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Cake day: December 30th, 2023

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  • The POSIX standard is more portable. If you are writing scripts for your system, you can use the full features in the main man pages. If you are writing code that you want to run on other Linux systems, maybe with reduced feature sets like a tiny embedded computer or alternates to gnu tools like alpine linux, or even other unixes like the BSDs, you will have a better time if you limit yourself to POSIX-compatible features and options – any POSIX-compatible Unix-like implementation should be able to run POSIX-compliant code.

    This is also why many shell scripts will call #!/bin/sh instead of #!/bin/bash – sh is more likely to be available on tinier systems than bash.

    If you are just writing scripts and commands for your own purposes, or you know they will only be used on full-feature distributions, it’s often simpler and more comfortable to use all of the advanced features available on your system.












  • To reference a movie in common vocabulary is to bring it up in conversation.

    Referencing in programming terms like C refers to assigning a value to a variable. You can re-assign those variables to new values and then de-reference (read) the new value.

    They are conflating the common meaning of reference with the much more obscure programming definition (obscure at least among non-programmers).

    Star wars = “no, I am your father” (reference) Jaws = movie about hunting killer shark (reference) Star wars = movie about hunting killer shark (OP is pretending we can treat movie references like variable references and re-assigns the star wars variable to mean something else) “Hey, have you seen star wars? The movie about hunting a killer shark?” (De-referencing your newly re-assigned variable)





  • Reddit used to have an open API. A lot of mobile apps sprung up to access reddit over the years, with different features. Reddit gained a lot of loyal members through users of these apps, but couldn’t make ad revenue off them. Reddit decided last summer to start charging a lot of money to these app developers to continue using the API. A few of the apps started a for-pay subscription model to continue operating, but many just shut down their apps. Many redditors and Reddit mods revolted, because these apps made the site usable (some of them offered advanced mod tools, etc). We protested, shut down subreddits temporarily or permanently, deleted our accounts, moved to new platforms (like lemmy/kbin), etc. This was basically a move to maximize their ad revenue while Reddit positions itself for an IPO. It was really not cool.