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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • Edit: preemptive “no you”lol

    To be understood, I’d probably just say projection, but if you need to emphasize a specific aspect of the behavior, we could break it down as:

    1. an existing insecurity or shame that
    2. prompts momentary social anxiety
    3. evidenced by a defensive impulse
    4. to preemptively introject

    Explanation: introjection refers to a mirroring behavior, the kind often seen in children. In this case, the accuser anticipates an accusation from you which threatens or hurts them. To defend themselves, they hurl the accusation right back at you. But of course the first accusation only happened in their head, so all we witness is someone wildly accusing someone else of having their own flaw without any justification.



  • Background

    YHWH (“Yahweh”) was the storm god of the Canaanite pantheon that was likely referred to as the “host” or “council” in the Old Testament book of Job. El was the “father” god or head of that pantheon. When gendered in the text, both El and YHWH were male, but are technically considered genderless. Some have speculated that the Shekhinah represents an expression of the feminine aspect of YHWH, but no Abrahamic religion officially regards either YHWH or El as gendered.

    Judaic tradition championed the storm god YHWH above the other gods, perhaps due to the oral tradition of a storm parting the Sea of Reeds (Red Sea) described in Exodus. Other gods in the pantheon came to be regarded as pagan/false, and their worship was considered idolatry (religious infidelity) but the older religious traditions proved difficult to stamp out, with numerous examples of the Israelites turning to the old gods and being punished for it.

    One such instance in the book of Hosea (echoed in Isaiah and Jeremiah) detailed an old tradition of offering “sacred raisin cakes” and “flagons of wine” to an unnamed god.

    That god was almost certainly Asherah, aka Ishtar, Esther, “Queen of Heaven,” and “She of the Womb” in different surviving tablets. She is named many times in the Hebrew text, more often than Ba’al, another prominent god of the Canaanite pantheon.

    Asherah was a fertility goddess, the wife of El, and sister to YHWH (sometimes consort; pantheons are often pro-incest). Asherah’s religious tradition featured the baking of raisin cakes in the shape of her body and the pouring of wine into the earth, matching the traditions described in the Hebrew text.

    So to answer your question, while none of the Abrahamic religions officially worship a god with an exclusive female gender identity, their holy books technically do recognize at least one goddess, and that’s Asherah.

    BONUS: her raisin cakes are still made in the Jewish tradition during Purim, though they are now triangular, contain various fillings, and are named after Haman, the villain of Esther’s story. They’re quite good.



  • I understand the terror of watching this unfold from the outside, if only because many people I love on the inside are facing these new horrors directly. Some wouldn’t even call it new, just a more explicit and sweeping abandonment of our crumbling democratic sociopolitical facade.

    Things don’t work that way.

    But they do. When it comes to collective action, especially when so many are effectively kept in the dark, revolutions progress slowly then all at once. For example the French Revolution didn’t attain critical mass with the general populace until the treasury was literally empty and the government couldn’t pay its bills. Even then it took many bloody years to stabilize into its modern liberal democratic form.

    By comparison, the intent of this new regime, while obvious to anyone paying attention, has only been truly manifest for a few breathless weeks. Though it takes time for the light to break through all the disinformation bubbles and dawn on the general populace, it is finally happening.

    I too want it to happen more quickly, and feel every bit of urgency you do, but the truth is it takes people like you and me working together to mobilize others, because this is just one expression of a global crisis, with global roots, that can only be solved with global collective action. Blaming the oppressed and deceived people of democracies that fall is understandable, since everyone thinks “that couldn’t happen here” while it certainly can and has been for years. It’s self-defeating, however, because we can only win this fight together.


  • I hear you, and I agree there’s a lot more that needs to be done. I can say with some confidence that the average American doesn’t want any of this in the slightest, even if the average American isn’t as politically engaged as they need to be to truly understand the global implications.

    The truth is that the average American is mostly thinking about immediate problems in their own life, like how to pay both their rent and their phone bill and still afford gas to get to the grocery store where many staples are increasingly expensive.

    Even something as important as voting or protesting can feel like a privilege for the well-off when it’s the choice between that and working a shift to pay bills, and of course voting has been made deliberately difficult in most states. Voter registration isn’t automatic, for example. Likewise Election Day isn’t a National Holiday, so many people have to take off work if they don’t plan ahead to register, apply to vote absentee and meet deadlines for ballot mail-in.

    Basically I’m just trying to encourage you to remember your neighbors are normal people who actually do value being good neighbors. They are oppressed and deceived, however, and a small portion of them are straight up brainwashed by a cult.

    I hope, trust, and believe that when the chips fall, people in this country will answer the call to fight the global oppressors for themselves and others, because deep down they know that we’re all in this together. First they must lift their heads and see, a difficult process which I think has finally begun.





  • Septimaeus@infosec.pubtoPrivacy@lemmy.worldPlease, don't!
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    13 days ago

    This is correct. The popular misconception may arise from the marked difference between model use vs development. Inference is far less demanding than training with respect to time and energy efficiency.

    And you can still train on most consumer GPUs, but for really deep networks like LLMs, well get ready to wait.



  • Yes, I only used mqtt because it’s a common low-level protocol in smart appliances that’s comparatively simple. A more accessible example might have been Smart TVs being half the price of dumb ones (if you can even find them now) since the principle is the same.

    I agree that support is one of the main things cloud legitimately makes easier. Support personnel have more reliable case data, more robust central control, and so forth.

    And I think you’ll agree many smart home folks already have/had hubs and bridges (servers) floating around that obfuscate most of that complexity without the need for always-on WAN access. Remote maintenance (patches, firmware updates, etc) don’t necessarily preclude a plug and play experience.

    Whether this accounts for the cost and complexity differential consumers experience can be debated, but my point was simpler. Cloud-based products are artificially subsidized in at least two ways. The first is that they’re a loss leader facilitating platform lock-in, but the second is that rich usage data from intimate user contexts is quite valuable to the endless parade of marketing voyeurs.


  • I get what you’re saying, but I’m not talking about SaaS products. I’m talking about physical things on local networks that don’t need cloud access.

    For example, a common wall switch may use mqtt internally, but inexplicably railroad all commands through the online Tuya platform. The device requires a beefier ESP chip as a result. It must be capable of ethernet and async workflows for client platform auth, token refresh, and so forth. It may even cease functioning when it can’t reach the servers.

    By comparison, the strictly intranetwork equivalent has far simpler hardware that can run for months on a watch battery. And yet, the cloud-based product will basically always be cheaper, in spite of being more complex and requiring cloud infrastructure.

    So, how come? Yes economies of scale might apply to the hardware manufacturing, but certainly not to the cloud requirement. No economy scales quite like 0.