Lvxferre [he/him]

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

  • 27 Posts
  • 686 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: January 12th, 2024

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  • He’s also the guy who tried to institute three new letters to the alphabet:

    • ⟨Ↄ⟩ or ⟨ↃC⟩ for /ps/ [ps]. Modelled after ⟨X⟩ /ks/ [ks].
    • ⟨Ⱶ⟩ for [ɨ]~[ɯ]~[ʉ]. Not a phoneme for sure; I typically analyse it as an allophone of /u/.
    • ⟨Ⅎ⟩ for /w/ [w]~[β]. Interestingly he didn’t make a new letter for /j/, but I guess it took longer to fricativise than /w/ did.

    They’re useless but show some rather interesting insights. For example, the letters were modified versions of ⟨C H F⟩ - so you don’t need to create new tools to press those letters (e.g. in wax, or to preview in charcoal something you’ll carve in stone), you can simply adapt old tools to do it. He also showed awareness of allophones in his native language, most people don’t do it at all.






  • Fuck neoliberalism. I might not like those kids giving thumbs up to authoritarianism but they’re less worse than neolib, it’s like comparing elephant shit with cat shit.

    That said: a few Hexbear users are fairly reasonable, but plenty of them remind me 11yos. Specially in groups. db0 threw the bait, in a humour community for anarchists… and they all ate the bait, with malagueta sauce. No, wait, Scorpion Trinidad sauce. While screaming “I CAN STAND THE HEAT!” amidst their torrential tears.

    Eventually the thing gets old, db0 gets bored and tells them to disengage.

    It was funny that the nanny - who was supposed to take care of the kids - was there too. And he’s another 11yo! He forgot to edit his comment and say EDIT WOW THANKS FOR THE GOLD KIND STRANGER! They might’ve left Reddit, but they still behave more like redditors than like decent people. Also, I saw a neoliberal Anglo supremacist there. Full of gullibleness. He still didn’t think on the purpose of this utterance. And yes, I’m still laughing my arse off that muppet.

    I’m almost sure db0 knows why those kids are mostly defederated. And the reason his instance doesn’t do it is because, good or bad, they’re left-wing presence in the fediverse.

    Hexbear users who might take offence with my comment are encouraged to address their complains about their precious feelings being violated to this form.









  • I’m going to reply to myself because there’s a huge discussion in the comment chain, and I’d rather speak freely than specifically address what they’re saying. And because this is 90% rant.

    A country is not the people it rules over. A country is not a human being. A country is an abstract structure of power. A country is an “it”.

    No country should be seen as having a “right of self defence” or crap like that; it’s the same as saying “I hate people so much I’d put them on the same level as an abstract structure.” It’s genuinely disgusting.

    And someone might say “well ackshyually the Israelis have a right of self defence”. Sure; unlike the state of Israel, the Israelis are human beings, they do have the right. However (and this is important), the ones joining the war against Hamas and the Palestinians are not just “defending themselves”; they’re putting themselves at risk to defend that abstract structure.

    And people keep oversimplifying this shit as if it was “Israel was attacked, so it’s self-defending”. More accurately, what’s happening is that the state of Israel was attacked by Hamas, and using the attack as excuse to kill the Palestinians.

    It gets worse. The continued existence of that “it” is causing people to be killed, since it’s an ethnostate on the same level as Apartheid South Africa. By assigning “it” a human right of self-defence, you’re giving the “it” an implicit thumbs up to kill actual human beings. Now you aren’t even putting human beings on the same level as an “it”, you’re putting them below the “it”.

    inb4 something that sounds pretty much like “B-but right of self defence! Apartheid South Africa is defending itself, from terrorists like Rolihlahla! Are you siding with the terrorists?”.

    (I do plan to read replies but I’m not arsing myself to reply to them.)




  • I don’t see what the problem is with using AI for translations. if the translations are good enough and cheap enough, they should be used.

    Because machine translations for any large chunk of text are consistently awful: they don’t get references right, they often miss the point of the original utterance, they ignore cultural context, so goes on. It’s like wiping your arse with an old sock - sure, you could do it in a pinch, but you definitively don’t want to do it regularly!

    Verbose example, using Portuguese to English

    I’ll give you an example, using PT→EN because I don’t speak JP. Let’s say Alice tells Bob “ma’ tu é uma nota de três pila, né?” (literally: “bu[t] you’re a three bucks bill, isn’t it?”) . A human translator will immediately notice a few things:

    • It’s an informal and regional register. If Alice typically uses this register, it’s part of her characterisation; else, it register shift is noteworthy. Either way, it’s meaningful.
    • There’s an idiom there; “nota de três pila” (three bucks bill). It conveys some[thing/one] is blatantly false.
    • There’s a rhetorical question, worded like an accusation. The scene dictates how it should be interpreted.

    So depending on the context, the translator might translate this as “ain’t ya full of shit…”, or perhaps “wow, you’re as fake as Monopoly money, arentcha?”. Now, check how chatbots do it:

    • GPT-4o mini: “But you’re a three-buck note, right?”
    • Llama 4 Scout: “But you are a three-dollar bill, aren’t you?”; or “You’re a three-dollar bill, right?” (it offers both alternatives)

    Both miss the mark. If you talk about three dollar bills in English, lots of people associate it with gay people, creating an association that simply does not exist in the original. The extremely informal and regional register is gone, as well as the accusatory tone.

    With Claude shitting this pile of idiocy, that I had to screenshot because otherwise people wouldn’t believe me:


    [This is wrong on so many levels I don’t… I don’t even…]

    This is what you get for AI translations between two IE languages in the same Sprachbund, that’ll often do things in a similar way. It gets way worse for Japanese → English - because they’re languages from different families, different cultures, that didn’t historically interact that much. It’s like the dumb shit above, multiplied by ten.

    If they’re not good enough, another business can offer better translations as a differentiator.

    That “business” is called watching pirated anime with fan subs, made by people who genuinely enjoy anime and want others to enjoy it too.




  • In both cases you have businesses using the lack of legal representation to avoid following local laws. But that’s it; everything else is quite different.

    • Xitter - blocked after orders of the federal court, because there was a legal representative but he was explicitly removed to avoid following the court decisions.
    • Nintendo - a state customer protection organ is requesting legal representation, to address violations of customer laws. Nintendo assigned a temporary representative, to handle this specific issue.

    I don’t think Procon organs have the power to ban the sales of an imported good within their states. But even if they do, note that this would only apply to the state (in this case São Paulo). Plus Nintendo is being considerably more tactful than that braindead idiot called Musk.