I was really excited when I learned of these characters, but ultimately if it’s in ASCII then it’s in-band and will eventually require escaping leading to the same problem.
POSIX doesnt even define long opts. I conciously dont follow POSIX these days. The standard will adapt once enough pressure has built up as they mostly document existing things instead of innovate. So I need to apply pressure.
POSIX doesn't even provide any utilities to write long opts and it also doesn't even define any long opts for basically any of its commands, so by default it is barely usable in maintainable scripts.
MacPorts has far more packages than Homebrew and was implemented by the creator of the original FreeBSD ports system, who was also an employee on Apple’s UNIX team. MacPorts is the standard macOS package manager.
I have always preferred BSD-style ports trees, which emphasize building the packages from source code. Easier to patch the source when needed, when adapting (porting) the package to a new environment.
This made it easier to adapt large collections of packages to new versions of macOS. Or to adopt the latest version of a package. Easier for integration testing for my application.
It doesn't surprise me at all that MacPorts has a larger collection of packages than HomeBrew.
I like MacPorts, but most macOS using developers I’ve conversed with over the past 12+ years never heard of it, while all of them used Homebrew. Maybe it depends on what developer circles one inhabits.
But, by all measures, MacPorts is more standard than Homebrew. Such as being implemented by an Apple employee who also created the official (source-based) package manager for the most popular BSD.
Homebrew definitely has a lot more market share though, much to my chagrin. The only other MacPorts users I’ve met in person are people I convinced to switch.
I have only ever used macports, but my first and only MacBook was salvaged from bigcorp IT, and is a 2009 model so homebrew is too new for it.
I’ve dabbled in BSD before and I can definitely see the correspondence between Macports and freeBSD ports. I assume homebrew tries to be more similar to apt or yum.
Everyone here is talking about rock music, but electronic music was also just on fire during the 90s. No decade since has come close to the perfection of the 90s across so many genres of electronic music. House, gabber, jungle, so many electronic genres are still just trying to reach the peaks they hit in the 90s.
I say this as someone who was 5 years old at the turn of the millennium, so this isn’t some sort of nostalgia filter.
I agree, the lack of social media, secrecy in production techniques, dawn of digital technology, big names in synthesis pouring millions into r&d was an amazing combo, and most importantly production heavily sampling and dubplate culture....hard to replicate that!
I tend to listen to a lot of electronic music, and am always looking for new recommendations myself. My taste for 90s stuff has typically run more toward Eurodance/Eurobeat and House and J-pop for more recent things.
Here are some random recommendations:
Daft Punk
Anything on the "Blade" soundtrack
Pretty much any Eurobeat featured in the anime Initial D. e.g. Dave Rodgers, Manuel, Fastway, Go2, m.o.v.e.
2 Unlimited - Get Ready, Twilight Zone, Tribal Dance, No Limit
Technotronic - Pump Up The Jam
Le Click - Tonight is the Night
La Bouche - Be My Lover
Mr Vain - Culture Beat
Black Box - Ride on Time, Strike it Up, I Don't Know Anybody Else (technically 80s, early house music)
The Shamen - Move Any Mountain
Livin' Joy - Don't Stop Movin'
Bonus, more recent: Destination Calabria (Alex Gaudino, Crystal Waters)
Future Sound of London - Dead Cities, was my first exposure to electronic, as an American. They are hard to describe, but are labeled as more psychedelic ambient with bits of techno, trip hop, and progressive house music thrown in. Each album is fairly different from the others, and there is a lot of experimentation that feels unique even in 2025 (at least to myself). I'm a big progressive music fan, or any genre, so they scratch an itch for me when it comes to electronic music.
I am biased as a Londoner but it UK Garage is/was a wonderful subgenre of house from the 90s, a uniquely London blend of genres including Chicago house. Infectious stuff. It was a precursor to later genres like Dubstep and Grime which are so popular today.
Spotify has some good playlists. Rosie Gaines 'Closer than Close' and Artful Dodger 'Movin too Fast' or 'Woman Trouble' are good starting points.
We have been enjoying Massive Attack. The same culture that hatched Banksy is my kind of folks and the music has a good edge, IMO.
For modern stuff, I've enjoyed SomaFM's Groove Salad out of San Francisco. They have net streams directly accessible in VLC, so the processor burning Web app is utterly unnecessary.
That same culture also hatched Portishead (just down the road from Bristol), which was pretty much the apotheosis of trip-hop. It's also the second home of reggae in the UK (after London), which has quite a bit to do with its musical vibe.
Be sure to go back and forth between Groove Salad and Groove Salad Classic, which is the more 90s-2000s version. There's not a lot of people putting out stuff with the "classic" feel anymore, which is partly why Rusty renamed it, and started a newer, modern channel.
SomaFM was incredible, I probably used more bandwidth on their streams than almost anything else for a good year at home. And iirc, this was during dial-up days!
In a parallel universe there must be a world where those choices of his serve as a reminder that the world, and the people within it, are not nearly as simple and convenient as narratives and principles would suggest.
Let's think it through. Say you're pretty passionately pissed off about what you directly observe (in this case spying), so you go full hero and do what he did. Then consequences come and the only lifeline you're given is... Russian.
You tasted the reality for a bit there, that was rough, but luckily you're safe and out. But wait, now you're being compelled into becoming an asset. And no lifelines are around anymore. Suddenly you realize that the reality of the stronger dog fucking never disappeared, and that choice you made was much more grave than you thought, and there's no real going back.
And it doesn't matter if this is what actually happened to Snowden, what matters is that this is a very reasonable possibility. People are not fairy tales, and especially not perfectly consistent in their thoughts and beliefs. Not spatially, not temporally. He may have at some point thought that doing the noble thing was his choice, but wouldn't now. He may have been swayed in other ways since, and now takes both stances at the same time, regardless how contradictory they are.
The real lie here is treating people larger than life. One can appreciate a result without subscribing to everything the person ever did or does, or labelling them one way or another.
He would have had a fair trial which would ultimately result in the dismantling of the entire US surveillance apparatus and would usher in the birth of the internet the forefathers intended.
He did not support the invasion of Ukraine. He just doesn’t comment on it. Which has somehow turned into an anti-Snowden talking point, despite the very obvious reasons why he doesn’t talk about it.
> Do you think he'd receive a fair trial if he came back to the US?
Honestly, yes. He was extremely visible and it was the Obama administration. I think it was well-understood how much damage it could have done to Democratic party interests if they nailed him to a wall for exposing behavior that was extremely unpopular among their constituents. Manning did far worse with far less duty-of-care and received a pardon after seven years.
For all its flaws, the US is actually a place where fair trials happen most of the time (especially when someone's in the media's eye). Snowden, much like Assange or Manning, wasn't in a position where he could just be disappeared. I think he traded, at most, a decade of discomfort for a lifetime of exile.
But it's his call. It's not like the US is the only good place to be; maybe a lifetime of exile is fine.
Democrats are always sabotaging their own party interests to support the supreme power of the state. They'd have no problem putting Snowden in Guantanamo.
I'm not thinking of a Hollywood movie; I'm thinking of Chelsea Manning, a person who dumped more state secrets into the international eye than the Rosenbergs were even accused of smuggling to Russia and is not only still breathing, but currently walking free.
> Thank goodness he [was more willing to betray his position for moral reasons] than the "I was just following orders" crowd. We know from WW2 that "I was just following orders" is not a legitimate excuse to help facilitate grave atrocities,
Which dilutes to this when challenged:
> he didn't oppose [the invation of Ukraine] for the same reason very few other Russians opposed it.
Those perspectives both can't be correct! If he was willing to face jail and expulsion for opposing US crimes, and to be celebrated for that, surely the same logic should hold for Russian crimes, no?
Snowden is complicated for sure. I think it's not unreasonable to ask why these decisions were different and to at least ask what differences he might have in loyalties and personal aims might lead to them.
He has never expressed himself to be anything other than a patriotic American. Why would he be putting his life on the line for a country that he does not identify with?
People who do that ti support just cause like Ukraine have my respect. But I wouldn’t expect if of anyone.
Uh, sure they can: he saw an opportunity where he could make a difference and bring a program to light where the NSA was otherwise blatantly lying to Congress and the American people, and he took it.
There is nothing he can or could do to stop the invasion of Ukraine.
Which is to say, he didn't merely oppose US crimes. He brought them to light. Everyone already knows about Ukraine.
Exactly this. His original revelations were shocking to his audience; the Ukrainian invasion is already almost-universally condemned among the same. His “speaking out” against it would be pure virtue signalling, not a single mind would be changed or informed by it.
So surely it's more important and not less that notable Russians like Snowden use their influence to drive policy and change, right?
Basically, you're just saying "It's OK not to challenge Putin if you're afraid". Which is fine. But I argue it needs to then inform the way we treat his other decisionmaking. The facts on the ground are at least as compatible with "Edward Snowden is a Putinist Partisan" as they are "Edward Snowden is a Patriotic American".
Yeah, maybe, but it's too easy for me to sit here in a comfy chair, safe in the US, and talk about what an exiled protester in Russia should do. I lack the moral authority to USplain to Snowden that the Russians are just sheltering him for his propaganda value, even though that's obviously what they are doing.
He owes us nothing. Through no fault of his own, he does owe Russia, though. If we didn't want Putin to make a useful puppet out of him, we (a) should not have placed him in a position to make the decisions he did, ideally by following our own laws to avoid inciting his actions in the first place; and (b) we should have been able to assure him of a fair trial without inciting snickers and guffaws.
You hear HRC saying (of Assange) "Can't we just drone him?" And you think Snowden has no cause for concern?! Naive.
Probably because the US empire had deteriorated enough by that point that revoking passports for exposing the blatant lies and crimes of our government was on the table by then.
Of course, it's different these days. These days they'd just kill Snowden. And Mark Klein, for that matter.
As an aside, I'd be very curious to hear your answer to the question. I'm generall very pro-diversity, but I think it's naive to think it's all lollipops and rainbows.
I’m aware. I personally wouldn’t want to tie my infrastructure, nor provide funding, to the government of Serbia at this particular juncture in geopolitical time, but hey, you gotta have a cutesy ccTLD hack or you aren’t webscale.
