• radix@lemm.ee
    66·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • Sebeck0401@feddit.nl
      27·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • DearOldGrandma@lemmy.world
      12·
      1 year ago

      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.

  • AgentGrimstone@lemmy.world
    38·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • ditty@lemm.ee
      8·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • x4740N@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Aren’t you supposed to turn fridges off when doing that to avoid potential shock

  • Jerb322@lemmy.world
    35·
    1 year ago

    “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.

    • ThisIsNotHim@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      12·
      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.

    • lazylion_ca@lemmy.ca
      9·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • fubo@lemmy.world
        3·
        1 year ago

        First, you get an ogre to bend a tree down to the ground. Then you fasten a bucket to the top of the tree, and put a rock in the bucket. Then you tell the ogre to let the tree loose, and the rock flies out and smashes your enemy’s castle.

        This is the invention of the tree-bucket.

      • gibmiser@lemmy.world
        2·
        1 year ago

        Wow you are my spirit brother. I did the same and was relentlessly mocked by friends playing Age of Empires

    • EmoDuck@sh.itjust.works
      3·
      1 year ago

      It actually refers to tying a napkin around your neck before eating. You had to “make the ends meet” before you could eat

  • Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world
    29·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • surewhynotlem@lemmy.world
      19·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • waz@lemmy.world
      8·
      1 year ago

      Similarly, and also often misunderstood…

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

    • itsprobablyfine@feddit.ukEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      Wait. The singular of cattle is cattle? I think that’s the part that confuses me. Or is there no singular and you must use cow/bull? Either way I’ve never really thought about it and now I can’t not

      • Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world
        4·
        1 year ago

        Actually, your already familiar with this: Moose.

        One Moose. Two Moose. Male is a bull. Female is a cow. 🤯

      • xantoxis@lemmy.world
        4·
        1 year ago

        No, the person you’re replying to is just wrong. The common name for that animal is cow, and in common usage it can refer to both sexes. Cattle is the plural.

      • fubo@lemmy.world
        2·
        1 year ago

        “Cattle” is a mass noun. You have a lot of cattle.

        If you want to state a number of them, you have seventy-two head of cattle. “Head” is a counter; compare “sheets of paper”, “bales of hay”, or “hands of poker”.

        You wouldn’t say you have fifty hay, or that you played five pokers. And “papers” (count noun) are written works, whereas “paper” (mass noun) or “sheets of paper” (mass noun with counter) is what the works are written on.

        If you’re in the cattle business, you absolutely do care about their age, sex, and reproductive status. So you might have one calf and six cows; or three steers; or two heifers, a yearling calf, and a bull.

        If you really need to refer to one bovine without talking about its age, sex, or reproductive status … you have one head of cattle, or you have a cattlebeast.

        Yep, that’s a thing.

      • Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world
        5·
        1 year ago

        I’m not sure if your mind is blown because you also didn’t know that, or you don’t understand what I’m saying.

        I could clarify if you’d like, but you’ll have to let me know what you mean by Wut.

        • Skyhighatrist@lemmy.ca
          5·
          1 year ago

          What you’ve said is technically correct (the best kind of correct). But the word cattle is also used to refer to other similar animals such as Yak, Bison, Buffalo.

          Merriam-Webster defines cattle as

          : domesticated quadrupeds held as property or raised for use
          specifically : bovine animals on a farm or ranch

          Cambridge defines it as:

          a group of animals that includes cows, buffalo, and bison, that are often kept for their milk or meat

          And Oxford as:

          cows and bulls that are kept as farm animals for their milk or meat

          Wikipedia is more specific and defines it as:

          Cattle or oxen (Bos taurus) are large, domesticated, bovid ungulates. They are prominent modern members of the subfamily Bovinae and the most widespread species of the genus Bos.

          Not disputing your fact at all, just clarifying that words often have multiple meanings and meanings also change over time according to popular usage, so saying cattle means livestock isn’t necessarily wrong, it’s just not as precise as the technical definition. And the more people that use it that way the more correct it becomes. As I dove deeper into the topic, I’m seeing evidence that suggests that Cattle is also an American term that means Livestock, but is marked as archaic. Which honestly makes sense as the word’s etymology is the following according to Merriam-Webster:

          Middle English catel, cadel “property (whether real or personal), goods, treasure, livestock, (in plural cateles) possessions,” borrowed from Anglo-French katil “property, goods, wealth,” borrowed from medieval French (dialects of Picardy and French Flanders) catel, going back to Medieval Latin capitāle “movable property, riches,” (in Anglo-Saxon law texts) “head of cattle,” noun derivative from neuter of capitālis “of the head, chief, principal”

          Anyway, good fact nonetheless.

          • Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world
            2·
            1 year ago

            Yeah. I often heard cattle used in that way, so that’s why I thought it. So, no it’s not wrong, but it was pretty wild to learn that it wasn’t completely correct.

              • Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world
                2·
                1 year ago

                I think it’s the other way around.

                Like you might call a bunch of mindless followers “sheep”. We didn’t name the animal after those people, we started using the word that way because it reminded us of the animal.

                • Skyhighatrist@lemmy.ca
                  1·
                  1 year ago

                  The etymology suggests that originally we just called livestock cattle (i.e. these are My animals, my property), and the name was so ubiquitous that when it came time to give the specific species a name, it stuck.

        • oNevia@lemm.ee
          1·
          1 year ago

          Definitely meant as in I had no idea either and you helped me learn something today ☺️

  • traches@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    28·
    1 year ago

    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.
    • jerkface@lemmy.caEnglish
      15·
      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.

    • EmoDuck@sh.itjust.works
      3·
      1 year ago

      My main takeaway from this is that I should eat 5 times my daily calorie count in chicken breast and I’ll turn into Arnold Schwarzenegger. Time to get out my KFC coupons

    • AA5B@lemmy.world
      2·
      1 year ago

      My kids love that I now make eggs and Canadian bacon with pancakes. They think it’s just a more elaborate breakfast. It may not actually be healthy but at least they’re getting some protein Instead of just massive amounts of carbs

    • jerkface@lemmy.caEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Eat an inconvenient amount of protein, it’s also good for you.

      No. You just shit it out. Your gut can only absorb so much protein in a day. Even if you only eat potatoes or rice, if you are meeting your caloric needs, you will automatically be meeting your protein needs. Meanwhile, animal protein is associated with very serious health issues.

      And of course the facts that you have known all along but choose not to connect with emotionally: that the experiences of animals are real and matter.

  • PissinSelfNdriveway@sh.itjust.works
    19·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • grasshopper_mouse@lemmy.world
    17·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • Usernameblankface@lemmy.world
      3·
      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.

  • TheActualDevil@sffa.community
    17·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • WarmSoda@lemm.ee
    16·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • helmet91@lemmy.world
    15·
    1 year ago

    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.)

    • Dr. Bluefall@toast.oooEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • helmet91@lemmy.world
        2·
        1 year ago

        Oh, I didn’t mean the boot sequence section of the bios, I meant the quick boot selector. Typically there’s a key for it (F12, Del, or something else), different from what you use for entering the bios.

        That being said, I’m using Grub as well, because I haven’t reinstalled it since I’ve made this discovery. Indeed it’s simpler.

  • Call me Lenny/Leni@lemm.eeEnglish
    15·
    1 year ago

    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.

      • Call me Lenny/Leni@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        I skimmed through the channel and believe it’s this one based on the fact it had Japan in it and was recent, but I might be missing something. Titles and thumbnails change often as a form of clickbait and that gets confusing when going back to something.

  • CubbyTustard@reddthat.com
    13·
    1 year ago

    PBR is made with sulphury water and that’s why PBR farts smell so bad. Beer made from good water doesn’t give you wicked bad farts! never again

    • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
      2·
      1 year ago

      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.