*NIX enthusiast, Metal Head, MUDder, ex-WoW head, and Anon radio fan.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Tiling WM that you are not sure you want to get into: Sway. It’s a great alternative to i3 IMO.

    What I use when I care to put in the effort of setting something up in great detail: Enlightenment. Some may argue that it’s not “lightweight”, but you can readily include only the bits you want, and avoid things like network config guis and system tray apps or whatever it is that you don’t want. Even when you’re using “all the things” which is not technically “lightweight” what it IS is performant. Oh, it’s also very pretty.


  • In addition to many of the fine points made in other comments I think it’s silly to overlook the power of celebrity worship and weird-ass parasocial relationships with famous people.

    There exists a large number of people who aren’t really interested in discussing <topic_x>, they just want to know what <favourite celebrity whos life I have deluded myself into thinking is attainable by me> thinks about the topic so that they can regurgitate it and feel like they’re “the same”.

    I’m sure if Chappell Roan or whatever “the kids” think is cool these days had jumped to Mastodon we’d be seeing something very different. TBH I’m mildly surprised that we didn’t see more record labels standing up instances. It’s always boggled me that people have just trusted the service desperately trying to be known as “X” as an authority on identity.




  • All of the repos for my GitHub sourced vim plugins live under one parent directory. I symlink to them from ~/.vim

    One example is a simple function that pushes the top level repo directory onto my dir stack and then runs a loop where it pushes each subdir into the stack, runs “ggpull” then pops back to the top level repo directory. ggpull is an alias added by the zsh git plugin. After all repos have been updated it pops back to my original pwd.

    I run this as part of my “update all the things” script but sometimes I also want to run it in demand from the cli. So I want this function in all scopes and I want it to have access to “ggpull” in all of those scopes.


  • It’s all about context. If you write a convenience function and put it in zshrc, scripts you run from the cli will not have access to the function as defined in zshrc. Same with aliases added by zsh plugins etc.

    If you need “the thing” on the command line, zshrc. If you also need it in scripts you run from the cli, toss it in the profile file.

    ETA: I personally keep the functions I want to access from scripts in .zshenv as I recall reading that this file is ALWAYS sourced.





  • I do greatly appreciate my management and general company tech culture, they’re great.

    I agree with your stance here, because it’s part of my point. I tend to see more people bitching about Agile itself and not management or their particular implementation.

    The jobs where I was only given enough info to plan 2 - 4 weeks out were so stressful because I frequently felt like I was guessing at which work was important or even actually relevant. Hated it.

    Turns out it’s a skill issue ;p (on the management level to be clear). Folks, don’t let your lazy managers ruin you on a system that can be perfectly fine if done right.



  • 2-3 sprints?! Y’all really flying by the seat of your pants out here huh?

    My teammates and I have no trouble planning multiple quarters in advance. If something crops up like some company wide security initiative, or an impactful bug needing fixed, etc then the related work is planned and then gets inserted ahead of some of the previously planned things and that’s fine because we’re “agile”.

    I delivered a thing at the end of Q3 when we planned to deliver at the start of Q3? Nobody is surprised because when the interruptions came leadership had to choose which things get pushed back.

    I love it. I get clear expectations set in regards to both the “when” and the “what”, and every delay/reprioritization that isn’t just someone slacking was chosen by management.




  • You’re absolutely right. For what it’s worth, it’s just the first part that’s important.

    When you pick up a new concept from a “resource” such as a tutorial, take a minute to explore the concept and understand the semantics of what you’re doing. In the name of illustrating a concept tutorials can often be misleading in subtle ways.

    An explanation of my “useless use of cat” example:

    The command line has a concept called “piping”. This lets one command send output to a second command. It’s very handy. There is usually also a “cat” command, which will read a file and send the contents where you tell it. This is often your screen, or through a “pipe” to a second command. There is also a “grep” command that lets you search data for certain words.

    Many “linux newbie” tutorials combine these tools to show how “piping” lets you send data from one command to another. “cat” some text file, then “pipe” the output to “grep” to search for your words. It usually looks something like cat ./my_address_book.txt | grep Giles to find lines in “./my_address_book.txt” that contain the word “Giles”. The thing is that “grep” can take a file name as an argument. You can just do grep Giles ./my_address_book.txt, and cat is for concatenating files into one. If you want to simply read a file there are more appropriate tools such as “less”. This by the way is the “useless use of cat”

    When you’re a newbie though, it may be the first time you’re seeing either “grep” or “cat”. The tutorial is just trying to show you “pipes”. Along the way you’re picking up these “bad habits”. I’ve met professional sysadmins who didn’t know grep took a filename as an argument. It was always “cat blah | grep my_search”. I will see people type “cat /some/file | less” instead of “less /some/file”. It shows a lack of understanding of what these tools actually do, and IMO it just comes down to regurgitating tutorial actions without bothering to understand the semantics of what you’re being shown.


  • Don’t follow tutorials, understand them. I’m so tired of seeing useless uses of cat because some asshole writing a tutorial 20 years ago decided to illustrate how pipes work with a good ol cat file | grep string as if grep didn’t take a file name as an argument.

    The more time I spend being mad about this the more I notice people using horrible practices in tutorials because they’re too lazy to setup a legit use case.

    A new user sees this and thinks this is how grep works.

    Loops are another common one. People going around not knowing you can pass a glob to a shell for loop. Because the tutorial they read was lazily written and they didn’t bother to understand the bits of what they were being shown, only how to reproduce/mangle the command until they manage to get close enough to what they want out of it.