Another book on the history of unix is UNIX: A History and a Memoir from Kernighan. It was a joy to read.

Cool. I noticed I have seen the author’s name in TUHS mailing list. He’s still posting there sometimes.

Around 25 years ago I had read about this Linux thingy in a computer magazine somewhere in the middle east. We had a Windows 95/98 PC. I got my hands on some Red Hat CDs (or floppies) and managed to install it on the PC. It booted into a prompt, but I had zero knowledge of Linux or any Unix-like OSes and had absolutely no idea of man pages. Didn’t manage to start the graphical environment. I took my case and rode my motorcycle to some computer engineering student (the most knowledgeable person I had access too, we had no Internet) and asked him for help. He told me it’s my graphics card (some old ISA VGA card), but couldn’t help more. In the computer market no one knew about Linux either. So my first try to switch to Linux failed.

Fast forward 25 years… I’m surrounded with Linux and computers in general. Desktops, laptops, single board computers, virtual machines, local or remote. I started with Ubuntu (free CDs posted to my poor country…) with Gnome and later gnome shell, tried Debian, Mint, Parsix, and finally Arch Linux. Moved from graphical to command line and started absorbing the Unix philosophy of simplicity and robustness. Nowadays I use sway and KDE on Arch Linux for work and pleasure, and follow very old Unix mailing lists looking for hidden internet gems.

P.S.: forgot to mention Libreelec (kodi) as my media server and OpenSUSE Leap on laptop which I chose to enjoy some automated install with encryption and btrfs which worked surprisingly well. If I live long enough, I might start thinkering with BSDs (openbsd probably, because of the picture at the bottom of their homepage). I already use pfsense which is based on FreeBSD.

Anyone interested in awk make sure to check the just published awk book second revision by original authors. Kernigan’s writings are a joy to read.

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tocc: https://github.com/aidin36/tocc

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You’ll be missed Bram. RIP.

Haha good catch!

Fun observation: as a native, just like many natives, you have made a grammer mistake. “have known” and not “have know”. Might be a typo though.

My fun theory is that grammer is just a form of heuristic made up by humans to simplify understanding languages.

I’m not a native.

For Europe it’s FOSDEM.

Came here to say this. Instead of pronouncing your name on the phone, just read the NATO alphabets that constitute your name.

Same here. btw, I just subscribed to !philosophy@lemmy.world , it has over 500 members, so you might want to check it out.

No, not really. I’m still learning my way around in Lemmy. I use wefwef.app and just recently the developer has added a subreddit import feature which might be able to find matching communities for you. though didn’t work great for me.

It’s very interesting indeed. A while ago I read Carl Popper’s Open Society and it’s Enemies. In that book he argues that Plato and to some extent Aristotle have developed underlying philosophical tools to support, for a lack of better term, “closed” societies. For example slaves rather remain slaves, farmers remain farmers, and rulers remain rulers. He argues that they contribute to a totalitarianism, and undermine democracy by discouraging being equal and in general “change”.

Take all this with a grain of salt, since it’s a while I’ve read the book, so can’t articulate it better. But your comment reminded me of all this, so I thought it might be interesting for you and other readers.

ps: I personally think there is no natural place for things, that’s us, sentient beings, who define that and give things meanings.

haha, yes, all hope is lost there…

You just need to master one rule: designate a place for each item and put them IMMEDIATELY back in their designated place after use.

gets better everyday indeed

wefwef is fantastic

https://radioparadise.com/