deleted by creator

I don’t knit. I’m saying this based on multiple factors:

1. Videos of people who knit trying to use a dodecahedron. Like this one or this one. They use the holes, they use the knobs, but the core shape of the tool itself is practically irrelevant, and if anything it gets in the way. Also note the end result, it’s way crappier than a good knitter could do by hand. (I might not knit but I do see people knitting all the time.)

2. The existence of a similar icosahedron. It could be used just fine for cyphers, but not for knitting - note how the holes are too small. (Also, you wouldn’t need so many faces.)

3. The Romans assigned manual labour - like knitting - to slaves. And slaves aren’t exactly the sort of person a Roman would waste precious bronze with, specially not for a tool with an excessively specific purpose, like this one.

4. Wool production in Rome was mostly around Gallia Cisalpina:

And yet those dodecahedra were mostly found around Germania, Belgica, Lugdunensis, some even in Britannia:

If anything the distribution hints more something military.

Luixi Manxone. Lvigi. The CEO buster. Green Mario (thanks expatriado!). Crappy Yoshi.

Done!

feddit.it, prepare yourself for the influx of new members.

Also, can we “appreciate” how idiotic the word filter is? You don’t even need to choose between false positives (e.g. “Luigi’s Mansion” gets flagged) and false positives (e.g. people say “LM” and it doesn’t get flagged), you got both at the same time.

(BTW if you want to avoid Reddit word filters, just mix some Cyrillic letters into your word. I bet that “Luigi” gets flagged but “Luіgі” doesn’t. I used this a lot while trolling in Reddit.)

I think it’s unlikely to be a knitting tool, as you could achieve the same with a simpler tool.

For example, I’ve seen people saying it’s for wool gloves. But a bar with five holes and some knobs would do the trick, no need for an intricate form like a dodeca.

Not necessarily a pea brain, but certainly clueless on why Reddit, Digg, Slashdot etc. went downhill.

Lemmy is nonsensical fediverse bullshit.

Lemmy will never take off due to their idiotic federalism approach.

See those muppets looking for the next Digg / Reddit 10 years from now, after their alternative “with no federated bullshit” gets enshittified the exact same way as Reddit did. 🍿

I use duck.ai a fair bit, but I’ve turned the Assist to “Never”. I’m fine with AI tools, as long as I explicitly requested their usage, so for me this is the best.

My guess for the dodecahedra is that they’re a tool to aid with cryptography. This video explains it well, but TL;DW you’d use the dodecahedron with two concentric circles full of letters, and rotate one to know which letter to replace with which. It’s a slightly more advanced and secure version of Caesar’s cypher, and I could easily see the Romans doing something like that.

On the other hand I wouldn’t expect them to be used for knitting or jewellery, as simpler devices would do the same job.

…but to answer your question, I think that most decor items will give those archaeologists a hard time. Stuff like this:

I was almost going to say “yerba mate bombillas”, but they’ll likely detect saliva DNA in them and guess that they were used as straws:

As in, the Italo-Western Romance language?

Yup, that one. Numbers are not to be trusted, but estimates are usually around 500k speakers in Brazil alone. There’s also a bunch of them in Argentina, and even in Mexico (more specifically Chipilo, Puebla).

Under Brazilian territory Venetian is often called “Talian”, and sometimes partially creolised with Portuguese. The name is a misnomer though, the language has little to do with the Tuscan-based standard Italian.

When you said there are about 200 other languages, I was expecting indigenous languages and maybe some Spanish, but certainly not other European languages

There are a few other colonial languages among those 200, like Eastern Pomeranian (Low German; extinct in Europe after WW2), Hunsrik (German too, but in the Franconian group). And I wouldn’t be surprised if here in Paraná some Polish- or Silesian-speaking clusters survived.

Additionally, some folks down north use Kikongo (a Bantu language, brought to South America due to African slavery) as a liturgical language for their syncretic religion (candomblé).

That said the “bulk” of those 200 languages I mentioned are Amerindian languages indeed. Typically Macro-Ge and Tupi-Guarani families.

What’s the history there? Were there Italian colonies in Brazil, or a notable migration of Italians to Portuguese colonies?

Yup, immigrants. Not just in Brazil; Latin America as a whole got a lot of them in the XIX and early XX centuries, and since Italy was in a ruckus a lot of them were from Italy. Mostly Gallo-Italic speakers in a “belt” between São Paulo and Buenos Aires. Both are tendencies though, and there are plenty exceptions - São Paulo city for example got also a bunch of Calabrians and Sicilians, and as I said there were Venetians even in Mexico.

Other common groups of immigrants in LatAm were Iberians, Germans, Levantine Arabs, Japanese. But the distribution changes heavily from place to place; for example here in Paraná we got quite a few Poles and even a few Ukrainians and Lithuanians, but up south in Chubut (Argentina) there were Welsh immigrants instead.

See, this is exactly the sort of conversation I had hoped the original thread would lead to. Interesting linguistics, history, and geography. Until dessalines came in with the toxicity.

There’s !linguistics@mander.xyz for any topic involving language. [Disclaimer: I’m one of the mods there.]

That backtracks to the main subject: the community was originally in lemmy.ml. One of the reasons why I migrated it to mander.xyz was the notoriously poorly way that .ml admins enforce rules in their instance - with the straw that broke the camel’s back, for me, being !anime@lemmy.ml. (I wasn’t a mod there but I’m a weeb so…)

Now thinking, if I didn’t do so, I bet that I would enter in direct conflict with dessalines and cypherpunk. What if someone wanted to talk about the Uyghur language? Or surzhyk (mixed Ukrainian/Russian) varieties? Bloody hell, even Proto-Indo-European (the Late PIE homeland is right where the war is happening now). Even mentions of lavender linguistics (i.e. how queer people use language) would become a ticking bomb.

[Info dump that sounds like an “ackshyually”, but doesn’t contradict what you said, nor tries to. It’s just that you touched a topic that I enjoy talking about.]

Under the territory controlled by the Brazilian most people do speak Portuguese but there are ~200 other languages; for example a good chunk of my family speaks a Venetian variety. Spanish is among those, and it’s actually spoken by a few people born in the territory controlled by Brazil due to border changes. Other varieties besides PT and ES can be roughly split into colonial (e.g. Talian, Hunsrik, Pommersch, Polish) and Amerindian (e.g. Mbyá, Kaingang, Laklãnõ).

On the other hand, Portuguese sometimes pops up even in territory controlled by other governments than Brazil. Ciudad del Este (Paraguay) and Puerto Iguazú (Argentina) are an example, but as well some northern chunk of Uruguay. And then there’s a bunch of “portuñol” mixed varieties that IMO should be protected by the statal governments (because the federation certainly won’t).

The thread itself is a shitfest that boils down to idiocy on the same level as “is tomato a fruit or a vegetable?” and “ackshyually water is not wet it wets things”. And that includes both your comment and the comment that you’re replying to. Specially the later, as the guy found some weird hill to die on.

Even then, PTB. As typical for lemmy dot ml.

I’ll also address what estefano is saying in another comment in the same thread, as it’s outright misinformation:

In Brazil, we use USians or Statesians

Most people in the territory controlled by Brazil refer to people in the territory controlled by USA as “americanos” (lit. “Americans”). People who call them “estado-unidenses” (lit. “United-Statians”), like I do, are a minority. And people certainly do not call them by anything remotely translatable as “USians” (EUAnos? That sounds awful*) or “Statesians” (estadenses?).

I used the second one on an academic paper and it went through.

You can submit a lot of crap on academic papers and it’ll still go through. Welcome to Latin America. No, even better - welcome to the world in 2025, the institutions supposed to defend science against the Sturgeon’s Law are busier counting money than doing their job.

As such, “they accepted it” is NOT grounds to claim shite.

Ma que djanho.

*EUAnos sounds like “eu ânus” [I anus] for most Portuguese speakers. (It doesn’t for me but it gets really close.)

I was steadily getting reports about it.

I just saw it. Yup, it changes the picture quite a bit since consistent behaviour justifies your intervention.

The leftover matter is then just “telegraphing” to users that you don’t consider this acceptable, and you don’t want to see it from your instance. OP suggested a rule against posting volume, but perhaps this is too specific? This could be even handled through small tweaks of the description text of your instance:

All are welcome to this instance. Please no illegal content, no personal attacks, no spam, no misinformation, no bigotry. Other than that, go nuts. Be productive, polite, and reasonable.

or something like this.

Half-related, from the other thread:

I wasn’t expecting “making sure we make a safe space for the spammers by banning people who complain about spam” to be an important moderation duty, but I guess in the bizarro world that is !news@lemmy.world moderation philosophy, it makes perfect sense.

LW in a nutshell: “if you complain about harmful behaviour, you’re the one getting screeched at”. It feels like they’re trying their hardest to transform Lemmy into Reddit 2: Electric Boogaloo.

BPR. This could have been handled better but I don’t think that the admin was powertripping.

EDIT: I’m changing my take to YDI / UDI (user deserved it). See discussion with the admin, his usage of power was 100% justified.

IMO what Philip did wrong:

• the issue was in a single community, so he should’ve let that community’s mods handle it. If the user was doing this shit across multiple communities it would be different.
• lack of transparency on what’s considered [un]acceptable behaviour for ponder.cat users. A single “be nice” would be enough to justifiably get rid of Cat.
• direct escalation, like OP said. Philip’s initial comment lecturing Cat doesn’t sound like an admin speaking officially; but when he does, it pops out of nowhere.

In the meantime, look at all Cat’s replies in the linked thread: the user is not just being spammy, they are being uncooperative, belittling other users, and passive aggressive. This sort of behaviour should not be given a free pass, and I do think that, if Philip dug across Cat’s post/comment history, he would find more reasons to ban the user from his instance… at least if his instance had some rule against poor behaviour.

Internet etiquette has dictates for dealing with undesirable yet not rule-breaking behavior that was just ignored here.

A lot of those dictates boil down to “report, ignore, move on”. Reporting would do nothing, and ignoring would be bad advice - because bad behaviour tends to spread. Eventually you aren’t just blocking a single person, but a whole lot… or leaving the space because why bother. As such, users in communities with lax moderation tend to monitor each other’s behaviour a bit, and this is not a bad thing.

NPC means “nihilistic proletariat/customer” now. Prove me wrong.

My neighbour is almost 60 and she still lives with her mum! (And when she married the husband moved with them.)

I think that it’s fine to still live with family. As long as nobody is a leech or a control freak.

I’ve seen a lot of LW users behaving like this.

They want a single comm per topic, preferably in LW; and everyone should go to that comm, no dissidence allowed. Always talking about “not splitting efforts”, or some FUD like “unless we gather together Lemmy will never succeed”.

And, when you tell them a clear “no”, they throw a tantrum. Like Serinus did there.

I think that they got out of Reddit, but they didn’t get Reddit out of themselves. They still behave like this was a Reddit-like monolithic platform; so when they see decentralisation - like multiple comms for the same topic, in different instances - they treat it as a bug, when it’s a feature.

Anyway, I’d call that FAPTB (failed attempt of powertripping). EDIT: wow, they removed your mention of the other comm! Talk about pettiness. PTB.

And the scorpion vowed “I’m not going to sting you” to the frog.

It’s all fun and games until venture capital kicks in, and exploits that central user data store to further centralise the rest of the network. Even then yes, I think that Mastodon has a lot to learn with Bluesky, on how to make user experience smoother.