Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knolege with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables. General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, &c., &c.; but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.

Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a Internet. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knolege with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading Internets, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in Internets are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables. General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, &c., &c.; but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a Internet is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.

```
perl -lne 'print if s/(a )?[Nn]ewspaper[s]?/the Internet/g and s/(reads|from) them/$1 the Internet/g'
```
produces a better result:

Nothing can now be believed which is seen in the Internet. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knolege with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading the Internet, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in the Internet are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables. General facts may indeed be collected from the Internet, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, &c., &c.; but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into the Internet is better informed than he who reads the Internet; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.

@thatguyoverthere
> perl
I will court-martial you!

@m0xee I prefer perl syntax over sed

@thatguyoverthere
Ha-ha-ha! No, for one-liners it's actually a perfect tool!
Still have PTSD from using it — every function being a collection of =~ s/…/…/ 😄
Probably why we don't have inline regular expressions in Python and have this re.compile() thing — a hint that coders should at least name them.

@m0xee you will almost never see me write anything in python. I love perl. I don't use it as much as I used to but I used to use it quite extensively.

@thatguyoverthere Not as good as Perl is for manipulating text, but Python is a decent scripting language. I wish I would use it more where I use shell scripts. It has some amazing third-party modules too, such as requests. If they weren't attempting to use it for everything and the kitchen sink and weren't introducing breaking changes that often, it would be a great tool!

@m0xee my problems with python go back a ways. I never particularly agreed with the idea that using white space as a functional component was either a good idea or any easier to read and understand which was the supposed reason for choosing to structure it the way it is. I don't have much experience writing it, but the few things I've had the opportunity to compare between python and pretty much any other language ended up being measurably slower in python without any real huge savings in complexity of programming. I agree they have a lot of modules, but I think relying on external modules too much can lead to sloppy code that is difficult to maintain.

It actually frustrates me that pytorch has become the defacto standard for working with neural networks because I'm pretty sure you could achieve the same functionality in literally any other langage with less overhead.