[-] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 52 points 10 months ago

1990? Oh I remember it. In Brazil they wouldn't be listing the year though, but the month - hyperinflation was raging on, back then. (I remember the 100 cruzeiro coins. They were cute.)

Anyway. The number doesn't match any pair of prices:

  • from '90 to '22 (32y): 224%
  • from '22 to '23 (1y): 162%
  • from '90 to '23 (33y): 364%

And one detail that they didn't mention is that +100%~200% between the 90s and the 20s is not a big deal, but +60% in a single year is a big fucking deal. That smells artificial as fuck, reinforcing what people have been saying here about not being inflation but price gouging.

[-] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 52 points 11 months ago

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 51 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

My hypothesis: Lemmy has an older userbase, and in general older people feel less of a need to express their emotions. They're busier discussing the topic than highlighting their attitude towards it.

Perhaps cultural reinforcement plays a role, too. As emoticons and emojis are less used, they feel more out of place, so people who'd use them elsewhere avoid them here.

[-] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 59 points 1 year ago

That doesn't surprise me.

Linux users are biased towards higher technical expertise, and they have a different mindset - most of the software that we use is the result of collaborative projects, and we're often encouraged to help the devs out. And while the collaborative situation might not be true for game development, the mindset leaks out.

[-] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 52 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Like, what the hell did I do to deserve that? I don’t know why I let it even bother me because of how obviously immature he is being.

Odds are that you did nothing. He's clearly an emotional vulture, he probably does it towards everyone around him.

I don't recommend framing it as immaturity, as it might give you the false hope that he'll "grow up" and get better over time. Perhaps he gets better, but odds are that he won't.

Some people might say "let it go", or "vengeance is never good, it kills the soul and poisons it". I'm almost 40 and I got something to say about this pacifist discourse:

Screw this masochistic shit. When you turn the other face you are not saying "I'm better than him"; you're saying "he's right in treating me as trash, as I am trash". You want to ruin his life and make him regret existing.

So, here's what I'd do:

  • Document every single time that he contacts you, including the contents. Record calls, save e-mails, take screenshots.
  • He's likely doing this with other people too, contact them. Former friends and any ex-SO are a good start. Ideally they should do the same as you (document it) and you should act in unison. Do not let him notice that you're acting together though, be as stealthy as possible.

I couldn’t take it anymore, so I blocked him on everything I could think of. [...] This quote was a part of what he commented on my Instagram picture of one of my tools yesterday:

That's actually great for you. It means that he kept contacting you after showed clear desire to not be contacted further. Depending on the local laws this gives you grounds for legal action.

And since the guy is a fucking idiot flaunting the fact that he's an engineer, you might also contact his business. Be polite towards them, but highlight the fact that one of their employees is harassing you. Even if he doesn't get fired, it'll put him in a poor position later on.

He deserves to be put in his place. I don’t know if that’s possible though without me becoming just as petty as he is.

The difference between "being petty" and "standing your ground" is why. You are in a position to screw him up without being petty.

You'll also want to ruin the psychological "kick" that he gets from harassing you. Ignoring him on the surface (while documenting it) is a good approach, because he'll feel unsatisfied but he'll try a bit harder.

Also shield yourself psychologically. Remember - you are not the problem, he is the problem.

Vengeance is not a dish to be served cold. You warm it in the blood of your enemies.

[-] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 54 points 1 year ago

There's a bunch of weird ones in Portuguese.

  • "Caroço de manga não é sabonete" Do you think that mango seed is soap? = "this is an absurd proposal/situation/etc."
  • "Pobre só sobe na vida quando o barraco explode" Poor people only ascend on life when the [shit]shack explodes. = "don't expect social ascension"
  • "Enquanto vem com o milho, já comi a polenta." While you're bringing the corn, I already ate the polenta. = "I've already handled this, you're too late."
  • "um polaco de cada colônia" a Pole from each settlement = a bunch of randomly picked people or items. I don't think that people use this too much outside Paraná.
  • "farinha do mesmo saco" flour from the same bag = extremely similar in some aspects that matter (and usually negative ones)
  • "comer o pão que o diabo amassou" to eat the bread kneaded by the devil = to go through rough times
  • "Vai chupar prego até virar tachinha!" Go suck an [iron] nail until it becomes a thumbtack! = somewhat polite way to tell someone to fuck off
  • "Vai ver se estou na esquina." *Go check if I'm around the corner." = also a way to tell people to fuck off
  • "anta quadrada" squared tapir = "anta" tapir is used to call someone stupid, so anta quadrada is stupid to the power of two.
  • "anta cúbica" cubed tapir = because some people do some really, really stupid shit.
  • "mais louco que o Requião de pedalinho" crazier than Requião on a paddle boat = Requião is a politician here in Paraná known for his crazy antics. The phrase highlights that something is completely fucking crazy. Clearly local.
  • "teu cu" your arse[hole] = definitively, clearly, and blatantly "no".
[-] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 54 points 1 year ago

Lying about events that allegedly happened while we were engaged, and expecting me to actually believe her. Specially when she switched who did what.

For example. "I even cooked at late night for you!" - err... no. She only cooked for me a handful of times, all of them afternoon snacks. (I'm not a big fan of afternoon eating but I appreciated the gesture.) I was cooking for her fairly often, including preparing a "fake" barreado (kind of stew) at 3AM.

Or claiming that a common friend (a woman) openly mocked her while we were drinking with friends, and I did nothing. I was there and I remember what friend said - a single sentence, roughly "hello and bye for both of you!", since that friend was leaving as we were arriving on the bar. Even if she wanted to mock my then girlfriend, she wouldn't have the time to do so.

What makes those funny is not the fact that she was lying, but that they're such idiotic lies that you can smell the bullshit from a kilometre of distance.

[-] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 58 points 1 year ago

I think on Rome fairly often, but it's usually more often on the republic.

about how the Republic fell and became a totalitarian state.

I was thinking about this literally yesterday, on the nature of Octavian betraying the Republic, and how the Iulii and the Claudii simply kept themselves on power through the whole process. (Both gentes were already powerful in Republican times.) Or how some of the Claudii called themselves "Clodius" instead of "Claudius" for the sake of populism. ("See? I'm from the people! I even speak like a pleb!")

[-] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 60 points 1 year ago

Really the api change did this?

Kind of. It wasn't just the change itself, but also how it was done.

Reddit showed complete lack of care about its own userbase (specially blind people and moderators) and that it's an extremely scummy company, even for company standards. It could've pulled the unreasonable API prices to kill off 3PA but it would need smarter people in charge of the decision than the ones who did it.

[-] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 54 points 1 year ago

Calling Mussolini a "great leader" isn't just immoral. It's also clearly incorrect for any reasonable definition of a great leader: he was in the losing side of a big war, if he won his ally would've backstabbed him, he failed to suppress internal resistance, the resistance got rid of him, his regime effectively died with him, with Italy becoming a democratic republic, the country was poorer due to the war... all that fascist babble about unity, expansion, order? He failed at it, hard.

On-topic: I believe that the main solution proposed by the article is unviable, as those large "language" models have a hard time sorting out deontic statements (opinion, advice, etc.) from epistemic statements. (Some people have it too, I'm aware.) At most they'd phrase opinions as if they were epistemic statements.

And the self-contradiction won't go away, at least not for LLMs. They don't model any sort of conceptualisation. They're also damn shitty at taking context into account, creating more contradictions out of nowhere because of that.

433
submitted 1 year ago by lvxferre@lemmy.ml to c/snoocalypse@lemmy.ml

Credits to the idea go to BarqsHasBite.

261
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by lvxferre@lemmy.ml to c/snoocalypse@lemmy.ml

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.

432
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by lvxferre@lemmy.ml to c/snoocalypse@lemmy.ml

Two IMO on-point excerpts of the article:

The highest-ranked replies are very critical of the post. “What good is our feedback when reddit seems perfectly happy to ignore all of it?” wrote one user. “What’s the point?” Another pointed out that Huffman called mods “landed gentry.” “Show, don’t tell,” wrote another user — to which the admin replied, “Agreed.”

“A beginning of what?” replied one user. “This solves nothing, and just wastes everybody’s time.”

Reddit's administration is sounding more and more like an abusive SO trying to gaslight you into staying in the relationship. "Baby I'll listen to you, I swear."

2
submitted 1 year ago by lvxferre@lemmy.ml to c/linguistics@lemmy.ml

It's a script attested from 2200~1700 years old inscriptions found in Central Asia, between what's today Kazakhstan and Afghanistan (both included). Discovered in the 1950s, but now freshly discovered inscriptions from Tajikistan (the Almosi inscriptions) encouraged people to take a further look at the decipherment, alongside older inscriptions (such as the Dašt-i Nāwur trilingual; written in Greek, Bactrian, and the unknown script).

This is specially interesting for those interested on Tocharian studies, as the language being deciphered might be potentially spoken by Tocharian speakers who migrated south.

[-] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 52 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Note that a fallacy is a reasoning flaw; sometimes the goal might be to trick you, indeed. But sometimes it's just a brainfart... or you might be dealing with something worse, like sheer irrationality. That said:

  • look for the conclusion. What is the point that the writer is delivering? (Note: you might find multiple conclusions. That's OK.)
  • look at what's being used to support that conclusion. What is the core argument?
  • look for the arguments used to feed premises into the core argument. Which are they?

Then try to formalise the arguments that you found into "premise 1, premise 2, conclusion" in your head or in a text editor. Are the premises solid? Do you actually agree with them? And do they actually lead into the conclusion? If something smells fishy, you probably got a fallacy.

Get used to at least a few "big" types of fallacies. There are lists across the internet, do read a few of them; you don't need to memorise names, just to understand what is wrong with that fallacious reasoning. This pic has a few of them, I think that it's good reference material, specially at the start:

In special I've noticed that a few types of fallacy are really common on the internet:

  • genetic fallacy - claiming that an argument is true or false because of its origin. Includes ad hominem, appeal to nature, appeal to authority, ad populum, etc.
  • red herring - bringing irrelevant shit up as if it supported the conclusion, when it doesn't matter. In special, I see appeal to emotion (claiming that something is false/true because it makes you feel really bad/good) all the time.
  • oversimplification - disregarding key details that either stain the premises or show that they don't necessarily lead to conclusion. False dichotomy ("if X is true, Y is false" in situations where both can be true or false) is a specially common type of oversimplification.
  • strawman - distortion of an opposing argument into a way that is easier to beat. Again, notice that "intention" doesn't matter; only that the opposing argument isn't being addressed.
  • moving goalposts - when you counter an argument, the person plops another in its place, without acknowledging that it's a new argument. Often relies heavily on ad hoc (making stuff up on the spot to shield an argument)
  • four terms - exploiting multiple meanings associated with the same word to create an argument like "A is B¹, B² is C, thus A is C".

There are also some "markers" that smell fallacy for me from a distance. You should not trust them (as they might be present where there's no fallacy, or they might be absent even when the associated fallacy pops up); however, if you find those you should look for the associated fallacy:

  • "As a" at the start of a text - genetic fallacy, specially appeal to authority
  • "Trust me" - red herring, specially appeal to emotion (once you contradict the argument there's a good chance that the other will create drama because you didn't blindly trust them, so the whole thing boils down to "accept this as true otherwise you'll hear my meltdown").
  • "I don't understand" followed by a counter-argument - strawman. Specially common in Reddit.
  • "Actually" - red herring through trivia that is completely irrelevant in the context.
537
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.

[-] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 57 points 1 year ago

From Reddit's PoV I don't think that there is a mass emigration; it's just that the most engaged sectors of the community left, so the 99% left don't give a damn about it. Over time I predict that it'll be a slow drain, not a mass exodus.

However from Lemmy/Kbin's PoV there is a mass immigration. And the users are disproportionally active; for example a comm with 3k subscribers getting 1k upvotes in a post, stuff like this.

247
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by lvxferre@lemmy.ml to c/snoocalypse@lemmy.ml

Excerpts from the link:

Fake internet points are finally worth something!
Now redditors can earn real money for their contributions to the Reddit community, based on the karma and gold they've been given.
How it works:

  • Redditors give gold to posts, comments, or other contributions they think are really worth something.
  • Eligible contributors that earn enough karma and gold can cash out their earnings for real money.
  • Contributors apply to the program to see if they're eligible.
  • Top contributors make top dollar. The more karma and gold contributors earn, the more money they can receive.

Not just anyone can be a contributor. To join and stay in the program, contributors need to meet a few requirements:\

  • Be over 18 and live in the U.S.
  • Only Safe for Work contributions qualify
  • Earn xx gold and karma each month
  • Provide verification information. You must have at least 10 gold and 100 karma to begin verification.
  • NSFW accounts aren't eligible for the Contributors Program

Here's my take on this. Since this is from the latest version of Reddit's ~~broken browser for a single site~~ "official app", it's likely a recent development, triggered by recent changes in the platform. Reddit Inc. is likely worried about contributors leaving due to the app-pocalypse, and is trying to counter it by throwing them some spare cash.

And I'm going to be honest: holy fuck this sounds like a Bad Idea®. For three reasons.

The first one is demographics; since 47% of the users are Americans, and 21% of them are 10-19yo, it's safe to say that ~60% of the users are ineligible, and thus will only contribute for free.

Will they? People often don't mind contributing for free, as long as the others are in the same page. The picture changes once you get at least someone making money out of it - odds are that those 60% will disengage further.

The second reason is that Reddit Inc. is disregarding the fluff principle. If the money threshold is the number of upvotes and awards that someone gets per period of time, why would the person bother with high quality content? Or even quality content at all - it's easy to make up for lack of quality with quantity. For example, setting up a simple bot to scrape the top posts and repost them. (Is Reddit expecting the mods to delete those reposts? OH WAIT)

The third and final reason is who you expect to give awards to those people, before they feel pissed and discouraged and leave the program, breaking even further their trust in the platform. Who would even buy Reddit gold on first place? The Reddit community has been outright mocking Reddit gold for years, and the suckers actually buying it were the ones who were the most engaged and emotionally attached to the platform, to the point that they're willing to "help" it. (As if corporations need help, but whatever.) It would be a shame if Reddit happened to piss off exactly that demographic... like it did.

6
submitted 1 year ago by lvxferre@lemmy.ml to c/snoocalypse@lemmy.ml

Here's the list of highlights from the article, as it's a good TL;DR:

  • The Reddit app-pocalyse is here: Apollo, Sync, and BaconReader go dark
  • How Reddit crushed the biggest protest in its history
  • Reddit will remove mods of private communities unless they reopen
  • Reddit CEO Steve Huffman isn’t backing down: our full interview
  • Why disabled users joined the Reddit blackout
  • Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit — and why users revolted
  • A developer says Reddit could charge him $20 million a year to keep his app working
14
submitted 1 year ago by lvxferre@lemmy.ml to c/anime@lemmy.ml

The second season starts without much fluff. The animation is rather on the budget side, but the characters are likeable, there's some development for the main couple and for Cuff/Zayn, and even ~~some~~ a lot of fanservice.

For those who watched the episode already:

I know that this is that sort of "if not for [X], they'd have happily married forever already", but still: the change of mood when Alice opens the last door, and sees that the duke fantasises about marrying her, was the cherry of the cake for me.

15
submitted 1 year ago by lvxferre@lemmy.ml to c/anime@lemmy.ml

Ryota (MC) dies in real world, and drops from a slime in the Lv1 of a dungeon in isekai (yup). He meets a girl who lives in the dungeon because she can't afford rent, and discovers three things:

  1. everything in that new world is produced through mob drops
  2. his max level is Lv1, so he won't level up, ever
  3. his drop skills are all S so he gets a lot of good stuff out of any monster that he kills

Run-off-the-mill isekai, but still fun stuff to watch in a rainy day.

2
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by lvxferre@lemmy.ml to c/linguistics@lemmy.ml

Caution is advised when watching this video, as not all linguists buy the idea of zero morphemes/phonemes/etc.; for some the zero is just a neat theoretical trick, as it simplifies some descriptions. And some outright avoid the concept.

Even then, I feel like this video should be fairly informative and enjoyable for people in general.

3
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by lvxferre@lemmy.ml to c/linguistics@lemmy.ml

King Charles speaks with a rather posh Received Pronunciation, much like Queen Elizabeth II did. In the meantime, William and Harry use a more Standard Southern British pronunciation.

The changes described by Lindsey can be summed up as:

  • PRICE - [aɪ] vs. [ɑɪ]
  • DRESS - [e] vs. [ɛ]
  • CHOICE - [ɔɪ] vs. [oɪ]
  • SQUARE - [ɛə] vs. [ɛ:]
  • HAPPY - [ɪ] vs. [i]
  • [ɫ] vocalisation, colouring nearby vowels - negligible vs. noticeable
  • word ending /t/ - [t] vs. [ʔ]
  • /t/ flapping into [ɾ] - rare vs. more frequent
  • /t/ before front high vowel affricating into [ts] - actually attested for both sides
  • unstressed syllable elision - King Charles did this quite a bit before rising to the throne, but William does it all the time
  • rising intonation on statements (uptalk) - almost non-existent in RP, fairly common in SSB
  • /θ/ as [f] - avoided in RP, present in SSB
  • word ending /k/ as [k'] - avoided [?] vs. common

Personal observation: the changes in the vowel sets remind me in spirit the Great Vowel Shift, as it seems that DRESS lowering is pressing PRICE to go back, and in turn PRICE is forcing CHOICE to raise.

15
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by lvxferre@lemmy.ml to c/anime@lemmy.ml

This anime series has the same premise as Bakarina*: an otome games fan reincarnates in one of them, some childhood event forces her to remember her life on Earth, and she realises that she has been reincarnated as the villainess. Then she tries to avoid the bad end of the game at all costs.

But beyond the premise, Last Boss Queen and Bakarina are nothing alike. Pride Royal Ivy is actually insightful and smart, unlike Katarina Claes; what motivates Pride is not fear of her own doom, but to avoid the suffering of the people around her; and the general tone of the Last Boss Queen series is heavier, more likely to pull your emotional strings than to make you laugh.

Overall, based on the manga and WN, I'd say that this is worth watching if you want something more serious in the genre.

The first episode was rather good IMO. It's no high-budget production, but it follows the script of the WN rather well, focusing on Pride and Stale. I feel like some context might be missing for non-readers, but it should be still enjoyable for them.

*Bakarina: fan nickname for the My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! series.

view more: ‹ prev next ›

lvxferre

joined 3 years ago
MODERATOR OF