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

Кўис кредис ессе, Беллум?

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: April 9th, 2021

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  • It could be worse.

    That word was originally a verb, it’s the perfect participle of Latin dirigo “to lay straight”, “to direct”, “to steer”. The verb itself kicked the bucket; if it didn’t, it would’ve been something like *dereger in Spanish, with the past participle *derecho.

    So “driven straight to the right” would’ve become *“derecho en derecho a la derecha”.

    (Thankfully the verb got replaced by its own reborrowed version dirigir “to drive”, “to direct”, so the sentence is a bit less maddening: dirigido en derecho a la derecha.)

    [inb4 I’m not a native speaker so if anyone finds a mistake please do tell me out. I’m a bit too prone to portuñol.]






  • [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.



  • That’s practically what happened with Siegfrieda (my cat) and me.

    Long story short: a stray hid herself in my garage. She was beaten, bleeding and pregnant, so I rushed her to the vet. “I don’t want another pet, we’re going to fix her up and find her a new home.” Seven years later, she’s still here.


  • A lot of times you don’t need to buy containers, you can reuse the ones where your food came from.

    For example inside my freezer there are three ice cream pots, but none of them has actual ice cream - it’s tomato paste, chickpeas, cat food. In the past I’ve also reused margarine and requeijão pots to store leftover food, as makeshift planters, etc. The requeijão pots even worked as drinking glasses in my uni times.



  • We’re talking about apples and oranges. Or rather, fruits and oranges. Contrast my note #1 with your comment:

    [Me] For the sake of this comment, I’m defining “dumb fuck” as someone who assumes too much, oversimplifies, disregards context, focuses too much on who says it instead of what is being said, lacks basic understanding of what other users say, or a mix of those.

    [You] people who are arguing in bad faith, trolls, people who are being too aggro for no reason, and of course people getting into a fight who need to cool it. […] say spready hate speech […] users knowing just how to be a dickhead without actually breaking the rules and ruin the place […] if someone posts hate speech […]

    You’re talking about intentionally socially disruptive behaviour; Beehaw does address it. However I’m talking about bad = non-contributive behaviour in general, regardless of “intentions” or “faith”.


  • see Methods and materials section for our definition of toxic comments […] We define a toxic comment as a comment that has a score of at least 0.8 on any of the six dimensions provided by Perspective API. The score means that on average 8 out of 10 raters would mark it as toxic.

    In other words, they did not define it. How was this even published???

    Digging into the project’s page (the reader shouldn’t need to do it - this info should be in the article), the six dimensions are “Severe Toxicity, Insult, Profanity, Identity attack, Threat, Sexually explicit” (note the recursiveness in “severe toxicity” - it’s fine for the project’s goals, but not a real definition). With the in-line pop-up saying “We define toxicity as a rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable comment that is likely to make someone leave a discussion.”

    With that into account, you actually get what the researchers “discovered”: that comments likely to make someone leave a discussion also reduce activity of volunteer editors on Wikipedia. That is almost tautological - “things likely to make you leave are likely to make you leave”.


    It highlights yet again that the word “toxic” is mostly useless, as it gives a façade of objectiveness to what’s intrinsically subjective; doubly so in a scientific context.

    (I apologise beforehand for vomiting uncalled advice: if you want to complain about “toxic” behaviour, identify exactly what the other person is doing, that rubs you off. You’ll have better grounds to promote change this way.)

    A better approach would be to focus on a specific type of behaviour, and then seeing its impact on Wikipedia contribution. They could even do it through the API, if they focused on one or more of the dimensions.


  • When the pirates told him that they had set his ransom at the sum of 20 talents, he laughed at them for not knowing who it was they had captured and suggested that 50 talents would be a more appropriate amount.

    Doing some quick maths with 32.3 kg/talent and 0.73 €/gram of silver: Caesar’s ransom was the equivalent of silver to half million euros, with Caesar suggesting that a million euros would be more appropriate.

    People often forget how stinking rich the Iulii were, even before Caesar’s military exploits.
    Also the whole thing highlights how much Caesar cared about his own image.



  • Those are great news. I’m more than happy with the Swiss AI Initiative. I do not think that they’re developing artificial intelligence, or even a language model (just like a taxidermised cat is not a cat), but they’re still developing an open source alternative to a nascent technology that showed some applications.

    Now, let me chew on a specially inane HN comment.

    > trustworthy AI // >> “… ensure legal, ethical and scientific criteria are met.”

    Please… We are talking about stochastic models. This means that we are in the domain of Math, not the domain of Philosophy, and not Law either. // Evaluating a stochastic model, even a multivariate model, involves only two dimensions. Even if it is running on 10k GPUs. Even if it has been trained on billions of data points. // The two dimensions are: // 1) Reliability // 2) Validity

    …and that is all. It is Statistics 101. Not only that, it is the most fundamental part of Statistics 101.

    I’ll explain why this comment is fucking stupid with a simple proof by counterexample.

    Let’s say that your site suggests usernames for your users, based on 6-characters words. And you want it to generate those words automatically.

    You’re OK with non-existent words as long as valid for English; e.g. skwerl and wugwug are OK, fdskjd and ngaaaa are not.

    So you solve this through a stochastic model; it picks the first letter at random, and then “predicts” the following letters based on the preceding ones. You did a great job, here’s a representative sample of the output: derbie, malcon, hitler, [insert here the N word], vacant, lacoid.

    The model is perfectly reliable and valid. And yet there’s still an issue with the output - you don’t want a username like hitler or the N word in your bloody site. This issue is in a third dimension - “ethicality”. Proved by counterexample.

    Granted, LLMs are far more complex than that hypothetical username generator, but the same reasoning applies. You actually care about the output of the LLM because it’s going to be used by human beings. You don’t want it to vomit shite that prescribes self-harm, or crimes against humankind, or things that are technically correct but misleading without the context to interpret them accurately.


  • Lvxferre@lemmy.mltoComic Strips@lemmy.worldOrnithologists are assholes.
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    10 months ago

    I love how it pokes fun at an ackshyually, and then proposes a monophyletic clade for arseholes.

    …at the end of the day herpetology studies tetrapods minus the ones that ornithologists and mammalogists called dibs on. You’ll see the same in medicine - vets treating all animals, except the species that physicians said “NOPE, I GOT THIS ONE”.


  • Together, they make up a bit more than 50% of active users, yet basically all far-right trolls are from there.

    That doesn’t say much about LW besides being the biggest instance - because trolls beeline towards larger audiences.

    but if you have more users to moderate, you should also increase moderating capacity or close registrations.

    Closing registrations might be the sensible approach here. Because the necessary moderation grows exponentially, and eventually too large of a mod/admin team becomes a problem on its own.


  • Then again you’re talking about Beehaw, their users react so badly to anyone telling them they might be wrong that it’s not surprising their mods need to spend a disproportionate amount of time taking action against other users.

    I think that you’re partially right.

    The sort of online fight that Beehaw seeks to avoid depends on having at least one dumb fuck¹. Two cause it faster, but one is enough - because smart people have an easier time reaching agreement or realising that no agreement is possible.

    Both sides (LW+SJW and Beehaw) have their shares of smart posters and dumb fucks². The later are there for different reasons:

    • LW+SJW absorbed the bulk of the Reddit diaspora, and Reddit culture revolves around being a dumb fuck;
    • Beehaw doesn’t prevent you from being a dumb fuck, as long as you are not the one apparently starting the fight. Effectively sheltering dumb fucks who are really good at passive aggression, and who’ll have a meltdown once you say “what you said is incorrect, here’s why”, as they’ll interpret this as a personal attack.

    If you’re a smart user, you eventually learn how to handle the dumb fucks in your instance, in a way that is allowed there: chewing them out (within limits) or avoiding them like a plague. But those approaches break once you’re handling someone from the other side:

    • smart Beehaw user interacting with LW+SJW dumb fuck: “I feel like I’m always swallowing frogs with those users, as they say stupid shit and I don’t want to be rude.”
    • smart LW+SJW interacting with Beehaw dumb fuck: insert here your first paragraph. It’s why I think that you’re partially right.
    notes
    1. For the sake of this comment, I’m defining “dumb fuck” as someone who assumes too much, oversimplifies, disregards context, focuses too much on who says it instead of what is being said, lacks basic understanding of what other users say, or a mix of those.
    2. Note that, while it’s useful to pretend that “dumb fuck” and “smart user” are different categories of people, they are not - those are different categories of user behaviour, i.e. the same person could be theoretically a dumb fuck in some situations and a smart user in another.

  • Usually I’d make a per-quote analysis, but let’s cut off the crap: the author seems to imply that the fediverse model would work great with science, and I agree with him - it’s a way to not rely on central (and greedy) authorities while still sorting the trash out, by defederation. That wouldn’t be a Mastodon or a Lemmy though, but something else.

    Here’s a specially stupid/HN-like/dumb comment:

    Federation is an example of solving an imaginary problem by creating a bunch of very real problems.

    “I don’t see the problem, and I’m an assumer, so I assooome that it’s imaginary lol lmao.”

    In the meantime, Musk and Greedy Pigboy laughing from a distance.