What rabbit hole have you lead me down… Now I can’t stop reading about BSD.

Amazing! Seems I posted in the right “sub”. I’ll check out Unicode tonight, perhaps as a “prelude” to endianness. :)

Thanks! I have no idea what endianness is, except for hear “big endian” in some CS-related presentation a while back… I’ll read up on it!

As for my questions and your answer, would it be correct to say then that it’s about scalability? That one byte being eight bits scales efficiently in binary?

Thanks! Your answer led me to this, which kind of explains it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_(computer_architecture)

Character size was in the past (pre-variable-sized character encoding) one of the influences on unit of address resolution and the choice of word size. Before the mid-1960s, characters were most often stored in six bits; this allowed no more than 64 characters, so the alphabet was limited to upper case. Since it is efficient in time and space to have the word size be a multiple of the character size, word sizes in this period were usually multiples of 6 bits (in binary machines). A common choice then was the 36-bit word, which is also a good size for the numeric properties of a floating point format.

After the introduction of the IBM System/360 design, which uses eight-bit characters and supports lower-case letters, the standard size of a character (or more accurately, a byte) becomes eight bits. Word sizes thereafter are naturally multiples of eight bits, with 16, 32, and 64 bits being commonly used.

So it has to do with character size, earlier six bits and today one byte/eight bits.

“Unfuck into workable state” is gold. Hope it’s open licensed. 🙏

Gentoo and LFS to the Highs of Knowledge

No.

A book about how to make medicine and food out of wild plants by some former military medic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-THp8-iY0Y

Haven’t checked my low level sound drivers in a long time - I’m using pipewire and wireplumber to control it all. Is ALSA still there at the bottom/as a dependency? Arch btw.

Most recent white lie: probably something I said not to hurt another person (cute baby/you did great/how could he/etc).

Most recent indecent lie (to save my own ass/to defame or to hurt somebody/etc): I have never tried drugs.

This about the IFS variable was eye opening! Thank you SO much! This is exactly what I was trying to understand, namely, how on earth the for-loop is smart enough to understand how to count when I haven’t specified a numerical interval (as I do in for instance C when I practice that). This just solved it all. Thanks! Now I also understand why my code gave me excessive outputs when I changed ls into ls -l. The IFS variable made the for-loop count every single blank space!!! :D

Reading this part of the Bash manual for the third time today, I think I finally understood it better, thanks to this part in particular:

[…]execute commands once for each word in the resultant list […]

In other words, whatever follows in is half expected to result in a list of words (items), each for which command is then executed. Beyond that, I guess I’d have to simply look at the logic behind for-expressions.

Thanks!

I was a teacher for some years and I absolutely understand your style of explanation. I don’t find it condescending at all! Thank you so much for the in depth guidance! Some of it I already knew, some of it I didn’t. Anyhow, a new perspective is always appreciated! :) God, Bash (GNU/Linux in general) is so much fun!

No.

The mere thought that my life is going to end at some point makes me freeze up emotionally and physically. It exacerbates my depression to a point where I sometimes simply call in sick.

It’s sad. There is so much beauty in this world, in our existence, in our universe and one day my body will give up because of old age or because of sickness, depriving me of it all.

There is so much that I haven’t experienced, and it’s not relativistic. I don’t buy the BS that some people try to console me with when they say that the only reason that I value life and all it’s beauty is because it’s finite. F*ck you all. I genuinely weep at the sunrise, at the beauty in people, at the undiscovered knowledge of the universe regardless. I wish my life would never end.

For those of you that know the Japanese animated series Naruto, I feel so much compassion for Orochimaru, even though his human experiments were vile and evil.

My depression sometimes makes me want to stop existing to stop suffering from it, but that’s a sickness and an internal struggle and it doesn’t represent my true feelings. I don’t want to die.

What a gem! Thanks for letting me know!

Sic! Thanks!

There’s a gdrive frontend for Linux?

The limits of my language are the limits of my world.