This account is being kept for the posterity, but it won’t see further activity past February.

If you want to contact me, I’m at /u/lvxferre@mander.xyz

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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: April 9th, 2021

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  • Sorry for such a late reply.

    I’m not sure if I’m part of this big exodus or not. I’ve been toying with the idea of migrating this comm for months, as lemmy.ml is focused on open source and privacy while mander.xyz is focused on sciences. It’ll be more discoverable there, it’ll be easier to access it across the Fediverse, and it’ll be easier to be on the same page as the admins when it comes to the rules.

    The straw that broke the camel’s back, for me, was not even politics. Or even which sort of content they allow/deny in their instance. It was how they handled another lemmy.ml community; it shows that they’re completely unprepared as a team to handle users in an acceptable way.







  • It isn’t “Hangul” that is saving the language, but the fact that it’s getting an orthography. That orthography could be theoretically in any writing system - not just Latin or Arabic (both already exist for Cia-Cia, contrariwise to what the video claims), but even a native one or Cyrillic or even, dunno, the Cherokee syllabary.

    Abidin looks informed on the matter; the same cannot be said about whoever produced this video. I’ll highlight a few issues.

    [0:33] - pretty much all languages are “syllable-based”. They organise sounds into syllables. The video is likely trying to convey that it’s a CV (consonant, vowel, repeat) language, unlike, say, Russian or English (that cram quite a lot of consonants in a single syllable).

    [0:36] The video is trying to use “transliterated” as a posh synonym for “spelled”; both are not the same thing. Transliteration is to convert text from a script from another; for example, “Quis credis esse, Bellum?” (Latin, using the Latin script) → “Кўис кредис ессе, Беллум?” (Latin, using the Cyrillic script instead) is transliteration.

    And you can spell pretty much any language in any writing system. The association between grapheme and sounds (or phonemes) is arbitrary.

    You might say “but the Latin alphabet doesn’t have a letter for /ɓ/!” - well, it doesn’t have a letter for /ʃ/ either. Italian handled it by spelling it ⟨sci⟩, English as ⟨sh⟩, Polish as ⟨sz⟩, Portuguese kind of repurposed ⟨x⟩. And the current Latin spelling for Cia-Cia - that you can check here - handled /ɓ/ just fine, using a similar approach as the Hangul one.



  • Persuasion itself goes from neutral to negative, depending on your moral standards. (They’re partially individual, partially cultural.) Because at the end of the day it boils down to “I want you to believe in this, because I benefit from your belief.”

    And you definitively see some backslash against this aspect of advertisement; same deal with personal communication, a person being excessively rhetoric for their own benefit is immediately labelled distrustful.

    Then over that propaganda adds further layers of nastiness, like:

    • Often, the one doing propaganda is supposed to defend your interests. Not their/its own.
    • You’ll usually need to omit and lie far more for propaganda than for other things. Because it’s usually a complex matter that involves society as a whole, not just your personal decision.
    • Since the political landscape changes, the discourse being propagated may flip 180°.



  • At the very least, I’d recommend you:

    • gloves - because you’ll get really close to that gross shit. You don’t want to touch it.
    • a sponge - it doesn’t need to be new; your old kitchen sponge is enough, just don’t use it again in the kitchen. Use the yellow side to spread the cleaning agent, and the green side to remove obnoxious grime stuck to something. (Do it gently, and only with a really old sponge, to avoid scratching the surface.)
    • a bucket - mostly to mix some soap and water.
    • a dry rag - mostly for finishing/drying. A cringey old shirt that you won’t be using again is usually enough.
    • toilet brush - don’t use the sponge to clean inside the toilet bowl; you’ll be spreading the bacteria from your shit and piss to the rest of the restroom.

    Everyone has the cleaning agents that they swear upon, so look for something that works for you. For me it’s

    • alcohol vinegar - to get rid of that brown crust in the sink (water in my city is hard as a brick) and around the shower drain. I usually apply it, wait a few minutes, then use the sponge to scrub it a bit. Then I remove the vinegar with the rag.
    • bleach - exclusively used inside the toilet bowl. I squish some bleach there, then scrub it with the toilet brush, then flush it off, making sure that there’s no bleach behind.
    • disinfecting agent - I squish a bit of that inside the toilet bowl and just leave it there. It smells good, and it gets rid of the bacteria.
    • an ammonium-based cleaning agent - I squish it on obvious grime on the walls (except the above), then scrub it with the sponge.
    • soap and water - to “wash” the walls with the sponge.
    • plain water with some disinfecting agent - to rinse it. Then I just remove the excess water with the rag and let the restroom to dry naturally (with closed doors otherwise my cats will step on the bathroom, step outside, and now I got to clean the bathroom again plus the corridor and furniture).

    Important detail: do not mix any two of the cleaning agents that I’ve mentioned. Specially not ammonium and bleach.

    For reference, the disinfecting agent that I use is called “pinho sol”, but I have no idea if it’s sold outside Brazil. You probably have some similar product wherever you live.




  • [Note: this is my personal take, not Chomsky’s]

    We can recognise colours and things even without properly labelling them. (Colour example: I have no clue on how to call the colour of my cat’s fur, but I’m fairly certain to remember thus recognise it.) However, it’s hard to handle them logically this way.

    • if you are outside and it is raining, then you get wet
    • if you get wet, you might get sick
    • so if you are outside and it is raining, you might get sick

    And at least for me this is the main role of the internal monologue. It isn’t just about repeating the state of the things, it’s about connecting pieces of info together, as if I was explaining the link to another person.

    Perhaps those without verbal internal monologue/dialogue have a more persistent innate language, that is not overwritten by common external language?

    Possible; I don’t know, really. It’s also possible that the “innate language” doesn’t really exist, only the innate ability to learn a language; but that ability is already enough to structure simple reasoning.


  • Chomsky’s concept of UG (universal grammar) is able to handle this. Since there would be a chunk of language that is innate (universal), that feral child would share it. So, as a conclusion from that, even if the feral child isn’t expressing it through vocalisation, since they lack an “application” of the UG (like Nahuatl, Mandarin, Quechua, English, Kikongo etc.), they’d still have some rather simple internal monologue.

    …that said I think that Chomsky’s UG is full of shit. I do agree with him that the faculty of language might have developed first to structure thought; but my reasoning resembles a bit more yours, the role of language would be to formalise thought. Thinking without language is possible in the same way as moving across a village without roads - it’s doable but clunky, and you’ll likely take far more effort than with proper roads/ a language.

    Not to challenge Chomsky on his own turf

    Don’t worry. Everyone and their dog challenges him. Including himself, he’s often contradicting his own earlier statements.




  • It depends a lot on what you consider “toxic”.

    If it’s just about intrusive off-topic political discussion, then I fully agree with you: it’s far more common in Lemmy than in Reddit, and sometimes it reaches a point that even people who’d otherwise enjoy discussing politics roll their eyes and say “not this shit again”.

    However, if “toxic” includes other forms of undesirable behaviour, then Lemmy is probably less toxic than Reddit. For example: while sometimes you do see here disingenuous and deliberate stupidity, “waah TL;DR!!”, the “I don’t understand” conveying disagreement, or passive aggressiveness, in Reddit they pop up all the time.

    So, what do you consider toxic? Depending on that, the other users’ experiences might be really similar or really different from yours.