Pica is eating things that are not food, but as pointed out in the article I linked, eating dog poo is providing a significant source of nutrition for foxes. In those circumstances, it by definition is not pica.

Pet dogs also eat poo on occasion, also without any underlying problem, so I really don’t think there’s any reason to think that far less domesticated species where it is well established would just stop. I’m sure you can reduce it, especially if it has a nicer food source, but still, an animal with far less history of domestication seems like a recipe for amplification of all the potential issues you don’t want to deal with.

To the “they smell bad” bit, I’ll add two things:

1. I have pictures (maybe I’ll post some, despite the ick factor) where this fox laid down to sleep right next to a pillow it had shit all over. And we’re not talking pebbles, we’re talking the runs and it was a nightmare to clean. It was tempting to burn the thing… I also have to clean massive piles of fox poop off the decking on a regular basis.

2. There is this: Dog poo forms a significant part of foxes’ diet

Of course, one captive-bred will likely be better, but I absolutely agree with you they won’t make great pets.

They are cute, but frankly, that is just about sufficient to let me tolerate them sleeping in the gazebo and thoroughly washing stuff afterward, but not nearly sufficient to make me consider one as a pet.

In the case of your example we’d do .map(&:unwrap) in Ruby (if unwrap was a method we’d actually want to call)

Notably, these are not the cases _1 and _2 etc are for. They are there for the cases that are not structurally “call this method on the single argument to the block” e.g. .map{ _1 + _2 } or .map { x.foo(_1) }

(_1 is reasonable, because iterating over an enumerable sequence makes it obvious what it is; _1 and _2 combined is often reasonable, because e.g. if we iterate over a key, value enumerable, such as what you get from enumerating a Hash, it’s obvious what you get; if you find yourself using _3 or above, you’re turning to the dark side and should rethink your entire life)

Frankly, I’ve seen it more often from Emacs users themselves, including while I used it myself for ~20+ years.

My own. My Emacs config grew over years to several thousand lines, and it got to a point where I decided I could write an editor in fewer lines that it took to configure Emacs how I liked it. It’s … not for everyone. I’m happy with it, because it does exactly only the things I want it to, and nothing else, but it does also mean getting used to quirks you can’t be bothered to fix, and not getting to blame someone else when you run into a bug.

That said, writing your own editor is easier than people think, as long as you leverage libraries for whichever things you don’t have a pressing need to customize (e.g. mine is written in Ruby, and I use Rouge for syntax highlighting, and I believe Rouge is more lines of code than the editor itself thanks to all the lexers)

As the old (bad) joke goes: Emacs is a great operating system. Shame it lacks a good editor.

The foxes are still more shy here for the most part. They’ll run if I open the door or if they see me move too much inside, while the cats will sometimes come to me and some of them (that one in particular) will come inside. But the gazebo is too tempting for both cats and foxes when I’m not out there.

That’s true. It’s been an issue near me as well. Thankfully in the most built up parts of London the foxes seems to mostly have enough food to not be particularly interested in cats. But I always keep an eye out when I see the cats here get close to foxes in case it turns nasty (not happened so far).

My first “paid” programming project (I was paid in a used 20MB harddrive, which was equivalent to quite a bit of money for me at the time):

Automate a horse-race betting “system” that it was blatantly obvious to me even at the time, at 14 or so, was total bullshit and would just lose him money. I told the guy who hired me as much. He still wanted it, and I figured since I’d warned him it was utter bunk it was his problem.

Yeah, Reggie is way past taking any shit.

The foxes here are so well fed and chill most of the time that the cats have lost almost respect for them… They’re still a bit cautious (which is good, because there certainly are incidents of foxes killing cats) but overall it’s pretty peaceful.

Especially when it’s hot and nobody wants to run around.

Reggie is great. Very chill. Just wish it wasn’t so shy. I’ve only been allowed to briefly pet Reggie on a couple of occasions over several years.

I have a suspicion she’s the timeshare cat for half the neighbourhood. One of my neighbours previous cats used to have at least half a dozen houses he’d go to where he’d come in if the garden door was open and go upstairs and go to bed in our beds…

Not trying to convince you - people have different preferences, but Ruby does exactly what you say and nothing else unless you start pulling in gems that do lots of monkey patching or metaprogramming cleverness.

This is one of the reasons I dislike Rails in particular - it twists people’s idea of what clean Ruby can be like and introduces a lot of “magic” conventions that makes the code hard to read for someone who doesn’t know Rails.

A lot of Ruby programmers do overdose on the “clever”, often inspired by Rails. You can do some truly insane things with metaprogramming in Ruby, but a lot of the time the cleverness is unnecessary and a bit of a footgun that people grab too early instead of thinking the problem through and realising there are simpler solutions.

My terminal is written in Ruby, and it uses a font-renderer that’s 100% Ruby ( https://github.com/vidarh/skrift - I didn’t write it from scratch, it’s a port from C ), and it’s definitely possible to get things “fast enough” for a surprising portion of code in Ruby these days, but you may end up writing Ruby code that is “surprising”. For faster Ruby, see e.g. Aaron Patterson’s walkthrough of speeding up a lexer which ends up doing things most Ruby devs would not usually do because at least some of the things he ends up doing goes against the readability (e.g. the TrueType renderer I linked above definitely sacrifices speed and assumes you’ll memoize heavily to maintain readability). For an interpreter, you’re probably right to drop to something lower level.

I prefer to hope the person who made this is just a crappy writer who desperately tried to find a way to make us think they were talking to a girl first and couldn’t think of another way of describing rejection. (I fear that’s not the reason, and that you’re right, but I live in hope)

That sounds like it’ll be more than solid enough.

The most delciously evil part of INTERCAL is “COMEFROM” (though COMEFROM was proposed a number of times as a joke long before INTERCAL)

Ignoring the intentionally esoteric languages, of languages in actual use: J, K. Any descendant of APL, basically, and APL itself, though arguably APL is less obtuse than many of its descendants.

E.g, quicksort in J (EDIT: Note Lemmy seems to still garble it despite the code block; see the Wikipedia page on J for the original and other horrifying examples)

    quicksort=: (($:@(<#[), (=#[), $:@(>#[)) ({~ ?@#)) ^: (1<#)

(No, I can not explain it to you)