Category: Uncategorized

https://redirectme.quora.com/SHU…

This advice is a bit more precise than what I’d heard, which is “report QCR” (and which I’d been doing):

Christopher VanLang:

For the record, you should not report the QCR since they doesn’t get very far since that review process is drastically different from human reports. Instead, you are best off using the https://www.quora.com/contact link to trigger an event review.

[…]

Might be easier to provide the question log to give the reviewer the full picture. The ultimate goal is to get a review of the QCR human or robot that is causing the problem.

I vaguely recall a story which hangs on the following premise: there’s a Greek word which can either mean lot or some type of food (omelette?).

This one continues to have me stumped. Both the Homeric moros and the Classical moira “fate” are derived from the word for “share”, just as “lot” in English is. moira has been a homophone of myrrha “myrrh” for maybe 1500 years (first as /myra/ then as /mira/); but I’m not seeing that pun.

Of Modern synonyms, other than those in Konstantinos Konstantinides’ answer, there’s

• ɣrafto “what is written”
• riziko “what is at the root” (possibly also the etymology of risk, though I think the semantic development is different: risk < shoal at sea < boulder fallen from a cliff < cliff < (mountain root)”: What is the etymology and origin of the word “risk”?)
• pepromeno “what is fulfilled” (ancient participle, learnèd)

Nothing obvious there. The only halfway possible parallel, from this Synonyms Blog: μοίρα, is meriða. The main meaning of the word is portion (of food), and you can order a meriða of lamb at a restaurant. But the synonym list posits it’s also a synonym of fate (via the same metaphor of sharing as lot and moira.) That meaning is not given in the Triantafyllidis Dictionary, but it is one of the definitions given in Kriaras’ Dictionary of Early Modern Greek (Nathanael Bertos, 15th century: “The blasphemer has no part with God, but his portion is rather with the traitor Judas”), so it must have survived in some dialect or other.

Here’s a PhD on Bertos, if you feel like reading up on 15th century sermonising in Greek: http://ikee.lib.auth.gr/record/2…. Yes, the PhD is in Greek too.

This seems like a stretch; I’m sure that word isn’t it either. Thanks for the Google search you made me do though. Turns out Bertos’ homilies have just been published by Athanasiadou-Stephanoudaki, who wrote that PhD; I didn’t know that, and it’s always good to get more Early Modern Greek prose!

EDIT:

I think I’ve got it.

A strapatsaða is one of the names for a tomato and feta omelette; it’s also known as kaɣianas (from Turkish), and it’s equivalent to the Turkish menamen.

strapatsaða < Venetian strapazzada < strapazzare.

strapazzare: to abuse, maltreat something; to chop into little pieces.

There’s another cognate of strapazzare in Greek: strapatso “disaster, fiasco”.

It’s not the notion of “all sorts of stuff going on”, which OP recalls (and which is proverbially is associated with omelettes). But it’s the closest I’m getting.

Nick Nicholas timeline.

18:05

Nick Nicholas’ answer to Are questions on Quora curated? If so, how did “Why did Loretta Lynch call for blood & death in the streets of the US March 2017?” ever get posted?

“Are questions on Quora curated?”

Only post facto.

Get reporting.

18:07

Why don’t we ban or declare war on Islam? [“Why don’t we ban or declare war on Islam?”]

With Christianity being the most persecuted religion, Muslims being most of the terrorists worldwide, and aiming to take over the world by reproducing, I see no reason to criminalize Islam, and maybe even reinstating the death penalty for Muslims as jailing them would make prisons “no-go zones”.

Nick checks Edit Log: https://www.quora.com/Why-dont-w…

Question added by Anonymous.

Of course.

*Reported*

Improvements to Anonymity on Quora by Riley Patterson on The Quora Blog (March 2017)

• All anonymous content will be reviewed for spam and harassment before receiving distribution

Anonymous Screening (Jack Fraser, June 2017)

So we finally have our answer:

There is human review as we were originally promised.

It just seems like they’re somehow doing it spectacularly badly!

https://insurgency.quora.com/Ano… (comment on Jack’s post)

Nick Nicholas:

—Can’t you see this ain’t good enough?

—I see what you mean.

—Then you give me some half-assed story about some delivery guy busting his arm. Look, Fawlty, if your chef couldn’t find the ingredients from that guy, why didn’t he get them from somebody else?

—Exactly. Hopeless.

—What?

—Completely hopeless.

—Right. You’re the manager, aren’t you? You’re responsible. So what are you going to do about it?

—… I’ll have a word with him.

—Have a word with him? Man, you gotta tell him, lay it on the line! Lay it on the line. Tell him if he doesn’t get on the ball, you’re gonna bust his ass!

(Fawlty Towers: Waldorf Salad)

Since Profanity as such is no longer banned on Quora, my response is: Του Αγίου Πούτσου.

That can be paraphrased as “Never”.

(It literally means “St Penis’ Day”, because Greeks are strange like that.)

Nick Nicholas’ answer to After “Quora auf Deutsch” what is the next language Quora will target? is a summary of discussions Josephine Stefani, Clarissa Lohr and I have had about the likely Quora internationalisation roadmap.

The choice of Italian remains an oddity among the potential candidates. I am not convinced by the purchasing power of the number of Italian-speaking Google users that might stumble on a Quora answer in a search, and see an ad there (the bottom line explanation for Quora internationalisation priorities).

But 60 million Italian-speakers on Google, living in a teetering economy within the First World, are still a much more compelling proposition for would-be advertisers on Quora than 10 million Greek-speakers on Google, living in a collapsed economy, within whatever world Greece now finds itself in.

And that’s the calculation. If the calculation were Wikipedia-style altruism, there’d be a Quora in Arabic and in Hausa already.

Unlike others here, I would be delighted if there were a Quora in Greek; but then again, I’m in the diaspora, so I miss being immersed in Greek. German Quorans I know were ambivalent about the point of a German Quora too, but I note that while some will not set foot on it (Kat), others have taken it up despite their scepticism (Clarissa Lohr). The global reach of English Quora is unlikely to be diluted, and the Other-Language Quoras can readily occupy a niche alongside it.

(Niche is not what Quora likely had in mind for all those Googling users and their monetisable clickbait. It’ll be interesting to see how many eyeballs Spanish Quora attracts that weren’t already on English Quora.)

But a Greek Quora? Only if Quora Inc turns into Wikimedia, and releases its software for public tinkering and customisation.

Like I said. Του Αγίου Πούτσου.

The quote as given does not appear in the Ancient canon, or even the Mediaeval canon. Nor in fact does the phrase βίᾳ ἤρχεσαν “they had ruled with force”.

The phrase is a little odd; it’s very much a tendentious summary of what happened in Athens with the Thirty Tyrants, which would be out of place in an historical account, though maybe not in rhetoric.

My strong suspicion is that this comes from a textbook.

The forests of Crete were renowned, and were going strong even in Venetian times: Cretan Renaissance literature abounds with pastoral scenes, and tales of deer hunting.

These are the kinds of mountains I grew up seeing in Eastern Crete:

They do have shrubbery. But actual trees are long gone. The first time I saw trees on a mountain was on a visit to Cyprus, and they looked all wrong.

The story I’ve heard is that they were chopped down for firewood, and erosion did the rest. Google Books corroborates:

Forestry in a Global Context:

Many of the forests that were severely exploited recovered and indeed have been through several cycles of exploitation and recovery. For example, deforestation of Crete was a factor in the demise of the Minoan civilization in 1450 BC and yet cypress imported from Crete was used for the construction of the Venetian fleet in the Middle Ages. In the 16th century, the Idhi mountain range in Crete was cpvered in cypress; a century later it was described as a barren spot. The city of Iraklion is located near the site of ancient Knossos, the major city of Minoan Crete. In the 17th century AD, Iraklion repeated the deforestation of the ancient Minoans such that no more local supplies of firewood were available. […] Essentially deforestation all over the Mediterranean occured where populations increased and reforestation occurred where population decreased and people moved out of the area.

• They don’t hate robots at all, and in fact they for one welcome our new robot overlords. They admit that AI is not there yet, but think that AI + humans will do a better job than humans alone. Adam D’Angelo’s answer to Do you worry that AGI (artificial general intelligence) will obviate the need for a structured knowledge repository?
• They’re right…
• … but AI is even less there than they admit, as demonstrated by the daily fails of Quora bots.
• They’re cheap. Quora is after all a business, and one that still hasn’t returned profit (although it will: Scott Welch’s answer to When do you think Quora is going to end?.) A combination of bots and subcontractors is indeed cheaper than professionals, and more scalable than volunteer admins.
• Scalable is not the same as effective, of course…
• The Terminator is on track to becoming real, but I think climate change will get us first.
• In fact, I’ve already speculated that the Quora bots are there to give us a false sense of security about how little progress AI has made. 🙂

From OED, the dialectal survivals like Yorkshire thaa reflect unstressed variants of thou (which were short); thou is a long vowel that has gone through the Great English Vowel Shift—just as house has an /aʊ/ vowel, and is still pronounced huːs in Scots.

The irregularity is you, and apparently the yow pronunciation was around in the 17th century and survives in dialect. OED has a somewhat convoluted account, but the bit of it I find convincing is ēow > you patterning with new, as a /iuː/ instance exempt from the Vowel Shift:

In early Middle English the initial palatal absorbed the first element of the diphthong /iu/ (the regular reflex of Old English ēo plus w ), resulting, after the shift of stress from a falling to a rising diphthong, in /juː/; a stage already reached (in some speech) by the early 13th cent. (compare the form ȝuw in the Ormulum). Middle English long ū thus produced was subject to regular diphthongization to /aʊ/ by the operation of the Great Vowel Shift, as is attested by some 16th- and 17th-cent. orthoepists, who also provide evidence that by the second half of the 17th cent. this pronunciation had come to be regarded as a vulgarism; it survives in a number of modern regional English varieties. The modern standard pronunciation derives partly from a Middle English unstressed variant with short ŭ , subsequently restressed and lengthened, and partly from a form which preserved the falling diphthong /iu/ and subsequently shared the development of other words with this sound (e.g. new adj., true adj.) in which the shift of stress to /juː/did not take place until later; see further E. J. Dobson Eng. Pronunc. 1500–1700 (ed. 2, 1968) II. §§4, 178.

(The unstressed variant of you with short ŭ would be pronounced yuh; it is of course the form usually spelled ya.)

The criterion for a deactivation appearing in Necrologue is that it is accompanied by another action indicating either sanction from Quora, or user dissatisfaction with Quora: Category definitions by Nick Nicholas on Necrologue.

People deactivate all the time, and users did not want Necrologue to be filled up with random reports of other users taking time out for exams; at user request, Argologue was set up separately, for users who are just taking time out of Quora for Real Life-related reasons.

Jordan has not indicated why she’s deactivated, or how long she’s deactivated for; so I have not reported her for either.

It has been alleged that several Quora accounts have been hacked in June 2017, with spurious deletion requests issued by the hackers, and promptly honoured by Quora. The team of users investigating the breach have identified a couple of vulnerabilities related to Cloudbleed as the likely culprit, possibly via Zendesk (used to manage email communications between users and Quora). Read recent posts on The Insurgency and Cordially Resistant for more.

(The group’s own blog has just been deleted, possibly as a reaction to Top Writer complaints, and the group lead has deactivated his account.)

At least one user impacted reports that he is in conversation with Quora to get his account restored, and the claim has been brought to Quora’s attention via intermediaries on the Top Writer Facebook lounge.

So Quora may be helping those whose accounts have been hacked.

To my knowledge, Quora has not to date communicated about whether the claims are true or not, nor what precautions users should take. (The Quorableed group recommend changing both your Zendesk password and your Quora password.)

The reticence of Quora to communicate to its user base on Quora is longstanding. I am A2A’ing Tatiana Estevez and Jonathan Brill.

EDIT: Update on Account Deletion Processes by Paula Griffin on The Quora Moderation Blog