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Cake day: June 28th, 2023

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  • Teodomo@lemmy.worldtoxkcd@lemmy.worldxkcd #2942: Fluid Speech
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    5 months ago

    Wait, Verlan is l’envers, stromae is maestro… Is this Verlan thing just like Rioplatense Spanish’s Vesre? (Vesre basically means revés i.e. inverse)

    EDIT: Just looked it up on Wikipedia and it turns out this phenomenon happens in a number of languages: Riocontra in Italian (riocontra -> contrario), Podaná in Greek, Šatrovački in Serbia, Totoiana in Romanian.






  • We humans just do a bad job explaining evolution to the general public, be it at schools, by science communicators, etc. Most laypeople want to believe in evolution so in the end they just kinda think it works like magic or that it’s guided by some kind of intelligence (whatever that means for them: divinity, we live in a simulation, an invisible natural algorithm that governs everything, the Universe itself as a sleeping deity, etc).

    When I was explained evolution as a kid (granted, around the year 2000) they made it seem evolution was an intelligent mechanism that somehow chose the best traits for the survival of a species based on its environment, as if this invisible mechanism had somehow the ability to analyze its environment, reason creatively and predict future scenarios. It was only on my mid 20s when I happened to read an article out of curiosity that I got a bit of a more clear picture. There’s gotta be a better way to explain it to laypeople: maybe that it’s more of a massive, long, non-directed trial-and-error process where there’s not an actual intention or intelligence, it just happens. Individuals with critically bad traits die because of those traits and the ones with better or non-harmful traits live and get to have descendants. But there’s not an intelligence guiding this, it just looks like an intelligence to some of us because we humans tend to apply personification to everything.



  • People here are just gonna tell you to leave (I have done so myself) but if you can’t for whatever reason something that can help is an extension like Blue Blocker which automatically blocks (or you can set it to mute) blue check marks as you encounter them. That way you don’t give them money for their horrible baits. While I was at Twitter waiting until the people I followed shared their new socials (sadly most went to BlueSky instead of Mastodon so I lost them anyway) I used Blue Blocker in that manner. You can set exceptions for certain accounts tho I didn’t, it mercilessly muted all checkmarks from my feed and revealed the bare Twitter behind. The result was somewhat like old Twitter at first but eventually it does get kinda slow as most of the valuable accounts become inactive. On the bright side that made leaving so much easier, so if you want to leave but need a motivator there’s one that might help you.





  • These are all hunches. I’ll add my own: he was initially just posturing about buying it but when he was forced to do it he was motivated by many things (his personal dislike of Twitter’s userbase -which was only partly leftist though it was a very vocal and hip even if sometimes unhinged and somewhat puritanical brand of leftism-, what he perceives happened to his daughter, the Saudi interests, his “I’m not owned! I’m not owned!” personality, etc.). Motivated to do what? Well initially it seems to me he wanted to transform it into more of a right-wing Elon cult (and he somewhat succeeded with the right-wing part). But the mass reaction was a destruction of his reputation. Before this he was usually clowned just by leftists but now it’s by a good chunk of the general public. My hunch is that he has started to like more and more the idea that he is “sabotaging Twitter from the inside” as revenge for the aforementioned reasons or just “for the lulz” (it seems he likes to think he does grave things for the lulz, maybe it’s desperation to fit in or cope). Wether this intentional sabotage is something that crossed his mind from the very start or something he picked up from his fans (“he… he can’t be taking these kinds of decisions, right guys? He’s a genius! He must be doing it all on purpose! He wants to tank Twitter”) it does sound like something that mends his ego a bit and also the only move that could maybe help restore his old PR image of brilliant player, real life Tony Stark.