Lvxferre [he/him]

The catarrhine who invented a perpetual motion machine, by dreaming at night and devouring its own dreams through the day.

  • 3 Posts
  • 182 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: January 12th, 2024

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  • Statistics for Brazil are probably inaccurate.

    There’s a local tendency for non-religious people to identify themselves as “non-practising Catholics” (CNP, católico não-praticante). Some of them are atheists, some unaffiliated theists, but if you ask their religion they’ll often answer that they’re Christian - for peace of mind, because apparently it’s verboten in the Americas to tell other people “this is none of your business, stop trying to convert me”.

    And this is old enough that it might introduce two sources of error there:

    1. People who were never raised Christian to begin with, but claim otherwise because their parents were CNPs.
    2. People who ditch Christianity without outright stating so, thus becoming CNP.


  • It depends mostly on my mood, but:

    • pingado (a small glass of coffee with a drop of milk) - I just need my caffeine fix
    • machiato - the above, but I’m treating myself
    • orange juice - I’m lunching, and I’d rather not have alcohol
    • chilled yerba mate tea - I’m lunching, I’d rather not have alcohol, and did I mention my caffeine fix?
    • beer - I’m lunching, I don’t mind some alcohol; OR I’m drinking with my friends
    • wine - I’m drinking with very specific friends who also enjoy chugging cheap wine
    • campari - I don’t care about whatever you guys are drinking, I want my bitters; or, I’m in the bar alone writing

    In my uni times I also drunk a lot of tubão (cheap spirit + soda, mixed in the soda bottle).








  • When translating things professionally I use the standards of the target language. Informally, though… screw it, I use my own punctuation conventions across multiple languages:

    • instead of en dash, tilde for ranges; e.g. 19:00~22:00.
    • no em dash either - I use space, hyphen, space.
    • generally I avoid single quotation marks, by default I use double.
    • nested marks become guillemets; e.g. “she said «fuck this shit» and left”
    • nested parentheses become square brackets; e.g. "I’m not buying cheese (although I love it [specially gorgonzola and emmenthaler]). Except if I’m writing about phonetics/phonology, then I simply rephrase the sentence.
    • I use the semicolon a fair bit; perhaps even more than the comma.

  • I wonder how Reddit managed to fuck the blocking function up so fucking bad.

    No, wait, I don’t. I know how:

    • Reddit doesn’t hire people to curb down harassment because that reduces the margins of profit
    • harassment runs rampant in the site
    • some users want to hide from harassers, and suggest that blocking should prevent the blocked from contacting the blocker
    • Reddit be like: “that’s cheaper than doing the right thing! Let’s do it!”
    • new blocking has exploits and more exploits, since it allows unilateral control of the conversation
    • Reddit tries to fix those exploits, introducing even more exploits

    Anyway. Will Digg enshittify again? (Yes.) And unless the functionality of the site changes upon relaunching, Digg is not a good replacement for what Reddit has become; Reddit is not just a link-sharing platform any more, it’s more like a bunch of forums.





  • I’ll try to summarise it but the text is long and messy, so watch out for potential inaccuracies from my part. TL;DR:

    It starts off with a group from Siberia and another from East Asia merging into a new group. The new group then re-splits.

    One side of the split stays in Siberia. The descendants of the other half then settle the Americas, in three separated waves, in 23~20kya:

    • a “ghost” population, not directly attested.
    • the “main” ancestors of the Native Americans (ANA)
    • Ancient Beringians.

    All three crossed the strait and arrived in the Americas, but separately, between 20kya and 23kya. The Mixe people have some partial heritage from the “ghost” population, but the past that the “ghost” population died off.

    The Ancient Beringians didn’t go too far, they only reached as far as Alaska. ~7kya or so they died off.

    One of those populations also made its way into Japan, but the text doesn’t specify which.

    Around 21~16kya, ANA split, but the text doesn’t mention how. Then around 15.7kya, it split again, into two new groups:

    • Northern (I’ll call them NNA) - ancestors of the Algonquian, Salishan, Tsimshian and Na-Dené. More on the Na-Dené later.
    • Southern (SNA) - they spread like crazy, being the ancestors of most Amerindians except the above.

    There was also some backmigration of NNA back into both northern China and Siberia. There’s some linguistic evidence of that in the Dené-Yeniseian language family; if I got it right the Yeniseians are descendants of the backmigrants.

    Further on the text details the further Amerindian genetic pool splits, but I didn’t read it so far.


    From a linguistic PoV this reinforces the Dené-Yeniseian language family hypothesis, but more importantly: it shows that Joseph Greenberg’s proposal of an “Amerind language family” is likely true. Sadly our current methods are rather shitty to deal with such old stuff, even Proto-Afro-Asiatic is a bit of a stretch of the method.