dasyatidprime

Did you forget the link?

And if it wasn't printed that fine in the first place, then you have a different problem.

Tangentially: I use a variation on this, but I do it as a custom keyboard layout system-wide. From a US keyboard, I rotate () → [] → {} in that order (associated character → new position), based originally on frequency analysis of X captures of my keystrokes from a decade or two ago. Nowadays I also swap ` over to F9 and rebind the ` key to Compose (leaving ~ alone), since I use it a great deal for extended punctuation.

> there won't be anyone machine learning on your expense records (apart from google looking at a generic spreadsheet).

… how is this not “anyone machine learning on your expense records” again? Does Google specifically forbid themselves that, and I didn't notice? Piercing the veil of “generic” is one of the main things classification ML does, yes?

Tab as the prefix for command lines is a property of all Makefile formats I'm aware of (though not of many other build script formats). Make itself (including GNU Make) does not generally use M4, though both Autoconf and Automake use it, often in conjunction with Make, as part of the Autotools suite which is also published by GNU.

So, none of the above, in itself. It is a historical anomaly which has been preserved.

The form I usually use is (cd TARGET && COMMAND), including the parentheses to make it a subshell. That seems close enough to not be worth adding features to something as simple as cd, given the basic shell philosophy of composability.

This can get you flamed, and in a way rightfully so, because you just made the author do more work for seemingly no reason. If no one else regularly has a problem integrating, being That One Person https://xkcd.com/1782/ is a great way to declare that you're hard to work with.

Then you find that GitHub forbids multiple identity contexts for free accounts in their terms of service ("One person or legal entity may maintain no more than one free account"), so if multiple people want you to do things on GitHub but you don't want to mix the activities together, your options are to pay for a monthly subscription (possibly forever) or break the rules and hope your ability to continue participating doesn't suddenly get taken away if they catch you.

Centralization of interaction by type creates social paradoxes like this.

The latter half of that is true, isn't it? And yet.

This is why you can't treat that type of statement as purely factual: so long as you're sharing a world with it, it's of a quine-like type which is always performative to speak, in a way, because how much people believe it on various levels (and thereby decide (or unconsciously "decide") things like "why should I bother to connect to these people when they won't even sign up for a free Facebook account to make it easier for me, since everyone knows that's just what you do") influences how true it is in a much stronger way than is the case for most objective statements.

In light of that, I wonder whether my having said the above is good or bad? Hard to tell.

Facebook can stay dominant longer than you can survive in isolation.

I've been tentatively calling the former FDO/Linux or XDG/Linux, FWIW.

I mostly agree with that, yes, though I worry about message saturation too early on. Currently there's very little many users can do about it. If they have the idea shoved into their faces too many times while that's true, will they keep the information around and be more willing to change habits later if that will help, or will the shock just get muted to a dull roar so that they get used to it? Or will they decide to believe that this is okay in order to avoid the current-day social consequences of trying to act according to the opposite?

I think there's a big difference between being arrested and being considered to be acting rude. There's also a big difference between pointing out a security flaw and continuing to actively exploit it. That's why I said I think it's fine as a code example, and I think it's fine to raise awareness. Just be careful about keeping this around in your main browser while you're chatting with many people; you might be risking trust if they find out.

Well, firstly, because they are not in a similar position to yours with regard to this fact unless they are of a similar attitude and skill for promoting these transmissions to human-side visibility. (If you know that they do have the same attitude as the one you expressed, then the "you know they're okay with it" exception applies.) There are a lot of things people "broadcast" in the physical world which are socially expected to be politely ignored as well.

Put another way, your statement makes perfect sense if you assume all software is actually a User-Agent in the traditional, ideal sense. But this isn't so, because even programmers don't generally have the spare cycles to rewrite everything they come in contact with, and non-programmers have an even more vanishingly small chance to do anything about it. Agency in the digital world is inevitably shaped by other people's decisions as represented in software, and social agency is shaped by how that software presents itself not just to you but to the people you're communicating with through it. When the state of the software doesn't exactly match the state as visible to the participants, the latter state prevails in a social context, and it's the responsibility of a polite conversation partner to not mess around behind the curtain unless you already know you're welcome.

So, as a code example, fine---but I'd caution against actually using this with your friends unless you know they're okay with it. They will be acting under certain social expectations with regard to when and how people can see their typing notifications based on when and how they were able to see them before, and if you tweak your way into getting more access without your conversation partners knowing it beforehand, you're at least being sneaky, and possibly creepy or rude depending on the attitudes of your circle. The flow of the machine transmissions doesn't currently constitute something visible enough to hang social norms off of, so be careful not to treat it as the anchor for them by mistake. (This applies to other implementations of similar things, as well, such as "Psychic Mode" for Pidgin.)

Emacs users have used regexp-opt in their own syntax highlighting (aka font-lock) for a while now, at least. If you wanted to port it, it'd depend on whether you're okay with the license, presumably, though I don't think writing a simple version from scratch would be that hard. (Do not let your eyes jump to the source block in the manual and then assume that it's not what you asked: that example is specifically described as the inefficient equivalent.) http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Reg...

Except when you can't.

Landlords very often just won't take you on at all if you don't show evidence of preëxisting stability. No proof of stable income? No housing—you can even offer to pay up-front or whatever, and they just won't bother dealing with you as a special case, because why would they deal with the special case when there's a dozen other safe, predictable, normal people in line behind you?

Got an income, but can't prove it to be consistently enough? Congratulations, no housing for you. And thus begins the downward spiral.

I more or less agree with both of your sentiments. I also suspect that if you can get anywhere near the tinkerer's market first, it becomes that much more likely that you can get another foothold, and that much more likely that the next thing to draw further interest will come from somewhere you can take advantage of.

I think ey probably meant “finding illegal content on the parts of the platter you haven't touched yet”.

Both are plausible for humans as well, I would say (in a more general sense). Certainly mistake spirals from not quite knowing how to deal with the consequences of the first mistake have happened to me personally, and I recall descriptions of people in poverty having to play more aggressively to get a shot at the part of civilization they want to be in, though unfortunately I don't have a source.

Which Robert Pirsig quotes did you mean again? That link seems to be for this article itself.

They do allow you to provide Sieve scripts as text, but you do have to use the Web interface to upload them, under Advanced → Rules, so changes aren't readily automatable AFAIK. Unfortunately, I don't remember exactly where the enable button is for people who aren't using it already, since I'm already using it.

C2Wiki has some discussion of a related phenomenon of asymmetrical decision-making: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LeastFlexibleProtocolWins

The surrounding cluster of pages there may also be useful for people curious about this topic.

"buffalo" can mean something like "bother" as an English verb (at least in American informal use), so the whole sentence as parsed in English does have a concrete mental image associated with it, in case that makes any difference.