spiesd

Too bad, indeed. It's well-defined in javascript (and thus, appropriate in this admittedly niche context). It's non-portable across different regex engines, yes.

If you think of it more as a meditative time, putting it on your calendar seems to make perfect sense. Simple quiet off time is really easy to skip. Not work, not chores, not take a nap, not make dinner, not read HN, not play with the kids. Just sit and not do anything and not feel the need to do anything for an hour.

To be sure, I do a whole bunch of nothing throughout the day, but that's usually just in avoidance of "productive" work. I don't feel meaningfully better having wandered off to get a coffee and stare out the window for a few minutes; in fact, I sometimes feel more pressure to get back to the grind, as if I'd wasted that time.

I'm interested in the general thrust, but this article is sloppy at best.

> Check digit: The final digit is essentially used to validate the prior 14 digits with an algorithm. Similar digits exist in other types of identifier codes, such as the Universal Product Code (UPC) and the International Standard Book Number (ISBN). The algorithm that the mobile industry uses, the Luhn algorithm, is also used for social security numbers and credit card numbers.

No, just no. SSNs (in the US) don't have check digits.

Also:

> Then there are network identifier numbers—the MAC address bestowed upon you by your WiFi network or mobile provider

Huh? This nonsense ("bestowed upon") serves only to confuse. This is bad tech journalism: it fails to inform the masses, and is transparently worthless to experts.

A few come to mind...

The executive order (and associated DoC/NTIA RFC) was long, and dense with both legal references and political platitudes. Not great reading, (though the EO got a good amount of discussion here). It's unfortunate, but less than surprising that it didn't make actual news outlets.

It seems complicated now, and many would like to see how things play out a little more before committing the time to deciding things. (I think that's a bad idea; regardless of the revolutionary tech, it seems wise to begin governmental thought early.)

It's kinda been buried in an otherwise heavy news cycle since the end of October of last year, AI and otherwise. I assume that wasn't intentional, but it seems hard to hide something so big at a better time.

And though I hate to say it, I suspect: apathy. Both traditional from the bottom ("too far off, unfixable, can't do anything about it"), and from the top ("once we get too big to fuck with, we just won't give a damn about any changes they try to make anyway").

Huh. I hadn't checked it, but plain mkfs does create ext2. Interesting. I agree, ext4 seems a sensible baseline today.

This is completely orthogonal, and not particularly relevant. That said, I didn't know this was the case. In fact, I'd assume an unspecified mkfs would complain these days.

1) mkfs is a userspace utility. Its defaults have no consideration for which kernel driver implements this interface; I'd bet a dollar that mkfs has been hitting the ext4 driver for ages. 2) As stated in sister comments, support for actual ext2 filesystems is unaffected. 3) Using a very simple fs by default seems like a good thing. FAT (variants) has survived forever by being dirt-simple, despite its faults. 4) Who in the world doesn't specify options to mkfs? It's one of the few operations that really doesn't have "sane defaults".

Is there a "better" default fs? I dunno. I've looked at a few, but most seem... troubled. So many trade-offs.

Genuinely curious: how do other languages manage? Surely societies adopt words, idioms, shorthand phrases that haven't (yet) been officially sanctioned? There's plenty professional jargon that, while not "proper" English, is understood within certain contexts. There are also, to my old ears' chagrin, plenty of teenage neologisms that come into common usage, either through popularity or attrition.

Do other languages remain static? What happens when actually new things happen? Does "CD-ROM" just get integrated in whole? Translated? Rejected?

While I find many "new" english words unacceptable for my use, I wouldn't personally declare them "not English words". Moreover, if there were an authority over authentic english (especially American english) word existence and usage, I get the feeling that most would laugh said authority out of the room.

Agreed on the general diffusion of knowledge; I think it's probably a step in the right direction for various cultures to have some basic understanding of those with which they are not personally familiar. We Americans shouldn't count on the shortstop being a secret to the world, nor should we be willfully ignorant of things that are popularly known elsewhere.

Shibboleths, like all language, evolve. Some die off, become ineffective or unuseful. Others spring up. Does tiktok live here, now? I fear that I would fail a modern test, but I try to keep up.