lvxferre

@lvxferre@mander.xyz

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ard⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not sure but I think the suffix in this case would yield “fuckard”. With “fucktard” being interpreted as “fuck [re]tard”. And given the later is nowadays interpreted as a slur, I’d discourage it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ard⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The -ard is basically “fucking” + nominaliser (if necessary):

  • wizard - fucking wise one
  • drunkard - fucking drunk one
  • coward - fucking tail (the initial part is from Old French “coue” tail, itself from Latin “cauda” tail. Who shows the back in a fight? Someone running away!)

  The “nominaliser” part is an artefact of the borrowing, the suffix is from French. Romance languages often use adjectives as if they were nouns, but that doesn’t quite roll in English. In turn French borrowed from Frankish.

  The etymology of “mustard” is disputed. The first part is likely from Latin “mustum” must; it used to be prepared with young wine. The -ard is typically explained as ardens (fiery, hot). So basically “mustum ardens” hot must. …Capsicum peppers are from the Americas, black pepper and long pepper were expensive, European mediaevalards didn’t really have a lot of spicy flavours to work with, so… I guess mustard was spicy for them?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft gets tired of “Microslop,” bans the word on its Discord, then locks the server after backlash⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The article used the word “Microslop” thirteen times. I guess the author really wants search engines and bots to associate “Microslop” with “Microsoft”. Apparently Microslop is a term for Microsoft products, or perhaps even Microslop is an intrinsic property of Microsoft.

  …'kay, I’ll stop it now.

  It’s rather curious how MS babbles so much about “AI”, but its Discord server uses such a simple filter that can be evaded by 0N3 0F 7H3 0LD357 700L5 0F 7H3 1N73RN37 5H17P0573R one of the oldest tools of the internet shitposter: leetspeak. It’s almost like it knows it’s selling a dud.

  Also, I guess this thing run so far they don’t even care about the Streisand effect any more.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Botanic nomenclature⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  related to temporal, not temporary

  That would explain it. But it still sounds funny

  Copromorphidae

  I stand corrected. Shit-shaped moths!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Botanic nomenclature⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I have no idea on why they decided to call the common European frog Rana temporaria, but “temporary frog” sounds really funny. “Eh this species name is just temporary, I swear”.

  I’m also kind of surprised I couldn’t find a single species called merdicula (little shit). Seems like the sort of humour some would have.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dinosaur Food: 100 million year old foods we still eat today⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Araucaria araucana Monkey puzzle tree nuts

  There’s also Araucaria angustifolia (aka Paraná pine). Dunno if it counts as either a separated entry or same entry as the A. araucana, both are phylogenetically close to hybridise, and the genus as a whole is what’s dino food.

  Some pics:

  Image
  (Yup, it’s my cover picture. See the big tree?)

  Image
  (Open and closed pines, full of edible nuts.)

  Image
  (Pine kernels with and without the shell.)

  I go crazy for those once May* hits — they’re delicious even simply boiled, but they can be also prepared into dishes. (I even adapted Roman burgers to use those.)

  *They actually start producing in April, but as there’s a non-zero chance the pine nuts from April are from felled trees, I avoid it. The species is critically endangered; eating some nuts is not a big deal, but falling the tree is.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Senta que lá vem história!

  Era uma vez um fazendeiro muito bom e humilde, que sobrevivia duramente de vender ovos de ouro. Quem botava os ovos de ouro era um bando de cachorros-de-polaco gansos cruéis, vagabundos e glutões, que exigiam comida em troca. Por causa dessa exigência ultrajante, o fazendeiro nem podia comprar quantos iates quisesse, tadinho.

  Um dia, apareceu um mago na fazenda, chamado Samu Homevéio. E disse para o fazendeiro: “criei uma máquina mágica que copia ovos de ouro.” O Samu mostrou a máquina funcionando na frente do fazendeiro, e não é que saía ovo de ouro dela? E ela não precisava de comida!

  O fazendeiro, felicíssimo, comprou a máquina. Então, disse para os gansos: “Chega de tanto abuso! A comida de vocês é ROUBO! Deviam trabalhar em troca de nada, mas nããão, insistem em roubar da minha margem de lucro! Agora morram de fome seus djanhos, tornaram-se obsoletos!”

  E os gansos disseram “Então tá, né, tchau.” Porque eram realmente ingratos. Alguns foram para o meio do mato, comer o que achavam na natureza; outros foram para outras fazendas. Alguns realmente morreram de fome. Mas quem liga para uns gansos famintos? Agora a filha do fazendeiro vai poder viajar para um paraíso turístico diferente por mês!

  …só que não. O Samu é um charlatão, e a máquina não copia ovos de ouro merdíssima nenhuma. Havia uns ovos normais escondidos ali, botados por outros gansos, e a máquina espirrava tinta dourada neles. E quando os ovos acabaram, a máquina começou a espirrar tinta dourada para tudo quanto é lado, fez uma melequeira lazarenta.

  O fazendeiro não tinha mais como produzir ovos de ouro. Deu cabo da máquina, e foi falar com os gansos. Alguns gansos disseram para o fazendeiro “teu cu, não queria que a gente morresse de fome?”. Outros até toparam voltar para a fazenda, desde que o fazendeiro desse para eles comida e férias e décimo terceiro. Ah, e a comida tinha que ser bolinho de carne de buteco, com pão fresquinho, que comer pão seco todo dia tava foda.

  É bem capaz da fazenda ter sido vendida. Ou talvez voltou a funcionar, mas com menos lucro do que antes. O que é certo é que o Samu tá podre de rico, vendendo máquinas que não funfam para um bando de fazendeiros trouxas, iludidos com seus ganhos, que achavam que poderiam produzir mais-valia sem proletariado. Fim.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨between medicine and this, we do not honour rats enough⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  My cats, in the meantime: train themselves to know when humans dispense food, everything else be damned!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When DinoCon is doing more than the US Gov⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Nah. The guilt by association fallacy is more like:

  • [P1] Hitler ate bread.
  • [P2] Hitler was a bad person.
  • [C] Thus if you eat bread, you’re as bad as Hitler.

  That is not even remotely close to what the DinoCon is doing. If we interpret their actions as an argument, it’s more like:

  • [P1] Knowingly associating yourself with a bad person makes you a bad person.
  • [P2] Those people knowingly associating themselves with Epstein, a bad person.
  • [C] Thus those people are bad people.

  You might disagree with the first premise (it’s a moral premise, so it depends on your values), but the argument is perfectly logical.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When DinoCon is doing more than the US Gov⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Sure thing, buddy. Whatever you need to tell yourself.\

  …since you’re insistently lying (yes) about what I need: I don’t “need” him to be innocent, and I don’t “need” him to be guilty. From my PoV he’s simply some old guy, with a bunch of hypotheses that range from “this is interesting” to “nah, bollocks”, always backpedalling when proved wrong. That’s it.

  Is this clear?

  We all knew who Epstein was by that point. He should know better.

  Yes, and? Myself said so in another comment dammit. The question here is how much he should be blamed. Should we blame him for:

  1. Abusing some children himself?
  2. Not abusing them, but actively helping Epstein to do so, in matters directly related to the abuse?
  3. Not directly helping Epstein with the abuse, but knowing to be associated with a paedophile, and not giving a fuck about it?
  4. Not knowing he was associated with a paedophile, but being in a position he should have done so?
  5. Nothing?

  Are you getting the picture? It’s a fucking gradient of shit. Both #1 and #5 are likely bollocks; but from #2 to #4 it’s all “maybe”. We don’t know what he did, and we don’t know what he knows.

  And before some muppet says “but you said «I guess he’s still in the “when in doubt, treat them as innocent” category for me.»!!!”: I was clearly talking about what I formalised as #3. This is bloody obvious by context dammit, check the comment I was answering to!

  How self deluded do you need to be in order to convince yourself that Chomsky reached out to the most notorious convicted pedophile in American history for some help with his taxes?

  That is not even remotely close to what I said.

  You don’t even know what you’re screeching at.

  At this rate it’s safe to ignore you as dead weight and a noise. Feel free to keep screeching at your own assumptions, as if you were screeching at what I said, but don’t expect me to read it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When DinoCon is doing more than the US Gov⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah.

  At the very least we can safely blame him for not doing basic due diligence: even a hypothetically honest “I didn’t know” shows disregard for the victims of his “associate”. It’s already morally awful, even if [AFAIK] it wouldn’t be illegal in USA. [Would it?]

  There’s also the possibility he actually knew about it, but didn’t act on it. Morally speaking that would be even worse than the above, and [again, AFAIK] already a crime (omission).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When DinoCon is doing more than the US Gov⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That sounds like Chomsky? Doing the taxes of an uber wealth financier/convicted pedophile?

  The inverse: the über rich paedophile doing Chomsky’s taxes.

  Plus Chomsky being smart+shitty enough to bullshit when in trouble, instead of saying “none of your business”. If Chomsky did the later instead of the former, it’s a sign he didn’t see any need to bullshit.

  Stop lying to yourself.

  A person lying to oneself would not say “when in doubt”. Or to “not [be] aware on how much Chomsky should be blamed”. Or talk about the “hypothesis” he is innocent. They’d be vomiting certainty: “Chomsky is [innocent|guilty] lol”.

  Instead, a person lying to oneself would be vomiting certainty like an assumer, re-eating their own vomit, and expecting others to eat it too.

  So perhaps the one being a liar (or worse, an assumer) here is not me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When DinoCon is doing more than the US Gov⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I am half inclined to believe he just wanted help filing his taxes and a guilty Chomsky would have the sense to lie.

  Yup, that sounds like him. He isn’t above bullshitting but not bothering to bullshit hints he believed he had nothing to hide.

  I guess he’s still in the “when in doubt, treat them as innocent” category for me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When DinoCon is doing more than the US Gov⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That fucker ruined Linguistics too — he was in friendly terms with Noam Chomsky.

  Personally I am not aware on how much Chomsky should be blamed for this association; it’s possible Epstein was simply using him. But even in the hypothesis Chomsky is innocent, it stinks.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When DinoCon is doing more than the US Gov⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ditto. Specially because they’re focusing on the executives of those organisations, i.e. the people with actual decision power. That’s the right way to do it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The world’s oldest known vertebrates had two pairs of eyes⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Got it - thanks for the info!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The world’s oldest known vertebrates had two pairs of eyes⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The association with the pineal gland bugged me (what does a pair of eyes have to do with a gland responsible for sleep cycles), so I went for a wiki walk and found this page, on the “parietal eye”. It’s present in quite a few cold-blooded vertebrates, and responsible for both thermoregulation and sleep cycles.

  I’d going to take a guess here and say it’s an intermediate stage between the second pair of eyes and pineal glands, something like

  • secondary pair of eyes with a similar function to the primary one →
  • secondary pair gets specialised into detecting near infra-red →
  • secondary pair merges and gets protected by a membrane, forming the parietal eye →
  • parietal eye specialises further, producing hormones for thermoregulation and sleep cycles →
  • IR detection gets fucked up in hot-blooded animals (NB: parallel development for archosaurs and mammals) →
  • the thing “hides” itself inside the cranium (less likely to be damaged), becoming the pineal gland

  …or something like this. Herpetologists can probably come up with a better hypothesis than I do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is boring and dangerous⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, got to borrow some word from discourse analysis :-P

  It fits well what I wanted to say, and it makes the comment itself another example of the phenomenon: that usage of “utterance” as jargon makes the text shorter and more precise but makes it harder to approach = optimises for #2 and #3 at the expense of #1. (I had room to do it in this case because you mentioned your Linguistics major.)

  Although the word is from DA I believe this to be related to Pragmatics; my four points are basically a different “mapping” of the Gricean maxims (#1 falls into the maxim of manner, #2 of manner and relation, #3 of quality, #4 of quantity) to highlight trade-offs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is boring and dangerous⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  To be clear, by “communication” I’m talking about the information conveyed by a certain utterance, while you’re likely referring to the utterance itself.

  Once you take that into account, your example is optimising for #2 at the expense of #1 — yes, you can get away conveying info in more succinct ways, but at the expense of requiring a shared context; that shared context is also info the receiver knows beforehand. It works fine in this case because spouses accumulate that shared context across the years (so it’s a good trade-off), but if you replace the spouse with some random person it becomes a “how the fuck am I supposed to know what you mean?” matter.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is boring and dangerous⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I believe that good communication has four attributes.

  1. It’s approachable: it demands from the reader (or hearer, or viewer) the least amount of reasoning and previous knowledge, in order to receive the message.
  2. It’s succinct: it demands from the reader the least amount of time.
  3. It’s accurate: it neither states nor implies (for a reasonable = non-assumptive receiver) anything false.
  4. It’s complete: it provides all relevant information concerning what’s being communicated.

  However no communication is perfect and those four attributes are in odds with each other: if you try to optimise your message for one or more of them, the others are bound to suffer.

  Why this matters here: it shows the problem of ablation is unsolvable. Even if generative models were perfectly competent at rephrasing text (they aren’t), simply by asking them to make the text more approachable, you’re bound to lose info or accuracy.

  I’d also argue “semantic ablation” is a way better concept than “hallucination”. The later is not quite “additive error”; it’s a misleading metaphor for output that is generated by the model the same way as the rest, but it happens to be incorrect when interpreted by human beings.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I never played DCSS. Does it have anything to cause monster infighting, like Nethack does with the ring of conflict? If yes, that would be probably your best bet: let them fight, and kill the survivor.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Because it’s a piece of addictive design. Here in Lemmy it’s fairly isolated, so not a big deal; but in larger and corporate platforms, it’s coupled with even more addictive design, in a way that you’re basically “stuck”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI retired its most seductive chatbot – leaving users angry and grieving: ‘I can’t live like this’⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The somebody in question, clarifying it: “I like waffles. I just like pancakes better.”

  The crowd: “I don’t understand, you like pancakes or waffles? Why are you lying? I’m so confused…”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  IIRC Dessalines (Lemmy and Jerboa frontend dev) once said to regret adding infinite scrolling, and the only reason he didn’t remove the feature is because people would rage. So odds are Jerboa will be one of the first to comply.

  And… frankly? As much as I criticise Lemmy devs, I think Dessalines is right in this one.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI retired its most seductive chatbot – leaving users angry and grieving: ‘I can’t live like this’⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s watt they say!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI retired its most seductive chatbot – leaving users angry and grieving: ‘I can’t live like this’⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Remember what Voltaire said about the HRE? Not Holy, not Roman, or an empire? So. OpenAI is the same.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI retired its most seductive chatbot – leaving users angry and grieving: ‘I can’t live like this’⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah, assumers ruining social media, as usual…

  If I got this right the crowd assumed/lied/bullshitted that 1) you knew why 4o is being retired, and 2) you were trying to defend it, regardless of being a potential source of harm. (They’re also assuming GPT-5 will be considerably better in this regard. I have my doubts).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Color? What's that?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In addition to all of that, since your comment is spot on:

  When people claim some variety is more conservative than another variety, they tend to cherry pick a lot. It’s easy, for example, to look at rhoticity and claim “American English” is more conservative, or to look at the cot/caught merge and claim British English is more conservative. But neither claim is accurate or meaningful; and when you try to look at the big picture, you notice changes everywhere.

  To complicate it further, neither “British English” nor “American English” refer to any actual variety. Those are only umbrella terms; they boil down to “English, arbitrarily restricted to people who live in the territory controlled by that specific government”. And the actual varieties that they speak might keep or change completely different features.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon on Mussolini⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Merdolini & friends hanging together
  ______________________
   ‖  ‖  ‖    ‖   ‖
  |º\⟨º⟩⟨º\  ⟨º⟩ |º|
  

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Color? What's that?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Backstory of the spelling of that word:

  Latin colōrem (accusative of color) gets inherited by Old French as color /ko’lor/.

  Somewhere down the line Old French shifted /o/ to /u/. I believe this shift affected at first stressed vowels, or that the distinction between unstressed /o/ and /u/ was already not a big deal; so there was more pressure to respell the last (stressed) vowel than the first (unstressed) one. So the word gets spelled color, colour, colur.

  Anglo-Norman inherited this mess, spelling it mostly as colur. Then Middle English borrows the word, as /ku.'lu:r/~/'ku.lur/. It’s oxytone in AN, but English has a tendency to shift the stress to the first vowel, creating the second pronunciation. Spelling as usual for those times is a mess:

  • colur - spelled like in Anglo-Norman.
  • color - swap the ⟨u⟩ with cosmetic ⟨o⟩. Scribes hated spelling ⟨u⟩ in certain situations, where it would lead to too many vertical lines in a row; that’s why you also got come, love, people instead of cume, luve, peuple.
  • colour - mirroring an Old French spelling that was more common up south, around Paris.
  • coloure - that ⟨e⟩ was likely never pronounced, I think it was there to force reading the previous vowel as long
  • coler - probably from some /'ku.lur/ pronunciation already reducing the vowel to */'ku.lər/
  • kolour - ⟨c⟩~⟨k⟩ mixing was somewhat common then. And no, KDE did not exist back then, they did no lobby to spell the word with a K for the sake of a program that would only appear centuries later (Kolourpaint).

  Eventually as English spelling gets standardised, the word settles down as colour.

  Then around 1800, Noah Webster treats this word as if it was directly borrowed from Latin. Since in Latin it’s color, he clipped the -u. And his dictionary was popular in USA, recreating the mess, even after it was already fixed.