Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by sumtechguy 2059 days ago
hehe this has become my favorite saying lately for computers 'do what I want, not what I told you to do!' computers have a lovely way of merrily going along and breaking things at a fairly fast pace.
2 comments

Lately I find myself saying “do what I told you to do, not what you think I want to do”

Mainly this is due to the autocorrect, autocomplete on most devices nowawadys. I’m sure it’s very helpful, but I seem to notice the mistakes more than the successes. (Eg, trying to type “nowadays,” I had to break out of typing on my iPhone 3 times to backspace and stop it from changing it to other words and expressions)

hehe that is awesome it is opposite of mine but also so true! I turned off autocorrect on my phone. Suggest is fine, but just changing it... not so much.
Many CLI tools have a dry run option for expensive (time/resource wise) or risky commands (one way, irreversible or reversible only with a lot of effort). It would be interesting to see this become the default for some of them, with a separate flag `--now-i-mean-it` to actually execute.
I wish more tools had the option of dry run. Been using it with ansible quite bit in the past few weeks. Look ma I can mess up 50 computers all at once!
Yes, like

make -n

https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/make.1.html

In fact, the above man page shows that one long form of the -n option is named --dry-run :)

I’ve spent so much time with rsync’s -n (I think it supports —-dry-run as well).
Shouldn't dry run be the default and the "prod" run be requiring adding the switch