cat mario.nes | nc play-nes.org 4444 (opens in new tab)

The Wikipedia article even concedes that cat might be better:

> A cat written with UUOC might still be preferred for readability reasons, as reading a piped stream left-to-right might be easier to conceptualize.[10] Also, one wrong use of the redirection symbol ">" instead of "<" (often adjacent on keyboards) may permanently delete the content of a file, in other words clobbering, and one way to avoid this is to use cat with pipes.

I‘ll happily continue to “abuse cat” going forward and sleep perfectly well.

> When I offer a pipeline as a solution I expect it to be reusable. It is quite likely that a pipeline would be added at the end of or spliced into another pipeline. In that case having a file argument to grep screws up reusability, and quite possibly do so silently without an error message if the file argument exists. I. e. `grep foo xyz | grep bar xyz | wc` will give you how many lines in xyz contain bar while you are expecting the number of lines that contain both foo and bar. Having to change arguments to a command in a pipeline before using it is prone to errors. Add to it the possibility of silent failures and it becomes a particularly insidious practice.

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/a/16619430/1040915

- Someone who knows the trick

"Let me give a half effort on X product. Oh, see, nobody likes it. Well, guess I'll go ahead and shutter it."

It's a shame that products with so much potential have all the resources put into them wasted with their behavior.

Definitely this. The service itself was great, was ahead of the competition gameplay-wise. Google just did what Google does.