It’s not really that straightforward though, is it? Firstly is it a mean or a median average? What counts as an empire? When do we date the rise and fall of specific empires? These are not questions with straightforwards answers. Would Hitler’s Germany count as an empire? How many Roman empires were there?

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Well that makes sense

Anyway never mind that. Back down the fat mines

. philosophy is important, but implementation is importanter

Yes. This is the key

I don’t mind a bullshit meme, most memes are bullshit. Sometimes the bullshittery itself is the funny bit, or to put it another way, there are times like this where the absurdity of it is what’s funny to me. Like, Linux’s kill levels operate, as they must, as advice to the running process, because the os has no insight or capability as to how to gracefully close a process - nor should it. It’s an impossible task to know what safe cleanup looks like. But I like the image of the Linux penguin shooting Firefox tbqh

One task lifecycle management tool to bring them all, one tool to find them. One tool to rule them all and in the darkness bind them.

Is ASAP Linux a variant of Asahi that I’m not hip enough to get?

I know, right? It turns up on the sorrel in my garden every year

I have actually had to write something that used the Google drive API for a friend’s company once and it was… Unpleasant. Counterintuitive. Woefully inconsistent. My solution worked but it sucked and I am a bit ashamed of it

Alas, doesn’t fit my purpose since it requires action by the script user. I usually just use perl in those situations

I can never get grep to work consistently on Mac and Linux. Now, ripgrep OTOH…

I set up a nix os for a friend once. Forgot the master password. It’s been 5 years. Oh well.

I remember Linus saying in an interview that he’d only really been involved in git for the first 6 months or so and that the other devs had managed it without him since then. This makes sense - Linus’s creations aren’t successful because he’s the only person who understands them, they’re successful because there are so many other collaborators on them.

Gnome 3 is pretty great

I’m a simple man. I see midnight commander, I think ‘dang, I need to use it more, stop calling me out’

But how do you write your awk script?

Everyone always dunkin’ on Perl, but I can’t even tell you how often it’s been the best tool for the job. Like, at least 3

If you can, just use Perl. Probably installed on your systems, even the ones without python.

Many years ago, my aunt bought an old, terribly specced laptop and couldn’t get Windows to run on it. I installed Ubuntu and everything was fine - she could check her email and browse toxic conspiracy theories on Facebook and all was good with the world.

Two years later when visiting I got my first support request - would I mind showing her how to print something? No problem, but would you mind showing me what you were trying? She was selecting menu items to send to a virtual printer, not the one on the network. I show her the correct printer to send to and the thing prints. Easy. Out of curiosity, I check the outbox queue for the virtual printer. Over a hundred documents, going back two years.

For two years she’d been unable to print, and every single time she’d ever attempted to print something she’d followed the exact same steps that didn’t work, and just accepted that this was the way things were.

SMH.