84
submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 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.

36
submitted 10 months ago by lvxferre@lemmy.ml to c/snoocalypse@lemmy.ml

I wish to stop being a moderator in lemmy.ml. However, I don't know what to do with this community; the last time I asked for new mods nobody showed interest. So I'd like the help of other members of the community to decide it.

Here are a few options:

  • Migrate this community. Frankly I don't care about Reddit nowadays, but I'm still willing to mod a comm about it in another instance. So if users tell me "migrate SNOOcalypse to [instance]!", I'll seriously consider it.
  • Recruiting new mods. If you wish to be a mod, please tell me so in this thread. I'll check if you'd be a good mod, recruit you, step down myself, and you're free to moderate it as you wish.
  • Closing down this comm. There are a few other comms about Reddit across the Lemmy/Kbinverse, so we'd use those instead. If neither of the alternatives above is viable/feasible, this is likely what's going to happen.
  • Something else. Then please do tell me. As long as it doesn't boil down to "negligently leave this comm active but unmoderated", I'll consider it.

I'm planning to step down 19/February/2024.

So, what do you think that should be done?

22
submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by lvxferre@lemmy.ml to c/linguistics@lemmy.ml

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.

100
[-] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 138 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

That's surprisingly accurate, as people here are highlighting (it makes geometrical sense when dealing with complex numbers).

My nephew once asked me this question. The way that I explained it was like this:

  • the friend of my friend is my friend; (+1)*(+1) = (+1)
  • the enemy of my friend is my enemy; (+1)*(-1) = (-1)
  • the friend of my enemy is my enemy; (-1)*(+1) = (-1)
  • the enemy of my enemy is my friend; (-1)*(-1) = (+1)

It's a different analogy but it makes intuitive sense, even for kids. And it works nice as mnemonic too.

[-] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 207 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

It's less complicated than it looks like. The text is just a poorly written mess, full of options (Fedora vs. Ubuntu, repo vs. no repo, stable vs. beta), and they're explaining how to do this through the terminal alone because the interface that you have might be different from what they expect. And because copy-pasting commands is faster.

Can’t I just download a file and install it? I’m on Ubuntu.

Yes, you can! In fact, the instructions include this option; it's under "Installing the app without the Mullvad repository". It's a bad idea though; then you don't get automatic updates.

A better way to do this is to tell your system "I want software from this repository", so each time that they make a new version of the program, yours get updated.

but I have no idea what I’m doing here.

I'll copy-paste their commands to do so, and explain what each does.

sudo curl -fsSLo /usr/share/keyrings/mullvad-keyring.asc https://repository.mullvad.net/deb/mullvad-keyring.asc
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/mullvad-keyring.asc arch=$( dpkg --print-architecture )] https://repository.mullvad.net/deb/stable $(lsb_release -cs) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mullvad.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install mullvad-vpn

The first command boils down to "download this keyring from the internet". The keyring is a necessary file to know if you're actually getting your software from Mullvad instead of PoopySoxHaxxor69. If you wanted, you could do it manually, and then move to the /usr/share/keyrings directory, but... it's more work, come on.

The second command tells your system that you want software from repository.mullvad.net. I don't use Ubuntu but there's probably some GUI to do it for you.

The third command boils down to "hey, Ubuntu, update the list of packages for me".

The fourth one installs the software.

18
submitted 11 months ago by lvxferre@lemmy.ml to c/linguistics@lemmy.ml

Interesting paper, about the alleged ability of LLMs* to judge the grammaticality of sentences - something that humans are rather good at. Eight phenomena were tested, and LLMs performed extremely poorly.

*LLM = large language model. Stuff like Bard, ChatGPT, LLaMa etc. I'd argue that they aren't actual language models due to the absence of a semantic component, as shown by the article.

59
submitted 11 months ago by lvxferre@lemmy.ml to c/snoocalypse@lemmy.ml

If you're paywalled, check this archive link.

What the article calls "corporate trolls" is simply astroturfing. It became rampant in Reddit; as the walled garden was unwalled, more of the organic grass has been replaced.

23
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by lvxferre@lemmy.ml to c/lemmy@lemmy.ml

Disclaimer: I like the Fediverse, Lemmy, and the concept of federation, I've been here for two years, and I feel grateful towards people working on this platform - devs and admins and mods and everyone else. As such, I hope that what I'm voicing is interpreted as constructive criticism and food for discussion.

TL;DR: I'll list some issues with Lemmy, how they relate to Reddit, and a few proposals on what should be done to address them.

The issues

When you're posting/commenting you're supposed to acknowledge and follow up to three independent sets of rules: of the comm, of the comm's instance, and of your instance. This is a burden for good users, and yet another excuse for bad users to ignore the rules.

There are also up to three groups of rule enforcers, in any situation: two admin teams and a mod team. If any of those goes rogue (greedy pigboy or powerjanny style), you got a problem.

Usually the ones enforcing the rules - the mods - are the group that, by design, lacks access to user info like IPs. So they either play whack-a-mole with old trolls under new accounts, or they rely on assumptions (i.e. stupidity) to keep control of their comms.

Your feed depends on which instances yours is federated with. So you either deal with the fact that you won't get content that you'd otherwise want, or you register into multiple instances to check multiple, partially overlapping feeds. One by one.

Federated instances mirroring content from each other causes sync issues (got removed from A, but not B? You'll still see it in B), storage issues (raising the requirements for people to create their own instances), and it's a big liability (cue to CP being posted to LW, and every single admin team removing it from their own instances).

The biggest instance (by MAU) is as large as the seven following instances combined. This sort of demographic concentration is bound to defeat the advantages of a federation (sharing the burden, sharing the power) without alleviating its cons (added complexity).

The top 10 instances is mostly populated by general purpose instances, doing redundant efforts to provide the same content to the users.

What do those issues have to do with each other?

Look at Reddit.

  • Users want their own Reddit communities, but they can't build new "Reddit instances". So they create their communities as "vassals" (subreddits) of the single Reddit instance.
  • Since you always post in the same Reddit instance as you registered to, there are no federation woes like "I want content from instance A, but I'm in instance B and they don't federate", or "admins of my instance vs. admins of the instance where I'm posting".
  • Reddit cannot rely on other instances to provide content for its users. As such, it hosts all its content in a single, general-purpose instance.

I believe that, once you apply those three aspects of Reddit to a federation, you get the issues that I mentioned.

In other words those issues are born from trying to replicate a non-federation into a federation.

So, what should be done in your opinion?

I'm no coder, nor I want to pretend to be one, and I'm aware that some of those might not be viable. Still, if I had to propose something...

First of all, a change of paradigm: we (users: including mods, admins, developers, everyone) should see Lemmy first and foremost as a federation of forums and advertise it as such. Similarities with Reddit should be only secondary.

People who code in Rust would do an amazing job if they focused on instance creation and management. Ideally, it should be feasible even for a tech-illiterate granny running a potato computer to spin up her own instance.

I think that content mirroring needs to go away, with the users pulling the content straight from the instances where it's created.

Interface developers should expect users to have 2+ accounts, and to log into all their accounts at the same time. The resulting feed should be a combination of the feed of those instances; handle this through the interface/front-end. And when the user is posting/commenting, ideally they should be able to choose which account to use, on a per-community basis.

Desktop users should be encouraged to migrate from "my instance's website" to instance-agnostic front-ends, such as Alexandrite and Slemmy. [This doesn't affect mobile users, I believe.]

We should be contributing more to specific-purpose instances (for example: mander.xyz, ani.social, etc.), at the detriment of general-purpose instances (for example: lemmy.world). Perhaps, at the start even migrate our comms to those instances.

Eventually [in the far, far future] I think that the concept of subreddit-like communities should be deprecated, with communities becoming simple sub-forums of the instance where they're hosted.

By default, admins should focus mostly on the activity inside their own instances. Let the behaviour of their users in other instances up to those admins; a dog with two owners ends either overfed or starved.

When possible/reasonable, admins should be moderating more communities in their own instances.

[-] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 98 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

[advertisement] !linguistics@lemmy.ml welcomes this sort of question [advertisement]

That said, look at Latin:

  • dexter - right side, but also: favourable, fitting, proper (cf Spanish diestro)
  • sinister - left side, but also: adverse, hostile, bad (cf Spanish siniestro)

The "privileges" that you see in derecho and right are an extension of what Latin already associated with dexter - things that are proper to do or to get. For example if I got a right to freedom, that means that it's fitting for me to get freedom, you know?

Based on that odds are that Spanish simply inherited the association, and kept it as such even after borrowing izquierdo from Basque and shifting directus→derecho from "straight" to "right". While English borrowed it, either from Latin or some Gallo-Romance language.

And overall you'll see a fair bit of that in the Western European languages, regardless of phylogenetic association, since languages clustered near each other (i.e. a Sprachbund) will often borrow concepts and associations from either each other or from a common source.

Also, note that right "as side" and "as privilege" are not homonyms. Those aren't different words from different sources, it's the same word with two different meanings, this is called polysemy. The same applies to derecho.

8
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by lvxferre@lemmy.ml to c/linguistics@lemmy.ml

I'm creating this thread to hopefully promote a bit more activity in the community.

If you want to talk about something Linguistics-related, but for some reason you don't want to create a new post just for that, feel free to post it here instead.

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

Even if not solid research, I think that this article is worth sharing as food for though.

The author mentions Duncan's five faces of poverty (material, social, spiritual, aspirational and identity), then focuses on the later two, and proposes that language also plays a role in social poverty.

Superficially it might seen that the author proposes "replacive bilingualism" (i.e. linguicide) as a solution for this problem; he doesn't, he is mentioning it to highlight how individuals seek to address this linguistic poverty.

Make sure to give a check to the references cited - there's a lot of good stuff there.

161
submitted 1 year ago by lvxferre@lemmy.ml to c/snoocalypse@lemmy.ml

IPO = Initial Public Offering, where shareholders offer to sell their shares to the public, shifting a company from a "private company" (it belongs to me, you, and that guy) to a "public company" (it belongs to anyone who pays enough for the shares).

The userbase has been always touchy when it comes to IPO, and rightfully so; they know that the new owners will only care about squeezing the platform dry. As such, I predict a new flood of Redditfugees to Lemmy and Kbin.

[-] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 110 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

5. We don't talk about Reddit here. Except when we do.
6. [De]federation is srs bizniz.
7. Seize the means of ~~production~~ computation.
8. People from that instance over there are bad.

[-] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 113 points 1 year ago

At least in a short time frame (2w? 1m?) I don't think that Lemmy got meaningfully better or worse. However from APIcalypse times to now it got way better.

17
submitted 1 year ago by lvxferre@lemmy.ml to c/linguistics@lemmy.ml

The article shows a case of language contact (Tsimané vs. Spanish) triggering the conceptual split of a colour into two.

20
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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
4 Link
[-] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 104 points 1 year ago

This post assumes that a meaningful amount of defed instances are caused by simple lack of agreement. Often, it's an orthogonal matter - it boils down to instance A actually understanding something about the userbase of instance B and saying "I'm not dealing with this shit, it'll make the instance worse for its own users". For example: the typical user of B might be disingenuous, or preach immoral prescriptions, behave like a chimp, or be a bloody stupid piece of trash that should've stayed in Reddit to avoid smearing its stupidity everywhere here.

Are instance admins too eager to pull the trigger for defed? Perhaps, in some cases; specially because it handles groups of users instead of individuals. But those cases are better addressed through actual examples, not through a meme talking on generic grounds.

[-] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 139 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

[Shameless comm advertisement: make sure to check !linguistics@lemmy.ml, this sort of question fits nicely there!]

There are two main points: agreement and derivation.

Agreement: grammatical gender gives you an easy way to keep track of which word refers to which. Consider for example the following sentence:

  • The clock fell over the glass table, and it broke.

What does "it" refer to? It's ambiguous, it could be either "the clock" or "the glass table" (both things are breakable). In Portuguese however the sentence is completely unambiguous due to the gender system, as the translations show:

  1. O relógio caiu sobre a mesa de vidro, e ele quebrou. // "ele" he/it = the clock
  2. O relógio caiu sobre a mesa de vidro, e ela quebrou. // "ela" she/it = the table

It's only one word of difference; however "ele" he/it must refer to "relógio" clock due to the gender agreement. Same deal with "ela" she/it and "mesa" table.

Latin also shows something similar, due to the syntactically free word order. Like this:

  • puer bellam puellam amat. (boy.M.NOM pretty.F.ACC girl.F.ACC loves) = the boy loves the beautiful girl
  • puer bellus puellam amat. (boy.M.NOM pretty.M.NOM girl.F.ACC loves) = the handsome boy loves the girl

Note how the adjective between "puer" boy and "puella" girl could theoretically refer to any of those nouns; Latin is not picky with adjective placement, as long as it's near the noun it's fine. However, because "puer" is a masculine word and "puella" is feminine, we know that the adjective refers to one if masculine, another if feminine. (Note: the case marks reinforce this, but they aren't fully reliable.)

The second aspect that I mentioned is derivation: gender gives you a quick way to create more words, without needing new roots for that. Italian examples:

  • "bambino" boy vs. "bambina" girl
  • "gatto" cat, tomcat vs. "gatta" female cat
  • "banana" banana (fruit) vs. "banano" banana plant
  • "mela" apple (fruit) vs. "melo" apple tree

Focus on the last two lines - note how the gender system is reused to things that (from human PoV) have no sex or social gender, like trees and their fruits. This kind of extension of the derivation system is fairly common across gendered languages.


Addressing some comments here: English does not have a grammatical gender system. It has a few words that refer to social gender and sex, but both concepts (grammatical gender and social gender) are completely distinct.

That's specially evident when triggering agreement in a gendered language, as English doesn't do anything similar. Portuguese examples, again:

  • [Sentence] O Ivan é uma pessoa muito alta.
  • [Gloss, showing word gender] The.M Ivan.M is a.F person.F very tall.F
  • [Translation] Ivan is a very tall person.

Check the adjective, "alta" tall. Even if "Ivan" refers to a man, you need to use the feminine adjective here, because it needs to agree with "pessoa" person - a feminine word. This kind of stuff happens all the time in gendered languages, but you don't see it e.g. in English.

[-] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 120 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It's from English, not Sanskrit. More specifically, an archaic English feature, where you'd use "be" instead of "have" for the present tense, if the main verb denotes a change of state (such as "become"). Note how "I have become Death" sounds perfectly fine for modern readers.

Odds are that Oppenheimer was quoting either an archaic translation Bhagavad Gita, or one using archaic language (this is typical for religious texts).

Also give this a check. English used to follow similar rules for be/have as German does for sein/haben.

[Shameless community promotion: check !linguistics@lemmy.ml ! This sort of question would fit like a glove there.]

[-] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 165 points 1 year ago

Here's my idea:

It's a middle ground between completely hiding the duplicates, and letting them as is. Once you click that plus button, it shows the duplicates as full posts, otherwise it leaves them as just one-liners.

[-] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 133 points 1 year ago

I think that they will get banned, no matter what they do. However, the way that they're setting this up, they're showing everyone that Reddit rules are used toilet paper - it's full of crap. They're forcing the Reddit admins to give them ammunition to use against the admins themselves, I love it.

[-] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 103 points 1 year ago

Archive link, for those not willing to give Reddit activity. I'll copypaste the mod post here, inside spoilers:

mod post

Breaking Down Barriers: Starting today, all Subscribers to r/madlads are now members of the Landed Gentry.

As you are no doubt aware, reddit has eliminated user choice and made it harder for visually impaired users and others to use reddit. Third party apps like Apollo and Boost have shut down for good.

In the last few weeks, words have gone back and forth. Reddit's CEO, Spez, aka Steve Huffman gave a disastrous AMA and a couple of subsequent interviews in which his contempt for moderators and for reddit at large came through very clearly. Spez doesn't even seem to like reddit any more.

In an interview with NBC News, he referred to as the “Landed Gentry”. As you can imagine, a group of democratically-minded individuals, such as your r/madlads mod team, were insulted by this comment and got right to thinking how they could prove otherwise.

Spez later revealed an exciting new idea for a system where users will be able to vote moderators out of their positions and install new ones. This type of pure democracy on a site like reddit is bound to be wildly successful and incorruptible. But, there's only one problem: At the pace it takes reddit to develop new mod tools and systems, it'll be years before such a system is ready. That clearly will not do in a society built on instant gratification.

That is why the r/madlads mod team would like to announce that starting today we are bringing pure democracy to the subreddit: All users are now mods, and as such, are part of the "Landed Gentry". Welcome to the club. ​ Full Rundown of Moderator Permissions:

  • !lock - As top level comment, will lock comments on any post.
  • !lock - Reply to any comment to lock it.
  • !unlock - Reply to any comment to unlock the locked comment above it.
  • !remove - If reply to a comment, will remove comment. If reply to a post, will remove post.
  • !restore - Comment anywhere to approve any of your removed or locked comments.
  • !restore u/USERNAME - Comment anywhere to approve any removed or locked comments for u/USERNAME.
  • !sticky - Sticky the post in the bottom slot.
  • !ban u/USERNAME - Ban a user for 1 day. Careful: forgetting the username will ban you.
  • !leaderboard - Get the top 5 most active mods.
  • !mod log - Get the full mod log.
  • how to ban users - Any user whose comment or post is downvoted to -11 will be temp banned.
  • how to unlock comments - Vote the stickied comment on each post to +10 to unlock comments or vote a post past 300.

The rest of the work is simply not fun, boring, unpaid, thankless, redundant, soul-crushing, endless, tedious, laborious, tiresome, never-ending, difficult-to-accomplish-with-reddits-primitive-mod-tools-and-without-third-party-apps-bots-and-tools work, and we'll take care of all of that for you Reddit has paid lip service to their moderator-users for years, perpetually insisting that communication and mod tools would quickly improve after a stumble like this one. We're cutting all of that out and bringing power directly to the people so that we can show the brilliance of Spez's idea today, rather than waiting years for reddit to develop it. Have fun with yourselves and Happy Moderating!

I love how much this fits the spirit of their community, and it highlights the blatant flaws on what reddit itself said against the mods. Popcorn time!

[-] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 107 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I think that it's important to note the 1% rule.

Most of the traffic of any given platform will be created by people who interact with it only passively; they mostly lurk and, for good or bad, they don't care about it. Admins this, mods that, who the fuck cares, my cat pics sprout spontaneously from the internet.

In the meantime the people who actually contribute with the platform will be a tiny fraction of it. They don't add traffic, but they add value - because they're the ones responsible for creating the content (posting), aggregating value to the content (commenting), sorting the content (voting and moderating). The admins' decisions and the mod revolts affected specially bad this group. And... well, not even the stupid like to be called stupid, and that's basically what the admins did.

Now consider the link. The lurkers are back to Reddit because there's still content to be consumed there, but eventually it'll run dry - because the contributors are leaving the site. As such, you don't expect the mod revolts to have a short-term impact on the site, but rather a long-term one: the site will become less and less popular over time, as the lurkers are looking for content there and... well, nobody is providing them jack shit. Eventually the site will be forgotten by the masses, just like Digg was.

So Reddit will die, mind you. But it won't be a sudden death; it'll be a slow bleeding.

I just wish that this process was slightly faster, specially before the IPO.

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lvxferre

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