• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Ah! This is a shell pipe! It’s composing several smaller commands together, cool stuff.

    • ls -1 is the grep-friendly version of ls, it prints one entry per line, like a shopping list.

    • head takes a set number of entries from the head of a list, in this case 2 items. negative two, meaning “all but the last two.”

    • xargs takes the incoming pipe and converts it into extra arguments, in this case applying those arguments to rm.

    So, combined, this says “list all the .dump files, pick the first two, all but the last two, and delete them.” Presumably the first are the oldest ones and the last are the newest, if the .dump files are named chronologically.












  • Ultimately I think it’s sort of like Python and C#. Python got big by being easy to use, with great community management, and it took decades to reach its peak of popularity. C# got big because Microsoft threw a ton of money at people to use it. Of the two, Python’s popularity seems to be lasting longer.

    I suspect this will be the case for all the new sites and protocols popping up in The Web 2.0 Crash, or whatever the history books call it. We’ll see a few sites like TikTok and Threads that “buy their friends”, get a ton of overnight popularity and then fade away, and we’ll get a few “institutions” that take their time building healthy communities over tens of years. ActivityPub didn’t wow me with Mastodon but I’m pleasantly surprised by Lemmy, so maybe the Fediverse will be one of those institutions… but personally I still think there’s room in the market for RSS to make a comeback.


  • Hear hear! I thought I didn’t like the fediverse because Mastodon did such an awful job selling it to me. “Oh, I can’t view other instances’ local timelines without making accounts on them? What’s even the point of federation then?” But on Lemmy you can easily browse communities outside your own instance. So it’s not the fediverse’s fault, Mastodon just doesn’t have a clear audience.

    And yeah, I can see how a lot of Mastodon’s features are “privacy-focused”, but I think it does TOO good a job, it’s so private that you can’t find anything!