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forinti

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https://alquerubim.blogspot.com

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The ones I know are completely brown.

They put their four front legs together, two by two, and sort of point at you.

I was told that they are aggressive because they are well fed because they feed on the sap from the bananas whereas most spiders are usually hungry.

In South America there's a very aggressive spider that lives on the bananas (genus Phoneutria). Spiders usually shy away from humans but these attack and have a very nasty venom. I wonder if the heat will take nasty critters to Europe.

Its a common occurrence for families to take in poor girls to do house work in exchange for food and lodging. And with the insidious nature of Brazilian racism, they will pretend that she is part of the family. They might even take her on vacations (to work, of course). If you grow up with this mentality it might even be hard for you to see the injustice. Brazil abolished slavery in 1888, the last country in the Americas to do so, decades after its neighbours. The slaves never got compensation but their owners did.

There's a Portuguese saying "há mouro na costa" which is literally "there are moor at the coast" and means that there is something fishy going on.

This reminds me of a T-shirt I once saw that read:

          perl -e '
     "$a="etbjxntqrdke";
  $a=~s/(.)/chr(ord($1)+1)/eg;
        print "$a\n;"'
It's cursing. Don't run it if it might offend you.

Upon seeing this, I decided to golf and came up with a shorter version:

  perl -e "print chr 1+ ord for split //,'etbjxntqrdke'"

I've gained a taste for a yt channel that shows depopulated towns across the US.

It seems to me that local governments must also have tons of properties to sell or give away. The real issue is that these are in places where people don't usually want to live.

I've been learning Russian by myself since the pandemic and along the way I've picked up bits and bobs about food, history, geography, music, and even electronics. Learning a language is not just about the language per se.

I've even realised a few things about my own language.

I had a little chat recently with a glaciologist and he told me about a student who had come from a very religious family. The guy had to learn all about the formation of Earth, etc, and decided to give up geology because it would put him at odds with his family and friends and he decided that they were more important.

So, you could say he rationally decided to keep his irrational beliefs.

My company recently hired a concierge. At first I thought it was unnecessary and just meant to give someone's friend a job.

But the guy is really good at it. He organises groups of people who show up; he knows everybody, so he can quickly point people to where they should go; and overall he just makes the reception a welcoming place.

The same thing used to happen in Brazil. Machado de Assis is great for older audiences, but a bore for children and teenagers. Making them read his books probably did more harm than good.

I started seeing LED displays on store fronts in the late 80s (the ones that scroll text horizontally).

This would have been quite the product then. TVs were expensive, but B&W TVs not so much.

I knew a bit of 6502 assembly, so I was happy just to have more RAM and more registers.

Looking back, the simplicity of the instruction set seems quaint next to the thousands of instructions we have today.

I'll just recognise that I'm old (and a bit grumpy): back in the day, if you didn't write minimally efficient code, it simply wouldn't run or it would be terribly slow.

Young devs have not been exposed to this and they can get away with writing inefficient code most of the time, sometimes all of the time.

And even if there is a RAM shortage, we are still in the Gigabyte age. So I don't think we will go back to cycle and byte counting.

I can't even get some devs to care if their query runs in 3s or 8ms.

Big Banana Car 1 month ago

That's just not enough motive to waste someone's time.

And, no offense intended, that car is not that interesting. I guess policing must be boring.