lvxferre

joined 3 years ago
MODERATOR OF
0
submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by lvxferre@lemmy.ml to c/snoocalypse@lemmy.ml
 

Ladies, gentlemen, and cherished non-binary folks: it has been a serious joy to moderate this community for you.

Based on the general input from an earlier thread, I'm closing this community down; I apologise for rushing this decision but it's for the best.


I'll also use the opportunity to publicly release the modlog of this community, showing at least which actions were taken by myself:

I can't show the other usernames because this would be allegedly "doxxing".

I'm doing so because I believe that transparency is essential to nurture a healthy and friendly community. I also encourage people here to check the mod logs of other lemmy.ml communities.

 

UPDATE, 2024/JAN/17: this address has been locked so mods only can post. Use the new one.


This comm is being moved to !linguistics@mander.xyz (Lemmy link) or /m/linguistics@mander.xyz (Kbin link). Same old topic, same old rules, same old mod. Different instance, focused on sciences. That's it.

A few additional points:

  • Since the new instance only defederates other two instances, access shouldn't be a concern.
  • I'll keep modding both addresses concurrently, until 19/February/2024 (August Schleicher's birthday), to give people enough time to migrate. In the meantime you can post in either but I'd like to ask users to use the !linguistics@mander.xyz address instead.

If you believe that it's worth keeping !linguistics@lemmy.ml as a separated community, and wishes to moderate it, please say so in this thread. Or wait until the migration is over and ask lemmy.ml admins, whichever you prefer.

[–] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 0 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

I feel like Greedy Pigboy and Reddit Inc. as a whole deserve to be punished, for all that "my precious data! No, it is not the users', IT IS MINE! MY PRECIOUS!" fiasco. Enshittification will happen either way.

[–] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I think that the RHEL example is out-of-place, since IBM ("Red Hat") is clearly exploiting a loophole of the GNU Public License. Similar loopholes have been later addressed by e.g. the AGPL and the GPLv3*, so I expect this one to be addressed too.

So perhaps, if the GPL is "not enough", the solution might be more GPL.

*note that the license used by the kernel is GPLv2. Cue to Android (for all intents and purposes non-free software) using the kernel, but not the rest.

[–] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 0 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Pretty much. English borrowed it from Latin because it's posh. And Latin borrowed it from Greek because it's posh. But at the end of the day it's in the same spirit as "the ABC", or Latin "abecedarius".

[–] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

When I registered 2y ago I didn't think that I'd stick around for so long.
I'm glad that I did.

[–] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Actually interesting video! I'm clueless when it comes to fonts, but a few comments about the start (when he gives it some historical background):

What the Phoenicians did was to take a look at the hieroglyphs like, "Yeah! Love that! But... what if we made the symbols even more abstract?"

I know, he's oversimplifying it (as it is not the focus of the video), but it's worth noting that this abstraction was done by the Egyptians themselves, while writing hieroglyphs. Hieroglyphs often use something called the "rebus principle", where you represent a word by a similar-sounding word. For example, "son of" /sa/ was often represented with ⟨𓅬⟩, a white-fronted goose /za/ - because they sound practically the same.

(It's a lot like writing "I like The Beatles" as ⟨👁️👍🪲🪲⟩. Why ⟨👁️⟩? Because it sounds the same as "I".)

What the Canaanites (including the Phoenicians) did was to use this rebus principle in a more consistent way, and only for the first consonant of the word. For example, ⟨𓉐⟩ (a house) representing [b] because "house" in those languages usually starts with that sound. That's the start of the phonetic principle (graphemes represent sounds instead of concepts).

There's yet another level of abstraction, that it's hard to pinpoint when started to become relevant: instead of representing the "raw" sounds, you represent the underlying phonemes. It's the reason, for example, that the /p/ in ⟨pit⟩ [pʰ] and ⟨spit⟩ [p] gets the same letter - because although they sound different, they're still the same phoneme.

Now, there were a couple of problems with this early alphabet from the Greeks, there only had uppercase, and while they wrote in rows, sometimes they wrote LTR, sometimes RTL

Ah, come on, that's silly - neither is a "problem" of the lapidary early Greek alphabet. It's just the absence of a feature that he's used to, and the presence of another.

For comparison: this is on the same level as an Arabic or Farsi speaker saying "now, there are a couple problems with the modern Latin alphabet, such as lack of initial/medial/final forms, and writing the vowels with their own letters as if they were consonants."

Enter the Romans...

Further info on the alphabet. Be warned that it's mostly trivia.

  • ⟨G⟩ is a later innovation, more specifically from 230 BCE. Originally the Roman alphabet used ⟨C⟩ for both /k/ and /g/.
  • Including ⟨J⟩ was a mistake - it was not a letter back then, it originated as a curled ⟨I⟩ in the middle ages. ⟨I⟩ and ⟨J⟩ got "split" into their own letters rather recently.
  • ⟨U⟩ was not a letter back then either, but he got it right. Same deal with the above, except between ⟨V⟩ and ⟨U⟩.
  • ⟨K⟩ was only marginally used. You do see it popping up for native Latin words, but it's usually for Greek borrowings. Specially after Latin shifted /k/ to sound like [tʃ] (as in chill) before front vowels.
  • ⟨Y⟩ was mostly used for Greek borrowings, representing the sounds [ʏ y:] (as in German Müller and über). Latin itself lacked the sound, and odds are that most speakers butchered those words to sound like [ɪ i:] (as in bit and beet) instead.
  • ⟨W⟩ is not there because, although ⟨V⟩ represented three sounds in Latin, [w ʊ u:] (as in wool, book and boot), confusing [w] with [ʊ] was not a big deal (more on [u:] later). It wrecked havoc for Germanic dialects though, so they started representing the consonant with a digraph, ⟨VV⟩.
  • ⟨Z⟩ used to be the sixth letter of the alphabet. Then it was kicked off the alphabet for being "too foreign". Then it came back at the end.
  • Some Roman emperor tried to introduce three letters into the alphabet: ⟨Ↄ Ⅎ Ⱶ⟩, that were supposed to represent [ps w ɨ] (as in cops, wool, and Polish byt). They were mostly forgotten.
  • The Romans used a diacritic, to represent vowel length, the apex. For most time it looked like its descendant (the modern acute), except over ⟨I⟩ - because then people wrote a longer ⟨I⟩ instead.
[–] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 1 points 9 months ago

Players: "Well... this is awkward."

Dupes: "New friend? New friend! Yay!"

[–] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Just to add random info/trivia: it's interesting to note that this mess between "botanical fruit" and "culinary fruit" is largely language-dependent. In Portuguese for example it doesn't happen - because botanical fruit is "fruto" (with "o") and culinary fruit is "fruta" (with "a").

So for example, if you tell someone that cucumber is a "fruto", that is not contentious; you're just using a somewhat posh word if you aren't in a botanical context. And if you tell the person that tomato is a "fruta", you're just being silly.

Berry has no direct equivalent. If you must specify that the fruit comes from a single ovary, you call it "fruto simples" (lit. simple botanical-fruit), as opposed to "fruto múltiplo" (multiple fruit - e.g. pineapple). Popularly people will call stuff like strawberries and mulberries by multiple names, like "frutinhas" (little fruits) and the likes.

[–] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Fun fact: strawberry was admitted to the psychiatric yard once pepper and cucumber joined the berry club.

[–] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 0 points 10 months ago (2 children)

It's mostly Mastodon. The text doesn't even mention Lemmy or Kbin.

I'm glad that Mozilla is doing this. It benefits both sides (Mozilla and the Fediverse), in a transparent way. Hopefully we get some Fediverse companion for Firefox, Thunderbird and Seamonkey.

[–] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 0 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)
exsuscitō
sed lūx non accendit
iam somniō

I wake myself up
But the light does not turn on
Still inside the dream

Note: in the Latin version I'm only counting two morae per syllable for the long vowels, not for the codas. (Japanese barely uses coda, if I do it here the verses get too long.) The English version disregards syllable weight.

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submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by lvxferre@lemmy.ml to c/anime@lemmy.ml
 

Please, no discussion about plot points not yet seen or skipped in the show. ~~Otherwise Guillotine-kun will get you.~~

Show info: MyAnimeList, official site, Kitsu, AniList, AniDB, Anime-Planet

Episode Link to Post
1 Link
2 Link
3 Link
 

Summary: Reddit warns mods that it's ending its crypto program, before it warns the other users. What could go wrong? /s

[–] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 0 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Okay, I know that this will sound silly, but I'll use my cat as an example.

She does nothing but sleep, eat, shit. She's rather defensive of her personal space, and often hurts us for that. 3AM she woke me up with loud noises because she wanted to play. The floor, my clothes, my keyboard, there's cat hair everywhere, and without her I'd probably need to clean a fraction of what I do.

Would I get rid of her? FUCK NO. Because even if she's annoying, I still love her and I want her around. It would be certainly better if I didn't get those annoyances but hey, nobody is perfect. And she gives me happiness on the small things, like when she headbutts my leg or "mrrown-wown?" at me.

It's perfectly possible that you are in a similar situation as my cat. Except that, as a human being, you understand that you're hurting people, and you can reflect on your behaviour and change it for the best of the ones around you. But it's still perfectly possible that you're underestimating the positive impact that you have in their lives. And at the end of the day, we all are like this, our social interactions are usually a mix of positive and negative.

[–] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Relevant detail: the modlog shows who did what, but only if you're a mod of that comm. Based on that, I think that it doesn't show it to the rest of the userbase to avoid mod harassment.

However I think that it should show to the rest of the userbase, at least, "[comm name] mod" or "[instance name] admins" instead of simply "mod". And there should be an easy way to contact the relevant group behind a certain mod action, that does not involve direct messages!

Another thing that I feel like missing is a proper channel for comm mods to "upstream" reports to instance admins, when the content fits the community rules but may or may not be in violation of the instance rules. That would indirectly help other users because there's a clearer division of responsibility, and you won't get situations like "comm mods need to take an educated guess on how to enforce instance rules that they did not set up".

 

I often switch between phones and speakers, but I'm too lazy to do it through the sound preferences window. So I came up with this script*, and I'm sharing it here as others might find it useful.

You'll need to tweak it a bit to work in your machine, but once you do it you can run it from a launcher or a keyboard shortcut, it's really comfy.

Okay, here's the code:


#!/bin/bash

# You'll need to swap those four values with the ones that work in your machine.
# Check the rest of the post for further info.
mainCard="pci-0000_06_00.1"
mainProfile="hdmi-stereo-extra1"
altCard="pci-0000_00_09.2"
altProfile="analog-stereo"

# If the current default source is main, your new source is alt. Else, your new is main.
if [[ $(pactl get-default-source) == "alsa_output.$mainCard.$mainProfile.monitor" ]]
then declare -g newCard="$altCard" newProfile="$altProfile"
else declare -g newCard="$mainCard" newProfile="$mainProfile"
fi

# Tells PulseAudio to shift the card profile and default sink to the new.
pactl set-card-profile "alsa_card.${newCard}" "output:${newProfile}"
pacmd set-default-sink "alsa_output.${newCard}.${newProfile}" &> /dev/null\

# Tells PulseAudio to shift the currently running programs to use the new output.
for i in $(pacmd list-sink-inputs | grep index | awk '{print $2}')
do pacmd move-sink-input "$i" "alsa_output.${newCard}.${newProfile}" &> /dev/null
done

# Optional text notification.
if [[ $(pactl get-default-source) == "alsa_output.$mainCard.$mainProfile.monitor" ]]
then notify-send -t 500 "Main sound output on!"
elif [[ $(pactl get-default-source) == "alsa_output.$altCard.$altProfile.monitor" ]]
then notify-send -t 500 "Alt sound output on!"
else notify-send -t 2000 "Something weird happened."
fi

# Optional audio notification. It runs VLC but it's easy to adapt or remove if you want.
cvlc --play-and-exit /usr/share/sounds/freedesktop/stereo/message-new-instant.oga


Check the first four lines of code. You'll need to replace that "pci.blahblah" and "audio.stereo.whatever" junk with the ones from your machine. To know them, run pacmd list-sources | grep name: in a terminal. The output will look like this:

name: ⟨alsa_output.pci-0000_06_00.1.hdmi-stereo-extra1.monitor⟩
name: ⟨alsa_output.pci-0000_00_09.2.analog-stereo.monitor⟩

Ignore ⟨alsa_output and monitor⟩. The second-to-last chunk (e.g. hdmi-stereo-extra1) is the profile. The rest (e.g. pci-0000_06_00.1) is the card. Now replace those in the script.

*credits: this script is partially inspired on this AskUbuntu comment.

 

Excerpt:

Most major subreddits show a decrease of between 50 and 90 percent in average daily posts and comments, when compared to a year ago. This suggests the problem is way fewer users, not the same number of users browsing less. The huge and universal dropoff also suggests that people left, either because of the changes or the protests, and they aren’t coming back.

 

The name of the game is Six Cats Under. It can be played online, and it's rather quick to play.

Backstory: you're the ghost of a recently deceased crazy cat lady. Your job is to free your cats from your home, because now you can't feed them, and you don't want them to starve.

All cats have their own personalities and names. For example Baroness is grumpy, Fredrick only cares about food, Mr. Spock likes to scratch furniture, etc. (Source: click on the cat and the ghost will say it.) This is relevant for gameplay because you need to make her cats interact in a certain way to open the door.

I'll provide the solution of the puzzle in the comments, but please try the game before using it. Otherwise you'll lose all those nice tidbits of narration from the ghost.

 

The outcome was predicted by plenty users in this community, but now the news are noticing it.

 

Left: 2yo, right: 15yo. Still the same ticklish weirdo, who thinks that the clothespin basket is a toybox.

 

I'm sharing this here mostly due to the "official" labels. Excerpt from the text:

“Starting today, we’re beginning early testing of placing a visual indicator on certain profiles to provide proof of authenticity, reduce impersonation, and increase transparency across the platform,” a Reddit admin (employee) wrote in a post. “This is currently only available to a *very* small (double-digit) number of profiles belonging to organizations with whom we already have existing relationships, and who are interested in engaging with redditors and communities on our platform.”

At least for me this looks like a really poor attempt to attract content creators into the platform, while shifting its focus from the content created and shared by the users to the users themselves, as in more typical social media platforms (such as Facebook, Twitter, TikTok). It's bound to fail - what made Reddit desirable for the users was the content that they shared among themselves, unlike in Twitter where a few personalities can "anchor" the rest of the userbase.

 

Users are already planning protest art. I personally wouldn't encourage people to join because it's more traffic for Reddit, but that's just me.

On other news, apparently requesting a subreddit now requires a 28d old account with 100+ karma.

EDIT: it's on again, since 20min ago:
The only two recognisable things are the "fuck spez" and nationalists spamming some government flag.

EDIT 2: better view:
I think that the meaning of the sentence in German up there should be rather obvious. It's on-topic.

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submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by lvxferre@lemmy.ml to c/snoocalypse@lemmy.ml
 

The link contains db0's views on the ongoing state of Reddit, and I think that it's worth sharing here - both to document a piece of opinion, and as food for thought. The main points are:

  • a comparison between the current state of Reddit vs. Myspace near collapse;
  • the illusion that everything is fine based on "raw" numbers like engagement;
  • that Reddit was never a "good" site, but it had two positive points (open API and hands-off approach to communities), destroyed by the current events;
  • the ongoing progression of the Fediverse as alternative to Reddit;
  • the change in quality in both the content and the behaviour of the people still there.

The text mentions an article from Cory Doctorow. I've copied it to a pastebin, in case someone can't access it.

EDIT: I hope that the author doesn't mind, but I'll copy the contents of the article inside the spoilers below. Hopefully for mobile users it'll be a bit more accessible.

Reddit is a dead site running

from July 10, 2023

Yesterday I read the excellent article by Cory Doctorow: Let the Platforms Burn and this particular anecdote

"The thing is, network effects are a double-edged sword. People join a service to be with the people they care about. But when the people they care about start to leave, everyone rushes for the exits. Here’s danah boyd, describing the last days of Myspace:

If a central node in a network disappeared and went somewhere else (like from MySpace to Facebook), that person could pull some portion of their connections with them to a new site. However, if the accounts on the site that drew emotional intensity stopped doing so, people stopped engaging as much. Watching Friendster come undone, I started to think that the fading of emotionally sticky nodes was even more problematic than the disappearance of segments of the graph.
With MySpace, I was trying to identify the point where I thought the site was going to unravel. When I started seeing the disappearance of emotionally sticky nodes, I reached out to members of the MySpace team to share my concerns and they told me that their numbers looked fine. Active uniques were high, the amount of time people spent on the site was continuing to grow, and new accounts were being created at a rate faster than accounts were being closed. I shook my head; I didn’t think that was enough. A few months later, the site started to unravel.

This is exactly what is happening to Reddit currently. The most passionate contributors, the most tech-literate users, and the integrators who make all the free tools in the ecosystem around reddit which makes that service much more valuable have left and will never look back.

From the dashboards of u/spez however, things might looks great. Better even! As the drama around their decision making certainly caused a lot more posts and interactions, and the loss of the 3rd party apps drove at least a few users to the official applications.

But this is an illusion. Like MySpace before them, the metric might look good, but the soul of the site has been lost. It’s not easy to explain but since I’ve started using Lemmy full-time, I’ve seen the improvement in engagement and quality in real time. half a month ago, posts could barely pass 2 digits, now they regularly break 3 and sometimes 4 digits. And the quality of the discussions is a pleasure to go through.

I said it before, but reddit was never a particularly good site. Their saving grace was the openness of their API and their hands-off approach to communities. The two things they just destroyed. It’s those 3rd party tools and communities that made reddit like it is. As as the ecosystem around reddit sputters and dies, the one around the Threadiverse is progressing in an astonishing rate.

Not only are the integrators coming from reddit aware what kind of bots and tools are going to be very useful, but a lot of those tools are shut off from reddit and switched to the lemmy API instead, explicitly cannibalizing the quality of the reddit experience. And due to the completely open API of the Threadiverse, those tools now get access to unparalleled access and power.

Sure if you visit reddit currently, you’ll see people talking and voting, but as someone who’s been there from the start, the quality has fallen off a hill and is reaching terminal velocity. But it feels like one’s still flying!

Not just the quality of the posts where only the most superficial meme stuff can rise to the top, not just the quality of the discussion, but even mere vibe of the discussions is just lost.

There’s now significant bitterness and hostility, especially as the mods who were responsible for maintaining the quality, have gone or are being hands off or just don’t have the tools needed to keep up. I’ve heard from multiple people who are leaving even while they were not originally planning to, because the people left over in reddit are just so toxic.

This is a very vicious cycle which will accelerate the demise of that site even further.

A house fire can go from a spark to a raging inferno in less than a minute. The flames consuming reddit are just now climbing up the curtains and it still appears manageable, but it’s already too late. Reddit has reached terminal enshittification and the only thing left for it to do, is die.

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