I always want to reach for `units`, but I'm perennially baffled by the output! What's up with the * and /?

The * value is the result of converting 10 miles to meters, as requested.

The / value is the inverse of that in case you wanted that, ie 0.1 meters in miles.

It's explained in `man 1 units`

Oh, I know it's explained in the man page. I read it every time and promptly forget because I can't internalize the choice of notation.

If you find the output a bit hard to parse at times (as I do), you might want to try qalc instead, I use it all the time from the terminal to do conversions:

    $ qalc 
    > 3 millilightseconds to miles

      3 milliLightSeconds ≈ 558 mi + 1491 yd + 0.1692913386 ft

I'm not sure if it has all the same units as `units` does, but it replaced my use of it entirely as it can do other useful operations as well

* multiply

/ divide

I am familiar.

I usually call it non-interactively:

  $ units 1500DKK USD
      * 236.76653
      / 0.00422357

in which case it's always the first line I want.

(The second line is telling me 1USD is 0.00422357 of 1500DKK.)

Note if you use the currency conversions,

  systemctl enable units-currency-update.timer

is needed to keep them up-to-date.

If you only need the first line you can invoke units with --terse.

  $ units --terse 2.4kWh megajoules
  8.64

the * is denoting the conversion from your first unit to your second, the / denotes the other way.

You have: 1 miles You want: feet * 5280 / 0.00018939394

In the above example, 1 mile is 5280 feet, and 1 foot is 0.00018939394 miles

If I do 2 miles to feet, the values are doubled (or halved for the reverse conversion)

You have: 2 miles You want: feet * 10560 / 9.469697e-05

I agree the law should attempt to be specific, but I have to point out that this is still quite ambiguous!

Is it permissible to dictate/listen to text messages on my handheld smartphone, so long as I don't hold it in my hand? Can I click "next track" on the steering wheel, but not on my phone screen?

What about smart watches? They are not handheld, but they are equally distracting, if not more so than a phone because their screens are so tiny and fiddly.

Surely you don't believe that there's a significant fraction of tech jobs that pay $500k?

No, not sure where you got that from.

Oh, I guess you were just sharing and this wasn't advice:

> I just landed a mid 6-figures job _without_ grinding leetcode. They’re out there. This game everyone plays is an abomination.

I’m way too humble and jaded to give advice to strangers on the internet, yes.

I offered an anecdote.

I thought TRAMP overrides that setting in your SSH config.

> TRAMP uses the ControlMaster=auto OpenSSH option by default, if possible. However, it overwrites ControlPath settings when initiating ssh sessions. TRAMP does this to fend off a stall if a master session opened outside the Emacs session is no longer open. That is why TRAMP prompts for the password again even if there is an ssh already open.

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/tramp/Ss...

It does and it becomes a bit annoying if you were already persisting sessions, but you can just tell emacs to use the same sockets that ssh sets up.

> I’ve used bad redaction to my advantage at work to make money

You've certainly piqued my curiosity. Can you say any more?

I sell construction work. Sometimes my customers will have me price up something that someone else priced to them and they will send me a competitor’s redacted scope letter with the pricing blanked out so I can bid ‘apples to apples’ aka the same scope of work.

I’ve unredacted proposals using the ‘unflatten’ command in Bluebeam Revu (which is by far the best PDF editor) which allowed me to underbid my competitor and win the job (and at a higher price than I would’ve submitted).

Definitely an ethical grey area, but an edge is an edge ;)

The information was in the document they sent me, they should’ve removed it completely if they didn’t want me to see it. The situation is identical to them mailing me a paper copy with a black piece of paper scotch taped over the price.

There are zero legal implications, it was a private contract. My customers regularly tell me the exact price that my competitors have submitted to them and that isn’t illegal.

Probably there are legal implications for attorneys circumventing redaction in legal documents but construction proposal letters have no protections against unredaction.

Morally gray, sure.

Legally, I can't see what's wrong with using information that you have, even if the other party didn't intend for you to have it. Lawyers themselves will use information in court that was accidentally sent to them by a counter-party, and that the other lawyer never intended them to have.

It may be technically an issue with some government bids, if you need to file an affidavit certifying you had no such knowledge.

But how would they prove it? And, doing so would reveal that they fucked up in the first place by sending it to you.

I would be really surprised if there was a law against this, and even if there was who really cares? As long as you don't make it super obvious (like consistently bid 1p under the competition) nobody will know.

There's no way there's a legal case that can be made against him imo

Probably trading of some sort?

Here's a more informative doc about sandboxing in Chromium

https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:san...

In my experience, you should prepare for retaliation when you do a charge back.

Whether one cares depends very strongly on what "retaliation" means. If they ban your account, not a big deal - you were getting bad service and didn't want to do business with them anyway. If they send an armed hit squad to kill you, that would be worth being concerned about though.

I "purchased" a digital game once on the PlayStation Store. It wasn't clear from the description that it was completely useless without an active subscription to PSN, so I tried to return it. They said no way, sales are final and you've already launched the game. I did a chargeback, and they basically locked down my account until I filed a support ticket and had to lie, saying someone else made a purchase on my account.

If they don't want you as a customer, it's not wise to fight them on that.

I think over the course of 3+ years, that keyboard probably wasted at least 30 minutes of my life.

Wow, you got off easy.

That keyboard was such a POS that a Wall Street Journal writer did a feature story on it without correcting any of the mistakes the keyboard introduced. It was essentially illegible. Then the Web site had buttons that you could push to remove each kind of error and make it legible: https://www.wsj.com/graphics/apple-still-hasnt-fixed-its-mac...

I love org-mode, but if I were king, it would accept freakin' back-quotes for monospaced text. Instead, it takes ~tilde~ or =equals=, and I will never remember the difference no matter how many times I look it up.

I use orgmode's ~tilde = "for code"~ and =equals_for_filenames.txt=, but what do I know.

I also like [Markdown's text first](https://hyperlink.com) then link format much more than [[https://hyperlink.com][Orgmode's link first then text]].

But for the life of me, there are so many things I hate about Markdown:

  - Alternative syntax for _italic_ *italic* and __bold__ **bold** (why?)

    - versus using /italic/ and *bold*. It just feels so right

  - You need to use HTML tags <u>to underline</u>, or <s>strikethrough</s>, or just about anything in Markdown (including line breaks! You need to use the <br> tag)

    - +strikethrough+ is alright, but _underline_ just makes sense

  - Lack of a unified Markdown standard:

    - Diminishes portability (e.g. varying approaches for file meta tags like in Obsidian)

    - Causes different renderings of the same document (e.g. Obsidian vs GitHub)

    - There was a serious standardization effort in 'Standard Markdown', only for the original creator to be a knob about it: https://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now-common-markdown/

It's a shame too because despite Orgmode being superior to Markdown in just about every way, its adoption is nowhere near as close (editing is hard on iOS, and needing Emacs is a barrier for the general public).

Markdown isn't going away anytime soon.

I switch between Markdown and Org Mode a lot, the syntactic differences don't bother me too much, but I guess I like Markdown's a bit more. But what I really miss in Markdown:

1. Collapsible headlines and headline search.

2. Executable source code blocks (for notebook style work).

3. TODO states.

4. Time tracking and clock tables.

5. Table formulas.

6. Inline LaTeX and document generation in general.

Now 1 is just an editor feature, and some of these others could be, too. But I wish Markdown was more powerful, extensible, or less ubiquitous.

What bothers me most about Org Mode is that support is pretty limited outside Emacs. We use it as a wiki replacement at my company, for that integrations into other editors are kinda good enough. But there's some areas like reporting only Emacs users can realistically work on. GitLab (and Forgejo, which we recently switched to) render Org pretty nicely, so it's easy to consume in a browser. But editing is a different story.

So I guess I wish for either a less complex (and thus easier to support) Org, or a more powerful Markdown.

I’ve seen a lot of apps extend markdown to support various additional features. Obsidian, for example, has an extensive number of community plugins which offer a ton of features.

This of course ends up being editor specific, but if org has the same limitation, by being tied to emacs, is it really any different? I think what emacs has going for it in this case is that it’s been around for decades, and we can assume it will continue to be around for decades into the future. The markdown editor de jour may not be.

Yeah, that's my thinking with these tools. I think it needs to be more of a standard.

Either Markdown++ or Org Lite. I'll take either :) I'm not a fan of coupling formats and tools tightly.

This is also the primary hangup that's kept me from adopting org-mode for notes, and I instead keep everything in MarkDown, and miss out on all the org-mode organization effects. The differences in link syntax are hard too, but I've got 5-10 years of DokuWiki in my history that make the link syntax more palatable. However, I still prefer MarkDown syntax for links too...

=string= leads to the text being transcribed verbatim. A good hint is to recall that the equals sign kinda implies verbatim.

Ironic then that [0] (the first hit when I search "emacs org mode tutorial") says:

    You can make words *bold*, /italic/, _underlined_, =code= and ~verbatim~, and, if you must, +strike-through+.

[0]: https://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/org4beginners.html

That seems to be a very old tutorial. It's indeed confusing that they host that on the official site.

The official manual states equals is used for =verbatim= quotes: https://orgmode.org/manual/Emphasis-and-Monospace.html

I just "lustrated" [0] my Debian Stable machine onto NixOS on Friday, and it's gone surprisingly well! It sounds silly, but I installed this way because I didn't want to figure out how to mount my LVM + LUKS encrypted partition on the live USB.

What is lustrating? Basically, you run the NixOS installation tools on an existing Linux installation (install the tools with the Nix package manager). The installer wipes out anything on / that doesn't belong, with a few exceptions, including /home and anything listed in /etc/NIXOS_LUSTRATE, a file you create as part of the installation steps.

[0]: https://nixos.org/manual/nixos/stable/#sec-installing-from-o...