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It's not the most succinct language I'll give it that.

But it is readable, which is much more important.

Even someone who has never seen a Windows PC in their life could guess what this script does.

Linux and Unix shell commands use completely arbitrary single letter parameters that must be looked up or memorised. That’s not a virtue.


Not to mention, everything-is-an-object is a much better experience than text only.

I wouldn’t mind a shell that uses structured text, such as JSON, but the inefficiency of the parsing and serialisation makes my eye twitch.

PowerShell does provide a ConvertTo-Json [0] for those who need it.

[0]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsof...

Contrary to how it sounds I actually like PowerShell as a scripting language in itself. A lot of its ideas are pretty clever.

I treat my dormant familiarity with it as a resume hedge. Ideally things in my life continue to go well, and I can keep climbing the ranks of doing more and more impressive things powered by the Unix systems I've been daily driving since I was 14. If, however, things in my life ever go truly sideways, I could probably dial it way back and eke out an existence at some low pay, low stress, fully remote Windows admin job at some dinosaur of a company somewhere. There I could use PS and its deep, deep integration with all things Windows to automate 90-99% of it away, so that I could spend my time e.g. tending to my young children instead. (Even if Copy-Item is 27% slower than drag and drop. My time is still more expensive than the machine's.)

I truly never hope that has to happen, of course.


Copy-Item is a cmdlet, the native way to do it in PowerShell. Gp posted a hack to replicate the GUI in PowerShell.

Because as TFA reported, Copy-Item is much slower than the GUI.

I suspect it's reached the point where the distinguishing quality of one model over the others is only observable by true experts -- and only in their respective fields. We are exhausting the well of frontier questions that can be programmatically asked and the answers checked.

Absolutely this. Strong disagree that progress is plateauing, merely that gains are harder for the general public to perceive and typically come from more advanced means than simply scaling. Math performance in particular is improving at an uncomfortably rapid pace.

IP law gives young or up-and-coming artists leverage in negotiations.

"I had Elizabeth Holmes explain to me three times what she got arrested for because it sounds an awful lot like what I do here every day."


You don't even have to sell tickets: if it's a free concert, copyright is likely infringed. This is likely true in all jurisdictions.


"I came close to madness trying to find it here in the States but they just don't get the spices right."


V1 is the decision speed with respect to a single engine failure in a multi-engine aircraft. It's the speed below rotation speed at which the decision to abort safely can no longer be made.

Captains can make the decision to abort the takeoff in the case of absolute power loss or for 'failure to fly' (where the aircraft is clearly not going to fly, e.g. the elevator/pitch controls aren't responding). But the training is adamant: if you're uncertain what has happened after V1 you try to fly the plane away from the runway.


> abort safely

That's what I'm getting at. I want to abort unsafely. Imagine 400 meters of grass field after the end of the runway, and a water body. I'm asking wether such factors are accounted for, or if plane on ground beyond runway does-not-compute.


> I want to abort unsafely

I expect pilots are trained explicitly not to do that.

If you can't abort safely, than it follows that the safer course of action is to try to fly. I'm sure there are exceptions to that, but a pilot has barely seconds in which to decide if any of those exceptions apply, so they're not going to abandon procedure unless the situation is clear.


You should never plan to use your safety margin!

That "extra" 400m of grass? That's for all the other things that can still go wrong even when you follow procedure. e.g., you're below V1 so you abort takeoff, close throttles and hit the brakes. You should be able to safely stop on the runway.

But now your brakes fail because maybe the reason you had to abort was a fire that also managed to burn through your brake lines, or it started to rain just as you were taking off, or...

Now that's where the 400m of safety margin comes in to save your ass (hopefully). It's "extra", you don't plan on using it.


Day 2 is like Switzerland---small and neutral. Day 1 is like Germany---ambitious and misunderstood.


In 1980s Star Trek it was used for porn. (TNG: The Perfect Mate, Hollow Pursuits)


And the Replicator was locked out from producing mass amounts of unhealthy food (unless you told it not to).

Maybe the lesson we should learn is our hardware should come with built in limits on use to keep our brains intact? That sounds dystopian.


the freedom to be able to choose to engorge yourself on twinkies is maybe a good thing, the fact that some folks are willing and able to indulge that impulse is probably less good


> the freedom to be able to choose to engorge yourself on twinkies is maybe a good thing

In isolation, freedom is wonderful. In practice, maybe not? If a member of the star trek crew abused twinkies to the extent that they were lethargic or unhealthy, it would negatively impact the mission.

There is some compromise between freedoms and social resposibility


Yes, and what if we saw what happened on Ferengi ships, with Ferengi replicators? Perhaps those are controlled by profit-seeking corporations, and have no such limits in the name of "personal freedom?" ;)


Indeed. If your family's welfare depends on you having work, and your work is meaningless, then it can be taken away honestly and without recourse.


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