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racer-von People who are less willing to apologize also tend to be less self-compassionate

You can't change the past, but you can make the future a better place, so I'll make the decision of whether to apologize based on the future.

racer-von The outdoor community made water filtration a must for a reason

Some "old ways" are healthier and some are less healthy. They have to be evaluated individually. Saying across the board, as you are, that pre-industrial lifestyles were universally less healthy in every way, is just as false as saying the opposite.

racer-von Disabling ANSI color output

Fair enough; since GREP_OPTIONS seems only useful for interactive sessions, perhaps non-interactive shells should purge it from the environment (e.g. with BASH_ENV).

It would be great if grep could figure out whether its parent process is an interactive shell or a script, but there doesn't seem to be a reliable way to do that.

racer-von Disabling ANSI color output

I like your solution further down in the Rust pull request:

programs like make could collect output using a pty rather than a pipe or temp file

This seems brilliant. The pipe mechanism is too dumb to differentiate between these cases - Unix needs a smarter pipe, and pty could be it. Maybe there could be another character in the shell for a pipe that's really a pty like '_', or a digraph like '|p'.

racer-von Disabling ANSI color output

Does that part of the build system then need to explicitly unset CLICOLOR_FORCE and MAKE_TERMOUT

Yes, it should be the responsibility of the build system to control the environment variables set during the build.

What would happen if a build system set one of those, and then somewhere deep in the build system (or even in a shell script called from the build system), someone ran grep in a pipeline

The person adding the 'grep' would need to be aware of whether the build system is using color output or not.

This is also part of why programs like grep are removing environment variables like GREP_OPTIONS: they break scripts.

This seems unfortunate; scripts could just unset GREP_OPTIONS if they care.

racer-von The outdoor community made water filtration a must for a reason

That's why I use exercise as a counter-example to the GP for mocking people who "wish to live in the past" and "live the way many of our ancestors did." Compared with today, the lifestyles of our ancestors had both advantages and disadvantages; one advantage was that adequate exercise came pretty much automatically.

racer-von People who are less willing to apologize also tend to be less self-compassionate

Who benefits when you try to force an unwanted apology on someone who doesn't want to be contacted by you? Consider whether you're just trying to assuage your own guilty conscience at the further expense of the victim.

racer-von The outdoor community made water filtration a must for a reason

I notice a lot more of what I'd call the "fallacy of progress" - the idea that because humans did more of something in the past, it must be outmoded and not worth doing. Exercise and fresh air are still good for you, even though cavemen had much easier access to them than modern urbanites.

racer-von The outdoor community made water filtration a must for a reason

Also, I'm not sure what you mean by the term "natural fallacy". I don't think it's the "naturalistic fallacy" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy - it sounds more like simple nostalgia. Just because people like some things about the past doesn't mean they want to literally return to the past.

racer-von The outdoor community made water filtration a must for a reason

The mentioned article https://slate.com/technology/2018/02/filtering-stream-water-... - is typical muckraking journalism. The original Slate author is trying to create a scandal out of the idea that outdoor gear makers are deceiving you in order to sell junk you don't need.

He then throws in salacious and irrelevant intimations about race and class ("Because the outdoor recreation community is far whiter, wealthier, and better educated than the U.S. population at large, it’s an interesting case study in how misinformation propagates through privileged communities.")

It's clickbait, exactly the sort of garbage published on the front page of every newsprint weekly - taxi drivers without medallions: scandalous! Boat owners profit from people fishing: another scandal! The real scandal is how any of this passes as journalism.

racer-von People who are less willing to apologize also tend to be less self-compassionate

You'll probably live a longer, happier life, and do more good for others in the world, if you have compassion for yourself.

racer-von People who are less willing to apologize also tend to be less self-compassionate

One of the first phrases I try to learn when visiting a foreign country is how to apologize for bumping somone, or ask someone to move aside. "Excuse me" in English, "entschuldigen" in German, "jièguāng" in Mandarin. It's so much less awkward being when you can communicate with words. Is there a phrase you would use for this in Norwegian, or would you just clear your throat and tap your foot?

racer-von People who are less willing to apologize also tend to be less self-compassionate

I agree that not every person who can't or won't accept your apology is toxic. My advice is: when a person you don't know well claims to have been offended by you, look for signs that the person just wants a fight. If that's the case, try to remove yourself before any more damage happens.

It's natural to want to apologize if you think you've hurt someone's feelings. Just be aware that some people are addicted to creating drama, and that may have nothing to do with you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karpman_drama_triangle

racer-von People who are less willing to apologize also tend to be less self-compassionate

By "toxic" I mean someone who essentially sees social situations as a way to play out their inner sadistic tendencies - for example by passive-aggressively seeking conflicts so they can play the victim, or constantly looking for "enemies" and trying to ruin their reputations. A person who has unresolved inner conflict or trauma which they try to rectify (or distract themselves from) by projecting issues onto others.

racer-von People who are less willing to apologize also tend to be less self-compassionate

It's also crucial to consider the motivations of the person you're apologizing to. If that person is interested in moving forward and (re)building the relationship, do it. But if the "offended" party is still resentful, they may use your apology as an "admission of guilt" and try to twist your words against you.

Moral: don't apologize to a truly toxic person - instead remove them from your life immediately.

racer-von Stealing from Self-Checkouts

There's one thing that prevents me from using self-checkouts: they have an annoying synthesized voice that says things like "place your items in the bag" or "please insert cash". I'm opposed on principle to voice interfaces that can't be muted, and machines telling me what to do. So far my best experience was with a checkout that let me change the language, so at least I couldn't understand it.

racer-von Why Create a New Unix Shell?

Doing what wrong?

racer-von SF tourist industry struggles to explain street misery to horrified visitors

If you're convinced that you should be making everyone work instead of subsidizing their existence (which is much cheaper), you need to bring jobs outside of the city. Telling everyone to just live in San Francisco doesn't scale.

racer-von Why Create a New Unix Shell?

Ah right you are, thanks - I remember learning Python and switching to Gentoo about the same time, but as David Hume warned us, it's hard to infer causality from proximity.

racer-von Why Create a New Unix Shell?

I've been hearing about Emacs X Window Manager but haven't given it a shot yet https://github.com/ch11ng/exwm

racer-von Why Create a New Unix Shell?

It's actually not that difficult to maintain context if you use completely different shells (with different-looking prompts) on your own machine vs the fleet. It's like code-switching when you talk to your friends at the bar vs co-workers.

racer-von Why Create a New Unix Shell?

Anything that supports pipes and signals, and is easy to install. I've started using Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL) because it's the default implementation used with the Roswell installer.

https://github.com/roswell/roswell

(As a side-note: Perl 5 was really the ideal language for this, by design; we might be in a different world today if it hadn't been derailed by Perl Forever^W 6).

racer-von Why Create a New Unix Shell?

Gentoo is basically this. I learned Python by writing .ebuilds (their package format is a short Python script that downloads and builds whatever software you're installing).

racer-von Why Create a New Unix Shell?

> I quite seriously believe that a 1000 line shell script only exists out of error.

Perhaps the best use case for Oil is to provide a debugging environment where you can figure out what your legacy shell scripts are doing, and rewrite them in another language.

> Unlearning bash-isms is not a liberty I can afford, as I need to be proficient when I SSH into a machine I do not own or control.

This is a slippery slope. I have heard things like, "don't make your own custom aliases / shell functions, because they won't be available when you SSH to another machine." Forcing yourself to always use the lowest common denominator of software is not a fun path.

racer-von SF tourist industry struggles to explain street misery to horrified visitors

I'm addressing comments that the solution has to be housing in San Francisco itself, rather than outside the city, such as:

> Only housing near economic opportunity means anything.

racer-von SF tourist industry struggles to explain street misery to horrified visitors

You're making it sound like this is some difficult research problem. The answer to homelesness is simple: give them homes. Give them food. Give them money. This is how it works in every industrial society that's solved the problem.

Your error is that you're obsessed with trying to fix this within a market economy, by specifically housing them in areas of high economic activity where they can supposedly find "opportunity". That won't work and is counterproductive.

racer-von SF tourist industry struggles to explain street misery to horrified visitors

My meaning was outside the capitalist system of exchanging services for goods. Many, many people need goods and have no meaningful services to exchange. The idea that we need to cram all of these people in the most dense and expensive centers of capitalist activity is ludicrous and harmful.

racer-von SF tourist industry struggles to explain street misery to horrified visitors

The natural tendency of a competitive (capitalist) economy is to exclude a subset of people. The "economy" is the cause of homelessness, not the solution. The solution has to come from outside the economy.

racer-von SF tourist industry struggles to explain street misery to horrified visitors

You remind me of someone who thinks he can fix a mouse problem in just one room of the house, without paying attention to the other, connected rooms. "I'm only worried about mice which are currently in the bedroom - thinking about the entire house is too much."

racer-von SF tourist industry struggles to explain street misery to horrified visitors

It sounds like you haven't really gotten to know many homeless people. If you did, you'd realize that what they typically need is not a job but something more like basic income - food and shelter, which can be more easily provided in a place that's not the most expensive city in America.