palordrolap

I think at some point in the future, after the main storyline ends, maybe a thousand years hence, humanity gets flung back into the dark ages, meaning we have to re-learn how to be a technological race without assistance from the elder races. It has been a long, long time since I watched it and I might have misunderstood/misremembered what was going on though.

This could be what they’re talking about anyway.

That’s just a symptom of moral prescriptivism, which in turn is a symptom of otherwise impotent desire for control over a weird and scary world.

That doesn’t mean they’re making good choices, but it does explain why they’re making them.

Licence / license, and practice / practise. I have to look them up every single time because I forget which of each is the noun and which is the verb, and even then, there are situations where using the noun as a verb might actually be the right thing to do and I hate the whole thing. So I probably still get those wrong whenever I use them.

Barring brain farts (increasingly common) and muscle memory leading me astray on the keyboard, my spelling is otherwise fairly good, but those pairings I could do without.

The former is British, the latter is American. Noah Webster eliminated letter doubles in words where he thought the extra one didn’t add anything useful. Another word that did the same thing is “level(l)ing”.

When that happens often enough, the supermarket installs something that locks the wheels when the trolleys go out of range.

You can still get the trolley away by other means, sure, but I imagine it’s a pain to have to do that when there are wheels right there.

bind 'set completion-ignore-case on' might be your friend in Bash. It won’t help in scripts and GUIs though, so you’d still have to deal with that.

There are ways to write functions that pick the right option intelligently, but that’s asking for trouble. One day something will create a better match for your guess and then things will go wrong, e.g. your script intelligently turns downloads into Downloads but then something actually goes and creates downloads. Your script chooses the impostor because it’s a better match. Oops.

And then there’s always ln -s Downloads downloads. That might be enough to confuse that helpful thing that would otherwise create downloads. It’s already there, ready for use. And it works in custom scripts and things too. Until you move your script to a different user or machine, anyway.

I’m not sure memes in the original Dawkins sense can be art, so I suppose we must be talking about the modern sense of “funny images and short videos”.

Elitists will say that for something to be art it has to be produced by someone who is capable of producing traditional kinds of art, but who for artistic reasons has chosen to do otherwise (see: Cubism), and there’s the whole problem of, at least for images, certain meme templates being recycled over and over which diminishes the artistic value of any specific instance.

But for specific rare instances? Sure. Art is often in the eye of the beholder, regardless of the intent of the creator.

And as for videos. See any Vine compilation. There’s bound to be at least couple in there.

Finally, if you really want to turn an existing meme into art, use those elitist traditional methods to imitate one. An oil-painting triptych of “OMG they were roommates” without captions would be both art and lean into the meme incredibly heavily.

Would that be a comic strip writ large? Maybe. But there’d be nothing inherently funny about two frames of a woman walking and then a man’s face in close up. But if you know the meme, buddy, that’s art.

Adopting IPA would be wrong because it would require that everyone talk exactly the same way.

I admit that of the things rm could be aliased to do, it is one of the safer ones. It’s still bad practice in my book.

This breaks the advice to never alias a standard command to do something radically different from its regular function.

Sure, go ahead and alias ls to have extra options like --color, but don’t alias rm to do nothing, or even rm -i (-i is interactive and prompts for each file).

Why? Because one day you’ll be logged into a different system that doesn’t have your cushioning alias and whoops, bye-bye files.

Now that you think about it, you thought that ls output looked weird, but that didn’t actually break anything.

As you suggest, yes, look into your OS’s trash option, but leave rm alone.

GNOME-derived systems can use gio trash fileglob (or gvfs-trash on older systems) to put things in the actual desktop trash receptacle.

KDE’s syntax sucks, but it’s kioclientX move fileglob trash:/ where X may or may not be present and is a version number of some kind.

You could set up a shell function or script that fixes that syntax and give it any name you like - as long as it doesn’t collide with a standard one. On that rare foreign system it won’t exist and everything will be fine.

Tricky. Microsoft currently use two different executable formats and only one of them is compatible with WINE. That still doesn’t mean that a compatible one will work properly though.

On the other hand, people who make ads want their ads to be literally everywhere, so they might make it Windows 3.11 compatible with all library functions baked in just to be safe. WINE would almost certainly run that.

I thought Win2K was peak Windows, but I begrudgingly got comfortable with XP (using the classic Windows theme) then Win 7 after they ironed most of Vista’s kinks out.

Been on Linux since then.

But it would be unfair to say that masochist tendencies aren’t a requirement to be a Linux system owner.

All systems require some level of that. It’s just Linux has been rushing towards “less masochism” and Windows even quicker towards “more”, and we find ourselves at that sweet spot where they’ve the same level of requirement.

Frankly, I’d prefer this sweet spot to be more towards “less”, so I’m hoping Linux continues its trend.

Now that you mention it, I do remember the backticks and symbols thing for infix, so yeah that’d be something extra that Haskell did. One of the few things about Haskell that wasn’t on the fringes of my capability and understanding as I recall.

I remember thinking that it would be cool if other, more procedural, languages allowed it, but then most other languages also don’t have the capability of setting the precedence of new operators relative to old ones on the fly. A lot of that stuff is hard-coded into those languages’ compilers.

This is one of those rare occasions where “IT” might have been better fully punctuated as “I.T.”, but the thought of using “Scotty” as a verb meaning “generously pad all estimates” amuses me.

e.g. “If I want to cover my a—, I should Scotty it.”

My mistake. I had somehow missed or forgotten that Lisp also supports currying, which is what I was thinking of as Haskell taking further. There might be other things regarding type declaration and such, but that’s a little beyond me to confirm or deny at the moment.

Yes. Most early BASICs even required that any reference to a function name, in definition or calling, be preceded by an FN keyword as well as the parentheses.

QBASIC, Visual BASIC and the related dialects of BASIC found in MS Office and LibreOffice all have slightly better syntax for defining and calling functions than the older BASICs, but they all still require parentheses on their subroutine parameter lists too.

At best, you might be able to call a subroutine by name with no empty parentheses after it, but as soon as you need parameters, you’ll need parentheses around them.

But like I say, there was at least one rare BASIC that didn’t need them, so I’m assuming there might have been others that I’m not aware of.

This kind of already happens there though. Video view counts are visible and often way below a channel’s sub count.

Sure, there are exceptions (viral video views often far exceeding the sub count), but by and large they’re a good metric for seeing how a channel is actually doing.

(f x) works this way in Lisp - as in the joke - and Lisp descendants like Scheme. And then there’s Haskell which takes the whole thing a step further still.

Also Perl, because Larry thought it would be fun(ctional). The external parentheses are technically optional in this case, but won’t break anything if included. Regular f(x) syntax is also supported there. (You could probably remake this meme with Python and Perl in first and second panels tbh.)

And I know of at least one dialect of BASIC that allowed subroutine calls to lack their parentheses, so the same external parentheses thing would apply if that subroutine was a function.

Loosening the definition to “something I bought that I didn’t need, despite having thought about it for a while and waited for the price to come down”, probably the recent remaster of the original Quake. And I only wanted it because it was the only way to get the Dimension of the Machine level pack that it came with.

As it turns out, I’m not really much of a Quake-head any more, but at least I’m no longer wondering about those levels.

For wackier definitions and slang, I like UrbanDictionary. I’d say Wiktionary, but someone already suggested that one.

I’ve also used dictionary.com and thesaurus.com in the past. Obvious names, but they’re not terrible.

But back to UrbanDictionary - there’s a lot of craziness and dross on there, but there are also plenty of diamonds in the rough.