One I always find weird is how often we reuse the exact same word with the same spelling and pronunciation to mean wildly different things. For example, the word ‘jam’ can mean:

• a fruit preserve
• to play music
• heavy traffic
• a door that won’t open
• to cram something into something else
• a difficult situation

Or ‘saw’, which can be to look at something in the past tense or to cut wood. The word ‘run’ apparently has over 600 different meanings!

We also have contronyms, which is when a word also means the opposite of itself. For example ‘dust’, which can mean to add dust or remove it. Or ‘left’, which can mean remaining (“I only have three left”) or departing (“They left.”)

Chinese has something a bit like this too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den

I also tried to learn German and I remember this about gendered nouns:

The man = der mann (masculine)

The woman = die frau (feminine)

The boy = der junge (masculine)

The girl = das mädchen (neutral)

Not even genders themselves have the genders you’d expect lol

Also in French once you get past about 60 the numbers turn insane. E.g. 97 = Quatre-vingt-dix-sept, or literally Four-twenty-ten-seven.

I did an experiment with this - knowing nothing about this guy, I was like “I bet he either worked or currently still works for the oil industry.” Then went to Wikipedia and the second sentence of his article is:

Before leading the U.S. Department of Energy, Wright served as the CEO of Liberty Energy, North America’s second largest hydraulic fracturing company

Nailed it lol

I’m working on that currently. I think I’m on book 6, so only about 40 more to go lol

Mine is Siamese Dream

I started building a RAID before the prices of hard drives popped off, so I got the enclosure and one drive, I was going to buy the other drives when I had some spare cash. Now a single 8tb HDD (not even solid state!) is $450 CAD and there’s no way I can spend $1350 to finish this thing so it’s just sitting there.

The Index of Economic Freedom is created by the Heritage Foundation, which should tell you all you need to know about that as a source.

I’m in a pretty mercenary mindset about it these days TBH. I’ve got some money on the table, whoever can provide 32gb of RAM and three HDDs for my RAID at a price that’s not ridiculous can have it.

China seems to be working on it.

Microsoft’s entire business plan seems to be to produce the shittiest possible interpretation of every single piece of software they can think of, and then have it become the default that everyone uses for some fucking reason.

I really hope China or someone else can step up and just flood the entire market with cheap components eventually.

Here’s a piece of the old knowledge: if you had a CRT monitor and a chair with rubber/insulated feet, you could lift your feet off the floor, spread one hand as wide as you could across the screen, turn the monitor off, and you could zap someone with an electric shock with your other hand.

You could also daisy-chain it across multiple people, so if you could rope 4-5 people into helping you then you could all hold hands and zap someone on the other side of the room if they weren’t paying attention.

That seems like a really good way to get sick lol

N o t i f i c a t i o n s .

My phone going ping because someone outside of work wants something. Slack going ping because someone at work wants something. Windows going ding because of some bullshit and I’m not allowed to use Linux for work. Some other thing going ping in the distance because it’s not connected to the internet, or it is connected to the internet and has an update.

Why did we build this world for ourselves

Especially if you have one of those friends who invites you to do something, and then they “just have to do a thing real quick” and you end up going with them while they do a bunch of random chores in various places.

One time in high school I was supposed to go to a movie with a friend of mine, she was supposed to come to my place first and we’d leave from there. She never showed up (and it was the 90s so no texting) so I was just like “okay” and went about my day. Two days later she randomly showed up at my house and asked if I wanted to go. I said no because she was two entire days late and now I’m doing something else, and she got annoyed at me for not dropping everything and going.

I do not understand this.

One of the supermarkets near me did that for a while (in Canada) and it was great. I don’t think they do it anymore though.

I don’t have kids so this might not work for you, but for me getting a nice pair of noise cancelling headphones has been a real godsend. They were a little pricey but being able to just have a silent bubble you can turn on whenever you want is great. They also completely cancel out the background sound of being on a plane.

I deleted my banking app off my phone because it asked me for a selfie lol. I will absolutely switch banks over this.