HankStallone

  find . -type f -name '*.foo' -not -path '*/.*' -print0 | xargs -0 grep bar

"Democracy" in these discussions increasingly just means the 21st-century bureaucratic status quo. It no longer has anything to do with antiquated notions like "the will of the people." If the people want something different, they're trying to dismantle democracy and should be ignored and given what the managerial class knows is best for them.

Persuading the voters is seen as a last resort, a distasteful task that really shouldn't be necessary, if we could just get the right systems in place to keep them pacified and voting for more of the same.

They've been saying 11 million for at least a couple decades that I can remember. It's probably a lot higher now, but no one in a position to find out has ever wanted to know.

I don't use docker, so I stuck with an ancient version of TT-RSS for years. But last week I couldn't get it to play nice with my new FreeBSD system and its updated PHP, so I installed from the git repo with surprisingly little trouble.

If you bookmark Dave's blog, you have to check his blog every day to see if there's something new, even if Dave only posts monthly. Or you check less often, and sometimes discover a new post long after the discussion in the comments has come and gone.

If you put Dave's blog in your RSS reader, one day "Dave (1)" shows up in your list of unread sources and you can read his new post immediately, and you didn't need to think about Dave's blog any other day.

I could use the "all articles" feed in my RSS reader (TT-RSS), but I would never do such a thing unless all the blogs I follow had similar posting frequencies that would mesh well together, which they don't. I never use the front page of Reddit for the same reason: the busy subs would drown out the ones that get a post a week.

It's strange how all these modern communication methods (blogs, forums, RSS readers) so often fail to have features that were available in Usenet newsreaders 30+ years ago. We had threading, searching, killfiling or scoring, marking posts to save, all pretty common features then. I'm not sure why there isn't more demand for them now.

Also, as programming languages have gotten more powerful, I think they've gotten so they require a particular kind of mind to work with. I could teach anyone with a little interest and aptitude to program in BASIC 2.0, because there aren't any hard concepts. Variables are global, there's no recursion, no objects, not really even functions, just subroutines. So you've got looping and variables, just enough to let you do some calculations and put things on a screen. Pretty simple. Also, my Commodore 128 came with a System Guide in which over 100 pages were a pretty solid BASIC instruction and explanation of every command. So if you bought one of those machines, there was a good chance you'd at least tinker with BASIC. You had to learn a couple commands just to use the thing, after all.

Moving to something modern, even a language that's considered easy to learn like python, you very quickly get into more complicated concepts. That seems to have created a situation where the easier and more powerful we make programming for programmers, the more it gets out of reach of anyone else. Though there are still languages specifically for learning (like BASIC), so that doesn't have to be a problem.

It'd cost me about $10k to replace the stack of Commodore equipment I gave away to a scrap dealer 20-ish years ago, if I bought it all used now. But I'm still tempted to start, maybe with just one or two pieces.

The monitor built into the C128 was a big step up. Not as good as an assembler since it didn't have labels, but you could do a lot with it.

Right. As I touched on elsewhere in the thread, our local jailers know all the homeless people in town because they show up regularly when their mental illnesses and/or substance abuse get them into trouble. The ordinary guy who wound up homeless due to a string of bad luck and just needs a place to sleep and a new job to get back on his feet is more a movie trope than reality. These are people with real problems who in many cases need regular supervision in something like a group home, if not outright institutionalization. And as you said, the latter is very hard to do now.

A quarter of a percent still seems like a lot to me, even if it's not a "crisis."

But we can't do anything about it until we face up to the problem. Spending more money won't help. I'm somewhat familiar with the activity at our local jail, and a good part of it is homeless people rotating in and out. They get brought in because they were trespassing or shoplifting or something, the jail cleans them up and dries them out (they're usually on drugs, which they somehow manage to buy) and tries to get them back on their medications, they get released, and the cycle begins again. Most of them are mentally unstable, and perhaps they'd be somewhat functional if they could stay on their medication, but they don't, so they can't function in society for long.

We don't want to put them back in asylums, because some asylums really were hellholes, and I guess we don't trust ourselves not to let them be hellholes again. That seems awfully pessimistic; factories used to be pretty awful too, but we require them to be safe and clean now. Seems like we could do the same with asylums, but we won't even consider it. So we're left with letting them wander the streets, maybe bedding down at homeless shelters when they feel like it, using the jails as temporary asylums when they get in trouble, and throwing more money at the problem once in a while to soothe our guilt. It's sad.

I've always wondered: do speakers of other languages enjoy spelling bees and puzzles based on spelling and wordplay as much as English speakers do? It seems like spelling bees wouldn't be as interesting in a more phonetic language, for instance.

Yeah, my Linux desktop PC is five years old and definitely wasn't cutting edge when I built it, and I can't see any reason to upgrade it. I just put a new CPU/MB/RAM in my 9-year-old FreeBSD system, only because it was starting to act flaky under heavy load converting video. But horsepower-wise it still had plenty for normal use.

Same here. I'm a fast typist, so the effort and slowness of pen and paper make me think more about what I'm writing. My longhand notes make me feel more like I've really gotten the thoughts out of my head and examined them and can stop stressing about them, which is funny since I'm more likely to lose the paper notes than if I typed them into a file which would automatically be backed up. So it's more about the process of writing for me than the recording.

And despite being slower, I'll often find that I've knocked out a couple pages pretty quickly once I get started. Getting started is the hard part.

One option would be org-mode's capture templates. If you had a capture template for structured journal entries, you could keep your daily file open for notes, and then pop open a capture window when you want to start a journal entry.

Or, if you're not sure which a piece of writing is going to be when you start, you could tag the ones you want to save in your "proper journal" with a :JOURNAL: tag, and then refile those once in a while to a separate file.

I do a lot of captures which all go to refile.org, and then I go through that weekly or more often and refile items to other files where they belong. That makes it easy to jot down a thought down quickly, since I don't have to decide where it goes first.

Yeah, "underfunded schools" is a talking point that bears no relation to reality but was great for pulling at people's heartstrings, because "think of the children!" But taxpayers have learned better, because they can look at their property tax bills and see how the bulk of it goes to schools. They can look up the per-pupil cost and see that it just keeps climbing faster than pretty much anything else but health care.

They can see that the corollary talking point (schools in disadvantaged areas get less funding) is a lie too. From an MIT study: "The distribution of spending experienced by children living in poverty (figure 1a) is nearly indistinguishable from that of children not living in poverty (figure 1b)."[1] People who make that claim usually only count state and local funding, ignoring federal Title I which makes up for it.

The "underfunded schools" dog just won't hunt anymore. People who are worried about their next paycheck don't want to hear it, especially when it often comes from school administrators who make more than they do.

[1] https://direct.mit.edu/edfp/article/19/1/169/116642/Funding-...

Especially since those private employers twisted their employees' arms (or fired them) not because they thought the employees were a risk, but because there was an OSHA mandate pending that was going to make them do it. The Supreme Court shot that down not long before it would have gone into effect, but a business can't wait until the last minute. There are HR procedures, consultations with legal, and so on that can take months to make sure everything's covered. So a lot of businesses went ahead as if the OSHA mandate were final, and when it got thrown out it was too late.

Which is exactly what was intended, so later (like we're seeing now) they could say, "Hey, we didn't make you do it."

Yeah, there's normal political corruption and graft, and then there are some who go above and beyond, taking unnecessarily destructive actions that don't even appear to benefit them in any visible way. Usually you can say, "So-and-so did X because Y," even if you disagree with X or think Y is a bad reason. You can at least see the motive.

When the action is clearly going to hurt their political career, and there's no indication that it will put money in their pockets, and they don't even make much of an attempt to claim they're fighting for a principle, yet they clearly have a purpose in mind and keep doubling-down on it, you have to start looking for a motive somewhere else. "They hate their own people" comes to mind, but that's not really an answer because it still leaves you looking for the reason why they hate their own people. Not all leaders do, after all.

Indeed. We've been begging them to throw us in the briar patch of a government shutdown for decades. The first one I remember was about 1990 when Democrats threatened a government shutdown if Bush the Elder didn't break his no-tax-increase pledge. He caved, and they (rightly) hung the "liar" tag on him all through the election. All he had to do was pander to his base and give them exactly what they wanted, but he was more interested in working with the establishment. (Which we should have expected, but we didn't know the Bushes as well as we should have.) Finally, we win one.

My high school French teacher said if we really wanted to learn a language, go live there for a couple months.

Of course, that's easier said than done (and paid for). But if you can afford the money and time away from home, it's probably the way to go.

A few years ago the manager of our local Menards got convicted of stealing over a half-million dollars over 5 years. She only got 180 days, too, and was allowed to leave the jail for work. Depending on how high on the hog she lived for those five years, she might figure it was worth it.

I knew one local HVAC company where the office manager skimmed off six figures over something like 20 years before she got caught. Just slow and steady, never taking enough to be obvious, I guess. It happens more than people would think.

Unfortunately, she doesn't say what kind of fence she's talking about. The kind of fancy privacy fence people put up between yards, maybe; but I'd be impressed if they're cheaper than livestock fence, which is the context some people are talking about in this thread. A typical cattle fence (woven wire, steel posts, barbed wire on top) will cost about $2500 per quarter-mile right now for the materials.

I'm not sure what a quarter-mile of solar panels four feet high would cost, or whether they'd survive the occasional cow rubbing on them. Neat idea, though.

Right. Adam tells Ben to go die in a fire, and Ben says, "Come on, moderators, that's obviously a violation of the CoC." Then Adam says, "No, because I was only responding to Ben's offensive and unwelcoming language when he referred to a 'master' repository. I've compiled a list of Ben's violations, and I demand a review according to section 3, subsection D of the code...."

A good moderator will shut that nonsense down immediately, but a good moderator wouldn't need a CoC to do it. All the CoC does is give the troublemaker a tool to start playing rules lawyer, in the hope that the moderator will get tired of it and give in.

Some people think the answer is to have a CoC that's too simple for rules lawyering, like a one line "Be excellent to each other." But even that can be twisted, so it would be better as a project motto than as an official CoC.

Often the moderator is the project lead (or one of them), who may not be suited to adjudicating personal disputes and probably has better things to do. That can result in siding with the louder faction in the hopes that giving them what they want will satisfy them and let everyone get back to work. Or worse, turning the job of moderation over to them because they seem to want it, and then the petty tyranny is off to the races.

I think that happens less now that people are aware of the danger; but a decade or so ago it was a real problem because no one saw it coming.

Right. I've seen a CoC used as a power-grab by people who had barely made any contributions to a project, when the people in charge were too easy-going or naive to shut down dishonest use of it, so they tended to side with the squeaky wheel. Once the bad actors got people they didn't like removed or driven away from the project, they just got worse, saying things like "go kill yourself" without consequence, because they were now in control and could interpret the code however they liked or just ignore it.

You can't write a CoC that will prevent bad behavior from bad actors in charge, so it's worthless at best and a weapon for the unscrupulous at worst. What matters is who enforces standards of behavior, and if those people are decent and honest, no written code is necessary.

Right. If you had a swimsuit malfunction on the beach in 1995, a few people got an eyeful of your unmentionables before you could grab a towel, someone might whistle or laugh, you'd blush, and then the world would move on and you'd forget about it.

If the same thing happens in 2025, there's a decent chance your unmentionables will end up posted online for anyone to ogle in perpetuity. If you find out about it, it could really eat at you.

I don't have a solution to it, or even know if there should be one. But I think it's undeniable that it's causing a fundamental shift in what "private" and "public" mean, in people's minds if not legally. We used to be more private in public than we are now.

Yeah, in the C64 days, when I could afford to buy a game at retail, it would often be an EA game, because they had some of the best. I still remember the logo flashing through the 16-color set, and how you could tell whether the game had a fast-loader by how fast it flashed.

They were pretty universally admired then, as far as I can remember, but not for much longer.

There's been a major shift just in the last few months. Those of us who have been concerned about this problem for years welcome them to the party, but with a bit of an eye-roll, because it's obvious that the shift wouldn't be happening if it were trucking and farming jobs under assault and not tech jobs.

My government requires me, by law, to send it tens of thousands of dollars every year, much of it to be spent on things I don't want or need, in order to stay out of prison.

Requiring me to spend another $100 or so on a phone seems like pretty small potatoes, compared to what they intend to use the device for. I'm not saying I'd like it, but it's a detail, not the main issue.

A lot of dirty stuff like stock yards and slaughterhouses also moved out of the main city toward the outskirts.