I hear you. It’s no good to just cede ownership of a word and allow others to define it however suits them. But… it’s Twitter, getting into a good faith philosophical discussion about the definitions of words ain’t going to happen, so in many cases it’s better to just not bring up the controversial words at all. Guess there’s pros and cons to each.

I agree. That’s why I suggest (or more like implied) that when we know we have different definitions of a word, we avoid using that word. It’s a good thing to at least try if two people really care about understanding.

“Woke” is a problem because people have different definitions, and no matter what Webster or any other authority says the definition is, people will continue to have differing definitions.

How can we reach understanding when we don’t even agree on the definition of words?

This is way to nuanced to deal with on fucking Twitter. If you use the word “woke” on Twitter, expect a lot of misunderstanding, talking past each other, and bad faith arguments to follow.

I did not suggest banning any words.

To understand why I’m opposed to the word “woke”, you must first acknowledge this fact:

Sometimes people have different definitions of the same word.

If you’re willing to accept that, then it logically follows that using a word that people have different definitions of will cause more confusion than understanding. If our goal in speaking is to convey understanding, then that is best accomplished by avoiding words where people have conflicting definitions.

We’ve all learned that there are facts and opinions, but there is a third category: definitions.

If you watch for it, you will see that many disagreements boil down to nothing more than disagreeing about the definition of a single word. If we temporarily avoid using that word, suddenly we find ourselves in agreement, or at least having a better understanding of each other.

Finally a place I can share my cold takes. (I’m not on Twitter, I won’t discuss this on Reddit either.)

1. The community manager had a meltdown and blocking everyone was a power trip and was wrong.

2. Godot’s tweet was wrong, because it used the word “woke” which immediately drives any conversation into the gutter. Doesn’t matter if you’re on the right or left, as soon as you say the word “woke” you have ruined the conversation.

3. It is good that Godot explicitly supports LGBT+ people. They should be welcome. The community CoC should make this explicit, and it does. A tweet to reaffirm this is fine, a cringe joke born from the dredges of Twitter is less fine.

4. Godot’s “revenge forks” are amusing and will not go anywhere. Someone might collect some donations before grifting into the night though.

5. None of this has any effect on Godot’s technical suitability for creating a game.

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.

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

Careful, the 100,000 kg of pizza will turn into manure.

Yep, drama always comes. The question is, do you want to have any power and rights when the drama comes?

I think the joke is that the Jr. Developer sits there looking at the screen, a picture of a cat appears, and the Jr. Developer types “cat” on the keyboard then presses enter. Boom, AI in action!

The truth behind the joke is that many companies selling “AI” have lots of humans doing tasks like this behind the scene. “AI” is more likely to get VC money though, so it’s “AI”, I promise.