> according to [2] a train crashed in 1972 due to a badly designed crystal oscillator spontaneously jumping to its third overtone

New fear unlocked

More interesting: amazing sleuthing to figure out that that was the root cause.

> just to feel better about themselves.

Mindread much?

It can be taught!

I can play instruments but never thought I could sing outside a range of less than an octave in the baritone range.

When I was 50 we had a singing teacher over at our house for my children. I asked if she could help my range. That day she took my voice to a high C. I am actually a tenor and can sing pretty much all the high parts. I am my in-laws’ favorite opera singer now.

Also I was too timid. Singing is really just controlled shouting.

I hear you. At 49 I also discovered an extra octave up there above the high e. Also baritone. The YouTube singiverse did it for me

Got any youtubers you'd recommend?

Bob Smeenk helped me personally a lot. But I guess it depends a lot on your background, experience and goals.

How cool is that! Congratulations!

    Every tool and shell that lay in arm's reach treated the comma as a perfectly normal and unobjectionable character in a filename.

WTF. After 40 years maybe I should have figured that one out.

It's not a completely non special character: for instance in bash it's special inside braces in the syntax where "/{,usr/}bin" expands to "/bin /usr/bin". But the need to start that syntax with the open brace will remind you about the need to escape a literal comma there if you ever want one.

You may enjoy learning about the [ binary.

You never used CVS/RCS with its “,v” files?

My introduction to RCS was indeed spurred by a command typo!

I was learning Pascal on AT&T 3B2 systems. They were running SVR3. Perfectly normal clustered systems with nifty things like RFS. We were all logged in via dumb terminals, and the machines were sequestered on another floor. I had pictured them as big, really big. But 3B2s were not.

Anyway, our first lessons were how to use the Bourne shell and how to use "vi" to edit our source code.

I had learned to type 4 years previously, so I was already fast and fearsomely accurate. But I still made mistakes.

So one day I typed "ci filename.p" and then I had an hour's worth of sheer horror!

"ci" had not spawned the visual editor as I had hoped, but it did something inexplicable to that file! It had renamed it to "filename.p,v" and had put a bunch of garbage into it!

I can't remember how much "RCS garbage" was inserted, or how much cleanup I needed to do. For some reason, our TA/lab assistants were not available for me to ask! I was in a cold sweat, because all my hard classwork had been utterly mangled by this unfeeling machine, and I didn't know how to effectively undo it.

Eventually I learned about the RCS system, and what those curious "$...$" symbols meant, and I think I worked out a way to "undo" it (which I think consisted of merely "co" to checkout the file again.)

But it was a rude awakening to the fact that simple command-line typos could have some very unintended consequences!

Until someone forces you to use a file system that cannot tolerate commas...

Which file system would that be?

Many early file systems like the original FAT, RSX-11, VMS ODS-2 ... Probably not a concern for anything in the past 30 years.

What about using the filename in arrays in bash/sh?

But Bash arrays don’t use comma, what’s the problem?

Oh, that might be true, I do remember encountering some escaping issues when creating a more complex POSIX (or bash) script that involved lists and iterating through stuff.

I see Bash only uses commas in Brace expansions:

file{1,2,3}.txt # file1.txt file2.txt file3.txt

I guess it would only be a problem if you want to expand

    file,.txt   
    file,,.txt   
    file,,,.txt

Imagine seeing this code:

    echo file{",",",,",",,,"}.txt

Ah, I see you're a man of culture as well!

Have you met Bash? It’s a shrine to space-delimited everything lol

I reworded my comment for clarity now.

Analysis: true on all counts

I think watching children being butchered or prisoners being tortured to death could be equally or more traumatic. Killing in processing animals is at least socially acceptable and (arguably) necessary for survival.

Boom!

Usually you can figure out what went wrong pretty quickly. Freaking out doesn't help with the "quickly" part though.

I’m not as smart as you

I am pretty forward-thinking but even when I started writing my first web server 30+ years ago I didn’t foresee the day when the phrase “my bookie’s datacenter” might cross my lips.

Usage map indicates that either Alaska is a heretofore undiscovered hotbed of juggling or Cloudflare analytics are countrywide