• radix@lemm.ee
    95·
    9 months 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.

    • x4740N@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      9 months ago

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

        • x4740N@lemmy.worldEnglish
          5·
          9 months ago

          I was doing phyical maintenance on a old laptop of mine where I fried a cable because I plugged the battery in and forgot to plug that cable in but I forgot to unplug the battery before plugging that cable in and ended up frying a cable when plugging it back in

          Luckily it was only the cable that got fried

          But that’s in the past now

    • KSP Atlas@sopuli.xyz
      7·
      9 months ago

      I once tried partitioning the disk i was running on because i was new and didnt know that wouldn’t work, cfdisk now has a warning if you try to do that

    • Zikeji@programming.devEnglish
      7·
      9 months ago

      Ha, I don’t fuck around with anything that make break my PC or phone until a weekend with no commitments comes up.

    • hactar42@lemmy.world
      3·
      9 months ago

      I had to extend the boot drive on a VM that also happened to run the application our entire company used to make products. This was back in the day when extending VM drives took forever because of the way the hypervisor worked. I only had a small window to do this between our Europe plants going offline and the US plants starting up.

      So I used a community tool that would extend the drive in seconds. Turn the VM back on and queue “NTLDR is missing”. I also discovered that the backups for that server hadn’t completed successfully in so long there was nothing to restore from. In my effort to save 30-45 minutes, cost me 8 hours completely rebuilding the server and a day of lost production in the US plants.

    • Sebeck0401@feddit.nl
      37·
      9 months 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
      17·
      9 months 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
    511·
    9 months 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
      14·
      9 months 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
        3·
        9 months ago

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

  • Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world
    508·
    9 months 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
      311·
      9 months 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
      19·
      9 months ago

      Similarly, and also often misunderstood…

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

        • DokPsy
          4·
          9 months ago

          Honestly not sure which is worse. Peafowl or guinea fowl

          • Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world
            3·
            9 months ago

            I’ve lived near both, and only one made me think that children were being murdered nearby.

            Peafowl sound like nightmares.

            • MrShankles@reddthat.com
              3·
              9 months ago

              First time I heard peafowl at night, I honestly thought a woman was being murdered in the distance or something. I was a kid and had to ask my parents what was going on. I almost didn’t believe them because I didn’t even know there were peafowl down the road at all. But that memory always stuck with me lol

      • Feathercrown@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        9 months ago

        You say peacock and nobody bats an eye… but you say poopcock and everyone LOSES THEIR MINDS

        - The Joker

    • itsprobablyfine@feddit.ukEnglish
      8·
      9 months 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

      • fubo@lemmy.world
        13·
        9 months 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
        81·
        9 months ago

        Actually, your already familiar with this: Moose.

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

      • xantoxis@lemmy.world
        74·
        9 months 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.

    • Lvxferre@lemmy.ml
      2·
      9 months ago

      Words don’t work this way. They more often than not have multiple, somewhat overlapping, meanings. For example, Wiktionary lists five meanings for the word, when it comes to quadrupeds:

      1. (strictly) An adult female of the species Bos taurus, especially one that has calved.
      2. (loosely or informal) Any member of the species Bos taurus regardless of sex or age, including bulls and calves.
      3. (uncommon) Beef: the meat of cattle as food.
      4. (uncommon) Any bovines or bovids generally, including yaks, buffalo, etc.
      5. (biology) A female member of other large species of mammal, including the bovines, moose, whales, seals, hippos, rhinos, manatees, and elephants.

      You’re likely referring to meaning #4 or #5, but keep in mind that #1 is the most common and #2 is likely the original one (due to the cognates).

      • Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world
        2·
        9 months ago

        See in number 2, where it says loosely or informal?

        That means, “people have said this wrong for so long, that some may become argumentative if you try to tell them it’s wrong.”

        Kind of like how literally, literally means literally, but it was funny to say literally when you meant figuratively, so literally literally is literally literally figuratively literally. Literally.

        • Lvxferre@lemmy.ml
          1·
          9 months ago

          “Loosely or informal” solely means that it’s associated with an informal register, specially in contrast with #1. Any claim past is assumption.

          “Wrong” is relative. Which is the standard/reference that you’re using for contrast? Your own usage?

          And odds are that #2 is the original meaning. It isn’t like “people suddenly started to refer to Bos taurus regardless of sex”, it’s more like “people have been using it with this meaning for thousands of years”. #1 (the more common meaning) is likely the result of semantic narrowing, and #5 (the one that you’re defending as “correct”) is probably fairly recent. None of those meanings should be seen as “incorrect”, but picking on a meaning that backtracks all the way into Proto-Indo-European is extremely obtuse. (And no, the situation is nothing like the one for “literally”.)

      • Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world
        82·
        9 months 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
          7·
          9 months 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
            3·
            9 months 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
                4·
                9 months 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
                  2·
                  9 months 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
          4·
          9 months ago

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

  • grasshopper_mouse@lemmy.world
    41·
    9 months 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
      8·
      9 months 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.

    • hactar42@lemmy.world
      6·
      9 months ago

      Holy crap, this could be a game changer for me. I live in an area with a ton of highway interchanges, so it not uncommon to get directs that say in 5 mile stay left on road XYZ, then right after that, it like exit right in .0001 miles. So, I’m always scrolling up on the map to see what’s really coming up.

      • grasshopper_mouse@lemmy.world
        6·
        9 months ago

        Exactly! Or when you’re taking a left at a light and there are two turning lanes, I like to know if the next step will be a left or a right so I know what lane to get into, and how far away that next turn is.

  • Jerb322@lemmy.world
    421·
    9 months 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.

    • lazylion_ca@lemmy.ca
      15·
      8 months 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·
        9 months 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.

        • Jojo@lemm.ee
          1·
          9 months ago

          That’s actually more of an onager-style catapult, not a trebuchet style one.

          • fubo@lemmy.world
            2·
            9 months ago

            If it doesn’t use real Asiatic wild ass, it’s not an onager, it’s just a sparkling mangonel.

      • gibmiser@lemmy.world
        3·
        9 months ago

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

    • ThisIsNotHim@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      9·
      9 months 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.

    • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
      271·
      9 months 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.

      • Shou@lemmy.world
        4·
        9 months ago

        I’m only 27, but may have undiagnosed ADD. My schooling, career and health continue to be harmed by stuff I just can’t seem to get control over. Always been this way. I expect to die of heart disease while reaching for 30s.

        • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
          4·
          9 months ago

          I gotta ask, if you’re so sure, why don’t you seek treatment? Take a couple online tests to try to get a measure of it and go from there. I know it’s hard to force yourself out of a rut with ADHD, but screw leaving it untreated.

          • Shou@lemmy.world
            1·
            9 months ago

            Bold of you to assume I haven’t. I’m on a waiting list for diagnosis right now. Ironically the same institution who fucked up my diagnosis in 2004. But they were the only place that had a 30 day, instead of a 30 weeks waiting list.

            • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
              1·
              9 months ago

              Why would I assume you’ve sought treatment when you stated you were undiagnosed? Nothing bold about that at all based on the provided information.

    • theangryseal@lemmy.world
      15·
      9 months 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.”

    • Lvxferre@lemmy.ml
      3·
      9 months ago

      Did the discovery have any deep impact on your life?

      For context: I’m asking this because I’m socially close to a woman roughly in your age range that shows clear signs of autism, and I don’t know if I should encourage her to get diagnosed.

    • Empricorn@feddit.nl
      272·
      9 months ago

      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…

      • Shou@lemmy.world
        6·
        9 months ago

        Sometimes, letting go is the best you can do for them, and it isn’t any easier than trying treatment. I’m sorry for your loss. I am glad she didn’t have to keep suffering a losing battle.

      • spittingimage@lemmy.world
        6·
        9 months ago

        After seeing what my grandfather went through on dialysis, I wouldn’t choose it for a beloved pet. I agree you did the right thing.

      • _TK@lemmy.antemeridiem.xyzEnglish
        5·
        9 months ago

        Absolutely agreed. The situation is almost never black and white. The reason I put this as my answer to the question is that we had a scare this weekend with one of our dogs. She ate something that gave her a blockage in the outlet to her stomach. In the end we spent around $4000 on the surgery required to save her life. Even though we chose to go forward with it, it was still a hugely stressful situation and one of the hardest decisions I’ve had to make. We were lucky that a local vet had time to rush her into surgery. If they hadn’t been able to, the cost would have been over $13,000 and we would not have been able to afford it at all. As it is, we had to borrow some money from family to do the surgery. When I wrote this, it was up in the air whether we would be able to do it or not.

    • Num10ck@lemmy.worldEnglish
      13·
      9 months 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.

  • shroomato@lemmy.world
    261·
    9 months ago

    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.

  • helmet91@lemmy.world
    24·
    9 months 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
      12·
      9 months 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
        6·
        9 months 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.

  • TheActualDevil@sffa.community
    23·
    9 months 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.

  • Call me Lenny/Leni@lemm.eeEnglish
    20·
    9 months 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
        3·
        9 months 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.

  • ccunning@lemmy.world
    15·
    9 months ago

    “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…

      • fubo@lemmy.world
        5·
        9 months ago

        Ferns are very weird plants. The big fern plant you see doesn’t produce seeds. It is asexual and produces spores off the undersides of its fronds. The spores grow into tiny sexual plants, which then reproduce to make more big asexual ferns.