Lvxferre

I’d gladly post Batatinha’s pics if he was my dog, but my cousin would probably get annoyed, it’s a privacy matter.

But, basically: picture a huge dog. By “huge” I mean, he probably weights 40kg or so. Mostly black, with some tan; it doesn’t follow the same pattern as the Rottweiler or the German shepherd, it’s different. Short hair, floppy ears. Rather intimidating, I wouldn’t go anywhere close to that dog without my uncle or my cousin nearby.

My relatives do it all the time. On purpose. Cue to

• Átila - named after Attila the Hun.
• Batatinha - roughly “little potato”.

Guess who’s the toy poodle and who’s the shepweiler.

AI sheep.

How much time until this bot gets banned by “harassment”?

I’m still bitter about the SSP/SMP merge. 1.2.5 runs so good.

In this context “politics” clearly conveys “things directly related to governments, such as wars, elections, or socio-economical ideologies”. It is only a subset of the definition of politics that you’re probably using, something like “things direct or indirectly related to human groups and their conflicts of interest”.

We got a whole Lemmy to talk about Israel vs. Hamas, late stage capitalism, elections etc. We could - and should - have at least one community to chill and talk about other stuff, and without that rule we won’t have it. For example without that rule 99.99999% of the content as of late 2024 would be about Trump, as if Americans didn’t have multiple communities to talk about it already.

I agree that Reddit will become irrelevant to internet power users. However, I disagree that it takes a massive fuckup to lose the critical mass of users.

A simple way to explain this is to imagine that everyone has an individual “I’m pissed and I leave” threshold; if a platform displeases a user more than that threshold, they leave.

For power users, this threshold is really low, so they ditch platforms like Reddit faster. However, that does not mean that the others aren’t getting displeased - they do; it might not be enough to convince them to leave, but it quickly piles up with other things displeasing them.

As such, even a large platform can lose that critical mass of users over time, even without a massive fuckup. It’s just about small things piling up.

Another thing to consider is that power users are more important to a platform than the rest of the userbase, because the power users interact with the platform more. And they’re typically the ones doing janny crap, or finding and sharing content, or that actually have anything meaningful to add instead of “lol lmao”. So once the power users leave, the platform becomes less desirable for the others too, and that’s recursive - as the power users leave, the almost-power users leave too, then the ones after them, so goes on. And there the critical mass goes down the drain.

My guess: there won’t be a specific date that you can poinpoint and say “Reddit died here”. It’ll be a slow decline, with small outbursts of re-engagement. Something like this:

Profit will follow a similar pattern, as both things are intertwined.

Then there’s the self-employed equivalent of that: savage some sense of freedom by sleeping up to 11:00, lunch, then spend up to 02:00 of the next day working nonstop because you got work piling up.

I have never met a person who can isolate the moment when Tucker Carlson became Alex Jones. So, where did it come from exactly? …it’s very clear to me both are demons.

Muito provavelmente, é spam. E o uso da expressão “vamos te ajudar a entender” sugere-me que o texto foi escrito por robô.

Ou seja. Melhor não interagir com este djanho.

Yeah. I got a leg scar from a domestic cat that I’ve raised from kittendom, who’d easily have ripped my face if she could reach it*. A wild, larger, and more powerful version of that seems like a bad idea.

*because I was holding a kitten that she never saw before. Yup. Fuck you Kika, I love you but you’re a bloody arsehole.

I’m fein mit this.

…my lizard brain is now confused, because it really your question word order as in German to interpret wants, thus still for the ending “is” waiting is.

I’m not assuming when the formalisation happened. I’m saying that it’s harder to get everyone to agree on how the orthography is supposed to be, when 2+ governments and populations associated with them are forcing distinctions even when there’s none.

You’re right that it is not impossible however, and your historical example shows it. Historically Lithuanian is the exception that proves the rule because

• the local population didn’t see themselves as Prussians or Russians, but as Lithuanians, so there was a community even across borders; and
• neither Prussia nor Imperial Russia were backing specific varieties of Lithuanian. They were backing German and Russian instead.

And nowadays it’s simply not an exception. (I was referring mostly to modern times.)

Instead, books in Latin script were printed in Prussia and distributed in Russia illegally. A handful of people like J. Basanavičius and V. Kudirka ended up in charge of printing most of those books and it made it easy to set language standards. Achieving such a monopoly with a bigger language would be much more difficult.

That’s a great tidbit of info, and it’s related to what I’m saying: those Lithuanian speakers in Russia only accepted the books as suitable for their language, even if they were printed in Prussia, because they didn’t see it as coming from “those other guys”.

[Thank you for the info, by the way! Across the whole comment, not just that paragraph.]

It’s actually easier to come up with a decent orthography for a language with a small number of speakers, as it depends on getting “everyone” (more like “enough people so the opposers can be safely ignored”) on the same page. Doubly true when it’s a language associated with a single government, because once you get 2+ governments into the bag they tend to force distinctions where there’s none.

For English there’s an additional issue, the lack of any sort of regulating body like the VLKK. The natives also seem to have a weird pride against diacritics (kind of funny as English spams apostrophes, but OK, not going to judge it).

Italian is the exception that proves the rule. The orthography is well-designed (transparent, without too much fluff), but not even then it could avoid ⟨ch gh⟩ for /k g/ before ⟨e i⟩, so it could reserve ⟨c(i) g(i)⟩ for /tʃ dʒ/.

It’s all related: modern European languages typically have a lot more sounds than Latin did, so Latin itself never developed letters for them. Across the Middle Ages you saw a bunch of local solutions for that, like:

• Italian - refer to the etymology to pick a digraph, then solve the /k tʃ g dʒ/ mess with ⟨h⟩.
• Occitan - spam ⟨h⟩ everywhere. (Portuguese borrowed from it.)
• English - spam ⟨h⟩ too.
• Hungarian - spam ⟨y⟩ instead.
• Polish - spam ⟨z⟩, plus a few acute accents (Polish has the retroflex series to handle too, not just the palatal/palato-alveolar like the four above)

I was kind of painting a broad stroke, but you’re right - German uses mostly ⟨ch⟩ and ⟨sch⟩. Should’ve said “English” alone.

It doesn’t need to be remotely close to the noun lol

You can, but it isn’t that common, it’s even considered a form of hyperbaton (messing around with word order).

Note that those distinctions that you mentioned (subjunctive vs. indicative, the right negation, perfect vs. imperfect) are all handled through the morphology in Latin, not the syntax (as in English). And yes Latin morphology can get really crazy, just like Polish or any other “old style” Indo-European language.

English syntax hard?

Yes, it is. It has 9001 rules for the allowed order of the words, 350 for each, and you have lots of those small words with grammatical purpose that don’t really convey anything, but must be there otherwise your sentence sounds broken. Refer to my examples with yes/no questions and *blue famous raincoat (instead of “famous blue raincoat”).

That happens because any language is complex, there’s no way around. You can dump that complexity in the word order, like English does, or dump it in different word forms, like Polish; but you won’t be able to get rid of it.

There’s a lot of issues with English. Most of them are for using loanwords without phonetically changing how they’re spoken in the English alphabet.

That’s something else, the spelling. It’s a fair point when it comes to contrast with Polish though - sure, the ⟨z⟩ might look odd, but it is consistent, most of the time you can correctly predict how you’re supposed to pronounce a word in Polish.