No relation to the sports channel.

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Okay, let’s skip the formal logic talk then and go straight to linguistics.

    The question “Good to merge?” does not contain a grammatical error. It is perfectly well-formed by the grammar that native English speakers actually follow in everyday communication. A grammar that fails to parse “Good to merge?” in context cannot parse native English speakers’ actual output.

    Schoolbook English is not native English, because it’s not how native English speakers actually speak. Schoolbook English contains rules that directly contradict native English speakers’ everyday usage.

    (Standard examples include the rule against split infinitives and the rule against ending a sentence with a preposition. These are not grammatical rules of English as it is spoken by native speakers. To boldly assert them is silliness up with which I will not put.)


  • The guideline (as applied) contains a contradiction, so the principle of explosion applies.

    Specifically, there is a contradiction between “native-sounding English” and “no grammatical errors”, when the latter phrase is interpreted in the manner seen here. Native speakers quite often use sentence fragments and in other ways do not follow schoolbook “proper grammar”. In fact, second-language learners often use schoolbook grammar where a native speaker would use a more relaxed register.

    Since the guideline contains a contradiction, it is either impossible to follow (i.e. forbids all communication whatsoever) or impossible to violate (i.e. forbids no communication).


  • But if someone creates a file called HEAD, should it overwrite a file called head?

    That shouldn’t matter to the “nontechnical” end-user at all. To the nontechnical user, even the abstraction of “creating a file” has largely gone away. You create a document, and changes you make to it are automatically persisted to storage, either local or cloud.

    Only the technical command-line user cares about whether /usr/bin/HEAD and /usr/bin/head are the same path. And only in a specific circumstance — such as the early days of Mac OS X, where the Macintosh and Unix cultures collided — could the bug that I described emerge.


  • I recall a case-insensitivity bug from the early days of Mac OS X.

    There are three command-line utilities that are distributed as part of the Perl HTTP library: GET, HEAD, and POST. These are for performing the HTTP operations of those names from the command line.

    But there’s also a POSIX-standard utility for extracting the first few lines of a text file. It’s called head.

    I think you see where I’m going with this. HEAD and head are the same name in a case-insensitive filesystem such as the classic Mac filesystem. They are different names on a Unix-style filesystem.

    Installing /usr/bin/HEAD from libwww-perl onto a Mac with the classic filesystem overwrote /usr/bin/head and broke various things.








    • The compiler hates you
    • The compiler sees nothing wrong with your code and is just giving error messages to look busy
    • The compiler was written by a maniac with a semicolon fixation
    • The compiler could optimize your code, but it’s just not feeling it today
    • The compiler wonders why you can’t match braces right like your brother does
    • The compiler had a torrid affair with a Perl interpreter in 2006
    • The compiler likes big butts and cannot lie
    • The compiler wants to grow up to be an IDE but hasn’t told its parents they need to send it to GUI school yet
    • The compiler reads Nazis on Twitter but only to make fun of them
    • The compiler works for the Servants of Cthulhu





  • Federated platforms don’t die to corporate-type enshittification. They die to spam or elitism.

    If operators fail to collaborate on keeping spam down, the platform becomes unusable or greatly-diminished due to spam. See Usenet for example — yes, it’s still around, but it’s greatly diminished from the 1990s. New projects and organizations don’t tell participants to subscribe to a Usenet newsgroup for discussion. (Curiously, email mailing-lists have outlived Usenet in this way, at least for technical projects. While email is federated, any given mailing-list is centralized.)

    If the technology isn’t developed with an eye to new users’ needs and new use cases, because it’s “good enough” for the existing established users, the platform becomes dated and gets replaced by something trendy and corporate. This is IRC vs. Discord and Slack. IRC has a higher barrier to entry and infamously doesn’t work well on mobile — but it’s good enough for the old farts who care about it, while the young farts move to Discord instead.