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Cake day: December 31st, 2023

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  • When you start a new job at a big company, you feel really incompetent and self-conscious because everybody else has been there so much longer, yet little old you know nothing about how any of it works or what’s going on.

    But then you go walking around talking to people, and you realize nobody actually knows what the hell is going on, and they just pretend they do.

    It’s kinda like that.

    But sometimes you meet some really competent and knowledgeable people who seem to have a better grasp and perspective on things. It’s good to not just listen to these people, but to bounce questions off of them. They don’t judge, because they know.










  • We used to think that they nap most of the day because we couldn’t see what lions did at night. With new camera technology, we can now. Male lions are, maybe, a little more badass than we thought. Their job is basically to fight other lions and hyenas and shit and patrol their territory. They do this at night. Lionesses are still super badass and maybe even more badass than we originally thought, too. I guess what I’m saying is that lions are just badass. The difference is that lions are social creatures while, as far as we can tell, tigers are more solitary, so there’s a comparison issue there. Male lions do, at least, do a bit more for the pride aside from sleeping and fucking, like some of the old documentaries I remember made it look like. That’s just how they are during the day, but I mean, they’re cats. They do a lot of shit a night we didn’t really have a good handle on until recently. Male lions are big and muscly and powerful not for no reason. They have to have that in case something else wants to fuck around with their pride and find out. The lionesses are the providers, the male lions are the protectors that stay at home and protect the territory. We like to try to fit things into our own ways of understanding, but they just do it different. It’s how they evolved to survive.





  • The taking/giving/reaching out term differences between Indian dialect and American English caused me some confusion on one of my calls. They kept saying they were trying to “take RDP from” server A to server B. I interpreted that as connecting from A to B, since they used the word “from.”

    It took a bit, but I eventually realized that there seemed to be to be a fundamental difference in the way these things are thought about.

    Americans, we always are reaching toward, pointing to, connecting to, or connecting something from HERE to THERE, like we’re shooting a gun or drawing a line. That is not how these Indian guys were looking at it.

    If you are “taking RDP from” server A to server B, then that means you are on server B trying to connect to server A. It’s more like if you were to imagine reaching out with your hand and grabbing something toward you.



  • The crazy thing about this is not just how evolution reverse-engineered what a snake looks like to a bird (or whatever preys on this moth), but also that some birds are born with an image burned into their brains labeled “avoid.” Snakes are such a problem to animals that may also prey on this moth, that a moth was able, over millions of years of evolution, to mimic that image through selective pressure. We’re not seeing here a moth mimicking a snake, we are seeing a moth’s wings resembling the image its prey holds in its brain of what it should identify as its own predator. An image that, itself, is held genetically and passed down from animal to animal, built by its own selective pressure. It’s amazing that this could produce such a clear image that’s immediately recognizable to us.


  • Let’s say you put like 1000 violinists all in a big, long row. Then, have the first violinist play a note, then the second plays the very same note, then the third, and so on. Let’s say you could also time it so that at the very moment the sound wave from one violinist hits the next is when that one plays the note. Brrrrrrump! All the way across. Let’s also say you could time it perfectly so that the waves don’t cancel each other out. What would happen?


  • Very similar situation, but in Physics, LOL. My self esteem was so low that I just assumed she was being lazy and taking advantage of me. I KNEW she was smart enough, but she kept asking me for help over and over. I don’t just give people answers, I work through it with them to teach them. Haha, looking back on it, she was probably just enjoying that interaction, meanwhile, I’m stewing inside about how this girl could be so ignorant as to accidentally keep sending me flirty signals and messing with me so she didn’t have to do her work. Funny thing is, I did like her. It just didn’t compute in my teenager brain that a girl would want to talk to me for any reason beyond getting some quiz answers out of me.