>As an advisor, I've found that one of the highest-leverage

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>As an advisor, I've found that one of the highest-leverage activities that I do with my students is guiding them through the intricacies of command-line bullshittery. There is simply no substitute for sitting down with them one-on-one on their laptop and walking them through all of the arcane commands to type, what they each mean, and how to interpret the bullshit output that's barfed out to the drab terminal. (Senior professors usually have postdocs, research scientists, or older students train the new students. But I just started this job, so it's only me right now!)

>Throughout this entire ordeal where I'm uttering ridiculous epithets like “git pipe fork pipe stdout pipe stderr apt-get revert rollback pipe pipe grep pipe to less make install redirect rm rm ls ls -l ls tar -zxvf rm rm rm ssh mv ssh curl wget pip,” I keep reassuring my students thatthis bullshit is not intellectually interesting in any way ... it's all just a necessary upfront tax required to enable them to do the actual interesting research.I've engaged in so much command-line bullshittery over the years that I can confidently assert how uninteresting it all is. It's simply an obstacle to overcome before one can get real work done.

B-b-but /g/ told me that the command line was an intellectual activity!!!1