NullInvictus

I think the quality of a language for shell scripting is often secondary. What’s of greater significance is where it is at. I.e., does it have it already installed? The answer with Linux and Bash is almost always “yes”. Not so with ruby.

The moment you start asking the user to install things, you’ve opened up the possibility for writing a program rather than a shell script. The lifecycle of a piece of software is almost always one of growing responsibility. This cycle is devastating when it happens to shell scripts. What was once a simple script slowly becomes creaking mass of untestable, poorly understood code playing in the traffic of swimming environments (which grep you got, buddy?).

I guess I’m saying that once you open up the possibility of writing a program, you generally take that option and are usually happier for it. In the “write a program” world, ruby is still good, but it becomes a far harder question to answer whether ruby is still the right choice. There are a lot of languages with a lot of features engineers like.

Notably Diamine’s Registrar Ink and Rohrer & Klingner’s Eisen-Gallus-Tinte inks are relatively easy brands of iron gall ink to acquire and the modern formulas are less harsh and useable in fountain pens.

They’re nice in that they’re naturally waterproof inks. They’re a bit on the dry side though in terms of flow.

I’m not really excited about this; Meta has no strong incentive to be a long term good neighbor in the fediverse, but plenty of incentive to engage in poor behavior. No matter how sincere or well meaning leadership is now, a quarterly loss or stagnant profit will eventually push them to turn to some market capture or embrace, extend, extinguish behavior.

I’m not the only one who feels this way. A number of instances are prepping to partially or fully block Threads from the get-go.

Even without Meta, I’m not excited for another 1M+ instance. My experience is that the larger an instance is, the worse it is. Less community, worse moderation, more bad actors hiding in plain sight. You just can’t toss people into a generalist million people scrum and expect them to form a digital community.

If you’re on mastodon.social, you’re not experiencing the best of the fediverse IMO. Find a small instance of your interest (<500 people) and interact with the local timeline. People on my instance recognize me, make in jokes, I chat with the admin and mods, it’s like actual digital neighborhood. It’s really the closest we’ve gotten back to forums and I don’t think dumping a bucket of FAANG-style corporate water on it is the answer.

You have to have been raised pretty sweetly to not have known this kind of racketeering was a 'thing' for a very long time. Pressure to hire cops is rampant. 'rent-a-cop' is not aimed at the fact that security companies apply aggressive mimicry to their people, but that these people are themselves often off-duty cops. Security companies are strongly "encouraged" to hire off-duty cops, and find themselves left out to dry or otherwise 'convinced' if they try to resist.

Before you add 'Why don't [you|they] do...' responses, recognize for a moment that the police in the U.S. are largely out of control, have undue control of local government and politics, and have an ideology that enforces self-righteousness and an 'enemy at the gates' siege mentality, and oh yeah, are able to apply violence at a level unmatched in society. These are not polite people, and the way one 'deals' with them has far more in common with radical militias rather than state bureaucrats. If you haven't encountered that, you're just lucky enough to have never threatened their interests.

Short of something within a few hundred feet of Bezo's desk being actually on fire, AWS's health page never seems to actually report issues.

My read as well.

I write shell-scripts when the current tools solve the problem easily. I distribute shell scripts to colleagues (never customers) only when I absolutely do not want to install extra software on their system.

I avoid awk and perl because if I'm going to introduce a second language to a tool, I'm not going to pick the niche ones everyone only learns opportunistically if at all. At that point I'd rather pick something my colleagues are deeply familiar with.

And on a small level, writing these little binaries that truly do one thing and do it well and that I understand intimately is a private joy.

Is the story of how the paper was stood up documented anywhere?

> Our concern would be that a professional educator would not only work for the district, but the district would also be their landlord

Employer:

* we don't want to wages in an amount to let the worker afford healthcare on his own, so we'll just tie the worker's health-insurance to his job.

* We don't want to pay wages in an amount that would let the worker afford housing on his own, so we'll tie the worker's housing to his job.

* Next step: We don't want to pay wages in an amount to let the worker afford necessities on his own, so we'll create a company store where he'll be able to buy things with our new innovative wage/credit scheme that will tie necessities to his job.

The implementation of this idea is terrible, one that will hold a further Damocles sword over the laborers, and if widely implemented, will absolutely be used against workers in future labor-disputes. We already have the history to show that. Your employer should not control your access to life-necessities.

> Folks recommend the really cheap platinum preppy pens, but be warned they are super scratchy.

The reason people recommend the platinum is that its cheap and its cap system is especially good for avoiding dry-out. To me, the platinum preppy feels like a rounded pencil. I think its a good pen, but my reservation is that the plastic is a bit brittle on the preppy. I'd personally probably go with the Pilot Kakuno, or the more expensive Platinum prefonte, or if you're really worried about costs, the interesting and fraught world of Chinese fountain pens

> I would go a size up from what you normally prefer wrt to nib (if you are new, try M as F and EF are extremely scratchy IMHO).

This is a feature of all the Japanese pens - they tend to have a finer grind. The European and other pens (e.g., Lamy) are about what you expect.

> Finally, I don't love the metropolitan. Feels great in the hand but I always find myself reaching for the smooth writing I get from my Eco.

The Metropolitan is a love-or-hate pen for some people, due to hand feel. I personally like it. If you can hold one, that'd be best. I think a couple of things make the Metro a better beginning pen than the Eco, if you like how it feels in your hand. It's cheaper; its got a metal body and cap (can be banged around), its got better QC (The first Eco I was given had the infamous 'barrel crack'. The second just flat didn't write. I'm a bit miffed at the brand), It can take cartridges or its included converter-sac, and it is by far one of the easiest pens to tear down and clean. The Eco can be taken apart with its special wrench too, but people commonly crack it in the process.

I just wish pilot sold the nibs separately for repair, like Lamy does, of TWSBI does with their more expensive pens.

For the crowd around here: I'd also say that one of the joys of a fountain pen is that you can tune, smooth, and even grind your own nibs if you're that adventurous.

Commenting with the others: I'm a left-handed writer and an avid fountain pen user. It isn't so bad.

The best thing I can say is: try to learn to write under the line (under-hand) as opposed to hookwriting or sidewriting. Those make things pretty tough. If not, there are things you can try: Prefer extra-fine (EF) or fine (F) nibbed pens. Private Reserve and Noodler's make some fast-drying ink. This combo will often allow the ink to dry faster than your hand can get to it.

It’s just Whataboutism. What the DNC did or did not do is entirely irrelevant to the case, because the DNC is not who was standing before the grand jury.

“You could pin this on a large percentage of politicians”. Yes, please. It will in fact be good for the country. I don’t care what party they come from.

At a previous company I had a chance to sit down and talk with python developers across a number of groups, and a fun question was asked: Imagine Python 4 is another large breaking change on the scale of 2 to 3. What feature makes it worth it to you?

The most common and enthusiastic answer was: Packaging and distribution.

I think to say that "large numbers of python developers think packaging is bad and should be fixed" undersells the current sentiment. I think there are large numbers of python developers with boots on the ground who are _utterly sick to death_ of the problem and willing to accept drastic measures resulting inconsiderable suffering if just means it means the issue goes away. People are in other words, getting rather desperate and discontent.

Upstream needs to do a little soul searching and come to an understanding that whatever ideological rock they're chained to that is preventing some solution from emerging has a high chance of not being moored in the needs of reality.

> EU is frozen and claim so many people will die in Europe due to high energy prices.

This complaint is one that (jokingly) makes me ask if you're new around here. the Economist is almost pathologically pessimist. I sometimes think they should call themselves _The Cassandra_, as they are constantly forecasting doom over every scenario.

I enjoy how they summarize background information and the candor of their analysis, but when it gets time to make long-term predictions I tune them out because they're about 0-50 on the number of times I should have been walking knee deep through rivers of bodies and economic collapse.