wtbob

I really don't think it's some sort of conspiracy: it's just that it's more efficient for someone to grow all your food, someone to make all your clothes, someone to purify all your water, someone to generate all your electricity &c. while you do what you do best than it is for you to learn how to do all of those things, acquire the raw materials and spend decades trying to make a computer from some copper, oil and sand.

I recall that Mao Zedong tried to get every farmer to smelt his own iron, which rather predictably led to a lot of poor-quality iron, and a food shortage.

I get the appeal of self-sufficiency, I really do (one of my dreams is to grow all of my own food), but I think it's a luxury for the rich and inescapable misery for the poor. Modern capitalism has made everyone richer.

This is my favourite terminal. I have it configured to run tmux, and couldn't be happier. Lightning-fast, stable as can be, it gets out of my way and lets me work.

> smokers can avoid feeling repressed simply by quitting smoking

What gives you the right to oppress people for the behavioural choices? What gives you the right to tell someone that his health is more important than his happiness?

I don't believe that you have that right.

Visually there's not a whole lot of difference. Ideally, you want something where the shape of each name is reasonably distinct from all the rest — otherwise folks will just ignore that odd blot before the prompt.

And then, once you've started naming things as $ENV-$TYPE, someone will want to cram in the location, and the OS, and the team which maintains it, and the customer, and and and. Then someone will reduce all of those identifiers into single characters … and you'll be in the situation I mentioned. Clearly clpudb1 is CharlesCorp's first London production database system!

> Are modern-day people perpetually drunk on mass-media opiates from consuming up to a gallon of behaviorally-engineered dopamine shots each day?

Yes?

> If the ground-state of the human mind is tipsy, then is sobriety functionally an abnormal state we're maladapted for?

I vaguely recall reading that the ancient Persians would make decisions twice: once sober, and once drunk. If their decisions were the same, then they knew that they'd decided correctly. Of course, they ended up being conquered by a bunch of teetotallers …

No reference, I'm afraid. It could be very well be total bunk.

> It's incredible. Every country should do it.

Yeah, it sure is wonderful to repress a hated minority. How dare they befoul our pristine public spaces with their benighted culture and their foul customs‽

Of course, the victims of your repression might feel a bit differently than you do.

> The negative externalities of alcohol are substantially exaggerated. Public health researchers go crazy inventing externalities for things they don't like.

…

> With cigarettes the damage and causation is much clearer. Something like 1 in 2 people who smoke will die early from a smoking related cause.

But the externalities of tobacco are essentially non-existent: 'second-hand smoke' is one of those invented public-health externalities. Tobacco preponderantly affects those who smoke it (although of course young children of older parents may lose their parents to smoking-related illnesses).

I honestly think that things like $40 packs of cigarettes are pure bigotry (the only politically-acceptable bigotry at the moment). It's kicking a man when he's down.

But then, I believe that cigars & pipes are an essential part of the good life. Can you imagine a world in which C.S. Lewis & J.R.R. Tolkien didn't head down to the Eagle & Child to enjoy a pot of ale and a few good pipes together?

> There is learning from a catastrophic fuck up, and then there is incompetence.

We all start at incompetence, but eventually we — wait for it — learn from our experiences. Would you believe that Caesar, Michael Jordan and Steve Wozniak once were so incompetent that they couldn't even control their bowels or tie their shoes? They learned.

Is it possible that the guys in the team running GitLab's operations were misplaced? Certainly — that's a management issue. And I can guar-an-tee you that GitLab now has a team of ops guys who viscerally understand the need for good backups: they'd be insane to disperse that team to the winds.

'db1' vs. 'db2' is still insufficiently clear, though. Even better would be e.g. to name development systems after planets and production systems after superheroes. Very few people would mistake 'superman' for either 'green-lantern' or 'pluto,' but it's really easy to mistake 'sfnypudb13' for 'sfnydudb13.'

Even better, move stuff to /trash/$(date -I), and have your cleanup script regularly clean out any directory from before a week ago.

> She signed an oath to defend the constitution, not an oath of loyalty to Trump.

Yes, indeed: and the choice available which is consistent with that oath is to resign.

> When did America become so stupid to vote in these people?

Well, in 1996 we re-elected Clinton, despite demonstrable evidence that he was a terrible president and an execrable human being. In 2004 we re-elected Bush, despite him violating his oath to the constitution. In 2012 we re-elected Obama, a man whose mediocrity and incompetence make Carter look like a capable executive (and our other choice was a business executive who couldn't even get a simple get-out-the-vote programme to run correctly).

> There's just the small matter that what he wants violates the law

No, that's exactly what the Giuliani story doesn't indicate: it indicates the exact opposite, which is that they did this legally.

Incidentally, I think it's possible to support neither the President nor the media. The National Review had a recent article, whose title was something like 'Trump's order is wrong, but the Left is insane.' It's entirely possible to disagree with everyone who's shouting.

> She signed an oath to defend the constitution, not an oath of loyalty to Trump.

Yes, indeed: and the choice available which is consistent with that oath is to resign.

> Obama used Executive Orders because in part he had a Congress that, courtesy of Mitch McConnell, stated openly that they had no intention of passing Bills on the President's behalf, even if good.

So? Mr. Obama's executive orders were in many cases inconsistent with the law and the Constitution. 'They won't be nice to me!' is insufficient reason for any president to violate his oath of office, whether Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama or anyone else.

She had two legitimate options: execute the President's instructions if she thought they are legal and moral, or resign if she thought they are illegal or immoral. She doesn't have the option to refuse to do her job.

Ministers and government officials resign all the time when they believe that their government's position is in error.

N.b.: I did not vote for Trump; I am not certain that everything in his immigration-related executive order is consistent with the law (but I am not certain that it's not, either: I am not a lawyer).

I'd love to think of something to do with GreenArrays, although AFAICT they're kinda dead. The idea is fascinating, but I honestly don't know what I would use it for.

The title is an instance where automatically substituting 'humanity' for 'mankind' leads to a contradiction in terms: humanity is the quality of being humane, or benevolence, and there's nothing bad or malevolent about it.

> Almost nobody runs mobile Firefox, so that turned out not to matter much.

FWIW, I love mobile Firefox and I really don't understand why folks use Chrome instead.

Since it predates CSV, it wasn't an alternative to it: it was the original.

I suppose the Excel or 1-2-3 team either didn't know about the separator characters, or they did but then-current text editors weren't useful enough to do anything with them (and user-editability was important). It's a real shame: with a more integrated system, they could have added functionality to the editors to understand ASCII record encoding, and CSV need never have existed.

I don't think so: just as reading, writing & speaking are still our primary forms of communication (rather than pointing & grunting), so too will CLIs last.

> The use of out-of-band characters like NULLs to separate pieces of text does help, but I don't think there is a complete solution.

NULL is actually in-band, not out-of-band, and in fact it illustrates the issues with in-band communication you mention. That's what, presumably, ESC was for: a way to signal that the following character was raw and did not hold its normal meaning.

You can still devise a pretty good protocol with straight ASCII over a wire, using SYN to synchronise the signal, the separator characters to separate data values and ESC to escape the following character (like '\' is used in many programming languages).

> When you find swaths of knowledge that younger people don't know, you've found success in the overall human goal of abstracting concepts and building on the shoulders of those who came before us.

Abstracting, yes, but I don't know about building-upon. The thing is, a lot of this stuff is still sitting around beneath the covers, and someone needs to understand it.

Even worse, sometimes there's stuff that's abstracted over that's important, e.g. if the Excel or 1-2-3 teams had known about Field/Group/Record/Unit Separators, would they have ever come up with CSV?

Or the fact that SYN can be used to self-syncronise, due to its bit pattern …

Ubuntu is trying very hard to abide by the letter of Free Software but not the spirit. Is there a solution? Simple: don't use it. There are many other distros out there which do abide by the spirit as well as the letter.

Canonical have tried to do some very good things to, and deserve some credit for successfully making Linux more end-user-friendly. They're not terrible people, just folks with a different set of perspectives & incentives from me.

> It's important that it be affordable to everyone, regardless of wealth.

That's the whole point of giving each child's parents that child's share of public-education funds.

> If it's private with public funding and a profit motive, that messes things up pretty hard - see what's been happening with college tuitions and unlimited lines of public credit.

Teachers' and administrators' salaries are private profits from public funding, too.

You are, of course, correct that private schools would see the voucher amount as a price floor.

I think that there are bigger issues with collegiate funding, which have to do that people borrow from their futures (backed by public funds) in order to pay for near-term benefits for themselves. I'd have lived much more frugally in college had I internalised that I'd be paying those funds back.

> you'll probably be happier with fish's defaults.

Probably (although I use a zsh distribution to get a sane setup). I definitely appreciate the idea of sane defaults, rather than forcing the user to set everything up properly from scratch. And your autosuggestions do look pretty swell.

> Customizations (prompt, colors, etc) can be done with a web UI or a nice command line interface, and not arcane syntax (PS1=...)

You ship a web server in the shell? Is it always running, or does the user have to do something to start it up?

I kinda like setting variables, to be honest. But I'm old-fashioned.

One thing I really wish y'all'd done was use more standard shell syntax. It's really painful working in an office where someone uses fish and lets fish-isms creep into shared command libraries.

> If you haven't tried fish, I highly recommend it. It takes a little getting use to, but overall it adds a lot of really amazing functionality that I find really useful.

Serious question (that I've asked elsethread): what does fish offer than zsh & bash lack? A quick perusal of the docs reveals nothing obvious, but … I could be missing stuff.

> Fish has been mentioned here (which I've used for 2+ years). It's amazing and adds a lot of good functionality.

What does it add exactly? As far as I can tell, it's needlessly incompatible with POSIX shells, and doesn't do as much as e.g. zsh (or even bash?).

I'm not saying that zsh & bash are the end-all, be-all of shells, but I just don't see that fish improves on them.

And honestly, for config files I think we could do a lot worse than an s-expression language.