Lvxferre

Federation woes?

Your comment has a different take though, and adding value to the discussion, it isn’t just the same as I said. Both are complementary.

Even more accurately: it’s bullshit.

“Lie” implies that the person knows the truth and is deliberately saying something that conflicts with it. However the sort of people who spread misinfo doesn’t really care about what’s true or false, they only care about what further reinforces their claims or not.

Predictable outcome for anyone not wallowing in wishful belief.

The image is simplifying it, but Italian borrowed the word from another Romance language, called Venetian. Latin sclauus /'skla.wus/ “slave, serf, servant” → Venetian scia(v)o /'stʃa(v)o/ “slave”→“bye”. Then Italian borrowed it from Venetian, and it ended as ciao /tʃao/ because Italian hates that /stʃ/ cluster.

The meaning evolved this way because of mediaeval humility expressions, like “mi so’ sciavo vostro”. It means literally “I’m your servant”, and it implies that I’m eager to fulfil some request that you might have.

A similar expression pops up in Southern German; see servus.

Sorry! I have a tendency to shift to technical vocab midtext, so it’s likely my fault.

I’ll use the comment to clarify some terms:

• Proto-Germanic: the ancestor of English, German, Icelandic, Gothic, etc. Spoken from 500 BCE to 200 CE.
• Proto-Celtic: the ancestor of Irish, Welsh, Gaulish, etc. Spoken from 1300 BCE to 800 BCE.
• Proto-Italic: the ancestor of Latin, Umbrian, Faliscan etc. Spoken around 1000 BCE. (Since it’s Latin’s ancestor it’s also the ancestor of every Romance language, kind of like their grandmother.)
• Sanskrit: one of “the big five” languages of the Old World, spoken in Indian subcontinent. Attested as early as 1500 BCE. Not quite Hindi’s ancestor, but close enough.
• Proto-Indo-European: ancestor of all languages that I mentioned above. And a lot more.
• If it’s written ⟨like this⟩, I’m referring to the spelling. If it’s written /laɪk ðɪs/, I’m referring to the phonemes (basic units of the spoken language). The symbols used are IPA, for a full list check this. For example /t͡ʃ/ is as in ⟨chill⟩, /θ/ is as in ⟨think⟩, /kʷ/ is as in ⟨queen⟩ but Latin handles it as a single unit, etc.
• Cognate: a word with a true common origin. Basically they used to be the same word but time happened and each language got its own version of the word.
• Affix - something that you plop into a word to make a new word. For example the un- and the -ing in ⟨undoing⟩ are two affixes.
• Trennbare verb - I wrote it half asleep and couldn’t remember the English term for this sort of verb. It’s “phrasal verb” (a verb where the preposition is part of the verb). Gonna fix it. Latin used something similar, but instead of letting the preposition roam free as in English/German it glued the preposition to the word, the de- in ⟨desertum⟩ is an example of that.
• feminine ending - in the case of Egyptian it’s a suffix (-t) that appears in a few words, like that “dšrt”. In this case it’s mostly for grammatical purposes, and not plopping it makes you sound like “then who was phone?”, but in Egyptian instead.

If anything else is unclear feel free to ask away!

I also wonder if some of these are actually false cognates, or if there is a much earlier common origin with false associations that came afterwards

Common but old origin tends to make words diverge over time. Compare for example:

All those eight are true cognates, they’re all from Proto-Indo-European *pénkʷe. But if you look only at the modern stuff, those four look nothing like each other - and yet their [near-]ancestors (the other four) resemble each other a bit better, Latin and Proto-Celtic for example used almost the same word.

They also get even more similar if you know a few common sound changes, like:

• Proto-Italic (Latin’s ancestor) changed PIE *p into /kʷ/ if there was another /kʷ/ nearby
• Proto-Germanic changed PIE *p into *f (Grimm’s Law)

In the meantime, false cognates - like the ones mentioned by the OP - are often similar now, but once you dig into their past they look less and less like each other, the opposite of the above.

They also often rely on affixes that we know to be unrelated. For example, let’s dig a bit into the first pair, desert/deshret:

• Latin ⟨deserō⟩ “I desert, I abandon [unseeded], I part away” - that de- is always found in verbs with movement from something, or undoing something. It’s roughly like English “away” in trennbare phrasal verbs like ⟨part away⟩, ⟨explain away⟩, ⟨go away⟩
• Egyptian ⟨dšrt⟩* “the red” - the ending -t is a feminine ending, like Spanish -a. And the word isn’t even ⟨deshret⟩ in Egyptian, it’s more like /ˈtʼaʃɾat/

Suddenly our comparison isn’t even between ⟨desert⟩ and ⟨deshret⟩, but rather between /seɾo:/ and /ˈtʼaʃɾa/. They… don’t look similar at all.

* see here for the word in hieroglyphs.

Other bits of info:

• ⟨shark⟩ - potentially a borrowing from German ⟨Schurke⟩ scoundrel. Think on loan sharks, for example, those people who chase you over and over; apply the same meaning to a fish and you got a predator, a shark fish. Note that the old name of the fish (dogfish) also hints the same behaviour.
• Turkish ⟨kayık⟩ - the word is attested as ⟨qayğıq⟩ in Khaqani Turkic. I might be wrong but I think that the -yık (Old Turkic “guk”) forms adjectives, as the Azeri cognates that I’ve found using this suffix are mostly adjectives; see qıyıq, ayıq, sayıq. Kind of tempting to interpret it etymologically as something like “sliding boat”, with the “boat” part being eventually omitted.

My concerns about the “immigration leftover” is not their opposing views, but their behaviour. I don’t want to deal with the “waaah the world revolves around my belly, why are you too stupid to understand that?” crowds and their incessant whining.

The drop is slowing down considerably:

And given that March was a peak, I’m tempted to interpret it as newbies not sticking around. I think that it’ll plateau around 40k users, then provided that the conditions remain the same it won’t increase or decrease.

That’s why I say that it’s stable - the core userbase will likely stick around.

That said, these numbers may particularly be bad, e.g. if anyone left Lemmy and went to Mbin and/or PieFed, then I think they would not be counted in those charts?

They wouldn’t be counted but I don’t think that this introduces a lot of inaccuracy. Mbin has 1.7k MAUs, and PieFed has 104.

The number of instances dropping is far more concerning IMO. It means that smaller instances have a hard time becoming sustainable.

I agree with you that both things have their upsides; and frankly, I don’t even think that we should be pandering to the immigration leftover wallowing in Reddit. Growth is good, but growth should never come at the expense of the community that you’re trying to grow.

However I feel like those points help to explain why the “lol lmao” crowds hate this place.

Besides other factors mentioned in this thread, there’s also

• selection bias: people with a positive view of Lemmy already migrated, so the leftover is bound to have more negative views
• older userbase: older people use language in a different way, talk about different topics, and dig into those topics in a different way. That often makes younger people throw a tantrum.
• group identity: for those “AS A SNOO” we’re basically apostates.
• edit: personal drama between higher ups is more visible here than in Reddit.

Easier: n(13-n).

The userbase is small but stable.

I wish that it was darin (darling). It rolls off the tongue so much better.

I don’t think that handedness plays a huge role. I think that in some cases it’s simply random, and in other cases it’s “we write in this direction because that’s how we learned it”.

Inkwriting exists since at least the 2500 BCE, it was already used with hieroglyphs, and yet you see those being written left to right, right to left, boustrophedon, it’s a mess. Even with the Greek alphabet, people only stopped using boustrophedon so much around 300 BCE or so.

Plus if it played a role we’d see the opposite of what we see today - since the Arabic abjad clearly evolved among people who wrote with ink, that’s why it’s so cursive. In the meantime the favourite customary writing medium for Latin was wax tablets, where smudging ink is no issue:

Just tested it. It works.

As others said it was a conscious decision of the developers, as it’s gamification of the system and they aren’t big fans of that.

I agree with this decision.

The Fluff Principle* makes easy-to-judge content get higher scores, and we do see it Lemmy. It isn’t a big deal because fluff ends on its own specific comms, but once you gamify the aggregation of score points, the picture changes - now you’re encouraging people to share content that they believe to score high over content that they believe to be contributive.

Additionally a publicly visible karma enables a bunch of poorly thought mod practices, like karma gating (“you need +500 karma to post here lol”) or automatically banning people with low karma (even if it might come from a single post/comment).

*“Hence what I call the Fluff Principle: on a user-voted news site, the links that are easiest to judge will take over unless you take specific measures to prevent it.” (Source)

And sadly, my Twitter/𝕏 thread with the company in private message is going nowhere. 😿

Sometimes “friendly” “reminding” a company about the relevant laws does wonders, making them return such “display” of “attentiveness” in a more timely manner. (Translation: they reply faster if you threaten them with the specific law.)

In this case the Ley Federal de Protección al Consumidor, article 17, second paragraph got you covered:

El consumidor podrá exigir directamente a proveedores específicos y a empresas que utilicen información sobre consumidores con fines mercadotécnicos o publicitarios, no ser molestado en su domicilio, lugar de trabajo, dirección electrónica o por cualquier otro medio, para ofrecerle bienes, productos o servicios, y que no le envíen publicidad. Asimismo, el consumidor podrá exigir en todo momento a proveedores y a empresas que utilicen información sobre consumidores con fines mercadotécnicos o publicitarios, que la información relativa a él mismo no sea cedida o transmitida a terceros, salvo que dicha cesión o transmisión sea determinada por una autoridad judicial

You // need // some // Xanax // /s 😁🍻

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO STOP IT!!! /s

Serious now. It doesn’t work here, since there’s no audible ping for every reply that you sent me. It’s more like in whatsapp*: I definitively don’t want to mute some people, but I wish that they didn’t send me multiple short messages.

*inb4 I hate whatsapp but not having it in Brazil is social suicide.

Messaging:

• People who reply to direct text questions with 5min audio recordings.
• People who use Enter as if it was the space bar, sending 10 messages for what could be easily sent as one.
• People who treat their requests as of utmost urgency, but when you contact them back take hours or even days to reply back.

Online forums:

• The sort of illiterate fuck who treats “but” as if it contradicted everything preceding it.
• People who feel entitled to have ELI5 versions of the text content produced by other people. (i.e. throwing a tantrum because of difficult words, text size, or even conceptual complexity.)
• Usage of “lol” and/or “lmao”. (I mentally translate those into “I’m braindead and should be treated accordingly.”)
• The sort of dead weight that focuses too much on specific words being used to convey something, instead of what it conveys.

For real. Companies being extra pushy with their product always makes me picture their decision makers saying:

“What do you mean, «we’re being too pushy»? Those are customers! They are not human beings, nor deserve to be treated as such! This filth is stupid and un-human-like, it can’t even follow simple orders like «consume our product»! Here we don’t appeal to its reason, we smear advertisement on its snout until it needs to open the mouth to breath, and then we shove the product down its throat!”

Is this accurate? Probably not. But it does feel like this, specially when they’re trying to force a product with limited use cases into everyone’s throats, even after plenty potential customers said “eeew no”. Such as machine text and image generation.