I’m so confused. I thought system76 was the company that sold me this laptop with a shitty battery - why are they getting into software?
They didn’t make the laptop either - they basically sold you a Clevo gaming laptop, put some branding on it, and support that. No surprise a gamer or workstation dingus has shitty battery life, especially with the poor and generic chassis design that sacrifices battery room for expandability in other areas.
It’s not just that it has bad battery life, it’s also that it goes down to 60-80% capacity after just a few months, and keeps getting worse. Their customer support will gladly sell a replacement for over $100, but won’t give the specs, so I had to open up the laptop to make sure I was ordering the right replacement (only available from China, and similar issues). Don’t get me wrong, I love most of the other specs and how well it runs Linux, but haven’t found a good solution for the battery.
Most of the errors in Rails are
undefined method XYZ for nil:NilClass, this is a whole class of bugs that compilers have been able to detect for years and years.
FTFY
class NilClass
def method_missing(*args)
self
end
end
The reason why this is bad is because a line with only apt-get update will get cached by the build and won’t actually run every time you need to run apt-get install.
I actually find this to be useful when developing Dockerfiles, so that I can leverage the cache while figuring out all of the packages to install. Once I get the list complete though, I’ll typically clean it up and put them all on the same line.
I love this concept! I agree that making people sign up to get basic content is a huge barrier, and this solution of using an AnonymousUser (I’m guessing single-table inheritance here?) is so elegant in that it keeps all of database relationships intact if the user decides to sign up.
Is anyone else bothered by the use of the term ricing? As far as I know it is co-opting the automotive term which has racist origins.
If somebody brings up ricing and linux, I have to think of this old site making fun of gentoo users w/o a clue:
https://web.archive.org/web/20080830031318/http://funroll-loops.info/
This thread got pretty ugly. It started out good talking about the history of the term and what it means to people but has sunk into personal attacks. If someone would like to cite academic sources on the history of the term in tech or racing, go ahead, but otherwise we’ve stopped adding new information and this thread is done. Please don’t post further comments.
I’m also going to delete the comments with personal attacks. Please don’t do this. If you’re right, being mean doesn’t make you more right. Nobody has ever taken incoming vitriol and abuse are a sign that someone must really be worth listening to and seriously considering, and they’re not appropriate here.
Tagging so everyone in the thread sees this: @fimad @fs111 @voronoipotato @djsumdog @mjtorn @nebkor @brendes @btaitelb @dz @vhodges @leolambda
Sorry, I missed this because I was writing the post and went out to the food truck. honest mistake, wasn’t trying to be a butt. I got a little reactionary there, it won’t happen again.
Let’s etch that in bronze and hang that over every discussion area on the Internet, please.
Exactly.
Hmm, I didn’t know about that at all. Would be nice to have a better term. Customization seems too general.
“Tweaking” seems to capture it pretty well.
I considered that, but “tweaking” also means being high on stimulants, which is just common enough in the hacker community that I think it would be confusing.
Perhaps modding, but that’s already a massively overloaded term: game modding, hardware modding, etc.
I’m inclined to use “dotting”, as in “dotfile”, but also with the connotation of meticulousness (as in “dotting i’s and crossing t’s”. Its alternate definitions are pretty tame, as well.
Dotting sounds what a dotard does, but I guess that’d be “doting”.
Yeah, good point. I like “styling”.
tuning, maybe?
That looks more apropriate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuning
“Fine tuning a computer environment” could be your job. “Like car tuning but for software” would be the hobby.
from other communities: Hot Rodding (cars - more Chip Foose than useless spoilers on the back) and Modding (computer cases)
Given that there’s a lot of style at work, maybe “peacocking”, spiffing up”, “turning out”, something riffing on fashion.
It’s like styling, but like even more so. Stylizing?
Styling is good, yeah. “Stylize” actually means “to depict or treat in a mannered and nonrealistic style”, so I don’t think it’s really applicable here.
I had never seen it used in the Linux desktop. The term ricer may not have the same racist meanings as before but two things are common about ricers in my area:
My personal view is that, even when a word has no racist origins, if there is a specific ethnicity that it applies to, it will quickly become a racist word anyway. Luckily there are more and more white dudes who bought their first car and became a ricer 🍚
My perspective is exactly the opposite – I have never heard this term in connection to cars, just with *nix customization, especially in and around the Linux/Unix community. In over 4 years I’ve never heard anyone use it in any other context, nor was I in any sense aware that it had this other meaning. And I would suppose that most people, especially non-car enthusiasts like me would have probably never found out, nor use the term with this connotation.
All in all, it seems like a fantastic starting point for a horrible confusion…
Yes, and yes. :( . It’s unfortunate when a racist term becomes so normalized that it’s just vernacular. Then the people who want to use it xenophobically basically get to do so and nobody speaks up because it’s just a word everyone uses. The term in guns is “Tacticool”. Perhaps there’s a good word for this that is less regressive and a little more general.
It doesn’t have racist origins; or at least not in the context we used it in back when I was in various SCCA and use to race. A ricer is just someone who adds all kinds of shit to their car. Each sticker adds 2hp. The K&N air filter adds 10hp. Big cardboard wing adds 90hp. Fart can exhaust adds 30hp. That carbon fibre hood? 120hp right there.
Most ricers were white. They were just kids who didn’t know dick about cars and pretended they did. They’d fill the parking lot and hang out in their riced out Hondas while the rest of us raced. I mean if you stretch, some people might trace ricer back to the term wigger referring to white people enacting black culture.
Ricers had nothing to do with race and more to do with shitty car mods like these: https://www.reddit.com/r/Shitty_Car_Mods/
Ricer aka rice burner kinda does though because it was about japanese cars. Yes this is where the term comes from and no I’m not shitting you.
I’ll be honest terms like wigger are also regressive. I’m not telling you how to speak or trying to say this is what you meant by it. Obviously you can use a word with racist or ethnocentric origins non-racistly. Just keep in mind that not everyone who uses it is using it the way you’re using it. Also keep in mind that someone who sees you using it might think you have it out for a specific ethnicity until they get to know you a bit better.
Frankly the title evokes a “Yikes” from me but in a “Yikes they don’t even know how bad that sounds” way. Like people who know you will probably go “Oh but that’s djsumdog, he doesn’t mean it in a racist way”, but wow it is just a really bad idea to lead with a racially loaded term in your article title to the general public.
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Someone can be unaware of how racist language affects thoughts and opinions without “being a racist”. Being said yea just because you heard the term from a person of the affected group does not mean it’s cool to say. Case in point if you dropped the n-word because you saw a black person doing it you’d probably get some frowns.
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I think that’s a really good definition of a microaggression, a term that people don’t knowingly use offensively, but which has offensive origins and still conveys that offensiveness to some.
Growing up, I’d use the term jip [sic] all the time as a synonym for screwing someone over in a deal. I actually thought it was less offensive to say than to say screw. Then I learned that the word has racist origins about stereotypes for Gypsies, so I went through the process that I think a lot of us go through. At first I was defensive because there was a discongruity in my reality between how I saw myself and how others might see me, so I rationalized that the word didn’t really mean that any more. And if someone happened to be offended by it, they were probably just being overly sensitive and should get a thicker skin.
But over time, I realized I had the choice when using words, and that it’s not up to me to dictate how others should feel. So I slowly started correcting myself, because when given the choice, I’d rather not use words that offend a group of people, especially when I’m not part of that group.
I didn’t think you meant that, sorry I was responding to the intense reaction to your post. Yeah I do think that’s the case. The root problem is like when you use a word that has racist origins, and a racist takes it as like “Ah they also hate the japs” validation for their racist attitudes. Which is bad. It also sucks because words that are that way primarily the racists, and the marginalized know what it means because they grew up in an environment where the intention behind the origin was more clear.
I hope you understand I do not agree with painting you as a bad guy simply because you grew up in an area where a word was the norm and you didn’t see harm with it. Doesn’t mean there isn’t harm? It just means it was the norm and you were used to it and it would be exceptional for you to escape that norm, and not the default expectation. At least you’re not shutting down the discussion.
Suffice to say, normal people have likely forgotten it, racists remember these things with a death grip and will use it to dehumanize people as much as physically possible.
You quoted it yourself: it’s pejorative, not racist. The difference is significant, yet the whole point is moot, because so few people are neurotic about political correctness in slang etymology[citation needed]
Things can be both pejorative and racist? Many racist things are pejorative. The term is racist because it uses East Asian products as a way to describe inferiority. To put in in a more personal way it would be like me saying “oh that’s snake code” as a pejorative for python programmers.It tries to illogically assert that since you’ve seen a python programmer make bad code, that a python programmer can never write good code. This is of course is horseshit, and is bigoted against python programmers. I’m merely trying to dislodge bullshit like that from the public consciousness.
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There’s nothing wrong with LeoLambda’s article, I liked it too. The title gave me a yikes, but that doesn’t mean that they’re a bad person it probably just means they either didn’t know about the origin of the word, or they knew about it but thought it wasn’t used that way anymore. I also like talking about culture, it doesn’t mean I’m virtue signaling. Though frankly I think you are virtue signalling to the pc-panic crew. You basically pooped your pants when you read the word racist like christ himself was being crucified. Exploring alternative words that are less racist isn’t virtue signalling it’s called not being actively hostile to an entire demographic for no reason.
Potentially ironically, “hysterical” has sexist origins.
This whole conversation is a little frustrating to me. I hope @mjtorn and @brendes are just reading past what’s being said to them, due to defensiveness and confirmation bias. The responses to their comments aren’t being worded to tiptoe around their feelings, which is also pretty understandable—these conversations are an emotional investment, and there are lots of aggressive racists out there who will throw that investment back in your face. I don’t really have a solution, but I think the situation is regrettable. The path to realization that subtle racism is everywhere always seems to involve an epiphany after the fact, not careful reading and understanding of the arguments.
From my experience it is probably racist. Case in point: In Edmonton they call riced cars ‘Nip’d up’ (racial slang for Japanese) since it would be mostly Asian drivers doing the mods.