Some middle-aged guy on the Internet. Seen a lot of it, occasionally regurgitates it, trying to be amusing and informative.

Lurked Digg until v4. Commented on Reddit (same username) until it went full Musk.

Was on kbin.social but created this profile on kbin.run during the first week-long outage.

Other Adjectives: Neurodivergent; Nerd; Broken; British; Ally; Leftish

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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2024

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  • Haven’t seen this in the other comments: Coolness factor. If you’re a successfully popular teacher, i.e. “cool”, then your students will likely want to participate in whatever it is you suggest.

    However, if they don’t see you as cool, you might have difficulty, and might even put them off the platform. This is not something that can be fixed easily, and trying to be cool is about as uncool as you can get.

    (Making it mandatory will work, of course, but how you go about that could determine whether they choose to stay on the platform once you’re done. This was kind of covered by OP talking about Matrix in another comment here.)



  • Coming back to this with thoughts. What you’re describing sounds a lot like a menu tree.

    “Press 1 to do this, 2 to do that, 3 to go to submenu A, 4 for B,” etc. 1

    “You have pressed 1. Do you want to turn on option ABC? [Y / n]” Y

    “Do you want option QWERTY47? [Y/n]” N

    “Are you sure you want to run notthebees --abc --no-qwerty47? [Y/n]” N

    “Aborted.”

    It sounds like a standards problem waiting to happen because no two menus will be alike, but hey, things like this can and do exist, and setting one up isn’t that hard, only time consuming.


  • Win7. I use LMDE+Cinnamon now and I have it looking suspiciously like how I had Win7. Old habits and all that.

    Though you didn’t ask, Win2K was the probably the best Windows, IMO. Then came the bloat and the ugly UIs. (I’ve kind of got used to bloat these days. Storage is cheaper than it was, and LMDE isn’t exactly the slimmest distro.)

    Maybe I would have liked Win10. Similar to how it was with the old Star Trek movies, it seems like every other version of Windows is terrible, and if that remains true, maybe 12 will be better than 11. Probably not going back to find out though.


  • So I decided to go peek at the ragecomic subreddit. Yes, the very one-time ragecomic home-from-home outside of 4chan. Last post 17 days ago, using at least two “extinct” faces, got 600 upvotes.

    It’s complaining that there are no good tools to make ragecomics any more. (I have not checked to see if that’s true.)

    Y’know, I feel like they should stay there. Anything that’ll mess up an AI should stay on that site for as long as humanly possible. smilingthumbsuprageface.jaypeg


  • xterm is a terminal emulator, not a shell. Anything that produces a terminal-compatible text stream can be started as the first program.

    e.g. xterm -e nano, assuming you have the nano editor installed, has no instance of a traditional shell (e.g. bash, zsh) running between the xterm and the editor, but the editor still works.

    You could argue that makes the editor itself a shell of sorts, because it’s interactive and you can do things with it, but it’s still not the xterm that inherits that title.


  • You might have some files hard-linked across directories, or worse (but less likely), there’s a directory hard-link (not supposed to happen) somewhere.

    For the uninitiated, a hard-link is when more than one filename points at the same file data on the disk. This is not the same as a symbolic link. Symbolic links are special files that contain a file or directory name and the OS knows to follow them to that destination. (And they can be used to link to directories safely.)

    Some programs are not hard-link aware and will count a hard-linked file as many times as it sees it through its different names. Likewise they will count the entire contents of a hard-linked directory through each name.

    Programs tend not to be fooled by symlinks because it’s more obvious what’s going on.

    Try running a duplicate file finder. Don’t use it to delete anything, but it might help you determine which directories the files are in and maybe why it’s like that.

    Also back up everything important and arrange for a fsck on next boot. If it’s a hard-linked directory fsck might be able to fix it safely, but it might choose the wrong name to be the main one and remove the other, breaking something. Or remove both. Or it’s something else entirely, which by “fixing” will stabilise the system but might cause some other form data loss.

    That’s all unlikely, but it’s nice to have that backup just in case.


  • palordrolap@kbin.runtoScience Memes@mander.xyzLike a prion
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    5 months ago

    “If you took all the DNA out of a person and laid it end to end, that person would die.”

    The distance to Jupiter from Earth is but a mere blip though. Even the galaxy is small compared to what’s beyond.

    Thanks to chaos theory, what we do here can have some effect on the far future of the Universe, at least, for those places within causal reach. How meaningful that effect can be remains to be seen.

    But do bear in mind that even, say, a cow farting in a field in France last Tuesday might have as much effect as everything you ever do.


  • This whole saga reminds me of the time I somehow ended up with Windows 9x’s “Recent Documents” feature pointed at the root of a drive, so when I pushed the button to “clear recent documents” it dutifully started deleting all the files on the drive.

    At the time, the “Recent Documents” feature created shortcuts to, as you might guess, recently opened documents and put them in a user folder specifically for that purpose. Clearing them was only supposed to remove the shortcuts.

    Or perhaps more relevantly, that one Steam bash script that could delete things it shouldn’t under some very rare circumstances.


  • There are probably pre-written awk scripts out there that already do what you want, not that I know where they’d be.

    That said, you might be better off using one of the bigger but still fairly commonly installed languages. There’s bound to be things on PyPI (for Python) or CPAN (for Perl) that could be bolted together for example.

    If you’re really lucky there might even be something that covers your whole use-case, but I haven’t checked.



  • ^S for unprompted save is in the default keybinds, not that I could say when it was added. (Pretty sure it wasn’t a pico thing, but that leaves quite a bit of time unaccounted for.)

    Muscle memory for other editors kicked in when I was editing something and did a literal slow realisation and double-take when it worked.

    Now if only I could stop pressing ^W in Firefox to use nano’s “whereis” to find something that’d be great.

    For those unaware, it closes the current tab. Or the whole browser. Ugh.