There’s also websites hosted in countries that don’t care about US law. We can access those even without a VPN, for now…

That’s a good example. If I’m regularly running a command that is a single whitespace character away from disaster, that’s a problem.

Imagine a fighter aircraft that had an eject button on the side of the flight stick. The pilot complains “I’m afraid I might accidentally hit the eject button when I don’t need to”, but everyone responds “why would you push the eject button if you don’t want to eject?”, or “so your concern is that the eject button will cause you to eject…?” – That’s how I feel right now.

Just checked my command history and I’ve run 60,000 commands on this computer without problem (and I have other computers). I guess people have different ideas of what “comfortable” means, but I think I consider myself comfortable with the command line.

I have shot myself in the foot with rm -rf in the past though, and screwed up my computer so bad the easiest solution was to reinstall the OS from scratch. My important files are backed up, including most of my dotfiles, but being a bit too quick to type and run a rm -rf command has caused me needless hours of work in the past.

I realized the main reason I have to use rm -rf is to remove git repos and so I thought I’d ask if anyone has a tip to avoid it. And I’ve found some good suggestions among the least upvoted comments.

That’s a good suggestion for some, but I’m quite comfortable with the command line.

It’s not that I’m irrationally scared of rm -rf. I know what that command will do. If I slow down an pay attention it’s not as though I’m worried “I hope this doesn’t break my system”.

What I really mean is I see myself becoming quite comfortable typing rm -rf and running it with little thought, I use it often to delete git repos, and my frequent use and level of comfort with this command doesn’t match the level of danger it brings.

Just moving them to /tmp is a nice suggestion that can work on anywhere without special programs or scripts.

More like, I’m afraid of the command doing more than I’m trying to do.

What I want to do is ignore prompts about write-protected files in the .git directory, what it does is ignore all prompts for all files.

That kid is superior

Two-chubby-chubby

Senior developer here, it looks like they are helping to me.

I just wanted to give a little recap of the Julian Assange controversy. The US is trying to prosecute him for breaking US law while outside the US and he is not a US citizen. In case people don’t know the story, that’s the most important part.

Julian Assange is not a US citizen and the crimes he is accused of did not happen on US soil. The US should not be the world police. Why are we trying to prosecute him?

Why doesn’t JavaScript have tracebacks?

I guess he valued money over his beliefs

Tale as old as money

It would help if you could link to at least one of the thousands. What’s one you think makes a strong case? I’m not sure if you’re referring to actual studies or, maybe, confusing blog posts and “expert” opinions with actual studies.

This thread confuses me. Are you or GP suggesting I have a certain political leaning based on this post? I’m curious to know what you think that political leaning would be?

Speaking of “enough information”:

I think blaming cellphones, and even blaming social media to some extent, is like blaming video games in the 90’s. There’s lots of opinions, lots of “experts” who also have opinions, and not a lot of scientifically valid research to support those opinions. This is what I’m making fun of in the meme.

You say that is “very dangerous”, maybe. I’ll note that (at the time of writing) I’m the only one who has linked to anything in support of my views and conclusions. So my views are, apparently, the least “dangerous” in the thread.

Sometimes you have to view the world as black and white to create a good meme. For more nuanced discussion, try non-meme communities.

That first chart I posted made it look like suicide rates were going into exponential growth recently, but “the curve” does plateau and seem to hover around the 1990’s levels. See following chart, also, note how this chart makes things look unprecedented because they cut off the 1990s.

I think a lot of those things are good. Limit cellphones in schools, good. Require websites to put a “content rating” in their HTML responses which would help make filtering the internet a lot easier, good. Require cellphone manufacturers to give instructions on how parents can setup filters on their children’s phones, good.

Require all adults to upload their government papers before participating in the most important speech forum of our time, bad. I think the laws created to “protect the children” aren’t really about protecting children (not exactly a hot take).

I have a challenge for you, and then a prediction:

My challenge is to look at this graph and form a world view that explains it. Certainly there’s more behind these numbers than cellphones. Suicide rates were also high around 1990, why?

My prediction is that if we take away kid’s cellphones, it will not actually help them and they will still be unhappy, and people will throw up their hands and say “what more can we do?”. Well, what more we can do is address those big problems in the first panel of my meme.

I’m 30+ and, granted, I haven’t given my daughter a cellphone, and I think well of parents who are careful about how their children use technology.

It’s a meme. It’s not super clear, but it’s memorable.

One belief I’m trying to express with this meme is that most laws created “to protect the children” are not really about protecting children. I know that’s a hot take (/s). For example, my state has recently said “to protect the children, let’s require all adults to upload their government ID before posting on any website”, and the skeptical part of me thinks that’s not really about the kids.

I don’t have time to review all the research that has been done on the topic, but fortunately others have done a review of the existing studies:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9200624/ concludes “Despite the fears held around wireless technologies, we believe that at this stage there is not enough evidence supporting a causal negative relationship between MP/WD use and children and adolescent’s mental health to justify particular public health interventions.”

And this isn’t a review, but here’s one additional study:

https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2022/11/children-mobile-phone-age.html says “Stanford Medicine researchers did not find a connection between the age children acquired their first cell phone and their sleep patterns, depression symptoms or grades.”