I think that making blocks visible only for admins could work. At least the admins of the instances of both users.
I’m not even really sure how big of an issue blocking abuse really is in reality
I'd say it's concerning, specially due to hit-and-run tactics - replying to someone and blocking them before they have the chance to counter-reply. I used this a fair bit for shitposting and taunting circlejerks, but it could be easily used also to make the other side look like lacking arguments (i.e. for public manipulation of views) or also for individual harassment.
One of the counter-strategies that I've seen was people editing their comments and highlighting that they were blocked. That only works when the person knows that they were blocked.
my last years in Reddit weren't exactly "contributing" with that place.
I think that it would be possible to implement true/two-way blocking while minimising the amount of abuse, if the blocklist is public. As in, if Alice simply mutes Bob, nobody knows it; but if Alice blocks Bob, you can see in Alice's profile "blocking: Bob".
I also think that the mute / block user option needs to have a confirmation window. From this thread it's obvious that a lot of people are muting bad faith users, instead of reporting them. That's bad because the problems never reach the ears of those who can act on them.
(I'm just throwing ideas around, mind you. Take them with a grain of salt, there might be some catch that I didn't realise.)
The rotation axis of the Milky Way. It seems more reliable for me than to pick two astronomical objects, as their direction might change over time. Plus it makes intuitive sense considering how we did it for Earth.
And that's why means matter, not just the ends. If Twitter was banned under the premise of being a Nazi nest (as it is), it would be still banned. But for that you'd need solid legislation to force platforms to identify and kick out the Nazi. Not just an "ackshyually you need a representative, you don't have one so Twitter isn't operating here any more".
"A poor person's happiness never lasts" - local saying.
Perhaps I'm overthinking it, but the English verb seems to have different meanings when it's used transitive and intransitively. For example, let's say that you ask someone to prepare you a salad, and the person answers:
Since Contramuffin answered most of it, I'll focus on the diacritics.
The acute in ḱ ǵ ǵʰ shows that they aren't the same as k g gʰ. Odds are that the ones with an acute were pronounced with the tongue a bit fronted (palatalised).
The acute over other consonants, plus in é ó, is something else entirely. It's the accent - you're supposed to pronounce those consonants with a higher pitch. "Yay, consistency" /s
The macron over ē ō is to show that the vowel is loooong.
Those floating ⟨ʰ⟩ refer to aspiration. Aspiration is that "puff" of air that you release when you say ⟨pill, till, kill⟩ but not when you say ⟨spill, still, skill⟩. In English this is not distinctive, but in a lot of other Indo-European languages it is, and the mainstream hypothesis is that it was distinctive in PIE itself.
In the meantime, a floating ⟨ʷ⟩ means that the consonant is pronounced with rounded lips. The difference between something like kʷ and kw is mostly that the first one behaves like a single consonant, the other as two.
That ring under some consonants is to highlight that they're syllabic, as if they were LARPing as vowels. It's a lot like writing "button" as "buttn̥".
If you ever see ə₁ ə₂ ə₃ etc., pretend that that "ə" is "h₁". It's simply different ways to annotate the same stuff.
H means "this is h₁ or h₂ or h₃, but we have no clue on which".
Close: it's French quatre (4), not "quatorze" (14). It goes like this: PIE kʷetwóres → Latin ⟨quattuor⟩ /kʷattuor/ → Old French ⟨quatre, catre⟩ /kʷatɾə/~/katɾə/ → contemporary French ⟨quatre⟩ /katʁ(ə)/.
French ⟨quatorze⟩ does contain that kʷetwóres, but it's only the "quator-". The "-ze" is from Proto-Indo-European déḱm̥ (10). This gets easier to see in Latin, as the word for 14 was ⟨quattuordecim⟩ (literally four-ten).
Note that almost all English words that you used to translate the PIE words are also examples of those PIE words being still in use nowadays - they're direct descendants, for example kʷis → who, éǵh₂ → I, etc. In English, German, Swedish and other Germanic languages, this gets a bit obscured due to some old sound change called Grimm's Law. (EDIT: the only exception is the second line - túh, te became "thou, thee".)
This is mostly correct so I'll focus on small specific details, OK?
Asterisk means not directly attested. In reconstructions it goes as you say, but you'll also see them before things that you don't expect speakers to use, in synchronic linguistics; for example me apple eat gets an asterisk because your typical English speaker wouldn't use it.
It is kind of "guesswork" but it follows a very specific procedure, called the comparative method. As in, it is not an "anything goes".
The sounds represented as h₁, h₂, h₃, h₄ and H do not necessarily sound like [h]. At this point they're simply part of the notation. For example, a common hypothesis is that h₁ was [ʔ], it's more like the sound in "oh-oh" than like [h]. And some argue that they aren't even the sounds themselves, but rather the effect of the sounds on descendant words (the difference is important because, if two sounds had the same effect, they ended with the same symbol).
[Shameless advertisement: we have a linguistics community, !linguistics@mander.xyz . I'm the mod there; I apologise for the relative lack of activity nowadays, but everyone is welcome to post this sort of stuff there.]
What Morris Swadesh did was at the same time simpler and greater than that: he created a list of concepts likely to pop up across many different languages, regardless of their time period and area. This is extremely useful to track the relationship between multiple languages, even if you don't speak them.
I'm not sure if he created one for Proto-Indo-European; "Swadesh list" became a generic name for this sort of list, regardless of who compiles it. Plus Morris Swadesh main interest was Amerindian languages.
Brandolini's Law is great to keep in mind when discussing online - because as you're busy refuting a piece of bullshit, the bullshitter is pumping out nine other bullshits in its place, so discussing with obvious bullshitters is a lost cause.
On a lighter side pointing the bullshit out is considerably easier/faster than to refute it, but still useful - as whoever is reading the discussion will notice it. As such, when you see clear signs of bullshit, a good strategy is to point it out and then explicitly disengage.
such as distorting what others say, assuming, using certain obvious fallacies/stupidities, screeching when someone points out a fallacy, etc.
This might be different depending on the speaker, but at least for me Portuguese and Italian are even stricter on interpreting cozinhar/cozer and cucinare/cuocere as involving heat. Like, if I were to say for example ⟨cozinhei um sanduíche⟩ (literally "I cooked a sandwich"), I'm almost sure that people would interpret it as "I picked an already prepared sandwich and used it as ingredient for something else"
Mixing batter and preparing pasta seem like great starts, too. The general idea is to not let the kid handle anything with heat or sharp knives until they're old enough to "respect" the danger behind those things.
My own initiation was whisking mayo (where I live it's traditional to prepare a potato-mayo salad on Sundays). Then when my nephew was young I kind of tried to teach him how to prepare some onigiri (he already liked them better than sandwich), with already cooked rice and fillings, but he was a bit too lazy to do it, and a bit too eager to eat the ingredients.
We'd look through the bathroom window, there was always something funny going on. Such as packs of velociraptors fighting each other, or a mastodon causing wreck on the neighbour's garden.
Talking about definitions and how far they go is not gatekeeping. There's no gate here, just a bunch of people with sticks drawing lines on sand and seeing where the others drew their lines.
True, but, turn that into ‘I’m cooking up a sandwich’, and now the phrase potentially expands its domain to basically mean any kind of food preparation.
The phrase expands into any preparation or invention, even ones that clearly do not have anything to do with cooking. e.g. "I'm cooking up a plan to deal with this."
I guess that it depends on context? Typically I wouldn't call it cooking, as it doesn't involve applying heat to the food. But if I were to teach a kid how to cook, then I'd consider it cooking - as teaching them how to prepare a sandwich would be a good start.
![Lvxferre [he/him]](https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/333d03a0-bcae-434b-a8d1-7dfd18962d20.jpeg?format=webp&thumbnail=128)
I think that making blocks visible only for admins could work. At least the admins of the instances of both users.
I'd say it's concerning, specially due to hit-and-run tactics - replying to someone and blocking them before they have the chance to counter-reply. I used this a fair bit for shitposting and taunting circlejerks, but it could be easily used also to make the other side look like lacking arguments (i.e. for public manipulation of views) or also for individual harassment.
One of the counter-strategies that I've seen was people editing their comments and highlighting that they were blocked. That only works when the person knows that they were blocked.
my last years in Reddit weren't exactly "contributing" with that place.