Lvxferre

Ah, got it.

The relevant root is Proto-Germanic *walhaz. If I got it right it was used by PG speakers first to refer to a specific Celtic tribe, then other non-Germanic Europeans. (Proto-Slavic borrowed the word but changed the meaning - from “any speaker of a foreign language” to “Latin/Romance speaker”.)

Latin never borrowed that root because they simply called any non-Roman “barbarus”.

He’s talking about the name Wallace, or rather its etymology.

By “the ‘w’ foreigner word” do you mean Wallace, or words with W in general?

If Wallace: I could’ve rendered his name by sound; in Classical pronunciation Valis [wɐɫɪs] would be really close. But then I’d need to do the same with Brett (Bres?) and Jules (Diules? Ziuls?) and it would be a pain.

If you mean words with W in general: yup. Long story short ⟨W⟩ wasn’t used in Latin itself; it started out as a digraph, ⟨VV⟩, for Germanic [w] in the Early Middle Ages. Because by then Latin already shifted its own native [w] into [β]→[v], so if you wrote ⟨V⟩ down people would read it wrong.

I’ve seen worse stuff. I’ve caused worse stuff.

In my Chemistry uni times, I already prepared limoncello at home (vodka infused with lemon peels). Nothing weird, right. I even brought some to the uni parties, people loved that stuff.

And in the Organics lab one of the practical tasks was to synthesise isoamyl acetate, also known as banana oil. It’s completely safe as food/drink flavouring, but it has a clearly artificial banana flavour.

Then there’s that muppet connecting both things. He took inspiration of my limoncello, but he wanted to do things “like a chemist”. So he prepared a batch of isoamyl acetate, and used it to flavour vodka. He also used a buttload of sugar and yellow food dye. And he brought that to a uni party.

He called it “bananacello”. Everyone else, including me, called it “banana de plástico” (plastic banana). We still drunk it to the end, because “a good chemist likes alcohol” was our motto back then.

• [Iulius] Num lupam similat?
• [Brito] Quid?
• [Iulius] LVPAMNE ILLE TIBI SIMILAT???
• [Brito] Nullo modo!
• [Iulius] Quare sicut lupam illum igitur futuere uis, Brito?
• [Brito] Nolo!
• [Iulius] Per hercle Brito, futuisti! Sic! Tu Marcellum futuere conatus es!
• [Brito] Non, non…
• [Iulius] Sed Marcellus Alienis fututum esse non amat. Nisi a Domina Alienis.

I hope so. This means that my mum will live to her 100s then. She’s crazy for this stuff. Story time:

>going to the market with my mum
>mum puts a few trays of Brand A garlic bread into the cart
>we walk a bit and grab a few other items
>couple sales representatives of Brand B see the cart
>roughly my age, 30~40yo, also men
>they get mildly curious, ask me about it
>trying to genuinely understand customer preferences
>they also noticed that I didn’t buy barbecue stuff
>I point to mum and say “the garlic bread is hers”
>mum spends 15min talking with one of representatives
>about her breakfast garlic bread
>why she prefers that brand
>how they could improve their own brand
>the other representative annotates stuff nonstop
>months later Brand B releases a line of garlic bread with hot pepper

Moral of story: if you see a cart full of extra spicy garlic bread being pushed by an almost-40yo with a beer belly, don’t assume that it’s for barbecue. Sometimes it’s for the breakfast of some granny alongside him.

I’ve been using 4chan for longer than Reddit and Lemmy combined. Mostly /vg/ (games), /g/ (tech) and /a/ (anime, manga).

Mostly for discussion. /g/ and /vg/ are decent for asking stuff if there’s a general about the topic that you want to ask info about, you want a relatively fast answer, and it isn’t something overly asked (e.g. “which distro should I use?” “INSTALL GENTOO” tier). Just make sure to not trust anything said there.

Other boards are typically too slow (like /ck/) or cesspools (like /b/, /b corta/ /v/, /pol/).

I had to websearch the term to know what they were talking about. Pfft, internet oddities.

Case in point. At least some side is lying here; either the people from r/gooncaves or the Reddit administration. And given their modus operandi I’m placing my bets on the admins lying.

Frankly, at this rate someone might end suing Reddit for libel in those ban messages. I think that it deserves it.

She doesn’t, but she damn tries.

I’ve mentioned this two days ago. I didn’t test it because I don’t have an account there any more, but I’m predicting that they’ll slowly remove functionality from old.reddit by redirecting it to the new one.

And, really, in another context getting rid of the old interface would be sensible. Because you expect the newer one to be improved. You got to be dumb as a snoo to do it like Reddit did, where the newer interface isn’t just markedly different from the old one, but crappy.

(inb4 yes, the admin said “nooo we aren’t removing old reddit lol”. And my cat said that she wouldn’t scratch my furnitures.)

People downvoting this post: don’t shoot the messenger.

I’ll copypaste what I said in !redditmigration@kbin.social about this topic:

As I mentioned in the kbin comm about redditfugees: I think that the platform stopped being sustainable, and that changes like this - either trying to increase engagement or appeasing power users - are only a symptom of that.

They won’t work, by the way, because of the trust thermocline (the impact of an act violating the users’ trust is considerably greater, if there’s a backstory of trust violations).

…excuse me while I grab some popcorn. I’m loving to watch this.

Fun comment (from a user) in that thread:

Because it’s a Reddit Product Decision, you can always expect one step forward, two steps back, and four steps off in a random direction that makes no sense.
FAQ
Can people who used all their gold due to your short-sighted mistake get it back? Haha, no.
Are you offering any compensation? Sure, we’ll give you some free bullshit. And it expires, so make sure to Drive Engagement and Interact with Posts before the end of the year!
Wait, you’re replacing the stuff you made arbitrarily expire with a different arbitrarily-expiring currency? You know it.
Can you use Gold that people give you on other posts? Absolutely not. Gold you are given goes into a big pot where it will remain, serving no purpose, unless you’re like the 0.1% of people on this site who ruthlessly and relentlessly farm for gold and karma. If you’re one of those people, you can financialize your Reddit experience, earning upwards of, like, five bucks!
I run a subreddit that provides resources for people in mental health crisis or other major medical issues. Can I turn off gilding to stop people boosting bad or unsafe answers? At Reddit, we believe that consumers deserve choice, and in this case, the choice they deserve is to seethe and cope. You absolutely cannot turn this shit off.
You’re at least blacklisting the really high-risk subs from the new old Gold program, right? Yes. What happens when you inevitably miss a sub and end up causing massive headaches for mods? They can contact us at the Mod Help PO Box in Anchorage, Alaska. When the intern checks the mail in 6 months, we’ll get right on it.
What if I’m not eligible for the Contributors program? Go fuck yourself.
Does it work on Old Reddit? What do you think?

Additional detail: did anyone notice that you can’t log through old.reddit any more? I don’t even have an account there any more, but if you try it, here’s what you get:

They are already actively removing functionality from old.reddit!

Yup, I also think that it’s a retention tactic. Not the first one: karma, user profiles, that new year crap etc., they all boil down to “we’re giving you reasons to consistently come back, and produce content for us for free.”

The timing hints me that the Reddit userbase is getting a lower rebound ratio nowadays. i.e. user goes there to see some junk, then forgets about the site.

OC infographics, shared as pics. Include the URL of your Lemmy account, for authorship. If the infographic is interesting/cool/useful people will share it, indirectly promoting Lemmy.

Yeah, the botter might have overdone it.

Another thing that I realised is that you could actually do this in a semi-auto way, without coding a single line of code - using a plain browser and an auto-clicker. EDIT: I’m not saying that autoclicker+browser is how people trying to bot Reddit “should” do it. I’m using it to highlight that botting Reddit is an extremely low-hanging fruit, to the point that you expect lots of bots there.

Even the strategy being used by the botter is obvious. Scrape off post titles, feed them into a LLM prompted with something like “Output a funny and short reply for each of the following prompts. Do not output any text besides said reply.”, then comment the output.

I tried it, and here’s how it turned out:

Sure, it is not the same replies, as this would depend on the exact prompt and the LLM bot being used. But note how it gets really close in spirit.

And this shit is trivial to do. Even for a non-programmer like me. Reddit might not allow you API access, but sometimes a simple scrapper does the trick.

@Windex007@lemmy.world mentioned the “default” name pattern, note that if necessary those could be also generated.

Ah, I remember this crap. It’ll show you content based on location. I’m almost certain that it’s unrelated to the block.

No one cares about their reputation.

This is blatantly false, as advertisers pulling off from Twitter show. Something similar happened in Reddit a few years ago.

They do care about brand reputation. Don’t lie (or worse, assume) that they don’t.

Lurking Reddit isn’t quitting Reddit.

Sure. And you are missing the point. I’m saying that nobody there will lift a bloody finger against the situation, because they either left (the 0.5%) or decided to lurk only.

Is this clear now?

It’s less that it was the target of mockery and more like the target of whining. Like, “waaaaaaahh they mentioned r/hailcorporate again! This hurts my fee fees!”. With then bootlicking mods using automod to filter out mentions of that sub.

Case in point yes, you’re right that it would be even less feasible now than it was before.

About like 0.5% Max actually stopped using Reddit.

It isn’t just people who stopped using it completely; it’s also people who were active there, and after the events started simply lurking. I believe that quite a bit of people did this (way more than the 0.5% who left), and that this is mostly overshadowed by the surge of bot content there.

And even if only 0.5% did something different, it means 99.5% fit what I said in the second paragraph.