I remember going into my networking unit and absolutely destroying it through the use of the command line. Everyone else was clicking through the wireshark GUI and I just grepped every answer. Finished the hour long practical assessment in about 15 minutes having run everything twice.
CLI is so valuable because rather than explore a presentation of the data you plan your RE etc and then run it and it either returns the answer or it doesn't.
There are some TUIs I quite like (LNAV as a pager) but I think if you really know what you're dealing with the CLI is better almost every time.
There's a layer above that, when CLI and bash and sed and tshark are becoming too hairy or slow, and it's 'just' parsing the pcap frames in your language of productivity. Over the years I've built layer over layer of optimized Java code to parse and analyze pcap/pcapng files with either visitor patterns or active iterations (and multi-pass analyses through indexation, or just interfacing with duckdb for months-long-capture analysis to surface low signal-to-noise-ratio events). It builds a good understanding of all the layers and brings the power of a full-featured workbench (language, IDE, libraries, visualization options...).
Built it in Java, and rebuilt it in Ada, and Rust. I find it's a good exercise to learn about a programming language... bonus point, once I have a parser, plugging it live behind libpcap, dpdk, xdp, or just raw sockets is easy.
however, ~99.8% of 18 year old students have never used any command line tool in their lives. they do not know what grep is. they can navigate a gui because they have used a gui all of their life.
when im teaching networking for example, using a gui means i only need to teach one thing (networking), where if i use a cli i have to teach two things (cli + networking)
>I think if you really know what you're dealing with the CLI is better almost every time
to be clear, i was not making an argument that gui is better in general.
i am speaking as someone who teaches introductory networking courses at a 1st-year college level. no one i teach "really knows" what they are dealing with because it is the first time they are learning about it.
Beautiful piece, with a great closer (not reproduced here, you should go with it).
I do wonder if our society would be better if we had more honourifics and formality. China has instituted social media rules based on qualifications. Many indigenous societies have forms of secret and sacred knowledge.
I think too many people are concerned with the abuse of these sorts of social systems when we already live in a system of value that is rife with abuse.
> I do wonder if our society would be better if we had more honourifics and formality. China has instituted social media rules based on qualifications. Many indigenous societies have forms of secret and sacred knowledge.
In the US we administer a test at age 16 that determines lifetime "qualifications" and access to "secret and sacred knowledge". How much further is there to even go on that front? Back to inherited nobility?
I don't know if you're being flippant but the information at universities is neither secret nor sacred. Sure, there is a stupid price for academic journals but most of it can be found freely on the internet.
Eldership, acceptance into a hierarchy based on deeds and demonstrated virtue within a relatively small social grouping that does not recognize the value of money is, I believe, worthwhile. And the socially formal recognition, not easily won nor necessarily expected from anyone who has not been permitted to give it perhaps recognises that our society has values and that you are still expected to grow, even as an adult.
> I don't know if you're being flippant but the information at universities is neither secret nor sacred. Sure, there is a stupid price for academic journals but most of it can be found freely on the internet.
Those institutions are chalk full of secret & sacred knowledge. Good luck becoming POTUS, a Tech Billionaire or Nobel Prize winner through freely available information on the internet.
> Eldership, acceptance into a hierarchy based on deeds and demonstrated virtue within a relatively small social grouping that does not recognize the value of money is, I believe, worthwhile. And the socially formal recognition, not easily won nor necessarily expected from anyone who has not been permitted to give it perhaps recognises that our society has values and that you are still expected to grow, even as an adult.
The point is we already have an extremely rigid hierarchy that encompasses our entire society (the mandarin system would be envious, it was just for officialdom!) and unfortunately unlike your ideal - it is not independent of money & does not expect growth.
We've had only 1 president and 1 supreme court justice in my lifetime who didn't attend the Ivy league. It's already de facto, why expand it or make it de jure? This sort of credentialism is what brought us the Bay of Pigs & the War in Iraq.
So your thesis is that the segregationists were right and there’s a causal link between the decline in conditions for white American workers and the success of the civil rights movement?
Why must anyone be content to be poor and equal to only the poor?
The civil rights movement broke the New Deal coalition and ended popular support for many of the policies that had maintained the socioeconomic status of working and lower middle class whites. Today, neither party seriously entertains extending social programs for anyone.
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