But if someone creates a file called HEAD, should it overwrite a file called head?

That shouldn’t matter to the “nontechnical” end-user at all. To the nontechnical user, even the abstraction of “creating a file” has largely gone away. You create a document, and changes you make to it are automatically persisted to storage, either local or cloud.

Only the technical command-line user cares about whether /usr/bin/HEAD and /usr/bin/head are the same path. And only in a specific circumstance — such as the early days of Mac OS X, where the Macintosh and Unix cultures collided — could the bug that I described emerge.

I recall a case-insensitivity bug from the early days of Mac OS X.

There are three command-line utilities that are distributed as part of the Perl HTTP library: GET, HEAD, and POST. These are for performing the HTTP operations of those names from the command line.

But there’s also a POSIX-standard utility for extracting the first few lines of a text file. It’s called head.

I think you see where I’m going with this. HEAD and head are the same name in a case-insensitive filesystem such as the classic Mac filesystem. They are different names on a Unix-style filesystem.

Installing /usr/bin/HEAD from libwww-perl onto a Mac with the classic filesystem overwrote /usr/bin/head and broke various things.

I recommend picking up Graham Hutton’s short text Programming in Haskell, Second Edition. Even if you don’t end up using Haskell in “real work” (and you might!) it will teach you a remarkable number of things about how functional programming works.

The term “open source software” was coined specifically to refer to software licensing that recognizes a particular set of freedoms. It is not a generic term for source-available software, and never was.

One of the freedoms of open source is “no discrimination against fields of endeavor.”

Calling the Hippocratic license family “open source” is inaccurate, since its entire goal is to discriminate against certain fields of endeavor.

It’s better described as a sort of source-available license.

Remember when a “pop-up blocker” was a browser plug-in because the browsers didn’t yet consider it a competitive feature?

(Well, okay, Opera and iCab did.)

Number of ads my OS shows me: 0

Mother mother duck

Oh, shove it up your heck!

As an individual? Don’t worry about it; show up at your local protest on the 19th.

To be clear, I mean people who praise Hitler, get swastika tattoos, blame everything on a Jewish Conspiracy, etc.

You know, Nazis.

Musks and Verses?

Not really. Nazis are scum and deserve to be kicked out.

To be clear, network costs represent a tiny fraction of WMF’s expenses. Much of WMF’s budget goes to social programs, not technical upkeep.

It was found in alum, so it should really have been alumium all along.

They Might Be Giants, “Your Racist Friend”

Ever play Q*bert?

This goes back to the days of AOL chat rooms, where they shut down forums for breast cancer survivors because they said “breast”.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/1995/12/02/america-online-admits-error-in-banning-word-breast/

You don’t need one. Translators are good at their job.

🦊

Fascists lie.