this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2023
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[–] [email protected] 103 points 1 year ago (15 children)

Don't mess around with partitions on your disk when it's past midnight, you're extremely stressed, and you don't have (easily accessible) backups.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago

Classic, “what the fuck did I do here and why did I think this was a good idea,” material.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

I am in this comment and I don't like it.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Yes, that does sound like good advice even from a morning, first coffee is brewing kind of viewpoint.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Additionally don't do maintenance on your computers when tired, learned from experience

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[–] [email protected] 94 points 1 year ago (3 children)

That if they stop loving you, they won't start again no matter how hard you try.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

This one hurts. I’m sorry, friend.

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[–] [email protected] 62 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

When you've been at good terms with a person close to you and they die, the pain will be like nothing you've ever experienced before and there is absolutely nothing you can do to make it stop.

But: Those are waves. At first it's just constantly all over everything with no end in sight but then there's suddenly a first moment of calm and then it starts again. Those moments get longer with time, for now, endure.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I never liked taking pictures of friends and family when traveling, cos I could see them anytime I wanted, but the places I was visiting I didn't plan on going back to.

Comically sad when I found out it was the other way around.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My brother passed away in November - it hit me worse than many losses I've experienced. The calm and waves of sadness is so accurate, but nothing can prepare you for it; I spent years preparing for my brother's death, but it did nothing when it actually happened.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I spent years preparing for my brother’s death, but it did nothing when it actually happened.

I had about a week between my dad being placed in ICU and his death. I saw it coming and I tried to get my mind into a place that would somehow hopefully cushion the impact when his final moment would be there and you know what, it didn't do shit.

A few minutes ago I fell apart when I cut a breakfast sandwich because that's what he used to to for me when I was, maybe fourteen. It was one of the things he tried to do to make things easier for me. I can't fucking cut sandwiches without crying right now. It's all just fucking shit.

[–] [email protected] 56 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I found out that I could disassemble my vacuum's dirt container further so I can clear it out easier. The container has a big plastic tube that runs through it and I've been squeezing my hand around it to grab clumps of pet hair that get stuck. The other day while I was trying to clear the container, the plastic tube fell out. Turns out I just needed to twist and pull the tube. I've had this vacuum for 8 years.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Lmao nice. Here's a similarly embarrassing story: my refrigerator light was burned out and I was too lazy to replace it for a few years. When I finally got around to it, it turned out I had the exact replacement bulb in my possession the entire time 🤦. Ofc replacing it also only took ~30 seconds.

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[–] [email protected] 52 points 1 year ago (12 children)

If you are a dude sit down to pee when you are home.... feels weird for like a day but it is fantastic. No more trying to aim on the middle of the night while trying to close your eyes, no more rouge pee stream, just a like moment to sit and relax.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Rogue: deviant from the norm.

Rouge: a shade of red.

If your pee is rouge when you stand, you need to see your doctor.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Or maybe you just ate a lot of beetroot.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I learned this lesson pretty quickly, once I started to have to clean my own apartment.

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[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 year ago (3 children)

When using Google Maps for driving directions, you can swipe left and it will show/speak the next upcoming step. I had no idea about this and I've been using Google maps for ages.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Well, this is news to me. Thanks! I often get worried that I accidentally turned off navigation or something, and hearing it repeat the next step would be great.

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[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

"Making ends meet" i use to think it was, "Making ends meat" like all you can afford is the cut of bits off of undesirable meat. I never saw it written down before, and now I feel dumb.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

I had only ever see trebuchet written, i had never heard it spoken. So young me thought it was pronounced tray-bucket. I was in my 40s before i finally heard someone discussing catapult vs trebuchet and realized it was french.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well guess who's pronouncing it tray bucket from now on

(It's me)

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

That's a wonderful eggcorn.

I was watching a video talking about how eggcorns are an unusual category of error because they require intelligence and creativity to make. The argument was that the process goes like this:

A new word or phrase is heard, but not understood. The brain makes sense of it using existing vocabulary that has sounds that are close enough. This is accompanied an explanation for why those specific words make sense in this new context.

For example: the original eggcorn was a mishearing of acorn. Egg because it's roughly egg shaped, and corn is sometimes used to describe small objects similar to how grain can be.

All this to say, it's maybe not something to feel dumb about. Your brain did something neat.

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[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 year ago (18 children)

There is no animal called "cow".

Cow is a term for females of multiple species.

The animal that gives us milk is called cattle. Female cattle are cows. Male cattle are bulls.

I always thought cattle was a synonym for livestock, but it is a species of animal.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago (9 children)

Words mean how people use them. There is absolutely an animal called a cow, regardless of sex, and it's a synonym for cattle.

You are also correct that cow means female is many species.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (10 children)

Similarly, and also often misunderstood...

Peacock only refers to the males. A female is called a peahen.

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago (4 children)

This summer I found out I’m autistic. I’m 60 years old.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Late diagnosis sucks in a way. You finally understand why you’ve had so many difficulties in life. Why you maybe didn’t fit in, why people treated you differently, etc. I mean, it’s such a relief when you understand why you had all those issues, but the other side of that coin is that you also understand how much of your life was lost to the untreated and misunderstood part of you. Maybe people get physical and/or verbal abuse as children because parents can’t get a diagnosis because they don’t understand, or think you can be forced to be “normal”. Peers don’t get you, you’re the wierd kid, friendships are difficult. Missing out on connections that can help move your life forward. Lots of stress and anxiety.

It good to know now, but it hurts to know that life could have probably been different if you’d been understood and been offered tools to help yourself.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

My daughter swears I’m autistic. I was talking to her this morning and said, “I spent every year with my desk right by the the teacher’s desk. I would have wondered if they all got together and planned it, but that’s where I was at, multiple schools in different states.”

She replied, “Dad, go get diagnosed. Seriously.”

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

I’ll interpret “just learned” as in the last year or so

  • Lifting weights is good for you and you should do it
  • Running is only bad for your knees if your form sucks, your shoes suck, or you overtrain. Done correctly it’s good for you in basically every way.
  • Eat an inconvenient amount of protein, it’s also good for you.
[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

Knees don't fail from wear, they fail from tear. If you're not actually injuring yourself, they get stronger from use, they don't wear out.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (2 children)

You never know how far you'll go to save a pet until it happens.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Unfortunately, it's not always that black & white with an assured outcome. I just had to make the difficult decision to put my cat down, kidney failure.

As a result, everything in her was shutting down. It would have taken several days and thousands of dollars just to stabilize her at an inpatient animal hospital. The cost aside, it would have required much more stress, pain, and separation for her, with pretty much the same unfortunate result. So I declined, and it was the right thing to do. I miss her terribly...

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

before you get married to someone you might want to discuss this. some cultures/families/people would happily spend a hundred thousand plus on chemotherapy etc on an old pet, while others draw the line at $200. understand their values.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (2 children)

That West Berlin was an enclave deep within GDR, completely encircled by the Berlin wall. For some reason I thought that Berlin was right at the border between FRG and GDR with the wall splitting it in half.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (2 children)

With UEFI bios you no longer need a boot menu like Grub for choosing an OS to boot. You can just use the boot menu of the bios.

(You still need Grub for booting Linux, but no need to show it for long seconds just so you can select Windows from it, if for some reason you have a Windows installed too.)

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I personally find it easier to use my bootloader's menu (I use systemd-boot instead of GRUB) to decide what to boot into. It's a lot simpler than clicking through to the boot submenu in my BIOS.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

You don’t even need grub to boot Linux; the kernel can be its own bootloader.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (5 children)

At 4 AM this morning I learned there was a smoke alarm in my office. Also that the beep it makes when the battery is dead is loud as fuck. Loud enough to wake me from a dead sleep in another room.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (4 children)

It's always at 3-4am. Every fucking time

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Economics. I never understood it that well having taken two years of high school classes for law and government, then watched a single Economics Explained video and understood so much that I hadn’t understood before.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I realized too late in my life that friendships of any kind or flavor all have a lifespan. This can mean anything, five minutes in line at the movies, childhood into high school, a semester of college, or your whole life.

Context: the friends I’ve (m35) had since childhood and into my adulthood have slowly and silently withered away due a multitude of reasons but mostly because we each have things going on in our life and those had taken precedence over cultivating and caring for our friendships. Sure we text for holidays or birthdays, but it all feels hollow compared to what we had together for literal decades.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

“Conifers” comes from “Cone” as in Pine Cone

“Mammals” as in Mammary glands

Those are the two that come to mind but there have been several more in the same vein of these as I rapidly approach the conclusion of my fifth decade…

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

I just learned that in the sky there are things called contrails, and they are made by machines that fly high above us called aeroplanes.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The actual rules of Scattergories. I had no idea that the rules I grew up with were not the actual rules, and the actual rules make the game much easier.

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