esa

For context I’m a scientist doing data analysis and modeling, so my view point is potentially significantly different than most of “the industry”.

Isn’t most of science also rather big on types, only they use the phrase “units”? If you take an attitude of “I never bother checking my units, I just see if it works or not after the fact”, that’s rather different from the science I learned where checking the types of calculations was considered an important step.

At some levels it’s even just like colour-coding your wires, helping you not accidentally put ground in the wrong part of the circuit.

Where’s the Orphan Crushing Machine community here anyway

Astral is already a Rust shop; uv and ruff are written in Rust, and it makes sense for them to expand on what’s already considered very successful.

Rust can enable a lot of speed and “fearless concurrency”; it also has a pretty good type system and a focus on correctness. They’d rather be correct than fast (C made the other choice, but is also from another age), but also show that that extra correctness comes with little runtime speed cost (compilation is another story).

I had to figure out how to do the factory reset at the gym after I got the blue triangle of death when leaving work. Oddly enough it synced the gym plan I wanted and leaving it connected to the phone didn’t seem to produce any other ill effects, but I stayed away from anything using GPS.

But yeah, the general advice for Garmins just now seems to be “just don’t” and hope it doesn’t triangle itself until the fix is out

They’re stuck in a reboot loop, but not bricked. A factory reset works (but the problem may reappear on update).

Yeah, while -e has a lot of limitations, it shouldn’t be thrown out with the bathwater. The unofficial strict mode can still de-weird bash to an extent, and I’d rather drop bash altogether when they’re insufficient, rather than try increasingly hard to work around bash’s weirdness. (I.e. I’d throw out the bathwater, baby and the family that spawned it at that point.)

Yeah, there’s also a subtle difference between ${1:-} and ${1-}: The first substitutes if 1 is unset or ""; the second only if 1 is unset. So possibly ${foo-} is actually the better to use for a lot of stuff, if the empty string is a valid value. There’s a lot to bash parameter expansion, and it’s all punctuation, which ups the line noise-iness of your scripts.

I don’t find it particularly legible or memorable; plus I’m generally not a fan of the variable amount of numbered arguments rather than being able to specify argument numbers and names like we are in practically every other programming language still in common use.

Yeah, another way to do it is

#!/bin/bash
set -euo pipefail

if [[ $# -lt 1 ]]
then
  echo "Usage: $0 argument1" >&2
  exit 1
fi

i.e. just count arguments. Related, fish has kind of the orthogonal situation here, where you can name arguments in a better way, but there’s no set -u

function foo --argument-names bar
  ...
end

in the end my conclusion is that argument handling in shells is generally bad. Add in historic workarounds like if [ "x" = "x$1" ] and it’s clear shells have always been Shortcut City

Side note: One point I have to award to Perl for using eq/lt/gt/etc for string comparisons and ==/</> for numeric comparisons. In shells it’s reversed for some reason? The absolute state of things when I can point to Perl as an example of something that did it better

#!/bin/bash
set -euo pipefail

if [[ -z "${1:-}" ]]
then
  echo "we need an argument!" >&2
  exit 1
fi

This just looks like the average Norwegian

The logs are handled, but I mostly use it for command separation and control, including killing unruly child processes.

I suspect my habit of having an alias userctl="systemctl --user" is slightly unusual, as is running Firefox, Steam, and some other graphical programs as systemd units is somewhat unusual (e.g. mod4-enter runs systemd-run --user alacritty)

But what I’m actually pretty sure is unique is my keyboard layout. I taught myself dvorak a summer some decades ago, but the norwegian dvorak layout has some annoyances, so I’ve made some tweaks. Used to be a Xmodmap file, but with the switch to wayland I turned it into a file in /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/.

Part of what I did to teach myself dvorak and touch-typing at the same time was randomize the placement of the keycaps too. It has a side effect of being a kind of security by obscurity layer: I type quickly and confidently, but others who want to use my machines have an “uhh …” reaction.

Yes, always has been.

There’s also no uppercase d in systemd, the word is entirely lowercase (but I’ll still write it with an uppercase s at the start of sentences).

Yeah, the manpages for systemd are large but also informative. Most of us only use a small subset of the features—much like we never explored everything possible with separate init programs.

Having used Linux on the desktop for some two decades and worked as a Linux sysadmin for a good while I don’t miss the init scripts. My impression is more that a certain cohort wants to pretend that service management is easy by ignoring large amounts of it. It’s easy to write a bad init script that breaks when you really need it, or be out of your depth with more complex cases.

Not to mention the whole conformity by convention thing. Systemd unit files are descriptive and predictable by their nature. So-called init scripts didn’t really have to be scripts, they just usually were, and their arguments and output and behaviour was also unenforced—there’s nothing really stopping you from writing a compiled program that self-daemonizes and place the binary with the init scripts rather than in /bin. Ultimately people who make programs also have to be good at writing init programs with that setup.

So we’d have people doing dumb shit themselves and getting angry at others doing dumb shit. PHP was also pretty popular and full of dumb shit. Lots of “worse is better” to go around.

Ultimately it’s more of the stuff covered in Bryan Cantrill’s Platform as a reflection of values. Some of us value predictability and correctness, others feel it’s a straitjacket. There’s no way of pleasing everyone with the same platform.

And currently the people who want to distribute their own riced-out init programs in bash, perl, php, node.js and so on are SOL. (They can still use them on their own machines.)

By that logic we would still be using horses since technically we don’t -need- cars.

Most of us would be using our feet and transit (and possibly bikes); both our households and our economies would be better off financially and bodily if car use was restricted to goods hauling and some few other uses (not to mention the environment). Mass motorism has turned out to be mostly a way to enrich the auto industry, not our societies, with North America as a warning to the rest of us. (See !fuckcars@lemmy.world for more.)

There are plenty of times where humanity has chased the latest fad without considering the costs & benefits properly. The amount of energy and hardware being blown away on LLMs are another example; same goes for creepto and NFTs.

That said, having a look around for various applications, including terminals, is generally good. If someone finds something that covers their needs but with lower costs, that’s good. And if they find something with a shiny new bell or whistle at exorbitant cost, eh, maybe think twice before choosing it.

Yeah, like the -berg names (e.g. Stoltenberg), it’s likely the family farm if you go far enough back. My family has a name that’s an island and the settlement on it. Taking a profile picture next to the town sign that’s also our last name is pretty common (for a name of a few hundred people).

Yeah, doesn’t seem to be a thing in Norway, but it could probably be revived for the countries that did that. Like Sheryl Copywriter or Ross Youtuber or whatever.

A lot of last names here are frozen patronyms (e.g. at some point some dude named Hans had kids; now there are lots of people calling themselves his son, Hansen) or place names. I kinda like the place name bit: Just give kids last names to a place they have a connection to. Where they were born or conceived or something.

Given how much antibiotics they pump into livestock it wouldn’t be that weird.

But yeah, less intensive animal farming would likely also reduce spread & impact.

Ah, so we didn’t have to wait until 2038.