hallettj

If I’m doing more than one cracking two together is best. For the last one, countertop.

I get the flat, inside-the-sink idea. But I’d want to clean either way, and I clean the counters more often than I clean the sides of the sink.

Oh this is just the thing for playing bard, and casting “vicious mockery” several times per combat

The justification for invading Iraq was a claim that they were developing nuclear weapons. It was well known at the time that the evidence was flimsy, and that even if true it was a flimsy excuse for an invasion. The main piece of evidence was an intercepted shipment of aluminum tubes that were soon shown to have nothing to do with a nuclear program. (See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_aluminum_tubes). That one is not a conspiracy theory.

This is exactly why we have Reversed Polish Notation. When will people learn?

Oh goddammit! Why doesn’t PEMDAS prepare us for unary negation??

The problem is that the way PEMDAS is usually taught multiplication and division are supposed to have equal precedence. The acronym makes it look like multiplication comes before division, but you’re supposed to read MD and as one step. (The same goes for addition and subtraction so AS is also supposed to be one step.) It this example the division is left of the multiplication so because they have equal precedence (according to PEMDAS) the division applies first.

IMO it’s bad acronym design. It would be easier if multiplication did come before division because that is how everyone intuitively reads the acronym.

Maybe it should be PE(M/D)(A/S). But that version is tricky to pronounce. Or maybe there shouldn’t be an acronym at all.

The parentheses step only covers expressions inside parentheses. That’s 2 + 2 in this case. The times-2 part is outside the parentheses so it’s evaluated in a different step.

The comment from subignition explains that the phone’s answer, 16, is what you get by strictly following PEMDAS: the rule is that multiplication and division have the same precedence, and you evaluate them from left-to-right.

The calculator uses a different convention where either multiplication has higher priority than division, or where “implicit” multiplication has higher priority (where there is no multiply sign between adjacent expressions).

Radium produces the most radiation by miles. The plutonium gives off some alpha radiation that won’t hurt you if you don’t eat it. (Eye protection would be a good idea I suppose.) I don’t remember what U-235 emits but I don’t think it’s a huge amount.

And also asking, how does it compare to a high-yield savings account?

This is what I use. Or if you don’t need image/PDF embedding or mobile support then VimWiki is a similar solution that is FOSS.

Wow, this is one of the most complicated Snopes analyses I’ve seen. But it seems like the statement is accurate with caveats. If the brightest component of Polaris is probably 50 million years old what was there before wasn’t really Polaris. And then it doesn’t make a difference whether sharks have been around for 450 million or 195 million years.

I feel like I’m in the same situation - although I haven’t done as much reading as you have. I want a movement with concrete objectives to rally behind, but I’m not sure where to find it. Besides wanting things to be better, real wages have been flat for decades while cost of living has been going up. That makes people look more and more for some kind of dramatic change. I worry that fascists have been more organized than socialists in presenting people with an idea that feels like dramatic change. (It doesn’t matter if fascism won’t make anything better if people believe it when they lie and say it will.)

From what I’ve heard the school of socialism that most speaks to me is “economic revisionism”, despite that term being invented as a pejorative. The idea is that a series of reforms can be implemented within a democratic-capitalist system to shift to a democratic-socialist one. I think that although it has flaws we have a sturdy democratic political system, and we would lose a lot by toppling it. If revolutionary socialists or anarchists had ever come up with a comprehensive plan for a better system I might think differently; but everything I’ve heard of or read about is very hand-wavy. My understanding is that both Marx-Engels and Bakunin had ideas something like: we can’t predict exactly what the better future will be like, but it will emerge naturally if we eliminate barriers inhibiting better human behavior. I’m not willing to risk throwing out what stability we have in the hope that something better will emerge if we believe hard enough. I think the next fight is socioeconomic, not political.

I’ve heard arguments like, “incremental reforms will never work because capitalists will chip away at them to take back any power they lose.” I’m not currently sold on that argument because I think you’re likely to have an unstable equilibrium of assholes making power grabs in any system. I’ve also heard “capitalism is fundamentally broken”, but at this point in time I’m more optimistic about fixing the broken parts incrementally than about starting from scratch because I don’t know what the replacement would be.

What I’d really like is a discussion of what reforms would make things better for everybody which would hopefully lead to a concrete plan that people can point to when talking to politicians, protesting, striking, etc. Or even better would be a plan that is already formulated that I can start pointing to. That might include reforms to spread wealth more evenly like a wealth tax, closing tax loopholes, raising the minimum wage, more social services. It could include political reforms to help pry power away from the wealthy such as campaign finance reform, stricter rules around gerrymandering and polling place access, more regulation on politicized mass media. Ultimately I think what would be required to clinch the shift from capitalism to socialism could be to democratize capital which might be accomplished by ideas like requiring companies over a certain size to have democratic governance models and employee ownership, or limiting the amount of capital investment a single individual can make. I’m sure there is work on these ideas, but I don’t know where to look. I want to hear a discussion about what people more knowledgeable than me think.

A plan that caught my eye at one point was the book One Way Forward by Lawrence Lessig which Lessig seemed to want to turn into a political movement. I’m not sure what the state of that is.

Anyway, economic revisionism is not as exciting as the idea of tearing down everything bad, and replacing it with something perfect. But until I find an argument with an amazing new idea, it’s what I think is the most practical solution.

This is an interesting idea! When I was learning Nix, and feeling frustrated, I often thought that a type-checked language would help with discoverability. But it seems like it might be difficult to combine strong type-checking with Nix expressions’ use of lazy self-reference. So with Garn you get the type-checking, but lose the laziness. I’m interested to see how that goes.

Thanks for the tip about nu_scripts, those look handy!

The expand command is nice. I don’t see how to use it to my mv command work. But that’s not a huge deal.

So maybe this is too much of a kludge, but I happened to see that you can define custom sub-commands to extend existing commands. You can use that to reproduce your familiar command:

def "ls -lrt" [] {
  ls | sort-by modified | reverse
}

Of course this does not capture the usual composability of those switches.

Well I might be hooked. It didn’t take me long to reproduce the niceties in Nushell I’m used to from my zsh config. Some of the important parts were setting up zoxide with a key binding for interactive mode, switching on vi key bindings, setting up my starship prompt.

Home Manager is preconfigured for the above integrations which made things easier.

One feature that is missing that I like to use is curly brace expansion to produce multiple arguments. For example,

$ mv *.{jpg,jpeg}

Unless there is a way to do something like this in Nushell that I haven’t seen yet?

Something I enjoyed was automating a sequence of steps I’ve been running a lot lately due to a program that often partially crashes,

def nkill [name_substring] {
  ps | where name =~ $name_substring | each { |p| kill $p.pid; $p }
}

I realized after writing this that I basically recreated killall -r. But it’s nice that it was so easy to make a custom command to do a very specific thing. And my version gives me a nice report of exactly what was killed.

Thanks for making this post OP! When I’ve heard mentions of Nushell I’m the past I think I conflated it with Powershell, and wrote it off as a Windows thing. (Maybe because it’s introduced as being “like Powershell”.) But now that I see that it’s cross-platform I’m enjoying digging into it!

I think the best way to get an idea is to look at feature lists for fancy shells like zsh or fish. But in short there are a number of things a good shell can do to help to execute commands faster and more easily. Stuff like autocompletions which make you faster, and also make things more discoverable; fuzzy searching/matching; navigating command history; syntax highlighting which helps to spot errors, and helps to understand the syntax of the command you’re writing.

I have a recurring task called “rotate butter” scheduled once a month which seems about right to me.

Neat! And for anyone not familiar Lib.rs is a package repository, described as an alternative [frontend] to Crates.io.