Ah, got it. Thanks for the reply!

FYI, syncretic beliefs are a thing. Candomblé, the Afro-Brazilian Religion, blends Catholic elements (such as saints) with many African traditions: “an African diasporic religion that developed in Brazil during the 19th century. It arose through a process of syncretism between several of the traditional religions of West and Central Africa, especially those of the Yoruba, Bantu, and Gbe” (Wikipedia)

It’s worth noting that Candomblé, as well as other afro-Brazilian religions (such as Umbanda and Kimbanda), although incorporating some catholic figures, are frequently misunderstood by christians, who often call them “devil worshippers”, an undeniable religious intolerance. Terreiros (sacred places where gatherings and rituals from Candomblé, Umbanda and Kimbanda takes place) are sometimes persecuted and vandalized by intolerant christians. The Afro-Brazilian believers, in turn, do not persecute churches neither christians (neither other religions).

I’m not from an afro-Brazilian religion (I’m actually Lilith’s worshipper, therefore I’m a literal “demon worshipper” for christians, I follow no specific religion), but I learnt from old friends from Umbanda and I know how sacred and important the Afro-Brazilian syncretic beliefs are to them.

The syncretic approach is also found in Göetia, where the tetragrammaton (YHWH) is used among demonic sigils to invoke entities such as Paimon, Lucifer and Stolas (also, some of those entities are syncretic themselves, such as Lucifer from the biblical Lucifer).

As I said before I don’t have a religion but I do my own research in a syncretic approach, while I try to find convergence between many traditions regarding The Goddess (The Dark Mother Goddess): Sumerian Lilit(h), Arabic Al-Lat/Allatu, Hindu Kali, Egyptian Isis, Thelemite Nuit, Greek Hekate, Chinese Chang’e and so on, as well as Umbanda’s Pomba-gira archetypes. So, to reiterate, syncretic approach is a thing.

A sincere question: why they don’t place some relay/repeater for the robot’s signal so they could control it from anywhere in the world through internet (or even some very private wireless communication network, outside internet due to security concerns)? The fact that they have to switch personnel every 15 minutes is a sign that they’re doing this in situ, rather than remotely.

Drones with mobile network connectivity are already a thing, for example. If you consider that internet exposure is dangerous (connection could be hacked, etc), ham transceiver repeaters are also a thing, and you can even chain many of them across many kilometers. It’s called mesh network.

Portuguese has no different word for them as well. Both raven and crow are translated as “corvo”.

In Portuguese we have the word “venenoso” for “poisonous” and “peçonhento” for “venomous” (i.e. something with a “peçonha”, any toxin substance produced and injected on another animal). But we often use “peçonhento” e “venenoso” interchangeably (e.g. “cobra venenosa”).

On PC, I use KDE’s Kate (it’s like the Windows Notepad, no formatting, just a plain text editor). On mobile, I’ve been testing Notesnook (migrating from Joplin), but sometimes I even use Telegram’s message composer to write.

If my writing gets too long and chaptered, then I copy-and-paste inside Google Docs, applying the chapterization.

Most of my writings are short/medium stream-of-consciousness texts (also, they hold a spiritual/esoteric component), so formatting is not a important thing for me to write them down.

However, I’m yet to find a good fediverse platform/instance to publish them. I’ve been hopping between Mastodon instances. Most of them are limited to 500 characters (as by standard), insufficient for non-short texts. I’ve been finding instances that allow for more than 500, but they aren’t active enough for people to interact with them, nor federated enough for reaching a broader public.

According to my searches, while a RTG uses radioactive material weighting in the scale of kilograms (average of 5 Kg across missions such as Voyager and Cassini), a nuclear power plant requires several tonnes worth of plutonium and enriched uranium. The minimal critical mass for plutonium is 10kg, the double of how many fuel RTGs hold (that’s why RTGs don’t blow while ascending and/or on space). It’s a large difference of mass/weight between RTG fuel and rods for nuclear power plants. They’d need to carry the whole tonnes worth of radioactive material split across very small quantities (which would require a lot of lead walling and/or launches)

I can imagine a rocket full of plutonium and uranium rods, sitting above immense tanks of combustible liquid: what the odds of such a rocket exploding during ascent? What are the effects of solar and cosmic radiation energy over these rods (even if they’re lead shielded), especially around Van Allen radiation belt? So many questions.

While I do rituals, it’s not exactly a summoning ritual. I do rituals involving (red) candles, incense sticks, hand-drawn symbols and sigils in order to meditate and widen my spiritual perception, focusing on my openness to Lilith. Physically, my spiritual development is (sadly) not enough to see or hear, just feeling a shiver.

I don’t (or, at least, I respectfully avoid to) summon Her, it’s She that suddenly and unexpectedly reach to me through one of the following three forms of spiritual interactions.

The first and main form is through what’s called as “gnosis” (stream-of-consciousness): all of sudden, words start to pop in inside my mind, I feel the need to write them down. This leads to more unexpected text, until I have a long text, often containing Her spiritual directions and/or warnings (generally in a strict tone of a wake-up call, like a spiritual “dose of tough medicine”) to me, communicated through a free-flowing stream of mental words.

It also involves dreams that inevitably became episodes of simultaneous false awakening loops and sleep paralysis (but not as unpleasant as it sounds), with Her presence becoming more and more intense to an almost unbearable point. In those dreams, all I can see is a silhouette figure standing somewhere across the room, so energetically intense for me to bear, where I’m caught on a mix of fear and awe.

Thirdly and rarely, it’s Her name appearing at the most unexpected places. It’s the most complex interaction to explain through a brief summary, but: imagine trying to chill watching some TV Series regarding fictional FBI characters investigating mundane things (so, nothing nearly related to spirituality) and, all of sudden, you see “Lilith” written on a paper inside a scene. Or using Google Lens to find out what species is an insect that appeared inside your home, and being taken by the app to a 2019 insectology page (not even closely related to spirituality as well) whose author’s nickname starts with “Lilith”. Both scenarios are real and actually happened to me. Maybe it’s a confirmation bias, but it’s too coincidental to be random.

I tried to summarize as briefly as I could, but I couldn’t avoid a long reply, sorry.

First Rule: don’t rawdog internet, especially torrent search sites. Always use protections.

Second rule: always check if you’re on the right site. It’s relatively easy to find torrent search sites, but even easier to find phishing sites (i.e. sites that claims to be the original site, but they actually aren’t).

Isn’t a file browser needed for browsing the saved documents and spreadsheets?

Not to mention that office suites (such as WPS, OpenOffice and LibreOffice) will inevitably pop up a file browser when the “Open” or “Save” buttons/menu items are clicked.

It seems utopia/dystopia, but some things get discovered/invented by accident. The more companies and organizations (and even individuals) fiddle with AI improvement, the more the “odds” of a sentient AI (AGI) being accidentally created increases. Let’s not forget that there are lots of companies, organizations and individuals (yeah, individuals, people outside organizations but with lots of computing power and knowledge) simultaneously developing and training AIs. Well, maybe I’m wrong and just very optimistic for such thing to appear out of nowhere.

/r/unexpectedfactorial

Lilith, Kali, Stolas, Lucifer, Baphomet, entities and deities that are often seen as malevolent but are neither evil nor good, they’re multifaceted sentient forces of Nature, manifestations of the Cosmos, archetypes of the transcendental divine. My quotes around the “demonic” is because I don’t see the demonic as inherently evil.

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.

Interestingly enough, there’s an AI experimentation focused on (trying to) debunking conspiracy theories. The article was posted here on !technology@lemmy.world

Edit: the “Can AI talk us out of conspiracy theory rabbit holes?” article’s cover is misleadingly trying to relate conspiracy theories with occult, pagan and esoteric concepts, with symbols that you find in esoteric field (such as the eyed hand, alchemy symbols for planets and stars, etc). I’m a pagan myself. Religious intolerance is a thing that harms minority religions and the article sadly helps to spread this intolerance.

The occult, pagan and esoteric has nothing to do with conspiracy theories, they’re belief systems, they’re religions, they’re spiritual practices and views. Religions such as Luciferianism and Wicca are often attacked by Christians (with moralist speech such as “you worship Satan, you worship demons, you’re evil, repent”; let’s not forget what the church did to “witches” some centuries ago). I’m not attacking Christianity here (I was a Christian once), but it’s a reality: pagan beliefs, such as mine (I’m somewhat Luciferian and Thelemite in a syncretic way), are often attacked, and such a scientific article does harm pagan beliefs. Pagans don’t spread conspiracy theories.

For me, a Zennial, born between Millennial and Gen Z, I won’t have kids due to following reasons:

• My abyssal lack of/difficulties with social interaction (I’m practically an hermit), friendships and relationships (not sure what “loving someone” is/means; I feel more comfortable among literal “demonic entities” and computers than with people)
• Climate changes turning Earth into a vision of underworld that even Dante couldn’t imagine, with ever-increasing scorching temperatures.
• Other complex and multifaceted political, societal, technological, esoteric, philosophical and scientific reasons too long to be summarized and enlisted.
• And, of course, finances: it’d become worse for my hypothetical son/daughter.

Not that Earth and Nature couldn’t bear more individuals (considering a mutual respect between the Homo sapiens and the whole biosphere, a respect that Homo sapiens clearly lacks), but the idea of a children growing in a world where 120°F/48°C is the “new normal” can’t be bearable. Not to mention that Homo sapiens is walking towards extinction due to our poor relationship with the environment and with ourselves. Unfortunately, next generations will inevitably face ever-increasing, deadly issues. Not only humans, other animals too (some are already becoming extinct).

“Press F to pay respects” Same vibe

Actively criticizing how both USSR and US secretly gave citizenship and hired nazi-fascists (and history is there to be checked) (therefore actively positioning myself against nazi-fascists and against everybody who “sits at a table with nazis and stays at the table”) is “carrying water for nazi-fascists”? WTH?!

Reeducation won’t revive nazi victims. USSR and US were no necromancers.