No Stupid Questions

I’m from Vietnam. I’ve been in the UK for 10 years now. When I met my English husband 13 years ago at 19 I knew 0 English. We communicated using machine translation. So that’s when I started learning English. Fast forward to present day after immersion, living in an English speaking country, formal study, etc. and I’d say my writing and listening (understanding) are good, but my speaking and reading are still bad. I kind of gave up on trying to become fluent at this point.

If a person reads a lot of theory about how to swim, different types of techniques, other people's written experiences etc., can they swim if thrown in a deep swimming pool? Or, at least, be able to swim enough to reach the steep end and save themselves from drowning?

By "a lot", I mean spending over 6 months to a year, gaining theoretical knowledge. And when we throw them in the pool, they are willing to try it, as in, "I have learnt enough, and I am willing to try it out."

Many moons ago I was in a band, and we had a website with our songs stored in Amazon AWS. I recently found that our site was archived on the Way Back Machine. But unfortunately, the audio was in S3 and those URLs don't work.

<Code>NoSuchBucket</Code>
<Message>The specified bucket does not exist</Message>

WBM did not archive these URLs (understandably).

I no longer have any AWS account because Amazon is poopy.

Are these files lost to time, or is there some magic way to retrieve them?

For those who don't know, it's where someone takes a QR code like on a poster for a concert and puts a sticker with a different QR code on top to a fake website that looks like the concert website (or a Rick Roll).

The obvious answer is to scratch off the QR code if you notice it's a sticker, but It's not always acceptable -or legal- to start damaging stuff to check if it's real or not. Also what if it's out of reach on a sign or something?

You can't put a little text under saying what the website is as a sort of checksum because the vandal can just write their own website under their sticker.

I realize there's no singular answer for this, but many of the MAGA crowd attribute many of our current woes to the prior administration, like cost of living, inflation, unemployment rates, etc.

I'd imagine that every day that passes and we get more and more distant from Biden's presidency, it gets a bit harder to blame him for every problem.

e.g. It'd be hard to blame many of the increased prices on electronics on him, since much of this has been driven by Trump's tariffs (but I bet someone will attempt to refute this!)

This is a long-winded way of me asking the community, have you seen any Trump fans start to come around at all? When do we start living in the conditions (good or bad) of Trump's America and stop laying blame on the last administration?

I'm interested to see what people of all persuasions feel about this.

For myself, I have seen some minor loss of enthusiasm among Trump followers, but I haven't seen anyone register as a Democrat yet :)

(not in the US)

For example, in English, you might type something like:

r u going out 2nite?

Instead of:

Are you going out tonight?

How does that sort of thing work when texting in a logographic language? Is it just emoji city, or can they mix and match characters to make things more compact?

And similarly, is there a formal journalistic shorthand system that gets used when jotting down comments in real-time, e.g. in China, Korea or Japan?

Thank you kindly!

Does anyone have recommendations for some chalk that resists water very well?

I'd love any recommendations of brands, specific chemicals or properties to look for, or maybe questions that I would need to answer about the environment.

I'm planning to use my chalk on my asphalt driveway.

And if so what are the ratios? Are they as dominantly righties as humans?

I mean do they have a handedness

Why isn't that common to cover with a blanket other parts of our body when we feel cold, like the belly or lower back?

The fediverse used to feel pretty anti-ai, but over the past month or two I've noticed a LOT of generated memes and images, and they tend to have positive votes.

Has there been a sudden culture shift here? Or is there a substantial percentage of people just unable to tell the difference anymore?

Lemmy is great and it is in essence an aggregated forum. But I would like to know how I can also find forums about specific topics.

For example I am very interested in football but the only place I can really find any discussion of football is r/soccer on reddit. I would like to find smaller but active forums where the discussions are more slow paced and drawn out over time.

I would like to know how to find these places on the internet, if they still exist, for any topic.

For me it was "Your mom looks like Gimli from Lord of the Rings.". My best friend took a few seconds to process what I just said to him and then started crying laughing. Good times. I think it was the deadpan delivery that killed him.

This question came about over a discussion my brother and I had about whether dogs should be on leashes when outside. We both agreed that yes, they should, for several reasons, but that's not the point.

Let's use a hypothetical to better illustrate the question. Imagine that there's a perfume - vanilla, for example - that doesn't bother you at all (you don't like nor dislike it), but that is very upsetting to some people, and can even cause some adverse reactions (allergies or something). In this hypothetical, based on the negative effects, you agree that vanilla perfumes should be banned. Currently, however, they are allowed.

You're walking down the street, and randomly smell someone passing you by and they're wearing a vanilla perfume.

Would that upset you? Why, or why not?

My answer is yes, without a doubt. Even though the smell itself doesn't bother me, the fact someone would wear that perfume and not only potentially upset others, but put them in danger, is upsetting.

My brother, however, would say no! He couldn't explain his reasoning to me.

I know this is a little convoluted, but I hope I got my question across.

You know that song by Freak Nasty from 1996? I heard it a few times and I still don't know what the "dip" is. Is it a dance? A drug?

Let's say you have something on your plate like rice or vegetables, and you need to push it onto your fork or spoon. Now say you have some piece of finger food with it, like a chicken tendie. Would it be better etiquette to push the veggies/rice onto your spoon/fork with the tendie or your finger?

Link to YouTube video in the vid the surgeon and the patient are interviewed. it was a CNN report

Asking cuz I can't find the actual case report of this anywhere but according to other news reports this case was first published on April 1st 2009. the doctors said the man inhaled a fir tree seed and the fir tree grew in his lung

going to Reddit was unhelpful since they just kept making the same jokes over and over again so I'm wondering if people more knowledgable than me can confirm or deny the authenticity of this lol

Title. And this will also affect non-AI imitations of voices?

For Context: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/03/photographer-arrested-home-depot-ice-raid

How to document these events safely?

Just asking cause I don't know what term to look for. I've also seen a couple sites that sell bunches of em for like 10 or 20 percent off, but those could be scam sites cause they disappear after a few months