I think that providing an exit status that is not 0 when zcat is used with an uncompressed file is useful. Though my opinion is less strong regarding whether it should write more text after an error occurred, it’s probably more useful for a process to terminate quickly when an error occurred rather than risk a second error occurring and making troubleshooting harder.

I think that trying to change any existing documented features of widely used utilities will lead to us having less useful software in the future (our time is probably better spent making new programs and new documentation): https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

You are correct. This probably produces something more similar to what you’d want the original command to do, but with better safely:

find -- . -type f -regex '^\./[^/]*$' -exec sh -c -- 'for file in "${@}"; do zcat "${file}" || cat "${file}" || exit; done' sh '{}' '+'

That assumes you want to interact with files with names like .hidden.txt.gz though. If you don’t, and only intend to have a directory with regular files (as opposed to directories or symbolic links or other types of file), using this is much simpler and even safer, and avoids using files in a surprising order:

for i in *; do zcat -- "$i" || cat -- "$i" || exit; done

Of course, the real solution is to avoid using the Shell Command Language at all, and to carefully adapt any program to your particular problem as needed: https://sipb.mit.edu/doc/safe-shell/

Did someone throw rocks at drones recently? I do see something like that was documented, but not recently: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-25/taiwan-soldiers-throw-rocks-chinese-drone/101371976

Remember that the system documentation can be different for different operating systems. For example, it’s notorious that the documentation for sed differs between GNU and macOS, particularly regarding the -i option: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4247068/sed-command-with-i-option-failing-on-mac-but-works-on-linux

In order to avoid surprises related to this, “POSIX.1-2024 defines a standard operating system interface and environment, including a command interpreter (or “shell”), and common utility programs to support applications portability at the source code level.” https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/ https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/utilities/sed.html

Building a Cathedral without Science or Mathematics: The Engineering Method Explained

I think this might be related to the idea that pets look like their owners, although I don’t think that normally manifests in the pets changing their appearance.

The alternative explanation is that there really is some bug spreading, but it spread to both the fish and the humans.

I’m assuming this is relevant: https://news.sky.com/story/ukraine-war-latest-ukraine-claims-it-killed-senior-russian-general-in-moscow-scooter-blast-12541713

There’s another post with this image here: https://lemmy.ml/post/23552582

Is this a trend or something https://lemmy.ml/post/23552644

You might be referring to “Nonfree open source” (“source code that is open source but not free”) described at https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html

Technical problems and political problems can be related, and discussing one in the context of the other can be useful.

OpenSource is preferable whenever possible, but as in anything else, fanaticism is harmful when a good proprietary soft offers a better solution

I think an engineering perspective is useful: we want to solve problems, but different people have different problems, and each person cares about each of their problems to a different extent. If one person thinks their problem is that a relevant amount of their income depends on proprietary software, then the solution is substituting free software to replace proprietary software they depend upon. If another person doesn’t depend on proprietary software for their income, but thinks it’s a problem that their thermostat runs proprietary software, then the solution is still to substitute free software to replace proprietary software (or to replace the thermostat entirely). However, if someone wants to increase their income tenfold and using proprietary software will accomplish that (and using free software will not), then the solution is to use proprietary software.

It’s probably better to help people learn and understand how to use free software than to encourage them to use proprietary software, since free software is probably easier to maintain as someone’s situation changes, but there might be some situations where the best solution for someone involves using proprietary software.

I believe these are relevant: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html

Of particular relevance is “Resurrecting projects”: if you have access to “open source software” but are denied access to install or run modified versions of the software, the access is not particularly useful.

For posterity, I see that another place this person has been asked for a source is https://lemmy.world/comment/13801385

They might be trying to express that the Matrix protocol makes it easier for Israel to spy on someone using it. That idea came up somewhat often about 2 years ago, but I don’t know many relevant facts. It’s also common for people to say that the CIA and Israel cooperate, so that might be the connection to the CIA.

The initial project was created inside Amdocs

In early 2000, federal agencies conducted a counterintelligence investigation to determine if Amdocs was being used by Israel to eavesdrop on U.S. government communications. The investigation found no evidence of such activity.

As for Signal, I am greatly annoyed that Signal requires your phone number for registration. Some people justify the centralization of Signal by saying that using a centralized network means that everyone using the network is using the same (good) security practices, and I’ve been told that the developers for Signal periodically express that they’re trying to remove that requirement, but I still try to avoid using Signal (or any networks that I can’t access without involving a phone number). The lack of progress on removing the requirement of your phone number from Signal (and the lack of information on where any centralized infrastructure is located) invites ideas about conspiring with the CIA.

Despite any uncertainty or discomfort, I defer to https://www.privacyguides.org/en/real-time-communication/ and https://soatok.blog/2024/07/31/what-does-it-mean-to-be-a-signal-competitor/ to determine what methods of communication might be suitable for me to use.

I don’t think this is correct. Consider what you see from using sh -c -- 'var="a " && printf "%s\n" "${var}"-z'

If "${var}"-z resulted in two arguments instead of one, I’d see “a” and “-z” on different lines, but I see them on the same line, which means they are treated as a single argument.

Reality is the matter we act upon, using energy.

I believe it is your responsibility to properly use energy you control. Moreover, you will always have excess energy that you need to dispose of somehow (living things need to collect more energy than is absolutely required, or they risk death).

Note that a collection of energy that is expended improperly is called a “bomb”.

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Accursed_Share

https://jakeukalane.github.io/archiving.html

If the people you’re talking to will make or have accounts, https://www.privacyguides.org/en/real-time-communication/ should have more useful information for you.

If people don’t want to make accounts, I know about https://framatalk.org/ (from https://degooglisons-internet.org/ (from https://framasoft.org/)) but I haven’t used that software myself.