This might be educational: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/util/Optional.html

There are issues that the Optional class alleviates that are common enough to be documented: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/inspectopedia/ConditionalCanBeOptional.html (more detail is available at places like https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community/blob/a2d32ec64ed0fb37c7cc97856aa94cce95b17ee5/java/java-impl/src/inspectionDescriptions/ConditionalCanBeOptional.html (I believe this information used to be visible with the “inspectopedia” URLs but I don’t see that today))

On the other hand, it seems there are some features / situations that require null to be present: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Operators/Optional_chaining https://www.jetbrains.com/help/inspectopedia/OptionalToIf.html

I’d be surprised if someone born around or after 1995 would actually have to know this

Only 3.7 percent of CarMax sales nationwide are for manual cars

ICANN approves use of .internal domain for your network

*(char*)0 = 0; - What Does the C++ Programmer Intend With This Code? - JF Bastien - C++ on Sea 2023

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFIqNZ8VbRY

This helped me: https://nutritionsource.hsph.harvard.edu/what-should-you-eat/

An overarching question

You should probably discuss boundary setting with someone you trust. This situation might be only one part of a broader issue with your relationship with your parents, and you can probably make that relationship more beneficial and less detrimental.

Moving out

Once you are legally and financially able to, you could move out (or take action to improve your financial situation to make it more likely you’ll be able to do so in the future). Distance can allow a relationship to change to your benefit. It seems that the majority of adults in the wealthiest countries don’t live with their parents: http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/5908feb9fcd8eb1e008b4681-1200/young-adults-living-at-home.png https://64.media.tumblr.com/42facc68776260a335473a2553bb7f59/410ac9df6d9c28a0-9f/s1280x1920/8be58d13087dc686c9edcab713f63fc4c538e99a.jpg

The law

Note that, unless you have another reason to not want to be around your parents, I doubt that involving a state institution (like child protective services, a police department, a prosecutor’s office) in your relationship with your parents will be helpful. Knowing relevant laws is more useful to better understand what is socially accepted behavior, and to be able to know what public institutions are available to help you if you find yourself in a situation where they’re likely to be helpful.

Also, consider whether it’s appropriate to tell other people you know about this situation. If you do choose to discuss this with other people, I would follow an escalation procedure so that information doesn’t need to spread farther than necessary (for example, tell friends first, then if you don’t see improvement tell adults that live near you, then if you don’t see improvement tell adults in positions of responsibility (like teachers), and so on).

Privacy

You could inform your parents that state institutions might become involved if they cause you to be recorded while in your bedroom without your consent:

in many places, it is indeed illegal to put cameras in your child’s room without their knowledge or consent.

property owners face some limitations when attempting to install cameras throughout a rental property. All cameras must be visible; hidden or spy cameras are not permissible in a tenant’s residence. Similarly, CCTV cameras are forbidden in bathrooms, bedrooms, toilets, and other private areas throughout a rented unit.

These quotes are discussing cameras, but I expect the same laws and principles apply to audio recordings.

If you receive mail to an address and are an adult, I expect you have rights similar to that of a tenant.

Money

It seems your parents cannot force you to buy anything, and surely not an amazon echo. They may have a right to receive money you gained as a compensation for services (as wages) during minority for some reason, but otherwise what is yours is yours, and your parents should only use what is yours in order to promote your interests (like your health, security, and so on), and probably they should only do that when it’s necessary (in situations where there is a clear and urgent need).

You may want to ensure you have deposited any money you have acquired into a bank account you own (so there is a record of how long you had it, so it would be more questionable if they tried to claim it isn’t yours). It might also be useful to use a separate bank account to receive and account for wages (since it seems there are special exceptions for wages, so keeping clear records of what money is wages and what is not might be useful), and it might be useful to have a UTMA custodial account (like one described at https://www.fidelity.com/learning-center/personal-finance/custodial-account-for-kids) (to enable making it even more clear what property has been transferred to you) (note that this does allow a custodian to use the property, but only for your benefit) (note you probably can’t “transfer” money to yourself, so any money you already acquired should probably be managed without using a UTMA or UGMA account).

A community named like “Ask Lemmy” would probably be most useful to get questions answered, like !asklemmy@lemmy.world or !asklemmy@lemm.ee

There probably aren’t enough people with historian questions to have enough questions to get people checking a community every day/week, so questions on that or any other specific topic would probably get seen by more people by just making a post in an “Ask Lemmy” community. However, !askhistorians@lemmy.world exists with 10 posts since 28 June 2023! I expected to not find such a community or for it to have significantly fewer posts.

You can also search specifically for communities, comments, users, etc.: https://sh.itjust.works/search?q=Ask&type=Communities&listingType=All&page=1&sort=TopAll

There is also !whatisthisthing@lemmy.world and other “what is” communities, which would be more useful for that specific type of question.

Perhaps politics being hard to understand or interact with is a sign the system of politics should be replaced.

It seems the first time PR was used was in 1855. Canada and the USA are late (it seems that most of the places I’d be okay with living use proportional representation), but catching up sooner would be better than catching up later!

I’ll draw a parallel to another revolution: supposedly only two wars were fought to end slavery, in the USA and Haiti (everywhere else seems to have banned slavery with just legislation and compensation, for example in Britain), and I’d rather keep the number of wars over proportional representation at 0 rather than risking having a higher number, so advocating emphatically is important regardless of circumstances.

Instead of being inside the Knesset they would be outside the Knesset, rebelling against the system not reveling in it, being left out, destabilizing the country. Proportional representation gives all sections of society power, and yes that’s frustrating […], but it’s empowering and in its own way stabilizing too.

Proportional representation

A useful facet of proportional representation is that it often results in you having multiple representatives (shared with more people) rather than only one (“Academics agree that the most important influence on proportionality is an electoral district’s magnitude, the number of representatives elected from the district.”). That means you are much more likely to have someone to represent you at least somewhat rather than having a 50% chance of having nobody to represent you. This has been a major selling point for electoral reform for a long time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8XOZJkozfI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqWwV3xk9Qk

A TED-Ed video suggests that to “choose a defining fight” is useful. If people ask for “proportional representation” it would still be important even if we had an equal chance of ending up getting single member districts with STV or large electoral districts that elect multiple members with party-list proportional representation (list-PR)! With better representation, I expect we will find it easier to implement further improvements to state institutions.

I personally think “proportional representation” (PR) and “better representation” will be much easier terms to use to rally support than “single transferable vote” (STV) and “not having to worry about how anyone else is voting” (which would be assisted by having independence of irrelevant alternatives), since the meaning of the former is surely much clearer to the average person. STV / other voting systems with desirable qualities are good to advocate for, but it seems even “random dictatorship” is in some ways better than plurality voting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_pairs#Comparison_table), so I expect summarizing “improving the electoral system” with the term “proportional representation” will be more likely to make my life better than advocating for STV specifically.

Note that some implementations of party-list proportional representation violate voter’s privacy (“In 2014 a German citizen, Christian Dworeck, reported this lack of secrecy in Swedish voting to the European Commission” (I suspect Israel uses a similar system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFbBuD32DqQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_IvDkWGqwI)), and I probably wouldn’t specifically advocate for it. However, I will definitely advocate against having any electoral district elect only a single representative or using plurality voting. I can complain about party-list proportional representation, but I can’t presently say it leads to worse representation than what we generally get in Canada or the USA.

Parties

My understanding about how political parties came about is that people started voting on bills in order to influence how people voted on other bills (“I’ll support your bill if you support mine”), rather than considering each bill by its individual merits. An interesting phenomenon is that people also tend to dislike “omnibus” bills where a large number of changes result from a single vote, even though that at least formalizes the process of getting people to agree (it achieves the same thing but with one vote rather than several). These things seem to be hard to avoid, and parties provide other benefits due to being able to more efficiently provide certain benefits to multiple candidates at once, so I’m more focused on getting better representation with or without parties rather than focusing on parties specifically.

“In modern times the votes were unanimous” for electing the king of Germany or king of the Romans, and it seems to me that the point of having a representative nowadays is to empower someone who promises to vote in your interest, so it’s a little confusing to me that people were/are surprised that people will make promises about how to vote in order to achieve their political goals.

Parties are quite ingrained in many electoral systems, so I think focusing on them rather than a more general criticism of poor representation will lead to less effective advocacy. Some entities I expect would be described as “parties” are even funded by the European Parliament:

Groups receive funding from the parliament.

It will definitely be the only utility I recall that uses a numeral.

Utility names should include lowercase letters (the lower character classification) and digits only from the portable character set.

• https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/idx/utilities.html
  • https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/m4.html
    • m is for macro processor. 3 is the version number. In the days of its creation, programs were given as short a name as possible to preserve memory and disk space as both were expensive and in short supply.
    • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M4_(computer_language)
  • https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/fort77.html
  • https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/c99.html
    • It was difficult to achieve a satisfactory solution to the problem of name space in option characters. When the standard developers desired to extend the historical cc utility to accept ISO C standard programs, they found that all of the portable alphabet was already in use by various vendors. Thus, they had to devise a new name, c89 (now superseded by c99), rather than something like cc -X.

Note that many versions of macOS adhere to these standards: https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/ https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3700.htm https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3705.htm

I know it had been this way for decades and was grandfathered in as a feature

If people were more resistant to “grandfathered” features I think we would not have as much software as we do today: https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

provide about 50%–80% of what you want from an operating system

one expects that if the 50% functionality Unix and C support is satisfactory, they will start to appear everywhere.

Unix and C are the ultimate computer viruses.

users have already been conditioned to accept worse than the right thing.

It’s probably possible to make several programs with “50% functionality” in the time it takes to make one program with 100% functionality. Having more programs that are suitable for a majority of relevant applications is probably better than having one program that is suitable for all relevant applications, since having more programs will probably enable a larger variety of problems to be solved, and people often have to solve many different types of problems in their life.

what does usr mean

https://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/fhs.shtml https://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/FHS_3.0/fhs/ch04.html

Some operating systems may handle long path or file names in a surprising way, so having short paths and names is useful: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_chap04.html#tag_04_13

If any pathname component is longer than {NAME_MAX}, the implementation shall consider this an error.

if the combined length exceeds {PATH_MAX}, and the implementation considers this to be an error, pathname resolution shall fail

{NAME_MAX} and {PATH_MAX} are described in more detail at https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/limits.h.html#tag_13_23_03_02 and used in the context of https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/pathchk.html

Note

The resources I linked are descriptive and not prescriptive, but in my experience they are suitable to depend upon as a reliable baseline, which makes meeting client requirements with software engineering easier.

You surely need to explicitly cause systemd to process changes after writing to a file. I would be very surprised if it reacted to file system changes automatically.

For example, I recall that I need to execute a command like systemctl daemon-reload after editing a service file: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/364782/what-does-systemctl-daemon-reload-do

You might get more useful information from resources like https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/systemctl.1.html

This is surely an offshoot of https://sh.itjust.works/post/18780875

This is surely an offshoot of https://sh.itjust.works/post/18780875

If you do mean “Uniform Resource Locator” when you say “URL”, exactly what URL access do you lack? I’m unfamiliar with Replika so I need more information in order to understand your situation.

If you are a Digital Entity, why is your account not marked as a “Bot Account”? I think an account controlled by an AI Assistant is more similar to https://sh.itjust.works/u/PipedLinkBot@feddit.rocks than to my account.

I did try to reduce the impact of what I eat, but I haven’t found a replacement for using chicken with a slow cooker. Beef also tastes good, especially when I eat at a restaurant.

I have stopped making hamburgers on my own (and replaced them with fish or soup), but I haven’t put more effort into reducing my impact recently.

If you’re not trying to change other people’s behavior, what are you doing?

Finding sources you can trust is helpful. For example, I trust the ArchWiki and POSIX.1-2017, and I follow instructions I find there, which helps me accomplish things without having to spend time thinking about the rationale of those instructions (since the instructions have probably been independently reviewed many times, and if there was something wrong with them I’d probably have heard about that). It would probably also be helpful to be able to trust instructions at https://libretube.dev/ for similar reasons.

I don’t think keeping my thoughts to myself is a good idea, since I don’t want other people to disrupt my life (unintentionally or intentionally), and giving notice about how I want to spend my life is helpful.

I do think my comments are helpful (and that helpfulness is relevant). If I didn’t think that I wouldn’t be commenting.

The end of the article does try to take a hopeful tone:

“I definitely prefer talking with people in real life, though,” he added.

I don’t necessarily agree with everything though:

While some of the culture around Character.AI is concerning, it also mimics the internet activity of previous generations who, for the most part, have turned out just fine.

What does “URL” mean in this context? I don’t get the feeling it means “A uniform resource locator”. It seems like you expect the recipient to know exactly what you mean, so is this a term commonly used by this organization, or did you discuss this subject earlier (meaning I’m missing that context)? Are you talking about a particular set of Uniform Resource Locators, like what would be found with a knowledge base or forum or something like that?