“Hallelujah” is a song about sex — but it’s not dirty sex, it’s holy sex.

Ward Cunningham, creator of Calvin & Hobbes?

But if someone creates a file called HEAD, should it overwrite a file called head?

That shouldn’t matter to the “nontechnical” end-user at all. To the nontechnical user, even the abstraction of “creating a file” has largely gone away. You create a document, and changes you make to it are automatically persisted to storage, either local or cloud.

Only the technical command-line user cares about whether /usr/bin/HEAD and /usr/bin/head are the same path. And only in a specific circumstance — such as the early days of Mac OS X, where the Macintosh and Unix cultures collided — could the bug that I described emerge.

I recall a case-insensitivity bug from the early days of Mac OS X.

There are three command-line utilities that are distributed as part of the Perl HTTP library: GET, HEAD, and POST. These are for performing the HTTP operations of those names from the command line.

But there’s also a POSIX-standard utility for extracting the first few lines of a text file. It’s called head.

I think you see where I’m going with this. HEAD and head are the same name in a case-insensitive filesystem such as the classic Mac filesystem. They are different names on a Unix-style filesystem.

Installing /usr/bin/HEAD from libwww-perl onto a Mac with the classic filesystem overwrote /usr/bin/head and broke various things.

England has a surfeit of terms for obnoxious people.

• Jobsworth (obstructive clerk or bureaucrat)
• God-botherer (religious fanatic)
• Cockwomble
• Minging cockwomble
• Tremulous bollock-for-lobsters cockwomble
• Sir Æthelbert Plonker Cockwomble of the Drubbing-over-Head Cockwombles

I may have made those last two up.

Lichess may be the best board game software for any board game ever. It’s that good.

Eight: English, German, French, Spanish, Latin, Russian, Japanese, ASL.

Bonus question: do you ever do your counting in a non-native language, just to make it more interesting?

Russian occasionally. ASL when I’m counting how many seconds the cat has to stay quiet before I give her a treat.

Split Colemak on an Iris keyboard.

Famously, The Lion King is Hamlet with a happy ending, for example. Any other ones you’re thinking of?

To be clear, network costs represent a tiny fraction of WMF’s expenses. Much of WMF’s budget goes to social programs, not technical upkeep.

anarchocristianism

To me this means Dorothy Day or Tolstoy. What does it mean to you?

For a start, look at the history of major companies traded in the first stock markets, such as the Dutch East India Company (VOC), the British East India Company (EIC), the Hudson’s Bay Company, etc. These were colonial ventures, but they raised money through the sale of shares traded publicly.

However, they were not subject to competition in the market, as they enjoyed legal monopolies and used military force. They also frequently employed slave labor.

Too many American right-wingers use “freedom” to mean “I get to impose costs on you; you don’t get to impose costs on me.” It’s not equality; it’s strictly positional. Look at the association of “freedom” with shitty driving for a little example: “I get to threaten you on the highway, pollute your air, tear up the land with my off-roading … but taxing my gasoline is on offense to the Founders.”

Thing is, the economists are right about free markets being a good idea; and free markets depend on a certain kind of regulation to exist. The trouble with capitalism is that it’s never been a reliable ally of freedom of any sort; going back to the origins of capitalism in the private funding of colonial slaver monopolies. The association of capitalism with free markets is largely propaganda; capitalism started with colonial slaver monopolies like the VOC; to a first approximation every firm wants to be a monopoly, and a great way of doing that is political corruption; see today’s USA.

But there’s a reason every government since ever — from empires to democracies — has done things like standardize weights & measures, build public goods like roads to enable trade, and establish courts of law to enforce contracts and fair dealing. Those things are really good ideas! And I’m not sure I can credit the left-anarchist proposals to replace them any more than I can credit the anarcho-capitalist ones.

Mutualism sure has some nice ideas though.

I use an Iris split keyboard from keeb.io. it’s comfy. Actually I have two of them; the heavy clicky custom one with steel plates stays home; the light quiet one is for travel.

I drifted slowly from right-libertarian to a more leftish position: pro-union, pro-social-programs, skeptical of the compatibility of unregulated capitalism with individual freedom. Still no fan of tankies.

This wasn’t from anyone sitting down and trying to convince me, though. Part of it was discovering how close right-libertarianism had always been to white-supremacism: some old Ron Paul newsletters were unpleasantly enlightening. Part was seeing people who called themselves “libertarians” line up with the far right to support state violence, especially against black and brown people. And heck, part was from getting richer and seeing how that worked.

I have a lot of sympathy for the frustrations that get young men into right-wing positions and occasionally I try to puncture some of the nonsense they’re being fed.

This goes back to the days of AOL chat rooms, where they shut down forums for breast cancer survivors because they said “breast”.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/1995/12/02/america-online-admits-error-in-banning-word-breast/

Woo hoo!

The 45 RPM adapter is this already, between generations.

Fascists lie.