Ariel Millennium Thornton @arielmt@computerfairi.es

TIL the `which` command is one of those commands everyone (including me) thinks is standard simply because it's everywhere in the Unix & unixlike worlds, but which really isn't, & is nowhere in POSIX.

LWN, "Debian's which hunt," 2021-10-28: https://lwn.net/Articles/874049/

TIL the POSIX-conformant "which" is `command -v`: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/command.html

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Web source: https://www.goodtechthings.com/pile-of-complexity/
Twitter source: https://twitter.com/forrestbrazeal/status/1628057409452122112
Did someone say "AIOps"?

Even if I did trust you as much as I trust my OS package manager, I can't trust that it will always be the real you on the other end of my link to you, and it's possible for an attacker to trick curl into giving one script to less and another script to bash. https://web.archive.org/web/20240228190305/https://www.idontplaydarts.com/2016/04/detecting-curl-pipe-bash-server-side/ Why set yourself up as a huge target like this?

With all the talk recently about making various forms of code safety national priorities, why in the world does any major compiler promoting built-in code safety features still think the official way to install it should be the anything but safe code delivery method curl-pipe-shell?

I really trust hallucinogenic computers masquerading as artificial intelligence to write software code unattended!

After all, they've recently proven themselves in lawyering unattended: https://www.forbes.com/sites/mollybohannon/2023/06/22/judge-fines-two-lawyers-for-using-fake-cases-from-chatgpt/

And billing unattended: https://fortune.com/2024/02/23/chatgpt-openai-new-york-city-lawyer-michael-cuddy-billing-rate/

And customer support unattended: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/air-canada-must-honor-refund-policy-invented-by-airlines-chatbot/

Nvidia CEO mistakes hallucinogenic computers for actual intelligence, says "AI" will take over coding, so kids shouldn't bother learning to code. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/jensen-huang-advises-against-learning-to-code-leave-it-up-to-ai

Has this billionaire idiot ever written so much as a "hello world" program that compiled & didn't segfault?

Do colleges teach source code version control & configuration change management in their computer programming courses?

When I went through college, all I got was a half-day lecture, half-day lab, & no test of any kind, on RCS. I may be old, but this was still recent enough that all the cool FOSS kids adopted Git & forgot the BitKeeper fiasco.

(In reality, `info ascii` just steals the `man ascii` output and gives it to you in GNU Info's too-special hypertext browser instead of a normal pager like `more`, `less`, or `most`.)

The difference in documentation quality:

`man ascii` gives you a single text file from section 7 of all the ASCII 7-bit codes, organized in easy tables by octal, hex, decimal, & binary values. Printing it is 3 pages.

`info ascii` gives you a book helpfully divided into 20 chapters of 12 sections each in an unique hypertext interface that, if marshaled into a printable form, yields a college textbook tome that still doesn't tell you what you need because it's buried.
:V