Back when I originally dabbled with using Linux on a computer of my own, maybe around year 2003 or so, I didn’t know about rm -rf and was many years from being an adult as well. But I did know about /dev/null, and was really fascinated by the concept of the /dev/ directory!

So, I tried removing a file by

# cat filename > /dev/null  
``` .  
The next time I booted my computer, there was... An error message.  

/dev/null: Not a file

From the perspective of a person who has now used Linux since 1998 (first with only user rights on my parents' computer) this sounds like an absolutely bonkers solution for that problem, but yeah: it's er-em-dash-rm-ef-slash level of error. And those do really happen. It's good to keep in mind what a n00b can be able to do!

if your partner falters or strays away, it’s also your fault.

Haha, this reminds me of what happened to me when I was around 15 or 16-year-old :D I had just stumbled upon the pages of Union of Freethinkers of Finland (Link to Wikipedia) and had read most of their relatively long page of “Critique on bible”. Here’s that page on Archive.org. (These should translate very well if you copypaste them to DeepL )

So, I had spent a couple of hourse reading about ways how the Bible contradicts itself. Then my doorbell rang. And I kept asking these “the Bible is supposed to be interpreted literally” people explanations for why the bible says that “X = 1” here and “X != 1” here, and “Y = 10” here and “Y = 50000” here. Eventually, I think it must have been at least 20 minutes, possibly closer to an hour - hard to say quarter a century afterwards - the chin of one of them started visibly shaking and he started looking really scared. And the other one was starting to look really bad as well. And they basically just abruptly stopped the conversation and without much of “bye!”, just turned out and got away from my door with quite some pace!

I did not know to look for one of them being the “boss”, so I do not know what happened for sure, but now I’m figuring out it probably went so that the more experienced person of those two started to seriously lose their faith and initiated an escape maneuver.

Tänu! Sulle ka head aastat!

I have watched a couple of them because the only video I have found on some interesting theme has been such a reaction video.

But, I’d say that I do feel kind of comfortable “having someone around” when watching the video. I would still prefer the video without the extra commentator saying things aloud that I can see myself, but I bet there are people who really do get something out of the reaction videos. I’d imagine they are very nice things for the most intoverted among us?

Still, they are there mainly for generating revenue for their makers and for youtube, not so much for some actual need…

They get more money from advertisements if you use the free version. Is an adblocker able to remove the ads from Spotify’s audio fred?

(And if it does, does it block Spotify from getting paid for the ad anyway?)

Using the unpaid version doesn’t really deny Spotify much any income. Better just move completely away to better platforms.

How did you die?

Maybe he accepted the money, brought it to a safe elsewhere but nearby, and was planning to make the hotdog only once he’s back at his hot dog booth? Your selling the hotdog is unfinished and as long as the customer doesn’t get their hotdog, you’re gonna stay a ghost.

I have children and have nothing against someone dating me.

As I consider it okay to date a single parent such as I am, I also consider it okay if at some point a I end up wanting to date someone else who is a single parent as well.

This got me curious! What do you think is an acceptable minimum age for having kids?

94.3 F is 34.6 °C. The body temperature is 36 to 37 °C. Therefore, the thermal camera shows the temperature a little bit wrong. It’s unlikely that the butt would be much colder than 36 °C.

What a nice learning tool, thanks!

I work at a children’s daycare centre and I try to speak at least a few words of each child’s language.
Firstly, it’s good to hear your language from some people other than your own parents only, and hopefully motivates the child to keep that language as a part of their own life. Heard too many stories of “my mother talked to me in this language, but I never actually used it for anything else, so I’ve forgotten all of it.”
Secondly, if they are distracted, they are unable to listen to other languages but might hear their own. Earlier, I used to work as a substitute worker for a workforce rental company owned by the towns comprising the capital city area of Finland. I was sitting at the lunch table and one 6-year-old had incredible difficulties concentrating on eating properly with an unknown adult at the table. I noticed they were interested in listening to me, but somehow talking with the other kids was too much more interesting. So, I asked them how to say “eat!” in their own language, Somali. It’s something like “ün!” After that, every time I noticed the child forgot they were supposed to be eating, I said “ün!”, he smiled and took a forkful of food. And another and a third. Until he forgot and I had to utter another ün. But, it worker really well and I’ve used the technique afterwards as well. “How do I tell you to _____ in your own language?” is a question that brings one surprisingly far with children.

But yeah, there being 7000 languages out there, it’s a bit difficult deciding which ones to learn. Learning ones used by people around you is a good excuse.

Cannot try it because it doesn’t work on my hardware, but this sounds very interesting. Could you consider making a browser-based version of it, for example?

Aren’t they mostly made in China? Or am I just mixing things up? I’ve been trying to find charger cables and bluetooth earbuds not made in China and I think at least among phone charger cables I’ve seen products by Hama on the shops’ shelves, having to leave them there after checking where they are made.

A company being European does little to help if the products it sells are not.

I wonder if the community’s name could be adapted to more precisely describe what the community is about? Is there one word that could be added to make it more clear?

I do appreciate the sentiment behind creating this community. Awesome!

Ну привет!

Меня Туукка зовут. Я отец украинки, а сам фин.
Вопрос у меня такий: Зачем в 2025. г. кому-то нужен учеба русского? Разве типа язык будующого или чо?

Убивтва мирного населении же возможно и без знании какого-небуд языка.

So: My question is: What grammatical errors made their way into those phrases? Did I use the correct i/y? I learned Muscovian in everyday use while I was living my life using mainly the Muscovian language through 2015 and 2016, and while I can speak it more or less adequately my writing is sometimes a bit questionable.

Works about 95 % reliably in Finland, though! And usually if it doesn’t, there’s been a warning saying “we have an exceptionally long queue; calling back might take over a day”. When you hear that, you know there’s a 50% chance that they will never call back. Once the queue gets three days long, they just delete it because so many of the calls would be useless at that point.

More about this here. So yes, they do that. And nobody does that unless they hate their country. Or at least their lungs and climate because lignite is a catastrophe for both.

I do not know, but I can give a guess: When some certain amount of users have flagged the same post/comment as “probably written by AI”, PieFed warns all of the users viewing the post (/comment) after that.

I stoppod learnong Oroboc bocauso of ots wrotong sostom: On tho caso of short voweols they onlo pot o mark sayong “o short vowol comos hero”, bot don’t bothor tollong whoch vowol ot octuallo os!

Or the same without garbling the writing the way the Arabic script does:
I stopped learning Arabic because of its writing system: In the case of short vowels they only put a mark saying “a short vowel comes here”, but don’t bother telling which vowel it actually is!

I know it’s something you can get around because the Arabic grammar does tell what is the only possible vowel in that place, once you know the language very well. But the requirement that I need to know the language very well in order to be able to start reading it, and thus, start learning it, was too much for me. Not an impossible thing, but damn difficult.

And then that of course is exacerbated in non-Semitic languages using the Arabic script, such as Farsi/Dari and Urdu, all of which are Indo-European languages. While in Arabic you can figure out which vowel is meant once you know the grammar very well, in Urdu and Dari that’s as clear as in English. The writing system of Urdu and Dari/Farsi is really as mad as what I wrote as the first line for this comment!
Luckily, Dari/Farsi has a third name: Tadjik. And Tadjik is written with the Cyrillic alphabet, meaning that you do have the full information about vowels visible. So, learn Tadjik well enough and you can then move on to Dari and further to Farsi. Similarly, Urdu is just Hindi with any words even remotely related to religion swapped for other ones. So, one can always learn Hindi, which does show all vowels in a (largely) sensible manner and then move from Hindi to Urdu with relative ease.

But yeah, directly learning a language written with Arabic or Hebrew script is something I won’t be trying. Somali is distantly related to Arabic and written with Latin script, so that’s something I’m trying to learn, hoping it will give me enough of starting boost with Arabic once I understand Somali.

Okay, that was about scripts being annoying enough to move me to learning other languages that are otherwise as useful for my life situation…

Then there’s a thing that really feels almost like an unsurmountable obstacle: Pronunciation systems that have too little differences making very big differences in meaning. All examples of these known to me are tonal languages. There are tonal languages that are just fine. Mandarin, the language spoken in Beijing, has four tones: Rising, falling, stable and wonky. In laymans terms: The tone is a melody. A word with a rising tone begins from a middle-level musical note and ends at a high musical note. A word with a falling tone begins with a high note and ends with a low note. And then there’s the tone where the note remains constant throughout the word. And the one that begins in the middle, goes far down and then returns to the middle for the end of the word. For example the word “ba” means either “eight”, “a father”, “to pull” or “a handle” depending on which of the four melody patterns (“tones”) you use when pronouncing the word. But the four tones are so distinct that I learned them in less than a day when I was hitchhiking in China. (I did have a book to help me, of course!) You can pronounce the four variants of “ba” by yourself right now when reading this, and you will probably get them right on the first try. Not all that bad!

But then there are languages such as Cantonese (the language spoken in Shanghai and Hong Kong) and Igbo (a language spoken in parts of Nigeria). Cantonese has whopping 16 tones. In Mandarin you need to only recognize whether the tone is rising or falling or wonky or flat. That’s easy to hear. But when you have two different tones that are otherwise clones of each other but differ by one beginning at a tiny bit higher note than the other? Get’s too crazy for me!
And in Igbo the tonal system is extremely clear as for itself: Each syllable either has a rising or falling tone, and that’s its. But they are falling or rising such miniscule amounts that I cannot hear them at all! The four ways of saying “aqwa”: áqwá, áqwà, àqwà and àqwá sound like just one and the same word for me, no matter how carefully I listen. I would probably learn to hear the difference if I really put an effort into it… But damn, there are about 7000 other languages to learn out there. I’ll just go for one where such a tiny tiny difference in pronunciation doesn’t completely explode the meaning of the whole fucking sentence! Igbo is an endangered language with 50 million speakers. It feels a bit crazy that a language with as many speakers as the combined populations of Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands and Belgium can be endangered when none of those eight are. But when your language is as difficult to learn as a second language as Igbo is, I understand that people are likely to choose whatever other language is available when they need to communicate across language barriers.