palordrolap

That’s just a symptom of moral prescriptivism, which in turn is a symptom of otherwise impotent desire for control over a weird and scary world.

That doesn’t mean they’re making good choices, but it does explain why they’re making them.

I was going to suggest putting something in the water that would discourage swimming, but I guess it needs to be worse than whatever’s already in there… and not kill the wildlife. That’s a fine line if it exists at all.

bind 'set completion-ignore-case on' might be your friend in Bash. It won’t help in scripts and GUIs though, so you’d still have to deal with that.

There are ways to write functions that pick the right option intelligently, but that’s asking for trouble. One day something will create a better match for your guess and then things will go wrong, e.g. your script intelligently turns downloads into Downloads but then something actually goes and creates downloads. Your script chooses the impostor because it’s a better match. Oops.

And then there’s always ln -s Downloads downloads. That might be enough to confuse that helpful thing that would otherwise create downloads. It’s already there, ready for use. And it works in custom scripts and things too. Until you move your script to a different user or machine, anyway.

I’d bet a few of those actually do want to exclude people from the other UK nations. Not as many as are flying the flags, I grant you, but nonetheless. Colonialist mindset still runs deep in some of the English.

I admit that of the things rm could be aliased to do, it is one of the safer ones. It’s still bad practice in my book.

This breaks the advice to never alias a standard command to do something radically different from its regular function.

Sure, go ahead and alias ls to have extra options like --color, but don’t alias rm to do nothing, or even rm -i (-i is interactive and prompts for each file).

Why? Because one day you’ll be logged into a different system that doesn’t have your cushioning alias and whoops, bye-bye files.

Now that you think about it, you thought that ls output looked weird, but that didn’t actually break anything.

As you suggest, yes, look into your OS’s trash option, but leave rm alone.

GNOME-derived systems can use gio trash fileglob (or gvfs-trash on older systems) to put things in the actual desktop trash receptacle.

KDE’s syntax sucks, but it’s kioclientX move fileglob trash:/ where X may or may not be present and is a version number of some kind.

You could set up a shell function or script that fixes that syntax and give it any name you like - as long as it doesn’t collide with a standard one. On that rare foreign system it won’t exist and everything will be fine.

Tricky. Microsoft currently use two different executable formats and only one of them is compatible with WINE. That still doesn’t mean that a compatible one will work properly though.

On the other hand, people who make ads want their ads to be literally everywhere, so they might make it Windows 3.11 compatible with all library functions baked in just to be safe. WINE would almost certainly run that.

Banksy is as much a person as Nicolas Bourbaki was. Although unlike Bourbaki, there is allegedly one guy who is kind of the main guy, but if that one guy goes to prison, I’m fairly certain Bansky artworks will continue to appear.

In fact I’d put money on the fact that one would appear in a prominent place soon after.

And if the establishment somehow manage to round up every single person associated with Banksy and manage to get something to stick to every single one of them, which I strongly doubt is possible, the rise in wannabe Banksy groups doing the same thing won’t be far off.

The artwork is almost always made with stencils and spray paints. Stencils can be prepared well in advance. A trained group could have one of these up in under a couple of minutes.

If I was Banksy - or one of them - I would almost certainly have distributed my art to trusted individuals for the event of my incarceration and beyond.

I thought Win2K was peak Windows, but I begrudgingly got comfortable with XP (using the classic Windows theme) then Win 7 after they ironed most of Vista’s kinks out.

Been on Linux since then.

But it would be unfair to say that masochist tendencies aren’t a requirement to be a Linux system owner.

All systems require some level of that. It’s just Linux has been rushing towards “less masochism” and Windows even quicker towards “more”, and we find ourselves at that sweet spot where they’ve the same level of requirement.

Frankly, I’d prefer this sweet spot to be more towards “less”, so I’m hoping Linux continues its trend.

Actual populists rarely call themselves populists, you got that right at least. Mainly because a good chunk of people they pander to aren’t bright enough to understand the term “populist”.

But the ones I can think of are all firmly right wing. Trump. Orbán. Farage. And not one of them is, or would call themselves “leftist”.

There was one guy back in the late 1930s who tried that and it didn’t go well for him, and I suspect that makes them nervous.

But then, you probably think that guy actually was a socialist.

This is odd in at least a couple of ways. Mandelson is well-known to be homosexual, so an association with a man known for arranging situations with underage girls doesn’t quite match up.

In the best case, this means that Epstein liked socialising with powerful people even if they didn’t want what he had to offer, but that raises the question of what Mandelson was getting out of it.

This kind of already happens there though. Video view counts are visible and often way below a channel’s sub count.

Sure, there are exceptions (viral video views often far exceeding the sub count), but by and large they’re a good metric for seeing how a channel is actually doing.

Hey, I don’t want my (albeit meagre) tax payments to go towards security for a war criminal. Would be far cheaper to leave him where he is.

You know you’ve hit rock bottom when DJT is your only hope.

Option 1 is a potential cause of “lost” revenue.

Late stage capitalism absolutely forbids anything that could cause that, even if the cost of implementation outweighs any potential gain.

Indigenous Peruvians: “Hey! You can’t do that!”

Peruvian Government: “Hey! How do you even know about this?!”

Serious answer: A surprising number of people, especially those who still have Facebook accounts in 2025, are susceptible to scams where someone pretends to be a rich and/or famous person asking for favours or money.

They get a message from a fake Zuck, and because they are dangerously credulous, they believe it is the real Zuck.

Zuck says they’ve been selected, or won a prize, or should send a photo or some such, and then suddenly Zuck’s blackmailing for a compromising photo or otherwise requesting Amazon gift cards or Bitcoin to “unlock” the prize or whatever.

“Zuck’s a rich man who owns the platform. He knows what he’s doing. I’d better look into how to do this Bitcoin thing.”

Facebook knows all this and so any Zucks that are not the Zuck get flagged as scammers and have their accounts shut down.

This wouldn’t work.

Well, it kind of would if you did alias downloads="cd Downloads" but then you wouldn’t cd downloads you’d just type downloads on its own.

As other comments here already point out, you can do it with a symlink if you really want it. i.e. ln -s Downloads downloads, then you can cd downloads.

Nowhere near the same as making everything effectively case insensitive, but it works for the odd one that you always mistype.

There are ways to patch command completion and/or write a variant cd that does the job intelligently too, but those are harder work.

Day-late edit that no-one will see: The answer is bind "set completion-ignore-case on". It’s embarrassing how simple this is and how long it took me to find it. I may have been trying to emulate this feature in other ways for a long time.

Surely someone has used the built-in Lisp interpreter to emulate a feature exact nano.

So your cross your fingers and ran it and got an error.

And eventually we learned to understand the programs we were typing in, knowing what those errors meant and how to fix them without looking back at the listing. Magical.