I actually laughed out loud at how different this is to the usual "be yourself and to hell with what people think" advice. Can you elaborate on why it's so important to care if people like you?

Not OP, but we humans are social animals. As much as we may want to pretend we live alone just fine, it's not the common case. Sure, some people enjoy solitude and don't have to care about what others think, but most of us enjoy company, and this comes with caring about others and what they think of you.

You surely care about what your partner thinks about you. Your parents perhaps? Your friends? It's part of the emotional connection.

You can be laid back and easy going, but you're still going to care if your loved ones strongly go against your core beliefs and ways of living, right?

Well, people are generally social animals.

Also, whether we like it or not we depend on other people. If you want to get hired, reproduce, sell stuff, or just not be a hermit, it matters what people think of you.

Sometimes that means changing who you are. Sometimes it means finding people who are more like you (I know that I hate living in most rural areas based on the people I've met in them, for instance). Maybe a combination.

You’re the common protagonist in every scene of your personal story.

If everyone prefers not do deal with you, perhaps they are all toxic, terrible people. Or… there is a common element.

There’s a difference between defining yourself based on the expectations of others and being such an individual that nobody can relate.

It’s basic human psychology

The "be yourself" crap generally doesnt work.

Good advice would be "be somebody else".

The self help books that teach various tricks... basically make one be someone else.

Yeah, most of the advice is really bad, because they want to avoid the harsh truth: that things aren't necessarily going to work out. You can't sell a self-help book that teaches "you need people to love you but you might be left alone forever". People want a guaranteed solution but that simply doesn't exist.

However, a lot of people, like the person I originally replied to, choose to remain alone, and that's often because they are scared of rejection or of being left alone. It's kind of ironic, like a contradiction. Longing for connection, but being so scared of rejection that you force the rejection to happen yourself, so that it doesn't happen to you involuntarily, but by forcing that rejection through self-isolation you basically guarantee your doom rather than opening the possibility for flourishing.

At the very least your parents need to tolerate you, because you depend on them for living during your early years. So early on it is a simple survival necessity.

It turns out that this necessity never truly goes away. Aside from merely surviving (e.g. you need your doctor to at least tolerate you) interacting with other human is what makes life more than just surviving. At least it’s like that for most people.

Even hermits and sociopaths need to be liked by at least one person, which is their own selves. Since the number must be at least one, it might as well be 2 or 3.

> At the very least your parents need to tolerate you, because you depend on them for living during your early years. So early on it is a simple survival necessity.

Yep, and even a slight degradation of that trust that your parents that are necessary for your survival will protect you can have devastating, life-long psychological effects. And indeed everything can be traced back to that.

Perhaps controversial but I think this is the origin of most religion: baby is protected by infinitely powerful parents, child has shocking and painful revelation that their parents are not infinitely powerful and have all kinds of insecurities and weakness, therefore a forever infallible representative (e.g. God) is constructed to fill in that gap.

But I think that's just one way to fill the gap, and people engage in all kinds of strange, obsessive behaviours to try and reclaim that illusion of eternal protection and safety.

Hopefully stupid question but were you replacing the pen nibs? My screen has been solidly responsive for several years of heavy usage, but the fiber nibs do get worn down and need replacing every few weeks/months (by design) or the pen starts exhibiting this behaviour.

I have to admit I have also switched back to real paper for a lot of tasks but I still like the remarkable as an e-reader, and enjoy writing on it occasionally, so I wouldn't say it's a big regret.

I replaced the nibs when I first noticed the issue, and a few times later. It did not resolve the problem, sadly.

I'm also using a lot more paper and have gotten into fountain pens for some kinds of note taking, which is about as economically ruinous as mechanical keyboards.

In the future, I have it on my list to change it into an eink linux box to use to connect to remote machines with the attached keyboard. At least the hardware will be used eventually. Probably won't use the pen in that configuration.

+1 — almost certainly the pen nibs

100% agree. I'm currently preparing several 10s of GBs of HTML in nested directories for static hosting via S3 and was floundering until Gippity recommended find + exec sed to me. I'm now batch fixing issues (think 'not enough "../" in 60000 relative hrefs in nested directories') with a single command rather than writing scripts and feel like a wizard.

These tools are things I've used before but always found painful and confusing. Being able to ask Gippity for detailed explanations of what is happening, in particular being able to paste a failing command and have it explain what the problem is, has been a game changer.

In general, for those of us who never had a command line wizard colleague or mentor to show what is possible, LLMs are an absolute game changer both in terms of recommending tools and showing how to use them.

If you have a lot of files, consider find piped to xargs with -P for parallelism and -n to limit the number of files per parallel invocation.

Only a tiny bit more complex but often an order of magnitude faster with today's CPUs.

Use -print0 on find with -0 on xargs to handle spaces in filenames correctly.

GNU parallel is another step up, but xargs is generally always to hand.

Thanks! Gippity did suggest the xargs approach as an alternative, but I found that

find [...] - exec [...] {} +

as opposed to

find [...] - exec [...] {} \;

worked fine and was performant enough for my use-case. An example command was

find . -type f -name "*.html" -exec sed -i '' -e 's/\.\.\/\.\.\/\.\.\//\.\.\/\.\.\/\.\.\/source\//g' {} +

which took about 20s to run

One can express your sed in less Leaning Toothpick Syndrome[1] via:

  find . -type f -name "*.html" -exec sed -i '' -e 's|\.\./\.\./\.\./|../../../source/|g' {} +

Using "/" as the delineation character for "s" patterns that include "/" drives me batshit - almost as much as scripts that use the doublequote for strings that contain no variables but also contain doublequotes (looking at you, json literals in awscli examples)

If your sed is GNU, or otherwise sane, one can also `sed -Ee` and then use `s|\Q../../../|` getting rid of almost every escape character. I got you half way there because one need not escape the "." in the replacement pattern because "." isn't a meta character in the replacement space - what would that even mean?

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaning_toothpick_syndrome

Parallel is nice when doing music conversion with ffmpeg.

Primeagen detected

I find him hard to listen to when he does things like this

Primeagen is some kind of Youtuber? I am not familiar and don't understand what you are trying to convey here.

Guessing 'gippity' has been used by primeagen recently, so now you're gonna be tarred with the 18-23 React bootcamp graduate brush (at least that's who I imagine find him watchable).

It's a case of convergent evolution - I don't know where I heard it first, but I asked GPT if it minded and it said "Of course, you can call me Gippity!", so I do, because it's more fun.

yes, and a cringy one

This reminds me of the substitution mode of Tim Pope's amazing vim plugin [abolish](https://github.com/tpope/vim-abolish?tab=readme-ov-file#subs...)

Basically in vim to substitute text you'd usually do something with :substitute (or :s), like:

:%s/textToSubstitute/replacementText/g

...and have to add a pattern for each differently-cased version of the text.

With the :Subvert command (or :S) you can do all three at once, while maintaining the casing for each replacement. So this:

textToSubstitute

TextToSubstitute

texttosubstitute

:%S/textToSubstitute/replacementText/g

...results in:

replacementText

ReplacementText

replacementtext

The Emacs replace command[1] defaults to preserving UPCASE, Capitalized, and lowercase too.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Re...

Of course it does. Or it wouldn’t be Emacs

Also just realised while looking at the docs it works for search as well as replacement, with:

:S/textToFind

matching all of textToFind TextToFind texttofind TEXTTOFIND

But not TeXttOfFiND.

Golly!

In vim, I believe there's a setting that you can flip to make search case sensitive.

In my setup, `/foo` will match `FoO` and so on, but `/Foo` will only match `Foo`

There's undoubtedly a setting but if you don't want it on all the time you can always add \c at the end of the search term, like /foo\c to denote case insensitivity

Curious if you have any examples of these pains? I'm not familiar with the late Python 2 era but I've been writing Ruby for a long time and wonder if I'm doing some of these as well.

"Nice" is a very subjective concept and can be used to describe people in both complimentary and derogatory ways. In my experience niceness and competence are in no way correlated – I have known nice people who were good at their jobs and assholes who were good at their jobs, as well as some of both who were terrible at their jobs. It is perfectly possible to be both competent and nice.

Given the choice between two persons of equal competence, where one is nice and one is not, I would be surprised if anybody chose the less nice one, all other things being equal.

I suggest continuing to be genuine, rather than focusing on "niceness", and not allowing a single comment on the internet to make you feel self-conscious about your character.

The m3u link is broken but the recording of the "corn chip sermon" Waits was referring to is on the same site: http://www.tomwaitslibrary.info/audio/fritolay.mp3. I can see why he was upset, I'd fall for it.

I not infrequently find myself prefixing my own code review comments with some variant of "I'm mostly asking this to make myself sound smart, but..." and then usually (not always) I delete the comment. But it's not a high proportion of my total review output, assuming I'm impartial enough to tell the difference.

My point is, it definitely happens, but if it applies to _most_ PR comments I think the code review practices of your project may need improving. My experience has been that most code review comments are either seeking to impart or gain knowledge that the commenter genuinely finds useful.

Pacifiers.

My advice would be never to purchase anything from Haier, IoT or not. We had a washer drier that had to be repaired three times because of an enormous design flaw causing it to overheat to a dangerous extent. I did eventually somehow manage to persuade them to collect it, after more than a year of back and forth with their nice, hardworking and entirely powerless customer service team. After the device was collected it then took more than six months for me to get my money back. Never again.

This is too bad. I've got a (dumb) Haier refrigerator that works perfectly well, going on 5 or 6 years now.

It's an odd width because of a stupid home remodel by the previous owner that I can't really undo, and haier was the only vendor that didn't want to charge me "designer" prices because of that.

Hopefully it keeps going strong :/