You say your house is clean, yet nothing’s stopping me from dumping out this bucket of mud on your floor, curious!

It’s not undoing the division, it never happens in the first place. Remainders aren’t ever fractions, that’s the whole point, they’re left over because they can’t be divided evenly. 5 % 2, you can take 2 away twice and you’ll have 1 left over which can’t have 2 taken away.

A minimal but powerful language can feel like magic. Like, literally. The whole appeal of magic in stories is that you can step out of the normal rules and do something that defies belief, and who hasn’t fantasized about that in real life?

If the language you’re using has a lot of magic built into it, things that the language can do but you can’t do, you feel mundane, like the language is letting you look at the cool things it can do, but doesn’t let you do them yourself. A more minimal language, where the important things are in the library, means that the language designers haven’t kept that stuff to themselves. They built the language such that that power is available to everyone. If the language gives its standard library authors the power to do things beautifully and elegantly without special treatment, then your library is getting those benefits too.

It’s also a sign of good design, because just saying “well, this thing magically works differently” tends to be a shortcut, a hack, an indication that something isn’t right and couldn’t be fixed nicely.

Most people don’t need a file to be in two places at once, it’s more confusing than convenient. And if they do want two of a file at all, they almost certainly want them to be separate copies so that the original stays unmodified when they edit the second one. Anyone who really wants a hard link is probably comfortable with the command line, or should get comfortable.

The Mac actually kind of gets the best of both worlds, APFS can clone a file such that they aren’t hard links but still share the same blocks of data on disk, so the second file takes up no more space, and it’s only when a block gets edited that it diverges from the other one and takes up more space, while the unmodified blocks remain shared. It happens when copy-pasting or duplicating a file in the Finder as well as with cp on the command line. I’m sure other modern file systems have this as well.

Hint: the solution depends on a more realistic and physics-based model of the problem than you’re using. And, even bigger hint, it’s less intuitive now that light bulb technology has changed to become much more efficient, you should imagine this problem taking place with a '90s bulb.

I don’t understand why this works, but it does

What was happening before was this: Git received your commits and ran the shell script. It directed the script’s output stream back to Git so that it could relay it back over the connection to display on your local terminal with remote: stuck in front of it. Backgrounding the npx command was working, the shell was quitting without waiting for npx to finish. However, Git wasn’t waiting for the shell script to finish, it was waiting for the output stream to close, and npx was still writing to it. You backgrounded the task but didn’t give npx a new place to write its output to, so it kept using the same output stream as the shell.

Running it via bash -c means “don’t run this under this bash shell, start a new one and have it just run this one command rather than waiting for a human to type a command into it.”

The & inside the quote is doing what you expect, telling the subshell to background this task. As before, it’ll quit once the command is running, as you told it not to wait.

The last bit is &> /dev/null which tells your original, first shell that you want this command to write somewhere else instead. Specifically, the special file /dev/null, which, like basically everything else in /dev/, is not really a file, it’s special kernel magic. That one’s magic trick is that when you write to it, everything works as expected except all the data is just thrown away. Great for things like this that you don’t want to keep.

So, the reason this works is you’re redirecting the npx output elsewhere, it just goes into a black hole where no one is actually waiting for it. The subshell isn’t waiting for the command to finish, so it quits almost immediately. And then the top level shell moves on after the subshell has finished.

I don’t think the subshell is necessary, if you do &> /dev/null & I think it’d be the same effect. But spawning a useless shell for a split second happens all the time anyway, probably not worth worrying about too much.

I most associate it with Slashdot comments in the 2000’s, complaining about Microsoft spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt about Linux and the GPL to scare companies into thinking that if they used Linux, they’d have to open source all their software, so yeah, definitely not just a cryptocurrency term.

I’m curious, what’s the worst case scenario in your eyes? I struggle to see why anyone would closed-fork it, or what threat it would pose if they did.

Why isn’t “it’s informed and you can just opt out” good enough for paid users? They could’ve developed a single system instead of two if that’s a sufficient standard of care for users’ data.

Opt out means “we will be doing this, without permission, unless you tell us not to” and opt in means “if you give us permission we will do this.” Codebases can contain important and sensitive information, and sending it off to some server to be shoved into an LLM is something that should be done with care. Getting affirmative consent is the bare minimum.

The right thing is to make it opt-in for everyone, simple as that. The entire controversy goes away immediately if they do. If they really believe it’s a good value proposition for their users, and want to avoid collecting data from people who didn’t actually want to give it, they should have faith that their users will agree and affirmatively check the box.

If free users are really such a drain on them, why have they been offering a free version for so long before it became a conduit to that sweet, sweet data? Because it isn’t a drain, it’s a win-win. They want people using their IDE, even for free, they don’t get money from it but they get market share, broad familiarity with their tool amongst software engineers, a larger user base that can support each other on third party sites and provide free advertising, and more.

The best, clearest code in the world will make it perfectly clear exactly what’s going on, but not why. “database.fetch(); // Fetch from the database” is a terrible comment, sure, but “// Resource loading is done lazily on first run, so we cannot depend on it being available right away” is something that can’t be conveyed through code alone.

They’re doing as much of a bad thing as they think they can get away with. I don’t feel a particular duty to carefully acknowledge that in some circumstances they feel obligated to do the right thing instead. If they don’t like the “misleading” aspects of that, they’re free to just do the right thing completely.

https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2025/09/30/detailed-data-sharing-for-better-ai/

I only use it when I’ve royally messed up and the commit I need to get back is no longer referenced anywhere. Accidentally deleted a branch, finished a merge or rebase before realizing I messed up, that kind of thing, just use the reflog to find it again, get a branch pointing to it, then try again.

Ugh, I’m devastated, I was so sure that math was gay but this is making me question everything

There isn’t a simple evolutionary definition of “fish”, not the same way there is for, say, mammals. If you found the common ancestor of everything we call a mammal and said “everything descended from this one is also a mammal”, you’d be correct. If you did that for everything we call fish, every animal in the world would be a fish. Also, we decided which animals were fish mostly on vibes, so without a clear definition you can pedantically argue that everything is a fish including mammals.

Older Unix systems used to only do the first 8 bytes for passwords. Sometimes for my own amusement when logging into one of the Sun machines at school, I’d type in enough of my password to count and then just mash the keyboard.

Yeah, TypeScript has to integrate with JavaScript for practicality’s sake, which pierces a hole in its ability to do proper, rigorous type checking. It’s closer to machine-readable documentation that helpfully flags some errors than an actual type-checked language, which will make you get your types right instead of gently suggesting that there might be an issue the way TypeScript does.

For the rest, well, there isn’t even actually a question, I suspect you’d open a door and pick a box and hope that you’ve got a gold ball to pick, and it’s not clear that he’s following Monty Hall rules and always opening a bad door, but I think knowing which ball got thrown would make the rest of the odds fall into place.