• 0 Posts
  • 13 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 24th, 2023

help-circle
  • itsnotlupus@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.mlraw man files?
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    27
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    You can list every man page installed on your system with man -k . , or just apropos .
    But that’s a lot of random junk. If you only want “executable programs or shell commands”, only grab man pages in section 1 with a apropos -s 1 .

    You can get the path of a man page by using whereis -m pwd (replace pwd with your page name.)

    You can convert a man page to html with man2html (may require apt get man2html or whatever equivalent applies to your distro.)
    That tool adds a couple of useless lines at the beginning of each file, so we’ll want to pipe its output into a | tail +3 to get rid of them.

    Combine all of these together in a questionable incantation, and you might end up with something like this:

    mkdir -p tmp ; cd tmp
    apropos -s 1 . | cut -d' ' -f1 | while read page; do whereis -m "$page" ; done | while read id path rest; do man2html "$path" | tail +3 > "${id::-1}.html"; done
    

    List every command in section 1, extract the id only. For each one, get a file path. For each id and file path (ignore the rest), convert to html and save it as a file named $id.html.

    It might take a little while to run, but then you could run firefox . or whatever and browse the resulting mess.

    Or keep tweaking all of this until it’s just right for you.



  • I was watching the network traffic sent by Twitter the other day, as one does, and apparently whenever you stop scrolling for a few seconds, whatever post is visible on screen at that time gets added to a little pile that then gets “subscribed to” because it generated “engagement”, no click needed.
    This whole insidious recommendation nonsense was probably a subplot in the classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus.

    Almost entirely unrelated, but I’ve been playing The Algorithm (part of the Tenet OST, by Ludwig Göransson) on repeat for a bit now. It’s also become my ring tone, and if I can infect at least one other hapless soul with it, I’ll be satisfied.













  • There have been efforts to build reputation systems that don’t rely on central servers, like early day bitcoin’s Web of Trust, which allowed folks to rate other folks with public key crypto, thus ensuring an accurate and fair trust rating for participants, without the possibility of a middle-man putting their thumb on the scale.

    One problem with it is that it was still perfectly practical for bad actors to accumulate good ratings, then cash out their hard-earned reputation into large scams, such as the “Bitcoin Savings & Trust” (for $40 million in that particular case), which quite possibly made it measurably worse than not having a system that induced participants into making faulty judgments in the first place.

    I think the main practical value of something like reddit’s karma is an indication of age and account activity, both of which can probably be measured in other, if less gamified ways.