It's less complicated than it looks like. The text is just a poorly written mess, full of options (Fedora vs. Ubuntu, repo vs. no repo, stable vs. beta), and they're explaining how to do this through the terminal alone because the interface that you have might be different from what they expect. And because copy-pasting commands is faster.

Can’t I just download a file and install it? I’m on Ubuntu.

Yes, you can! In fact, the instructions include this option; it's under "Installing the app without the Mullvad repository". It's a bad idea though; then you don't get automatic updates.

A better way to do this is to tell your system "I want software from this repository", so each time that they make a new version of the program, yours get updated.

but I have no idea what I’m doing here.

I'll copy-paste their commands to do so, and explain what each does.

sudo curl -fsSLo /usr/share/keyrings/mullvad-keyring.asc https://repository.mullvad.net/deb/mullvad-keyring.asc
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/mullvad-keyring.asc arch=$( dpkg --print-architecture )] https://repository.mullvad.net/deb/stable $(lsb_release -cs) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mullvad.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install mullvad-vpn

The first command boils down to "download this keyring from the internet". The keyring is a necessary file to know if you're actually getting your software from Mullvad instead of PoopySoxHaxxor69. If you wanted, you could do it manually, and then move to the /usr/share/keyrings directory, but... it's more work, come on.

The second command tells your system that you want software from repository.mullvad.net. I don't use Ubuntu but there's probably some GUI to do it for you.

The third command boils down to "hey, Ubuntu, update the list of packages for me".

The fourth one installs the software.

Here's my idea:

It's a middle ground between completely hiding the duplicates, and letting them as is. Once you click that plus button, it shows the duplicates as full posts, otherwise it leaves them as just one-liners.

[Shameless comm advertisement: make sure to check !linguistics@lemmy.ml, this sort of question fits nicely there!]

There are two main points: agreement and derivation.

Agreement: grammatical gender gives you an easy way to keep track of which word refers to which. Consider for example the following sentence:

• The clock fell over the glass table, and it broke.

What does "it" refer to? It's ambiguous, it could be either "the clock" or "the glass table" (both things are breakable). In Portuguese however the sentence is completely unambiguous due to the gender system, as the translations show:

1. O relógio caiu sobre a mesa de vidro, e ele quebrou. // "ele" he/it = the clock
2. O relógio caiu sobre a mesa de vidro, e ela quebrou. // "ela" she/it = the table

It's only one word of difference; however "ele" he/it must refer to "relógio" clock due to the gender agreement. Same deal with "ela" she/it and "mesa" table.

Latin also shows something similar, due to the syntactically free word order. Like this:

• puer bellam puellam amat. (boy.M.NOM pretty.F.ACC girl.F.ACC loves) = the boy loves the beautiful girl
• puer bellus puellam amat. (boy.M.NOM pretty.M.NOM girl.F.ACC loves) = the handsome boy loves the girl

Note how the adjective between "puer" boy and "puella" girl could theoretically refer to any of those nouns; Latin is not picky with adjective placement, as long as it's near the noun it's fine. However, because "puer" is a masculine word and "puella" is feminine, we know that the adjective refers to one if masculine, another if feminine. (Note: the case marks reinforce this, but they aren't fully reliable.)

The second aspect that I mentioned is derivation: gender gives you a quick way to create more words, without needing new roots for that. Italian examples:

• "bambino" boy vs. "bambina" girl
• "gatto" cat, tomcat vs. "gatta" female cat
• "banana" banana (fruit) vs. "banano" banana plant
• "mela" apple (fruit) vs. "melo" apple tree

Focus on the last two lines - note how the gender system is reused to things that (from human PoV) have no sex or social gender, like trees and their fruits. This kind of extension of the derivation system is fairly common across gendered languages.

Addressing some comments here: English does not have a grammatical gender system. It has a few words that refer to social gender and sex, but both concepts (grammatical gender and social gender) are completely distinct.

That's specially evident when triggering agreement in a gendered language, as English doesn't do anything similar. Portuguese examples, again:

• [Sentence] O Ivan é uma pessoa muito alta.
• [Gloss, showing word gender] The.M Ivan.M is a.F person.F very tall.F
• [Translation] Ivan is a very tall person.

Check the adjective, "alta" tall. Even if "Ivan" refers to a man, you need to use the feminine adjective here, because it needs to agree with "pessoa" person - a feminine word. This kind of stuff happens all the time in gendered languages, but you don't see it e.g. in English.

It's from English, not Sanskrit. More specifically, an archaic English feature, where you'd use "be" instead of "have" for the present tense, if the main verb denotes a change of state (such as "become"). Note how "I have become Death" sounds perfectly fine for modern readers.

Odds are that Oppenheimer was quoting either an archaic translation Bhagavad Gita, or one using archaic language (this is typical for religious texts).

Also give this a check. English used to follow similar rules for be/have as German does for sein/haben.

[Shameless community promotion: check !linguistics@lemmy.ml ! This sort of question would fit like a glove there.]

At least in a short time frame (2w? 1m?) I don't think that Lemmy got meaningfully better or worse. However from APIcalypse times to now it got way better.

5. We don't talk about Reddit here. Except when we do.
6. [De]federation is srs bizniz.
7. Seize the means of production computation.
8. People from that instance over there are bad.

I think that it's important to note the 1% rule.

Most of the traffic of any given platform will be created by people who interact with it only passively; they mostly lurk and, for good or bad, they don't care about it. Admins this, mods that, who the fuck cares, my cat pics sprout spontaneously from the internet.

In the meantime the people who actually contribute with the platform will be a tiny fraction of it. They don't add traffic, but they add value - because they're the ones responsible for creating the content (posting), aggregating value to the content (commenting), sorting the content (voting and moderating). The admins' decisions and the mod revolts affected specially bad this group. And... well, not even the stupid like to be called stupid, and that's basically what the admins did.

Now consider the link. The lurkers are back to Reddit because there's still content to be consumed there, but eventually it'll run dry - because the contributors are leaving the site. As such, you don't expect the mod revolts to have a short-term impact on the site, but rather a long-term one: the site will become less and less popular over time, as the lurkers are looking for content there and... well, nobody is providing them jack shit. Eventually the site will be forgotten by the masses, just like Digg was.

I just wish that this process was slightly faster, specially before the IPO.

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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.

Evolution as a concept; not just biological. The fact that you can explain the rise of complex systems with just three things - inheritance, mutation, selection. It's so simple, yet so powerful.

Perhaps not surprisingly it's directly tied to what OP is talking about cellular automata.

In response to such critiques [concerning the decline of quality], Reddit spokesperson Rathschmidt said he did not “know of an industry benchmark for scoring content quality”.

My sides went into orbit. It's a Reddit spokesperson acting like the worst of the Reddit userbase: being passive aggressive and using appeal to ignorance, at the same time.

Ultimately, what went wrong is that most Reddit users were screeching at individual leaves littering their garden, without noticing the tree creating those leaves on first place. They failed to connect the dots between: arbitrary bans, subreddit suspensions, user-on-user harassment, the idiotic way that rules are enforced, the presence of powermods, then Reddit trying to get rid of the powermods, the 3PA being killed... while focusing too much on a braindead clown called Steve Huffman.

It's all about profits. You can't enforce any demand if you don't make Reddit lose money. Blackouts and John Oliver posting only go so far, you need to migrate out of the platform. And if you're staying in the platform you need to transform it into an advertiser-hostile shithole. But for that you need more coordination than just "HURR DURR WE WRITE FUCK SPEZ IN PLACE LOL LMAO".

Misleading name, on the same level as calling water "non-explosive hydrogen". That said the material looks promising, as a glass replacement for some applications (the text mentions a few of them, like armoured windows).

(It is not a metal; it's a ceramic, mostly oxygen with bits and bobs of aluminium and nitrogen. Interesting nonetheless, even if I'm picking on the name.)

Here's an example. Let's say that you don't know how open source works, and I told you the following:

Why are you in Lemmy? It's open source so any hacker can screw with it, and infect your computer with viruses. You'll never know, right?

That's FUD: fear, uncertainty, and doubt. It's a disingenuous tactic to convince you to not do something, based on the following:

• You fear a certain outcome. In this case, a computer virus.
• That fear is vaguely associated with something that is uncertain for you. In this case, how a hacker could use Lemmy to inject viruses into your computer.
• The odds of that outcome happening are doubtful; it may happen, it may not, otherwise you could call me out for not happening. In this case, even if you don't get a virus from using Lemmy, I can still say "well, some people get it, some don't, but let's play it safe and avoid Lemmy."

This shitty strategy is fairly used in the tech industry because most people are clueless about tech, but they know that it has a big impact on their lives. However you'll also see this in politics, religious debate (Pascal's Wager is FUD), and others.

It's mostly Mastodon. The text doesn't even mention Lemmy or Kbin.

I'm glad that Mozilla is doing this. It benefits both sides (Mozilla and the Fediverse), in a transparent way. Hopefully we get some Fediverse companion for Firefox, Thunderbird and Seamonkey.

Lemmy removes EXIF data from pictures, since it includes potentially private information such as phone model, where IRL the pic is from, date, time, etc. But as a side effect, it also removes a tidbit of info that says "rotate this pic when showing it".

The way that I usually solve this* is by editing the picture in Kolourpaint. Either cropping it or resizing it.

*by coincidence to post cat pictures. Yours is making such a silly face :3 love it!

Not something that I'd personally use (I'm happy with the current FF layout customisation capabilities), but it's a fucking great idea and it's good to see people building Firefox derivatives against the "it's all Chrome with different names" current environment.

You know what, enough is enough. Snaps run like shit in my system (IDK/DC why), I hate companies forcing their shit down my throat, and I was planning a clean reinstall anyway from Ubuntu 20.04 to 22.04. Might as well use the opportunity to go back to Debian. Or Mint. Or Mint Debian Edition. Who knows.

Next on the news, Ubuntu ("humanity") gets renamed to Amasimba ("shit"). /s

Android File Transfer for Linux. Here's the release note from the OP.

I'm not asking anything because I'm a potato when it comes to software. I just wanted to drop by and say: thank you both for Lemmy. The platform is amazing, and it's clear that you guys are pouring some heavy love (and labour hours) in it, as it's improving at an amazing pace.

Oh "great", more crap between Ctrl and Alt.

[Grumpy grandpa] In my times, the space row only had five keys! And we did more than those youngsters do with eight, now nine keys!

Reddit event from July 2023, when Steve "Greedy Pigboy" Huffman decided to demand exorbitant amounts of money for API access, effectively killing most third party applications used to access the site from a phone, and neutering the leftover. It had a huge impact on Lemmy, for obvious reasons.

The worst part of this quote is that, in the original, she (Marilyn Monroe) actually framed her "worst":

>I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best.

So in the context it sounds more like "here are my flaws - take me or leave me, but you won't change me". Which sounds reasonable. But without that context it sounds more like "I'm entitled because I like to pretend that I'm above other people".

Being slightly forceful might work, but being too forceful has the opposite effect. I've seen a lot of people avoiding Edge not because of its technical demerits, or due to lack of knowledge, but because MS forces it so much down your throat that something "feels" off.

From Reddit's PoV I don't think that there is a mass emigration; it's just that the most engaged sectors of the community left, so the 99% left don't give a damn about it. Over time I predict that it'll be a slow drain, not a mass exodus.

However from Lemmy/Kbin's PoV there is a mass immigration. And the users are disproportionally active; for example a comm with 3k subscribers getting 1k upvotes in a post, stuff like this.

Pretty much. English borrowed it from Latin because it's posh. And Latin borrowed it from Greek because it's posh. But at the end of the day it's in the same spirit as "the ABC", or Latin "abecedarius".

In the early 00s, here in my city, it was fun to go to a certain pedestrians-only avenue to drink with friends. Or a date. If you do it now - yes, post-COVID lockdowns! - you can't hold a conversation for five fucking minutes without someone interrupting you with advertisement. As a result, people use that avenue nowadays strictly to commute.

I've ditched TV when I was 14. (I don't regret it.) But plenty people told me that open TV, and then cabled TV, became unbearable due to the sheer amount of advertisement.

Unless I recognise the number, I'm not bothering to pick the phone up any more. I'm probably not the only one doing it.

Are you noticing the pattern? Perhaps the internet suffers a bit more with it because people are a bit freer to do what they want here, but the problem is not exclusive to the internet, it's everywhere advertisers appear. The world has become less fun due to advertisers ("how do people DARE to have fun and ignore our «marketing opportunities»?").

The very fact that you're requesting payment info already makes plenty people think twice. Specially in the light of the brand changing from Twitter to X - if you're clueless about the change something "smells off".

On the other hand for a lot of bot owners this is absolutely no issue. You shouldn't be popping up a whole bot army, but instead only a handful of well coordinated bots to astroturf the shit out of the platform.

In other words the idea might have the opposite effect - keeping potential new human users out, but allowing the bots in.

Me, five minutes ago: "who's this Empress?"

Me, now: "I need to follow her, it's free popcorn!"

Fediverse? Do you mean, the Threadiverse?

I'm being cheeky to illustrate a point - Threads will almost certainly harm the overall health of the Fediverse in the long run, with users relying increasingly more on Threads' instance[s] to use Mastodon services and connect to people.

I think on Rome fairly often, but it's usually more often on the republic.

about how the Republic fell and became a totalitarian state.

I was thinking about this literally yesterday, on the nature of Octavian betraying the Republic, and how the Iulii and the Claudii simply kept themselves on power through the whole process. (Both gentes were already powerful in Republican times.) Or how some of the Claudii called themselves "Clodius" instead of "Claudius" for the sake of populism. ("See? I'm from the people! I even speak like a pleb!")

Brain plasticity, window of opportunity, it's all babble. You can learn new languages just fine as you age; the matter here is how much time you spend using the language.

The reason why adults perform generally worse than kids learning languages is mostly motivational, and not spending enough time with the language. But as an adult you got access to a bunch of resources that kids wouldn't, such as a decent grasp of grammar on theoretical grounds, that you can (and should) use to your advantage.

Note however that watching sitcoms will likely not be enough to get any decent grasp of any language. (Otherwise I'd be speaking Japanese, given the amount of anime that I watch.) You'll need proficiency on four levels: hearing, speaking, reading, writing.

Reverse image search told me that it's puttu, and that the pic is from Wikipedia.

The description (rice cake with coconut shavings) sounds tasty - gotta try it someday.

Lying about events that allegedly happened while we were engaged, and expecting me to actually believe her. Specially when she switched who did what.

For example. "I even cooked at late night for you!" - err... no. She only cooked for me a handful of times, all of them afternoon snacks. (I'm not a big fan of afternoon eating but I appreciated the gesture.) I was cooking for her fairly often, including preparing a "fake" barreado (kind of stew) at 3AM.

Or claiming that a common friend (a woman) openly mocked her while we were drinking with friends, and I did nothing. I was there and I remember what friend said - a single sentence, roughly "hello and bye for both of you!", since that friend was leaving as we were arriving on the bar. Even if she wanted to mock my then girlfriend, she wouldn't have the time to do so.

What makes those funny is not the fact that she was lying, but that they're such idiotic lies that you can smell the bullshit from a kilometre of distance.

There's a bunch of weird ones in Portuguese.

• "Caroço de manga não é sabonete" Do you think that mango seed is soap? = "this is an absurd proposal/situation/etc."
• "Pobre só sobe na vida quando o barraco explode" Poor people only ascend on life when the [shit]shack explodes. = "don't expect social ascension"
• "Enquanto vem com o milho, já comi a polenta." While you're bringing the corn, I already ate the polenta. = "I've already handled this, you're too late."
• "um polaco de cada colônia" a Pole from each settlement = a bunch of randomly picked people or items. I don't think that people use this too much outside Paraná.
• "farinha do mesmo saco" flour from the same bag = extremely similar in some aspects that matter (and usually negative ones)
• "comer o pão que o diabo amassou" to eat the bread kneaded by the devil = to go through rough times
• "Vai chupar prego até virar tachinha!" Go suck an [iron] nail until it becomes a thumbtack! = somewhat polite way to tell someone to fuck off
• "Vai ver se estou na esquina." *Go check if I'm around the corner." = also a way to tell people to fuck off
• "anta quadrada" squared tapir = "anta" tapir is used to call someone stupid, so anta quadrada is stupid to the power of two.
• "anta cúbica" cubed tapir = because some people do some really, really stupid shit.
• "mais louco que o Requião de pedalinho" crazier than Requião on a paddle boat = Requião is a politician here in Paraná known for his crazy antics. The phrase highlights that something is completely fucking crazy. Clearly local.
• "teu cu" your arse[hole] = definitively, clearly, and blatantly "no".

Calling Mussolini a "great leader" isn't just immoral. It's also clearly incorrect for any reasonable definition of a great leader: he was in the losing side of a big war, if he won his ally would've backstabbed him, he failed to suppress internal resistance, the resistance got rid of him, his regime effectively died with him, with Italy becoming a democratic republic, the country was poorer due to the war... all that fascist babble about unity, expansion, order? He failed at it, hard.

On-topic: I believe that the main solution proposed by the article is unviable, as those large "language" models have a hard time sorting out deontic statements (opinion, advice, etc.) from epistemic statements. (Some people have it too, I'm aware.) At most they'd phrase opinions as if they were epistemic statements.

And the self-contradiction won't go away, at least not for LLMs. They don't model any sort of conceptualisation. They're also damn shitty at taking context into account, creating more contradictions out of nowhere because of that.

Note that a fallacy is a reasoning flaw; sometimes the goal might be to trick you, indeed. But sometimes it's just a brainfart... or you might be dealing with something worse, like sheer irrationality. That said:

• look for the conclusion. What is the point that the writer is delivering? (Note: you might find multiple conclusions. That's OK.)
• look at what's being used to support that conclusion. What is the core argument?
• look for the arguments used to feed premises into the core argument. Which are they?

Then try to formalise the arguments that you found into "premise 1, premise 2, conclusion" in your head or in a text editor. Are the premises solid? Do you actually agree with them? And do they actually lead into the conclusion? If something smells fishy, you probably got a fallacy.

Get used to at least a few "big" types of fallacies. There are lists across the internet, do read a few of them; you don't need to memorise names, just to understand what is wrong with that fallacious reasoning. This pic has a few of them, I think that it's good reference material, specially at the start:

In special I've noticed that a few types of fallacy are really common on the internet:

• genetic fallacy - claiming that an argument is true or false because of its origin. Includes ad hominem, appeal to nature, appeal to authority, ad populum, etc.
• red herring - bringing irrelevant shit up as if it supported the conclusion, when it doesn't matter. In special, I see appeal to emotion (claiming that something is false/true because it makes you feel really bad/good) all the time.
• oversimplification - disregarding key details that either stain the premises or show that they don't necessarily lead to conclusion. False dichotomy ("if X is true, Y is false" in situations where both can be true or false) is a specially common type of oversimplification.
• strawman - distortion of an opposing argument into a way that is easier to beat. Again, notice that "intention" doesn't matter; only that the opposing argument isn't being addressed.
• moving goalposts - when you counter an argument, the person plops another in its place, without acknowledging that it's a new argument. Often relies heavily on ad hoc (making stuff up on the spot to shield an argument)
• four terms - exploiting multiple meanings associated with the same word to create an argument like "A is B¹, B² is C, thus A is C".

There are also some "markers" that smell fallacy for me from a distance. You should not trust them (as they might be present where there's no fallacy, or they might be absent even when the associated fallacy pops up); however, if you find those you should look for the associated fallacy:

• "As a" at the start of a text - genetic fallacy, specially appeal to authority
• "Trust me" - red herring, specially appeal to emotion (once you contradict the argument there's a good chance that the other will create drama because you didn't blindly trust them, so the whole thing boils down to "accept this as true otherwise you'll hear my meltdown").
• "I don't understand" followed by a counter-argument - strawman. Specially common in Reddit.
• "Actually" - red herring through trivia that is completely irrelevant in the context.

Like, what the hell did I do to deserve that? I don’t know why I let it even bother me because of how obviously immature he is being.

Odds are that you did nothing. He's clearly an emotional vulture, he probably does it towards everyone around him.

I don't recommend framing it as immaturity, as it might give you the false hope that he'll "grow up" and get better over time. Perhaps he gets better, but odds are that he won't.

Some people might say "let it go", or "vengeance is never good, it kills the soul and poisons it". I'm almost 40 and I got something to say about this pacifist discourse:

Screw this masochistic shit. When you turn the other face you are not saying "I'm better than him"; you're saying "he's right in treating me as trash, as I am trash". You want to ruin his life and make him regret existing.

So, here's what I'd do:

• Document every single time that he contacts you, including the contents. Record calls, save e-mails, take screenshots.
• He's likely doing this with other people too, contact them. Former friends and any ex-SO are a good start. Ideally they should do the same as you (document it) and you should act in unison. Do not let him notice that you're acting together though, be as stealthy as possible.

I couldn’t take it anymore, so I blocked him on everything I could think of. [...] This quote was a part of what he commented on my Instagram picture of one of my tools yesterday:

That's actually great for you. It means that he kept contacting you after showed clear desire to not be contacted further. Depending on the local laws this gives you grounds for legal action.

And since the guy is a fucking idiot flaunting the fact that he's an engineer, you might also contact his business. Be polite towards them, but highlight the fact that one of their employees is harassing you. Even if he doesn't get fired, it'll put him in a poor position later on.

He deserves to be put in his place. I don’t know if that’s possible though without me becoming just as petty as he is.

The difference between "being petty" and "standing your ground" is why. You are in a position to screw him up without being petty.

You'll also want to ruin the psychological "kick" that he gets from harassing you. Ignoring him on the surface (while documenting it) is a good approach, because he'll feel unsatisfied but he'll try a bit harder.

Also shield yourself psychologically. Remember - you are not the problem, he is the problem.

Vengeance is not a dish to be served cold. You warm it in the blood of your enemies.

know

Wine is wine, bread is bread. Let us not conflate lack of reasoning (stupidity) with lack of knowledge (ignorance).

My hypothesis: Lemmy has an older userbase, and in general older people feel less of a need to express their emotions. They're busier discussing the topic than highlighting their attitude towards it.

Perhaps cultural reinforcement plays a role, too. As emoticons and emojis are less used, they feel more out of place, so people who'd use them elsewhere avoid them here.

I don't think that you're being overzealous. Far from that - even the phrasing rubs me the wrong way; it conveys "you're something fooling itself that it has a choice. You don't - you aren't a rational human being, you're a user. Do as you're being ordered to. The continued pestering adds "You'll be bossed around until you learn to obey." to the insult.

On a lighter side I agree with Grouchy that you have options. I think that we should start giving those companies the middle finger. And frankly I think that we're better off doing so for other reasons - the data vultures love this sort of "non-confrontational on surface, but bossy upon analysis" discourse.