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> ... glorious chaos. I like that concept. Thanks for the laugh! :D

Thanks for the link. I observed a flock of "mourning" crows around a dead one in the field behind my yard. I was flabbergasted at what I was seeing. So they are mourning and investigating the cause of death for the sake of the flock. Wow!

I live next to a farm in a rural town. We have lots of cats around which are necessary to keep the rodents in check. Our cats love to play their prey to death in our yard (yeah nature is cruel). Some of the local crows know how to get the dead mice from the cats. One or two crows distract the cat, the cat likes to chase the crows for the thrill of the hunt, and then one crow swoops in and steals the cats prey. The cats are always bamboozled when this happens and we watch and laugh. Really smart these feathered freaks :D

I leave shelled peanuts and other bird feed out in the winter, and is fascinating to watch the crows and magpies to crack them open, feed on some of them, then grab two shelled peanuts and fly off with them. They already recognize me coming out in the winter mornings with the bird feed and peanut bags. They wait patiently in the surrounding trees until I'm in the house again. They even see me through the windows watching them and only come down to feed once I am out of sight for them. Truly remarkable.

We also have some pairs of red kites in our area which circle over our fields for prey. The crows don't like them and will try to chase them away, mostly in packs of two to three crows. They are 99% successful in chasing the red kites away because they are more agile in the air and can do more complex flight manouvers. But once one of the crows got to close to the claws of the kite and was killed instantly and dropped down dead. What happened then was even more fascinating. The whole flock of crows gathered around their dead companion and maybe "mourned"? I don't know how to else explain it.

Next winter I will try to befriend them even more, they are so fascinating!


I've heard the crow "funeral" is an information gathering strategy. Figuring out what killed it, what risks are in the area, how to mitigate it happening again.

Very clever!


The irony of a group of crows being called a murder while they are gathered for a funeral, going over their own post mortem of a fallen comrade.

Anecdata: I see this in the park next to my house. Two crows will repeatedly chase and tail-pull an Egyptian goose that has no food and nothing they could want. Hard to read it as anything other than play, which lines up with documented corvid tail-pulling of eagles, cats, etc.

Thank you for sharing these wonderful stories!

Exactly my thoughts. There are so many good alternatives already, it's insane to me that people still use this garbage. LibreWolf is a godsend


> ... and sort LEGO bricks by colour

You never sort by color, ever! You sort by form, and then throw every color of that specific form in one bin. If you throw every red brick in the same bin, you'll never find a specific formed red brick because to many red bricks. But if you first search by form and then by color, you are much faster.


As any DBA worth their salt knows.

Index the many valued column, not the column with few discrete values.


Are you sure that's a good strategy if every unique index value requires you to buy a physical container?



You can put a few shapes into one container and it's still much faster than searching color-first.


How about arithmetic coding? That will give you the highest amount of entropy reduction for any possible number of containers. Which probably means that you’ll sort similar pieces far apart but group by colors that are easy to separate, like red+yellow, brown+green


Radix sort. Decide how many containers you're fine with, and group accordingly.


As someone who tried to sort many lego sets lately, I do like this. The problem lies that modern lego has so many unique forms that it feels like you'll have many bins with one or two pieces in.


As the “Disturbing the Piece” podcast points out - you “sort” the good important parts you want easy access to and you “bin” everything else in the giant box you can dig through if needed.

https://youtube.com/@disturbingthepiecepod


That's why you buy different sized bins, and then you can even combine some forms into one bin (but be careful not to combine similiar forms, this counters the goal).


You need to get some bins that have a top shelf like a toolbox. The low item counts go in the top shelf, segregate the bottom for efficiency. Bin by color.


I love that we are ignoring Git and taking Legos.

Anyone have a solution for another annoying problem: 1 missing piece.

Somehow got lost halfway through the build.


If you know the ID, I think you can get Lego ship it to you.


It’s always under the most annoying thing to move or get to. Under table legs, couches, etc.

Also, Lego will send you any missing pieces for free.


Thank you!


Just keep those in a single bin


Unfortunately there are so many bespoke LEGO brick forms that this doesn't work.


counterpoint (don't take this to seriously):

there are to many types of bricks to sort by form. unless you have an inventory the size of a brick factory you can only sort by category or by size.

otherwise, sorting by color makes your collection aesthetically pleasing, and when you build, you usually want to use specific colors only to make your model look good.


That's why you have to group similar forms. - Bricks - Plates - Narrow Plates - Wheels - Windows/Doors - Smooth pieces - People bin

And then if you like to sort further you sort out the smallest of each bin because those always fall to the bottom when mixed together


sorting by size needs to come first. from my own experience, you can't find any small pieces if they are mixed/covered by larger ones.


There are less different forms than any normal brick enjoyer has bricks of a specific color. Therefore the lookup is faster ;)


Every time I read C and memory safety, I just think Golang. Especially for user space


Go programs are not fully memory-safe if they use multiple treads, due to possible data races with fat pointers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44672003


Still much better than C will ever be, even if I disagree with some of its design decisions.


Yes, think of something like Inferno, but Limbo now is AOT compiled instead of JITed.

However there are also kernel like commercial projects in Go, and apparently the related TamaGo fork might eventually get upstreamed into the reference implementation.

https://www.withsecure.com/en/solutions/innovative-security-...


Na is the safest Alkali, they get increasingly bad as you go DOWN (not up) the perodic table. Learn basic facts before you spit BS


Na is the _next_ safest alkali metal after lithium :)


Ever since Steam released in Beta for Linux (proud owner of the Tux accessory for the Demoman in TF2!) I switched to Linux and stayed there. In the beginning I ran Ubuntu 12.04 and used Steam there. I also used Wine to run Diablo 3 and WoW, although performance was bad at that time. All other programs I needed where there also. (Im a software engineer, so using Linux is even better). But Ubuntu moved to slowly and broke here and there.

What followed was a odyssey between a lot of distributions. Six years ago I tried Void Linux (rolling release without SystemD) and finally settled. Then Steam Proton came around and changed the whole Gaming On Linux scene again for the better. Playing retail WoW with on par performance is now possible. Running any game from Steam on Linux is now a breeze, even if not a native game. Open Source office tools are also on par with Windows / Microsoft counterparts. There really is nothing holding me back from using Linux full time. There is nothing I am missing, and the more I read about problems in the Windows world, the more I am glad I switched all these years ago.

Convincing all my friends doing the same is difficult though. They frankly do not care about privacy or freedom to make the switch. But in the end it is their fault, not mine. If someone comes to me for guidance to make the switch, I will guide them. But I won't evangelise anymore.


There's no equivalent to Excel if you need compatability with a proper Excel spreadsheet (anything more than basic formulae), outside of spinning up a VM.


Office 365 in browser + avoiding Excel like the plague.


Forklift-Proof ERP was not on my bingo card. Thanks for the laugh :D


Life is to short to learn and memorize Vi / Helix keybinds. That's why I stay with Micro as terminal editor.


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