@[email protected] @[email protected]

Yes. It's called "Eigengrau" and it happens due to the adaptation of the eye amidst the darkness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eigengrau

@[email protected] ![email protected] I'm Brazilian and oftentimes the "All" feed across the entire Lemmy ecosystem feels, in fact, like a smoothie mashup between European-specific political issues and USian-specific political issues, so, when it comes to the phenomenon that the European Fedizens feel on Lemmy, not only we feel the same, but we, Fedizens from the Global South, we feel it twice!

@[email protected] @[email protected]
@[email protected]

Does the following count as original?

@[email protected]

In another Brazilian city I personally know, Jundiaí - SP, some restaurants built some kind of "deck" (made of wood planks) on the side of the street. I tried to embed a photo from one of these (this is my first attempt on sending images to Lemmy using Calckey so I'm not sure if the image will work).

These "decks" were permanently installed, including electrical wiring running from the establishment to the "deck" lights. I don't even know how the city hall authorized this, considering how the region (Campinas Microregion, Jundiaí Urban Agglomeration and Greater São Paulo, all of them in growing process of conurbation) is highly car-centric (yeah, there's a growing public infrastructure including trains and bicycle lanes, and Jundiaí, specifically, is pretty walkable, but many things still seem to revolve around vehicles around there).

On the one hand, this theoretically frees up the sidewalk for pedestrians. On the other hand, it depends on the restaurant respecting pedestrians by keeping the sidewalk clear, and I don't know to what extent these restaurants do this. But this concept of flatbed truck bar isn't too far from that of these restaurants in Jundiaí.

@[email protected] @[email protected]

Brazilian here. I'm neither a lawyer nor a specialist, just someone who has read the Portuguese text from the Brazilian flavor of the ongoing worldwide age check set of laws.

I must note that the Brazilian age check law (Lei 15.211/2025) specifies "vedada a autodeclaração" (English: "self-declaring is forbidden"). This means that this kind of implementation, where age or birthday is an user input, wouldn't be compliant to Lei 15.211/2025, because it requires the age information to be assessed independently from the user whose age is being assessed. This means face biometrics, government-issued ID (in our case, CPF, CNH, Passaporte and similar) or "behaviorial analysis"... Anything but a "yes I'm 18" or "I was born in day month year", for those are self-declared and the Law says it's "not enough".

Someone should warn the systemd maintainers of this "Brazilian jabuticaba".

(Cross posting this reply of mine because the post was cross posted to two different Lemmy instances)

@[email protected] @[email protected]

I used to deal with programming since I was 9 y.o., with my professional career in DevOps starting several years later, in 2013. I dealt with lots of other's code, legacy code, very shitty code (especially done by my "managers" who cosplayed as programmers), and tons of technical debts.

Even though I'm quite of a LLM power-user (because I'm a person devoid of other humans in my daily existence), I never relied on LLMs to "create" my code: rather, what I did a lot was tinkering with different LLMs to "analyze" my own code that I wrote myself, both to experiment with their limits (e.g.: I wrote a lot of cryptic, code-golf one-liners and fed it to the LLMs in order to test their ability to "connect the dots" on whatever was happening behind the cryptic syntax) and to try and use them as a pair of external eyes beyond mine (due to their ability to "connect the dots", and by that I mean their ability, as fancy Markov chains, to relate tokens to other tokens with similar semantic proximity).

I did test them (especially Claude/Sonnet) for their "ability" to output code, not intending to use the code because I'm better off writing my own thing, but you likely know the maxim, one can't criticize what they don't know. And I tried to know them so I could criticize them. To me, the code is.. pretty readable. Definitely awful code, but readable nonetheless.

So, when the person says...

The developers can’t debug code they didn’t write.

...even though they argue they have more than 25 years of experience, it feels to me like they don't.

One thing is saying "developers find it pretty annoying to debug code they didn't write", a statement that I'd totally agree! It's awful to try to debug other's (human or otherwise) code, because you need to try to put yourself on their shoes without knowing how their shoes are... But it's doable, especially by people who deal with programming logic since their childhood.

Saying "developers can't debug code they didn't write", to me, seems like a layperson who doesn't belong to the field of Computer Science, doesn't like programming, and/or only pursued a "software engineer" career purely because of money/capitalistic mindset. Either way, if a developer can't debug other's code, sorry to say, but they're not developers!

Don't take me wrong: I'm not intending to be prideful or pretending to be awesome, this is beyond my person, I'm nothing, I'm no one. I abandoned my career, because I hate the way the technology is growing more and more enshittified. Working as a programmer for capitalistic purposes ended up depleting the joy I used to have back when I coded in a daily basis. I'm not on the "job market" anymore, so what I'm saying is based on more than 10 years of former professional experience. And my experience says: a developer that can't put themselves into at least trying to understand the worst code out there can't call themselves a developer, full stop.

@[email protected]

First and foremost, it's not something limited to UK. Maybe it's because I'm watching things from "outside" the so-called "first world" (I'm Brazilian), and I can't help but notice how it's something that have been spreading throughout the countries: Canadian bill whose number I forgot, EU's "Chat Control", some Australian laws, etc... It's getting everywhere! It didn't start yesterday, also: I remember SOPA and PIPA back in 2010s (or was it 2000s? I'm getting old).

It's worldwide, and it won't be long before there are no more countries where "nothing to fear, nothing to hide" is the official motto via some kind of global treat/pact. It won't stop in adult entertainment: eventually, it'll cover every online activity. In this sense, "children" are just the frogs being morally leveraged by scorpions to cross an Orwellian river.

That said, VPNs are someone else's computers sitting between latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates delimiting some geodesic convex hull we know as "country/nation" ruled by an entity who happens to have the monopoly over asymmetrical forces ruling over that very someone. Even nodes from Tor, I2P, Yggdrasil, Hyphanet, GNUNet, Usenet servers or grand-old SOCKS4/SOCKS4a/SOCKS5 proxies are someone else's computer sitting inside some "country".

And if all countries end up agreeing, out of shared dominance interests (even the so-called "inimical" countries, because even those "inimical" countries agree on certain treats such as the Global Treat regarding Antarctica), to some kind of "Online Kid Protection Global Treat" or whatever frog they can take any moral advantage of, there will be no computer proxification left for circumventing the new KYC requirements for accessing the Web, because there'll be no more alternative countries left... Not even micronations such as Principality of Sealand.

Yeah, future doesn't seem good, and the majority of global citizens won't fight against it (we, privacy-conscious and tech-savvy people, we're not the majority), so it's kind of a Cassandra curse going on right now.

Maybe we must go back to radio communication? Radio mesh networks? Perhaps well-hidden geo-treasure pen-drives for exchanging and archiving files? Creating our own novel ciphering methods, steganography and security through obscurity, becoming able to physically speak through coded language on a daily basis? Even carrier pigeons and smoke signaling (I'm not joking) feels "safe" and out of the Orwellian reaches for now... For now.

(I guess they could still be spotted by LEO satellite imagery. And god-forbid a smoke pattern is caught modulating and transmitting the original uncropped Lena picture over the atmosphere /s).

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]

The Brazilian flavor of age checking explicitly prohibits self-declaring ("vedada a autodeclaração"). Estimation of age via selfie or behavioral analysis, as well as the need for government-issued IDs, perhaps validation via credit card microtransactions, are some of the accepted age verification mechanisms for Lei 15211 ("ECA Digital" or, more informally known as "Lei Felca" due to the involvement of a YouTuber sub-celebrity on getting this thing to Brazilian lawmakers). Doing age bracketing via self-declared mechanisms, such as birthdate input or the usual consent button, risks fines and other provisions.

KYC ("Know Your Customer") is, deep down, what these laws are going to be about, ID checks as sine qua non part of purposefully vague-worded laws with broad and outreaching enforcement, so tech organizations and companies worldwide, especially the smaller ones, will eventually find themselves in a situation where they are legally compelled to implement everything that's being pushed as part of these dystopian laws. After all, it's far from being just a Brazilian or a Californian thing.

Currently, yes, we're seeing this law-concept restricted to a handful of places such as some USian states, as well as countries such as UK, Australia, Canada, now Brazil... Zoom out, however, and you'll realize how this thing is gradually spreading worldwide because this is the only way for age verification to get effectively enforced.

You read it correctly, those laws are very likely getting to more and more countries, eventually turning KYC into part of international, industrial standards. Nothing too hard for big corps to do on their own, such as Google and Microsoft, even Canonical and Red Hat which are large companies, but small companies will end up being pushed into relying on non-free third-party KYC services in order to comply with age verification.

Such situation would end up benefiting the big players, with KYC services such as Persona becoming the new ubiquitous Cloudflare when it comes to this digital landscape. KYC gates, in this sense, would become the new CAPTCHA, Biometrics-as-a-service would become the new normal, true FOSS projects would become unlawful a priori while large corporations would thrive with another data point for tracking and advertising, and as the tolerance bar gets lowered, people will end up used to it, because any attempt to be against it will lead, at best, to social ostracization...

I don't know, maybe I'm being overly pessimistic about it, but I can't help but notice how dystopian things, some of which were long foretold and were warned about, are slowly taking away our privacy and freedom...

@[email protected] ![email protected]

In order to understand what happens with the light from our earthly shelters, one needs to look up. See those stars shining all across the night sky? Those celestial bodies aren't where we see them, and many of them are long gone. So we don't see the stars, we see their "ghosts", compelled to physically wander through the spacetime continuum.

Roughly speaking, EM radiation (and, by extension, visible light) travels indefinitely to the far reaches of cosmos once it's emitted. It'll definitely decay and become fainter and fainter (Inverse Square Law), eventually blending with other faint signals also scattered and wandering through the space. We call it "noise", which is nothing but the sum of all cosmic EM activity that once happened since the dawn of time, especially (but not limited to) that of Big Bang, as "Cosmic Microwave Background", which is still around (it's just that our home equipment, as digital sets, are designed to ignore such noise, but people used to be able to tune into it with the early analog TV and radio receptors).

Now, there's a maxim from Hermeticism that says "As above, so below": just as we see the past from cosmos whenever we look at the skies, some hypotethical extraterrestrial civilization at hundreds of thousands of light-years from here would see (supposing they exist and supposing that they got highly advanced optics) a Pale Blue Dot with some minuscule flame spots on its surface, the bonfires once lit by Homo erectus when they began tinkering with fire. Those extraterrestrials won't see the Earth as it currently is relative to the Sun, which also won't be where it currently is relative to Milky Way, which also won't be where it currently is relative to Laniakea.

Those extraterrestrials definitely won't see our desperate signals begging for them to beam us up (from the former Arecibo transmission all the way to someone lonely blinking their home lights right now desperately trying to call the extraterrestrial attention): we're all screaming to the void, and the void screams back as a silent noise from long-gone celestial bodies. The cosmos is a big cemetery where ghosts are hauntingly compelled to roam around without getting anywhere (still they sometimes stumble upon other ghosts, when energy is absorbed by all sorts of cosmic matter both here and out there).

In the end, this is what happens with your home light every time you turn it off: it becomes some kind of "electromagnetic ghost" electrically "summoned" in your room and unleashed to the outer space, not to haunt, but to be haunted and devoured by the ineffable darkness of the abyss, where it will spend the eternity going everywhere to reach nowhere...

@[email protected] @[email protected]

This!

Also, the irony: those are AI tools used by anti-AI people who use AI to try and (roughly) determine if a content is AI, by reading the output of an AI. Even worse: as far as I know, they're paid tools (at least every tool I saw in this regard required subscription), so Anti-AI people pay for an AI in order to (supposedly) detect AI slop. Truly "AI-rony", pun intended.

@[email protected] @[email protected]

Quotting my own microblogging post from minutes ago when I learned about the death:

Year's 2026. Chuck Norris, yes, that Chuck Norris, just died. Chuck Norris, the Chuck Norris, died, could you imagine it? Yeah, welcome to 2026. It's still March... Miss 2020 already? You should!

Person was a fash, but to me art isn't the artist, so when it comes to the fictional , "invincible" character, it's quite a symbolical death... Are y'all ready for the remaining of 2026? It sure gonna be M.A.D. (not just "mad")!

@[email protected] @[email protected]

This reminds me of the time I had general anesthesia during a surgery. I experienced this... phenomenon. One where I barely closed my eyes and, suddenly, I was laid down on another bed in another room, surgery was complete. There was no dreaming in-between, no hallucination, and even the "time gap" itself felt... non-existent. Just a literal, overwhelming but relaxing, almost cosmic, "nothingness". As if the general anesthesia were a Seek-Forward button which was pushed and my biological existence simply jumped an unknown amount of time into the future (it was roughly an hour, a simple surgery).

See, the passage of time looks pretty much like a "fall" towards a singularity. All matter is moving towards a point into the "far future", some moving slower than others due to the gravitational and relativistic effects (e.g. time is slightly slower for us than it is for ISS astronauts, because we're closer to the Earth's gravitational well). There are scientific hypotheses about the "far future" having some kind of "singularity", such as the logical conclusion from the Black Hole Cosmology which states that this universe were actually a cosmically-big black hole due to how cosmological constants and measurements matched the ones expected for black holes. If this proceeds, matter would be literally falling towards a cosmic "abyss", towards singularity, and what we, as living beings, perceive as "death", would be just the subjective (almost "solipsistic") stretched perception of said singularity.

At least, I myself like to think of my death as this. A spaghettified but imperceptible, fall towards the abyss, akin to that general anesthesia I once had, except that it wouldn't jump to wakefulness anymore; rather, it would become stuck in a perpetual state of "Seek-Forward", without a perceivable gap in-between. An eternal nothingness, essentially a return to the same "nothingness" I perceive from the time before I was born. And, well, it's scary, but it's also pretty comfortable if I really think about that, knowing that there'd be no more nociceptors triggering my central nervous system into feeling pain, knowing that there'd be no more emergent "me", just the primordial "nothingness" from the singularity we, as baryonic matter, exist in.

I got some (dark, esoteric) beliefs alongside that (especially "Death Herself") but, given I'm in c/science, I'm trying my best to stick to the more (or, at least, as close as) scientific (as) aspects (could get) of what I think about the phenomenon of death, with "sentience" as an emergent byproduct of a dynamic system (think "dual pendulum experiment", but deeper and more intricate involving several interconnected biological systems) we refer to as biological organism, a self-rearranging structure, and "death" as the cessation of said emergence (as soon as the a significant part of this dynamic system grinds to a halt, therefore rendering it unable to self-rearrange).

@[email protected] @[email protected]

In parts, the answer to your question lies in the very title of your thread or, to be precise, the latest word from it: 2020s.

Something happened in 2020. And this thing, for good and bad, required people to distance themselves. And those who were stubbornly unconvinced of the reasons why people should keep social distancing, were faced by the harsh reality sooner or later. We saw people falling dead like flies. We saw how the whole world was facing the exact same struggle, we saw the burnout of their health systems as doctors, nurses and other health professionals were dying in numbers like never before.

Then the pandemic forced the world to go full digital. To a certain extent, it was really great: we could be finally free from metropolitan pollution, as we could work from anywhere (including rural towns, far from the large cities), we could work while petting our cats at home, we could work without needing to get stressed by human modes of transportation.

But this digitalization is what provided enough crude material for a dystopian dungeon to be slowly build around us. Shortly after COVID, we saw things like ChatGPT popping up into existence out of nowhere. And what follows is contemporary and needs no introduction. Of course there's much more, but my reply is already big.

The fact is: people became (understandably) traumatized, like, for ever. Meanwhile, people became used to a fully digital life, with every aspect of their lives being an app (LaaS, Life-as-a-Service). People were never the same, the world got worse. "Third places" started to wane because Internet supposedly have all places humans need. Then capitalism, now technofeudalism, thrived to further enslave society.

To me, a Zennial (someone born in the cusp between Millennials and Gen Z), the COVID-19 is something that left a permanent wound, not just biological or physical (e.g. long COVID syndrome), but psychological, economical, social: all aspects of my existence were affected.

Before it happened, my social life was blooming, I was enrolled in college again to try and complete my degree I gave up a few years earlier. I was living plain adulthood, independent and far from my parents while living with nice stranger people in a hostel. I was well employed with not-so-bad paycheck and a quite steady IT career... Then COVID came and simply shattered it all. Not just my life goals, not just my academic or professional career, everything! And tech, which I used to love (hence my DevOps career), suddenly started becoming the dystopia I described earlier.

Eventually, COVID made me realize of the impermanence of this pointless existence, pushing me towards nihilism, until I simply gave up trying to deceive myself with mundane illusions. My attempts to seek friends, love, family and career are long gone: it's all pointless.

I'm just biologically surviving against the will at this point... Billions of humans are, too.

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]

For me, a Brazilian, there's something I must hide if I want to be employable: my occultist practices, my religion. I'm a worshiper of Lilith, surrounded by mostly Christian people. I literally heard "faux-jokes" (when people want to condemn someone, but wrapping the condemnation as a joke) tying my belief to "ending up in hell".

Even though my legal name isn't difficult to find through my pseudonym, you can imagine why I use a pseudonym to openly express my religion. And once digital activity is tied to my CPF (Brazilian citizen/legal identity), and I'm definitely not buying the "anonymized checking" arguments, suddenly potential employers and buyers/merchants will know I "worship the devil" and will have yet another reason to refuse hiring me or buying/selling things from/to me.

Also, some of Lilith imagery and stories involve content which is sensitive, subjected to those very "age check" laws, further making it necessary for me to comply to "age checks" whenever I want to read or write, observe or do drawings about the fundamental deity I worship.

But according to certain people, "having something to hide = must be a criminal!!!". Because they're likely followers of some mainstream religion which is not socially persecuted, or religion isn't something significant in their lives.

Seriously. I'm truly tired of this world.

@[email protected]

Those LoRa devices like meshtastic look good

Yeah, tinkering with radio and Open-source hardware in general is funny and awesome. I did some personal projects in this regard, not exactly meshtastic, but experiments using a cheap RTL-SDR and some transmission-capable things such as Baofeng UV-5R and remote controllers from some of my childhood toys. I wish I could afford to experiment more with hardware, electronic and, especially, radio equipment.

Unfortunately, it's like @[email protected] said, radio equipment can become targets, too.

In reality, this is already happening in EU: recently, I saw something about EU passing a law requiring all radio-capable devices to be, as far as I can recall, "tampering-proof" or something similar, and this is threatening alternative mobile OSes (such as GrapheneOS) because this law requires bootloaders to be unlockable or something. So, in practice, governments are already targeting radio.

Not to mention how "easy" is to triangulate a signal and how telecommunication regulators often do "wardrive" scanning in order to seek "irregular transmissions" (not just those disrupting others' transmissions, but anything they could deem "irregular" because they're the authorities in charge of allowing or refusing others rights, and this deemed "irregularity" could easily be using Briar through Bluetooth, or meshtastic nodes, during a strike/protest).

This takes me to another point from your reply:

I don’t like the idea of TOR and I2C because it’s known to hold disgusting and concerning stuff

It's worth mentioning that disgusting and concerning stuff isn't exclusive to Darknet, Clearnet also has such stuff, especially mainstream social media.

I mean, you're not wrong, Darknet is indeed used for that, not because it's inherent to Darknet, but because people who do concerning stuff also seek anonymity just like legitimate, well-intentioned privacy-concerned people, and Darknet happens to provide such anonymity for both uses in a double-edged sword manner.

Problem is: there's no way to differentiate two anonymous actors without breaking the very fundamentum of anonymity.

And this very argument you used unfortunately can be twisted by authorities to justify breaking anonymity and, by extension, privacy.

For authorities willing to control everyone's lives so badly, it just takes a small leap for the phrase to be reshaped and re-adapted as...

"private content/people's intimacies must be scanned/watched because they're known to hold disgusting and concerning stuff"

This is almost the argument behind EU's "Chat Control". And the majority of people end up joining this bandwagon unaware of where this bandwagon leads to: something that makes 1984 feel like a sugarcoated documentary.

Unfortunately, there's no easy solution regarding "disgusting and concerning stuff", but we should be really careful lest to throw the baby out with the dirty bathwater.

@[email protected] @[email protected]

I'd really love a Linux phone (personally, I have a Linux PC and I use Arch, btw) so don't get me wrong when I question: what about the banking and government apps? Yeah, because finance systems are getting increasingly digital around the world and every payment will eventually need to involve banking apps, and you guessed it: just Android (Google) and iOS (Apple), no Linux, no KaiOS. One will eventually need apps to pay for rent and consumer bills, even for buying groceries, as fiat currency will get more digital and less physical.

And, no, European Union won't fight against it because, in fact, the same European Union is seeking to digitalize EUR (see "ECB publishes third progress report on the digital euro preparation phase", published by European Central Bank on 16 July 2025). It's not a matter of if, but when physical currencies will become ruled out, and "For Our Security™", Linux (alonside other alternative OSes) will either be ruled out from internet banking altogether or it'll be forced to comply with "security requirements" that, in practice, would turn Linux indistinguishable from Android and iOS.

And this seems to be where everywhere is headed, it's not just an European or USian phenomenon. The future is bleak.

@[email protected] @[email protected]

Pois é, o bagulho tá mó difícil de entender, o pessoal parece que não desembucha na hora de prosear 😅

/s

@[email protected] @[email protected]

Brazilian here. I'm neither a lawyer nor a specialist, just someone who has read the Portuguese text from the Brazilian flavor of the ongoing worldwide age check set of laws.

I must note that the Brazilian age check law (Lei 15.211/2025) specifies "vedada a autodeclaração" (English: "self-declaring is forbidden"). This means that this kind of implementation, where age or birthday is an user input, wouldn't be compliant to Lei 15.211/2025, because it requires the age information to be assessed independently from the user whose age is being assessed. This means face biometrics, government-issued ID (in our case, CPF, CNH, Passaporte and similar) or "behaviorial analysis"... Anything but a "yes I'm 18" or "I was born in day month year", for those are self-declared and the Law says it's "not enough".

Someone should warn the systemd maintainers of this "Brazilian jabuticaba".

@[email protected]

When you treat Assembly as a full-fledged, high-level, hot-reload-able language:

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]

There's the big deal (already a thing in the country I exist in):