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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: October 1st, 2023

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  • “Just Google it” was always worthless advice, even when Google worked right. When you look up information on the Internet, you need prior knowledge in order to assess the information. Maybe this is great info? Maybe it’s dumb and whoever wrote it is a moron? Without prior knowledge you don’t know. With prior knowledge you can see what they say about the things you already know and decide from that.

    I once tried to configure a Cisco access point, with zero prior experience with Cisco IOS. Simple stuff, but I knew nothing and had to Google it. I found some blog explaining it, but it looked weird. But I also knew IOS is weird, so maybe it’s right? Hard to say! I reached out to an old friend who is Cisco certified to verify, he told me to ignore that thing and showed me what I should actually do. It really made me realize how useless googling something is if you don’t have the prior knowledge to assess it.


  • As a European from elsewhere in Europe, I’m never going back to Milan. Maybe it’s fine if you’re into fashion, but if you’re not there’s not much to look at except a cathedral which resembles every other cathedral, and it’s impossible to get a photo of it without also having a friendship bracelet scammer in the frame, actively harassing you.

    All tourist locations in Italy and France have people trying to scam you (and some non-scammers just trying to sell you cheap toys), but Milan is the only place I’ve been to where they’re straight up harassing you non-stop. Go to Pisa instead, it’s super relaxing there and you can marvel at their past mistakes in structural engineering. A far better deal.





  • bus_factor@lemmy.worldtoComic Strips@lemmy.worldXXX
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    3 months ago

    No, you don’t have a point. You’re missing the point. The point is that America in English is not the same word as America in Spanish. They’re false friends.

    False friends is the linguistics term for two words spelled the same in two languages, but with different meaning. For example, the word “glass” means ice cream in Swedish. We don’t tell the Swedish they’re using the word “glass” wrong, we accept that it has a different meaning in Swedish.

    Sometimes the false friends are pretty subtle. The word “må” means “may” in Danish, but “must” in Norwegian. This can sometimes lead to misunderstandings, because unlike the ice cream example above, you don’t get any hints from context. You just have to know.

    It’s the same deal with America. English-speaking countries (yes, the UK too), and all of the Nordics for that matter, use a continental model where North and South America are separate continents, and America is shorthand for United States of America. And the superior amount of Spanish speaking countries don’t give them the right to tell English speakers what words should mean in their native language.



  • bus_factor@lemmy.worldtoComic Strips@lemmy.worldXXX
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    3 months ago

    Do you genuinely think that giving Americans a few hundred bucks caused immediate and persistent inflation? Because I’m more inclined to blame the spike on a collapse in the global supply chain due to quarantining of factory workers and container ship crews, and the subsequent increases on a combination of factors, including interest rates (or, more accurately, what caused the raise in interest rates) and corporate greed.


  • Gone in 60 Seconds is fantastic, except that one tiny scene in the final fight where he’s hanging from his fingertips and the bad guy stands around almost stepping on them without noticing. I’m willing to suspend my disbelief to some extent, but that scene is an insult, and so close to the end that the sour aftertaste lingers past the credits. I should really just rip the Blu-ray and edit it out.







  • bus_factor@lemmy.worldtoComic Strips@lemmy.worldDIY car repairs
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    4 months ago

    That’s obviously false. Tons of stuff is both lower stakes and easier than brakes. Changing simple stuff like lights, fuses, battery, wiper blades, wheels or oil, tons of other stuff. The only way brakes is the easiest part to work on is by arbitrarily excluding lots of other stuff from counting as “working on your car”.