Melmi

Yeah, fair enough. To my mind I guess I don’t think of array indexes as an example of actual zero based numbering, simply a quirk of how pointers work. I don’t see why one starting from zero has anything to do with the other starting from zero. They’re separate things in my head. Interestingly, the article you linked does mention this argument:

Referencing memory by an address and an offset is represented directly in computer hardware on virtually all computer architectures, so this design detail in C makes compilation easier, at the cost of some human factors. In this context using “zeroth” as an ordinal is not strictly correct, but a widespread habit in this profession.

That said, I suppose I still use normal one-based numbering because that’s how I’m used to everything else working.

Indexes start from zero because they’re memory offsets, but array[0] is still the first element because it’s an ordinal number, not an offset. It’s literally counting each element of the array. It lines up with the cardinality—you wouldn’t say ['A', 'B', 'C'] has two elements, despite array[2] being the last element.

The “make a fork” thing is part of the issue, I think. In general there’s this culture in the open source community that if you want a feature, you should implement it yourself and not expect the maintainers to implement it for you. And that’s good advice to some extent, it’s great to encourage more people to volunteer and it’s great to discourage entitlement.

But on the other hand, this is toxic because not everyone can contribute. Telling non-technical users to “make it yourself” is essentially telling them to fuck off. To use the house metaphor, people don’t usually need to design and renovate their houses on their own, because that’s not their skillset, and it’s unreasonable to expect that anyone who wants a house should become an architect.

Even among technical users, there are reasons they can’t contribute. Not everyone has time to contribute to FOSS, and that’s especially notable for non-programmers who would have to get comfortable with writing code and contributing in the first place.

Just because you can work with one monitor doesn’t mean multiple monitors isn’t more comfortable though. You can have multiple windows open at once, at full size, and glance between them freely. No need for them to share the limited real estate of a single monitor.

I run Sway on my laptop because it lets me take full advantage of my single monitor, but on my multi monitor desktop setup I use a regular floating DE.

Systemd does a lot of things that could probably be separate projects, but run0 is an example of something that benefits from being a part of systemd. It ties directly into the existing service manager to spawn new processes.

This works because block devices like /dev/sdX are just files. If you cp a file onto another file, it overwrites the data of the destination with the source. A block device represents the device itself, not the filesystem; if you wanted to put the ISO inside the filesystem, you’d have to mount it first.

A lot of Linux ISOs are hybrid images which can be booted if flashed directly to a USB stick.

Except GNU is a great example of an acronym that is pronounceable. It’s even in the dictionary. The GNU mascot is a gnu, in fact.

LGBTQIA+ is essentially unpronounceable, thus we treat it as an initialism. Not that that’s a requirement, there are examples like VIP where even though we could pronounce it we pronounce each letter individually.

I would rather X didn’t get access to deadly neurotoxin, thanks

Unless they’re running LFS, I don’t see the point. By the time the antivirus database is updated, surely an update will be available in the package repo?

The Linux ecosystem is built around package repos rather than manually installed software, so antivirus makes even less sense on Linux than it does on Windows. If there’s malware it’ll get removed from the repo as soon as it’s detected.

We already have a confusing abbreviation: B vs b. One is bits, one is bytes.

It’s a pretty drastic difference. One Gb per second is only 125 MB per second. Don’t mess up your capitalization!

These are all rough averages, of course, but Tweets can be rather bigger than 140 bytes since they’re Unicode, not ASCII. What’s Twitter without emoji?