Is there any actual, useful, worthwhile reason for avoiding useless `cat` though?
128 karma · joined March 18, 2021
I was surprised to see it was already installed with coreutils, so I've apparently had it for a while now. Thanks for the heads up.
If you `lndir` your mp3 directory to a functional copy of it, a playground of sorts, you can move things around and rename them without having to worry about scenarios like having to listen to a bunch of mp3s in order to put them back to where they're supposed to be.
When you're satisfied with the re-organization of your files, you can replace your symlinks with the original files. Since none of the directories are symlinked, you never have to worry about `cd`ing into a place you didn't intend to.
That and `readlink -f` to get the absolute path of a file. (Doesn't work on MacOS; the only substitute I've found is to install `greadlink`.)
And `cp -a`, which is like `cp -r`, but it leaves permissions intact - meaning that you can prepend `sudo` without the hassle of changing the ownership back.
I never see `lndir` on these lists either. It makes a copy of a directory, but all of the non-directory files in the target are replaced with symlinks back to the source while directories are preserved as-is. Meaning that when you `cd` into it, you are actually landing in a copied structure of the source directory instead of the source directory itself, as would be the case if you just symlinked the source folder.
Once inside, any file you want to modify without affecting the original just needs you to create the symlink into a file, which you can do with `sed -i '' $symlink`. There you have it: effectively a copy of your original directory, with only the modified files actually taking up space (loosely speaking).
Looks like I have a few pull requests to submit.
It's a fantastic INDIRECT way of telling someone they did something stupid. And because stupid actions map so well onto their doers, it's also a fantastic way to insult people.
As an aside: this sort of indirection - asking a question to assert something - it's not peculiar to English, but it's suuper common in English-language expressions (which is, in fact, due to the habitual indirection of the English - at least according to a linguistics professor I once had.)
The kicker is: because it's an ironic construction, it’s likely going to require more effort to process: the presence of irony means that what is actually meant by the speaker is not encoded literally, but rather must be interpreted - derived from what WAS said - and irony (and other ways of flouting literal language) yields a disjunction (x || y || z). It puts the listener into a role where their recognition of intent and ability to joke around are tested - and the correct interpretation is up in the air. So while it's possible to say this expression to a friend when they screw up ("Have you considered NOT showing up to work drunk?"), it's also a great way to make an enemy ("Have you considered NOT being a fuckup that nobody likes?"). Same construction. (In fact, this later example is especially sinister, because any answer you give just makes YOU assert what you're being slandered with. "No" - I haven't considered not being a fuckup? / "Yes" - I did in fact consider not being a fuckup? You get the idea. It can be wielded in a very mean way.)
And your comment wasn't intended this way at all, and in fact it's obvious when you read it that straight talk and no irony is meant, but it shares enough of the signification with the ironic phrase that it sets off alarm bells. Especially in an online reply to someone, where trolling is sport! The context is working against you here.
And the context is the first tool we have when interpreting communication, because it's already available to our cognition before we receive any given message. And brains are energy misers, using heuristics to filter shit out that doesn't look like a good reward for the necessary energy expenditure.
So I bet that the downvoters saw 1) a short comment, and short is by the way much more likely to be low effort and unconstructive; and 2) all the native speakers' downvoting brains instantly recognized the same construction as the ironic idiom talked about above, and then they instantly said fuck it, this person is being a dick, without even really reading it. Since irony (unless it’s expected) requires more processing effort (both in detecting WHETHER irony is present AND what the ironic speaker means, just to get to the point where you can start assessing the semantic content), these two things were enough to justify jumping the interpretive gun. I wouldn't be surprised if your question was flagged by MOST native speakers’ brains’ asshole detection systems. And so, the actual substance of your question, which, processed in its entirety, have indicated that you were asking a bona fide, relevant, even microservices-essential question - got booted out. And then the overzealous downvoters succumbed to the urge to smash the downvote button without a second thought and never looked back.
I found myself in the same place, actually - thinking "they're being a dick," then moving on. Probably took less than a second. Often when people in online conversations say why the downvotes? they're trolls acting in bad faith, which pisses me off because I always go reread what they wrote. So I did. You weren't calling anyone stupid! Still, I had to stare at it a bit before I realized it was an unintentional collision with the syntax of sarcasm. Maybe like if I wrote "Was hast du denn?" and really truly meant "what do you have?" instead of "what's wrong with you?" If you don't recognize it for what it is, it might look like an honest question which expects an honest answer.
Oh. Another thing to consider: after a while spent in any given semiotic context, our cognition adjusts and those cognitive heuristics that reject hard things become even lazier. Our pattern of behavior when reading on screens starts with reading, but then it turns to skimming and scanning if given long enough. I'd bet money that if your brief, but bona fide contribution had been one of the first comments, your downvote percentage would be a LOT lower. Halfway down a long page, the skippers are skipping and the downvoters downvoting. That doesn't mean that they intended to or are even aware of the switch in reading modes. At the top of the page, information is still shiny and new, and worth interpreting, speculating on the speaker and their intentions, etc. After a while, nobody gives any comment a second chance.
Anyway, I don't get to revisit all the shit I learned at university enough, so it felt good to write all that. Are you still here? Maybe everyone's already moved the fuck on. Brain got bored? Would serve me right, ha! So, here I go, back to my job, where instead of working in cognitive linguistics, text semiotics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, etc., I'm writing boring-ass JavaScript all day, for an application ... being built on microservices.
(The link here doubles as an explanation and as a warning to anyone thinking about getting a forkbomb tattoo.)
(Note: I am not responsible for any irreparably cracked teeth, chunk-wise hair loss, or overexertion-onset voice loss sustained from reading this comment.)
Brit: "Not very often"
It's its own unintentional genre. Once you learn to recognize it, you see it everywhere.
What's probably tripping you up is that "rest" is usually a noun that takes predicative adjective rather than an attributive adjective. It's more common to hear "The rest of my day was nice," but less common to hear "the nice rest of my day."
But despite the ostensible grammaticality of the noun phrase here, frequency still plays a huge role in determining what we deem acceptable, so it's not sufficient to argue as a counterpoint e.g. "a nice rest of your day" is perfectly fine like these other analogously formed noun phrases, checkmate ... Language doesn't work like that.
I'd argue that your point is actually best articulated simply as "it just sounds weird," rather than calling it any kind of flub, grammatical or otherwise.
Their involvement with the tax system is chiefly to use their influence to prevent their wealth from being taxed as much as possible - not to profit from it. (Whenever possible, they will seek public investment into their own private projects, but that's not the same as surreptitously siphoning off tax money for their own coffers.)
Moreover, it's good to be exposed to scenarios where the code is technically correct, but the attitude of the author ought to raise red flags - for example, unnecessarily representing a solution as authoritative, discounting other approaches for dumbass reasons (such as preferring fewer lines for its own sake), saying that a problem is "simple" to solve, you "just" have to do this, etc. They tend to have the effect of shutting down critical inquiry, and that's a good thing to learn how to recognize.
In other words, you can learn a lot from hamfisted tutorials and toxic teachers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gNZtI7hbvI
In order for us to start building things to last, there are a number of things that would need to happen first. We're pretty much at the mercy of the companies who have integrated the manufacturing of plastics into their supply chain. There's no doubt that they've optimized their own individual cost-benefit ratios as much as possible, which involves externalizing costs as much as possible. It's not purely due to greed, which is unfortunately a super common and super facile take; rather, they have to get all their shit as efficient as possible (privately, not socially) in order to remain competitive. Capitalism forces participants in the market to be continually improving in order to remain competitive; unfortunately, offloading costs onto the environment is a great way to do this, which has absolutely disasterous effects at global scale.
Our options are 1) to change the market conditions through state regulation, but that only works at the national level. 2) We can impose tariffs to try to incentivize our overseas trade partners into changing their behavior, but they're also free to shop elsewhere where there are no such "barriers to free trade" (in addition, we'd also be incentivizing overseas governments and companies to compete with each other for who can take the most environmental waste the cheapest, which ultimately does absolutely nothing to solve the problem). 3) Instead of changing the economics from the top down, we could look to bottom up solutions (with perhaps some help from government). If companies who use unrecyclable plastics were required to clearly mark their packaging as such - say, requiring plastic bottles of Sprite to have a conspicuous red ring around the neck (obviously NOT made of unrecyclable plastic), this would impose minimal additional cost, but it would contribute to consumer awareness by introducing the public to a semiotics of environmental consequences - THIS bottle is going to end up in a landfill. It's recyclable, but it won't get recycled, because no one wants your trash. Competitors, seeing a market opportunity, would be incentivized to explore a shift to "green" packaging, distinguishing their brand as well as their individual products from the wasteful stuff. (Superficially, it looks to be the same approach as mandating cigarette packaging to show photos of lungs filled with pulmonic phlegm-cheese in order to get consumers to think twice. However, from my experience, smokers are aware of the joys of emphysema, but it's damage they're doing to themselves, so there's not really that much disgust or shame. Moreover, cigarette warnings suffer from too much abstraction: yeah, cigarettes cause cancer, but the impact of this pack is not quantifiable, and plus, I can easily displace any feeling of responsibility, because I can always quit later. Compare to the real-time insight that this bottle before me is offering ten minutes of bubbly enjoyment but will go on to hang around on our planet as absolutely useless plastic somewhere for a thousand years immediately after the consumption of its contents in one of our designated waste dumps we pretend aren't a problem growing worse alarmingly quickly … it’s much more cognitively salient when the negative consequences being signified are nearly certain, the signifier pointing to it is not an amorphous type of behavior, but an individual observable token, and the nature of the connection between the two is indexical, i.e. a physical, direct cause/effect relation between signifier and signified.
I was going to go on about Dosenpfand in Germany - the deposit you pay on cans is high to incentivize consumers to recycle them to get their deposit back, but due to the inconvenience of having to return them to the store to get it, plastic bottles of beer (kein Scheiß) have become an attractive alternative to some consumers. But I should actually be working for the man right now ….
If the rent being charged is in excess of market value, there is indisputably a surplus profit being pocketed by the owner, which thereby cancels any contribution back to society (quite the opposite, in fact, since the profit is directly off of the backs of tenants, who are typically not land / property owners).
However - even if the landlord is charging market rate, rent-seeking is still going on when the value of the property has appreciated (say, the whole neighborhood’s property values have gone up) and the owner is charging tenants in excess of what the owner is actually paying (which was negotiated at the time of purchase, when the value was lower) in order to make a profit where the owner has not contributed at least the same amount of value.
Since both of these tend to be the typical case in the landlord-tenant relationship - property value goes up, landlord accordingly raises rent in order to profit off of unearned income (which it is, at least according to US tax law), landlords are absolutely rent-seeking rent-seekers.
And while I sympathize with the plight of the retired granny and grampa landlords whose fatal flaw was trusting their no good, criminal-minded tenants too much - that does not hold a candle to the plight of the millions of working class Americans who will be sleeping in their cars because they didn’t have the foresight to become homeowners.
It gets argued again and again that the profit incentive is necessary for cutting inefficiencies, and looking at it from Kroger's perspective, this appears to be another such example. Yet this is only the case for Kroger - when considered in its full context, as a supplier of necessities for working class folks, it's the total opposite. It's the composition fallacy at work: just because companies with a profit motive evolve to cut inefficiencies wherever possible (such as by externalizing costs) does not mean that society as a whole reaps the same benefits.
Paul and Kay (1969) argue for a linguistic universal which posits that the set of which colors a language has is a function of how many colors it has. (Stealing from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_...):
1. All languages contain terms for black and white. 2. If a language contains three terms, then it contains a term for red. 3. If a language contains four terms, then it contains a term for either green or yellow (but not both). 4. If a language contains five terms, then it contains terms for both green and yellow. 5. If a language contains six terms, then it contains a term for blue. 6. If a language contains seven terms, then it contains a term for brown. 7. If a language contains eight or more terms, then it contains terms for purple, pink, orange or gray.
The opposite of the grue phenomenon exists too, i.e. languages which subdivide the "blue" part of the spectrum into separate lexemes. In Russian, for instance, goluboy = light blue, whereas siniy = blue to dark blue. This morning I was reading the Wikipedia entry for color revolution, and there's a quote from Belarusian President Lukashenko, "They [the West] think that Belarus is ready for some 'orange' or, what is a rather frightening option, 'blue' or 'cornflower blue' revolution." I had to chuckle about that - it sounds so goofy in the English translation, but that's only because we don't have a lexical distinction there. (Now I would have personally translated it to light blue, but that's another matter.)
If any of those conditions is not true, the existence of evil is a lot easier to explain: - omniscient and omnipotent, but not 100% morally good - omniscient and omnibenevolent, but has limited power to change the bad things - omipotent and omnibenevolent, but isn't aware that evil exists
It's only when someone's making the claim that all three are true at the same time that it starts to get interesting, because some of the arguments get really hokey.
So to address your observation that there's an implicit assumption that one god exists, I would wager a guess that it's because polytheistic religions don't wade into the waters of theodicy much (if at all), as they don't deal in "omni-'s" to the same extent as monotheistic religions tend to.
The author is committing the etymological fallacy here - there was nothing like Singapore (or the USA, for that matter) a mere few centuries ago, so while the history of the word may inform us, it is not sufficient alone to capture the meaning of nation.
Either nation is polysemous - a word having multiple similar distinct meanings - or its semantics has fuzzy boundaries. To answer questions like these, we are able to turn to corpus linguistic methods nowadays, whereas we used to have to rely on the intuition of native speakers. I don't think the author's narrow definition of nation would survive either of those tests.
I think it's great to read about conceptual distinctions such as the ones the author brings up, regardless of whether those concepts are lexically distinct, so I enjoyed the blog post anyway.