This account is being kept for the posterity, but it won’t see further activity past February.

If you want to contact me, I’m at /u/[email protected]

  • 22 Posts
  • 34 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: April 9th, 2021

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  • 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.






  • 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.




  • Personally I don’t see any problem with the words “poor” or “poverty” on their own, and IMO rephrasing them only reinforces their negative connotations. For me the issue is when, as you said, the poor are blamed for being poor - but thankfully the text doesn’t do it.

    The solution that the text offers is in the last paragraph. When rephrased, it boils down to:

    • Make sure that the language can and is used in multiple situations. At home, in work, school/uni, media, third places, etc.
    • Address other aspects of poverty alongside the linguistic one.

    Regarding the church: I get your point and I partially agree with you, but note that in some situations the church strengthened marginalised linguistic communities. For example, the Jesuits documenting and creating orthographies for a few native languages, like Tupinambá (standardised as Old Tupi) and Guarani here in South America; IIRC Nahuatl in North America. So overall I believe that the role of the church was/is ambivalent, both to be blamed and weakly praised.






  • Sorry for the wall of text.

    I honestly do not think that your judgment was accurate in this situation, and I think that you jumped the gun; the poster sounds genuinely clueless. However I’m fully aware that I don’t have full access to all the info necessary to conclude shite here.

    Large bans don’t decrease your workload, they increase it.

    Trolls and bad faith agents might wait for a short ban to expire, but they won’t wait for a large ban - they’ll evade it with an alt account and call it a day, and now you’re playing whack-a-mole with them. With a permaban at least you’re telling them to fuck off, even if they won’t listen.

    For more sensible users, the large ban is unfair, and conveys “we still want you here… but we’re too lazy to deal with you thing right now, so shoo”. Other users are not blind, they will notice that the mods overreact to rule infractions and they will avoid reporting things, except for petty reasons. Now you’re bound to fine-comb threads manually to enforce the rules because nobody is reporting shite.

    Either way, you’re doing more work than you would otherwise.

    A better approach here would be to contain content prone to trigger rule-breaking comments. Megathreads work like a charm for that; they allow you to fine-comb a single thread instead of the whole community. It also helps to bring up the content diversity of the community.

    Another thing. I do agree with you that automatically tying that chant to Antisemitism is itself Antisemitic; however you’re taking for granted that all users are on the same page when it comes to that, and both of us know that the media is spamming them with misinformation that conflates Israel with Jewish people. In those situations it’s better to issue an official statement, explaining what will be considered Antisemitism for the sake of rule enforcement. (It helps to inform other users too.)


  • Let’s roll with your interpretation that the slogan is solely Antizionist. That would make the poster misinformed and incorrect; in this situation, the right thing to do is to talk with the poster, informing them, while checking their profile for potential Antisemitic activity. This also works great when the user is not rational (i.e. a bad faith agent) because it gives you better grounds for a ban.

    Another issue that I see is ban length. A short ban is great as a warning, or to tell the user to cool their head; while permaban is great when you want to convey “we the mod team do not you here, fuck off”. A two months ban is the worst of both worlds.


  • Based on the original post of this thread, this comment, the modlog, and an “innocent until proved guilty” approach, I have no reason to distrust the OP.

    As such, what I’m going to say might be wrong, and I’m ready to apologise if it is; but I do not think that it is wrong.

    What the fuck, [email protected] mod team? If OP is being accurate, at least one of you is bloody irrational, to the point that the mod is unable to understand the difference between “here’s why this discourse is bad” and support to said bad discourse.

    I get that it’s hard to recruit new mods in Lemmy, but remember - a bad mod is worse than no mod. In other words, IMO you guys should seriously consider to review each others’ mod actions and perhaps expurging a mod or two.

    OP: your mileage will vary when it comes to Lemmy moderation. Some communities are moderated by sensible people; some, well… you know. Sadly there’s not much that you can do against this, except perhaps avoiding those comms. (inb4 Reddit is not an option in this regard; here, shitty mods are like stepping on shit, but there it’s like drowning in it.)

    I also think that mod actions need more transparency. I’m thankful to the developers for the modlog, but I do not think that it is enough. IMO the content being removed should be still visible, when not illegal, with a big (USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST/COMMENT) in it.

    Also, the current modlog should at least clarify which team was responsible for a mod action - the comm mods, the comm’s instance admins, or the user’s instance admins. And there should be a way for mods to report users upstream to the instance’s admins.


  • That doesn’t surprise me.

    Linux users are biased towards higher technical expertise, and they have a different mindset - most of the software that we use is the result of collaborative projects, and we’re often encouraged to help the devs out. And while the collaborative situation might not be true for game development, the mindset leaks out.



  • Brain plasticity, window of opportunity, it’s all babble. You can learn new languages just fine as you age; the matter here is how much time you spend using the language.

    The reason why adults perform generally worse than kids learning languages is mostly motivational, and not spending enough time with the language. But as an adult you got access to a bunch of resources that kids wouldn’t, such as a decent grasp of grammar on theoretical grounds, that you can (and should) use to your advantage.

    Note however that watching sitcoms will likely not be enough to get any decent grasp of any language. (Otherwise I’d be speaking Japanese, given the amount of anime that I watch.) You’ll need proficiency on four levels: hearing, speaking, reading, writing.









  • Lvxferre@lemmy.mltoMemes@lemmy.mlDefediverse
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    2 years 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.