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.

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.

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/

Woo hoo!

Fascists lie.

As a reminder, Eich was turfed from Mozilla for joining an anti-LGBT hate campaign (and thus alienating a whole lot of developers, sponsors, and users); and his So Brave browser pushed NFTs and stole money via referral fraud.

Congratulations … you’ve trained a generation of junior product managers.

First step: Find a country with a navy competent to defend your undersea cables.

Case in point, Microsoft’s water use shot up from 6.4 million cubic meters in 2022 to 7.8 in 2023, in large part due to the “construction of more data centers.”

By way of comparison, the California almond industry uses 3.5 billion cubic meters of water per year. Describing datacenters as using “astronomical amounts of water” is a plain and simple lie.

Moreover, datacenters can be cooled with water that’s not suitable for most other uses. Google’s Finland datacenter is cooled with seawater, for example.

Zuckerberg has a moral defect. Evil is not a medical problem.

I trust my city government a hell of a lot more than I trust the incoming federal administration.

If it’s unified under the federal government, then an asshole president can mess with it.

If it’s distributed, with states and major cities having their own instances, then it’s more asshole-resistant.

• The compiler hates you
• The compiler sees nothing wrong with your code and is just giving error messages to look busy
• The compiler was written by a maniac with a semicolon fixation
• The compiler could optimize your code, but it’s just not feeling it today
• The compiler wonders why you can’t match braces right like your brother does
• The compiler had a torrid affair with a Perl interpreter in 2006
• The compiler likes big butts and cannot lie
• The compiler wants to grow up to be an IDE but hasn’t told its parents they need to send it to GUI school yet
• The compiler reads Nazis on Twitter but only to make fun of them
• The compiler works for the Servants of Cthulhu

“What the user needed” / “What management demanded”

Good catch! Typo. Fixed.

Regex is good for a few very specific things, and sysadmins used to use it for goddamn everything. If all your server logs are in lightly-structured text files on a small number of servers, being able to improvise regex is damn useful for tracking down server problems. Just write a shell loop that spawns an ssh logging into each server and running grep over the log files, to look for that weird error.

These days, if you need to crunch production server logs you probably need to improvise in SQL and jq and protobufs or systemd assmonkery or something.

But if you actually need a parser, for goodness sake use a parser combinator toolkit, don’t roll your own, especially not with regex. Describing your input language in plain Haskell is much nicer than kludging it.

(This is the “totally serious software engineering advice” forum, right?)

Whatever you do, don’t get in a time machine back to 1998 and become a Unix sysadmin.

(Though we didn’t have CL-PPCRE then. It’s really the best thing that ever happened to regex.)