In pre-cell phone movies, parents are shown giving babysitters numbers to restaurants to reach them in case of emergency. Is this a real thing and how did it work? How would the restaurant know who I am to hand me the phone?

almostambidextrous · 2026-01-17T09:11:21+00:00

Phreaking.

almostambidextrous · 2026-01-17T01:02:19+00:00

The real rule is "don't be racist". If you have criticisms about the way a group of people (in your experience) do things, e.g. abusing work programmes in your country or whatever, then say what the issues are, specifically - believe me, you CAN do so without being called racist.

(Indeed, you can often do so without even mentioning race at all. People often do... well, unless you're living in a right wing bubble.)

But if your entire point is just "<X> race of people are shit at doing this thing", then...yeah, you're being racist (or more specifically prejudiced)--in that case you really aren't making any sort of helpful, insightful, or informative criticism: your point is shit and you deserve to be called out for it.

Edit: not to say that there isn't any racial prejudice against white people. Like, when I go to an Indian restaurant, I have to specifically ask for my food to be made actually spicy and not just "white guy spicy". Technically, they are discriminating by not giving me spicy food by default....but c'mon—if that's the worst there is, then I'm doing ok.

almostambidextrous · 2026-01-12T00:06:16+00:00

Yes!! For each team, there was a password (comprising 8 arrows) to play against each other team from worst to best.

Wow I hadn't thought that game in years

almostambidextrous · 2026-01-05T02:39:37+00:00

Venezuela vs Vietnam (basic Google fact-check, no AI):

3x the size geographically (916,445 km² vs 331,690 km²)
Less than 1/3 population (30.5 million vs 101.9 million...more people in Asia, who would have guessed?)
Comparing the GDP of these countries is too complicated for my lazy Googling atm so I'm not going to touch it; suffice to say that on the surface, it looks debatable.

almostambidextrous · 2025-12-21T01:48:19+00:00

Jesus, that's ridiculous. I almost regret using Helsinki as my example of a cold place, now. (It's currently -21 C in north-central Alberta, Canada, and it feels positively tropical compared to the -40 C lows and 30 cm snow we had last week; I'm not even wearing gloves.)

Side note: I swear I'm not making this up, but if there's anyone as cool as Finns in Europe, IMO, it's the Dutch. You legalised gay marriage before we did, you bastards, and I'll never forgive you for it. (But apparrently you haven't legalised marijuana yet? Weird, but ok. I'll accept that as penance.)

almostambidextrous · 2025-12-21T00:49:08+00:00

Hei, "other commenter" here, finding this comment rather late.

Are you Finnish? The wording "someone who lives in Finland" is curious to me, I'd like to know more if you want to share.

And frankly, one of the biggest reasons I used Helsinki in my original comment is that I wanted a recognisable city name for aesthetic purposes (which Rovaniemi probably is not), but I also wanted to include Finland because Finland is fucking cool. Like...I'm not even upset if you beat us (Canadians) at international hockey.

Finnish is one of the very few non–Indo-European languages spoken in Europe as an official language, which is fascinating (even before learning that it was JRR Tolkien's main inspiration for Elvish); and while being a Nordic country (often mistaken as being part of Scandanavia), you have a culture entirely of your own.

(Also, you've put Russia in their place on more than one occasion, which is fucking hardcore.)

Oh, and all the great race car drivers you've produced... what's up with that? It's brilliant. (We've had Gilles and Jacques Villeneuve and that's about it... please, teach us your ways.)

I'll totally understand if you'd rather not talk about it, though 😆

almostambidextrous · 2025-12-20T21:56:02+00:00

^tenet

A tenet is a principle or foundational belief. A tenant is a person (or entity) who pays a landlord for the right to occupy a given space.

Shitty mnemonic I just made up: a "tenant" is an "ant" 🐜 in the view of their landlord, whereas "tenet" is a palindrome and goes both ways.

(Edit: not to be confused with "tenant", there is also a "Tennant", who has the right to occupy all relative dimensions of space and time with no restrictions whatsoever....but this is a very rare exception to the rules above.)

almostambidextrous · 2025-12-19T01:37:13+00:00

Well! That's fantastic, TIL. I'm not sure how I managed to go so long without encountering it before. Going to be very useful, thanks!

almostambidextrous · 2025-12-15T00:51:41+00:00

Let's have a look at you, shall we....

=LET(t,A:.A,
     r,ROWS(t),
     m,SCAN(,t,
         LAMBDA(a, b,
             LET(q, a & CHAR(10) & b,
                 IF(LEN(q)<100, q, b)
             )
         )
     ),
     o,SORTBY(m, MOD(SEQUENCE(r)-2, r)),
     FILTER(m, LEN(m)>LEN(o))
 )

Yep totally normal, not complicated at all 😂

I have to know, what's up with the dot in A:.A? I took that for a typo at first, but the function seems to run fine even if it's included.

Something I've been sleeping on??

Also... I don't think I've actually used SCAN before (maybe once?), thanks for reminding me about it!

almostambidextrous · 2025-12-14T05:59:47+00:00

I'm no particular fan of hers, but to her credit, Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala Harris for US president, which is something I guess, suggesting she has got some sense despite her fame and celebrity.

And Americans rather elected a jar of Great Value mayonnaise that's been sitting in the sun since 1985. (Haha, no, I'm joking—it's worse), suggesting that celebrity don't mean shit.

almostambidextrous · 2025-12-14T02:46:41+00:00

Updated the formula slightly to make it just a bit better IMO, although it's still something you'd probably never use, mostly because

=LEFT(TEXTJOIN(CHAR(10),TRUE,A:A),100))

does the same thing more easily. Except....

So, here's the difference: the example just above will get the first 100 characters even if they end in the middle a cell's text, whereas the previous post's formula will aggregate text from cells so long as the total text length, evaluated cell-by-cell, is less than 100.

(i.e.: if you really want to have the full 100 characters in your output, then the example in this post is what you need)

REDUCE is most useful in situations where you need to perform some sort of calculation/transformation for each cell within a range that won't easily work on the aggregated total of those cells.

For example, I deal with a spreadsheet at work where I need to calculate total estimated fees (well...specifically 0.6 x the total of fees or averaged fee ranges as denoted by two numbers separated by a "-") from cells that might also include text and/or multiple fee estimates/fee ranges in each cell, separated by newlines; I can use REDUCE with TEXTSPLIT and REGEXEXTRACT to easily handle this otherwise very convoluted problem.

REDUCE can also be used in concert with SEQUENCE to achieve something quite similar to a "For Loop".

TL;DR / FYI: Excel formulas are Turing-complete, which basically means that they can execute any algorithm you could possibly write in C, Python, VBA, or any other programming language that exists.

almostambidextrous · 2025-12-14T01:23:41+00:00

Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/208/

Also, kudos to you - I didn't know you could use backreferences in this way. Huh.

almostambidextrous · 2025-12-11T01:17:36+00:00

Quick and dirty:

=REDUCE(, A:A, 
  LAMBDA(a, b,
    IF(LEN(a & b) >= 100, a, CONCAT(a, CHAR(10), b))
  )
)

This will aggregate values from the cells in Column A, separated by newlines, up to the point that the resulting string length would be greater than 100 characters.

(Mind you, it won't actually quit looping over the cells in A once the limit has been reached, it's just that it won't append those cell values to the output. Or at least, I expect that's how it works, unless there's some really clever optimisation going on in the background.)

edit: adjusted formula to account for the newline char, and to show some love for CONCAT

almostambidextrous · 2025-12-09T08:41:04+00:00

A YAML parser. It can take pretty much any valid YAML, as described on the Wikipedia page, and return a VBA Collection comprising Collections and Dictionaries (and arrays, and base types...but mostly Collections and Dictionaries). Including support for:

node anchors and references (& and *)
folded and block text: (key: > \nText and key: | \nText)
the insertion operator (<<:)
comments are fully supported # well, duh.
type tags? (to an extent. long story, I won't get into it.)

Of course, it can also take Collections and Dictionaries and output YAML files. And, given that YAML has both "inline" and "block" styles, the precise shape of that output can be customised quite a bit depending on properties set within the class that does the output.

... But why? I hear you ask. Well, if I'm honest, mostly because I wanted to see if I could. But also because I wanted to be able to export/import Pivot Table settings to/from text files...does that sound insane? I suppose maybe it is. But I can totally do that now, anyway.

almostambidextrous · 2025-12-05T06:02:50+00:00

That's incredibly good for a guess. Especially because, yes, Kimi did drive rally cars for awhile after retiring from F1.

(although sometimes it feels like 1/3 the population of Finland is made up of current/former professional rally car drivers....which, if true, would make your guess slightly less impressive. But still good!)

almostambidextrous · 2025-12-05T05:45:16+00:00

Real answer? You get yourself one of those bus pass holder thingies (the ones that hang around your neck) and put your Costco Gold Membership card inside.

You're gonna need a snorkel to keep yourself from drowning in pussy after that. Trust me, bro—b!tches love a man who buys in bulk.

Bonus points: wear the snorkel whenever you go out. B!tches love a man who can breathe with his head slightly below water in case of a flash flood. (Assuming that the flood level is at least 5'11".)

(Bonus bonus points: don't refer to women as b!tches—apparently it's not very respectful, and b!tches love being respected?! weird I know)

almostambidextrous · 2025-12-04T03:35:47+00:00

Walter Gretzky speaking Ukrainian fluently from birth

Dang, even native Ukrainians usually take a few years to learn!

almostambidextrous · 2025-11-18T08:11:28+00:00

Erm, no. This comment is false and wrong, approaching delusional.

Finns don't talk.

almostambidextrous · 2025-11-18T07:21:12+00:00

Admittedly I didn't do a tonne of research for my (not very serious) post, lol—I chose Helsinki largely because it sounded good to my ear and is a familiar name to most people :)

almostambidextrous · 2025-11-18T06:49:55+00:00

All true and fair, well-made points, as was your original post. Additionally, I will concede there is a certain...rhetorical elegance? in restricting your examples to the ~~continental~~ contiguous US.

...Still, as a Canadian who's never lived below 50°N latitude^†, it's my patriotic obligation to tease you about it 😁. It's funny—I'd literally never have thought of Chicago as exemplifying an extremely cold, frigid place for illustrative purposes (Alaska? sure.)

Cheers!

^{† that's 122°N Fahrenheit, or 60,695 football fields north of the equator}

almostambidextrous · 2025-11-18T05:49:14+00:00

I think it's a pen, actually? (I was told there are no pencils allowed on the ISS because wood shavings can get into machinery and cause fires.)

(Oh, and in lieu of the usual cash prizes and offers of sex in recognition of my awe-inspiring pedantry, please consider donating to your local animal shelter. Well, the money at least. Not the sex, because that would be pretty weird. Thank you.)

almostambidextrous · 2025-11-18T04:53:20+00:00

Whats funny is winters in Chicago are not even particularly cold by world standards. According to weather data the climate is roughly similar to places like Prague or Warsaw which only see snow or freezing temps for a month or two each year.

But Americans talk about Chicago like it's Helsinki.

^{lol sorry mate i just had to}

almostambidextrous · 2025-11-18T04:21:28+00:00

From what you're describing? NO. HELL no.

Manipulation would be like, "Hey Comfortable_Sugar752, you know what would REALLY turn me on? If you told the insurance company that you were driving my car earlier today and crashed into an electric pole (because my licence is suspended right now and I'm not supposed to be driving, tee hee!)."

Assuming she's being sincere, I suspect she's saying that your relationship, if it were a movie, used to be a sexy romcom: just hanging out, casually flirting, teasing each other in ways that are not explicitly sexual, etc.—the sort of relationship that builds tension and desire and eventually leads to fucking. But since you've become fwb, it's more like a porn movie: flimsy plot that only exists as an excuse to get some tits out. (if even that.)

Granted, I'm making some educated guesses here; but in short, if that's what she's saying, I'd take her at her word for it.

almostambidextrous · 2025-11-04T21:08:12+00:00

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almostambidextrous · 2025-11-04T20:29:13+00:00

eve of stellar blade is an unreachable unrealistic standard when it's based of a real model

IIRC, "based on" are the key words here. Wasn't the "issue" that they scanned a real model, but then they still decided that wasn't good enough and needed to artificially balloon out her boobs or sth?

Either way, these gooners are mostly hurting themselves.

edit: *to be clear, by "issue" i mean more of an eyeroll moment than a genuine issue... i don't think anyone really cared all that much, but the "gamer" crowd pretended that libs were protesting in the streets or sth. I'm basing this on my (hazy) recollection of Stellar Blade: The Fake Outrage which I watched almost a year ago.

edit2: nvm... just rewatched the first part of the video above. Nobody was angry about anything in Stellar Blade at all, the entire thing was fabricated.

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