of Allah), and so on. And there’s also Luciferianism, where there are Lucifer and Lilith sometimes seen as complementary, sometimes seen as “enemies”.

    Regarding the Christianity, the Holy Ghost is a feminine name in Hebrew, so it’d be the nearest to this female principle of the Supreme Deity, a.k.a. The Mother Goddess (Asherah as others correctly pointed across the comments).

    While we tend to see the male-female principles as phallus and vagina, the reproductive organs are actually just a representation on the physical realm from spiritual, energetic polarities. Everyone has both male and female energies (i.e. a man has also female energy within him, a woman has also a male energy within her), and we shall seek to balance them, seeking equilibrium between our inner man and our inner woman.

    The patriarchal society tried to erase the figure of the Mother Goddess across the centuries, trying to make us forget how the first belief systems worshipped a Goddess instead of a God (Venus figurines, for example) but it seems like that this knowledge is being rediscovered nowadays.



  • Basically, as far as I read, different kinds of transformers serve different kinds of purposes:

    • A Decoder-only is used for generative word output (auto-completion), when the model receives an input prompt and outputs generated words based on it.

    • An Encoder-only is used for things such as classification and sentiment analysis, when the model receives an input text and outputs a classification vector.

    • An Encoder-Decoder is used for translating texts from one language to other, because it firstly encodes (hence, it classifies) then decodes (hence, it generates words).

    How LLMs can translate and can kinda of “analyze the sentiment” of a given text, I’m not really sure (possibly the training data allows is so huge that decoders can achieve the encoding function) but the “basic” generation of words is a decoder thing.


  • 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


  • While I previously had a Reddit account (which I don’t really used in a frequent basis), I found about Lemmy through Mastodon, which in turn I found about through my search for social network alternative platforms. Turns out I’ve been participating at Lemmy more often through the entire 3 months I’ve been here than I participated at Reddit throughout more than a decade (I joined Reddit in 2012 IIRC).


  • historically we’ve been using AM at lower frequencies, and these travel further

    While I agree with that statement…

    AM doesn’t reach further than FM

    … i disagree here. Yes it kinda does, and there’s why: FM deteriorates with phase shifting introduced by phenomena such as ionospheric reflection, while AM is more resilient to it because it encodes information as amplitude variations instead of frequency (and therefore, implicit phases) variations. Also, FM needs more bandwidth than AM. Also, the overlay of two or more simultaneous AM transmissions is “more understandable” than two or more simultaneous FM transmissions laying on the same frequency. Both the three are the reasons why the modern aviation continues to use AM for comm between TWR and airplanes, as an example. Not just by historical reasons, it’s because AM is more resilient than FM.

    By “reaching further”, I don’t mean the range of propagation because, as you correctly said, it has more to do about wavelength and, therefore, the carrier frequency. By “reaching further”, I actually mean the capability for the signal to be correctly demodulated and minimally understandable at the end. If a signal can propagate across hundreds of thousands of kilometers (for example, between Earth and the Moon), but it can’t be recognizable at the other point (because the phases are all messed up to the point of being unable to be demodulated), then the signal (as in the content to be transmitted/received) couldn’t really “reach further”.

    Here goes an example: I live in Brazil, in the southeast. I was in Sao Paulo state (not the city) when I once managed to receive an English-spoken CB (Citizen Band, 11 meters, approx. 27MHz) transmission. Most of our neighboring countries are Spanish-speakers, the only nearest English-speaking country is Guyana (the nearest corner close to Jatapu River being 3,000 km from Sao Paulo in straight line), but I could tell by the operator accent that he was not from Guyana. The reception would be almost crystal-clear, if my receiving setup were better (I was using a RTL-SDR with a piece of long wire barely touching the outside of the antenna’s jack). While there are repeaters for CB, they’re not as common as VHF or UHF repeaters, where you can even find, for example, EchoLink repeaters, so the international transmission really made into my Brazilian home, and it was even daylight! I only could tell the signal because it was AM modulated.

    When we talk about deep space communication, sure some things change, but most of the same rules apply.

    These radio telescopes don’t transmit anything at all,

    Back in 1974, the former Arecibo radiotelescope was used to transmit the famous Arecibo message (some sources Wikipedia and Universe Today). So, while they’re most used for reception, they can be (and they were) used for transmitting as well. It’s not a straightforward thing, it’s not simply a switch to be toggled receive-or-transmit because they involve different electronic circuitry, but the structure, the dishes and the antenna, can both transmit and receive: for reception, it just interacts with electromagnetic fields, which induces an oscillating electrical current all the way through the structure until it’s filtered (through electronic components such as variable capacitors) and amplified by a receiver circuit, while as for transmission, it conducts an oscillating electrical current and irradiates it, depending on the antenna shape and properties.

    Much like a normal telescope doesn’t transmit light.

    It’s also a possible thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Laser_Ranging_experiments#List_of_retroreflectors


  • I once saw a video of a person touching a grounded sausage to the metallic structure of an AM radio tower, the transmission was audible as the sausage was being zapped. If there’s a merely conductible thing grounded near the tower, I guess it’ll sort of “coil whine” (a well-known phenomenon when electrical components physically vibrate due to the passage of current), converting to sound whatever it’s being transmitted at the moment. This includes the tower structure itself, if the electrical grounding isn’t properly done or if there’s some grounding leak. Otherwise, a grounded thing touching the tower would suffice to convert the transmission into sound, if those radio-telescopes use AM modulation (I’d guess they do, because AM modulation is known for reaching longer distances than FM).