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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.












  • When I first heard of TDS I thought it was about his deranged stans and I thought that made sense.

    Then I was told it was about all the people who lost their minds because of his election and defined themselves purely oppositionally to him, and I thought that made sense.

    Then I observed that it’s really just used as a slur against anyone who doesn’t like him or his policies, and that makes sense too because that’s the ultimate death of every social critique that ends up promulgated by conservatives.




  • Hypocrisy, politicization, hellfire, and lack of community I guess.

    If religion is supposed to be the opium of the masses, it should at least leave me feeling better after church. The rising ideology was naive and attracted narcissists, and there was less and less space to hold on to the original beliefs. It started looking less like a refuge from the world and more of the world. It wasn’t perfect before but there was more flexibility and grace at least.



  • I think it’s uncontroversial to say that porn is bad for children, and I would say that social media is bad for children as well. I think as one matures and becomes an adult both become less bad, less fraught, but the difference between the two of Is that one with one of them you sometimes want to be anonymous, and the other one you almost always want to be anonymous.

    I mean I’m against requiring affirmative identity verification online anyway, even as a solution to keeping children away from things that are unhealthy for them. You can’t sacrifice the freedom of adults on the altar of protecting children.