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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 13th, 2023

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  • For just regular text to be consumed by humans, it’s not that great, you probably want a word processor.

    It shines when you do a lot of more structural editing, stuff like “change all quotation marks on this line to be single tick”, “copy everything inside these parentheses and paste it after the equals sign”, “make the first word on the next five lines uppercase”, these are the type of things vim make easy that are not easy in other editors.

    So it’s great for code and config files. Markdown is borderline. You can have a setup that lets you live view how the markdown renders while editing in vim, so it can be pretty good, but the advantage might be a bit dubious.



  • tl;dr: Run vimtutor, learn vim, enjoy life

    It’s extremely powerful, for mostly the same reason that it’s incomprehensible to newbies. It’s focused not on directly inputting characters from your keyboard, but on issuing commands to the editor on how to modify the text.

    These commands are simple but combine to let you do exactly what you want with just a few keypresses.

    For example:

    w is a movement command that moves one word forward.

    You can put a number in front of any command to repeat it that many times, so 3w moves three words forward.

    d is the delete command. You combine it with a movement command that tells it what to delete. So dw deletes one word and d3w deletes the next three words.

    f is the find movement command. You press it and then a character to move to the first instance of that character. So f. will move to the end of the current sentence, where the period is.

    Now, knowing only this, if you wanted to delete the next two sentences, you could do that by pressing d2f.

    Hopefully I gave a taste of how incredibly powerful, flexible, yet simple this system is. You only need to know a handful of commands to use vim more effectively than you ever could most other editors. And there are enough clever features that any time you think “I wish there was a better way to do this” there most certainly is (as well as a nice description of how).

    It also comes with a guide to help you get over the initial learning curve, run vimtutor in a console near you to get started on the path to salvation efficient editing.




  • So you are straight up denying the existence of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact?

    To be clear I don’t fault them for signing a NAP, I fault them for invading a bunch of eastern European countries with whom they had no quarrel because they wanted to do imperialism.

    But I guess the fact that you dodged the question and immediately started spewing whataboutism proves that you’re not really interested in a discussion.


  • It’s an ironic title. Like saying “A benefit of loosing your legs is that you don’t need to buy shoes anymore. I mean I can’t get down the stairs to leave my apartment, but at least I never have to shop for shoes again!”.

    The benefit is real, but it’s also clearly not in proportion to the drawbacks presented, so focusing on the benefit is a joke.





  • I honestly kind of like the title and the angle of being brutally honest about the fact that the author (like most who are well off) actually benefit a lot from world hunger. That’s an important point, not because we should support world hunger, but because if we are to tackle it we must be willing to lower our standard of living.


  • To quote the article in question (highlight is my own):

    “[H]ow many of us would sell our services so cheaply if it were not for the threat of hunger? When we sell our services cheaply, we enrich others, those who own the factories, the machines and the lands, and ultimately own the people who work for them. For those who depend on the availability of cheap labour, hunger is the foundation of their wealth.






  • I’m still pissed at being forced to write in a passive voice in university. It’s awkward and carries less information, and makes it seem like nobody had any agency, science just kind of happened on its own and you were there to observe it.

    I don’t know why anyone would prefer something like “An experiment was conducted and it was found that…”

    To the much better “We conducted an experiment and found…”



  • Don’t go by any general rules. If you are unsure, take it home and sit down with your mushroom guide book and go through all the ways of identifying it and separating it from similar species until you are sure, or you give up and throw it away.

    Just off the cuff here are a couple of examples that violate the advice given above, golden chanterelle is very spicy but perfectly edible; gyromitra esculenta (“false morel”) does not have lamelles, is supposed to be mildly flavoured, but is deadly toxic.