lvxferre
@lvxferre@mander.xyz
The catarrhine who invented a perpetual motion machine, by dreaming at night and devouring its own dreams through the day.
- Comment on LLM-generated code must not be committed without prior written approval by core 25 minutes ago:
(g) `Tainted Code’ is defined as code for which redistribution by
either The Member or The NetBSD Foundation would be unlawful,
a violation of applicable licenses or restrictions, or a
violation of this or other contracts to which The Foundation
or The Member is a party.That hints that their main issue with the code is licensing.
- Comment on NetEase Backs Down On Requirement For Early Streamers Of ‘Marvel’ Game To Not Critique The Game 7 hours ago:
In a follow-up posted to social media this morning, NetEase went on to “apologize for any unpleasant experiences or doubts caused by the miscommunication of these terms…
Ooh, corporate gaslighting! “Your fee fees are hurt because you didn’t actually understand the message correctly!”
There is no miscommunication here. The message is clear as day - “don’t criticise our product”.
We actively encourage Creators to share their honest thoughts, suggestions, and criticisms as they play. All feedback, positive and negative, ultimately helps us craft the best experience for ourselves and the players.”
Given the content of the clause, NetEase is simply lying…
NetEase says it is making “adjustments” to the contract “to be less restrictive and more Creator-friendly.”
…and they’re fully aware that they’re lying, otherwise they wouldn’t be trying to make the clause less unpalatable.
My sides went into orbit.
- Comment on Lots of times the restaurants won't even have milk 22 hours ago:
They take labour into consideration because less time spent serving a drink = you can serve more drinks = we can replace two of you with one.
- Comment on I Don't Want to Spend My One Precious Life Dealing with Google's AI Search 1 day ago:
LLMs are a decent tech if you know their limitations and actually want to use them. This shit fulfils neither condition - this shit is going to hallucinate wildly, and gullible muppets will swallow the hallucination like it was caviar.
- Comment on Prison Architect 2 developers part ways with Paradox months before it's due for release 3 days ago:
Further info here about the move.
Since Paradox Interactive went public in 2016, it was never the same; at this rate comparing it with EA is fair game. As such I’m not surprised that devs are getting
I never heard about this Kokku studio, even paying taxes to the same government as its folks do. I don’t have reasons to think that it’s a good studio or a bad studio, but the fact that PI is throwing the game into the hands of a “who?” studio spells problems.
- Comment on Discord has been using ML to determine the gender and age of some of its users 4 days ago:
It’ll likely get worse with generative models. It’s probably already worse.
Gen models suck major balls for anything that requires reliability, but Discord doesn’t care enough about its users to see the errors as a big deal. It’s probably profiling even the colour of your undergarments.
- Comment on Discord has been using ML to determine the gender and age of some of its users 4 days ago:
Machine Learning.
- Comment on Becoming an Amateur Polyglot 4 days ago:
The text is mostly good advice, but there are hidden catches and assumptions.
Counting the languages that you speak: yup. Language learning is quantitative and multidimensional.
Why learn a foreign language when soon we will have AI auto-translate from our glasses and other wearables? This is a valid question for work related purposes but socially it’s not. […]
I wouldn’t consider it a valid question even for work-related purposes. It simply assumes that machine translation tech will reach a point, in the near future, that it’ll stop translating things wrong, or at the very least it’ll stop vomiting certainty on what it gets wrong. I wouldn’t put my trust on this given that LLMs are reaching a dead end, and it’ll take a while before they’re superseded by another tech.
I agree with him on a social level. Language plays such a big role on most people’s identities that it’s simply foolish to disregard it.
One of the most important things when learning a language is motivation.
At the end of the day, motivation is a proxy for exposure. You can learn without motivation, as long as something forces you to interact with the language; you’ll hate yourself in the process though.
Why am I saying this? Because that exposure is key. Going the extra half hour to do stuff related to the language pays off, even if you aren’t that motivated.
apps
I’m skipping that part as I bloody hate phone programs, so my advice on this wouldn’t be helpful.
Learn only 4 tenses. […]
As it is written, his advice only works for Indo-European languages from Europe that follow that weird “past/tense/future oh wait let’s mix aspect into the bag” pattern. Plenty languages don’t do this; for Mandarin for example this piece of advice would be foolish (the language doesn’t split tenses). Also, good luck distinguishing present and future in Arabic.
That said, the core of the advice - focus on grammatical features with higher usage - is rather sensible. And it can be extended into other things.
For example, in Latin if you pick the whole declension table you’ll have
- seven cases (nom, acc, gen, abl, dat, voc, loc)
- five “main” declensions with quite a few sub-declensions
- singular and plural
That’s around 100~200 endings. But eight of them are bread and butter - nom/acc, 1st/2nd non-neuter, singular/plural. Learn those eight first, before ever thinking on the others.
Forget complicated spelling and especially accents in French if it’s not entirely necessary. There is no need to learn if a word takes a ` or ‘ if you know how to pronounce it correctly. (Edited because I wrote intonation instead of spelling in the first draft).
That works for French because diacritics in French are mostly etymological, and the distinctive ones are between similar vowels. For some languages however this is bad advice:
- Irish - if you don’t know which vowel is long, you probably don’t know which vowel should be pronounced on first place. You won’t be understood.
- Spanish - the acute can be skipped, sure, but it’s such a low-hanging fruit that you’d be a fool for doing so. Instead skip the z/c/s distinction, as even in dialects with said distinction they sound similar anyway ([θ] and [s] are rather clothe thoudth).
The real advice here would be, instead: ask non-native speakers of said language what’s important to learn first. [Caveat lector: I don’t speak Irish, I’m saying this based on its orthography.]
When you look up a word in one language, do it for all other languages too. The mind works like a database and each row has columns for each language you speak. Fill that database up!
You’ll probably merge the semantic fields of each word, or spend N times longer to memorise a word.
me irritated) amigo, entiendes que estoy hablando en tu idioma? (native speaker) yes but I also want to practice my English!
That’s mostly entitlement from the author’s part, expecting that others should go out of their way to teach him a language. His example is specially good because it’s blatantly obvious that those sentences are not from a passably proficient Spanish speaker. (I wouldn’t get “sobre las 7?” for example, if not due to English - he’s translating “about the 7” word-by-word)
Remember - one of the key roles of language is communication. For a lot of people, if you get it, then it’s fine, be it in Mandarin or English or Spanish or Javanese or whatever.
Fixing this piece of advice would yield something fairly obvious - get people to use the language with you, who are in the same page. If you’re doing any sort of language exchange, then demarcate times; for example once I was doing it with a German speaker who (for some puzzling reason) wanted to learn Portuguese, and we simply split “one hour each language”.
- Comment on EA want to put adverts in your video games to squeeze you for every penny 5 days ago:
Obligatory greentext story from 2013
>2018 >wake up feeling sick after a late night of playing vidya >excited to play some halo 2k19 >“xbox on” >… >"XBOX ON > Please verify that you are “annon332” by saying “Doritos™ Dew™ it right!” >“Doritos™ Dew™ it right!” >"ERROR! Please drink a verification can " >reach into my Doritos™ Mountain Dew™ Halo 2k19™ War Chest >only a few cans left, needed to verify 14 times last night >still feeling sick from the 14 >force it down and grumble out "mmmm that really hit the spot " >xbox does nothing >i attempt to smile >“Connecting to verification server” >… >"Verification complete! " >finally >boot up halo 2k19 > finding multiplayer match. … >“ERROR! User attempting to steal online gameplay!” >my mother just walked in the room >"Adding another user to your pass, this will be charged to your credit card. Do you accept? >“NO!” >“Console entering lock state!” >“to unlock drink verification can” >last can >“WARNING, OUT OF VERIFICATION CANS, an order has been shipped and charged to your credit card” >drink half the can, oh god im going to be sick >pour the last half out the window >"PIRACY DETECTED! PLEASE COMPLETE THIS ADVERTISEMENT TO CONTINUE " >the mountain dew ad plays >i have to dance for it >feeling so sick >makes me sing along >dancing and singing >“mountain dew is for me and you” >throw up on my self >throw up on my tv and entertainment system >router shorts >“ERROR NO CONNECTION! XBOX SHUTTING OFF” >“PLEASE DRINK VERIFICATION CAN TO CONTINUE”
EA: “Wow, what a visionary! This will give our players a sense of pride and accomplishment!”
- Comment on Euro bottles are so much better now 6 days ago:
So? (implied: “I dun unrurrstand”)
I’m highlighting that the other user is missing the bloody point of the complain.
People want less plastic waste, sure. And yes, less consumption is a way to achieve so - no shit Sherlock “riodoro” Holmes. However, in this specific case the design solution was done so poorly that it inconveniences the user by a lot, and it isn’t even reducing the amount of plastic being used, it’s just in the hopes that people actually recycle (third R) that small piece of junk there.
Is this clear now?
- Comment on Euro bottles are so much better now 6 days ago:
„Im so inconvenienced by the piece of trash i bought wanting to stay a single piece of trash” // Humans as they discovered they made a small continent out of trash in the ocean. If it bothers you so much then stop buying plastic trash.
People are clearly complaining about how the feature was implemented. Not the goal (to keep it as a single piece of trash).
- Comment on Industrial Design Student Work: "How Long Should Objects Last?" 1 week ago:
Another issue is that the changes required for longevity might introduce undesirable characteristics into the product. Like, the durable umbrella weights 1.7kg, it’s a lot.
- Comment on Why you shouldn't believe the AI extinction lie 1 week ago:
Those concerns mostly apply to artificial general intelligence, or “AGI”. What’s being developed is another can of worms entirely, it’s a bunch of generative models. They’re far from intelligent; the concerns associated with them is 1) energy use and 2) human misuse, not that they’re going to go rogue.
- Comment on Will I ever be seen as truly British? 1 week ago:
I’m perhaps a bit biased because for me a country boils down to a government, and I’m from the new world (we tend to see immigrants differently - more like “newcomers” and less like “outsiders”), but I’d consider you British.
That doesn’t say much though. At the end of the day, “you’re British” or “you’re Polish” seem fairly minor to me, compared with “you’re human” and “you’re you”.
- Comment on Will I ever be seen as truly British? 1 week ago:
People actually say shit like “borrow me your car Friday” or “borrow me a pencil”, instead of “lend”.
That’s correct. The distinction between lender and borrower is given by the case, so the same verb works for both.
- Comment on Will I ever be seen as truly British? 1 week ago:
I think that the key difference is that plenty societies were built with the “immigration” mindset. It isn’t just the ones in USA, but mostly the whole New World. And even if the “bulk” of the immigration in the XIX and XX centuries is over, the mindset is still here.
As opposed to the typical society in the Old World where, if you were born somewhere, odds are that your grand-grand-grand-grandparents were also born there, like Japan and UK-minus-London.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
Acho que participaria, sim. Dependendo dos temas; gosto de filosofia da linguagem, epistemologia e ética/moral.
…mas o que isto tem a ver com uma comu para coisas “levemente enfurecedoras”?
- Comment on Why you shouldn't believe the AI extinction lie 1 week ago:
Interesting video. At the core it can be summed up as:
- “AI is existential threat” is a lie of big tech trying to use regulatory capture against competitors
- the main competition for that big tech would be open source generative models
- we should fight against big tech in this
- Comment on The way my daughter's middle school health class classifies drugs is insane. 1 week ago:
I fucked it up - thanks for pointing it out, fixed it. (I switched them because smoking a cig relaxes me quite a bit.)
- Comment on The way my daughter's middle school health class classifies drugs is insane. 1 week ago:
And they’re making a fucking mess of the pharmacological and social definitions of “drug”. It’s the propaganda version of that “ackshyually tomato is a fruit, not a vegetable” brain-rotting idiocy.
Depressant, stimulant, those refer to the pharmacological activity; it’ll include even things not socially considered as drugs, such as caffeine (stimulant) and alcohol (depressant). In this sense marijuana is not its own class, it’s THC is a depressant.
That “club drugs” category is a fucking mess in both definitions. Ketamine is an anaesthetic, thus likely a depressant; ecstasy is mostly a stimulant with weak hallucinogen properties, pharmacologically they’re nothing alike. And socially they’re closer to caffeine (as things that you ingest willingly) than to date rape drugs (things that people give you against your consent).
And even the division in social drugs depends on usage. Marijuana for example can be used for clinical or recreative reasons; abuse is of course bad, but frankly I wouldn’t be surprised if most marijuana smokers had better lungs than I do (I don’t smoke weed but I smoke tobacco - nicotine is a depressant BTW). Same deal with the date rape drugs, alcohol could be used as one.
Aaaaah, sorry for the rant. What I want to convey is that yeah, I get why this infuriates you. It infuriated me too.
- Comment on Anon reaches a new level 1 week ago:
EDIT: I just think cats are cunts if u love them go ahead allegedly its a free world
That reminds me a local meme, about caramel dogs being cunts. Doing stuff like getting in the way of the bus reaching the platform, stealing junk from shops, running away alongside a 1yo human, running under a wee kid that does a 360° in air, so goes on.
On a more serious note I had dogs. And cats. And dogs alongside cats. (It was rather cute to see that cat making the milk dance over the dog’s fur, and the dog like “I’m getting petted!”) Cute, cunt, both apply. And while one of my current cats is a notorious cunt, the one that I mentioned to sleep with me is the sweetest thing ever - not just with me, but with everyone.
- Comment on Japan anon complains about Google 1 week ago:
Word order in Latin is only syntactically free. As in, if you change the word order, you aren’t changing who did what. However, you’re still changing the topic (whatever we were talking about) and comment (the new info that I’m adding in).
I’ll give you an example:
- Puer puellam amat - boy loves girl; but more like “the boy loves a girl”.
- Puellam puer amat - boy loves girl; but more like “a boy loves the girl”.
- Amat puer puellam - boy loves girl; but more like “speaking on love, the boy loves a girl” (hard to convey in English).
Note how I used articles to convey roughly the same meaning in English. That’s because what Latin is doing with the word order is not too unlike what English does with articles. Sure, you can use “the boy”, “a boy”, or simply “boy”, it won’t change the basic meaning, but it’s still not “random”.
- Comment on Japan anon complains about Google 1 week ago:
Sure. I’m not saying that Latin is useful for most people. It isn’t; I don’t expect most people to fuck around with Plautus, Cicero, Catullus etc. I’m saying that Yandex Translate is useful for me because of decent support for Latin, while Google offers better support for a handful of Latin descendants aka Romance languages (like Italian).
And it’s mostly due to a coincidence - because the platform was made by Russian speakers and Russian happens to still keep a similar case system as Latin does.
(…anche parlo italiano, ma davvero per italiano non uso nessuno - se non so qualcosa uso dizionari. Dà meno lavoro.)
- Comment on Japan anon complains about Google 1 week ago:
Yes! Video related, that’s me!
Serious now. It’s just that I don’t recall which Latin descendants Google support, and I’m not going to check it.
- Comment on Flags Are Not Languages 1 week ago:
Props for the site owner. That’s something that I’ve been saying like a broken record, and it’s an issue on multiple levels.
At the end of the day, those flags represent the country that you pay taxes to. It’s somewhat sensible to extend it to the territory controlled by that country. However, country is not culture.
This shit breaks specially bad when you’re handling minority languages. Doubly so when the language is spoken across multiple governments, like Basque, Kurdish, Venetian etc.
It also applies to varieties considered “within” a language, by the way. Here’s an example that I like to use:
If what you call “Argentinian Spanish” is whatever is spoken in Buenos Aires, it is not spoken in a good chunk of Argentina. However, it is spoken in Uruguay.
So, do you need different versions of the program for the folks in Uruguay and BBAA? Certainly not. You probably don’t need a Spanish version for Argentina either - “Spanish (South America)” is often good enough. Going any deeper and you’ll need to care about the varieties spoken (Andean, Rioplatense, etc.), not going blindly by the gov borders.
[I’d gladly say something about Portuguese here, but given recent events I’d probably go into a political rant. My condolences for the people who lost their loved ones and houses in Gramado, by the way.]
- Comment on Japan anon complains about Google 1 week ago:
Yandex reverse image search often works considerably better than Google’s.
And their translator too. I use it all the time for Latin. Google Translate was made to service Romance and Germanic languages in mind, so it sucks at assigning the right case to Latin, and the word order is often a mess. Yandex was however made with Russian in mind, that is syntactically closer to Latin in those two aspects.
- Comment on Anon reaches a new level 1 week ago:
“Anon needs a pet.” Happy now?
- Comment on Anon reaches a new level 1 week ago:
In the meantime, me:
>buy big pillow due to back pain
>plain white sheet, no perfume
>hug it while laying in bed thinking about random shit
>cat nests herself between the pillow and me
>feel more loved from sleeping with the cat than I did when sleeping with my then fianceeConclusion: Anon doesn’t need a GF. Anon needs a cat.
- Comment on Akiya houses: why Japan has nine million empty homes 2 weeks ago:
The shrinking demographics play a role, but the “bulk” of the issue is rural exodus - because kids would rather live in a 4½ tatami (7~8m²) room in a large urban centre than in “the middle of nowhere”.
- Comment on At Microsoft, years of security debt come crashing down 2 weeks ago:
two major nation-state breaches of its core enterprise platforms, Microsoft is facing one of its most serious reputational crises.
Emphasis mine: web “journalist” using terms wrong to sound fancy, and sounding like a muppet instead. “Nation-state” is not a fancy synonymous for “country” dammit.
On-topic: Microsoft software vulnerability shouldn’t be a surprise for anyone here. It is not just a matter of higher market share, it’s also their “flashy new thing” syndrome - Microsoft loves to add irrelevancies to their products and push them down the users’ throats, and those irrelevancies increase the surface area for attacks.