Speakers of non-English languages, what common mistakes do native speakers make that drive you crazy?
Lvxferre @ lvxferre @lemmy.ml Posts 17Comments 1,115Joined 4 yr. ago
Lvxferre @ lvxferre @lemmy.ml
Posts
17
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1,115
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4 yr. ago
Due to Linguistics I spend more time trying to analyse the feature than judging it.
That said, two things that grind my gears, when it comes to Portuguese:
- Usage of the gerund for the future tense; e.g. estaremos enviando (roughly, "we will send") instead of "vamos enviar" or "enviaremos". My issue here is not grammatical, but that this construction usually marks lack of commitment.
- "Cuspido e escarrado" (spat and coughed up) to highlight the striking resemblance between two things or people. When the saying is supposed to be "esculpido em Carrara" (sculpted in Carrara).
Yup. There are reasons to use a VPN, mind you; but they involve the person actually knowing the risk, when it applies, and taking a cost vs. risk judgment. The FUD in those sponsors is basically "you don't know so you might be at risk, subscribe to our VPN juuuuust in case".
Here's an example. Let's say that you don't know how open source works, and I told you the following:
Why are you in Lemmy? It's open source so any hacker can screw with it, and infect your computer with viruses. You'll never know, right?
That's FUD: fear, uncertainty, and doubt. It's a disingenuous tactic to convince you to not do something, based on the following:
- You fear a certain outcome. In this case, a computer virus.
- That fear is vaguely associated with something that is uncertain for you. In this case, how a hacker could use Lemmy to inject viruses into your computer.
- The odds of that outcome happening are doubtful; it may happen, it may not, otherwise you could call me out for not happening. In this case, even if you don't get a virus from using Lemmy, I can still say "well, some people get it, some don't, but let's play it safe and avoid Lemmy."
This shitty strategy is fairly used in the tech industry because most people are clueless about tech, but they know that it has a big impact on their lives. However you'll also see this in politics, religious debate (Pascal's Wager is FUD), and others.
9:45, on the "universal social network": this can't be stressed enough.
No matter how much Musk babbles about "I wanr an errything app! lol lmao", Twitter won't become one. The Fediverse however has the potential to become an all-encompassing social network, with different aspects of online interaction being integrated organically.
There's a future not too far away where you can share a picture, from an account that you made for video sharing, that'll get a lot of microblogging toots and spark a discussion in a forum. This would be impossible using Instagram, Youtube, Twitter or Reddit; but once the interfaces get ironed out, it will become reality for PixelFed, Piped, Mastodon, Lemmy and Kbin.
That's different. I'm talking about avoiding to rush towards certainty, not lack of opinion/preference.
That said, "I don't know... it's too late to buy groceries, but we got a frozen lasagna, there are some vegs in the fridge, and I could whip some fried chicken if you want. What do you want?" sounds perfect for me. So the issue here isn't the "I don't know", it's the lack of input.
[Dunno if you were speaking seriously or joking. If joking, sorry for the serious answer.]
The way that I explain it is quite similar to yours. It works, but you need to emphasise
- that unlike in Reddit, there's no central group of admins controlling the whole thing; and
- that each instance has its own communities, and those are equivalent to subreddits.
otherwise users start associating instances with subreddits.
1 The person says "I don't know" fairly often. It shows that the person is not quick to draw conclusions, based on little to no information; this is gold, it means avoiding a lot of personal drama where they could blame you for things that they assume that you did.
2 They're generally on the same page about common acquaintances as you.
It's a bit off-side, but another sad part of this quote is that it actually sounds reasonable in the original context:
I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best.
Marilyn Monroe went out of her way to list what she considered her "worst", that is in direct contradiction with the "best" (that everyone could see) from her public persona. She's saying "Here's my worst; you know my best. If you don't accept me for who I am, you don't deserve that sex symbol that I built".
It's a fair cry from how people often use this quote, where they justify making your life a living Hell under the promise of some "best" that you're never going to see.
Now I got your point. You're right - the AI in question will inherit the biases and the worldviews of the people coding it, effectively acting as their proxy. IMO for this reason the bot's actions should be seen as moral responsibility of those people (i.e. instead of "the bot did it", it's more like "I did it through the bot").
in the case of reddit automod bot yeeting content based on included words… most of that is stupid, I agree, but then it’s those mod’s community.
Even if we see the comm as belonging to the mod, it's still a shitty approach that IMO should be avoided, for the sake of the health of the community. You don't want people breaking the rules by avoiding the automod (it's too easy to do it), but you also don't want content being needlessly removed.
Plus, personally, I don't see a community as "the mod's". It's more like "the users' ". The mods are there enforcing the rules, sure, but the community belongs as much to them as it belongs to the others, you know?
The origin (being programmed by people) doesn't matter, what matters are the capabilities. Not even current state-of-art LLMs understand human language on a discursive level, and yet that is necessary if you want to moderate the content produced by human beings.
(inb4: a few people don't understand it either. Those should not be moderators.)
all they really do is put a buffer between the actions of a moderator [user? otherwise the sentence doesn't make sense] and the (real) moderators.
Using them as a buffer would be fine, but sometimes bots are used to replace the actions of human moderators - this is a shitty practice bound to create a lot of false positives (legit content and users being removed) and false negatives (shitty users and content are left alone). Reddit is a good example of that - there's always some fuckhead mod to code automod to remove posts based on individual keywords, and never check the mod logs for false positives.
Your post trashy but I'll pick what I believe to be worthy out of it.
Three side effects of Greedy Pigboy screwing with Reddit in July were
- mods are less emotionally attached to their communities; why bother contributing with a platform that mocks them as "landed gentry"?
- your typical mod is dumber than before - because a lot of the insightful mods were aware of what was happening, and jumped off the ship.
- there are overall less mods, so they all got more work to do.
Overburdened, dumb, uncaring, and able to tell you what you should [not] do? That's bound to create grievances.
Reddit always had a disgusting acceptance of witch hunting, based on witch hunters having "good intentions". Usually you'd get decent mods kicking the witch hunters out... except that this means actually understanding what's going on, cue to the above (overburdened, dumb, uncaring mods) - it's easy to leave the witch hunter alone and just remove the comment chain.
Same deal with trolls. Sometimes you only get a troll by investigating and looking at the context. But if there's something that dumb trash cannot do, it is to look at the bloody context of an utterance. So trolls got free reign there.
witch hunting: to accuse someone of belonging to a group of morally or ethically undesirable people, based on little to no evidence or reasoning. Just like in the Middle Ages: "I assume that you're a witch, then you're a witch lol, time to burn you lmao".
I don't think that the type of power that a janny has is able to meaningfully corrupt the janny. At least, not in most cases; because it's practically no power, like it or not your online community means nothing in the big picture.
Instead, I think that bad moderators are the result of people with specific moral flaws (entitlement, assumptiveness, irrationality, lack of self-control, context illiteracy) simply showing them as they interact with other people. They'd do it without the janny position, it's just that being a janny increases the harm that those trashy users cause.
Why the alternatives that you mentioned to human moderation do not work:
- Bots - content moderation requires understanding what humans convey through language and/or images within a context. Bots do not.
- Voting - voting only works when you have crystal clear rules on who's allowed or not to vote, otherwise the community will be subjected to external meddling.
The first thing is basic organisation of the problem and of its solution. The board is a mess, it's hard to track which line leads to which, and yet this is essential to follow the reasoning. You can train that into your students with simpler problems, but requesting them to go thoroughly with them, in an ordered way; it's also a great way to introduce new concepts so you don't lose time.
This is important because, a lot of the times, students have a good grasp of the underlying concepts but struggle to chain them into a logical reasoning (it's fine if it's idiosyncratic, as long as it is there). And 5min later they don't follow what they just did.
A lot of the students will suck major balls on the maths necessary to ground the physical concepts. That will take a huge time, so work in conjunction with the maths teacher to drill them in that. I remember Chemistry uni students not being able to calculate pKa because of fucking Baskhara, of all things.
Notation matters, you want to avoid ambiguity like a plague. A t is not a +, and the fraction in the second-to-bottom line is ambiguous (is it supposed to represent [80/(2t+1)] / 2, or 80 / [(2t+1)/2]?
Include the units into the maths, and encourage your students to do the same. Sometimes which formula you need to use becomes obvious from that alone; e.g. if you want distance and you got v=80, t=4, you'll need to remember that s=vt; but if you were to list v=80m/s, t=4s instead, by the simple fact that distance is measured in metres you already know "well, I can cancel 1/s with s, so maybe I just need to multiply v by t, no?"
No poop challenge.
5 We don't talk about Reddit here. Except when we do.
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6 [De]federation is srs bizniz.
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7 Seize the means of production computation.
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8 People from that instance over there are bad.
Dr. Stone taught me that Suika = watermelon.
...from the link that @bobbytables@feddit.de provided, it seems to be "2048 meets Tetris with circles". On each turn, you drop a small fruit of a random size; fruits of the same size merge into a larger fruit, and your job is to get the biggest fruit before the box fills up.
I won't mention the rest of the text because I'm not interested enough on the discussion to do so. I'll focus on a single thing.
On the science side it’s a human from the moment of conception.
What should be considered a human being or not is prescriptive in nature, because it involves ethics. Science - i.e. the scientific method - does not give a shit to prescriptive matters; science is descriptive, it's worried about what happens/doesn't happen. For science it doesn't really matter if you call it a human, a tissue, a wug or a colourless green thing sleeping furiously, as long as you're unambiguously and accurately describing the phenomenon being studied.
As such, no, science itself doesn't really tell you "when it becomes a human being".
[From another comment, after being asked for source] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33620844/
The only thing that it "proves" is that the author (not "science") is referring to foetuses (from nine weeks after conception [not zero] to 16 weeks) as "children". And it certainly does not back up your claim that [ipsis litteris] "On the science side it’s a human from the moment of conception."
And no, "The growth and development are positively influenced by factors, like parental health and genetic composition, even before conception." does not prove it either, given that the author is solely mentioning conception as a time of reference.
Sorry to be blunt but the way that you referred to science sounds a lot like "I'm ignorant on science but I want to leech off its prestige for the sake of my argument". If you don't want to do this, here's a better approach:
- Show how certain actions generate certain outcomes. Science will help you with this.
- Explicit the moral and ethical premises that you are using, to judge said outcomes as good/bad. Science will not help you with this.
It's also a nice way to avoid a fallacy/stupidity called appeal to nature (TL;DR: "[event/thing] is natural, so it's good lol lmao"), that often plagues discussions about moral matters like abortion.
Sorry for the late reply.
- 4 bananas, including the peels
- 2 cups of sugar
- 1/2 cup of veg oil
- 3 eggs
- 3 cups of breadcrumbs
- 1 Tbsp of baking powder
- [optional] 1 cup of chocolate chips
- cinnamon and sugar (for sprinkling)
- Blend together the bananas, sugar, veg oil and eggs, until you get a homogeneous dough. Transfer to a bowl.
- Add breadcrumbs and baking powder to the dough, and mix it by hand for a few minutes.
- Transfer the dough to a greased and floured cake pan. If using chocolate chips: add half of the dough to the pan, then the chips, then the other half.
- Bake it at 180°C, for roughly 20min.
- Take it off the pan still hot, and sprinkle cinnamon and sugar.
the recipe itself doesn't use flour, only breadcrumbs. Use preferably light-coloured ones.
don't trust the time alone, as it varies a bit (I think that it has to do with the bananas); pierce the cake with a wooden toothpick and check if it comes off clean.
It boils down to scientists not knowing if they're actually reaching some conclusion or just making shit up. It's actually a big concern across multiple sciences, it's just that Psychology is being hit really hard, and for clinical psychologists this means that they simply can't trust as much the theoretical frameworks guiding their decisions as they were supposed to.
I think that there is some semantic association between spitting and copying, that all three languages are using. (I wonder how modern it is; photocopy machines spitting copies come to my mind.)
However in Portuguese it might be also because most people don't know the reference of the original saying (the marble sculptures of that Tuscan city), so they parse it as a phonetically similar saying. And in quick speech they do sound similar, e.g. for me: