cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions

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Cake day: January 17th, 2022

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  • They were not “passing the time” (more than people on ISS always are… 🤡).

    The decision was made in August that they would join the Expedition 71/72 crew.

    As a result, Stephanie Wilson and Zena Cardman did not get to fly on Crew-9.

    Yes they could go back to Earth in case of an emergency and would have to take the other passengers with them prior to the end of their missions.

    It would have been prior to the end of their own missions as well, since they became members of Expedition 72.

    They couldn’t not return to Earth simply because they decided they wanted to go back.

    Do you think astronauts ever go to space with the expectation that they can “return to Earth simply because they decided they wanted to go back”? 😂


  • The fact is they were stranded.

    The astronauts said “we don’t feel abandoned, we don’t feel stuck, we don’t feel stranded”, because they were prepared for this contingency. And they object to this nonsense framing too: “Help us change the rhetoric, help us change the narrative. Let’s change it to ‘prepared and committed.”

    They couldn’t go back to Earth when initially planned, nor at any time before the following mission ended.

    You are simply mistaken. At all times there were multiple options available for them to go back early if it ever became necessary to.

    Changing the planned duration of a mission is not the same as being “stranded”.




  • stranded astronauts from the ISS

    The Facts Behind the Delayed Return of U.S. Astronauts

    In response to Musk’s claims, several astronauts took to X to refute the idea that the astronauts were purposefully abandoned. Andreas Mogensen, a former SpaceX astronaut from Denmark, posted: “What a lie. And from someone who complains about lack of honesty from the mainstream media.” In response to Mogensen, Elon replied: “You are fully rеtarded. SpaceX could have brought them back several months ago. I OFFERED THIS DIRECTLY to the Biden administration and they refused. Return WAS pushed back for political reasons. Idiot.”

    Mogensen responded by stating, “Elon, I have long admired you and what you have accomplished, especially at SpaceX and Tesla. You know as well as I do, that Butch and Suni are returning with Crew-9, as has been the plan since last September. Even now, you are not sending up a rescue ship to bring them home. They are returning on the Dragon capsule that has been on ISS since last September.”

    Steve Stich, the program manager for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, said after the determination was made that Williams and Wilmore should not return on the Boeing Starliner, NASA officials met with SpaceX officials and considered “a wide range of options” and ultimately decided to attach the astronauts to the previously scheduled Crew-9 mission.

    “When we looked at the situation at the time, we had a Crew-9 launch in front of us, it made sense to take the opportunity to bring Crew-9 up with just two seats and have Butch and Suni fill in and do the rest of the long duration mission,” said Dana Weigel, manager of NASA’s International Space Station Program.

    “We thought the plan that we came up with made a lot of sense, and that, especially for Butch and Suni we know they’re experienced astronauts, they’re great in space,” Bowersox said. “We knew they’d be great additions to the crew and we knew that for most astronauts, spending extra time on orbit’s really a gift. And we thought they’d probably enjoy their time there. So we thought it was a good way to go … for a lot of reasons.”

    see also: NASA astronauts — from space — discredit Trump claims they’re stranded

    @alkbch@lemmy.ml is any of the above news to you, or were you aware of this already when you posted your “stranded astronauts from the ISS” comments?






  • for example, on a linux distro, we could modify the desktop environment and make it waaaaay lighter by getting rid of jpg or png icons and just using pure svg on it.

    this has largely happened; if you’re on a dpkg-based distro try running this command:

    dpkg -S svg | grep svg$ | sort

    …and you’ll see that your distro includes thousands of SVG files :)

    explanation of that pipeline:
    • dpkg -S svg - this searches for files installed by the package manager which contain “svg” in their path
    • grep svg$ - this filters the output to only show paths which end with svg; that is, the actual svg files. the argument to grep is a regular expression, where $ means “end of line”. you can invert the match (to see the paths dpkg -S svg found which only contain “svg” in the middle of the path) by writing grep -v svg$ instead.
    • the sort command does what it says on the tin, and makes the output easier to read

    you can run man dpkg, man grep, and man sort to read more about each of these commands.


  • No, SVG files are not HTML.

    Please change this post title (currently “today i learned: svg files are literally just html code”), to avoid spreading this incorrect factoid!

    I suggest you change it to “today i learned: svg files are just text in an html-like language” or something like that. edit: thanks OP

    SVG is a dialect of XML.

    XML and HTML have many similarities, because they both are descendants of SGML. But, as others have noted in this thread, HTML is also not XML. (Except for when it’s XHTML…)

    Like HTML, SVG also can use CSS, and, in some environments (eg, in browsers, but not in Inkscape) also JavaScript. But, the styles you can specify with CSS in SVG are quite different than those you can specify with CSS in HTML.

    Lastly, you can embed SVG in HTML and it will work in (modern) browsers. You cannot embed HTML in SVG, however.





  • Reading just those quotes alone, or skimming the article and searching for “CIA”, can give an incorrect impression that Sharp’s affiliation with the Central Intelligence Agency was more overt than it actually was.

    Just to clarify: the “CIA at Harvard” it’s referring to is actually an [independent, totally-not-CIA™, founded by Henry Kissinger] organization which was then called the Center for International Affairs at Harvard (which was originally actually abbreviated “CIA”, according to Howard J. Wiarda’s book about it, but later was called “CFIA” and today is the WCFIA).

    Here is the paragraph where it is first introduced in the article:

    In the mid-1960s, Thomas Schelling, a Nobel Prize-winning nuclear theorist, recruited 29-year-old Sharp to join the Center for International Affairs at Harvard, bastion of the high Cold War defense, intelligence, and security establishment. Leading the so-called “CIA at Harvard” were Henry Kissinger, future National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, and future CIA chief Robert Bowie. Sharp held this appointment for thirty years. There, with Department of Defense funds, he developed his core theory of nonviolent action: a method of warfare capable of collapsing states through theatrical social movements designed to dissolve the common will that buttresses governments, all without firing any shots. From his post at the CIA at Harvard, Sharp would urge U.S. and NATO defense leadership to use his methods against the Soviet Union.












  • Note: for readers who aren’t aware, the notation ^X means hold down the ctrl key and type x (without shift).

    ctrl-a though ctrl-z will send ASCII characters 1 through 26, which are called control characters (because they’re for controling things, and also because you can type them by holding down the control key).

    ^D is the EOF character.

    $ stty -a | grep eof
    intr = ^C; quit = ^\; erase = ^?; kill = ^U; eof = ^D; eol = <undef>;
    $ man stty |grep -A1 eof |head -n2
           eof CHAR
                  CHAR will send an end of file (terminate the input)
    

    Nope, Chuck Testa: there is no EOF character. Or, one could also say there is an EOF character, but which character it is can be configured on a per-tty basis, and by default it is configured to be ^D - which (since “D” is the fourth letter of the alphabet) is ASCII character 4, which (as you can see in man ascii) is called EOT or “end of transmission”.

    What that stty output means is that ^D is the character specified to trigger eof. That means this character is intercepted (by the kernel’s tty driver) and, instead of sending the character to the process reading standard input, the tty “will send an end of file (terminate the input)”.

    By default eof is ^D (EOT), a control character, but it can be set to any character.

    For instance: run stty eof x and now, in that terminal, “x” (by itself, without the control key) will be the EOF character and will behave exactly as ^D did before. (The rest of this comment assumes you are still in a normal default terminal where you have not done that.)

    But “send an end of file” does not mean sending EOT or any other character to the reading process: as the blog post explains, it actually (counterintuitively) means flushing the buffer - meaning, causing the read syscall to return with whatever is in the buffer currently.

    It is confusing that this functionality is called eof, and the stty man page description of it is even more so, given that it (really!) does actually flush the contents of the buffer to read - even if the line buffer is not empty, in which case it is not actually indicating end-of-file!

    You can confirm this is happening by running cat and typing a few characters and then hitting ^D, and then typing more, and hitting ^D again. (Each time you flush the buffer, cat will immediately echo the latest characters that had been buffered, even though you have not hit enter yet.)

    Or, you can pipe cat into pv and see that ^D also causes pv to receive the buffer contents prior to hitting enter.

    I guess unix calls this eof because this function is most often used to flush an empty buffer, which is how you “send an end of file” to the reader.

    The empty-read-means-EOF semantics are documented, among other places, in the man page for the read() syscall (man read):

    RETURN VALUE
          On success, the number of bytes read is returned (zero indicates end of
          file), and the file position is advanced by this number.
    

    If you want to send an actual ^D (EOT) character through to the process reading standard input, you can escape it using the confusingly-named lnext function, which by default is bound to the ^V control character (aka SYN, “synchronous idle”, ASCII character 22):

    $ man stty|grep lnext -A1
           * lnext CHAR
                  CHAR will enter the next character quoted
    $ stty -a|grep lnext
    werase = ^W; lnext = ^V; discard = ^O; min = 1; time = 0;
    

    Try it: you can type echo " and then ctrl-V and ctrl-D and then "|xxd (and then enter) and you will see that this is sending ascii character 4.

    You can also send it with echo -e '\x04'. Note that the EOT character does not terminate bash:

    $ echo -e '\x04\necho see?'|xxd
    00000000: 040a 6563 686f 2073 6565 3f0a            ..echo see?.
    $ echo -e '\x04\necho see?'|bash
    bash: line 1: $'\004': command not found
    see?
    

    As you can see, it instead interprets it as a command.

    (Control characters are perfectly cromulent filenames btw...)
    $ echo -e '#!/bin/bash\necho lmao' > ~/.local/bin/$(echo -en '\x04')
    $ chmod +x ~/.local/bin/$(echo -en '\x04')
    $ echo -e '\x04\necho see?'|bash
    lmao
    see?
    


  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMtoLinux@lemmy.mlroot (or sudo) access delay instead of password
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    5 days ago

    sure. first, configure sudo to be passwordless, or perhaps just to stay unlocked for longer (it’s easy to find instructions for how to do that).

    then, put this in your ~/.bashrc:

    alias sudo='echo -n "are you sure? "; for i in $(seq 5); do echo -n "$((6 - $i)) "; sleep 1; done && echo && /usr/bin/sudo '

    Now “sudo” will give you a 5 second countdown (during which you can hit ctrl-c if you change your mind) before running whatever command you ask it to.