dingosity · HackerTrans

I think I was talking about the pundits, not the staff at Bluesky. They certainly existed in 2020. You can be a pundit and say things without saying them on Bluesky. There is a notable history of people saying things before 2023.

dingosity

10 mesi fadiscuss

If your assertion is "a bunch of people got on Bluesky to talk about the election..." well, did you notice there were two candidates? I think what you're saying is "DEMOCRATS left TWITTER to go to Bluesky," which may be true, but that is a hypothesis for which data would confirm or refute.

dingosity

10 mesi fadiscuss

So your data is "I noticed BlueSky is people who left Twitter." This may not be the convincing argument you think it is.

dingosity

10 mesi fadiscuss

It sounds like your point is when left wing politicos are targeted and people celebrate it, those are obviously sock-puppets and bots. But when right wing celebrities (for lack of a better word) are targeted, it's the democratic base that comes out in force to celebrate.

So only right wing commentators who advocate political violence deserve protection?

[Also... Do you have any data supporting this hypothesis?]

dingosity

10 mesi fadiscuss

[flagged]

dingosity

3 anni fadiscuss

Sure. But the benefit of open source is you can do whatever the eff you want. I just don't like being told "I have a use case that dictates your behaviour. You need to follow that use case, even though it's not your use case and contravenes an existing convention."

This is sort of my hot button issue. After years of working on BSAFE, OpenSSL, firefox and libnss, I hate that people say "Hey. Great software. Here's a list of things you must add to it. Of course I'm not going to pay you."

Why should I change my code to adhere to someone else's conventions when they're in opposition to existing conventions?

dingosity

3 anni fadiscuss

I think this might be the crux of my discomfort with the OP's exhortation we should all adhere to his preferences. Unix and it's derivatives are great because there's a long history of people trying to do things, finding it hard and then slathering on a layer of functionality which is invoked through abstractions that are novel and probably inconsistent with those abstractions that came before. You don't need to ask anyone's permission and you won't find people saying "meh. you shouldn't do it that way." (okay. maybe a few, but you can ignore them. The Unix(tm) police won't show up to cart you away like what happens with VMS.)

But the flip side of this is, yes, cruft.

dingosity

3 anni fadiscuss

Sure. But the comment wasn't "You probably shouldn't be touching the shell if you haven't shipped industry-leading products" it was "You probably shouldn't be touching the shell if you don't know what that does."

Also, if you needed to use it every day, I suspect it would be more familiar than a vague memory.

dingosity

3 anni fadiscuss

I can see how that's a reasonable preference. Though I fall in @OjFord's camp. I have a mouse scroll wheel and I'm not afraid to use it. But... I have to remember to hit return a few times beforehand because it's sometimes hard to find the top of help when you're scrolling up in the terminal.

And if your brain is wired for vi, then that makes complete sense.

But... the cool thing about using the scrollwheel to scroll up to see the --help output is it's always there. If you pipe it into less, it disappears as soon as you exit less. So if you're writing a big, beefy command with lots of unfamiliar options, you can start typing down at the prompt and then scroll up to read the help output. It's annoying when you type that you immediately scroll back down to the bottom of the terminal buffer, and I think all terminal emulators default to doing this, but maybe it's a configurable behaviour.

This also works with `man <command> | cat`.

Also... how many times have I had to type out `git branch -a | cat` and tried to remember to put the `| cat` in it. I HATE that the stock git cli automagically pipes to /usr/bin/pager. If I wanted to pipe the output to /usr/bin/pager, I would type `command | /usr/bin/pager`. But now I'm just kvetching.

dingosity

3 anni fadiscuss

Sure. I don't need to be a grumpy elitist.

The problem isn't that you get a usage message when you ask for it. It's that you get a usage message (written to STDOUT) when you don't. Many commands will print out the usage message when command line options specify a condition that can't be met. I find this frequently when ssh'ing into busybox based systems. Busybox's find command is much less "refined" than comparable desktop OS finds (BSD & GNU/Linux).

So if I do something like:

  ssh [email protected] "find . -type f | while read line; do sha256sum \$line; done" | tr -s ' ' | cut -f 2,1 -d ' ' | sort | uniq -c

And expect output that looks something like a sorted line of hashes, I will be sorely disappointed.

dingosity

3 anni fadiscuss

I believe you have completely misunderstood my "argument".

dingosity

3 anni fadiscuss

If the next command in the pipe wants to do something with non-normal output of a command, then yes, it should do something with that. And the command can redirect stderr to stdout with the use of `2>&1`.

Yes. You're unlikely to like my software. I don't recommend you use it.

dingosity

3 anni fadiscuss

Let's take the cut command for instance. If you read the man page you discover it's job is to parse fields out of each line of input. Printing a usage message into STDOUT is not part of its documented behaviour. It is therefore an exceptional event.

dingosity

3 anni fadiscuss

This is going to sound snotty, and I'm not really trying to be, but... Unix and its derivatives were made for people who sort of knew what they were doing. The reason you pipe exceptional events to STDERR is so the STDOUT output, if it exists, can flow into the next command in the pipe. Asking for help is an exceptional event. If you want the error output of a Unixish (linux, macos, solaris, etc.) machine running bash to be lessable, re-direct it to STDOUT with `2>&1`. You probably shouldn't be touching the shell if you don't know what that does. These tools were developed assuming the users would have a basic understanding of the system they were running on.

The GNU Project has published tools of varying quality, based on who was around to write the tool, debug it, give feedback, etc. It is not the exemplar of high quality software. (But it's far from crap.) The important bit about GNU (and any other software) is that it was written to adhere to their uses. Other people have different requirements. Telling people to "write your software like GNU writes their software" is to misunderstand personal agency and one of the major points of open source software.

Your comments sound like you're saying "Software freedom means you're free to write software the way I want you to write software."

No thank you.

dingosity

4 anni fadiscuss

[citation needed]

dingosity

4 anni fadiscuss

There's a difference between copyright and license. Under US intellectual property law, it is possible to release software for zero dollars, but retain IP interests. This is why you'll see a LICENSE file in the source code for most open source projects. It contains a legal contract explaining the users rights to use the software.

What you're probably thinking of is "Public Domain." That's where a creator disclaims most (though not all) rights to the creation.

dingosity

4 anni fadiscuss

My experience with GPL is that it's used to sell commercial licenses. For instance, the Second Life viewer is dual licensed: GPL and Commercial. Several commercial customers (names redacted to protect the guilty) made changes to the viewer and were later told by Linden they had to purchase a commercial license to avoid violating GPL, even though they were only distributing the viewer internally.

I dunno man. That seems like a bait and switch. You start off with "oh. how could we charge you, it's open source" and then turn around and say "pay up or we'll get Eben Moglen to sue you."

Seems like a racket to me.

But YMMV. I release things under a BSD license, but that's just me. Unlike GPL fans, I don't try to tell other people what license they should release their software under. If you're hip to GPL, by all means use it, I don't think that EVERYONE using a GPL license is running a racket. Just mentioning it so peeps might understand the pushback on EFF/GPL some people feel.

dingosity

4 anni fadiscuss

Which is to say... It sounds like the OP inhabits an environment where design is decidedly un-ad hoc (the reference to TLA+ is a dead give-away.) Not everyone lives there. Not everyone approaches design the same way. People dissing the OP should chill. The OP should probably also chill. If someone tells you "you're doing it wrong," just ignore them. People who know what they're doing won't say "you're doing it wrong," they'll say... "Hey, that's different than how we initially thought this methodology would be used... you must have a different environment from what we're used to. Let's dig into this a bit more."

dingosity

4 anni fadiscuss

Meh. OP sets of a strawman that rarely exists outside Reddit message boards.

TDD is the wind, it cannot be captured by your net.