Alcohol. Once a week or two. Usually cheap wine, homemade liqueur, or beer.

Three hypotheses:

1. It’s easier to find news content than other stuff. And your typical forumverse user is more likely to share what they find, because they know this place needs more content.
2. News content gets more engagement than hobby content.
3. Feedback loop: more news content attracts people who are mostly interested on news content, and those people post more news content.

My all feed can empty pretty quickly when I turn on the politics/news filter, I just wish there were more chill posts.

That’s also my experience with manual subscription in Lemmy.

A good deconstruction points out blatant flaws of some trope (conventionalised storytelling pattern) or even a whole genre; often the ones people take for granted. And in the process, it encourages the subsequent works to evolve, refine, diversify.

I’ll give you an example. In isekai anime/manga/light novel series there’s the “summoning” trope: one or more natives of a world do some magic or divine mumbo-jumbo, so the MC (main character) gets transported from another world (often Earth) into the first one. Often because those natives want the MC to do something, a “quest”, like defeating the demon lord.

But wait a minute. They’re kidnapping the MC from their home world, for some quest the MC has zero to do with. So odds are the summoners are really shitty people, who shit on basic human rights like freedom. And they’ll value the MC not as a person, but as a tool for that task; for example if they want the MC to kill the demon lord, the MC will get judged by how strong they are.

If the trope is played straight, all of that is glossed over; you accept it as part of the universe of that work, and that’s it. But the issue is so blatant that a lot of series popped up, deconstructing that trope; e.g.

• Chillin’ in Another World with Level 2 Super Cheat Powers — MC is supposed to kill the demon lord, but his fighting potential didn’t pop up as soon as he was summoned. So the king dumps him in a forest: out of sight, out of mind.
• Failure Frame — the goddess who summoned the MC is a fucking piece of shit, to the point she ranks the summoned heroes (yup, there are many) based on their powers. The MC got an apparently shitty power, so he gets dumped into a dungeon full of monsters to die.
• Nidome no Yuusha — once the MC kills the “big bad”, the princess who summoned him kills the MC, in a mix of prejudice and ruthless pragmatism.

And so many others. In turn, this forced a lot of series to handle the summoning trope in a more acceptable way, like:

• Cooking with Wild Game — summoner? No need for that! The MC is in Japan, then he’s in another world, and both the MC and readers get puzzled on why that happened. That’s it. And he isn’t in some quest either, except the one he decides for himself, because he’s grateful to the people who gave him a home.
• Risou no Himo Seikatsu — there is a summoner, but she’s a fairly reasonable person. She summons the MC and gives him a choice, that TL;DR to “if you don’t want to stay in this world, I’ll send you back to Earth tomorrow”.
• Headhunted to Another World — the guy is summoned by the demon lord, who’s pragmatic but fair. And the demon lord didn’t do it because the MC got some amazing fighting power or whatever, but to perform the same tasks as he did in Earth as a sales manager.

So, note how the isekai genre got way more diversified than it was, simply because of that deconstruction. And even works playing that trope straight at least try to justify it better.

But it isn’t just isekai, or this trope. Deconstructions in general are like this.

Great. Now I want to see Brazil doing it, instead of short-sighted laws about verifying your age to see porn. Specially given how egregious Meta is under its territory; people treat you like a weirdo for not having Facebook, assumers think you should have Instagram, and everybody and their dog has that bloody WhatsApp, to the point not using it is social suicide. If at least civil servants were required to use something else than WhatsApp there would be some room to push for alternatives.

My comment doesn’t, but the OP does. Four downvotes in Beehaw is quite a lot, given the local users don’t downvote. Same thread is in the negatives in one of the cross-posts even if it’s on-topic.

And, like. I get why people would react negatively towards the product itself, but I don’t think it’s good tone to react like this towards the news being shared, you know?

People, please stop shooting the messenger. Please.

With that out of the way: I wish Mozilla didn’t waste so much money on chasing the latest trend of the season, and instead used it for its main products. Including Thunderbird. The one asking for donations.

Some years from now Thunderbolt will likely pop up in this list, of abandoned Mozilla products. Because it isn’t the result of Mozilla finding a niche to create an AI product to benefit users; it’s simply execs chasing the latest trend.

*Beehaw users are likely not seeing this, but this post has a bunch of downvotes.

All dogs are gold. At least in spirit!

For me he’s mostly black (at least in this picture), but I can get why you’d call him grey as a whole.

Thanks! I immediately thought they were a troll, but I can’t really act on assumptions, so… I let the troll out themself, then act.

Oh, that reminds me someone I banned some months ago. It went like this:

OP shared some on-topic but borderline NSFW content, in a comm I mod. I requested (not demanded; just requested) OP to use the NSFW tag, so people (incl. me) could go wild discussing it, without making others uncomfortable. OP did it just fine, no issue, I know that poster and they’re a fairly reasonable person.

Then a second user started stirring shit up about my request. Their complain was TL;DR “I assume you’re overly sensitive, grow a thick skin” and using an ableist slur as a slur, in a way that targets a marginalised group. I gave them a 3d ban. Just three days, as it was first offence… and because if you give this sort of user enough rope, they’ll quickly find a way to ban themselves.

Bingo. And as soon as I banned them, they started DM’ing me. Ban elevated to permaban, messages reported, and admins eventually banned them. :-)

Most people agree with her. But for me calling such a warm tone “grey” is weird, it’s like calling your typical red apple “pink” instead of “red”, you know? To complicate it further I typically refer to fur colour with the same words I’d use for human hair colour, and I’m not sure they don’t map 1:1 with colours used for objects.

(Another situation this pops up is when talking about magenta. But it’s more like a discussion about the “main” colour vs. hue.)

Man, colour perception is weird

It is! And colour words are weird too. And they somewhat influence your perception, too.

I often get into similar “fights”, but because of mismatching colour terms. For example, if Siegfrieda’s coat is “cinza” grey:

For me the colour is a bit too warm to be “cinza” grey, it’s more like “castanho” brown. But my mum insists it’s grey.

(She’s probably in the right, though. My mental colour palette is all fucked up.)

If there’s any antisemitism in this matter, it’s coming from a government that uses the Jewish victims of the Holocaust as meat shields against criticism of the ongoing Nakba.

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I wish I saw this link years ago.

For a long time I’ve been noticing the exact same behaviour in social media, and I’ve been calling it “witch hunting”. I’m glad others already noticed it, and gave it a name.

That makes sense; it would be a mix of “if you can do it and I can’t, you must be cheating” and “your a bot than you’re arguement is invalid” ad hominem.

I think unnecessary combativeness might be also a factor. I’ve noticed on the internet people who want to fight against “something”, it doesn’t matter what; so they pick any low-hanging fruit they can find to fight you.

“Have you seen orca fashion? They put salmon over their heads! That’s so démodé.”

I’m actually using more those resources (em dashes, three points lists, “it’s worth noting that”, “it’s not X, it’s Y”, etc.) after AI popped up. They’re a damn good way to detect assumptive people, eager to conclude based on little to no info or reasoning; the same ones OP is complaining about. They don’t want a conversation at all, they want to whine, so if you give them a low-hanging fruit you can detect them early and block them as noise and dead weight.

That’s in my “casual” writing style, though. Professionally (as a translator) I mostly play by the tune, trying to preserve the style of the original. (Plus I barely translate things into English, it’s usually into Portuguese, very rarely Italian.)

That might not necessarily be the case – there is a possibility every example is completely organic – but it’s a sign of the times that we can’t just relax and assume the things we see and hear were made by people.

Guys, I found em dashes! The author is a bot! Bring me my pitchfork! /jk (those are en dashes, by the way.)

My “boss” on the other hand is always getting in the way of my work. She keeps tapping my arm, as if saying “pet me! pet me!”; I need to stop writing, slap her butt a few times (that’s working place harassment, I know!), and then she’ll stop pestering me.

My take is that cetacean communication is, as far as we’ve analysed and attested it, proto-linguistic: it shows some of the features you’d expect from Language¹, but not the complete package.

This case is a good example. It’s showing low order units equivalent to phonemes; but it isn’t showing all that recursive “use blocks to build blocks” structure we see in Language e.g. [gestemes² | phonemes] building morphemes, morphemes building words, words building clauses, clauses building sentences, sentences building utterances, all of those to convey meaning.

Now let me point out some issues with the article. Mostly as correction.

[title] Sperm whales’ communication closely parallels human language, study finds

Correction: “Sperm whales’ communication closely parallels aspects of human language, study finds”. Namely the abstraction of sounds into phonemes, or of gestual articulations into gestemes.

Not only do sperm whale have a form of “alphabet”

No, they don’t. In fact a lot of humans don’t have any sort of alphabet, with or without quotation marks. What they do have is a form of phonemes.

The distinction is important here because phonemes³ pop up instinctively for us, but an alphabet is a rather later learned development of some human societies. And the cetaceans in question likely have it instinctive too, like we did.

Analysis of these clicks shows that the whales can differentiate vowels through the short or elongated clicks or through rising or falling tones, using patterns similar to languages such as Mandarin, Latin and Slovenian.

The video explains this better, but: note Mandarin has phonemic tone but not vowel length, and Latin has phonemic vowel length but no tone. For a better example of a language combining both, check Ancient Greek⁴. (For Slovenian it depends on dialect, some have tone⁴ and some don’t.)

The structure of the whales’ communication has “close parallels in the phonetics and phonology of human languages, suggesting independent evolution”

I think a lot of the “underlying” structure might be actually shared across mammals: it’s the ability to abstract a variable signal into discrete units. The convergent evolution in this case would be only to use that underlying structure with the sounds produced by one’s own species.

Project Ceti has set a goal of being able to comprehend 20 different vocalized expressions, relating to actions such as diving and sleeping, within the next five years.

One thing the article doesn’t mention is the potential for those being community-specific. As in: different vocalisations mean the same thing in different groups of sperm whale.

Side note this is fucking cool, and props to the researchers behind this. I wish the article did a better job conveying their findings. I’m reading the links provided by the article right now, and they look amazing.)

1. I’m using “Language” with a capital “L” to refer to the human faculty. While “language” with a minuscule “l” refers to some system using that faculty; like Mandarin, Latin or Slovenian.
2. Gesteme: the sign language equivalent of phonemes. It’s a set of gestual articulations used in a way that contrasts with other sets of gestual articulations.
3. At least, the process of organising sounds into phonemes. Which sounds will end as which phonemes vary wildly, as those depend on the language, not on Language.
4. Pitch accent used contrastively is a simple type of tone system.