Lvxferre [he/him]

I have two chimps within, Laziness and Hyperactivity. They smoke cigs, drink yerba, fling shit at each other, and devour the face of anyone who gets close to either.

They also devour my dreams.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 12th, 2024

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  • A bit frustrated, to be honest.

    It’s always a bloody chore to extract meaningful pieces of info from my mum, and so far I had to do it this week multiple times: asking her if my sis is going to dine with us tomorrow or lunch with us Sunday, which bills she wants me to pay (she has a bit of a hard time with online payment), which dishes she wants me to prepare, stuff like this.

    It could be worse, I guess. At least I didn’t need to ask her directions.

    And speaking about old ladies, my 17yo cat has also been extra annoying. Kika decided to rummage my recyclables bin, as if it was a toybox. For the sake of an empty cigs pack. And then went “MEEERRRRWWWOOOON MEEEWWWWRRROOWWWN” = “I finds hunts!”, three o’clock of the morning, in one of the few days my sleep schedule was normal. Then the other day she decided to hop onto my bed, found Siegfrieda (the other cat) sleeping on my belly, and picked a fight with her. Over me.




  • Acc. to my mum (she loves orchids) phalaenopsis orchids roots need to dry a bit before you water them again, so they really don’t like this sort of “always wet” system like semi-hydro. That’s why the bottom roots in your picture are all rotten, but the top ones (that likely get drier) are thriving.

    She also said those rotten roots must be clipped out, otherwise the bacteria spread to the healthy ones.

    Her suggestion is to simply use the traditional method, with an organic substratum: a mix of pine bark and charcoal, with just a wee bit of sphagnum (so you don’t need to water them constantly; but do wait until it’s dry to water them again). With LECA only at the bottom of the pot, for drainage.






  • Most people agree with her. But for me calling such a warm tone “grey” is weird, it’s like calling your typical red apple “pink” instead of “red”, you know? To complicate it further I typically refer to fur colour with the same words I’d use for human hair colour, and I’m not sure they don’t map 1:1 with colours used for objects.

    (Another situation this pops up is when talking about magenta. But it’s more like a discussion about the “main” colour vs. hue.)

    Man, colour perception is weird

    It is! And colour words are weird too. And they somewhat influence your perception, too.





  • I’m actually using more those resources (em dashes, three points lists, “it’s worth noting that”, “it’s not X, it’s Y”, etc.) after AI popped up. They’re a damn good way to detect assumptive people, eager to conclude based on little to no info or reasoning; the same ones OP is complaining about. They don’t want a conversation at all, they want to whine, so if you give them a low-hanging fruit you can detect them early and block them as noise and dead weight.

    That’s in my “casual” writing style, though. Professionally (as a translator) I mostly play by the tune, trying to preserve the style of the original. (Plus I barely translate things into English, it’s usually into Portuguese, very rarely Italian.)

    That might not necessarily be the case – there is a possibility every example is completely organic – but it’s a sign of the times that we can’t just relax and assume the things we see and hear were made by people.

    Guys, I found em dashes! The author is a bot! Bring me my pitchfork! /jk (those are en dashes, by the way.)




  • [François] The revived people of South America helped me to learn it [Spanish]

    Things like this are the ones that make me like the least this part of the series. It shows how much they rushed research.

    There’s no way they’d learn Spanish in Araxá, most of the population there speaks Portuguese. In fact, I don’t even know why they decided to mine niobium there, if they entered SA through the Amazon river delta; for reference they’re further from each other (2000km) than Berlin from Moscow. Plus there are niobium deposits in the Amazon basin, smaller and less profitable but still enough for their purposes.

    And the whole idea of going to Catalunya feels silly. There are some fluorite deposits in Sant Cugat del Vallès but they’d need to walk something like 15km from the coast, on a rather hilly terrain. Transport is hard. There are better deposits in Asturias, by the coast, but no olives. But you know, where there are fluorite deposites near the coast? And olives? Tunisia. Plus dates; amazing travel food, tasty even if dried for long-term storage, and with a high caloric content. I should stop chewing on those everyday, though. They certainly don’t help with my weight.


    Those things don’t make me say “bleeergh, I’ll drop it!”, but come on… it’s a stain in a series that shone because of all the research behind it. Granted, mostly Chemistry, but still.


  • If you develop some feature (or bug!) of course some people will find a decent way to use it. That doesn’t mean the feature should be there on first place, specially when the possibility of abuse is so obvious. Plus if the pressure behind this anti-feature was “only” single page applications, and nothing else, I bet it would be implemented in a different way.

    Also, look at the big picture. In isolation, one could argue giving pages access to your browsing history was a necessary albeit poorly thought feature; but when you look at other stuff browsers nowadays are supposed to do, you notice a pattern:

    • Browsers giving more info to the page about your system than just “I’m a browser, I can browse pages”: the browser software, its version, the operating system, the fonts you have installed, your screen dimensions…
    • Letting pages decide the behaviour of mouse clicks. And if the window is focused or not.
    • The ability to show pop-up messages.
    • etc.

    Are you noticing it? All those “features” are somewhat useful, but with such obvious room for abuse it would be insane to add them, in retrospect. And that abuse is usually from money hoarders, or people controlled by them.

    Worse: all of them crammed into what was supposed to be a system to show you content, but eventually got bloated into a development platform, transforming browsers into those bloody abominations of nowadays, with a huge barrier of entry, dominated by a single vendor (and where the vassal of said vendor got ~3% market share). I’d say that not having a monopoly is more important than all those features together.

    And odds are the ones pushing for those features (like Google) knew they were insane, and that they would raise the barrier of entry for new browsers. But that was their goal, innit? Enshittify the web while claiming control over it.


  • Mass nouns get no S

    More accurately, a mass noun cannot be assigned a grammatical number. For example, compare

    1. *one bread, *two bread, *two breads, some bread
    2. one sheep, two sheep, *two sheeps, some sheep

    Asterisk means “agrammatical”. #1 shows “bread” is a mass noun, and #2 shows “sheep” isn’t, even if “sheep” doesn’t accept the ⟨s⟩. (It’s just a weird plural.)

    …that said I think your take is bad. “Countability” is rather unstable, specially if there’s some semantic pressure to keep both the countable and uncountable meanings. That applies to “mail”; in fact the word used to be only countable. (It meant “bag”. Nowadays that meaning is archaic, but still.) Add dialectal variation (e.g. Indian English speakers seem to be rather fond of using “mail” as a countable noun) and language interference, and the whole thing becomes an “I only accept when people use a language the same way as I do!”.