I tend to read entire words at a time, and doing that your brain only really checks the first letter, last letter, and that most of the rest of the letters are actually there. That can be tolerant of mistakes like “raeding” or even “hte” but unexpected words or misspellings caused by touch screen keyboards make you stop and revert back to other, slower methods.

I do both. If I know exactly what I want to install, I’ll install it from the terminal because it’s often more direct. If I go “I need an app that does thing, what’s available?”

So the joke is, you’ve got something you want to install, be it a Python module, Java library, steam game, desktop application, whatever. You want it installed, figuring out which package manager has it and remembering the exact command syntax starts getting to be a pain, so just use this script to try installing it from a variety of sources.

You would evoke it by running ./install.sh package and it will replace all instances of $1 with the string “package” at runtime. The ampersand at the end of each line will run that line as a separate background process rather than in the foreground process, so effectively this will attempt to install “package” or whatever you put in as an argument from a half dozen sources simultaneously in parallel.

These include the old and new Python package managers, the old and new Red Hat package managers, debian/Ubuntu’s APT with and without sudo, cloning a git repo and building from source, and the icing on the cake is curling directly into bash.

Don’t curl directly into bash. You’ll catch genital rabies.

Remember that this is an XKCD comic, it’s a joke. The alt-text says “The failures usually don’t hurt anything and if it installs multiple versions it increases the chance one of them is right. (the ‘yes’ command and ‘2>/dev/null’ are recommended additions.)” “Yes” is a bash command that will spam ‘y’ in the terminal, the point of it is to answer yes to any questions an automated system asks, and 2>/dev/null will stop it from displaying errors. These add an even deeper level of Yolo-ing.

Can the average U of A student be expected to read words as complicated as “genetalia”?

So the state hasn’t approved it because the governor hasn’t signed it. It’s only a bill here on capitol hill.

Jesus fuck Bloomberg, go watch some School House Rock.

He’s a Maine Coon, that’s already going to be a near death experience. Maine Coons are huge!

It is a Maine Coon, known for extra toes, but this is kinda ridiculous. I hope kitty will be able to live a comfy life with what? over a dozen extra digits?

So in this movie she’s a successful big city criminal but she’s getting disillusioned with that and wants to move back home to a picturesque podunk town to be a small town criminal, maybe burgle a cute little antique shop in the town square, enter our eligible bachelor, the handsome, charismatic and eligible town axe murderer?

I seem to recall hearing that viagra will turn your vision blue. And then they released that series of ads for it with a blue tint, which struck me as an interesting choice.

Lies, damned lies and statistics.

Okay. When I walk into a Lowe’s to buy a power drill, the entire aisle of bathroom sinks on the other side of the 5 acre store don’t bother me at all, because they’re back there.

When they start putting out the Halloween decorations for sale in April or the Christmas shit in August, they put that right at the entrance, it tends to make noise, it’s often scented, and especially with the Christmas shit they start playing non-stop Christmas music over the store’s speakers. So we get half a fucking year now of either the same old shit, or this year’s repackaging of the same old shit. It is actively bothersome.

Like, you walk into Michael’s and there’s always an aisle of wreaths and pine fronds back there. And it stays there year round. That’s fine. They don’t choose an increasing number of months out of the year to wave it in your face as you walk in.

Add to that the ever-increasing commercial nature of the holiday and it’s just…ugly.

Elect me your president and I’ll bring back tarring and feathering.

What the fuck kind of compromise? “Let us technical loophole around your constitutional rights just a little bit?”

How about we compromise and let that guy in Tennessee hang you just a little bit.

He got short sleeves!

😁

It’s Allens that aren’t in arbitrary sizes but their actual dimensions and sold in metric and normal sizes.

Silly Putty I think was an attempt to make plastic that failed and they went “well it’s kind of fun to play with, we’ll sell it as a toy?”

wikis the pedia

Rubber. It was an attempt to make synthetic rubber during WWII rationing. Found to be pretty useless but kind of a fun toy.

Point of order, you’re thinking of play doh, not silly putty.

My high school US history class spent like two weeks on the revolutionary war, half a class on everything that happened up to the civil war, two or three weeks on the civil war, half a class on the rest of the 19th century, like a week on WWII, the roaring 20’s and dusbowl 30’s got a week, and the rest of the class was World War 2, the 4 years that made up 60% of our 250 year history.

I have two hypotheses for why it was like that and they’re not mutually exclusive:

1. WWII ends on a very boastful note for the USA. The defeat of not one but two objectively evil empires through both military and industrial might, that and having basically none of the fighting on our soil meant we came out of the war powerful and rich, eclipsing Great Britain as the superpower in the west. Almost immediately after that, history gets a lot less flattering.

2. The boomers were in charge of setting the school curriculum circa 2002, and by their logic “Then World War 2 happened, and then I was born, and then stuff I personally remember happened, and because I personally remember it, it isn’t “history” therefore we don’t have to teach it. You learn about Upton Sinclair in history class, you learn about the Cuban Missile Crisis by watching the news, that’s just how it is.”

Problem 1: They make the same DTMF tones that severe weather alerts do. That particular tone should mean “Immediate risk to YOUR life” such as a flash flood, severe thunderstorm or tornado. Using the same tone for amber alerts (or silver alerts, for missing old people) is just crying wolf. How many people are going to go “FOR FUCK’S SAKE I’M IN BED I’M NOT JOINING A MANHUNT” and mute such an alert without reading it, and then it’s gonna be about a tornado?

Side problem: I learned something from Technology Connections a month or two ago that I’ve known since I was four. Almost all fire alarms sound a cadence of three short bursts. When I was in kindergarten, our school used the normal bells for the emergency alarm system, we were taught that groups of 3 short bursts on the bell was the fire alarm, but they taught it as if that’s how it works at this school and not universally. I bet the alert noises your phone makes, you know the government screeches? I bet those carry meaning they haven’t even tried to teach the public, in either the exact tone or beep sequence.

Problem 2: It seems to assume that every adult in half a state is going to drop what they’re doing and fod walk the world looking for this kid (or geezer). Almost no one is, in large part because no one has been trained as to how. I guess the idea is you’re supposed to be out driving, get that alert, remember the details including the license plate number of the vehicle, and then call 911. Has that ever even once happened? Especially since:

Problem 3: The message isn’t persistent or retrievable. It’s a push notification. If you dismiss it, possibly to get it to stop making noise so you can concentrate on reading it, it vanishes. There’s no message history to find it in, no real way to go “Hey wait a second, is that the car the amber alert was talking about?” 22 minutes later.

It does kind of come off as a very political “I am assembling a task force to create a solution to these dastardly crimes” solution.