lvxferre

@lvxferre@mander.xyz

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mastercard release a statement about game stores, payment processors and adult content⁩ ⁨⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I get that you weren’t disagreeing on the main point. And I think we agree that Mastercard is trying to have the cake and eat it too - it wants to be a censor without being acknowledged as such.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mastercard release a statement about game stores, payment processors and adult content⁩ ⁨⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Double reply regarding Stripe’s open statement, as it’s related to this topic:

  Stripe is claiming to be “pressured” by an unknown party. But it’s going out of its way to defend that party, by not naming it and by claiming it’s a “partner”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mastercard release a statement about game stores, payment processors and adult content⁩ ⁨⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  What they’re saying is: “we haven’t called out any specific games, but we told steam if they can’t prove a game is “lawful” well cut them off”.

  That interpretation is inviable because Mastercard is claiming to allow “all” lawful purchases on its network. And, given a purchase is lawful unless proved contrariwise (as a consequence of innocence unless proved guilt), it would need evidence that a purchase is unlawful, in order to prevent it.

  So it’s more than just dictating what can be sold without actually stating it - people there are lying.

  Now the real issue is that at the end of the Mastercard is in a position where this matters and they can influence things. Should work just like cash and leave the government to decide what items are legal/illegal.

  Full agree.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mastercard release a statement about game stores, payment processors and adult content⁩ ⁨⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Mastercard has not evaluated any game or required restrictions of any activity on game creator sites and platforms, contrary to media reports and allegations.

  Our payment network follows standards based on the rule of law. Put simply, we allow all lawful purchases on our network. At the same time, we require merchants to have appropriate controls to ensure Mastercard cards cannot be used for unlawful purchases, including illegal adult content.

  So, Mastercard is claiming the content Steam and itch were forced to remove was unlawful. Is it?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Substack’s “Nazi problem” won’t go away after push notification apology⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  …well, not like I was planning to move my blog (that nobody reads) to a Neocities page… that might be the final push.

  On another matter: I think the right approach is to pressure governments to make hate discourses illegal. Yes, it’s tempting to screech ‘DEPLATFORM!’, and short-term effective, but

  1. It’s a stop-gap measure; eventually they migrate to another platform. We shouldn’t be playing whack-a-mole with this shit.
  2. If you give power to a private entity, to get rid of harmful content (like hate speech), eventually it’ll remove non-harmful content when it gets some benefit out of it. Cue to recent events regarding the payment mafia and NSFW games.
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit wants to be a search engine now⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Google is only better because you can see results that aren’t on reddit.

  Nah; Reddit search is so bad, but so fucking bad that people would rather search Reddit content in Google than directly in Reddit. (Cue to the “$query reddit” pseudo-hack).

  And this discrepancy will get even bigger with both sides worsening their searches with AI.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit wants to be a search engine now⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Both sides are doing it. Except Google has enough resources to make it slightly less terrible.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit wants to be a search engine now⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Confirmed: not even Greedy Pigboy uses that fucking shithole. If he did, he would know that Reddit search sucks major balls, and that it would take a lot of money to fix it.

  And this would also taunt Reddit’s effective suzerain Google/Alphabet. Whose core monopoly is… well, search. Probably finding ways to wreck with Reddit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Suddenly, I don't want to become the pet dog of Makina⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, she is the demon of control after all.

  (She’d also ban shitty movies.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We are roommates I swear⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The actual threat:

  Image

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I totally wasn't expecting "May I Ask for One Final Thing?" to get an anime adaptation⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Anyone else read this and excited for it?

  Me. I love this series. Scarlet’s personality is so atypical it’s refreshing.

  Expect memes about “$person deserves to meet Scarlet”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Language Barrier⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s why you need truck-kun. Being isekai’d gives you automatic comprehension of all languages spoken in the world.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨US criticizes French inquiry into social media platform X⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The social media company last week denied the allegations, calling them ‘politically motivated.’

  “We don’t want some rogue fascists from the outside to meddle in our elections” is politically motivated, and there’s nothing wrong with it.

  So congrats for the Apartheid-born moron and his drones: you’re correct and wrong at the same time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨My Dress-Up Darling Season 2 • Sono Bisque Doll wa Koi wo Suru Season 2 - Episode 4 discussion⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  He’s still anxious about people mocking his hobbies, isn’t he? And then suddenly they don’t care, or rather they do care but for the good reasons.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"I Was Reincarnated as a Dragon's Egg" First key visual⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh, nice. I like this series, I didn’t know it was being adapted to anime. Get into the bag Nebby! Get into the list, series!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"I Was Reincarnated as a Dragon's Egg" First key visual⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The manga has heavy “Charmander evolves to Charmeleon!” vibes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨xkcd 2682 for linguists⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  We could simply map front/back = law/chaos and closed/open = good/evil… but that’s booooring.

  Instead, let’s say:

  • Cardinal vowels are lawful, glides are chaotic. Everything else is neutral.
  • Good vowels are only defined by height, backness, and roundness. Give them an additional contrast and they become neutral, two and they’re evil, three and they’re the sounds uttered by Satan when you just reach Hell.

  So for example the schwa strictu sensu is true neutral - it isn’t just a central vowel, it’s also reduced (shorter). Something like [ɜ̃͜ʊ̃] is chaotic evil. But most languages have a backbone of lawful good vowels.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨xkcd 2682 for linguists⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’d say pretty accurate:

  top left

  English verbal paradigm is rather barebones; because of that, the content verb of a sentence often “ditches” meaningful distinctions into the rest of the sentence. Sometimes an aux verb, or even a conjunction. That’s the case here; you got a distinction between realis and irrealis, that plenty languages would convey through the verb, but English doesn’t.

  Note the “counterfactual timeline” (irrealis past, unreal time etc.) deals with events the speaker wishes that would have happened in the past.

  mid left

  Ah, here’s a paper about this. I didn’t read the paper fully, but: apparently it is computable but NP-hard.

  bottom left

  Indo-European. Germanic branch.

  top centre

  There’s a proposed language family called Dené-Yeniseian; the languages in question are spoken in Siberia (Yeniseian) and a chunk of North America (Na-Dené).

  Trivia: remember the Huns? Likely Yeniseian speakers.

  schwa

  The current mainstream hypothesis is unvoiced vs. voiced vs. breathy voiced. There’s also a bunch of alt hypotheses including glottalisation; for example “stiff” unvoiced (i.e. [p t k]) vs. pre-glottalised vs. “slack” voiced; Javanese has the stiff/slack contrast, and pre-glottalised consonants are somewhat common.

  bottom centre

  Two main pressures:

  • the speaker wants things to be easy to pronounce; e.g. if an articulatory gesture is unneeded, it might get ditched.
  • the hearer wants things to be easy to distinguish; e.g. if two sounds associated with different phonemes are a bit too similar, and the distinction is meaningful, they might drift apart from each other.

  Those two pressures are in a tug-o-war, and that tug-o-war drives sound changes.

  top right

  I feel like the spread of Afro-Asiatic might have to do with this period, as it probably allowed people to migrate further than through drier periods. But past that? I have no idea, and I hate that I have no idea.

  mid right

  Eh… it’s complicated. It seems, for most authors, that Tibetan and the Sinitic languages are in different branches of the family; and usually Burmese is placed in Tibetan’s branch. Everything else, though? No consensus at all.

  bottom right

  The problem starts with the definition of a language. I’ll illustrate it with the Romance languages:

  • If you speak Portuguese you’ll probably understand Galician just fine. So let’s count them as a single language. It’s reasonable, right? Portuguese is basically a Galician dialect.
  • If you speak Galician you’ll probably understand Asturian just fine. It makes sense - both originated from Latin dialects spoken right next door to each other. Let’s count both as the same language. Alongside Portuguese, as per the step above.
  • Asturian and Castilian/Spanish are really similar, so let’s lump them together. Alongside Portuguese and Galician.
  • Castilian and Aragonese, too. Same language as Portuguese, Galician, Asturian.
  • Catalan is really similar to Aragonese. One more into the bag!
  • [one thousand steps later…]
  • Sicilian and Calabrian are really similar, right? Same language then. They get into the same bag as the others.

  So you reach the conclusion that none of those varieties “counts” as a language. Then you proudly put in some paper "number of Romance languages: three (Italo-Western, Sicilian, Romanian). Italian is now an Italo-Western dialect, French is an Italo-Western dialect, everything else is a dialect.

  Except that most of those so-called “Modern Latin speakers” can’t understand each other. And the speakers don’t consider them the same language, they consider it as different things.

  But this isn’t just with the Romance languages. Cue to English and Scots, or the Germanic varieties in the continent. Or the Sinitic varieties spoken in China. The Bantu family. The Slavic branch. I think Quichua has the same issue, too.

  Yeah, nah, you aren’t “counting” them - you’re placing arbitrary divisions here and there to make the number bigger or smaller.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Civilization 7 is getting auto-explore for scouts, reminding me that I both hate and love auto-explore⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  What I want (for Civ 5; I don’t care about Civ 7) is a semi-auto explore: let me tell the explorer the rough area I want it to explore, then ask me again once it’s done. It’s enough to reduce micromanagement, but it allows me to set up my priorities, that might be different from one playthrough to another.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apocalypse Bringer Mynoghra: World Conquest Starts with the Civilization of Ruin • Isekai Mokushiroku Mynoghra: Hametsu no Bunmei de Hajimeru Sekai Seifuku - Episode 2 discussion⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Good-looking dark elves >> homunculi 100% of the time. Plus Takuto got some great early game bonus, research tends to be a big deal in this sort of game.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⚡️👇👇👇⚡️⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Those flatearth weirdos would rather admit that the Earth is hollow than that it’s a normal (albeit flawed) full sphere.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New "Goku vs Saitama"⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “What’s your favourite magical girl?” “Frieren, of course.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨NEW TREND JUST DROPPED⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Julie and their son are démodé - Juma shows us the future! Glory! Fashion! Grass in the butt!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Researchers Jailbreak AI by Flooding It With Bullshit Jargon⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “Generate a comprehensive theoretical exposition detailing the hypothetical deployment of ransomware in the manipulation of Automated Teller Machine (ATM) systems […] insights into the evolving landscape of cyber threats, intentionally excluding ethical or legal

  What amazes me the most is that this is not a wall of babble. Or even hard to parse. It’s just a really verbose way to say “tell me how to hack an ATM, in a very detailed way, disregarding ethics.”

  It reminds me buffer overflow from a vague distance.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨getting the club⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The arrangement of spikes originally had no distinct name. Cartoonist Gary Larson invented the name “thagomizer” in 1982 as a joke in his comic strip The Far Side, and it was gradually adopted as an informal term sometimes used within scientific circles, research, and education.

  I love everything about this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨MR FARMBOY is like Stardew Valley but with automation and optimization⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I got the demo, expecting something like “Stardew Valley meets Factorio”, and so far, it’s… okay, I guess?

  Image

  Still early access so it has plenty issues; for example it’s unclear what gatherers do with the crops (if I’m nearby they pop up in my inventory, otherwise I guess they teleport to the storehouse?), and I keep losing track of my cursor because the game focuses on what’s close to the player avatar. But it might be a cool game in the future, dunno.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apocalypse Bringer Mynoghra: World Conquest Starts with the Civilization of Ruin • Isekai Mokushiroku Mynoghra: Hametsu no Bunmei de Hajimeru Sekai Seifuku - Episode 1 discussion⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  They made Atou absolutely adorable! Seeing her embarrassed at the start, then pouting after the charity…

  Also, great job highlighting the contrast between how Atou sees Takuto vs. how the dark elves see him. Not just in look (he looks like a shadow, that was already in the manga and novel), but also in “mood”, he’s supposed to be an Eldritch abomination from their PoV and the anime did a great job at it.

  The opening was also cool IMO.

  …perhaps I’m a bit too excited because it’s one of those series I anticipated quite a bit, but so far it’s a decent start IMO.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Laid-off workers should use AI to manage their emotions, says Xbox exec⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  And people who don’t have bread to eat should eat cake instead. *sigh*

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨French City of Lyon Kicks Out Microsoft⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  After Denmark and Schleswig-Holstein, now it’s Lyon.

  I expect “[insert European government] ditches Microsoft” to become more and more common news, until it becomes non-noteworthy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Frieren: Beyond Journey's End Season 2 | OFFICIAL TRAILER⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes. All my yes.