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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: March 24th, 2022

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  • Yeah I’m okay with the basic navigation options. The primary point is that man pages do look like they had written by someone who does not do technical writing. Whether that’s someone coming from a law background, programming, or whatever.

    It’s not written for an end user who wants to know how to use the tools they have available. It will tell you what a command “does”, sometimes, but it doesn’t explain itself. It presumes a certain amount of pre-existing knowledge, or familiarity with the syntax of man writers.

    For another example, the man for ls repeatedly lists options referencing “implied” entries without ever explaining what “implied” means in this context. It presupposes that the reader knows what that term means. I know what an implication is in an English class, and the antonym for “implied” is “explicit”, but in a man page? No clue. Not like there’s reference to or examples of “explicit” entries to contrast with “implied” entries. You just have to know what it means in context, or figure it out some other way.


  • I don’t think you get what I mean.

    I don’t mean that man itself isn’t functional, I mean the way most man pages are written isn’t clear enough to communicate how to use the programs they refer to.

    I’d include the man page for man in that, and I’d encourage anyone else to look at it from the eyes of someone who can follow written instructions and ask “How does this manual/help file compare to others I have read?”.

    So, for example, in the examples, it says:

    man -a intro Display, in succession, all of the available intro manual pages contained within the manual. It is possible to quit between successive displays or skip any of them.

    Those two lines are the only place within man’s man page (at least the one you get from man man) that use the string “intro”. What is an intro in this context? Guess you got to run it to find out.

    What is -a for? About 200+ lines down there is a two sentence explanation.

    The first sentence tells you how man normally behaves, saying: “By default, man will exit after displaying the most suitable manual page it finds.” This sentence is unclear (“When does man exit after displaying the most suitable manual page it finds? When I run man ls I see the manual for ls on my screen until I press ‘q’ to ‘quit’ out of it.”) and not immediately connected to the purpose of the flag/option.

    The second sentence says: “Using this option forces man to display all the manual pages with names that match the search criteria.” This is a lot clearer, and my only complaint about it can be that it’s not the first sentence in the explanation.


  • Mostly true, but…

    Replacing clip art, generic filler from Getty images, and other hand-crafted slop with machine-made slop for things like slideshows, YouTube thumbnails, and other applications where the image isn’t meant to convey something actually existing from the primary content, that I think is fine.

    Of course it should be based on free software (such as AGPL) and use only freely provided or public domain inputs.

    Of course it shouldn’t be used to misrepresent its outputs as produced by, authorized, or of people that it is not.

    But what we have right now is an another sort of enclosure of the cultural commons, blended with plagerism-by-another-name. If there are already terms for this sort of misappropriation, I can’t think of them right now.







  • I appreciate your perspective, and I agree that we should probably be more concerned with how the company functions than the personal character of the CEO .

    Sam Walton was a hardworking, amiable, humble man by all accounts. And even when he was alive Walmart the company was cutting throats.

    At the same time, if a CEO deeply ingrains himself in the political process, I can probably take a pass on his products even if they are marginally better. So these days Musk is doing so much damage to the functioning of the US government that even if Teslas were good I wouldn’t buy one.

    The Chikfila guy on the other hand was just donating to a few discriminatory “Christian” charities last I checked but stopped trying to change policy, so…as fast food shops go it’s actually not too bad even if I don’t prefer to eat there.

    Starbucks…evil CEO, but preemptively boycotting before the organized shops strike doesn’t help the workers.

    Brave…has had too many fuckups for my taste. On the rare occasion that I need a privacy focused Chromium-based browser I just use Chromium with uBlock Origin for the one website I need to visit.