/dev/chat

Faheem Mitha

12:12

Folks, someone just posted this in Seasoned Advice - it's not fun reading but quite informative: medium.com/@yonatanzunger/trial-balloon-for-a-coup-e024990891d5

Stephen Kitt

@FaheemMitha it's worth reading this to put things in perspective: twitter.com/Cato_of_Utica/status/826298974361501702

or tompepinsky.com/2017/01/30/…

Faheem Mitha

12:36

@StephenKitt I don't know about perspective, but this is scary. Without me reading people's columns.

Stephen Kitt

@FaheemMitha I agree it's scary, but it's impossible to know whether it's true, and there are other possible explanations

(not trying to minimise the badness here)

Faheem Mitha

@StephenKitt Impossible to know what is true?

Kusalananda

@FaheemMitha That's one of the goals of propaganda (in general). To sow uncertainty, to "let people make up their own minds" (preferably without them knowing the facts, or with filtered facts, or with made up facts).

Faheem Mitha

@Kusalananda I'm not following. Are you referring to the link I posted?

Stephen Kitt

@FaheemMitha impossible to know what motivations result in the behaviour we're seeing

read the Pepinsky piece

Faheem Mitha

12:48

@StephenKitt Oh, right. I'm not really concerned about motivations. The actions are scary enough.

Kusalananda

@FaheemMitha You have (at least) two teams here, and they are going to be afraid of each other and try to make the other look bad. They will both say scary things about what will happen if the other team does <whatever>.

Stephen Kitt

@FaheemMitha the whole "trial balloon" interpretation depends on the motivations

Faheem Mitha

@Kusalananda By teams you mean the Republicans and Democrats?

Kusalananda

I think it's a bit larger than that.

Stephen Kitt

@FaheemMitha it feels more like "the Trump administration" and "everyone else" now

Faheem Mitha

12:49

I'm no fan of the Dems, but they're not the ones who just issued an insane immigration ban.

@StephenKitt I hope so. It looks like the Republican Party is still backing him for now.

Posting the Yonatan Zunger link doesn't mean I agree with what he said. But he posted a bunch of informative links. Some of which I was not aware of.

Presumably you're aware the Acting Attorney General was just fired for refusing to obey orders.

(And good for her, btw. If that needs to be said.)

Kusalananda

She was fired for "betraying" the DoJ. Now that's a word I don't like the sound of. We have neo-Nazis in Sweden using that on social media far too often.

Stephen Kitt

@Kusalananda and the new AAG said he was pleased to serve the president

when the oath is to the constitution

...

Faheem Mitha

@Kusalananda It's nice to see public servants standing up for the law. It's not always the case.

In the US, or anywhere else. Good for Ms. Yates.

Kusalananda

But I also don't like the word "un-American" (used about the law), for the same reason. "Indecent" is what it should be called.

Faheem Mitha

@Kusalananda How about "obscene"?

Kusalananda

12:57

@FaheemMitha Whatever word that doesn't drip with nationalism but with some sort of human value.

terdon

@Kusalananda Nobody likes the word un-american. It's an awful, meaningless, purposefully obscure, made-up word that reeks of nationalism.

Faheem Mitha

The word "un-American" is generally considered to smack of totalitarianism, but that doesn't stop people from using it.

Funny to see a creep like Giuliani speaking out against the Adminstration. Shows how bad things are.

terdon

Wait, what, he did? I thought he spoke out for the executive order, not against it.

Faheem Mitha

@terdon I may be misunderstanding what he said.

thehill.com/homenews/administration/…

"I’ll tell you the whole history of it: When he first announced it, he said ‘Muslim ban,'" Giuliani said on Fox News.
"He called me up, he said, ‘Put a commission together, show me the right way to do it legally.’"

Still sounds pretty bad to me.

It should be easy to find the clip.

terdon

@FaheemMitha Bad, sure. But for you, not for Guiliani. Nothing there suggests that he doesn't agree with it.

(Bad for me too, of course; just not for little ole Rudy)

Faheem Mitha

13:04

@terdon Hmm. Good point.

terdon

Remember, you need to start from the assumption that all Muslims are, by definition, bad, bad people who want to kill us in our sleep and destroy our way of life.

Faheem Mitha

But I venture to think that the orange menace would not be happy to hear him say things like Muslim Ban publicly. That's kind of what I meant by - speak against.

terdon

Orange menace?

Faheem Mitha

@terdon I'm adapting Anthony's terminology. It's good stuff.

terdon

I'm sure it is. But who does that refer to?

Faheem Mitha

13:07

@terdon The current President of the United States.

I can also offer "King Pumpkinhead".

terdon

@FaheemMitha Why would he be anything but happy to hear someone referring to a Muslim ban publicly? That was one of his main campaign promises.

This is not a secret.

Here, for a random example I just found:

edition.cnn.com/2015/12/07/politics/…

Faheem Mitha

@terdon I guess I'm coming late to this party. Excuse my ignorance.

terdon

I envy it. . .

Faheem Mitha

I live on the other side of the world now, otherwise no doubt I would have spent the last year as frightened as everyone else.

Kusalananda

I don't know why terrorist attacks are such a big thing to be worried about. You're much more likely to die from a car crash, and just as badly. In the US, you also run a much higher risk of being shot by a fellow American. The fun thing is that being shot by someone wielding a lawfully purchased gun is easily preventable, while car crashes can't as easily be prevented.

Terrorist attacks will happen for as long as a leader pisses people off (alienating, exploiting, etc.). That's preventable too, of course.

terdon

13:18

@Kusalananda Because they make a very convenient bogey-man that can be used to set up an us vs them culture.

Which is not to say they are not atrocities, mind you. They are just also used politically.

Kusalananda

@terdon ... which further fuels the terrorism.

terdon

yep

Kusalananda

It's the general short-sightedness of that kind of politics that I don't like. You can't stop a disease by getting rid of the symptoms. You have to get rid of the cause of it. And the cause of it most likely isn't "he hit me first".

It's more likely "I made him angry".

terdon

Exactly.

Or, to be precise, I've been making him angry for the past few hundred years.

Kusalananda

Trump doesn't seem to possess the personality to be able to say/see that though. To him, everything else is doing the wrong thing and he's doing the right thing.

Related: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auriga_(slave)

terdon

13:31

@Kusalananda Sadly, nobody who's ever been in power in the US has been able to see that as far as I know. Or, if they have, they haven't acted on it.

Kusalananda

@terdon Well, for other power-hungry people around them, it would be a sign of weakness.

Faheem Mitha

@terdon Actually, one striking thing about terrorist attacks is how few there have been, historically.

terdon

Yep. But they cause a hell of a lot of pain, so they make a lot of noise.

Faheem Mitha

For example, there seems to have been remarkably little terrorist activity against Imperial Britain, as far as I can tell. No Indian counterattacks or anything that I'm aware of.

Kusalananda

quora.com/…

Faheem Mitha

13:47

@Kusalananda I meant outside India. It can't be a terrorist attack inside India. By definition, it would be resistance.

Kusalananda

@FaheemMitha Yes, funny how words work.

Stephen Kitt

@FaheemMitha so really the only thing that would count by your definition is attacks on the British Isles themselves, correct?

only the IRA did that

and then the London bombings

Kusalananda

@StephenKitt "remember remember the 5th of november", if you want to go further back.

Stephen Kitt

@Kusalananda ah yes indeed

Kusalananda

"The only man to enter the parliament with honest intent" ;-)

terdon

15:21

> je vous hack lol je suis en bts

@StephenKitt bts?

Stephen Kitt

@terdon a short undergraduate course

Brevet de technicien supérieur en France

Le brevet de technicien supérieur (BTS) est un diplôme national de l'enseignement supérieur français, créé en 1962 (décret du 26 février 1962). Il se prépare normalement en deux années après l'obtention du baccalauréat ou d'un diplôme de niveau IV dans une section de technicien supérieur (STS). Il s'agit d'un diplôme de niveau III. L'obtention du diplôme se fait sur examen. À la différence du baccalauréat, il n'y a pas d'épreuve de rattrapage pour ceux qui obtiennent une note légèrement inférieure à la moyenne requise (10/20), mais une simple commission permettant le rattrapage des étudiants proches...

terdon

Ah. Thanks.

Damn though, is there anything in the French educational system that doesn't have the word supérieur tacked on?

Stephen Kitt

@terdon everything after the Baccalauréat is "enseignement supérieur" so...

terdon

I know, I know. It's just all the écoles normales sup etc that bug the pedant in me.

So, which is it, normal or superior?

Stephen Kitt

ha ha yes

but French normal is superior of course ;-)

terdon

15:35

Naturellement!

:P

Kusalananda

15:52

Developers without Borders: The Global Stack Overflow Network

David Robinson on January 30, 2017

A while back I encountered a developer who shared a story of a positive experience on Stack Overflow. He'd asked a question late one Sunday on Labor Day weekend, and been delighted that he'd quickly gotten multiple responses. He said he was impressed that someone else in San Francisco was also "burning the midnight oil," and noted it as a testament to the work ethic in Silicon Valley.

2

Faheem Mitha

@StephenKitt Well, imo attacks on the British in India by Indians during the Occupation would have been resistance. But that mostly didn't happen. Outside India it would just have been violence, again imo. But as far as I know, that didn't happen at all.

There was the 1857 revolt, granted. Which was a nasty affair. But also very short-lived.

user367890

17:11

Is there a tool that can give line number from byte offset?

Stephen Kitt

@user367890 you should ask that as a question on the main site

terdon

@user367890 But please make sure to clarify. Ideally, give us an example file and the output you would like to see from it.

derobert

18:13

@user367890 cut -b 1-«N» | wc -l would be the obvious. Please ask a question, though, after considering the difference between bytes and characters. Some characters (like, say, œ) could be multiple bytes—and lines only really make sense with characters. (IOW: the command I gave does exactly what you asked for, but probably not what you want. Unless you can guarantee only single-byte characters—i.e., ASCII or legacy ISO-8859-x encoding)

Kusalananda

18:30

@derobert That cuts a column out at the specified bytes offsets.

It turns out that part of the file is a binary blob, so I wonder if it's solvable anyway.

derobert

@Kusalananda right, I guess that doesn't really make sense does it...

the part about bytes vs. characters does though

I guess head -c would make more sense

@user367890 head -c «N» would make more sense there as @Kusalananda pointed out my use of cut was rather silly

phk

22:35

Experimented around with bash its parser and came across something interesting

probably useless, but might work in other shells as well (not tested yet)

Create an executable (e.g. shell script) in the PATH with the name {

and then experiment around with various invalid shell expressions and if you are lucky this shell script with run

e.g. it works for foo=bar { else }

certainly no shellshock but still a bit of fun, goes to show that parsing shell seems to be a bit like parsing HTML tag soup…

Gilles

@phk yes, that's the way it's supposed to work

{ is a keyword, like if, do, etc.

it only has a special meaning when it's the first word of a command

when there's an assignment before it, it isn't the first word

(plus a few other contexts, RTFM/RTFPOSIX if you want the gritty details)

terdon

@Gilles OK, but why doesn't the shell choke on the closing }?

$ foo=bar  }
bash: }: command not found
$ foo=bar { else }
foo

Gilles

@terdon Because } is also a keyword.

terdon

(here, { is just a script with echo foo)

Gilles

@terdon print out $1 and $2 in that script

terdon

22:41

@Gilles Right

I see.

Gilles

Here, {, else and } are all ordinary words, so this executes the command called { with the first argument else and the second argument }

Contrast with ) which is recognized by the parser, and with [ which is a builtin.

Why all these different things? I dunno. Ask Stephen Bourne or Ken Thompson.

phk

But why should it be ordinary when it has a special meaning at the beginning of a line?

terdon

@Gilles Is this because () is also used in various shell constructs such as $() etc, while { } is only used to denote a subshell?

Gilles

@phk Because you can write echo if, and if is just an ordinary word.

terdon

And functions though

Gilles

22:44

@terdon { is also used in ${…}, which predates $(…)

terdon

@phk I guess it's for the same reason that ls ls will attempt to run ls on the file called ls instead of executing ls twice. First place is semantically important.

phk

but with echo if something becomes a parameter and not something to run

Gilles

and with echo { it's exactly the same thing

terdon

Yes, but I can't do foo=bar ( as I can do foo=bar { if they're script names.

You said it's because one is recognized by the parser while the other is not. That's what I was trying to grok.

Gilles

because ( is not a keyword, it's a special bit of syntax

terdon

22:46

$ type {
{ is a shell keyword
$ type (
bash: syntax error near unexpected token `newline'

I see

Gilles

The historical reason may have been that the original Thompson shell didn't have a parser as such, it executed each line in turn.

Control structures were implemented by jumping around in the shell process's memory, I think.

So if was a command like any other. Except that it worked by manipulating the shell's memory rather than by operating in its own memory space.

So, hypothesis: { dates back from that era, whereas ( came later.

terdon

Is there any way I can execute a script called (?

terdon@oregano ~ $ ./scripts/(
bash: syntax error near unexpected token `newline'
terdon@oregano ~ $ bash scripts/(
bash: syntax error near unexpected token `('

Gilles

So ( got proper parsing but { kept its strange syntax for backward compatibility.

@terdon sure: \( or '(' or "("

terdon

Yep, just found it

Gilles

what you can't do is execute an alias called (

terdon

22:49

(it helps if you make the script executable first terdon, you idiot)

Gilles

I'm not sure about functions, some shells allow special characters in function names but not all shells and not all characters

terdon

Heh, thanks @phk and Gilles, a nice nugget of new knowledge to take to bed with me. Good night!

phk

I still stand by my tag soup comparison, for such keywords the rule shouldn't be: "Huh, I have no other meaning for this keyword here, I will just try to execute this alias/function/executable."

Especially when the user has numerous ways of making explicitly clear if he/she would want to run something with such a name. Oh and good night to you too, terdon.

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