Youtuber Johnny-come-lately gets way too much attention.

In complex cases where speed is less important than maintainability, I tend to agree.

In this case, a simple comment would suffice. And in fact nothing at all would be okay for any half-competent Python coder, as testing if lists are empty with if not is super-standard.

They’re quite simple. Just convert the values to binary and apply the applicable truth tables. Just remember operator precedence when you use them, and in doubt, don’t trust your luck and apply parentheses generously 🙂

But what is an example of where I can use it?

Aside from operations on bitfields, a bitwise operator can be useful in several “non bits” cases. For instance:

value & 1 evaluates to 1 if value is odd (and will evaluate to True in an if statement)
value >> 1 divides value by 2 (integer division)

But usually bitwise operators are for when you want to manipulate bits in values. For instance:

value | 5 returns value with bits 1 and 3 set to True
value & 0xffff returns the 16 least-significant bits in value (usually you do this to make sure it will fit in 2 bytes in memory for example)
value & (0xffff ^ 5) returns the lower 16 bits of value with bits 1 and 3 set to False

Etc.

Much to unpack here…

coin == 25 | 10 | 5

…will evaluate as True if coin is equal to the bitwise OR of 25, 10 and 5 - i.e. 31. In other word, it’s equivalent to coin == 31. That’s because the bitwise OR has precedence over the == operator. See operator precedence in Python.

If I replace the ‘|’ with ‘or’ the code runs just fine.

It probably doesn’t. If you replace | with or, you have the statement coin == 25 or 10 or 5 which is always True in the if statement because it’s evaluated as (coin == 25) or (not 0) or (not 0) in an if statement.

coin == 25 | coin == 10 | coin == 5

…will evaluate as coin == (25 | coin) == (10 | coin) == 5. Again, operator precedence.

What you want to do is this:

if coin in [25, 10, 5]:

or

if coin in (25, 10, 5):

or simply

if coin == 25 or coin == 10 or coin == 5:

Don’t create problems and confusion for the next guy who reads your code for nothing. Simple and readable are your friends 🙂

That’s the most accurate article on the subject I’ve read in years.

With shell scripts, I’m not sure.

With Python scripts, you want argcomplete.

I’m glad one more person discovered Linux is good in 2025.

I’m a random person too and I discovered Linux in 1993. Where’s my 15 minutes of fame?

Oh right, I’m not a Youtuber…

Have remembered to set the reboot in future command since

That’s not a bad idea actually. I’ll have to reuse that one. Thanks!

This is a server I was setting up. It’s not doing anything useful at all at the moment, hence the lax work practice. The only reason I drove back to work is because it’s needed tomorrow and I wanted to finish setting it up tonite.

In my defense, I just installed the machine. I was configuring it from home after hours.

Because I plain forgot I was remote. It’s as simple and as stupid as that.

I use Terminator. It’s nothing fancy but it works fine.

If I work locally, I usually stick several Terminator windows side-by-side and up-and-down in i3 tiles and that’s good enough.

If I work remotely through SSH though - which is 75% of what I do in a terminal, I’ll run tmux so I can have several shells in one terminal of course, but mostly so that I don’t lose what I’m doing if the internet goes down.

You’re comparing apples and oranges here. Kitty is a terminal emulator, tmux is a terminal multiplexer. They are only tangentially related, which is why…

The one thing I miss a lot is being able to quickly detach and re-attach to existing sessions

security updates are for cowards, amirite? 😂

The server isn’t exposed to the internet. It’s a local IMAP server.

That was my family’s email server 5 months ago:

So roughly 2500 days today 🙂

Isn’t it the same as tuning?

Although it’s unclear what tuning is because it depends on who says it:

• It does mean doing modifications to a vehicle for actual performance improvements
• It’s used extensively by ricers to describe themselves and their hobby and they think it’s a positive term
• It’s used extensively by people who dislike ricing and most definitely as a derogatory term

Yet for all its faults, I believe that’s the closest word to ricing you’ll find that is universally understood, neutral and isn’t rendered hopelessly bland and meaningless by the process of political correctness newspeak.

A lot of those BT adapters are cheap shit. Like the aforementioned RTL8821CE: it’s a nasty hack to do wifi and BT using a single 2.4 GHz transponder. But here’s the thing: however bad they are, they’re made to work well in Windows - possibly with a lot of awful engineering shortcuts and hackery, but in the end, Windows users will never know and that’s the point.

When open-source developers try to make equivalent Linux drivers without documentation or help from the manufacturer, reverse-engineering their way around the general crappiness of the products, you get… well, not very good drivers. And it really is nobody’s fault but the unhelpful adapter’s manufacturer.

So there is that, and the general bugginess on BlueZ on top of it.

My experience with Bluetooth support in Linux is: you’re either using one of the very few problem-free BT controllers and it works okay most of the time, or you have more or less problems all of the time.

The least problematic controllers I own are ASUS USB-BT500. The most problematic are ASUS USB-BT400 and Realtek RTL8821CE.

The state of Bluetooth in Linux is completely terrible, it has been for many, many years and it’s hardly getting any better. Bluez, like Pulseaudio, needs to die, and sooner rather than later.

rm -r *

Also, if you have to type that, don’t use the numpad: / is only one key away from *. If you finger snags the / key on its way to * and you happen to be root, your root partition will go bye-bye.