Hey, I’m sorry that “Jesus Christ” as an expletive feels alienating to you. I hadn’t thought about that perspective. As a lifelong atheist my feeling is that Christianity, and by extension blasphemous expletives, are so thoroughly enmeshed in Western culture that that’s what comes out when I’m startled. I don’t feel like I’m using the words to show distaste for another group; I feel like the words are part of my culture even though I’m not religious. My guess is that saying"Jesus Christ" is generally not intended to be a statement on Christians. But I can see how someone who is religious might see it differently. I suppose lots of people see their relationship with Jesus as a part of their identity that distinguishes them from people who don’t believe, and from that perspective I can see how a perceived attack on Jesus feels like a personal attack.

I’ll also mention that since I didn’t have a religious upbringing I was never taught to have any particular reaction to blasphemy, which tends to make me see those expletives as less-offensive alternatives to scatological or sexual expletives. I don’t have a good perspective of what such language feels like to someone who was taught that blasphemy is bad.

And why not add one more paragraph - I agree that when I view him as a moral philosopher and proto-socialist I find a lot of what Jesus said and did to be admirable.

One of favorites cds to the root of a project directory from a subdirectory,

# Changes to top-level directory of git repository.
alias gtop="cd \$(git rev-parse --show-toplevel)"

That’s a helpful one! I also add a function that creates a tmp directory, and cds to it which I frequently use to open a scratch space. I use it a lot for unpacking tar files, but for other stuff too.

(These are nushell functions)

# Create a directory, and immediately cd into it.
# The --env flag propagates the PWD environment variable to the caller, which is
# necessary to make the directory change stick.
def --env dir [dirname: string] {
  mkdir $dirname
  cd $dirname
}

# Create a temporary directory, and cd into it.
def --env tmp [
  dirname?: string # the name of the directory - if omitted the directory is named randomly
] {
  if ($dirname != null) {
    dir $"/tmp/($dirname)"
  } else {
    cd (mktemp -d)
  }
}

Fair enough - although I interpreted it as a flag like at the end of a sed match-and-replace command. Or I guess a closing HTML tag would make sense.

Why is Laforge in charge of the cargo bay? He’s a busy guy!

Since traditional tiling window management hasn’t caught your interest you might check out Niri, which is a scrolling tiling wm. The differences are that windows always stay the size you set them to, remain in the relative layout you put them in, and you don’t fiddle with layout switching. Niri is also especially mouse- and touchpad-friendly. It’s great for pure keyboard use too - you have both options to suit your preference & mood.

I mention Niri despite it not being what you asked for because it checks all the boxes you listed (apart from stacking), and it’s amazing! https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri

I suppose this video essay is relevant: Actually, Star Trek Has Always Been Horny

There’s also the death slugs in The Expanse

It looks like the setting is max_parallel_downloads in /etc/dnf/dnf.conf. Here’s a post on how to increase it - so do the opposite, and set it to 1.

There’s a relevant episode if you don’t mind DS9 spoilers:

I don’t think the Pegasus plan involves all levels of Federation leadership. I think it’s a conspiracy that, although it does include at least one of the highest-ranking Starfleet officers, doesn’t go all the way to the top. From the transcript:

PRESSMAN: It’s not just me, Will. The Chief of Starfleet Security has personally given me her assurance of complete support.

RIKER: Admiral Raner? How many other people know about this?

PRESSMAN: Not many, and it’s up to us to make sure it stays that way. Raner has given me written orders for you.

Pressman says that a small number of people are involved. He doesn’t mention the Federation president or any Federation officials outside of Starfleet (remember that Starfleet is the military-ish arm of the Federation, it’s not the whole organization.) He only mentions one Starfleet officer.

Pressman emphasizes that it’s important to keep the secret from getting out. Of course that’s partly because he doesn’t want the Romulans finding out. But I think it’s mainly that the conspirators don’t want to be held to account for unauthorized actions.

Later in the episode Pressman tells Picard, “the Chief of Starfleet Intelligence herself is watching this one”. I think it’s possible that Chief of Security and Chief of Intelligence are titles used interchangeably for the same office. Or it could be a second officer involved in the conspiracy.

There’s also this conversation:

PICARD: You know, it wasn’t easy to get this record. I had to pull in quite a few favours at Starfleet just to get a look at it. It seems that it was classified by Starfleet Intelligence.

[…]

PICARD: The Judge Advocate also believes that the surviving officers are deliberately withholding vital information from this inquiry. Further investigation is recommended. Will, there was no further investigation. This report was classified and then it was quietly buried. Why?

RIKER: Sir, may I suggest you take this up with Admiral

PICARD: I’m taking this up with you, Will! The Judge Advocate thought you were participating in a conspiracy to cover up the truth. Now, what the hell is going on here, Will?

The judge advocate on the case is not in on the secret. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t go higher, but the conversation does imply that whoever was involved had limited authority to, say, prevent that inquiry in the first place, or to instruct the judge advocate to avoid sensitive topics.

Someone did have the authority to classify and bury the report. Maybe that’s something the Chief of Intelligence could do unilaterally.

Note that Picard is confident that with the secret exposed the project will be shut down. If it had been authorized at all levels you might expect it to continue, but out in the open.

Now Section 31, that does seem to be institutionalized so that’s a different story.

The images probably don’t have to look meaningful as long as it is difficult to distinguish them from real images using a fast, statistical test. Nepenthes uses Markov chains to generate nonsense text that statistically resembles real content, which is a lot cheaper than LLM generation. Maybe Markov chains would also work to generate images? A chain could generate each pixel by based on the previous pixel, or based on neighbors, or some such thing.

I’m not sure if I’ve used more in the last 25 years. And when I did I think it was in MS-DOS.

For the sake of benefit of the doubt, it’s possible to simultaneously understand the thesis of the article, and to hold the opinion that AI doesn’t lead to higher-quality products. That would likely involve agreeing with the premise that laying off workers is a bad idea, but disagreeing (at least partially) with the reasoning why it’s a bad idea.

Yeah, the article seems to assume AI is the cause without attempting to rule out other factors. Plus the graph shows a steady decline starting years before ChatGPT appeared.

The article doesn’t suggest using Control+C. It talks about dedicated copy and paste key codes, and you can program your keyboard to map those codes to whatever keys you like. They suggest Fn+C.

I’m not positive I’m correctly matching the title to the episode, but I’m sure I remember this one.

Less is not an editor, it’s a “pager” which is a read-only viewer for files, or for command output that doesn’t fit in a single screen, or whatever. Generally to control which you want programs use you set the PAGER environment variable.

The old grandaddy pager was called “more”, as in “there’s more text than fits on the screen”. The successor is called “less”. For most purposes, less is more.

It sounds like you’re including NixOS in this category so I guess I have switched.

I also tried Fedora Silverblue a bit, and it seemed to me that ostree distros are built on a cool idea supported by compromises I didn’t like:

Some stuff doesn’t work in Flatpak sandboxing - at least not yet. One example that comes to mind is Firefox integration with the desktop 1Password app. Maybe I could make this work by tinkering with Flatseal, but when install the native packages in NixOS this interaction just works.

I don’t want my CLI tools in a container running a different distro. For example if I’m using Distrobox to set up a dev environment that’s installing a distro with traditional package management to get around not being able to install packages natively in the host OS. I get that Distrobox enables isolated dev environments for different projects. But for that use case I think Nix devshells are more flexible, robust, and performant.

Nix also has its problems - in particular the usual complaint that the documentation is not comprehensive enough to match the complexity of the system.

This is a big reason for me. Also because if anything breaks - even if my system becomes unbootable - I can select the previous generation from the boot menu, and everything is back to working.

It’s very empowering, the combination of knowing that I won’t irrevocably break things, and that I won’t build up cruft from old packages and hand-edited config files. It’s given me confidence to tinker more than I did in other distros.