lvxferre

joined 2 years ago
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[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 1 points 4 hours ago

For most part pretty good. A bit worried about small things: I need to lose some kilos, my old cat is becoming crankier by the day, I got no idea on what to prepare for lunch tomorrow, my mum changes ideas on what she wants for our living room furniture by the day, this sort of thing.

Also excited with the fact it's Thursday, tomorrow is Friday, and Friday means deep-fried food snacks in our "home bar".

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 1 points 4 hours ago

From my experience, that isn't an issue; eventually the salt at the top dissolves, and since brine is heavier than water it sinks, so it mixes itself. (Sometimes a gentle shake helps too.) I do it this way because the resulting salinity is a bit more consistent, than when using a brine with a fixed salt/water ratio.

A third option is to eyeball the amount of water you'll be using, weight it, do the maths on the amount of salt you'll need for the water+veggies, make the brine separately with that water, then pour it over the veggies. It takes a bit more work, but if you're worried about the salt not dissolving properly, it's a good option.

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 2 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (2 children)

The lowest safe amount is 1.5% salt for the total weight of everything else. So, for example: if you're fermenting 300g of peppers and cover them with 200ml = 200g of water, you should have at least (200+300)*1.5% = 7.5g salt.

When preserving veggies I usually do this by weighting the veggies and water together then adding the salt, instead of making the brine separately. Salt dissolves easily anyway.

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 4 points 8 hours ago

I would recommend Linux Mint because, first, it's the one everyone says, and second, it was the Linux OS that I started with, fresh off Windows.

Both are bad reasons to pick a distro to recommend. Better reasons would be

  1. You got some experience with that distro and you're willing to help the newbie in question, with issues that they might have.
  2. The distro offers sane out-of-the-box defaults and pre-installed GUI software.
  3. The distro is reliable, and won't give the newbie headaches later on.

why not just skip the middleman and get right into the distros that have a bit more meat on them?

Because a middleman distro is practically unavoidable.

You don't know the best distro for someone else; and if the person is a newbie, odds are they don't know it for themself either. So the odds the person will eventually ditch that distro you recommended and stick with something else are fairly large.

Cinnamon vs. KDE Plasma

I have both installed although I practically only use Cinnamon (due to personal tastes; I do think Plasma is great). It's by no ways as finicky as the author claims it to be.

Plasma is more customisable than Cinnamon indeed, but remember what I said about you not knowing the best distro for someone else? Well, you don't know the best DE either. You should rec something simple that'll offer them an easy start, already expecting them to ditch it later on.

So, why don't I just recommend Linux Mint with KDE Plasma? Well, the cool thing about abandoning Cinnamon and embracing KDE Plasma is that it unlocks a ton of distros we can pick from.

That's circular reasoning: you should ditch Mint because of Cinnamon, and you should ditch Cinnamon because it allows you to ditch Mint.

Bazzite, Novara, CachyOS

Or you can install all those gaming features in any other distro of your choice.

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 1 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

Não sou português, então falo aqui como observador externo.

Todos os problemas psicológicos e sociais mencionados no PL afetam adultos também; talvez menos, mas não de forma negligível. Então, se o objetivo do PL fosse realmente coibir dano, criaria restrições contra características danosas das mídias sociais. O ônus das leis sendo propostas estaria nestas redes, e não no usuário.

Em outras palavras, o PL proibiria o que define no artigo 4º, alínea h (design aditivo); que a Meta e similares mudem seus sistemas. Mas, ao invés de fazer isto, cria uma barreira etária onde o usuário ou fica proibido de usar a rede, ou deve provar que pode.

Aliás, como o usuário provará que tem mais do que 16 anos, sem erodir o anonimato online? Anonimato é essencial para proteger tanto a privacidade como a expressão livre de todos.

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 8 points 17 hours ago

Gus, Linus, Pam, Willy are a bit too old. Jas, Leo, Vincent are a big no, they're too young.

That leaves Sandy and Clint. Both would be viable with some subtle changes:

  • Sandy could leave someone to work on her place, I guess? Going between the desert and valley to commute all day seems awful
  • Clint needs better characterisation, so he stops being seen as "the creepo who's after Emily" to become a cool char on his own

Alternatively CA might decide to add new characters. I think it would be fun, specially if they migrate to the valley after the player does. It makes the place feel a bit more alive, you know?

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yes, there is. But it's more like a bunch of tiny nature reserves in the middle of a sprawling metropolis, full of "BUY IT!" flashy signs. When the old web was more like an expansion of wilderness, you didn't need to look for amateur stuff to find it.

(I agree Lemmy has that same vibe.)

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

The "accent" is completely normal; every language we know changes a wee bit how we use all the other languages. Even the native ones¹. Linguists call it "language transfer", or "linguistic interference".

Do you get an accent if you don’t use a language often then try to talk in it again? Is that even a thing?

I think it's the opposite: your Cantonese is interfering on your English more, not because you've been using English less, but because you've been using Cantonese more. If for some reason people in your home decided to speak something else among yourselves, you'd get that Cantonese interference being slowly replaced with interference from the new language.

I fucking hate my voice… // Do y’all like your voice?

No, I bloody hate my own recorded voice too. The pitch feels really off.

I think it's fairly normal to hate it though. It's not just the mismatch between hearing it "through the skull" vs. "from the outside", but also because our own internal "abstraction" interferes on it.

For example. Let's say you're saying "wug"² /wʌg/. Then you record it, and you realise you aren't really pronouncing it as [wɐg], it's more like [wəɣ] or [ʋɐg] or even [ɰʌ:]. Everyone was hearing you pronounce it a bit slurred, but you don't notice it yourself because inside your head it's crystal clear.

If this worries you, don't — it's like this for every single body out there.

  1. Anecdote time: people sometimes ask me where I'm from, in the city my family has been living for four gens, because my Portuguese got some "accent". This bugged me for some time, so I investigated it further and... to keep it short, it's a bunch of phonetic features from my second language, Italian. That I started learning when I was, like, 8yo? 10yo? It's fairly subtle though, non-Southerners are quick to point out my thick Southern accent, it's only other Southerners who ask me where I'm from.
  2. "Wug" is a nonsense word. I'm just using it for the example.
[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 4 points 1 day ago (3 children)

still, the modern web feels different. even if HTML5 and WASM can do everything flash could and then some, it’s not the same… you don’t really see websites filled with amateur web games anymore.

I guess the tools are better but the passion is gone. The whole web was amateur back then; now it's all... you know.

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 3 points 1 day ago

Nowadays this would be seen as insanity. (Back then, too.) Like, Flash wasn't exactly the safest platform out there, specially not to handle money.

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 4 points 1 day ago

Snaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaake! Snaaaaaaaaake!

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 25 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (7 children)

We remember it fondly because it made animation accessible for young creatives

And simple games, too. But yes, I agree with you; what people remember fondly isn't Flash itself, it's what it enabled.

 

Key points:

  • The word surzhyk (суржик) ['surʒek] in Ukrainian originally refers to a mix of grains, or a flour made with that mix. It's being used to refer to a "mixed" Ukrainian + Russian linguistic variety. Kind of like Spanglish, but more like Portuñol.
  • The Russian invasion of Ukraine shows people in central and eastern Ukraine using surzhyk more, and Russian less.
  • Acc. to the text the surzhyk being used nowadays is markedly different from the one used in the 30s, as if the mix was originally "some Ukrainian with lots of Russian" and nowadays "some Russian with lots of Ukrainian".
  • Attitudes towards surzhyk seem to be changing, too; from negative to positive.

Note: there's no way around politics, when it comes to language; it's an intrinsically political topic. However, I'd like to ask other users here to keep any potential discussion on-topic for this community. Also, please do not conflate populations with governments, OK?

 

Quick summary: excavations from the Boğazköy-Hattusha archaeological site (present-day Turkey) unearthed a tablet. That tablet is written mostly in Hittite, but it mentions an idiom from another language, "of the land of Kalašma", that would be spoken in the northwest of the Hittite empire (also in what's today Turkey).

Said language would be an Anatolian language; so it's a close-ish relative to Hittite (and Luwian, Palaic, etc.), and ultimately related to Russian, English, Italian, Hindi etc. (it's all Indo-European).

EDIT: @chemical_cutthroat@lemmy.world linked an even better source. Enjoy!

 

I shared this recipe in another comm, then someone linked me this one, so I'm sharing the recipe here.

Picture stolen from some random site, but the recipe I'm sharing is the one I prepare. And I know the idea of sweet pasta might not be for everyone, but don't rule it out without trying, it's actually tasty.

Ingredients:

  • 150g pasta. Short pasta with lots of texture works better; fusilli, farfalle, penne, they all work great, avoid something like spaghetti or linguine.
  • water and salt, to cook the pasta. Yes, salt.
  • 500g strawberries, washed, chopped into eights.
  • around 4 tablespoons of sugar; more or less to taste.
  • [optional] a drop of vanilla extract
  • 200g sour cream. See the bottom for alternatives.
  • [optional] peppermint leaves and/or crushed ricotta, for garnish

Preparation:

  1. Boil the pasta in the same way you'd do it for savoury dishes, but use only half the amount of salt you like. It should be around a teaspoon of salt per litre of water.
  2. Reserve 1/3 of the chopped strawberries aside. Add sugar and vanilla extract to the rest, then mash them together with a fork. Add the sour cream and mix it well.
  3. Add pasta to the plate, then the strawberry/cream mix over it, mix it a bit, then pour the 1/3 of the chopped strawberries you reserved over the pasta. Then any garnish you might be using.
  4. [Optional] Chill before serving.

Notes:

I often prepare this recipe with yoghurt instead of sour cream, for health reasons. I never tried using coconut cream but it feels like it might be a good option, for those who'd rather avoid dairy. If your concern is the fat instead, @kuberoot@discuss.tchncs.de also mentions it being prepare with twaróg = cottage cheese. And, worst hypothesis, it's fine to omit the sour cream, IMO it tastes incomplete but still nice.

You can serve this recipe either warm or chilled. Personally I think it tastes way better chilled.

Raspberries or mulberries also work really well for this recipe.

It might be tempting to sub the salt from the pasta water with sugar, but I don't recommend it, the contrast between the sweet/sour "sauce" and the salty pasta is really nice.

 

The spiders in question are Stegodyphus dumicola aka African social spiders.

I couldn't find a link to the video in the article itself so here it is. Discretion is advised - it is fascinating and horrifying at the same time.

 

Interesting short text about the history of Finnish, focusing mostly on its interaction with nearby Germanic languages.

 

Archive link: https://archive.is/20240503184140/https://www.science.org/content/article/human-speech-may-have-universal-transmission-rate-39-bits-second

Interesting excerpt:

De Boer agrees that our brains are the bottleneck. But, he says, instead of being limited by how quickly we can process information by listening, we're likely limited by how quickly we can gather our thoughts. That's because, he says, the average person can listen to audio recordings sped up to about 120%—and still have no problems with comprehension. "It really seems that the bottleneck is in putting the ideas together."

Ah, here's a link to the paper!

 

I regret not posting it before Canvas 2025, but hopefully it'll be useful for people playing it in 2026. All letters are 5 pixels tall, and most 3 pixels wide (some 4, a few 5). I've also included a few Cyrillic letters and the digits.

I tried to make it even smaller, but it gets really funky.

 

Interesting video on the stone that allowed researchers to decipher Ancient Egyptian. Check comments for a few notes.

 

Additional links with press coverage: ArcheologyMag, Oxford.

For context:

The Huns were nomadic people from Central Eurasia; known for displacing a bunch of Iranian (e.g. Alans) and and Germanic (e.g. Goths, Suebians etc.) speakers, that ultimately invaded the Roman Empire. They reached the Volga around 370 CE, and one of their leaders (Attila) is specially famous. Often believed to be a Turkic people, but if the study is correct they're from a completely different language family instead.

The Xiōng-Nú are mentioned by Chinese sources as one of the "Five Barbarians" (i.e. non-Han people). They would've lived in Central Eurasia between 300 BCE and 100 CE or so, and eventually became Han tributaries.

The Paleo-Siberian language in question would be an older form of Arin, a Yeniseian language. Yup, that same family believed by some to have relatives in the Americas.

 
 

For further info, if anyone is interested, Stephen Bax claimed a decade ago to partially decode the manuscript; here's a video with his reasoning, as well as the paper he released. Sadly Bax passed away in 2017 (may he rest in peace), so the work was left incomplete.

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