That's surprisingly accurate, as people here are highlighting (it makes geometrical sense when dealing with complex numbers).

My nephew once asked me this question. The way that I explained it was like this:

• the friend of my friend is my friend; (+1)*(+1) = (+1)
• the enemy of my friend is my enemy; (+1)*(-1) = (-1)
• the friend of my enemy is my enemy; (-1)*(+1) = (-1)
• the enemy of my enemy is my friend; (-1)*(-1) = (+1)

It's a different analogy but it makes intuitive sense, even for kids. And it works nice as mnemonic too.

It's less complicated than it looks like. The text is just a poorly written mess, full of options (Fedora vs. Ubuntu, repo vs. no repo, stable vs. beta), and they're explaining how to do this through the terminal alone because the interface that you have might be different from what they expect. And because copy-pasting commands is faster.

Can’t I just download a file and install it? I’m on Ubuntu.

Yes, you can! In fact, the instructions include this option; it's under "Installing the app without the Mullvad repository". It's a bad idea though; then you don't get automatic updates.

A better way to do this is to tell your system "I want software from this repository", so each time that they make a new version of the program, yours get updated.

but I have no idea what I’m doing here.

I'll copy-paste their commands to do so, and explain what each does.

sudo curl -fsSLo /usr/share/keyrings/mullvad-keyring.asc https://repository.mullvad.net/deb/mullvad-keyring.asc
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/mullvad-keyring.asc arch=$( dpkg --print-architecture )] https://repository.mullvad.net/deb/stable $(lsb_release -cs) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mullvad.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install mullvad-vpn

The first command boils down to "download this keyring from the internet". The keyring is a necessary file to know if you're actually getting your software from Mullvad instead of PoopySoxHaxxor69. If you wanted, you could do it manually, and then move to the /usr/share/keyrings directory, but... it's more work, come on.

The second command tells your system that you want software from repository.mullvad.net. I don't use Ubuntu but there's probably some GUI to do it for you.

The third command boils down to "hey, Ubuntu, update the list of packages for me".

The fourth one installs the software.

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That said, look at Latin:

• dexter - right side, but also: favourable, fitting, proper (cf Spanish diestro)
• sinister - left side, but also: adverse, hostile, bad (cf Spanish siniestro)

The "privileges" that you see in derecho and right are an extension of what Latin already associated with dexter - things that are proper to do or to get. For example if I got a right to freedom, that means that it's fitting for me to get freedom, you know?

Based on that odds are that Spanish simply inherited the association, and kept it as such even after borrowing izquierdo from Basque and shifting directus→derecho from "straight" to "right". While English borrowed it, either from Latin or some Gallo-Romance language.

And overall you'll see a fair bit of that in the Western European languages, regardless of phylogenetic association, since languages clustered near each other (i.e. a Sprachbund) will often borrow concepts and associations from either each other or from a common source.

Also, note that right "as side" and "as privilege" are not homonyms. Those aren't different words from different sources, it's the same word with two different meanings, this is called polysemy. The same applies to derecho.

5. We don't talk about Reddit here. Except when we do.
6. [De]federation is srs bizniz.
7. Seize the means of ~~production~~ computation.
8. People from that instance over there are bad.

At least in a short time frame (2w? 1m?) I don't think that Lemmy got meaningfully better or worse. However from APIcalypse times to now it got way better.

This post assumes that a meaningful amount of defed instances are caused by simple lack of agreement. Often, it's an orthogonal matter - it boils down to instance A actually understanding something about the userbase of instance B and saying "I'm not dealing with this shit, it'll make the instance worse for its own users". For example: the typical user of B might be disingenuous, or preach immoral prescriptions, behave like a chimp, or be a bloody stupid piece of trash that should've stayed in Reddit to avoid smearing its stupidity everywhere here.

Are instance admins too eager to pull the trigger for defed? Perhaps, in some cases; specially because it handles groups of users instead of individuals. But those cases are better addressed through actual examples, not through a meme talking on generic grounds.

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There are two main points: agreement and derivation.

Agreement: grammatical gender gives you an easy way to keep track of which word refers to which. Consider for example the following sentence:

• The clock fell over the glass table, and it broke.

What does "it" refer to? It's ambiguous, it could be either "the clock" or "the glass table" (both things are breakable). In Portuguese however the sentence is completely unambiguous due to the gender system, as the translations show:

1. O relógio caiu sobre a mesa de vidro, e ele quebrou. // "ele" he/it = the clock
2. O relógio caiu sobre a mesa de vidro, e ela quebrou. // "ela" she/it = the table

It's only one word of difference; however "ele" he/it must refer to "relógio" clock due to the gender agreement. Same deal with "ela" she/it and "mesa" table.

Latin also shows something similar, due to the syntactically free word order. Like this:

• puer bellam puellam amat. (boy.M.NOM pretty.F.ACC girl.F.ACC loves) = the boy loves the beautiful girl
• puer bellus puellam amat. (boy.M.NOM pretty.M.NOM girl.F.ACC loves) = the handsome boy loves the girl

Note how the adjective between "puer" boy and "puella" girl could theoretically refer to any of those nouns; Latin is not picky with adjective placement, as long as it's near the noun it's fine. However, because "puer" is a masculine word and "puella" is feminine, we know that the adjective refers to one if masculine, another if feminine. (Note: the case marks reinforce this, but they aren't fully reliable.)

The second aspect that I mentioned is derivation: gender gives you a quick way to create more words, without needing new roots for that. Italian examples:

• "bambino" boy vs. "bambina" girl
• "gatto" cat, tomcat vs. "gatta" female cat
• "banana" banana (fruit) vs. "banano" banana plant
• "mela" apple (fruit) vs. "melo" apple tree

Focus on the last two lines - note how the gender system is reused to things that (from human PoV) have no sex or social gender, like trees and their fruits. This kind of extension of the derivation system is fairly common across gendered languages.

Addressing some comments here: English does not have a grammatical gender system. It has a few words that refer to social gender and sex, but both concepts (grammatical gender and social gender) are completely distinct.

That's specially evident when triggering agreement in a gendered language, as English doesn't do anything similar. Portuguese examples, again:

• [Sentence] O Ivan é uma pessoa muito alta.
• [Gloss, showing word gender] The.M Ivan.M is a.F person.F very tall.F
• [Translation] Ivan is a very tall person.

Check the adjective, "alta" tall. Even if "Ivan" refers to a man, you need to use the feminine adjective here, because it needs to agree with "pessoa" person - a feminine word. This kind of stuff happens all the time in gendered languages, but you don't see it e.g. in English.

Ultimately, what went wrong is that most Reddit users were screeching at individual leaves littering their garden, without noticing the tree creating those leaves on first place. They failed to connect the dots between: arbitrary bans, subreddit suspensions, user-on-user harassment, the idiotic way that rules are enforced, the presence of powermods, then Reddit trying to get rid of the powermods, the 3PA being killed... while focusing too much on a braindead clown called Steve Huffman.

It's all about profits. You can't enforce any demand if you don't make Reddit lose money. Blackouts and John Oliver posting only go so far, you need to migrate out of the platform. And if you're staying in the platform you need to transform it into an advertiser-hostile shithole. But for that you need more coordination than just "HURR DURR WE WRITE FUCK SPEZ IN PLACE LOL LMAO".

It's from English, not Sanskrit. More specifically, an archaic English feature, where you'd use "be" instead of "have" for the present tense, if the main verb denotes a change of state (such as "become"). Note how "I have become Death" sounds perfectly fine for modern readers.

Odds are that Oppenheimer was quoting either an archaic translation Bhagavad Gita, or one using archaic language (this is typical for religious texts).

Also give this a check. English used to follow similar rules for be/have as German does for sein/haben.

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Here's my idea:

It's a middle ground between completely hiding the duplicates, and letting them as is. Once you click that plus button, it shows the duplicates as full posts, otherwise it leaves them as just one-liners.

Evolution as a concept; not just biological. The fact that you can explain the rise of complex systems with just three things - inheritance, mutation, selection. It's so simple, yet so powerful.

Perhaps not surprisingly it's directly tied to what OP is talking about cellular automata.

I think that it's important to note the 1% rule.

Most of the traffic of any given platform will be created by people who interact with it only passively; they mostly lurk and, for good or bad, they don't care about it. Admins this, mods that, who the fuck cares, my cat pics sprout spontaneously from the internet.

In the meantime the people who actually contribute with the platform will be a tiny fraction of it. They don't add traffic, but they add value - because they're the ones responsible for creating the content (posting), aggregating value to the content (commenting), sorting the content (voting and moderating). The admins' decisions and the mod revolts affected specially bad this group. And... well, not even the stupid like to be called stupid, and that's basically what the admins did.

Now consider the link. The lurkers are back to Reddit because there's still content to be consumed there, but eventually it'll run dry - because the contributors are leaving the site. As such, you don't expect the mod revolts to have a short-term impact on the site, but rather a long-term one: the site will become less and less popular over time, as the lurkers are looking for content there and... well, nobody is providing them jack shit. Eventually the site will be forgotten by the masses, just like Digg was.

So Reddit will die, mind you. But it won't be a sudden death; it'll be a slow bleeding.

I just wish that this process was slightly faster, specially before the IPO.