It’s such a godsend. I wish people would teach both methods. It’s great that the “righty-tighty” thing works for so many people because it’s probably much faster than using your hand, but I spent so many years thinking I was shit at mechanical stuff because I couldn’t figure which way to turn a screw. I probably wouldn’t have a fucking obnoxious complex about it nowadays if I had learned this when I was five.
Badabinski
Alt account of @Badabinski
Just a sweaty nerd interested in software, home automation, emotional issues, and polite discourse about all of the above.
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Not everyone has this instinct. There are many people who are unable to differentiate left from right. For those people, this doesn’t really work. I’m in my thirties and I still give shitass directions because I suck at telling left from right. I can do cardinal directions pretty well as long as I have a reference like some mountains, but like, I still have to think about left versus right.
I posted this elsewhere in this thread, but the only thing that’s ever worked for me was the right hand rule, where you use your right hand to physically demonstrate to yourself which way a screw needs to go.
Also, TIL that there’s a specific term for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-right_confusion
Reposting this as a direct response to you in case it’s helpful:
Try using your right hand directly to figure out which way to turn a screw. Make a loose thumbs up. Point your thumb in the direction you want the screw to go. The way your fingers are curling is the way you turn your screwdriver. If it helps, try to imagine there are arrows pointing out of your fingertips. Works just like the right hand rule in physics.
EDIT: here’s a picture of what I mean:

Or just use your right hand directly, just like some forms of the right hand rule. Make a loose thumbs up. Point your thumb in the direction you want the screw to go. The way your fingers are curling is the way you turn your screwdriver. If it helps, try to imagine there are arrows pointing out of your fingertips.
A few years ago, I learned that there are people who can distinguish left and right as easily as they can distinguish up and down. Righty-tighty lefty-loosey as a mnemonic device works for those people. I have never had, nor will I likely ever have, an intuitive understanding of which way to turn a screw. If one part of the screw is moving left, another part is moving right. My brain simply cannot keep it consistently straight. I have to use my right hand in the manner I described every so often. It’s not a hindrance to me (I build stuff all the time and have a little hobby machine shop), and I sure as shit wish I had been taught this method as a child.
The latter was always doable with breeder reactors and spent fuel reprocessing. France recycles their nuclear waste. They end up with extremely radioactive waste that becomes safe within decades instead of centuries or millenia.
The approach is not without its problems, but there are solutions.
Badabinski@kbin.earthto
Technology@lemmy.world•Shell Tricks That Actually Make Life Easier (And Save Your Sanity)
10·11 days agoset -e: Exit on error. Very useful, but notoriously weird with edge cases (especially inside conditionals like if statements, while loops, and pipelines). Don’t rely on it blindly as it can create false confidence. (Pro-tip: consider set -euo pipefail for a more robust safety net, but learn its caveats first.)
while I appreciate that the author mentions how weird this is, nobody is going to learn all the caveats correctly. Don’t use
set -e. Don’t useset -e. Don’t useset -e. It’s a shit ass broken ass fucked feature that half of nobody understands well. Here’s a great wiki page explaining why it’s trash: https://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/105People like Go, and Go requires you to manually and stupidly handle every possible error case. Why not do the same for shell? It’s really quite easy:
#!/usr/bin/env bash echoerr() { echo "$@" 1>&2; } die() { message="$1"; shift exit_code="${1:-1}" echoerr "$message" exit "$exit_code" } temp_dir="$HOME/tmp" mkdir -p "$temp_dir" || die "Failed to make persistent temporary dir $temp_dir" lc_dir="$(mktemp -d -p "$temp_dir")" || die "Failed to make target dir in $temp_dir"Look at that, descriptive error messages! And it doesn’t depend on a shell feature that is inconsistent between versions with no good documentation about all of the fucked up caveats.
Badabinski@kbin.earthto
Technology@lemmy.world•Shell Tricks That Actually Make Life Easier (And Save Your Sanity)
1·11 days agodeleted by creator
Badabinski@kbin.earthto
Books@lemmy.world•What book(s) are you currently reading or listening to? March 31
3·21 days agoA book which resembles my favorite series ever, and which is endorsed by one of my other favorite authors? That’s a hell of an endorsement. Final Architecture was a DNF for me, but I’ve enjoyed basically all of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s other books.
Badabinski@kbin.earthto
Books@lemmy.world•What book(s) are you currently reading or listening to? March 31
3·21 days agoThis book made me feel so much dread that I couldn’t even finish it.
Badabinski@kbin.earthto
Technology@lemmy.world•The US bans all new foreign-made network routers
7·30 days agoSo uh, OPNSense?
Badabinski@kbin.earthto
Not The Onion@lemmy.world•World-first as Rathlin Island is declared ferret free
3·1 month agoI’m here for it.
Badabinski@kbin.earthto
Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world•When do you think that AI chatbot/image generator/etc use will significantly decrease?
2·1 month agoEd Zitron seemed to estimate that it was probably 4-5x the current going rate, so a $20 ChatGPT subscriber likely costs OpenAI $80-100.
“sucundus dick” oh my god I love it
Badabinski@kbin.earthto
Technology@lemmy.world•Robot dogs priced at $300,000 a piece are now guarding some of the country’s biggest data centers
9·1 month agoSounds like a perfect use-case for some subsonic .300 Blackout rounds.
Badabinski@kbin.earthto
Selfhosted@lemmy.world•Harmony - Yet Another Discord Alternative
283·1 month agoThese other responses are annoying. This looks really cool, and I hope that it works well for you and your friends! We definitely need good discord alternatives ASAP, and more options are better imo.
One cool feature would be some sort of official support for interop/bridging to other services. That might help to boost adoption and would make the “why not just contribute to Y” people be quiet.
I mean, just use any stable distro and you can live that life. Arch is good for its own reasons precisely because it’s this way.
Badabinski@kbin.earthto
Lemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world•Causes of death, or track list for latest black metal album?
2·1 month agoAccording to Wikipedia, it’s known in modern times as mycobacterial cervical lymphadenitis.
The disease mycobacterial cervical lymphadenitis, also known historically as scrofula and the king’s evil, involves a lymphadenitis of the cervical (neck) lymph nodes associated with tuberculosis as well as nontuberculous (atypical) mycobacteria such as Mycobacterium marinum.
As for what lymphadenitis is?
Lymphadenopathy or adenopathy is a disease of the lymph nodes, in which they are abnormal in size or consistency. Lymphadenopathy of an inflammatory type (the most common type) is lymphadenitis.
The Wikipedia article for king’s disease has a picture if you’re curious, although it’s a bit gross.
Badabinski@kbin.earthto
Gaming@lemmy.zip•Ubuntu and Fedora devs comment on California's new Digital Age Assurance Act
5·2 months agoYeah, it’s the only solution that doesn’t directly contribute to the construction of the Torment Nexus. Just have a simple fucking OS-level flag for a user. The browser can then send a header or something saying “I’m an adult” if the flag is set to adult.




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