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Today is a GREAT day for the ocean. Not only is the new Attenborough Ocean film out today, but I got a sneak peak at the new Great Map being installed at the National Maritime Musuem in Greenwich, and it's just astonishing. It's the Spilhaus projection - a way of unwrapping the globe that keeps the ocean intact - and it's got beautifully detailed topography and plenty of other fun bits and pieces. The whole redecorated hall will be renamed Ocean Court and will reopen to the public on June 7th, World Ocean Day. Do go as soon after that as you can - it really is stunning.
#Ocean
32 s
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The commands 'cd $PWD' and 'cd .' in bash both look like useless no-ops which change into the same directory you're already in. But they're not, and both can be useful.
$PWD is a string variable which caches the pathname that your current directory had at the time you changed into it. It's not automatically updated in between cd commands.
So 'cd $PWD' (or 'cd "$PWD"' if you're being properly careful) changes to whatever directory _now_ lives at the pathname that your actual cwd _was_ when you changed to it.
'cd .' really _does_ just change directory to the same physical directory you're already in, but it's still not useless, because it causes bash to recalculate the value of $PWD.
For example, if one shell is in ~/test, and in another shell you rename ~/test to ~/newname and make a new directory ~/test, then in the first shell 'cd $PWD' will move to the new ~/test, whereas 'cd .' will stay in the original directory but update $PWD to reflect the fact that it now lives at ~/newname.
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“i before e, except after c, and provided it rhymes with ‘key’ “
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THE BIGGEST NEWS! Rob and I are offering up a hand-signed hardback, first edition/first printing copy of Monstrous Regiment straight from the Pratchett archives. Those who know the story will know why it’s a pertinent one for this cause.
32auctions.com/organizations/1…
Monstrous Regiment (Signed 1st edition)
Auction item 'Monstrous Regiment (Signed 1st edition)' hosted online at 32auctions.32auctions
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I won't be able to partake in this but thank you for this!
Not only do you carry on Terry's legacy, but you are so much of an amazing person in your own right and I love your work.
Please help push back against the transphobic UK Supreme Court judgment. Philippa East has created an excellent letter that you can co-sign using this link. forms.gle/FZXBWzWFx4fHhPAL8 #TransRightsAreHumanRights
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You know the worst thing about today's ruling? It doesn't take into account the primal, overwhelming power of - and I'm going to use the old term - gender dysphoria.
Most cis folk haven't experienced it, though many cis queer peeps know what I mean from a different context. The compulsion to live free or die. I wouldn't be alive now if I hadn't transitioned.
The lucky ones transition before they get there but the rest of us hit a point in our lives where it's transition or die and that's not hyperbole. I always wanted to see a world where transition happened for all before that point, because I barely made it through. That hope is pretty much gone.
Call us mentally-ill if you like. I don't care. I live, or I don't. For the sake of preventing some vile people feeling a bit uncomfortable, you've put our lives in real danger, judges of the Supreme Court.
You're disgusting bigots and any remaining respect I once had for the law has gone. We're outlaws again.
Please boost this unless you don't give a shit.
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The Transphobic Guardian practically jumping for joy today, as is 'White Feminism'
How well things are going for that rich bigot in her castle, a new TV Series, Trans people being punished for simply existing.....and Westminster just shrugs and follows Gilead's lead
I feel ill, as a Queer man I fill ill and alone in this country, it's not hatred mostly I see, it's indifference....so when the Fash come for us, nobody will make a stand.
I don't feel British at all.
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Sorry man
You're just a victim of the human condition, apathy 🤷
Or
🎵💃🕺📯Derrr da derrr
🥳👯♀️📯
Da der da der dadud derrr🎵
YOU CAN GO DOWN DANCING!
FUCK EM
Young man
there's no need to feel down
I said, young man
pick yourself off the ground
I said, young man
'cause you're in a new town
There's no need
to be un happy
THEY MARCH YOU TO THE TRENCH, ASK IF YOU WANT A SMOKE/BLINDFOLD, TAKE THE SMOKE, KEEP DANCING. EVEN IF THEY TELL YOU TO STOP, WHAT ARE THEY GUNNA DO, SHOOT YOU¿
Ah, I see that GNOME has started throwing X out the airlock. According to the Fedora 42 release notes, GDM no longer supports X-based sessions, leaving Cinnamon, XFCE, and various other desktops out to lunch, and if you switch to another login manager, GNOME itself may not work properly.
Good job, everyone, right when Windows 11 could give desktop Linux a great opportunity to pick up users.
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Good practice for RSS Feeds, about which there seems to have been some fedi chat mendeddrum.org/@fanf/114324807…
linkspam!RSS/Atom feed best practise.
kevincox.ca/2022/05/06/rss-fee…
saved 2025-03-27 dotat.at/:/JTER8.html
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One of the more unhelpful trauma responses that’s resurfaced this year is the fear of copying. When I was a kid I was mocked for picking up interests from friends, so I used to try hard not to do that or to be cautious or contrary in how I developed interests.
I learned not to do this at some point, especially with transition initially (which I think I knew had to be about me and nobody else whatever my brain said) but it’s come back this year. I have to fight against an urge to reject for myself anything people I know find positive.
I always feel there should be a mirror image of the heart emoticon "❤". We talked about this - after all, Unicode should offer some possibilities - and so far we have:
E> - robot heart
∈> - lewd Jack-in-a-box
∑> - sideways cat.
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#BabyGoatCountdown
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This is what I try to communicate to team leaders, that even looking past all the obvious reasons for equality and inclusion, choosing NOT to take full advantage of the skills available in your team is simply bad for business.
The (mostly) men in this world are wasting such an immense amount of talent.
One of the hard bits of social media is feeling that the approval of people on the internet is important, and that their disapproval is to be avoided at all costs, even if it means avoiding discussion for fear of having a Wrong Take.
I'm working on myself to change this.
Rust is indeed woke. It's woke technology that embodies a woke understanding of what it means to be a programming language.
Blog post, by me.
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I agree with this post, and think it's an insightful perspective.
However, I think Rust faces a challenge with complexity. I completely failed to get any of the rest of the team to work on a Rust project I'd developed on leaving my last programming job cos they got stuck learning Rust (before they saw my code!)
Folk found things like co-/contra-variant lifetimes befuddling. I couldn't even convince people they need to know the difference between heap and stack. Not least, management stripped this exact question out of hiring interviews.
Things like async are a mistake, I think. (A mistake I used in my project until I understood why), mainly because of the way they pile on things like pinning. I coped okayish, but the project failed because I was the only compsci degree-er.
I worry that Rust is turning into C++
I don't really think Rust can hope to be inclusive while it require so befuddling concepts. I hold out hopes for maybe Zig (I've not learnt it).
I have no problem with the community.
I do agree that Rust faces a challenge with complexity.
But, I think the problem in the language is much less severe than often imagined. One can write eg Easy Mode Rust - which is still a highly performant and reliable language.
I certainly wouldn't bother novices with lifetime variance; that's advanced stuff which you hardly ever have to worry about (and as ever, either if builds it's fine, or you're an expert doing unsafe). I think "heap vs stack" is another thing novices can ignore.
It doesn't help that there's still a fair amount of perf hacker thinking even in resources for total newbies.
A very real challenge is the way that Rust programs almost never compile first time, which can be deeply offputting to people who've been socialised to be afraid of error messages. I wish we could somehow persuade folks that compiler errors are completely normal and fine, so they feel free to go ahead and experiment.
People apparently don't realise that I moderate comments on my blog. They think that if they send a 1000-word screed complaining about "wokeism" that anyone (even me) will read it.
FTR, my practice is to moderate comments vigorously so as to try to maintain the space as both enlightening and pleasant.
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NEW
“We will deport you if we have evidence against you, and deport you if we do not”
On an extraordinary witness statement from the US government - and how it has adopted the logic of the Ducking Stool
By me, at Prospect
prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/l…
We’ll deport you if we have evidence against you, and if we do not
On an extraordinary witness statement by the US governmentwww.prospectmagazine.co.uk
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I'm reminded of the WWII internment of the Japanese-Americans:
"He felt that the lack of sabotage efforts only meant that it was being readied for a large-scale effort. "The fact that nothing has happened so far is more or less . . . ominous, in that I feel that in view of the fact that we have had no sporadic attempts at sabotage that there is a control being exercised and when we have it it will be on a mass basis."" en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_L…
Given the onerous requirements of the UK online safety act this is a very good way forward. mstdn.party/@pandorablake/1142…
I've spoken at length about my journey to a good solution over on Patreon: patreon.com/posts/open-source-…
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Yeah. The original UNIX philosophy was "small single-purpose tools that do one thing brilliantly and can be connected like Lego bricks"; systemd pours a pint of cyanoacrylate glue into the toy box.
mastodon.social/@LinuxAndYarn/…
@jimcarroll I'm not getting into Vim vs Emacs, Gnome vs KDE, Debian vs Rhel vs Arch or any of their siblings and children fighting amongst themselves.But systemd is the most cursed, bastardized, overcomplicated and overcompensating crock that has ever been forced upon Linux users. (AI is still a choice, after all.)
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Some of you have been eagerly awaiting part 2 of my test date with Jack. HERE IT IS!
The conclusion: love yourself before you start #dating. You'll know you're ready to #date when you can accept rejection with a shrug and 'your loss!'.
(pls share if you like it!)
girlonthenet.com/blog/love-you…
Love yourself: Test date with a blog reader part 2
Part two of the test date I had with a blog reader, and a message I don't think men get to hear often enough: love yourself before you start dating.Girl on the net (Girl on the Net)
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That's a lovely piece.
(JHR's internalised transphobia) "But!"
(JHR) "No. I'm sure you think you mean well, but no. The core message is still correct."
Ed Davies
in reply to Simon Tatham • • •Hugo Mills
Unknown parent • • •@amonakov I just tried zsh and got the same behaviour.
What shell are you using, Simon?
Tony Finch
in reply to Hugo Mills • • •@darkling @amonakov set -P (physical directory paths) changes the behaviour of cd pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/…
which might be more pertinent than the choice of shell
i put set -P in my bashrc over 25 years ago because the default “logical” behaviour makes no sense
cd
pubs.opengroup.orgschiermi
in reply to Simon Tatham • • •Jyrgen N
in reply to Simon Tatham • • •Ian Jackson
in reply to Simon Tatham • • •I often use cd `pwd` which (in bash at least) is pretty close to the effect of cd $PWD, but easier to type.
This is useful with tests that blow away and recreate a temporary workspace. You run the test, and in another shell cd there and inspect its files etc. The next iteration will delete your inspection shell's cwd - but cd `pwd` puts you in the same place in the new run's output.
For this, the test case must reuse the same temp path. But you wanted to avoid /tmp, anyway.
Moritz Dietz
in reply to Simon Tatham • • •kæt
Unknown parent • • •Diego Roversi
in reply to Simon Tatham • • •That's remind me something i found amusing some times ago:
While the error in creating the file looks legit, why can I list a directory that doesn't exist? And I think that a new directory with the same name, it's still a new directory, but looks like "cd ." somehow fix the cwd of the shell.
Just for reference tests were made on linux on a ext4 filesystem (but does it matters?).
Simon Tatham
in reply to Diego Roversi • • •@diegor 'why can I list a directory that doesn't exist?' – it does exist, it just isn't linked from anywhere. On Unix, directories as well as files have the property that the inode (containing the actual contents) persists even after there's no path to it from the filesystem root, if a process has it open. So your cwd can still be in a directory that's been deleted.
'looks like "cd ." somehow fix the cwd of the shell' – assuming the shell is bash, yes, by default "cd ." will do that. It _doesn't_ do what I claimed in the head of the thread, unless you have the non-default 'set -P' option, which I set long ago for myself and had forgotten was relevant. If _I_ had done "cd ." in that situation, I'd have stayed in the deleted directory.