lol omg i accidentally a massive rant
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I feel like there ought to be a discipline of something like "perceptual geometry", and I need to be better at it.
We all know that finding the "optical centre" of a glyph is not straightforward (but there are algorithms). Even something as apparently simple as "stroke contrast" requires thought. Stroke contrast is just the thickness of the thickest part divided by the thinness of the thinnest part, right? Not so. The thickest part of the O on the right is not relevant to contrast.
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oh lots of fun stuff 😄 measuring contrast and italic angles isn’t even 5% of it—too much to fit in under 500 characters
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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 $PWD to reflect the fact that it now lives at ~/newname.
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That's remind me something i found amusing some times ago:
~/tmp/tmp$ rmdir ../tmp
~/tmp/tmp$ # where am i now?
~/tmp/tmp$ pwd
/mnt/vg00/diego/tmp/tmp
~/tmp/tmp$ echo $PWD
/mnt/vg00/diego/tmp/tmp
~/tmp/tmp$ # everything is fine, right?
~/tmp/tmp$ ls
~/tmp/tmp$ ls .
~/tmp/tmp$ cat /dev/null > x
bash: x: No such file or directory
~/tmp/tmp$ # ah!
~/tmp/tmp$ mkdir ../tmp
~/tmp/tmp$ # so does it works now?
~/tmp/tmp$ cat /dev/null > x
bash: x: No such file or directory
~/tmp/tmp$ #still no luck
~/tmp/tmp$ cd .
~/tmp/tmp$ cat /dev/null > x
~/tmp/tmp$ # now it works!
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?).
@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.
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This entry was edited (Tuesday, April 29, 2025, 10:55 PM)
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Nobody ever quotes the full rule, though:
“i before e, except after c, and provided it rhymes with ‘key’ “
“i before e, except after c, and provided it rhymes with ‘key’ “
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This llama is so very, very patient, and baby goats can be so very, very annoying!
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It's not entirely safe to transition. I'm done with entirely safe, that's just how to achieve staleness
This entry was edited (Saturday, December 27, 2025, 1:21 PM)
@laura_fae that was perhaps the thing I needed to get over to transition. I was so used to maximizing my safety, but still I felt neither safe nor happy. I was just hiding from the world.
Transition involved making myself deliberately vulnerable, and that is a risk! But what I didn't realise beforehand was how much courage that would generate.
Yes, and now that transitioining has become more accessible, the number of creatures who start hormones but don't actually transition into whatever would be the happiest person of themselves has risen dramatically. The community focused a lot on making sure people can find hormones easily, but turns out we need to also provide people with help being enthusiastically themselves, or they just end up depressed boymoding on estrogen :/
@faithisleaping I remember being a teenager and realizing that people sometimes got killed for feeling about gender like I did and being terrified. That really only lasted a few years before I realized I wasn't in that much danger.
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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this is beautiful. And seeing the bidding price i had a chuckle. Terry always used to say he signed so many books that unsigned ones were more valuable. Oh how we miss him. Xx
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.
How come I can’t make decisions but I can decide just to have a nap?
Who sets up a business and decides to call it Fahrenheit 451 (Communications) Ltd?
I love the way depression makes it impossible to make decisions while also making me postpone them until the time they are most stressful
Worthwhile copypasta from a friend.
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
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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This entry was edited (Monday, April 21, 2025, 1:48 PM)
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Somehow reassuring to see the Guardian and Observer getting absolutely mauled for their transphobia. Dump that trashfire of a paper. I think by normalising transphobia among the soi-disant left they’ve done as much if not more harm than the right wing press.
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Really not liking Bruce Schneiers naive optimism about AI in democracy
The Vagina Museum is trans inclusive. We always have been and we always will be. As long as there's a Vagina Museum, we cannot be bullied or bought to change our stance on this.
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just curious, how is trans inclusivity practiced at the vagina museum ?
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¿
I just took a very satisfying dump in the ladies’. I imagined every transphobe was down there.
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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By Durante.
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So. On one shoulder is Satan. On the other is an LLM. Who do you listen to?
Good practice for RSS Feeds, about which there seems to have been some fedi chat mendeddrum.org/@fanf/114324807…
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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.
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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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U+218B TURNED DIGIT THREE is of course rotated and not a mirror image: ↋>
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#Kink info request! Anyone got links to good resources on choking? Why it’s not safe, safer breath play alternatives etc?
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I have to say that having a barn full of cute baby goats (current count at 5 babies from 2 mamas) that I can snuggle anytime I need is much, much more therapeutic than rage-screaming in the hay field.
#BabyGoatCountdown
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The first live birth I witnessed was our goat Valentina giving birth to triplets in Brea, California. Around 1954 or thereabouts. I was impressed! ❤️
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When my family gives me crap for using the metric system, this is what I hear:
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This entry was edited (Saturday, March 29, 2025, 2:33 PM)
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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.
This entry was edited (Friday, March 28, 2025, 1:42 PM)
Tbh, a less crazy C with arena-based memory allocation, polymorphic types, and better programmer-assist provability on memory management would be ideal, I think. Rust is almost very like that.
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.
This entry was edited (Friday, March 28, 2025, 4:16 PM)
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.
This entry was edited (Sunday, March 30, 2025, 10:17 PM)
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How to quit Vi
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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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When there's, like, one or two guys out there, y'know, if you're completely honest. 👀
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Courtesy of @kæt I’m reading about Indra’s Net, which is interesting to use as a metaphorical way of looking at the complexity (and futility?) of causes and effects in relational networks. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indra'…
Just heard mention of the Celtic Sea on the Shipping Forecast. I never knew it was a thing.
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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@wonka @quixoticgeek @leeloo @hector I haven't tried reFind since my first successfull Hackintosh, about 15 years ago. Aside from Hacks, I tend to avoid UEFI if at all possible. I guess it's time to take another look...
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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)
This entry was edited (Wednesday, March 12, 2025, 10:48 AM)
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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."
I applied for a job a few weeks ago and got an invitation back from them to do an "matrix reasoning test": a sort of IQ type thing where you had to figure out which shape went in the gap. I think I failed pretty comprehensively and then ran out of time.
You know what sort of chat you’re having when you describe someone’s sense of self as “kinda ergative-absolutive aligned” and get a reply considering “if Descartes were from Cumberland”…
Jochie 👨🏻💻🏳️🌈
in reply to Tony Finch • • •Tony Finch
in reply to Jochie 👨🏻💻🏳️🌈 • • •@jochie yeah i might have written up a proposal along those lines ~20 years ago, it’s basically adding an lmtp mode to smtp
but tbh i doubt it’s worth the effort because spammers tend not to co-operate with anti-spam features
and if recipients disagree on the value of a message then it’s borderline enough to deliver to spam folders instead of rejecting
Jochie 👨🏻💻🏳️🌈
in reply to Tony Finch • • •yeah, there is that. the $work use case I was thinking of is a little different: we handle SMTP in a proxy like manner and then if 49 recipients were successfully delivered but one was deferred or blocked by the destination server, we have to work around that, because we’re trying to avoid sending NDRs at all cost.
Oh well, back to dreaming of a solution
Simon Tatham
in reply to Tony Finch • • •the mention of format=flowed reminds me that I had a correspondent around 2011 who used to send me f=f mail done exactly wrong.
The point of f=f ought to be that you can read it even in a MUA that _doesn't_ support it (as mine at the time didn't) and it looks enough like ordinary wrapped-at-72 text/plain that you almost don't notice, and if you did notice, wouldn't care. Meanwhile a more savvy MUA can use it to reflow if it needs to.
But my correspondent's email had each paragraph on a single physical line, including quoted paragraphs starting with a >. So the receiving MUA _had_ to speak f=f to read it as intended. Exactly missing the point!
(Obviously, not my actual correspondent's fault. The sending MUA takes the blame, and what do you know, it didn't identify itself in the headers.)
Roger BW 😷
in reply to Simon Tatham • • •Martin Hoffmann
in reply to Tony Finch • • •I really enjoyed how the thing flipped from reasoned analysis into angry rant without so much as a warning.
That said, I had hope for email, but seeing how high-ranking IETFers now write email, I’ve officially given up.
Royce Williams
in reply to Tony Finch • • •jelte
in reply to Tony Finch • • •Jyrgen N
in reply to Tony Finch • • •