rando14775

Why do I enjoy writing shell scripts then?

My own and some other actually way more informative criticism of Orwell got deleted by the mods.

So once again, let’s invite the obvious: Orwell is lying when he calls himself a socialist. And again, once the possibility is admitted, the evidence piles up. Read Orwell’s correspondence with poor Victor Gollancz over Wigan Pier and you see the stolid, loyal Gollancz trying desperately to understand why his star writer spent so much time vilifying his fellow socialists in a book commissioned by them. Read that exchange and you’ll never buy Orwell’s version of himself as simple, honest man. He’s the Satanic diva, pushing Gollancz into objections which allow Orwell to play the lone, misunderstood hero.

But if he never was a leftist, why did he call himself one? For Orwell, the red star was protective coloration. It allowed him to smuggle his hates into print, gave them a fine radical gloss, and spared him the cold, clear readings his essays deserved. (Only academics believe that writers want to be understood. Writers want to be misread to their advantage.)

https://exiledonline.com/big-brothers-george-orwell-and-chri...

This article's list of privilige dropping tools is missing setpriv(1) from util-linux, which is the only one actually installed on my system.

Imagine how many they would sell if it ran on something else besides a switch. I'm not paying $500 just so I can play the three switch games I'm interested in.

The main reason English is used so much is because of the British (and later US) empire, and not because it's easy as a second language (that depends heavily on what someone's first language is). Empires always spread their official language far and wide, no matter how "easy" it is.

I agree that language purity stuff is related to xenophobia.

The pointer/array confusion in C makes this way harder to understand than it has to be. The other thing is the syntax, which is too clever and too hard to parse in your head for complex expressions. Both of these things also tend to not be explained very well to beginners, probably partly due to the fact that explaining it in detail is complex and would perhaps go over the beginner's head. It's also stupid, so you'd probably have to explain how it turned out to be this complex.

In Emacs, undo makes an undo pointer go down in the undo stack. Pressing undo again goes back another step. If you do any other regular edit, the pointer starts over at the top of the undo stack. Undo puts its own edits on top of the stack like any other command.

So if you "undo, undo" you undo two things. If you "undo, edit, undo", you're keeping the first undo but reverse the edit. If you "undo, edit, undo, undo", you're back to where you started (except your undo stack has now grown).

You can save more energy probably if you only put a little bit of water, and then steam the eggs in the pot (no need for a steamer basket, just put the eggs in the shallow water). Also, apparently, peeling is easier when the eggs are placed in hot water vs cold. Look up Kenji's egg boiling experiment stuff.

You sure? Germany is a (shit) coffee country and everybody has had electric kettles since the 90s.

And nothing of value was lost.

What is PDB?

When will they add a slice (fat pointer) type? I.e. a generic version of

struct T_slice { T* ptr; size_t len; };

with all the syntactic sugar and bounds checks added in. This could catch so many out of bounds issues and doesn't seem that hard to do.

I'll add that side effects alone can influence depression scores. Any medication that de- or increases sleepyness will change the score of any questionaire when taken at the appropriate time of day.

UHT to my taste also adds slightly bitter flavor. I grew up drinking fresh milk but my parents at some point switched to UHT and so did most people I know. I'm not sure if the middle ground longer-shelf-life type is actually more popular than UHT in Germany as someone here claims. UHT tasted bad to me (slightly off) back then, but now being used to it I have the opposite reaction and think something's wrong when I drink fresh milk. The difference in taste seems negligible when used as a cooking ingredient.

UHT (and longer-shelf life) milk became pretty popular in Germany during the late 90s I think. I'd speculate it's because it's much more convenient due to smaller fridges, as well as discounters (which are very popular) selling it for very cheap.

I will also agree with the other commenter that the type of heat treatment is the most obvious factor in how milk tastes, and that I've heard people from abroad comment on this. Though I've never had US milk so IDK.

Why though? They specifically suspect fructose of causing this, and starchy grains contain no fructose.

Not an expert on how they do it, but I've played a few. The logic in these things is excellent, they won't ever give you an unsolvable game (and the Zelda ones have been playtested to death at this point). I think they just specify the prerequisites for each item and then just don't assign them if they are impossible to get, not sure how exactly the algorithm works but I can think some easy ways on how solve this problem once you have that list of dependencies.

You can still get the wrong items in the temple of course, it just means it's outside the temple. Sometimes you even have to go into a temple you can't beat, get an item from a chest, which allows you to get the required item outside, which then finally allows you to beat it.

The problem with Facebook is that it's too big. Different online communities have different standards of what sort of behaviour is acceptable. Facebook is effectively splintered, there is no one community and so there is disagreement on the community standards, to a degree that I don't think can realistically be resolved. Splintering may very well be the result.

If social media were more decentralized, the responsibility would also be decentralized. Standards would set by the communities. And as for overall standards, that would be dealt with by the legislature and courts, which would be a huge improvement, as those are way more transparent and fair than Facebook et al.

Abuse of power by Facebook (or advertisers pressuring them) would be much less of a problem if people could move more easily between social media platforms.

I think a more decentralized model of social media would be good all around. Add some interoperability so you can still communicate when you're not on the same platform, this should alleviate some of the tendencies for these platforms to become so big and centralized.

I don't know what reasons other people have for refusing to answer. As a bit of pedant I just wanted to explain why I personally don't like them, it has a lot to do with being vague, abstract, unclear. Confusing really. You sit there and are not sure you can even answer the question honestly.

In a normal situation I would probably refuse and ask them to clarify, or challenge their assumptions or something. In this situation I just try to get over my aversion to answer and try to interpret it as best as I can. Sometimes I got no clue what it could mean and choose neutral or whatever. It's mentally exhausting.

This doesn't invalidate the methodology. Just saying I don't like it. If people refuse to answer or answer in a way that doesn't fit the schema and they throw it out, that's obviously a problem though.

Edit: To maybe answer your question, I skimmed through the actual article and they mention things like old people not culturally accepting a young person administering questions, children thinking they should not speak in the presence of elders. But also other weird things as mentioned that seem to me as stemming from confusion. I mean, you get better at answering with practice, so the whole concept might be totally baffling to some people which haven't gone through a Western school, where you're also quite often expected to answer unclear and confusing questions on tests.

More edit: The PhD students and professors designing these questions and the college students used as test subjects are basically the most overschooled people on the planet. They are the ones that, in school, excelled at answering abstract, underspecified, questions with multiple choice answers. Many have seen these before. They might even know how they are made and how the results get processed. Of course they're going to have less trouble answering.

You are right, they do this, especially in the more tedious longer ones.

I think improving these things is difficult, because of you change the questions, you also loose all the accumulated data, and maybe now you might have a better questionnaire, but you wouldn't know it, and you wouldn't know what the results mean. I mean, until you administer it to just as many people as the old one. It's a lot of work.

[...] something like “I generally trust people.” Then participants are asked to choose one point along a five- or seven-point line ranging from strongly agree to strongly disagree. This numbered line is named a “Likert item” [...]

Oh god, having filled out a bunch of these for diagnosis and such I hate these with a passion. I always wondered how well these actually work.

I've seen grammatical nonsense like, "Do you often do X? -- always, often, sometimes, rarely, never". What, I often rarely do X? And what does often mean, anyway? Like once a week? Every day?

Then, there are the abstract or vague questions that you then have to interpret what concrete situation it could apply to. Hard to think up an example off the top of my head, but how people reply to these surely depends on what exactly they think it might mean.

Then you start losing patience after about 3 minutes of this shit, not to mention 15 or 30 minutes, and just go through them barely reading the questions, but for the first couple of questions you were pondering whether you "agree" or "somewhat agree" for ages.