“…and there are no comments, because it’s Self Documenting™”

Modern bots are bad, but the old school IRC (maybe early Battle.net?) bots… I’m cool making an exception for them if you are.

*flea

You’re just gatekeeping.

ThinkPad with a generator? Nothing wrong with that — maybe add LoRa, get a ham license and add some packet radio or digital modes and you have a neat disaster setup.

MacBook that you don’t want to scuff? Well, I’m not that precious with my gear, but you do you. Many Mac laptops last a very long time, and the performance of modern Apple silicon is really, really impressive — and you have UNIX out of the box. Plenty for a tech enthusiast to like.

It’s not all bad — remote work policy is now a major topic. You’d be laughed out of any number of job interviews for asking about remote work policy, whereas now it’s a completely fair question.

Our first was a girl. Second was a boy. Third will be a vasectomy.

Pretty sure that’s completely acceptable in parts of northern California (source: born and raised in northern California).

Jobs created toxic work environments.

…and so did Linus Torvalds* — he’s certainly not the embodiment of capitalism. But I absolutely have a huge amount of respect for Torvalds, even if I don’t approve of his way of interpersonal/professional style.

(I used to run Arch btw [but I run Debian now].)

*He’s supposedly taken steps in the right direction here and has made improvements.

I can only remember this because I initially didn’t learn about xargs — so any time I need to loop over something I tend to use for var in $(cmd) instead of cmd | xargs. It’s more verbose but somewhat more flexible IMHO.

So I run loops a lot on the command line, not just in shell scripts.

How do you make a small fortune?

Start with a large fortune and buy a boat.

If it’s a campus bus it’s almost certainly free, and probably timed to class schedules. If you only have 10m or so between classes it makes sense.

Wait til you see fetal MRIs…

Newer macOS is not Unix certified.

It’s UNIX 03 compliant https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_UNIX_Specification

One or two Linux distros were (are?) UNIX certified, though.

Indeed, the 1st and 3rd worst offenders for plastic per capita are administrative regions of China (Macau and Hong Kong) https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/plastic-pollution-by-country

There’s a bulk food store near me and it allows BYO containers (or you can use one of their compostable bags). It’s great! A little bit more work (you need to tare your/container write down the empty weight), but you get your goods in the container of your choice.

You can ride your bike on many highways in the USA at least. Generally you cannot on the freeway, but there are some exceptions — in California there are requirements about bike accessibility which means that certain segments of a freeway may be bike accessible.

If you live far from a store then groceries are a problem unless you use a trailer, but if you live in a city it’s totally reasonable to use a bike (or walk) for your weekly groceries.

And you can get a new Trek FX for under $600, and that’s just from a quick search. Yes of you want Ultegra or better and a carbon frame, the sky is the limit.

I think mplayer has an ASCII output mode (VLC, too?), and I believe youtube-dl can output to stdout.

The rest is, as they say, left as an exercise to the reader.

Haha yeah that was the counter example I was thinking of. I agree completely — you could make a Gentoo from source beginner distro, and I think you could make it reasonably “idiot proof,” but it would still be a bad user experience most likely (too much time spent compiling).

If your distro can’t be forked into a “beginner distro” then it’s fundamentally flawed IMHO.

To be clear, I’ve used Arch as my daily drivers for a while, and while it’s not the best fit for my needs (I use Debian mostly), there’s nothing that I experienced that was incompatible with a “beginner” distro.