Today I Learned

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Nah, you're a smart one BB. I expect you to learn.

Thanks man

In general, if I have high expectations of someone or attempt to hold them to a high standard it means I like them, not that I dislike them. It might feel prickly in the moment, but it's ultimately an expression of affection and not contempt.

One of my bosses said that about me and him when I asked him why he was nastier to me than he was to worse people. I didn't buy it.

I get that, I've also been told similar and was skeptical. With a boss the test might be if you're retained while other people are let go. It also might depend on whether they give both good and bad praise and seek to guide you vs. just using you as a punching bag.

I wouldn't trust it from all people, but if someone said it I'd try to evaluate based on how they actually treat me in different situations. I don't think I've ever treated BB in a way that would suggest hostility or contempt, but hopefully, if she did something uncharacteristically terrible, she'd understand if I freaked out and was harsher than possibly expected.

I've noticed that situation is one that sometimes messes up friendships, because party 1 expects to be supported and party 2 is like wtf is wrong with you?!

There's a fruit called a dingleberry.

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

Aw that's cute

That I did good gutting dead battery from Dell Latitude D610 I was recently given. Turns out it's one of models that had their batteries explode

Couldn't do the test, because strange though it may seem these days, in my line of work it was very hard to kick us out (I love that euphemism "letting people go"). He was a peculiar man IMO, and we had a sort of love-hate relationship. Mostly hate but he had his good points. One of his problems was that he'd worked in the university of Chicago where the culture was to make no bones about it when you saw flaws in a colleague's ideas, and to mock rather than be polite about it, which has its advantages but only in the right culture. When he returned to the UK he tried to bring that ethos back with him, and offended the majority because they had more of the British reserve about them.

It's difficult with bosses because of their enhanced power to make the lives of others a misery. Like if somebody's carrying a gun and you're unarmed, they get away with being brash and outspoken, and it's too risky to challenge them, so they get hated but they don't know why, because they forget they've got a gun to your head. But it's a complicated story.


Neither do I. I feel that she takes well to teasing, like many Northern England folks do, and it's refreshing not to have to pussyfoot round her and be all stiff and careful. But I should let her speak for herself.

TIL that the blood pressure in my left arm is not significantly different from the blood pressure in my right arm (as judged by two sets of 5 readings on each arm on two consecutive days, using a brand new recommended meter instead of the suspicious one I was using before). All of which strongly suggests that there is no blockage in either of the arteries that might cause such a discrepancy, which means that there's no longer any reason to suspect that I'll need another bloody operation for that. The doc put me up to testing it, and he did rather scare me because I thought "why does he want me to do that if he doesn't suspect there's a blockage?"

Neopets is back after their 25th anniversary, which was in 2024, and they have new wearables for your pets such as shirts with the gold and rainbow infinity symbols and other autism-friendly products.

Statler and Waldorf, the two elderly gentlemen hecklers on The Muppet show, are named after two hotels.

That there are 56 recognized ethnic groups inside China. It's incredible the amount of different ethnic groups that live there. I've been on a China spiral for the past couple of days.

I can't imagine autistic cats and dogs would enjoy wearing any kind of shirt? Clothes are uncomfortable enough for me and I'm used to them


Today I watched someone explain complex integration, but it would be a stretch to say I learned it.

TIL that free software exists that will create a subtitle file from a video and translate it into English. It's a bit of work to get it done for a long video, but I like that kind of thing and I couldn't find a subtitle file for a video in Swedish that I want to watch. Nor is it perfect, but I think with a bit of manual tweaking it'll end up good enough to get the job done. Couldn't have been done a few years ago. I like trying out modern programs.

I've seen programs that can translate srt files but not ones that can actually "watch" the video and make its own subtitles. It's an AI I assume?

Name of the program would be appreciated. I can foresee this being useful.

Yes it's AI:

https://mvsep.com/en

Enjoy! You just drag and drop the video (or its soundtrack) into the box, wait for it to upload, select "Whisper" from the algorithm list, choose the model type, check the box to tell it you're not a robot, and click the "Separate" button, then when it's done you download the .srt file. You don't have to buy into it, though it's said to be quicker if you do. When the queue is long I usually just let them run overnight. It's also got a lot of other algorithms, mostly for separating instruments and vocals out of music files. Some of them do a much better job than Spleeter ever did.

One limitation for non-paying users is that it will only process 10 minutes of audio at a time, so as my video was nearly an hour long I had to split my video up into 6 parts and run them separately. Then I had to alter the numbers in the subtitle files so they didn't all start from zero, then I had to stick them all together. But I'm determined like that. It'll probably want a bit of tweaking, as the AI screws up some of the subtitle times and durations. AFAIK all AI is prone to doing that. But for the most part it does an astonishingly good job.

The queues have been very short (for Whisper at least) which makes me wonder if people are losing interest in using the service. I'd hate to see it disappear.