Lvxferre [he/him]

The catarrhine who invented a perpetual motion machine, by dreaming at night and devouring its own dreams through the day.

  • 44 Posts
  • 3.83K Comments
Joined 1 年前
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Cake day: 2024年1月12日

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  • Wow. Installing it now. I need this.

    I see YT videos mostly in three languages (IT, PT, EN), and you have no idea how much I bloody fucking hate that autodubbing crap - no matter how I configure YT, Google, and my browser, that steaming pile of shit automatically turns on for at least two of the languages.

    And frankly, I don’t want it even for other languages. For me it’s subtitles all the way. Let me see the korokke recipe with the original audio, who cares if I don’t speak Japanese?

    It is not even good dammit. Not even for people who want/need it. It sounds robotic and expressionless, the voices being chosen don’t match the people being shown, the lip movement is desynchronised to the point of uncanny valley, the translation is filthy garbage.

    I wish I could outright ditch YouTube, but PeerTube tends to be unstable and true alternatives (i.e. not relying on anything Google) have network effect against them.


    [rant]

    Might as well rant about the rest of the botnet aka Google aka Alphabet:

    Even when taking privacy concerns out of the equation, I can’t help but stay clear of most things Google. Mostly because of anti-features like the above.

    Search? I’m using DuckDuckGo nowadays, except for reverse image search. It has the decency to ask me if I want an AI overview, and if I say “never” it respects my choice; I don’t need an assumption algorithm telling me to put glue on my pizze. I also abhor results being “tailored” (= bubbled) based on location, and goddammit respect the language options I’ve set up in my browser!

    GMail? I never used it for my primary e-mail, only for potentially junk subscriptions. Nowadays it isn’t even worth that, so I’m using a Proton account for the same purpose. And if some service assumes you use GMail, guess what - I’m not using it.

    Android? Yeah, I still need to use it because of my bank app, but goddammit every fucking update I need to deactivate yet another dumb feature. Plus I barely use the phone. Also, stop trying to convince me to enable PlayProtect, this wall is not to stop invaders going in - it’s against users going out, and using non-Google repositories.

    Maps? I want a map; nothing more, nothing less. Organic Maps fits the bill.

    And in every single Google product, there’s always that belittling tone. Never to be spoken in loud voice, always implied. Something like this:

    • “Since you’re a user, we assume you to be stupid/filthy/dumb trash unable to think by itself. Something like you would cause itself harm if allowed to decide what it should do, so we’re telling you what you should do.”
    • “You want to say «no»? Ah, so you’re too stupid to understand simple concepts, like obedience… right. Here’s a «maybe later»; we’re going to smear the same pop-up on your snout all the time, until you say «yes». You’re a user, not a human being, so consent doesn’t apply to something like you.”
    • “Oh, the user is still able to jump the wall and run away from the walled garden! Quick, raise the walls. Users are things to be herded in factory farms, not free range, you know?”

    [/rant]



  • If by “most correctly”, you mean “the closest to what Koine Greek would do”, then yes. Note however that each language will impose restrictions on the allowed sounds and sequences of; for example Finnish won’t use [ä] like Ancient Greek would, simply because the sound isn’t there in Finnish (it adapts it to an [ɑ]).

    Also note the word itself can be pronounced multiple ways even in Koine Greek. For example the ⟨αῖ⟩ diphthong can be read as either [äɪ̯] (as in English “by”) or as [ɛ:] (as in English air); as far as I’m aware this sound change happened in early Koine Greek times.

    Never really understood why English insists of weirdly dropping the final bits of Greek and Latin names (“Plutarch” vs “Plutarkhos”, “Justinian” vs “Justinianus” etc)

    Short explanation: English does it because it’s what French does. And French does it because of its history as a Latin descendant.

    Long explanation:

    Since French is a Romance language, it’s the result of a Latin dialect undergoing a bunch of sound changes. Those sound changes affected all words inherited from Latin. For example capus/capum¹ → chef, bonus/bonum → bon, Romanus/Romanum → Romain (yup, it applies to personal names!) ille → le, so goes on.

    However, Latin is a prestige language in Europe. So even if French is a Latin descendant, it kept reborrowing words from Latin. And because of the above, French started changing those loanwords in a specific way, that kind of mimics part of its own evolution.

    In other words: French developed a convention on how to handle Latin borrowings². And part of that convention is to sub/remove the endings. Other Romance languages do something similar³.

    What I said applies to the Latin names. Now, the Greek names go one step deeper: Latin itself borrowed Greek words left and right, adapting them into Latin. Some would be eventually inherited by French. So the convention on how to handle Latin names in French also handles Greek names: “Latinise them first, then pretend they’re Latin words.”

    Then you get English. Most of that Classical knowledge entered English through French, so English borrowed that convention of adapting Latin words too. Eventually developing its own convention on how to do it, that looks kind of similar to the one French used back then. And some names were subjected to local sound changes, and just like the Romance languages English messes a fair bit with word endings. And the vowels, too (Great Vowel Shift).

    In contrast, German also treats Latin as a prestige language. But since it’s neither a Romance language nor borrowing the convention from one, it’s getting the names straight from Latin, and modifying them a bit less⁴. That includes keeping the nominative endings of the words.

    NOTES:

    1. I’m listing words by their Latin nominative and accusative. The nominative is the form likely to be borrowed; however, French and the other Romance languages inherited the accusative.
    2. This can be seen by the Modern French renditions of those names: Ptolémée, Justinien, Plutarque.
    3. For reference, look at the Italian versions of those names: Tolomeo, Giustiniano, Plutarco. Parts of the ending are still there, unlike in French, but the ending -s/-m is gone.
    4. It still does change them, mind you. After a word is borrowed into a language, it’s subjected to the sound changes of that language; plus spelling plays a huge role, and even in non-Romance languages there are minor conventions on how you’re “supposed” to handle Latin names. Cue to German spelling “Justinianus” instead of “IVSTINIANVS” or “Iustinianus”.

    Sorry for the wall of text.


  • For my take on those news, check here. Including context. Here I’ll solely talk about the comments in that cesspool of idiocy.

    [1]All this does if make things worse. [2] Things like banning the sale of personal information would be a step in the right direction.

    1: It’s too early to know what’ll happen. It might make things better, worse, or the same.

    2: I agree that the sale of personal info should be outright banned; one’s control over their own data should be seen as an inalienable right.

    Note currently there’s an ongoing law project seeking to assign property rights to individuals over their personal data. IMO a side-step - on one hand it means you’d have an easier time suing megacorpos for stealing your data, on another it means they can still press you to share it.

    A big issue here would be defining social media. // Are forums social media? What about reddit? What about YouTube? // I think what we really need is a ban on algorithmic recommendations that seek to encourage engagement or total time spent on the app.

    The article 19 of the Marco Civil da Internet - that the STF is getting rid of - does not talk about “social media”, but rather “provedor de aplicações de internet” (lit. internet application provider). It’s basically anyone providing internet services to a third party.

    As such, “ackshyually wut teh definishun of sacial meria” is not a relevant concern.

    US Social Media should just cancel service to that territory.

    I kind of low-key wish that that happened, those megacorpos are cancer. But it won’t - no megacorpos would unnecessarily restrict its own market.

    But let’s roll with that. The impact of that would be hilariously small: a single month of disruption, then business as usual. For reference check what happened when the dickhead Alexandre de Moraes banned Twitter, almost everybody and their caramel-coloured dog migrated to Bluesky. Once a platform is gone so is the network effect associated with it.


  • The “right” pronunciation depends on what you take for reference. If you’re treating the word as an English one, the woman is right - English doesn’t allow this sort of initial cluster, and spelling-wise it’s well-established that some initial consonants are mute (see e.g. “knife”).

    And, if treating the word as a Koine Greek one… odds are both are butchering the word so much that [pə] wouldn’t save the day. Even the man is likely pronouncing it as [pə.'tɒl.ə.mi]; the Greek word would be more like [pto.le.'mɛ:.os], or [pto.le.'maɪ̯.os] with a really conservative pronunciation.



  • I don’t blame the orcas - have you seen a human? Those things are, like, 1/3 of the size of an orca; they’re clearly malnourished, some good ol’ seal meat will fix’em up real good!

    Serious now. I think it’s interesting how they’re interacting cooperatively, with an animal of a different species. And it isn’t like either side domesticated the other (unlike, say, humans vs. dogs and cats); they don’t even live in the same environments, at most you have some humans doing short trips into the sea and that’s it.

    “What I think in a sense is more impressive is that humans basically give no credit to any other creature for having a mind,” Safina said. Yet many other creatures, including orcas, understand implicitly that humans have minds. “So they understand us, and give us more credit there, they seem to comprehend the world better than we do, in our self-imposed estrangement.”

    I feel like this is a step beyond theory of mind already.






  • Based on the modlog, I’m going to take an guess and say that the person in question posted an AI-generated image representing a fictitious but realistic child doing something sexual with an adult, and the removal entry doesn’t show in the modlog because it was purged.

    “Technically” this is not CSAM, but the difference does not matter here. No sane instance allows images depicting sex with children; doubly so if it can be reasonably confused with CSAM, like AI generated images can. So, if my guess is correct, the user deserved it.

    And, if my guess is wrong (it could be - I don’t know), the user still deserves a permaban, but under another reason: just look at the modlog. It boils down to the user assuming (i.e. making shit up, lying to know what they don’t) things about other users, so they can screech at them. Being an assumer on its own is already bad, but a combative assumer is even worse.




  • Levine told The Atlantic that Ford does not “encourage or measure ‘sludge,’” and that “there was zero intent to add ‘sludge’” to my interactions with Ford.

    Here’s the catch: odds are that what Levine is saying is technically correct - truthful, but misleading.

    Sure, they (people in those big businesses) might not be active and directly adding sludge. They might not be encouraging it. Or measuring it. But it’s there. Because they created the perfect conditions for it to thrive, as the author shows.

    And, sure, odds are they are not targetting the author; that sludge is for every single body in a similar situation.

    Why this matters: because any potential law punishing sludge should disregard esoteric concepts like “intention”, and focus solely on what the customer gets. If the customer is getting sludged, it doesn’t matter if the business says “trust us ( = be gullible filth), we don’t have the intention!” - the business should get the short end of the legal stick.