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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • Prion diseases. In order to work properly, proteins have to be folded in a certain way. Misfolded proteins typically don’t work as they should. Prions are misfolded proteins that cause other healthy proteins to misfold when they come into contact with each other. This causes all sorts of medical issues.

    Mad Cow Disease is one of the more infamous prion diseases. In humans, it manifests as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. It basically causes your brain to melt, as the proteins holding it together all get misfolded. It has a 100% fatality rate, typically within 1 year of initial diagnosis. Fatal Insomnia is another prion disease, where the area of the brain that controls sleep is affected, but the body’s need for sleep still persists. You just become totally unable to fall asleep, until you fucking die from sleep deprivation.

    The big issue with prion diseases is that they’re totally 100% incurable and untreatable. Once you have come into contact with the prion, you have a death timer. Prions are also extremely resilient. They aren’t destroyed by time, decomposition, fire, or even caustic chemicals. So they’ll just sit there, waiting for someone to come into contact with them.



  • My coworker once had a paramedic push adenosine when he started having heart arrhythmia. The main side effect for adenosine is an overwhelming feeling of impending doom. Apparently it’s to help hit the reset button on your heart… But it also just happens to make you think you’re 100% going to die in the next two seconds. Apparently it was a full blown transformative experience for him.



  • I have similar feelings about my partner. They’re constantly in and out of the doctor’s office for a variety of medical issues. It would be nice if there were at least some sort of diagnosis. Like we have family and friends say “oh it’s good that the tests for all of those things came back negative” like it somehow means her symptoms will stop since she wasn’t diagnosed. Every time I hear it, the voice in the back of my head goes “how is not knowing the best case scenario?” At least if you have a diagnosis, you can work on treating the root cause.


  • Honestly, as long as you can just coast across, you’ll be fine. The people who get into trouble are the ones who intentionally stop (like maybe a red light across the tracks) and then can’t start again. Even with the giant “do not stop on tracks” signs, people are just stupid and park across them anyways.

    So just make sure you stop before the tracks, or that you have enough speed to get clear of them. There shouldn’t ever really be a scenario where you’re forced to actually stop on the tracks.


  • The most gnarly scar I’ve ever seen was from a Skil saw. He was a former roofer. Roofers would get tired of dealing with the blade guard; They don’t typically have a place to put sawhorses up on a slanted roof, and they don’t want to constantly be passing sheets of plywood up and down the ladders to make cuts on the ground… So they want to be able to do things like make plunge-cuts (which the blade guard gets in the way of) with only one hand, while holding the plywood with their other hand. So it became standard practice (not best safety practice, but still standard practice) to wire the blade guard open.

    So he had his guard wired open. He made his cut, and then set the saw down. The issue is that his trigger was stuck, so the saw didn’t stop. And without the blade guard to protect it, it was just the bare saw blade spinning against the wood roof. The saw quickly ran away at like 70MPH, with the blade acting as a sort of wheel. His foot snagged the power cord, it whipped back around, and the saw came back at him.

    It hit his left ankle, ran all the way up his left leg, went all the way up and across his torso, and exited via his right shoulder. It apparently peeled him open like a can opener, right before he fell off the roof and dislocated his shoulder from the fall. He didn’t bother taking off his pants to confirm it, but I saw the scar starting at his ankle, and it ran all the way up his chest to his shoulder.

    So yeah, Skil saws are fucking terrifying. The only thing scarier is the table saw, because that’s where the vast majority of lost fingers happen.



  • Yeah, one of my most often stated phrases at work is “you can’t make people read.”

    Error pops up, explaining exactly what the issue is and how to fix it? Oh god, let me call IT to see what I need to do. Yeah, you can’t make people read.

    Some piece of equipment or machinery has changed in some meaningful way? Management is quick to go “just hang a sign on it, letting people know the new process.” Nope, you can’t make people read. People will physically move the sign to the side, try to use the machine like they previously did, and get surprised when it doesn’t work as expected.

    Some area is unsafe due to work happening overhead? “Oh just hang signs on the doors, telling people not to come in.” No, you can’t make people read; I have seen people push their way past physical barriers with big “do not enter” signs, just to ask if we’re open. How about we lock the doors, and disable the keyways on all the doors (except one, where we have physical barriers to entry) until the work is completed?

    The floor is freshly painted? People will walk past six different “do not enter - wet paint” signs and physically push past stanchions or barriers, and then act surprised when their shoes stick to the floor.




  • Yeah, Gnome is like the Apple of the Linux world. The devs have the same kind of “we know better than you do” mentality towards design. The issue tracker is a lot of “hey the OS won’t let me do [edge-case scenario that an OS should be able to do, but which most users won’t bother with]” followed by the devs going “Gnome isn’t designed to support [edge-case scenario]. Bug report closed.” Like the devs have a very “it’s not a bug; It’s a feature” mentality, and anyone who runs into that bug must be using the OS “wrong”.





  • It stores your data in plaintext, and simply uses the program to parse special formatting characters. There are no attempts at obfuscation or encryption, and it doesn’t lock you into a walled garden that refuses to play nice with other programs. The program itself is closed-source, but anyone could write an open source version to parse the same info… There just hasn’t been a good reason to do so. Even if Obsidian as a company and program ceases to exist overnight, your data is still safe on your machine and can be read by anyone who cares enough to dig into the file. Hell, you can even open it as the plaintext file and dig through it manually.


  • And here’s a reminder that if you run a Plex server, there’s an app called Prologue which turns it into a fully fledged audiobook server.

    Plex doesn’t natively support things like audiobook bookmarks in m4b files, and tries to just play them straight through like a gigantic 4 hour long music track. But Prologue does support bookmark data. Prologue simply uses Plex’s service to access the files, (because admittedly, Plex is good for letting newbies remotely access their content) and then it ignores Plex’s built-in “lol just play it like music” instructions, and actually parses the files for bookmark data.

    As someone who couldn’t get Audiobookshelf to work properly, (something about not being able to access network drives via Docker), Prologue has saved my audiobook library by allowing me to just host it via Plex instead.


  • And then there are things like poor sleep hygiene when very young can trigger a correlates with the development of ADHD later on.

    FTFY. Correlation≠Causation, especially in cases like you mentioned. It’s a chicken and egg scenario.

    Are kids getting ADHD because they didn’t sleep well? Or is poor sleep hygiene an early indicator of ADHD? Lots of people with ADHD have poor sleep hygiene, even as adults. Many will struggle with things like Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome, because they get their biggest bursts of focus late at night when everyone else is asleep, the brain is releasing dopamine to keep them awake, and distractions are limited. Every single adult with ADHD has stories about getting focused on a project right before bedtime, then suddenly realizing the birds are chirping outside their window and the sun is rising.