these days I ask chatgpt for help to install arch instead of using the docs which are designed as a gate keeping mechanism to discourage the uninitiated by making them feel stupid.
chatgpt just tells you how to do and turns out its really not that hard.
I actually agree that the Arch docs are absolutely excellent in their level of detail, precision and helpfulness. I also think its possible for them to simultaneously be a gate keeping mechanism and stand by what I said
Gatekeeping is an active effort to keep others out of something (out of a field, away from information, etc.). Where is the active effort to keep people out of Arch when the documentation is made available for free?
I think you're talking past the person you're replying to.
Not sure why you use the word "active", as it's unnecessary. Gatekeeping is just erecting barriers of whatever sort in an effort to keep people out. Making install documentation that is very very detailed to the point that some people will be turned off by it and go away could very much be considered gatekeeping. Even if that documentation is objectively good documentation.
Obviously we can't know the motives of the people who wrote the documentation. But it's fair to look at the docs and believe that the authors are engaging in gatekeeping. That belief might be wrong, but there's no evidence either way. Unless the authors have come out and said something about this topic, of course. And even then, it depends on if you believe what they've said.
It's subjective.
(I personally have no dog in this race. I don't use or particularly care about Arch; Debian suits me just fine. My main experience with Arch is positive, though: their wiki is amazing, and when I search for answers for various questions about Linux and Linux desktop software, the Arch wiki comes up very often, and is nearly always helpful.)
> Making install documentation that is very very detailed to the point that some people will be turned off by it and go away could very much be considered gatekeeping.
In my times, we called such people lazy. No gatekeeping needed.
I haven't had that feeling. In fact, installing Arch Linux is easy. The hardest part is the bad partition editor UX and that you need to have an understanding of how UEFI booting works. There is also the problem of GRUB being a terrible bootloader, but that is another story for another day.
The install wiki is full of outdated information that causes people to install outdated and old methods of doing things. So I wouldn't advise people to use it, other than the fact there's no other option.
I find that hard to believe. I've always found the Arch Wiki to be excellent and very up to date. Do you have any examples of articles which document outdated ways to do things?
If you have found incorrect information, please edit the wiki to improve it.
I wonder if they tried to correct for 'exercise intensity' for that, because (fun fact), exercising regularly is negatively correlated with regularly taking all kinds of drugs -- except for alcohol, where the correlation is apparently positive [1].
Furthermore, drinking weekly seems better than monthly.
But frequency doesn't mean much unless we know amounts. For example, small amounts weekly could be benefiting social relations and regulating things like anxiety. Binging monthly might not give these benefits.
Before we rush to conclusions and make up just-so stories, note this passage from the research:
"The relationship between cognitive function and lifestyle factors such as alcohol consumption and smoking
proved complex. Individuals who abstained from alcohol
showed lower cognitive scores than those who consumed
alcohol, conflicting with previous research[1] that has
connected moderate drinking with cognitive impairment"
[1] Topiwala A, Allan CL, Valkanova V, et al. Moderate alcohol
consumption as risk factor for adverse brain outcomes and cognitive
decline: longitudinal cohort study. BMJ 2017;357:j2353.
Yes, the parent comment incorporated and was consistent with that. I.e., there's something confounding these results. It then hypothesized the confounder.
First Reaction: These days, less-clever folks are mostly in situations where they're lucky if they can afford food and rent. Alcohol just another out-of-reach luxury.
Re-read the "Methods" section, on page 2 of the PDF. I'm not too familiar with the UK Biobank database, but the researchers broadly exclude anyone whose record (in the DB) did not include completion of multiple cognitive tests. And prioritized people whose data include rather comprehensive sleep & related data.
Again I don't know this dataset well...but I'd really suspect that few of the UK's homeless would have passed this study's selection criteria.
its an interesting idea, but its very complex because of varying attitudes to alcohol within and between religions.
It is interesting that fundamentalists tend to be anti-alcohol across religions with different attitudes in mainstream believers (say Christianity that commonly uses alcohol in religious rites and hose founder's first miracle was to give people alcohol, Buddhism, and Islam which is clearly anti-alcohol).
I think that means you are onto something in that there is an important correlation there. Not sure it is as simple as lower income (there are lots of rich fundamentalists of all religions) or cognition. Personality traits or associated cultural factors more likely?
> A hunch would be that alcohol abstinence is strongly correlated with religious fundamentalism which is correlated with lower income and cognition.
It seems you are pointing to second largest religion in the world - islam. It covers over 2 billions of people. They largely don't drink not because they are fundamentalists, they just follow basic premises of their religion. And my various travels to various countries with them being either majority or minority its extremely common, even when they resettle ie to Europe. There are also completely dry countries in North africa for example, they are not full of religious fundamentalists.
Please educate yourself about the world a bit before making such harsh and discriminating statements, they have no place on this forum.
I started feminizing hormone therapy about 4 years ago and I've noticed that I still get angry but that it's way easier to maintain my composure and it's less likely to build to a point where I lose control of myself.
Cf: "honestly the best marketing scheme in history is men successfully getting away with calling women the "more emotional" gender for like, EONS, because they've successfully rebranded anger as Not An Emotion"
Of course it is sarcasm. The real meaning is closer to "because men are widely believed, and indeed widely believe themselves to be, better at emotional self-regulation, without real evidence for this, what often happens when they can no longer contain their negative emotions (e.g. anger), they thus project these emotions and fail to regulate them effectively, but maintain denial of being emotional."
Python is the only one mentioned that “actually works” without endless exceptions to the rule in the normal case. The ones mentioned (Rust/Javascript/Lisp/Go) all have specific syntax that is commonly enough used which makes it harder to search. Possible, absolutely, but still harder.
I'd say Python works well at greppability because community conventions generally discourage concealing certain kinds of definitions (e.g. function definitions are usually "def whatever").
However, that's just convention. Lots of modules do metaprogramming tricks that obscure greppability, which can be a pain. This is particularly acute when searching for code that is "import-time polymorphic"--that is, code which picks one of several implementations for a piece of functionality at import time at the module scope. That frequently ends up with some hanky-panky a la "exported_function_name = _implementation1 if platform_supported else _implementation2" at the module scope.
While sometimes annoying, that type of thing is usually done for understandable reasons (picking an optimized/platform-supported implementation of an interface--think select or selectors in the stdlib, or any pypi implementation of filesystem monitoring using fsnotify/fanotify/kqueue/fsevents/ReadDirectoryChangesW). Additionally, good type annotations help with greppability, though they can't fully mitigate this issue.
Much less defensible in Python is code that abuses locals/globals to indirect symbol access, or code that abuses star imports to provide interfaces/implementation switching.
Those, fortunately, are rare, but the elephant in the "no greppability ever" room is not: getattr bullshit in OO code is so often utterly obscure, unnecessary and terrible. And it's distressingly common on PyPi. At first I thought this was Ruby's encouragement of method_missing in the bad old days bleeding into the Python community, but the number of programmers for whom getattr magic is catnip seems to be disproportionate to the number of folks with Ruby experience, and, more concerningly, seems to me to be growing over time.
That’s usually how it’s done with words that end in one consonant when adding a suffix that starts with a vowel, so as not to change the pronunciation of the short vowel in the root word due to english’s rules around long and short vowels. See also map->mapped, bat->batted, tap->tappable etc
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