Apparently, it was in a forest in Guyana. And well, perhaps you’re imagining a filled-out spiral, but in this case, it looked like a normal ant migration at the first. They were going in 6 lanes at most and at 370 meters circumference, that just looks like a line until you follow it around.

That’s according to this source, which seems to have excerpts from his book: https://themountainsarecalling.earth/the-army-ant-death-spiral/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_mill

A few years ago, I set up a home-server with music and some pictures on there, and recently I noticed that my storage disk was getting full. Then I saw that the disk only had 16 GB and wondered, where the hell I got that small of a disk from.

So, I go to plug in a bigger disk and can’t even find the original disk at first. Turns out my whole storage capacity was one of these bad boys:

And yeah, I’ve got about 1800 songs, clocking in at 5.8 GB, so even that tiny storage would easily be enough for a much larger collection.
And I do also have them replicated on my phone, for listening on the go. (Don’t even need an SD card in my case.)

Presumably, that ampersand needs to be replaced with &…

I find that it’s mainly frustrating to those learning German at an advanced level, since using a wrong article immediately exposes you as a non-native speaker. Because yeah, as the others said, it hardly ever happens that native speakers use a wrong article…

Yeah, I just thought that’s called “dry shampoo”, but not sure where I got that idea from. Might’ve just been a brainfart. 😅

Huh, I thought, dry shampoo is a bar soap with additives. Sounds like it’s pretty much the polar opposite…

Man, at $DAYJOB, if we open-source something, they tell us to check for checked-in passwords and whatnot, and force us to throw away the commit history, which always feels stupid when we’ve known upfront that we’re going to open-source it and so kept things clean from the start.

But then, yeah, you see a post like that and just think that it really wouldn’t have been too difficult to search for swear words before publishing.
I mean, I also don’t really care, since it’s code rather than an official communication channel, but I can understand why management might care.

There’s a store in the next town, which has only organic foods. Rather expensive to shop there, but I still go there more often than I need to, just because everyone’s friendly and relaxed.

Yeah, if I ever catch a calm hour in the store, I’ll actually look through the aisles and check out products I wouldn’t normally buy. If the store is busy, I grab the usual and flee as quickly as possible.

I thought about creating something like that and the major problem that I see is that lots of meme templates do have copyright and the font that’s typically used for memes, Impact, isn’t free either. Well, and it isn’t done by merely developing a software and offering it for download. You would need to host the meme templates or some editor webpage, which is a whole 'nother skillset.

If we say that users bring their own meme template, and it can be a free font that looks similar to Impact, and it’s not to be hosted as a webpage, then it would be quite doable.
You would “just” need to call the ImageMagick library with the right parameters. Still not trivial, but the path to get there is fairly straightforward. I could imagine that something like that already exists as an open-source project…

It’s mostly about ease of use. You don’t really want to spend more than a few minutes on a silly meme. As such, having a database with meme templates, the right kind of font and easy text placement, can make the difference, whether you’ll bother creating a meme or not…

One time, I had to request firewall access for a machine we were deploying to, and they had an Excel sheet to fill in your request. Not great, I figured, but whatever.

Then I asked who to send the Excel file to and they told me to open a pull request against a Git repo.
And then, with full pride, the guy tells me that they have an Ansible script, which reads the Excel files during deployment and rolls out the firewall rules as specified.

In effect, this meant:

1. Of course, I had specified the values in the wrong format. It was just plaintext fields in that Excel, with no hint as to how to format them.
2. We did have to go back and forth a few times, because their deployment would fail from the wrong format.
3. Every time I changed something, they had to check that I’m not giving myself overly broad access. And because it’s an Excel, they can’t really look at the diff. Every time, they have to open it and then maybe use the Excel version history to know what changed? I have no idea how they actually made that workable.

Yeah, the whole time I was thinking, please just let me edit an Ansible inventory file instead. I get that they have non-technical users, but believe it or not, it does not actually make it simpler, if you expose the same technical fields in a spreadsheet and then still use a pull request workflow and everything…

They have breaking changes in their minor versions…

Personally, I find that (complex) software implemented in Python tends to be so unreliable that I typically don’t want to use it after all, but I only find that out after wasting a bunch of time learning the software.
It’s just frustrating, especially if I come back to the software every so often, naively thinking that it’s been a few versions, so maybe they’ve fixed it. It’s always just different bugs, which still end up being too frustrating to use the software.

To give an example, I like to compose music using Lilypond, which is more-or-less a programming language to create sheet music. And there is a program that’s supposed to give you a well-integrated workflow for that (i.e. an IDE), called Frescobaldi.
The first time I tried it, playback of the composed music wouldn’t work.
The second time, I couldn’t click on notes to jump to the respective code snippet.
And I tried it again a few weeks ago and it just crashed immediately with an obscure error message.

Instead, I’ve slapped together a script, which just opens the sheet music in my PDF viewer, the code in my normal editor and then uses a CLI tools to generate and playback the sheet music. And while it’s definitely not perfect, it has been working more reliably for me than Frescobaldi ever has.

Then those indigenous people need to figure out their morals. Chances are, they are embedded in a context where this is a lot easier, because they don’t have factory farming. They are part of the food network and take only as much as nature can recover.

You want me to be the arbiter of all morals? Well, there’s my take. Indigenous people hunting are not the problem. Other parts of the hivemind might have a different view on that, though, and I’m not gonna apologize for their take.

They just dumped them there in the 60s and 70s before there was regulation…

Edit:
Here’s two links, if you want to read up on it:

• English Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine
• Most official source you will find (German): https://www.bge.de/de/asse/themenschwerpunkt-radioaktive-abfaelle/
  (Mind that a translator will like translate the name of the mine “Asse” as “Aces”.)

Thanks. 🙂

Yeah, the complaint isn’t so much that we should be talking about rape all the time, but rather that we should stop shaming consensual sex.

Not knowing what I’m looking at, this is a rather confusing post. I’m guessing these are not just off-color potato chips, since those do tend to be round…