• 4 Posts
  • 94 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 14th, 2023

help-circle


  • That’s a good example. If I’m regularly running a command that is a single whitespace character away from disaster, that’s a problem.

    Imagine a fighter aircraft that had an eject button on the side of the flight stick. The pilot complains “I’m afraid I might accidentally hit the eject button when I don’t need to”, but everyone responds “why would you push the eject button if you don’t want to eject?”, or “so your concern is that the eject button will cause you to eject…?” – That’s how I feel right now.


  • Just checked my command history and I’ve run 60,000 commands on this computer without problem (and I have other computers). I guess people have different ideas of what “comfortable” means, but I think I consider myself comfortable with the command line.

    I have shot myself in the foot with rm -rf in the past though, and screwed up my computer so bad the easiest solution was to reinstall the OS from scratch. My important files are backed up, including most of my dotfiles, but being a bit too quick to type and run a rm -rf command has caused me needless hours of work in the past.

    I realized the main reason I have to use rm -rf is to remove git repos and so I thought I’d ask if anyone has a tip to avoid it. And I’ve found some good suggestions among the least upvoted comments.


  • That’s a good suggestion for some, but I’m quite comfortable with the command line.

    It’s not that I’m irrationally scared of rm -rf. I know what that command will do. If I slow down an pay attention it’s not as though I’m worried “I hope this doesn’t break my system”.

    What I really mean is I see myself becoming quite comfortable typing rm -rf and running it with little thought, I use it often to delete git repos, and my frequent use and level of comfort with this command doesn’t match the level of danger it brings.

    Just moving them to /tmp is a nice suggestion that can work on anywhere without special programs or scripts.




  • It helps make things more self-contained. If a Linux distribution comes with an LLM that knows how to use and tweak the OS and also knows a lot about various programming languages and lots of things in general, that’s a big step towards having an OS that can be operated locally without using the internet.

    I wouldn’t like it if Linux required an internet connection to function, and yet… I’ve never been able to configure or do much of anything in Linux without referring to the internet.











  • Yeah, parents are getting ruined by social media algorithms too.

    Our government seems to be moving towards an “we only care about the children, but everyone, including adults, upload your government papers” approach.

    Y’all got any of those protections for adults? I remember reading regulations that companies couldn’t show children advertisements. Can I have some of that regulation too?

    I just can’t stop being cynical that there is little focus on homeless or underpaid adults, or other adult issues, but the one problem we’re focused on just so happens to include everyone giving up anonymity on the Internet.

    We do need to help kids with social media, but there’s a lot of other challenges they will soon face as adults that we’re ignoring.




  • It’s been a couple decades since I worked in a call center (tech support).

    Are they still dominated by shitty ticketing systems that employees are expected to fill out while being on the call? I don’t know if that was just an oddity of the call center I worked for or not. If I didn’t fill out a ticket correctly we wouldn’t get paid for the tech support, so management would get real upset if you didn’t fill out a ticket correctly. There were like 400 fields to fill out in a ticket and you had to fill out about 15 of them just right; fill out one too many, or one too few, or the wrong one and management is upset.

    Honestly, language models would do better filling out those tickets than they would handling the call. If an AI can’t fill out the ticket, how can it solve an actual problem? It would sure make life for the call center employees better if all they had to do was talk instead of managing a bunch of tickets and paperwork using shitty internal apps. But who am I kidding. They’ll probably find a way to make life worse for the customers and the call center employees and they’ll make a profit, because that’s how free markets work, right? Whoever makes life worse for everyone prospers.