He was removed, not because he was bad, but because he was bad and unnecessary.

If the monster world went into a blackout, he’d have been out and operating the child-reactor with full government support. Only because Sully found a new, compatible, source of power was the ethics of the old system finally up for debate. Slavery is only allowed to be abolished after it stops being “necessary” for the economics of the system.

And yeah, it’s a movie, so he got taken away in cuffs before the new power source was operationalized, but that’s just a bit of movie magic 😉

That’s cool man, we’re not talking about you. We’re talking about Open AI, who pays employees hundreds of thousands of American dollars a year.

You should be allowed to use it for free. And a donation from a company like them, could make it easier for a person like you to get an awesome cutting edge tool for free!

The difference is that a tip is “you’re already getting paid to do your job, why would I pay you to do your job?”. Whereas this is “you gave me this for free, so maybe if I make a bunch of money I could show appreciation for that gift” or pay-it-forward so the next guy can also get a free start, etc.

And yes I know they’re are busted places on this Earth where basically servers don’t already get paid to do their job and are thus reliant on tips as income, but that’s a different problem…

Maybe not a teen thing, but among children I think “because 789” could bring 789 into the discussion.

Given your tone and general panic, I’m going to say don’t look into Guix. It’s technically interesting, but I don’t think it’s for you where you’re at. 😛

And I mean this with love, not gatekeeping.

Yeaaaaaaah, I wasn’t sure whether or not to put that somewhere or not, and eventually decided not. I devalued all env vars, which I would feel like I had to move up to get into the PATH. I love the path, and I do agree with you that is important for understanding how the system really works, and how you can add your own commands, but I guess I figure that’s a good Shell 201. For someone who wants to start using it, and isn’t sure what a grep is or why a cat is involved, I figure they’re not yet primed to care where these things live on their disk.

But soon after, for sure! And obviously others can disagree with me.

Before you get too lost, I want to write a tiny intro:

The terminal (also called shell and sometimes command prompt, even though these are technically different things) is a place where you run commands.

If you open one right now and type ls (that is a lower case L), and then hit enter, it will list the files in your current folder. And it spits that out as text, which will be important later. So that’s the gist, ls is a program that does something, and you type the name of it to run it, and it outputs its result as text.

Most commands have “flags”, which are options you give it when you run it. ls -l is ls run with the “l” flag (also lower case L). If you run that you’ll see it lists more information per file this time. The mnemonic here is “l for long”. There are lots of flags, and you can usually combine them with a single dash, so ls -lth is the same as ls -l -t -h, which lists extra data, sorts by time, and uses human readable units like “3GB” instead of 3096432764 bytes.

There are also “long flags” that start with two dashes by convention. These would look like ls -l --time --human-readable which does the same thing as before, but is more readable but less compact. Long options don’t combine the way short options do, so you need to separate them with spaces.

Some flags need values. Like ls -l --sort size which is usually the same as ls -l --sort=size but confusingly not the same as ls -l --sort = size (note the spaces) which makes sense if you know how these things work, but for now you just need to accept.

Commands also have “arguments”, which are not flags. Sometimes also called “parameters”. So for ls up until now we’ve been just listing the current folder over and over, but ls can list any folder, like ls Documents or ls Downloads, and that can be combined with flags, usually before the arguments, like ls -lth Downloads.

Okay, so that’s flags and arguments, but you may be wondering how do you know what flags are available and what they do? Two main options!

The first is called a “man page”, man being short for manual. Man itself is a command that opens essentially instructions for a command, in the terminal itself, and you can use the arrow keys to go up and down and “q” to quit. Try man ls to see what is it’s got for you. You usually don’t need to read it to to bottom and understand everything, you normally just go looking for something in particular. You can also use / in man to search for something, like /sort to look for the word sort. And then n and N go forward and back searching for the next and previous hit for that search. Also man -k search will search through the man pages looking for things that match, in this case, the term “search” and list you commands. You may want that for being like “there’s gotta be a way to do this, but I don’t know what the command is!”. Also man pages are sorted into sections, and contains more than just commands. So you only care a out the things in section 1 for now.

The second way to get help is that most commands, but not all, will have a -h or --help flag that tells them to list their own help as output instead of what they normally do. So ls --help lists the options it supports.

Quoting! You may have noticed the shell is sensitive to spaces. So imagine you had a folder with a space in the name. If you ran ls My Folder, it would break that into two arguments, My and Folder, and would try to find you the contents of both of those two folders, which would fail because they don’t exist! So to fix that we have two options: quoting and escaping. You can wrap it in quotes like ls "My Folder" to tell the shell “this is all one unit, don’t break it up”, or you can “escape” the space by putting a backslash before it, like ls My\ Folder to tell it “this next space isn’t a splitting one, so please include it in the argument”. The backslash won’t be there by the time ls sees it, it’s just telling the shell how to split the arguments.

And then pipes! Pipes are the killer feature of the shell, as they allow you to take the output of one command and make it the input of the next. And some commands are built with this in mind. Like grep, which can search its input for things that match the pattern given as its argument. Like ls Downloads | grep pdf, which will take the list of files we’re used to seeing ls output to us, and instead feed that to grep which will filter it down to just the pdfs. There’s a lot you can do with these pipelines, because you could then take the output of grep and pipe it to something else to further process it, etc.

So that’s nowhere near everything, not even close, but it’s hopefully enough to be able to wander around the big wide world and know what the heck people are talking about, and at least how to read what you’re seeing.

Quick note! The command rm means remove. It deletes files, and it doesn’t use a trash can or anything, they’re just gone. So be very careful with that one! And if some jackass out there tries to get you to run rm -rf / or some equivalent, DON’T DO IT. That stands for “remove” with the flags “recursive”, which means descend into child folders and keep going, and “force” which means delete things even if you shouldn’t. Then it has the argument of “/” which is the root of your filesystem, meaning a recursive operation on that will effect every file on your computer. So essentially this command deletes all files on your machine. Bad. 😅

Here’s some quick notes to give words to other things you might see and have trouble looking up!

• ls $HOME: the thing after the $ is an “environment variable”, which is some value your shell has stored and allows you to inject into the command. You can run the env command to see what variables there currently are
• echo blah is a command that just outputs its args (argument is such a long word). It’s useful for injecting words into a pipeline, or outputting environment variables, like echo $HOME
• ls ~/Pictures: The “tilde” is just a shortcut for your home folder, so it’s actually the same as ls "$HOME/Pictures", but it’s so common to do things relative to your homedir, that it’s a shortcut.
• ls | less: the less command is great, because it takes its input and presents it in an interactive scrollable thing sometimes called a “pager”. This is actually what man uses to present its pages, so the same arrow keys and q applies, but you can take any output and put it in less
• ls `echo Documents` or ls $(echo Documents) are two equivalent ways of running a command in a subshell, and then having the result be itself and argument for the outer command. So echo spits out “Documents” as its output, but not to us. That output is then an argument to ls, which just runs like ls Documents. This is different than a pipe, but is a other way commands can be linked together to form larger units. The first one is called “back-ticks” by the way.
• sudo whoami: sudo is a command that “does” something as “super user”. S U DO. It’s used to escalate your privileges. So maybe a normal user can’t install packages, but sudo whatever can. The sudo command just asks your password and gets you access, the runs the rest of the command as-is. You’ll see this a lot in instructions people give.

I think that’s enough to get off the ground? Good luck!

The world tells me I’m white, but if I had to name my skin I’d say it’s pretty clearly pink 😛

I know it doesn’t matter, and is fully a side issue to this post, but I hate that “blacklist” gets brought into this. It’s never been used to be “a list of black people” or something; that wasn’t the original meaning, and that’s not the modern intention. It’s just a word that sounds like maybe it could have been racist in origin, but it wasn’t. And that one makes me grumpy just as an annoying word person.

The real hot take was that we used the term black and white for people at all! If we could go back to the past and make it so we call it, like, Affo and Euro or something, whatever, it would have cleared up a lot of unrelated term confusion.

I mean, if we could go back and change things there’s maybe some other stuff that would be more important to change… but among the changes I would make are those!

I think the classic answer would be Mailman. But I hope someone else has a better answer 😛

The “where I live” part is key. Because very likely this person is in SF, where they cannot buy a luxurious house cash with that money, and where cost of living eats surprisingly far into that stupid high number.

But notably, this is why all the normal people who don’t make a half million dollars a year can’t live in SF! 😅

I always assumed the name was more of a reference to audio Master Recordings.

It’s the original tapes or whatever that all copies are derived from. It’s also where the term “remastering” comes from, as in “we went in and rebuilt a new master from the individual tracks, and this is the new master now”, versus just making another copy of the master for a re-release.

Yeah, typically per year. And usually it’s called Total Compensation because some of it is in salary, some in stock, some in stock options, sometimes even some kinds of perks, etc.

So all of that gets balled up into Total Compensation, which is different than annual salary

Uhmmmm, pretty sure it’s worse than that. My understanding of the term is that it comes from cars, where cheaper Asian cars were entering the American market and were called “rice burners” (racistly), and I’m pretty sure from there the concept of decking out a cheap car with spoilers and ground kits and a wild paint job and stuff was called “ricing” because it was a thing in the Asian communities. As in “ricing a car” is “doing what an Asian would do to that car, and you know how they’re all about rice”

I’d be happy to be wrong here… but I think that’s the history on that word.

Oh, the human interaction is annoying! Yeah gotcha. That makes more sense!

git log will only show you commits in your history. If you’re only ever working forwards, this will contain all the stuff you’ll ever need.

But if you’re rewriting history, like with a rebase or squash or something, or you’re deleting branches without merging them, then you can run into a situation where the official history of your branch doesn’t contain some of the commits that used to exist, and in fact still exist but are unlinked from anywhere. So reflog is the log of where you’ve been, even if where you’ve been isn’t in the official history anymore, so you can find your way back to previous states even if there isn’t otherwise a name for them.

If all you care about is your current history, git can use the dates of commits just fine to see where you were on Thursday without needing the reflog.

Maybe I’m just a wizard, or I don’t know what y’all are talking about, but rebases aren’t special. If you use git reflog it just tells you where you used to be before the rebase. You don’t have to fix anything, git is append only. See where the rebase started in reflog, it’ll say rebase in the log line, then git reset --hard THAT_HASH

Pushing without fetching should be an error. So either they got the error, didn’t think about it, and then force pushed, or someone taught them to just always force push. In either case the problem is the force part, the tool is built to prevent this by default.

Continuing after merge should be pretty easy? I’d assume rebase just does it? Unless the merge was a squash merge or rebase merge. Then yeah, slightly annoying, but still mostly git rebase -i and then delete lines look like they were already merged?

Humans are, perhaps above all things, storytellers. And one thing that makes an interesting story is shared context. All things being equal, a story about Thor or Horus or Coyote or Jupiter is more interesting than a story about this guy you don’t know named Roger.

If you’re a skilled storyteller you can make a story about Roger interesting, but a story about someone people know will always be more interesting, because it connects to something they’ve already got with them. In a sense, they’re part of the story, because they have a kind of relationship with the subject, even if it is parasocial. And the more people I know know this subject, the more broadly applicable I know this story to be, and that gives it power in a sense.

So celebrities are just that. If I tell you I met this guy Dave that’s boring. If I tell you I met this guy Dave from your work, that’s more interesting because you know Dave. If I tell you I met the mayor of your town Dave that’s prominent, and might be interesting to many people in your town, but not super interesting outside that. If I tell you I met this guy named Dave who used to host a late night TV show watched by tens of millions of people, that’s more interesting because he’s known by lots of people. The story isn’t different, but more people have context on it, they know the guy, and that gives it a different kind of value.

Note I’m not saying it’s more interesting to more people because more people know him. I’m saying it’s more interesting to each person I tell it to, because they know this guy is known by more people. It’s the prominence that gives it currency. And probably in no small part because now they can tell a guy at work they have a buddy who met Dave the late night guy, and that guy will know who that is too. It’s now their semi-interesting story.

Of course this doesn’t apply to all people and I’m sure you’re immune. And sometimes people hate the subjects of the story enough to not care about them. And some people don’t care about movie stars at all, but care about comic book authors because that’s what has currency in their communities, etc.

Since Linux 5.2 you can actually make the (ext4) filesystem case-insensitive, per directory. If you’re into that kind of thing.

I think it’s because the early marketing and hype compared NoSQL to rdbms. At the beginning they were all “hey man, don’t schemas suck? Isn’t it a pain having to migrate your data? Sometimes you just wanna cram shit somewhere, go fast, break things, and your DBA is a jackass! MongoDB”

And people, at that time, were either like “what the fuck?” and continue to not trust it to this day, or “hell yeah brother!” and then put everything into Mongo and were surprised when it lost some data or got into a corrupted state, or at least were surprised the first time they thought “huh, I really wish there was some consistency to all this data…”

So yeah, I think MongoDB didn’t come into the scene as “I’m a new kinda thing that has niche uses” it came on as “hey pussy, why are you still using your dad’s DB. Are you afraid?” and people still carry that in their hearts