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Cake day: Aug 09, 2023

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I’m a native speaker of Mandarin from Taiwan. In Chinese, some people often mix up 在 (zài) and 再 (zài) in writing. It’s a bit hard to explain their definitions since they are merely function words (words that have little lexical meaning and express grammatical relationships among other words within a sentence), so I’m just gonna copy and paste their definitions from an online dictionary:

在: to exist; to be alive / (of sb or sth) to be (located) at / (used before a verb to indicate an action in progress)
再: again; once more; re- / second; another / then (after sth, and not until then) / no matter how … (followed by an adjective or verb, and then (usually) 也 (yě) or 都 (dōu) for emphasis)

As you probably have noticed, their meanings don’t overlap at all. The only reason some people mix them up is because they are homophones.

Another typo some… let’s just say, less educated, people often make is 因該 (yīn’gāi). The correct word is 應該 (yīnggāi), meaning should; must. 因該 is never correct. You can think of 因該 as the Chinese version of the much dreaded “should of.” The reason is that the distinction of -in and -ing is slowly fading away in Taiwan (it is still very much thriving in other Chinese-speaking societies), and some people just type too sloppily to care.

By the way, I should mention that 在, 再, and 應該 are very basic words, probably one of the first 500 words a non-native speaker learns.


Thank you! I often feel the urge to use “less” before a countable noun despite knowing that I’m supposed to use “fewer.” Good to know that it isn’t just me.


Agreed. Recently youtube started adding tracking parameters (?si=) to their share links. I always clean them up.


I also hate going through prep. Not being able to eat normal food is bad enough, and now I need to down cups and cups of this sickening liquid reminiscent of burnt plastic?

if the surgeon lost his watch in there

Are you implying that the surgeon once stuck his fist into your anus?







Wow, our admin uses Tumbleweed too? Cool. I’ll look into distrobox next time I want to install something not readily available on openSUSE. Thanks!


I’m not sure if 1 year of using Tumbleweed makes me a long time user, but here goes.

From my prior multiple years of experience with Manjaro and EndeavourOS, I must say that nothing beats the AUR. I sometimes run into softwares that are not on the openSUSE repos. If this happens, I try looking it on Flatpak. If it’s not available on Flatpak either I go search for the version that kind people have packaged for openSUSE. These 3rd party repos are kind of like PPAs on Debian(-based distros). If still no, I try looking for the .rpm made for Fedora or the AppImage version provided on the software’s sites, but this solution is less than ideal since it does not update automatically and the .rpms sometimes do not work. That is the main con of openSUSE. Other than that, I would say that there are no more major advantages or disadvantages to using openSUSE over Arch-based ones. A minor advantage is that things feel more polished on openSUSE.

I hope this was not too intimidating. Softwares available neither on the openSUSE repos, on Flatpak, on 3rd party repos, in RPMs, or in AppImages are rare. Still, openSUSE Tumbleweed remains my favorite distro and I urge you to give it a try.

Edit: I forgot another major thing about openSUSE. It uses BTRFS by default, and handles system backups for you. Fortunately, I haven’t needed to use this yet, but it is a really nice feature.


It’s not common but you can absolutely find some at the candy section in a supermarket.