My first interaction with Grendel came from this post:

He intentionally changed "transgender" in the title of his post to "transsexual", and his intention was to troll. He pretends to be unbiased, but he introduces a strong anti-feminist, anti-trans, pro-chauvinism tone to everything he posts. Really, I should say "anti-SJW", because that's what he thinks of it. He knows what he's doing. He's trying to infect the hubski zeitgeist with misogyny and transphobia.

Step 1. Post a bunch of cool science stuff to get nerds to like you.

Step 2. Post a bunch of subtly anti-SJW stuff, like the example I gave where he substituted an offensive word (transsexual) for a non-offensive one (transgender).

Step 3. All the nerds who like the science stuff will be more inclined to trust his opinions on the anti-SJW stuff.

Step 4. Reddit.

This is exactly what happened to Reddit. This is the foot-in-the-door technique of all abusers and trolls. Over time, he will escalate the tone of his posts as he gains more support in the community, all while playing the victim. I have seen this happen to more communities than I can count, and I saw it kill Reddit.

Read over Grendel's comments. Ask yourself: Is this the example of permissible behavior that you want new hubski users to see and think is normal? Is this something you're willing to let snowball out of the control?

Risk of allowing Grendel in our community: Eternal September, breakdown of civility, Reddit-ificiation.

Benefit of allowing Grendel in our community: Some good science posts that others would be posting anyway.

The rational decision is excommunication.

IMO the best out-of-the-box linux setup is Ubuntu with Gnome 3. It has the GUI config tools you're looking for (or at least, it has more than other distros I've tried).

As for (2), it works like this: Configuration in linux is done primarily through human-readable text files. The same goes for how processes communicate with each other. One program will spit out a bunch of text, the next program will eat that text and spit out more text, etc. A human centipede of small programs is the unix way.

And yes, if you really want to be a power user, you will probably need to learn regular expressions, which are a mini-programming language used for manipulating text. That is what the `sed` command is doing in your example. It's like find-and-replace on steroids. Once you understand what each part means, it won't look so scary.

But you don't need to do that. The command is just an automated way of going through a big config file by hand and manually changing a whole bunch of entries.

First, know that `sed` means "stream editor". Here's your regex:

s/^[^ ][^V].id=\([0-9]\)./\1/p

Let's break it down into parts. First, the top-level structure of a sed command:

s/foo/bar/baz

The s means we're going to do a substitution. The foo is what we're searching for, and the bar is what we'll replace matches with. The baz on the end are options that affect other stuff, like case insensitivity or whether or not to do more than one substitution per line.

In your command, the foo part is

^[^ ][^V].id=\([0-9]\).

Let's break it down.

^

This first carat will match the beginning of a line.

[^ ]

[^V]

Same as before, but now we're matching anything but a V.

.id=

The . means "any character", and then id= is just taken literally.

\([0-9]\)

This is the interesting part of the pattern. The \( and \) introduce a "capture group". Any substring matched in a capture group will be available in our replace pattern. This is very powerful for doing complex search-and-replace stuff. Inside the capture group we have another character class. This time it's 0-9, which means any character from 0 up to 9. So basically just the digits 0123456789.

.

And then another arbitrary character.

Before we move on to the third section of the sed command, let's think about what our search pattern will match.

Vaid=31

Vbid=1p

V.id=3.

I suspect that the author of your regex made a mistake, and wanted actual periods like in the third example.

Let's look at the last two sections.

/\1/p

The replacement pattern is just \1. \1 refers to the capture group we talked about earlier, so this \1 means "take that number you found before, and replace the whole match with just that number".

p

This is some option that has to do with printing the inputs or something, but I don't remember off the top of my head because I don't use it that much.

So, in total, the command means "Find stuff that looks like ' V.id=(some number).' and replace it with just that number." This sed command is consuming input from `xinput list`, so it's probably intended to grab the numeric ids of a bunch of devices from the plaintext output of `xinput list`.

Also I just realized that hubski's formatting probably obliterated some of the regex you posted. The markup tips mention a "verbatim" option.

Here's the output of `xinput list` on my machine:

  ⎡ Virtual core pointer                    	id=2	[master pointer  (3)]
  ⎜   ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer              	id=4	[slave  pointer  (2)]
  ⎜   ↳ xquartz virtual pointer                 	id=6	[slave  pointer  (2)]
  ⎜   ↳ pen                                     	id=8	[slave  pointer  (2)]
  ⎜   ↳ cursor                                  	id=9	[slave  pointer  (2)]
  ⎜   ↳ eraser                                  	id=10	[slave  pointer  (2)]
  ⎣ Virtual core keyboard                   	id=3	[master keyboard (2)]
      ↳ Virtual core XTEST keyboard             	id=5	[slave  keyboard (3)]
      ↳ xquartz virtual keyboard                	id=7	[slave  keyboard (3)]

I don't think it's necessary to tell people when you've blocked them. All it does is get one little jab in, and it's to tell them you're not going to listen to their response. This normalizes the "shots fired" that signal beginning of flame wars, and it's a slippery slope from that to the degeneration of thoughtful discourse site-wide.

But for the record, I already had him filtered, too. :P

You're not guilty by association, and I want to make a special point about this. I feel an ethical imperative to block people who associate with the True Guilty, such as Grendel. Without doing this, the problem of Grendel's creeping corruption of the hubski community will not be solved. He will have a second-order influence on the hubski zeitgeist through people like you who continue to interact with him. This is why I regretfully embrace the concept of collateral damage.

I share things that spawn decent discussions. Grendel does not do that. He is intentionally trolling the community. You are right that he takes an opposite view. He does this on purpose. I know his type. There can be no leeway for people like him, especially during such a critical moment in a community's history, with so many new users joining the site.

New users will see the things Grendel says, and even though they will see that he's 80% against the hubski zeitgeist, they'll think his behavior is maybe 15% permissible. So they'll maybe act in a 5%, or even only 2% way similar to him. But this error compounds and gets bigger and bigger as more users flood in. This is how Eternal September ruins communities. This is why reddit turned into a stupid parody of itself.

Grendel's behavior is 100% unacceptable. I don't want to have anything to do with him. I want my social graph to keep him 7 nodes away from me, not 2. If I don't block people who follow Grendel, then Grendel is right there, lurking right outside my vision, influencing my filter bubble through you and others like you.

I don't want Grendel to have any influence on my filter bubble at all. I don't want him to be a part of the community that I'm a part of. Hubski lets me tailor my community, and I am the sort of person who is willing to cut away some of the good flesh of the fruit to get rid of 100% of the rot.

I am morally opposed to blocking you, but I feel it is ethically necessary unless you stop following Grendel.

The way that hashtags change the public discourse by adding layer of political-linguistic abstraction to everyday social interactions by people at all levels of stratification across race, class, gender, etc, is... still incredibly astounding. I didn't think mass adoption of the internet would ever have looked like this, but here it is. Something weirder and yet more amazing than any of us internet early-adopters would have imagined.

I think it can be dangerous to block out opinions that are contrary to your own

I agree with this.

(even if they are made maliciously)

I do not agree with this. There is no place for bad actors in my community. I choose not to spend the mental energy combatting trolls. Trolls such as Grendel are intelligent, and they choose their words carefully. They are masters of psychological abuse. It is harmful to the health of our community, and to the mental health of each of us as individuals, to have anything at all to do with Grendel.

People who don't understand how truly dangerous it is to allow sociopaths like Grendel to have any voice at all, are the unwitting pawns of the cycle of abuse.

I am considering creating a hubski bot which will re-post Grendel's posts, so as to not allow him to have any inkling of hegemony over discussions pertaining to interesting science topics.

  Don’t just find someone who loves everything about you. Find someone who makes you love everything about yourself.
  Drink more water.

The word "nutty" wouldn't have the connotation of "bad idea" if we didn't stigmatize mental illness, and we stigmatize mental illness because we use words like "crazy" and "nutty" to describe bad ideas. See how it's a self-perpetuating cycle?

Whenever people phrase things like that, what they really mean is "I don't understand why you want to do X." But instead of phrasing the dialogue in a way that asks why they want to do X, instead the mentally ill are scapegoated. This is literally the definition of scapegoating. You don't want to actually talk about why you think the idea is bad, or just tell someone that their judgement is bad... instead you choose a group of people with a biological illness with negative connotations to associate with the behavior that you don't understand the motivations for, because OF COURSE no one would want to be associated with that group of people.

People with mental illnesses are not stupid. They are not irrational. I am stable the majority of the time. But because of language like the example you gave, and because of the way the mentally ill are portrayed in fiction, I have to keep my disability a secret at work because otherwise people will question every single thing I do and use my disability to discredit me when I disagree with them. That is the life I have to live because people use the same words to refer to my disability as they do to refer to unpredictable, dangerous behavior, even though there is no correlation.

Am I calling for the banishment of that usage of the word "nuts" or "nutty"? Not really, but in my ideal world? Yeah. Like, is it really so hard to phrase it in a way that doesn't promote the stigma? Instead of saying "You'd have to suffer from a disability that will likely lead to your death to try to code that up in Javascript!", why not just say, "I don't understand why you'd want to code that up in Javascript!" or "Why the hell do you want to code that up in Javascript?"

It hurts me a lot more than the benefit you gain from being able to use that word. By using that sort of language, you are directly contributing to the complex of memes which hurts me directly on a daily basis. And when I say it hurts me, I don't mean "oh you made me feel bad by saying that". I mean you contribute to a culture where people mistreat me and get away with it in the workplace, in my own family, in school, etc.

I think being well-dressed has a lot to do with it. I feel powerful when I feel safe, and I feel safe when I'm dressed well.

I used to feel powerful by tricking creeps on 4chan into downloading a trojan by telling them it was a webcam viewer for some girl. They'd run it and I'd spy on them, then after a few days, take over their keyboard and mouse and start messing with them. Talk to them through input boxes on websites they were visiting.

It was a stupid teenager thing to do, but it did make me feel powerful.

I like that you like me.

This thread is going to turn into a networking party.

There's a kind of person who makes 6 or 7 digit purchasing decisions for proprietary software when an open source solution would have sufficed. Because they make stupid decisions, they need a psychological defense mechanism to feel good about their decisions. These people are stuck in the 90s and believe that proprietary software is, as a rule, of higher quality than open source software. So to them, "proprietary" signals "quality". "Proprietary Algorithm? Must be so good they need to keep it a secret!"

And actually, that's true for a lot of industries. FOSS has changed web development for the better, but there's plenty of other industries that just don't have that. Just compare Octave with Matlab, or Sage with Mathematica, or Blender with Maya, etc...

“Huh… why didn’t you just turn this into a function?” Comments that could have been phrased as helpful tips are instead often delivered in ways that imply the other person is somehow strange for not having arrived at the same conclusion.

I used to phrase what I thought were helpful tips in this way. I thought that by phrasing it as a question, I was showing that I wasn't making assumptions about the other person's level of skill, and was leaving room for them to know better than me.

What is the better way to phrase it?

"You should put this in a function." - I seem presumptuous, arrogant, patronizing.

"Why not put this in a function?" - Implies "the other person is somehow strange for not having arrived at the same conclusion."

"If this were in a function, the code would be easier to read." - Implying that the code is hard to read.

Giving advice to colleagues who lack skill is something that I have no idea how to do in a sensitive way, and no one ever tells me how they'd like me to do it. This article points out a serious problem in tech culture, but offers no solution while at the same time implying that the solution is obvious. As I write this, I realize the irony in the article:

“Huh… why didn’t you just turn this into a function?” Comments that could have been phrased as helpful tips are instead often delivered in ways that imply the other person is somehow strange for not having arrived at the same conclusion.

The sentence commits the very sin it criticizes. How meta! I like it for the empathy it elicits, but I churn inside with the feeling of being oh so close and yet so far.

How do I phrase criticism of code as a helpful tip? I can read all the MVC articles in the world, but they don't do me a lick of good if they don't have concrete suggestions for how I should change my behavior aside from "stop doing X". I readily follow "stop doing X" advice so long as X is not essential to the job. But I can't just stop helping people improve their code.

ESR deserves no respect. He's a sexist racist homophobe. Just a small sample for your perusal:

ESR says Obama only won due to voter fraud: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=586

ESR denies HIV, praises Nazis, and claims the contemporary left in America is literally run by soviet propagandists: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=184

ESR says gay men are at fault for AIDS and are pedophiles: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=26

ESR says that women and black people shouldn't expect equal outcomes in STEM compared to men because they're just stupider on average: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=129

Ideas are more important than people. ESR deserves no respect, and until the hacker culture disabuses itself of ESR-style white supremacy and misogyny, we're never going to get to that gleaming chrome meritocracy we were all promised.

True things. It's hard for me to explain to my parents how things work now. They don't have the concepts, and they CAN'T because they can't have the same formative social experiences.

God I fucking hate Jonah Peretti so much. His big talk that he gives is how to exploit people with mental illnesses to get your shit to go viral. He actively discusses different neurotypes and how to best exploit each one, as if this is a totally normal and not at all Lex Luthor scumbag thing to do. Fuck I hate that guy. If I ever become a ruthless warlord after the fall of civilization, I'd love his skull as a fashion accessory. Symbolize the come-uppance of techie scum. #DieTechieScum. :)

I just disable youtube comments entirely.

Yes, I agree. The first step is to understand what needs to be done. Anyone who tells you that you need to learn the most obscure and unreadable perl one-liners to be a True Linux User is full of shit. Those one-liners make no sense unless you are already familiar with the sorts of editing tasks that you might need to do in the first place.

Zoe Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian, etc. They are the tanks who draw the trolls to them with taunts, so that other party members, who have less HP and defense, don't have to take damage directly.

The author's assessment of Zoe Quinn's and Anita Sarkeesian's behavior is accurate. The part he gets wrong is moral judgement of those actions.

He lacks the ethical understanding of appropriate responses to internet-scale abuse. He finds himself as collateral damage in the reaction to a sexist gaming culture run by teenage boy morality. He didn't have the social conscience earlier in his career to try to stop things from getting as bad as they have, and he doesn't have the perspective now in his late career to realize he's on the wrong side.

You shouldn't comment on something without reading it first.

EMBRACE VIM

VI VI VI

HAIL STAN

I don't think it makes sense to crow about abuse of the CoC until it actually starts happening. And since we're talking about Github, any alleged abuses of the CoC will be in public, permanent. Just like all the other discussions that occur on Github projects.

Two things could happen at some point in the future:

1. Someone abuses the CoC and gets a project pulled off github for offending them in some "trivial" way, and Github turns into a SJW dystopia with mandatory estrogen injections for all project admins.

2. Someone CORRECTLY uses the CoC to file a complaint, and then gets harassed and stalked and driven out of tech because of it.

2 is far more likely than 1, and I think you know that. What does that say about the trade-offs this CoC makes? I don't think it'll be difficult to filter out CoC abusers from legitimate complains. Do you have trouble doing that?

We should be friends.

People who identify as "nerds" like to think they're smart. And they're usually perceived as smart, because that's our shitty American culture. You wear glasses? Must be a nerd. Must be intelligent. But no, actually.

I once interviewed for a job, and wore glasses during the interview. I had taken my contacts out and hadn't bothered to replace them. I got the job, and when I showed up for the first day of work, I was wearing contacts. The guy who had hired me was visibly distressed that I wasn't wearing glasses. "Where's your glasses?"

Nerds are idiots with specialized knowledge, which knowledge our society deems only attainable by geniuses when in fact it's not very hard stuff at all. It's not hard to write web apps.

Being on this list of Great People makes me feel Great. %)

If you don't talk to people, you will lose your mind. If you're isolated for any reason, self-imposed or otherwise, you'll seek out socialization wherever you can find it. Humans are social animals; we need social interaction to survive. Choosing bad friends hurts your mental health as much as choosing bad food hurts your physical health. It's important to surround yourself with good people, for that reason. There are more than a few popular social networks which are actively harmful to their participants. I think hubski is not one like that.

The variety of nonbinary gender identities have likely existed as long as humans have been around, and simply haven't been discussed or named in our culture.

Quats, you surprise me in all the right ways tonight. :)

Too many people. It's time to eat the rich.

This is what the internet should be about. I feel like hubski tends towards this sort of interaction more than the Old Internet does.

People like to conflate reddit-style back-patting atheists with MRAs, but the overlap is really due to a confounding factor: They're all boys without much education who nevertheless have "being smart" as a part of their ego identity. They love the idea of knowledge that contradicts what most people believe: If they can know some factoid that most people get wrong, they think this means they're intelligent.

Oh well. I'll go back to reading Onfray.