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.

Another important detail is that Digg v4 pissed off most of the userbase, so the impact was pretty much immediate. Reddit APIcalypse pissed off only power users instead; the impact will only come off later (sadly likely past IPO).

Who said that the word doesn’t haue “u”?

Was that my Father that went hence so fast?
Ben. It was: what sadnes lengthens Romeo's houres?
Ro. Not hauing that, which hauing, makes them short
Ben. In loue.
Romeo. Out.
Ben. Of loue.
Rom. Out of her fauour where I am in loue.
Ben. Alas that loue so gentle in his view,

Romeo and Juliet, foglio I, around verse 170

…good enough for Shakespeare, good enough for me. No need for a fifth letter!

I’m half-joking with the above, but the word did use to be spelled with “U” instead of “V”. Past then both were taken as the same letter. [/trivia]

9:45, on the “universal social network”: this can’t be stressed enough.

No matter how much Musk babbles about “I wanr an errything app! lol lmao”, Twitter won’t become one. The Fediverse however has the potential to become an all-encompassing social network, with different aspects of online interaction being integrated organically.

There’s a future not too far away where you can share a picture, from an account that you made for video sharing, that’ll get a lot of microblogging toots and spark a discussion in a forum. This would be impossible using Instagram, Youtube, Twitter or Reddit; but once the interfaces get ironed out, it will become reality for PixelFed, Piped, Mastodon, Lemmy and Kbin.

Fun fact: strawberry was admitted to the psychiatric yard once pepper and cucumber joined the berry club.

So were there many Roman citizens in Britannia, or was it a pretty small ratio of Romans to locals?

Relevant detail: this changed a lot in 212.

Before that date, Roman citizenship basically implied Roman culture, language and lifestyle; but in that year Caracalla passed an edict granting citizenship to all free men in the Empire, so a lot of non-Latin-speaking locals were to be considered Roman citizens. (And taxed as such).

That said, I’d estimate the ratio of Latin speakers in the province to be 3~6% in the 4th century, based on a few Wikipedia numbers:

• Roman army, family, dependents: 125k people. Likely 100% Latin speakers. You also get a few bureaucrats but they’re numerically insignificant.
• Urban population: 240k people, including the above. The others were likely a mix of Brittonic and Latin speakers.
• Total population: 3.6 million people. Unless urban, likely to be Brittonic speakers.

Did the Roman soldiers give commands to the local elites, who would then tell the locals what to do?

Not quite. The army was responsible for the enforcement of the rules, but the ones commanding the local elites and the army were former consuls appointed as governors.

And would you say that life changed much for the locals under the new rule?

I’m not sure at all. But I guess that, for both the slaves and the general working class, there was barely a difference. You still work to the bone, and die an ungrateful death, no matter if you’re doing it for the sake of a local tribal chief or for some “imperator” in the middle of nowhere.

As @GreyShuck@feddit.uk correctly highlighted, it wasn’t even Latin that displaced so much of the local language. It was the Germanic tribals invading the islands later on. So I’ll focus specifically on the Roman role.

The Roman process of Latinisation was rather slow. For reference: Gallia was conquered in 58-50 BCE, but odds are that Gaulish survived until the ~sixth? century of the common era, 600 years later. That’s because the Romans didn’t really give much of a fuck about what rural local folks spoke - if they rebel you kill them and done, problem solved.

Instead they were actively placing colonies in the conquered regions (to give land to Roman citizens) and converting the local elites to Roman habits and customs, because unlike the farmers the elites could be actually dangerous if rebellious.

The same applies to Britannia. Except that it was conquered ~a century after Gallia, it’s a fucking island in the middle of nowhere with harder access, it doesn’t grow grapes or olives, grain production in the Empire was mostly in Africa and Egypt so odds are that they couldn’t reliably grow their wheat variety there either… really, the island was mostly a tin mining outpost.

Another factor to consider is the distribution of the Roman settlements in the area:

Are you noticing a pattern? Most settlements were in the Southeast, specially the larger ones (in yellow, full of Roman citizens). Perhaps not surprisingly the extant Brittonic languages are spoken further West, when you couple this with the tribal invasions. (That’s simply because of the Fretum Oceani aka Strait of Dover. It was easier to reach the island by there.)

I half-agree with this. I think that this depends a lot on the topic and, while the smaller amount of comments does hurt discussion depth, the individual comments themselves partially offset this by being more thoughtful.

And, while anecdotal, I think that there’s a considerably lower ratio of comments with negative discussion value here in Lemmy than in Reddit. I’m not even talking about the out-of-place jokes (although they add noise), but shit like this:

• “waaah, TL;DR!!” discouraging in-depth explainations
• feigned lack of understanding as ad nauseam tactic
• context illiteracy
• unchecked assumptions towards other users, for the sake of ad hominem
• “trust me”

Don’t get me wrong; you do find this crap here, but IMO it’s way less than in Reddit. And they hurt discussion because they either waste the time of the more thoughtful and knowledgeable users, or outright disengage them.

It’s sensible to calculate this sort of cost, regardless of being normal or not. However be careful when and how you share this info with your family - because depending on the context, you’ll be basically saying “I put $0.16 over your hourly well-being”. (In special, pissing kids with this is a bad idea. They might even leave the AC turned on needlessly, just to spite you.)