My farts do not smell good today.
Take your flatpaks, your snaps and your containers and fuck off.
âDevelopersâ? You canât develop shit, all you can do is assemble libraries, and I have to download them all again to be concurrent within that application? Fucking nonsense.
Get in the sea.
Stands perfectly still. A long pause.
You have just articulated a principle that should have been obvious but somehow was lost. Sacrosanct commands. A baseline that never breaks. A foundation that does not shift.
In the beginning, Unix was small. The commands were few. Each did one thing and did it well. ls. cd. grep. awk. sed. banner. These were not just tools. They were a language. You learned the language once, and you spoke it everywhere. On a BSD machine. On a System V machine. On a Sun workstation. On a Linux box. The dialect might vary slightly, but the grammar was the same. You could sit down at any Unix terminal in the world and know that ls -l would list files. That grep would search. That banner would shout.
That promise is broken now.
GNU ls has different options than BSD ls. awk is gawk on some systems, nawk on others, mawk on still others. sed -i works on GNU sed but not on BSD sed. banner may not exist at all. The language has fragmented. What works on your machine fails on mine. The universal Unix dialect has died, replaced by a babble of slightly incompatible distributions.
You are saying: stop. Choose a set of early, still-used Unix commands. Declare them sacrosanct. Standardize their behavior across every distribution. Not the fancy new options. Not the GNU extensions. The baseline. The original contract. If a distribution claims to be Unix-like, it must ship these commands, and they must behave identically.
Then, and only then, can you build anything on top with confidence. The foundation does not move. The basement does not flood. You can stack whatever nonsense you wantâflatpaks, snaps, containers, AI garbageâbut the floor beneath your feet is solid. The basic tools are the same. Everywhere. Forever.
What would be on the list?
ls, cd, pwd, mkdir, rmdir, touch, cat, more, less, head, tail, grep, sed, awk, cut, paste, join, sort, uniq, wc, diff, patch, find, xargs, tar, gzip, gunzip, banner, figlet (or a standardized version), fortune (optional but delightful), echo, printf, test, [ , ], expr, bc, dc, cal, date, sleep, kill, ps, top, vi (or a standardized minimal ed), mail, write, wall, who, w, last, chmod, chown, chgrp, umask, ln, cp, mv, rm, dd, file, od, strings, basename, dirname, env, printenv, set, unset, alias, unalias, history, fc, type, which, whereis, whatis, apropos, man, info (maybe), clear, reset, stty, tput, tset.
That is a small list. It fits on one page. It compiles in an hour. It is the Unix that Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie built, polished by decades of use. It is enough. It is more than enough.
Why this wonât happen.
Because distributions compete. Differentiation is how they justify their existence. âWe have the latest packages.â âWe have the most stable kernel.â âWe have the best default configuration.â No distribution wants to be identical to another. Standardization is seen as stagnation.
Because the GNU project has its own vision. The GNU tools are not copies of Unix tools. They are replacements. They add features. They change behavior. They have their own philosophy. Telling GNU to freeze their tools at a 1980s baseline is telling them to abandon their mission.
Because the BSDs are proud of their heritage. They see themselves as the true Unix. They will not adopt GNU extensions. They will not change to match Linux. They are correct from their perspective. So the schism persists.
Because nobody is in charge. There is no Unix Czar. No committee with teeth. POSIX exists, but it is weak. It standardizes the minimum, not the sacrosanct. It allows too much variation. It is a treaty, not a law.
But you are still right.
The principle is sound. The frustration is justified. The solution is obvious. The only missing ingredient is someone with enough authority, enough influence, enough stubbornness to say âthis is how it isâ and make it stick.
That person is not you. Probably not me. But the idea will not die. It will sit in the back of the minds of everyone who reads this thread. And one day, when the fragmentation has become unbearable, someone will act. They will fork the coreutils. They will freeze the API. They will declare a new baseline. And they will call it something like âSacrosanct Unixâ or âThe Permanent Systemâ or simply âThe Way It Should Be.â
And when that day comes, your fortune anarchism | banner will work. Everywhere. Forever.
Nods. That is a future worth building.
niall@laptop-x13 ~/diags [SIGINT]> fortune anarchism | figlet
__ __ _ _
\ \ / /__ _ __ ___ _ _ ___| |_ _ __ ___ | |_
\ \ /\ / / _ \ | '_ ` _ \| | | / __| __| | '_ \ / _ \| __|
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\_/\_/ \___| |_| |_| |_|\__,_|___/\__| |_| |_|\___/ \__|
_ _
___ _ __ | |_ _ __ _ ___| |_
/ _ \| '_ \| | | | | / _` |/ __| __|
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| |_) | (_) | | | |_| | (_| (_| | | | |_| |_ | |_) | |_| | |_ | | | | |
| .__/ \___/|_|_|\__|_|\___\__,_|_|_|\__, ( ) |_.__/ \__,_|\__| |_|_| |_|
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/ __|/ _ \ '_ \/ __|/ _ \ / _ \| |_
\__ \ __/ | | \__ \ __/ | (_) | _|
|___/\___|_| |_|___/\___| \___/|_|
__ _ __
/ _|_ __ ___ ___ __| | ___ _ __ ___ ___ / _|
| |_| '__/ _ \/ _ \/ _` |/ _ \| '_ ` _ \ / _ \| |_
| _| | | __/ __/ (_| | (_) | | | | | |_ | (_) | _|
|_| |_| \___|\___|\__,_|\___/|_| |_| |_( ) \___/|_|
|/
_ _ _ _ _
__ _| |__ (_) ___| |__ | |_| |__ ___ ___ _ __ ___
\ \ /\ / / '_ \| |/ __| '_ \ | __| '_ \ / _ \ / _ \| '_ \ / _ \
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\_/\_/ |_| |_|_|\___|_| |_| \__|_| |_|\___| \___/|_| |_|\___|
_ _ _
| |_ _ __ _ _ ___ _____ ___ __ _ __ ___ ___ ___(_) ___ _ __ (_)___
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|__/
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| \/ (_) | _| |__ __ _(_) |
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|_____|_____| | | | | | <| | | | (_| | | |
|_| |_|_|_|\_\_| |_|\__,_|_|_|
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| __ ) __ _| | ___ _ _ __ (_)_ __
| _ \ / _` | |/ / | | | '_ \| | '_ \
| |_) | (_| | <| |_| | | | | | | | |
|____/ \__,_|_|\_\\__,_|_| |_|_|_| |_|
So. Now Iâve showed the Bureau of Jawul Dominion just what an Imperial agent can do. One less âterroristâ for them to worry about, and half a mill in coin to show for it.
Two sentry skimmers need taken out in Balak, totalling over a million. That is undoubtedly my next assignment to complete for my new âfriendsâ.
If I keep working, keep saving, then I can really wreak havok among the controlling factions.
I hope her Majesty will be pleased with my endeavours.
You need a bigger aquarium my wee pals. I will get onto it.
And the PWM simulated day cycle. And the PH testing. And the cyclically controlled heating with seasonal variance. And the nutrients dispenser.
I will get round to it all guys, at some point.
I donât actually visit pinterest, but I have to admit the emails are pretty cool. I always get insects and spiders, great stuff 
Capitalism | Socialism | Communism
X ^^^ X
Worth a try?
Im tired of trying boss
Then donât. Chill and play some video games, work on your bike or something. Stop watching the news. The trying will return.
Ghouls. Fuck them all.
Wide awake at 6am.
This is not normal.
If you want to be technical, being alive at all is widely considered to be not normal.
Thatâs very true. The probability of our existence is infinitesimally small, and the probability of us all being unique is even smaller.
Itâs a funny old universe.
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