Pete_D

Online Etymology Dictionary claims: "The figurative one-trick pony is 1897, American English, in reference to circus acts."

https://www.etymonline.com/word/pony#etymonline_v_17634

I think it's impossible. We lost. The incentives aren't there for interoperability and support for client-side customization to meaningfully improve - big names will resist, either because it makes it easier for users to sidestep ads and tracking, or because the kinds of features it would require aren't within reach of the minimum viable user (https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyr...).

Legally-enforced open APIs and client-agnosticity like you mention downthread sounds wonderful (maybe we could start by deprecating the User-Agent header) but for similar reasons, I can't see it ever taking off.

Pessimism notwithstanding, here's an idea: imagine a browser extension where you could implement privileged pages/tabs that had access to other tabs' script environments/DOM, and could inject elements from other pages into itself. So you could write a workflow like:

1. open a Wikipedia page in a background tab (`const wiki = new Tab(etc...);`)

2. run some JS to pick out values from a <table> in it

3. open a Google Docs spreadsheet in a background tab

4. fill out the spreadsheet using the previously obtained data

5. as a bonus, inject the table + spreadsheet elements into the extension page for side-by-side reference

Not sure what the emacs analogy would be - maybe something like org-mode and Babel being able to generate things using the contents of other buffers.

Thanks, I understand better now. These kinds of dataflow-OOP environments always look like magic to me.

I don't know what the state of vi(m) emulation was the last time you used emacs, but evil-mode is very comprehensive. About the only thing I missed when I made the switch was tabs; everything else either just worked as in vim or had a near-identical equivalent. I'm curious what you expect would be missing.

> Another thing. If you like Unix pipes, you have to love late-bound dynamically typed objects that communicate through message passing, because Unix pipes can be generalized as such. Yet I routinely see people who claim to like the former and hate the latter.

Sorry if this is a dumb question, but could you explain this a bit more?

The portability is a very nice feature of autotools, but that distinction between developer sources and distributed sources it was designed around isn't as clear cut or widespread as it used to be. If I start a new C/C++ project today, chances are I expect users to be building from the git repo or a snapshot of it, rather than a semi-cooked tarball.

(I don't know what build system I'd pick these days - probably just write the Makefiles by hand.)

Same, no problems yet. A hypothesis I found while looking into it: shelf life of condiments nowadays might be less than it used to be due to manufacturers cutting sugar and salt.

If I cared about VHS, I'd probably go for the combo too - separate players means double the number of power outlets, video input cables, and remotes.

Bundling a VHS/DVD player together feels more sensible than bundling a TV into a fridge, or a calculator into a mousepad, but I don't know if I could come up with a principle behind why.

> English isn't even in top 4 of world spoken languages

By what measurement? Wikipedia gives Mandarin > Spanish > English > Hindi for native speakers[0] and English > Mandarin > Hindi > Spanish for all speakers.[1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num...

CentOS 6 (and increasingly Oracle Unbreakable Linux 6) are alive and well in enterprise.

Same. I thought about it after a few surprised reactions, and concluded: I got interested in technology when I was a kid because you could take it apart, tinker with it, understand it. That's less true than it used to be - things in general are more complex and opaque and less repairable. A "technology"/"magic" distinction, perhaps.

Anecdote: I had a surgical incision around six inches long glued shut after an operation in the UK. No stitches. I was surprised, but from talking to the nurses it sounded like that was standard procedure. Judging from other comments, the stuff they used (DermaBond) is a variant of superglue.

FWIW, that sounds like The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling by Ted Chiang.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact%2C_the_Truth...

A bit off topic, but in case you were still looking, may I suggest https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/javascript/? That site is my first port of call whenever I need to get a quick overview of a new language.

I assumed OP was using a different definition of art (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/art#Noun):

> 2. (countable) Skillful creative activity, usually with an aesthetic focus.

> She's mastered the art of programming.

..

> 7. (countable) Skill that is attained by study, practice, or observation.

If that doesn't convince you, compare with such phrases as "The Art of War", "artisan bread", or "liberal arts" (which includes topics like philosophy).

Judging from the Wii and the iPad, people will get used to any brand name, no matter how ridiculous it sounds initially.

I use emacs python-mode for this. It's more or less a wrapper around the REPL you'd get by typing "python" at a command line, but with some integration to support sending updated function definitions, tab completion, etc.

Yes. Forums worked this way for years. It was fine.

This always makes me nervous. If I have some old laptops lying around, how worried should I be about them exploding? Does it only apply if they're in use?

gdb has checkpoint/restart that uses fork(), though you have to specify the checkpoints manually. https://sourceware.org/gdb/onlinedocs/gdb/Checkpoint_002fRes...

It has another mode where you can record and rewind execution traces, which sounds more like the description, but I'm almost certain that doesn't use fork. https://sourceware.org/gdb/onlinedocs/gdb/Process-Record-and...

I didn't - I'd heard it was dangerous since breaking the membrane meant you'd absorb the contents a lot more quickly at the cut edge.

The full report (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/67/wr/mm6745a1.htm?s_cid=mm...) says they're using the Standard Occupational Classification system (https://www.bls.gov/soc/). You can read the full definitions at https://www.bls.gov/soc/2010/2010_major_groups.htm; farm managers are at 11-9013, agricultural workers are under 45-2000. The distinction in this case seems to be whether or not someone working on a farm is mostly a manager or mostly a laborer.

Since you say you're on a very low dose, may I suggest gum or lozenges? I tried nicotine patches for focus a while ago and found that even the weakest ones were far too strong.

Another Gwern link: https://www.gwern.net/Nicotine

Highlight: "Wikipedia summarizes Guillem et al 2005 as "Technically, nicotine is not significantly addictive, as nicotine administered alone does not produce significant reinforcing properties" - the addictiveness coming from MAOIs (eg. Khalil et al 2000, Khalil et al 2006) & possibly other compounds present in tobacco"

So I'd expect cigars and pipe smoking to be addictive. My personal experience is smoking cigarettes occasionally (average less than one a day), and I wouldn't say I was addicted either.

My current hypothesis for why cigarettes seem more addictive is frequency. Searching "cigarettes per day average" turns up estimates mostly around 15 per day; most cigar/pipe smokers aren't anywhere near that.

(Disclaimer: I am not a doctor or scientist.)

The man page suggests it's equivalent to "vim -R". I usually use that because "view" seems to ignore my .vimrc for some reason.

I like to keep a bell in my PS1 so I get notifications automatically.

How about "awk /pattern/"?

Was it this one? https://web.archive.org/web/20180801143131/http://www.shamus...

(archive link because the site seems to be down at the moment)

I got tired of writing the time specs manually, so now I keep this script in my PATH:

    #!/bin/sh
    # print a crontab entry for 2 minutes into the future

    date -d "+2 minutes" +"%M %H %d %m * /path/to/command"

at(1) is great, but you'll still have the problem of a different environment to cron (it copies most of your environment variables and working directory).