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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: February 1st, 2024

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  • I remember when phones used to be good.

    Telemarketers have been around for a long, long time (Wikipedia claim “…the practice of contacting potential customers by telephone originated in the late 19th century.”).

    I personally recall a lot more telemarketing in the 90s, though I was a kid and just passed the phone to mom or dad. But that was also a time when caller ID was a luxury, and not everyone had answering machines.





  • Most of the time that leads to them dying.

    Well, squishing has a 100% chance of them dying. With a toddler and a baby, having them run loose sadly isn’t an option.

    We live in a very mild climate, and there’s under-deck and fence space around our house, in addition to bushes, trees, and underbrush — fairly suitable for a variety of arachnids. It’s not the same as indoors, and survival rate certainly isn’t 100%, but it’s not the death sentence of going from a climate controlled house to below-freezing outdoors.



  • I think large planes “look” like they can’t work because their “relative speed” is really low — that is, their speed relative to their length. We’re used to seeing birds cover tens of lengths per second, whereas a large airliner covers ~1ish per second at takeoff.

    Or not, but this always seemed like a plausible explanation as to why planes look impossible. (Though given that hovering birds don’t look funny, maybe this is a silly observation…).





  • I mean, vigorous physical exercise is one of the most mentally relaxing activities, in a way (at least for me). Go for a 100km bike ride in hilly terrain, push yourself on the climbs, and just kind of let your mind wander. It’s not edible-and-David-Attenborough relaxing, but it is relaxing in its own way.


  • It is “backwards” from some other commands — usually you run copy/rsync/link from source to destination, but with tar the destination (tarball) is specified before the source (directory/files).

    That, and the flags not needing dashes always just throws me for a loop.

    And the icing on the cake is that I don’t use tar for tarring that often, so I lose all muscle memory (untaring a tgz or tar.bz2 is frequent enough that I can usually get that right at least…).