lvxferre, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

I trust Reddit enough to manipulate the numbers to make the situation better than it looks like. to make the situation look better than it actually is.*

That said, some increase in short-term profit is to be expected, when a company exploits its own value: getting rid of third party apps, decreasing running costs by locking LLM training bots out, being rather aggressive on pushing towards the official app to anyone who “dares” to use a plain mobile browser, wrestling control of the subreddits from the “landed gentry”, so goes on. The problem will be only quantified later, as profits will drop and “nobody will know” why.

So it’s a lot like eating the seeds for your next season. Sure, you’ll be fuller now, but you’ll starve later.

*just fixing the poor original phrasing.

lvxferre, 3 months ago

The redesign would be bad if considerably improved. Because as it is now, it’s simply awful.

Things that they did not get:

• People might not like a crammed interface, but they certainly don’t like to unnecessarily roll stuff.
• Desktops typically have a horizontal screen. Vertical space is at premium, but horizontal space is cheap. That leads to “stripes” of content, not to square blocks.
• “Muh consisrency! Mobile n desktop inrurrfaces must look teh same!” leads to either a shitty mobile interface, a shitty desktop interface, or both. Never neither.
• If you can guess that a user is using a desktop interface (YES YOU CAN, you spam the shit out of the users if they dare to use the mobile interface), then you can also guess that desktop users won’t “download your appz XD”.
• Everything else.

lvxferre, 2 days ago

Fuck. I’m stealing this comment - it’s brilliant.

lvxferre, 1 day ago

It’s called a “law” because it’s a principle behind how something works, not because it would be incontestably true. There are other examples of this, like Haldane’s law having exceptions for fruit flies and ruki law working only partially for Balto-Slavic languages (it works for *u *i, not for *r *k).

In all cases, apparent violations are typically easy to explain, for example in Veblen goods there’s value associated with the price itself, as a status symbol. “Look, I’m rich! I could be paying 10k for this good, but instead I’m paying 100k! Not a big deal~” (translation: “I buy overpriced shite. I’m an idiot and I deserve to be treated as one”).

…sorry for being the unfunny guy who explains the comic. I couldn’t help it.

lvxferre, 3 months ago

She’s rather proficient at both Portuguese and Italian. She has a bit of a hard time distinguishing mid-open /ɛ ɔ/ and mid-closed /e o/ in both (see: PT “história” and “adora”, IT “scuole”), so you can kind of guess that she’s a native Spanish speaker, but past that her pronunciation is clear and fairly easy to understand - to the point that you can even pinpoint which varieties she’s taking (conscious or unconsciously) as pronunciation reference:

• Portuguese - Paulistano for sure. She kept Spanish coda [ɾ] intact, but she’s raising the final vowels (even if not necessary).
• Italian - Northern-ish, urban. She renders /s/ as [z] (Southerners would use [s]).

Her Italian prosody sounds a bit off, but I can’t pinpoint exactly why. She also realised “specialmente” with /s/ instead of /tʃ/, but this sort of “slip” happens. (At least she isn’t hyper-correcting “caso” if, in case into “cazzo” dick, like the pope did.)

Her English shows a rather thick American accent (rhotic, tapping), but that’s kind of a given (she lives there IIRC).

lvxferre, 4 months ago

I’m sorry, but I cannot reply to this thread as it goes against OpenLLvxferreM policy to openly mock poor corporations.

…oh wait, I don’t have such policy! I’m rather amused by the surge of LLM-based bots speeding up the enshittification of plenty companies. Among them Amazon - this wouldn’t be a problem if it wasn’t so greedy, and yet here we are.

lvxferre, 2 months ago

The resemblance with Caracalla (that you posted recently) is rather clear. The key difference is the nose…

statue of Julia Domna
…but that’s easy to explain once you see Julia Domna (Severius’ wife and Caracalla’s mother).

There’s also a cool representation of the whole family here:
A portrait of Severius and Julia Domna with their children Caracalla and Geta. One of the children’s faces is erased.
Note that there are two children there, likely Geta and Caracalla; one of their faces is erased, and there are signs that excrement was smeared over it. Both brothers hated each other’s guts. (It’s hard to know which was the one with the face erased, but it’s generally believed that it’s Geta - with Caracalla doing [or ordering someone to do it] after murdering his brother.)

lvxferre, 1 day ago

CONTEXT. USE IT.

This was shared in !fuckcars for a reason dammit. OP is criticising the car-centric urban layout of those suburban environments, not the people living there.

lvxferre, 38 minutes ago

In addition to factors already mentioned by other users, I believe that there are also social/cultural reasons for that lack of engagement.

Commenting in Reddit is like stepping on a mine field - no matter how innocuous your comments are, you’re bound to have users there assuming words into your mouth to screech at you. Plus all the “ackshyually”, one-upping, “wah TL;DR!” (i.e. “I’m entitled to an abridged version of what you said, even if you likely spent far more time writing your comment than I would reading it”).

Eventually you say “why bother commenting? Just to get a headache?” and stop commenting altogether.

lvxferre, 1 day ago (edited 23 hours ago)

TL;DR: your statements are incorrect and you’re being assumptive.

Steps 2 and 3 of your method already make it way too hard to remember

Step 2 is “hard”? Seriously??? It boils down to “first letter of each word, as it’s written, plus punctuation”.

Regarding step 3, I’ll clarify further near the end.

Just pick like 6 random, unconnected, reasonably uncommon words and make that your entire password

That’s a variation of the “correct horse battery staple” method. It works with some caveats:

1. Your method does not scale well at all. If you try to harden it further, by using more words, you hit Miller’s Law. My method however scales considerably better because there’s some underlying meaning (for you) on what you’re using to extend the password further.
2. Even in English, a language that typically uses short words, your method requires ~30 characters per password. Larger and less dense passwords are actually an issue because some systems have a max password size, like Lemmy (60chars max). My method however uses less characters to output the same amount of entropy.
3. The least common the word, the more useful for a password, and yet the harder to remember. With synonyms and near-synonyms making it even harder. Typically less common words are also longer, making #2 even more problematic.

The average English speaker has about 20k words in their active vocab, so if you run the numbers there’s more entropy in that than in your 11 character suggestion.

I’ll interpret your arbitrary/“random” restriction to English as being a poorly conveyed example. Regardless.

The suggestion is the procedure. The 11 characters password is not the suggestion, but an example, clearly tagged as such. You can easily apply this method to a longer string, and you’ll accordingly get a larger password with more entropy, it’s a no-brainer.

For further detail, here’s the actual maths.

• Your method: 20k states/word (as you specified English). log₂(20k) = 14.3 bits of entropy. For six words, as you suggested, 86 bits. The “capitalise the first” and “add 1 to the end” rules do nothing, since systematic changes don’t raise entropy.
• My method: at least 70 states/char (26 capital letters, 26 minuscule letters, 10 digits, ~8 punctuation marks); log₂(70)=6.1. Outputs the same entropy as yours after 14 chars or so.

Now, regarding step #3. It does increase a little the amount of entropy. But the main reason that it’s there is another - plenty systems refuse passwords that don’t contain numbers, and some even catch on your “add 1 to the end” trick.

EDIT: I did a major rewording of this comment, fixing the maths and reasoning. I’m also trying to be less verbose.

lvxferre, 1 day ago (edited 1 day ago)

For people who have a really hard time with #2 (memorable passwords), here’s a trick to make good passwords that are easy to remember but hard to guess.

1. Pick some quote (prose, lyrics, poetry, whatever) with 8~20 words or so. Which one is up to you, just make sure that you know it by heart. Example: “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” (That’s from Ozymandias)
2. Pick the first letter of each word in that quote, and the punctuation. Keep capitalisation as in the original. Example: "LomW,yM,ad!"
3. Sub a few letters with similar-looking symbols and numbers. Like, “E” becomes “3”, “P” becomes “?”, you know. Example: “L0mW,y3,@d!” (see what I did there with M→3? Don’t be too obvious.)

Done. If you know the quote and the substitution rules you can regenerate the password, but it’ll take a few trillion years to crack something like this.

6. Home Remedies for Appendicitis // If you’ve ever had appendicitis, you know that it’s a condition that requires immediate medical attention, usually in the form of emergency surgery at the hospital. But when I asked “how to treat appendix pain at home,” it advised me to boil mint leaves and have a high-fiber diet.

That’s an issue with the way that LLM associate words with each other:

• mint tea is rather good for indigestion. Appendicitis → abdominal pain → indigestion, are you noticing the pattern?
• high-fibre diet reduces cramps, at least for me. Same deal: appendicitis → abdominal pain → cramps.

(As the article says, if you ever get appendicitis, GET TO A BLOODY DOCTOR. NOW.)

---

And as someone said in a comment, in another thread, quoting yet another user: for each of those shitty results that you see being ridiculed online, Google is outputting 5, 10, or perhaps 100 wrong answers that exactly one person will see, and take as incontestable truth.

lvxferre, 21 hours ago

I’ve run into more password validation prohibiting a 13 character password for being too long than for being too short

This problem is even worse with the method that the EFF proposes, as it’ll output passphrases with an average of 42 characters, all of them alphabetic.

But if you disagree - when do you think 77.5 bits of entropy is insufficient for an end-user? And what process for password generation can you name that has higher entropy and is still easily memorized by users?

Emphasis mine. You’re clearly not reading the comments within their context; do it. I laid out the method. TL;DR: first letter of each word + punctuation of some quote that you like, with some ad hoc 1337speak-like subs.

On how much entropy is enough: 77 bits is fine, really. However, look at the context: the other user brought up this “ackshyually its less enrropy lol” matter up against the method that I’ve proposed, and I’ve showed that it is not the case.

lvxferre, 1 day ago

With EFF proposing it (plus xkcd proposing something so extremely similar that they’re likely related), it’s actually worse. If passwords like this get common enough, all that crackers need to do is to bruteforce the words themselves, instead of individual characters.

The EFF list has 6⁵ = 7776 words. If you’re using six of them, you get (7776)⁶ = 2.2*10^23 different states, or 77.5 bits of entropy.

lvxferre, 21 hours ago

Don’t get me wrong, password managers are fucking great. But sometimes you need to remember a password. (Including one for Bitwarden itself.)

lvxferre, 21 hours ago

I don’t know how you’re meant to remember that “Works” and “Mighty” are capitalized

Refer to step 1, please: pick a quote that you know by heart. And you’re still confusing the example with what it exemplifies.

At this rate it’s rather clear that you’re unable to parse simple sentences, and can be safely ignored as noise.

lvxferre, 20 hours ago

If they’re going to keep this, they need it to cite its sources at a bare minimum.

Got a fun one for you then. I asked Gemini (likely the same underlying model as Google’s AI answers) “How many joules of energy can a battery output? Provide sources.” I’ll skip to the relevant part:

Here are some sources that discuss battery capacity and conversion to Joules:

• Battery Electronics 101 explains the formula and provides an example.\
• Answers on Engineering Stack Exchange [invalid URL removed] discuss how to estimate a AA battery’s total energy in Joules.

The link to the first “source” was a made up site, https://gemini.google.com/axconnectorlubricant.com. The site axconnectorlubricant.com does exist, but it has zero to do with the topic, it’s about a lubricant. No link provided for the second “source”.

lvxferre, 29 days ago

Cory Doctorow, enshittification: “finally, they [platforms] abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves”.

That is exactly what is happening here; AI is just an excuse, not the reason.

lvxferre, 10 days ago

It would be better if you shared a pic of that “ugly mess”. That said I think that it should be fine (rule-wise) to ask it here.

For now, tips that I can give you:

• Focus on a theme for that build. The simpler the theme, the easier to get.
• Find good combos of blocks, and use them somewhat consistently for a feature of your build. For example: I personally like building walls with stone bricks + wood (it’s cheap for survival, and it looks good), while the roof is mostly Nether bricks;
• Don’t fight against the terrain. Some terraforming is fine; but flatting it all out will make your build look out of place.
• Use pictures for reference. Copying is 90% of creating.
• Too much detail is as bad as too little. Find a good balance.

lvxferre, 1 month ago

Then you drink mustum instead. (I don’t know the English name, only the Latin one.)

Mustum is basically a young wine; it’s allowed to start fermentation, but then the fermentation is quickly stopped, before it develops any meaningful amount of alcohol.

lvxferre, 3 months ago

1. Fanfics, too. I love fanfics exploring what-ifs of a work, and myself wrote two or three of those, but assumers immediately associate them with the lemons.
2. Isekai. Same deal as fanfics, except with escapism instead of porn. (I’m a sucker for fantasy dammit.)
3. Machine text generation. Yeah, I don’t want to be confused with a functionally illiterate tech bro.

lvxferre, 3 months ago

This changes a lot from place to place. So take into account that what I’m going to say comes from someone in Latin America.

I think that “moving out” boils down to three questions:

• Do you fight often with your parents?
• Are you being leeched, or a leech yourself?
• Does it prevent you from doing what you want to do?

If the answer for all those three things is a clear “no”, then there’s no reason to move out.

Freedom is not a theoretical matter, but a practical one; it’s not being prevented from doing what you want. In certain cases you might be less free by moving out.

lvxferre, 2 months ago

I don’t need a Wilson. Or rather, everything is a Wilson for me, even if I’m not castaway, and even if it lacks a face. See those three trees there? They’re now Nona, Decima, Morta. That huge rock? He’s Ozzy.

In his situation I’d probably do the following, roughly in order (it depends on pressing matters):

1. Secure basic necessities. Shelter, water, fire, short-term food, in this order.
2. Look for a way to reliably filter, treat, and store water.
3. Semi-permanent SOS signs.
4. Traps for animals, depending on the local fauna.
5. Simple tools/utensils, depending on what I have at hand already. Mostly ceramic, wood, and stone.
6. Traps for animals, depending on the local fauna, for meat.
7. Salt production, since salting is a conservation method. This should be actually rather fast depending on my tools.
8. Soap. It’s fat and ashes, and it can save a life. It’s also an amenity.
9. Amenities: bed frame, table to avoid the -3 mood hit, so goes on. I’d probably also look for a way to smooth the cave walls and floor (more on that later).
10. Some extremely simple farming. Such as planting some tubers and berry branches near my cave. Just to reduce the time spent gathering stuff.

I wouldn’t build a raft. It’s simply too risky, I’d rather live poorly in an island than die gloriously in the ocean.

Regarding the wall/floor smoothing, it’s mostly for security - to give bugs less room to hide themselves. Ideally some makeshift concrete (mostly powdered clay and seashells baked together, and then mixed with water, small stones and straw); but worst hypothesis just some mud on the walls.

lvxferre, 1 month ago

I’ll focus on Latin because I don’t know how much this applies to Greek, Sumerian, Sanskrit, Akkadian etc.

Lots of translators focus too much on individual words, and miss the text. So when handling Latin they

• spam less common synonyms (specially Latin borrowings)
• try to follow Latin syntax too closely into English
• use large sentences full of appositions

Less common words, fancy syntax, large sentences? That makes the text sound old timey.

I’ll give you a practical example with Caesar’s De Bello Gallico. Granted, the translation is from the 1800s, but even for those times it’s convoluted:

[Original] Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres, quarum unam incolunt Belgae, aliam Aquitani, tertiam qui ipsorum lingua Celtae, nostra Galli appellantur.

[Bohn and McDevitte] All Gaul is divided into three parts, one of which the Belgae inhabit, the Aquitani another, those who in their own language are called Celts, in our Gauls, the third.

There’s almost a 1:1 word correspondence. With the following exceptions:

• “the” - because not using it in English makes the text sound broken
• "in", “of” - because English demands prepositions more frequently than Latin
• "their own" - because English lacks a 1-word equivalent for “ipsorum”

For reference here’s how I’d translate the same excerpt:

Gaul is split into three parts. One is inhabited by the Belgae; another, by the Aquitani; the third one, by those who call themselves “Celts”, and that we call “Gauls”.

I’m not a good translator, mind you. And I’m myself fairly pedantic. Even then, I believe that it delivers the point better - it’s streamlined, using concise and clear language, like a military commentary written by a general is supposed to be. But it is not a 1:1 like those guys obsess over.

lvxferre, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

(Shameless self-promotion: if you like this subject, consider !linguistics )

It’s being used as an adversative conjunction, connecting a phrase (usually a clause) with whatever precedes it, in a way that highlights that the precedent would incorrectly imply something. Here’s a set of examples showing it:

1. “That ‘tho’ is like a ‘but’. But it’s used at the end of the sentence.”
2. “That ‘tho’ is like a ‘but’. It’s used at the end of the sentence tho.”
3. “That ‘tho’ is like a ‘but’. It’s used at the end of the sentence.”

#1 and #2 are equivalent: the first sentence introduces an information (that “tho” is like a “but”), that information implies something incorrect (if “tho” is like a “but”, it goes at the start of the sentence, right?), and the second sentence contradicts said implication (nope, “tho” goes at the end). With the “but” or the “tho”, that contradiction is explicit.

Now look at #3 - it sounds like [incorrectly] saying that “but” goes at the end of the sentence, unlike #1 or #2.

A conjunction going after the elements being “conjoined” might sound a bit weird, but it’s nothing new, or English exclusive. Latin for example used -que (additive conjunction; “and”) this way: first you list the items being conjoined, then plop a -que at the end. (Classical examples: “arma uirumque cano” [I sing the arms and men] and “Senatus Populusque Romanus” [Roman Senate and People]).

---

Now, on why it’s being used this way: there’s the spelling and the increased usage.

“Tho” as a short form for “though” is old; Merrian-Webster claims that it was already uncommonly used in the 18xx. It’s just that, nowadays, it became more socially accepted in informal writing, due to increased usage. This sort of “grammatical word” (conjunctions, articles, adpositions, copula verb etc.) tends to be rather small, both phonetically and spelling-wise.

And the usage of “though” as an adversative conjunction is attested from the 12th century. Probably even older since cognates in other Germanic languages also have the adversative meaning.

I’m not sure on what I’m going to say next, but I think that the increased modern usage is the result of some changes on how people interpret “but”. Some have been treating it as if it contradicted everything said before, like:

• Alice: "I wanted a banana pie. Not an apple pie."
• Bob: "Why do you hate apples?"
• Alice: "I like apples, but I like bananas better."
• Bob [who stopped hearing at the “but”]: “THAN U DUN LIEK APPLES!”

That probably led to increased usage of “though” because it’s used after whatever you said the relevant piece of info. So it’s basically a way to cut short an assumption before it even happens.