Home folder litter is one of my top pet peeves in computing. In fact it's the only reason why I refuse to use snaps on Ubuntu. I don't even care about whatever technical stuff everyone argues about - but snaps create a permanent `~/snap/` directory and Ubuntu devs don't care. There's been a bug report on Launchpad for over a decade[1] and it's the second highest voted bug in Ubuntu history, but no, Ubuntu devs think littering the home folder with highly visible system-level machinery is totally unavoidable.
It's like putting your car's engine in the passenger seat - rude, intolerable, and plain stupid. What if Grandma was browsing her home folder and deleted `~/snap/` because she has no idea what it is?
I want to add an addendum to this. There's just so much bad naming everywhere. So often I'll be looking for configs and can't find them because the name of the configs folder isn't remotely the same as that of the program. How is anyone supposed to know? `~/.config/TrollTech.conf`? Are you really telling me you don't expect people to be confused? The only nice thing I can say is that at least it is put in `~/.config` and not `~/.` There's plenty of things with more menacing looking names too.
Hell, it isn't even computers. I bought a monitor from Samsung recently and it showed up in my bank as Hanwha Vision. You google it and you find a wiki page for the company, and read
> Hanwha Vision (Korean: 한화비전), founded as Samsung Techwin, is a video surveillance company.
or you look at the parent company, which was originally Korea Explosives. Seriously, if fucking In N Out can show up as "IN N OUT <LOCATION>" they can just show up as "Samsung" or something else actually meaningful.
I know there's 2 problems in computer science but there's a huge difference between not having a good name and having a misleading name. And don't get me started on emails. People wonder why there's so much fraud, but I'm just impressed there isn't more. The normal way things work makes it hard to distinguish things from fraud. We've just created a world where the signal is impossible to distinguish from the noise because we decided it was a good idea to obfuscate the signal...
This is why Linux needs a sensible, universal way to hide files that doesn't involve bloody renaming them (since that will just cause the original one to be re-created! What is that!?). Many file managers respect the .hidden file, which is a start! But it's not enough, shells and `ls` don't care. It's one of those many strange failures that make Linux on the desktop still painful to use.
On topic of hidden files: wherefrom is the pattern of treating configuration files as hidden? I'm referring to the pattern of `.configfile` -- I mean, for code projects, a local config file is a first-level construct. This leads to hidden files being not being a viable construct, as there is no longer any consensus on what should be hidden.
I don't know the answer to this, but I have to wonder if, for source files specifiically, .git is the culprit here... It's not part of your project, it's part of your repo. Which maybe makes sense if people ever divorced their source code from the repo but that's not a thing anymore. Others probably just copied it.
The gem in this post is Pure, which I haven't heard of until now. I also have my prompt show the git status, and for large repos `git status` can take 10+ seconds to load and cache.
I had no idea that you could do that asynchronously, and then have ZSH update the already printed prompt with the status later! That blows my mind!
If you like that, you should check out my project https://beachcomber.sh . Its about time I take it from dogfooding to beta users if you want to give it a go.
SE editor in chief here. What you describe is incorrect. The only thing we do is very light sound-alike spelling modernization, like "to-night" -> "tonight". We do not do things like change from en-GB to en-US, replace old words with different modern words, or change text for "American readers", whatever that means. I have no idea where you got that impression.
I personally worked on the Forsyte saga. If you think something was done in error, please let us know and we'll be happy to fix it.
This article is rediscovering the same phenomenon that happened when the steam-powered machinery was invented, leading to the Luddite movement.
Machinery at the dawn of the industrial revolution was supposed to be a time-saving miracle that freed capitalists from having to deal with workers, and also freed workers from backbreaking labor, letting them spend their hours in the pursuit of leisure.
Of course, the opposite happened. Machinery meant workers could produce more output in the same amount of time, so they didn't work less, they worked at least the same and eventually even more to keep up with competition and the demands of consumers. It took decades of unrest and bloody conflict to give us the 8-hour workday.
This article is rediscovering that same history, but for a different class. AI is to white-collar knowledge workers what steam-powered machinery was to the rough-handed working class of the 1800s. It promises capitalists freedom from having to deal with highly-paid knowledge workers, and it promises highly-paid knowledge workers freedom from their labor so they can spend their time in the pursuit of leisure.
I've always told people, Kindles are ereaders seeming designed by people who hate books.
The renderer is atrocious and is holding back the entire industry, much like IE6's crappy renderer and monopoly on users held the entire web back a decade. Browsers (and thus ebooks, which are just HTML/CSS) can now do pretty decent typography, but Amazon inexplicably refuses to get on board with epub.
Their file formats are equally garbage. Mobi, a format that has hardly changed since circa the year 2005, was still in active use until just recently. Their other proprietary formats are confusing in feature set and are opaque to create. The official tool to create Amazon ebooks only runs on Windows![1]
Kindles still can't natively read epubs, but since they accept epubs via email, their customers get confused and email me about it. (Epubs sent via email are quietly convert to Amazon's propriety format, meaning all bets are off on the result. Good luck, publisher!)
I always tell people, buy literally any other ereader.
[1] Calibre can also create them but it's reverse-engineering and not the official implementation.
The reading ease algorithm we use is the Flesh-Kincaid algorithm, which works pretty well for regular prose books but clearly fails very badly on avant-garde prose like Ulysses or As I Lay Dying.
XML lost because 1) the existence of attributes means a document cannot be automatically mapped to a basic language data structure like an array of strings, and 2) namespaces are an unmitigated hell to work with. Even just declaring a default namespace and doing nothing else immediately makes your day 10x harder.
These items make XML deeply tedious and annoying to ingest and manipulate. Plus, some major XML libraries, like lxml in Python, are extremely unintuitive in their implementation of DOM structures and manipulation. If ingesting and manipulating your markup language feels like an endless trudge through a fiery wasteland then don't be surprised when a simpler, more ergonomic alternative wins, even if its feature set is strictly inferior. And that's exactly what happened.
I say this having spent the last 10 years struggling with lxml specifically, and my entire 25 year career dealing with XML in some shape or form. I still routinely throw up my hands in frustration when having to use Python tooling to do what feels like what should be even the most basic XML task.
> Plus, some major XML libraries, like lxml in Python, are extremely unintuitive in their implementation of DOM structures and manipulation.
Lxml, or more specifically its inspiration ElementTree is specifically not a (W3C) DOM or dom-style API. It was designed for what it called “data-style” XML documents where elements would hold either text or sub-elements but not both, which is why mixed-content interactions are a chore (lxml augments the API by adding more traversal axis but elementtree does not even have that, it’s a literal tree of elements). effbot.org used to have a page explaining its simplified infoset before Fredrik passed and registration lapsed, it can be accessed through archive.org.
That means lxml is, by design, not the right tool to interact with mixed-content documents. But of course the issue is there isn’t really a right tool for that, as to my knowledge nobody has bothered building a fast DOM-style library for Python.
If you approach lxml as what ElementTree was designed as it’s very intuitive: an element is a sequence of sub-elements, with a mapping of attributes. It’s a very straightforward model and works great for data documents, as well as fits great within the langage. But of course that breaks down for mixed content documents as your text nodes get relegated to `tail` attributes (and ElementTree straight up discards comments and PIs, though lxml reverted that).
Base JSON not supporting comments is a sometimes annoying 'feature' because without it no-one can use the comments to try and add extra functionality into their JSON file using comment tags so you don't end up with a million JSON+ custom formats.
Taking their sponsors page at face value and doing the math, they're bringing in close to $100k/month with corporate sponsorships alone... how much money could maintaining a framework possibly cost?
No, none have reached out yet. I've had some brief, high-level discussion along those lines with some people in the library industry, and the conclusion I drew is that public libraries in the US are highly fragmented in terms of technological capability. Instead of partnering with individual local library systems, it would make the most sense to - as you mentioned - partner with Overdrive. But there's been no movement in that direction. If anyone from Overdrive is reading, get in touch :)
I know you griped about this in a different thread, but we won't be doing that, sorry. You can uniquely identify an ebook and its version by using dc:identifier in combination with dcterms:modified in the metadata file. If you desperately need a filesystem-safe string then concatenate those two and sha it.
It's like putting your car's engine in the passenger seat - rude, intolerable, and plain stupid. What if Grandma was browsing her home folder and deleted `~/snap/` because she has no idea what it is?
[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/snapd/+bug/1575053
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