As others said it was a conscious decision of the developers, as it’s gamification of the system and they aren’t big fans of that.

I agree with this decision.

The Fluff Principle* makes easy-to-judge content get higher scores, and we do see it Lemmy. It isn’t a big deal because fluff ends on its own specific comms, but once you gamify the aggregation of score points, the picture changes - now you’re encouraging people to share content that they believe to score high over content that they believe to be contributive.

Additionally a publicly visible karma enables a bunch of poorly thought mod practices, like karma gating (“you need +500 karma to post here lol”) or automatically banning people with low karma (even if it might come from a single post/comment).

*“Hence what I call the Fluff Principle: on a user-voted news site, the links that are easiest to judge will take over unless you take specific measures to prevent it.” (Source)

I have never met a person who can isolate the moment when Tucker Carlson became Alex Jones. So, where did it come from exactly? …it’s very clear to me both are demons.

Greek and Roman mythologies are almost the same

Kind of. They’re like bananas and plantains - they look similar, they have a similar origin, but once you bite into them they taste completely different.

A lot of the similarities are shared since the beginning, as they backtrack to the ancient Indo-European polytheism; you often see those similarities popping up in Norse mythology and Hinduism, for the same reason.

And beyond that, the Romans went out of their way to interpret foreign gods as variations of their own native gods, or outright copy them; not just the Greek ones, even stuff like Isis and Yahweh. So those similarities between Roman and Greek mythologies got actively reinforced once the Romans conquered Greece, and you got gods like Apollo and Bacchus being borrowed.

But the Romans still had their own specific gods, without Greek equivalents; like Janus Bifrons, who governs transitions and gates. And I feel like there’s some “humanity” in the Greek myths absent from the Roman myths, almost like one saw the gods as powerful but flawed individuals and another as aspects of nature. For example you can cheat a Greek god and get away with it, but not a Roman one.

[Sorry for the info dump. I love this stuff.]

I also think that it’s interesting. And I wonder if it’s something shared by the “collective memory” of humankind, or if it’s just that flooding events are so common and impactful that any culture is almost certain to develop that myth, given enough time.

Do you want to elaborate more on how politeness cant be explained by gricean maximes?

The Gricean maxims only handle the informative part of a conversation; they don’t handle, for example, the emotional impact of the utterance on the hearer, or the social impact on the speaker. As such, in situations where politeness is a concern, you’ll see people consistently violating those maxims.

I’ll give you an example. Suppose two people in a room: Alice and Bob. Alice has a lot of cake, she’s eating some, and Bob is craving cake.

If Bob were to ask Alice for some cake, Bob could simply say “gimme cake”. It fits the four maxims to the letter - and yet typically people don’t do this, they request things through convoluted ways, like “You wouldn’t mind sharing some cake with me, would you?” (violating the maxim of manner), or even “You know, I was in a rush today, so I had no breakfast…” (implying “I’m hungry”, and violating the maxims of quantity and relation).

To handle why Bob would do this, you need to backseat Grice’s Logic for a moment and use another framework - such as Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory, it explains stuff like this really well.

This is probably obvious for you (and for me), and yet you still see some pragmaticists shoehorning everything into Grice’s logic. Or some doing the exact opposite and shoehorning it into Austin’s speech acts, or B&L Politeness Theory, etc. It sounds a lot like “I got a hammer, so everything must be a nail”.

To the latter point: My biggest gripe with linguistics is the tendency to boil everything down to a simple system.

Yes, yes, and yes. You can see Language (as human faculty) as a single system but, if you do so, any accurate representation of that system is so big that it’s completely useless, like a map as large as the territory.

That’s already a tendency in Linguistics in general, but in the case of the generativists it’s their explicit goal.

To be frank the only ones that I know a bit in depth are the Guaraní and Kaingang ones, as those are the two main Amerindian peoples here in Paraná. I’m completely clueless on the Yanomami one, for example.

Accordingly to some Guaraní myths, Kuarahy (the Sun) and Jasy (the Moon) are brothers, with the Moon being the younger one. As their mother gave birth, the celestial jaguars (a type of evil spirit) killed her and stole the children, raising them in her place. The children eventually grew up and learned the truth, unleashing their vengeance towards the jaguars, killing almost all of them. They spared a pregnant female, who would eventually become the ancestor of all mundane jaguars.

That’s the origin of such enmity between man and jaguar - as men took Kuarahy and Jasy’s side, and the jaguar their ancestors’. (Jaguars fulfil in Guarani mythology a role similar to the bear in the European ones. It’s an animal to fear, to revere, to avoid, to respect, but that you’re still bound to fight).

In another myth, that would happen before the brothers’ revenge, one of the celestial jaguars (called Charia) was fishing on a river. Charia didn’t notice the brothers, so Kuarahy decided to troll Charia a wee bit - diving and pulling Charia’s hook and line, to imitate a large fish. Charia pulled the fishing rod with all force, falling behind, amusing the brothers. Kuarahy did this three times, and in all three times Charia fell for it.

Then Jasy, amused, said: “now it’s my turn!”. He dives and pulls the hook, like his brother did. However this time Charia was quicker - he fished Jasy, killed him with a wooden club, and brought Jasy’s corpse home as if it was fish, to eat with his wife.

As they were cooking “the fish”, Kuarahy went to Charia’s home, and he was invited to partake on the fish. He thanked Charia, but he said that he’d only eat some maize soup; he also asked for the fish bones, allegedly for stock. He took those bones to a remote place, and used his own divinity to resurrect his brother.

That’s why lunar eclipses happen - the Moon gets devoured by the evil spirit, with the reddish hue in the sky being the Moon’s blood. And the Moon only resurrects, always as a full Moon, because his brother Sun saves and resurrects him.

For further kawaii, I think that the Mboi-Tatá is based on the same constrictor boas that some people keep as pets. It doesn’t inject venom, it sees larger animals as potential prey, and it likes to sleep in burrows, just like the boa.

There’s quite a few other Guaraní myths involving serpents, like the Mboi Tu’i, or “serpent-parrot”. It’s a giant serpent with two legs around the waist, the head of a parrot, and plumes on the head and the neck. It has cursed eyes and a terror-inspiring scream, but it eats only fruits and protects aquatic animals, specially amphibians.

In what I believe to be the Pre-Columbian version of the myth, that serpent-parrot was the second of the Seven Legendary Monsters - the offspring of a cursed couple; their father was the evil spirit Taú and their mother was the most beautiful woman of the tribe, Keraná, who sloped together.

In another story the Mboi Tu’i was actually born as a parrot, and it had free access to The Land of No Evil. However as some mestizos shared him fermented wasp honey (i.e. mead) and the parrot got drunk, it spilled the beans with the mestizos and told them how to enter The Land of No Evil. As a punishment the parrot was partially transformed into a snake, losing the ability to fly and reach the sacred land.

I still get into this sort of dumb argument all the time, so I kind of get why the other users were arguing the troll - even if you don’t know why their comment pisses you off, you still get pissed and it’s hard to not react when pissed.

Once upon a time, there was torrential rain. Such heavy downpour that the animals saw their homes flooding. They run to the hills, the flooding got worse; they run to higher hills, the flooding was still getting worse; eventually they couldn’t help but gather together onto the largest hill of the region.

Such a ruckus wouldn’t go unnoticed by the Mboi Guazú, the giant serpent; she woke up from her deep slumber, feeling a bit peckish. Unlike most animals she could see in the dark, and what she saw was a feast. Such abundance of prey! She could even ignore their meat, and go straight for the tastiest bits: the eyes.

So she ate the other animals’ eyes. One by one. She ate so many eyes that they wouldn’t fit the serpent’s belly, but she kept eating them. So the eyes started appearing over her body, in-between her scales, creepily emitting light. The more eyes she ate, the more eyes she would have over her body, to the point that she was bright, she was light, she was fire.

She has become the Mboi-Tatá, or the “fire serpent”. And she still roams those lands, looking for prey, burning the path as she goes through. If you ever find her while roaming, don’t ever forget to close your eyes - and hope for the best.

Okay, that doesn’t answer your question but I was in the mood of sharing a bit of the Guarani mythology, the fire serpent. This version of the myth is the one from the Mbyá.

If anyone wants I don’t mind sharing other Guaraní myths. I also remember a few Kaingang ones.

I’m checking the Curated Tumblr thread and modlog. Holy fuck, what a shitty user - clearly behaving passive-aggressively. I’ve seen more oldschool forums being ruined by those than by the ones hurling insults.

[Warning: the following is my opinion, not some incontestable truth.]

It’s less about bending rules and more about enforcing them by spirit, not letter.

Reusing your example: I think that you did the right call there - sure, the post doesn’t “share” a cool website, but it’s still about one. It might not fit the letter of “find a cool or useful website on the internet. Share it here so others Lemmings can bookmark it too.”, but it’s still well within the overall spirit of the community, and why that rule is there on first place.

Another example: my comms often have a rule against off-topic, but if people start some friendly chitchat in the comments (they do it often) I leave them alone. Because the spirit of the rule is to avoid content that would derail the community, and that chitchat won’t do it.

You’ll often get rule lawyers trying to “mmm, ackshyually, the rule says that orange socks aren’t allowed, but my post has a reddish yellow sock”. That’s unavoidable even if you enforce rules by the letter; nothing ever written is completely unambiguous, there’s always some grounds for alternate interpretations. As such don’t feel discouraged by them.

Note however that what I’m saying does not mean that you should disregard the letter of the rules. Don’t - the rules should be still listed in a succinct and accurate way, both to guide your comms’ users and justify your actions; it’s a matter of transparency. Instead edit the written rules over time, to address issues that makes their letter betray their spirit.

Muito provavelmente, é spam. E o uso da expressão “vamos te ajudar a entender” sugere-me que o texto foi escrito por robô.

Ou seja. Melhor não interagir com este djanho.

Both are cats.

Kika thinks that human arms are made of rubber. She asks to be petted, and then gets further and further from you, and then looks at you with a “why did you stop?” face. If you stand up to get closer to her, she runs towards a specific corner of the house (that changes from time to time, currently her cardboard box), because apparently being petted there is the bomb.

Siegfrieda has some deep connection with… mats. She likes them so much that she never leaves them alone, they’re always out of the place and messy. The kitchen mat in special - sometimes she rolls herself into a makizushi with it. (And yet she still doesn’t know how to get inside her pocket-folded blanket by herself.)

Most of the time I make my meals from the scratch. Exceptions are usually takeaway food; I only buy stuff like frozen lasagne and the likes very rarely, it’s expensive and it doesn’t taste as good. (In fact even a few of my spices is homemade.)

As others said, in your case (provided that you’re the one in charge of cooking) it might be sensible to buy the store-bought pancake mix for the sake of your wife, and then prepare the rest of the food as you typically do.

you dont. Because chomskyite grammar sucks sweaty balls.

Well, that explains a lot.

Frankly the way that I handle syntax nowadays is completely heterodox - the tree is just a convenient way to represent some pseudocode-like “rules”, nothing else. My framework is completely proto-scientific and it probably has more holes than a sieve, but it isn’t a big deal since my main area of interest is Historical Linguistics anyway.

On pragmatics: it’s a really amazing field to dig into, but professors with “strange interpretations” are a dime a dozen. Often because they’re too stubborn to ditch their favourite framework even when it doesn’t work for something - for example, trying to explain politeness expressions through the maxims won’t work, and yet some still try to do it.

I did well in pragmatics. My bane was syntax - that professor did a really poor job even to explain the basics, for example I still don’t know why the hell you’re supposed to spam XP, X’ and X in generative trees even if they won’t branch out anyway.

What you said immediately reminded me Grice’s “Logic and Conversation”. The author outline what he calls “conversational maxims”, that resemble a lot your five bullet points - except that they don’t just apply to technical writing, they’re more like principles that we “automatically” use in human conversation. They are:

1. Maxim of quantity - “be as informative as possible and needed, and no more.”
2. Maxim of quality - “be truthful; don’t give false or unconfirmed info.”
3. Maxim of relation - “be relevant; say things that are pertinent to the discussion.”
4. Maxim of manner - “be clear, brief, and orderly; avoid obscurity and ambiguity.”

Those four maxims are constantly being violated by the speakers, as they’re in conflict with each other. For example, clarity (maxim of manner) often requires simplifying things, to the point that they aren’t as accurate (maxim of quality) as before.

This is relevant here because, if you can’t avoid violating those maxims, you need to reach a compromise. And good writing is about finding a good compromise for the target readers.

I’m fine with replies correctly filling what I’ve deleted with actual and meaningful info.

Instead, most of the time, I regret it due to some reply misrepresenting what I said - because the replier is now assuming shit, or interpreting literally a figure of speech that I’ve used for brevity, etc.

I don’t know, even if I’m extremely prone to write huge walls of text, and need to actually take my time to abridge them.

(And every bloody time that I do abridge it, some reply makes me regret it.)