palordrolap

I’m going to assume you’re not kidding, in which case, no, I mean the first letter of the command name it was called by.

There are already commands that do this. For example, on my machine, ex is the head of a symlink chain that leads to the vim text editor’s executable and if I run ex, vim will know that it was started with the name ex and will start in ex mode. ex was an editor that worked in a different way but was vim’s ancestor, so backwards compatibility is built right in for those strange people who love ex, (or have some kind of automation reliance on it being present).

Usually, the main command has a command line option that achieves the same effect as the special name. Here, vim -e is the less clever way to start vim in ex mode.

For yes, symlinking the name no to it and then calling that should arguably cause it to print n repeatedly, but it doesn’t, for historical reasons, hence my suggestion to go back in time and make it act differently.

(None of this touches on the fact that the GNU philosophy wants nothing to do with clever tricks like this. They prefer to compile separate executables for each and every use case. For example, most Linuxes have dir and vdir as variants of the ls command. Their functionality could have been implemented through this symlink trick, but instead there are three near-identical executables taking up space instead.)

Part hubris, part greed. They believe their own hype and either think that other people will believe it too or that they can force it on the unbelievers, thus leading to great profit.

Where is the profit? Enforced cloud accounts and storage mean users’ information is permanently held ransom, and users shall pay monthly to retain access to it.

They can also pick through users’ files and sell that information to data brokers and advertisers, if not also various government intelligence agencies.

Actually that last one is more about the continued ability to go on bleeding users dry, but it amounts to the same thing.

The two commands are not equivalent. sed 11q prints 11 lines whereas head’s default is 10.

Personally I would prefer head -11 in this situation as it more clearly indicates, for the sake of the meme, that something is being removed from the head.

There’s also that head seems to be ever-so-slightly quicker, perhaps proving what we already knew about thinking being quicker than speech.

TL;DR That’s what she sed?

The BeOS command line command set were all borrowed from or based upon Unix and/or Linux (IIRC many were straight from GNU), which is the basis for my comparison.

The kernel and graphics were all from-scratch and radically different from Linux, sure, but the same could be said of Linux when compared to the original Unix, or any of the BSDs.

Haiku is what grew out of the ashes of BeOS. And if you’ve never heard of that, you’re no worse off. It was another Unix-alike that was neither Linux nor BSD which showed early promise but didn’t gain enough traction.

That just means that the lowly, customer-facing peons that work for government offices don’t have access to any such master database.

Most people work for companies that hold information inaccessible to them. Other government databases would definitely be on that list.

You mean to tell me that such a database doesn’t already exist?

Sometimes the only real options are “bad” and “less bad”. An uncomfortable echo of something else we’re all familiar with, perhaps.

This does not mean that we should not criticise the less bad option, only that we should not switch to the the bad option.

Black and white 80x25 BIOS text screen with the IBM PC ROM font, not unlike the MS-DOS it sought to replace.

Everything else is fluff on top of that, possibly occupying different graphics planes available in whatever hardware is available.

Yes, technically modern PCs and Linux have moved beyond that 80x25 screen for the most part, but its immediate descendant is still in use, often during boot, but also on Ctrl-Alt-F[1-6] on many distros.

I caught trouble the other day for saying this. Apparently there are themes for GNOME (even GTK4) that can mitigate the limited colour palette(s). Locked-in window layout choices are a different matter entirely, of course, but we can do something about the colour of them.

$ yes n
n
n
n
n
n
n
...

I kind of want to go back in time and make it so that the original yes always printed the first letter of the name it was called by. That way you could symlink any name you like to it and it would do the right thing. Called as no it would print ns, etc. The optional parameter would still be there for longer strings or alternate uses.

The reason time travel would be needed is that there’s bound to be, or have been, someone who has done something weird regarding symlinking yes that relies on it always printing y when it has no parameter, and the name trick would be a breaking change.

And then the LLM says something like “You’re absolutely right, there was an error in that code that is clear and obvious now it has been pointed out and despite the fact you gave the instruction to make no errors. Is there anything else I can help with?”

… and they’ll be too blind to take that as the warning it is and continue to ask even more of the LLM.

Do mine eyes deceive me? Some of those don’t even have the address bar merged with the menu bar and hamburger menu icon… although I can’t tell whether those are just the apps insisting on doing things the tried and tested way.

Nonetheless, I’ll add a note to my original comment.

Edit: The situation is more nuanced than I had been led to believe. This stays for posterity.

Irony. In GTK4 there literally are only two genders: Dark Mode and Light Mode.

Earlier GNOME was much more accepting of alternative window styles.

Note for second (or more) language speakers of English (and maybe a few first language folks as well): The plural ‘s’ is omitted when a sentence fragment is turned into an adjective. It’s supposed to have hyphens in it as well, though these are often left out.

So, for example, “My PC is ten years old and runs Linux” becomes “My ten-year-old PC runs Linux”.

In the case of this meme, it should be “My 10-year-old PC”.

Call me cynical, but I think you’ve put quotes around the wrong part of your title.

Try around “accidentally”.

If the day ever comes that I end up in possession of a healthy late 20th century laptop, I’d genuinely consider putting FreeDOS on it. Not least because I threw away my customised MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11 floppies years ago (a regrettable decision).

For later hardware, I think I’ll stick with Linux.

For a middle ground, I seem to remember Puppy Linux, which is designed to run on more limited hardware, runs most things as root. (Though maybe they’ve changed that in the intervening years. Correction welcome).

It’s kind of amazing that this is only anachronistic by four months. Both Bliss and (that image of) Tux are both from 1996, and Tux is younger.

Thirty years ago. Please excuse me while I turn to dust.

DDR4 is cheaper than DDR5, sure, but retailers have jacked the price of both by the same percentage, so it’s not really all that much of a rescue.

I expect people will need a full mortgage to pay for DDR6 when it comes out next year.

Interesting. And yet it’s still incomplete. F6 and Alt+D both do the same thing (focus the address bar), so there’s at least one line missing and definitely at least one column.