this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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[–] netvor 10 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Today I learned:

  • curl development cycle has a cooldown after a freeze.

How cool is that?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

Maybe its because I am tired but I don't get it, what does this mean?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

Using curl as a substitute for man/help has made it one of my most used commands for me as of late:

curl cheat.sh/AnyLinuxCommand to view tldr/cheat tips

Also great for the weather via curl wttr.in

Hopefully more commands utilize this technique

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Thanks for the tip! I sometimes use the program tldr for this purpose.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

tldr is also baked into cheat.sh too! (But it's redundant if you already have tldr/bro/etc installed probably)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Unfortunately wttr.in produces incorrect weather reports in many cities around the world

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Did not know about this. Care to elaborate?

[–] danielbln 4 points 10 months ago (3 children)

I recently watched the 3.5-hour workshop Mastering the curl command line by Daniel Stenberg, the author of curl

I commend the author for watching and subsequently summarizing this into a blog article, but in the age of LLMs like ChatGPT I cannot be arsed anymore to memorize any of the arcane command line arguments of curl, ffmpeg and the like.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago (1 children)

You don't have to memorize. Next time, you can just recall the commands by looking at manpages or this blog post again. You will already retain most concepts.

ChatGPT is cool, but it is wrong often enough that makes hard to trust. I don't want to be running the wrong command and suffering its consequences. I only resort to chatGPT when docs and web search do not give me an answer quickly. Even then, I try to verify chatGPT with docs before going forward.

[–] danielbln 4 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I mean, we're talking curl here, I don't think a lot of suffering of consequences is happening. And man pages are often also not a great resource, throw everything at you, often don't contain examples. If I'm building an app that integrates curl or libcurl, oh yes I'm reading the doc. If I just need curl to do something quickly, the LLM output is perfectly fine.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

I think you're right, it is harmless for the most part. But one time I unintentionally overwrote a file using curl. It is definitely my own stupidity here though.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

I'd be scared to perform POST/PUT with LLM-generated commands. For immutable calls I agree though

[–] demonsword 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

but in the age of LLMs like ChatGPT I cannot be arsed anymore to memorize any of the arcane command line arguments of curl, ffmpeg and the like

you should beware trusting blindly any LLM output, they are often wrong

[–] danielbln 1 points 10 months ago

Who said anything about trusting blindly? We're talking curl here, not dd or fdisk. And in my experience the LLM gets it right most of the time, and even if it doesn't, it's often still faster to just test the outputted command and feed back the error than crawling through the manages.