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Americans are not passive. Look at the videos of any of these incidents. People are supporting those under attack, collecting evidence, and protesting. The message is clear.

Peaceful protest is the key. Riots, violence, and fighting are not peaceful and only play into the administration's aims.

When Americans resist and protest peacefully, as they have been in the largest numbers ever in the country's history, it exposes the brutality and baseness of those commiting the heinous acts.

Through such peaceful protest as we see, America will overcome this.

The big question is, what next? How to hold people accountable, fairly, while rebuilding the system and rebuilding trust?


Those things work in democratic and ordered societies though, and you need to figure out other approaches when democracy and freedom stops being something the government still cares about. The current leader of the country attempted an insurrection, yet was still allowed to become the leader after that? I think you're beyond being able to change this through just peaceful protests, although it's definitively a part of the answer.

Who are you gonna report this brutality to, when the judicial arm of the government is just following the directions of the administration? How do you hold people accountable, when the system to hold anyone accountable is being undermined?


This is pretty neat! The calendar didn't work well for me. I could only seem to navigate by month. And when I selected the earliest day (after much tapping), nothing seemed to be updated.

Nonetheless, random access history is cool.


Cna you let me know? I'm sure there's some weirdness lurking there and I want to smooth it out. Calendar is essential.


This is an interesting observation. One could argue that some AI generated or driven things does have utility, and thus qualifies as "slop" (although not for those on the receiving end). For example, when used to drive clicks and generate revenue, to troll, or to spread propaganda. You get the idea.

In this instance however, I agree, barf is more accurate.


I'll also take the bait. As far as I understand it, these rules come, fundamentally, from the German Basic Law which was drafted, in part, with direct support from the US after the war. There's certainly always room for healthy debate about what is meant by freedom of speech. But it strikes me as ignorant to come from a US "absolutist" perspective and not understand the history (of US involvement). No clue if the poster is approaching it from that perspective; I'm trying to raise the point of historical context in response to the category of such responses I've encountered.


Sounds like the kind of thing a union or works counsil could help with: enforcing a fair policy. That and revisiting the concept of at-will employment.


Do you have any particular resources lined up?

Regarding how computers work under the hood, i can recommend Nand2Tetris.

https://www.nand2tetris.org/


Re: 8 complete info-manual

Yes, it has an info manual and, I agree, info is the superior documentation viewer. However, a good browser is no replacement for bad writing.

The Guile manual is not well written. The organization seems almost random. The text emphasizes minutia while glossing over fundamental details. It off-loads much to RnRSs and SFRIs (whatever those are). Basically, it suffers badly from The Curse of Expertise.

The documentation's shortcomings might be okay except that Guile is, or was, the premier extension language for the whole of the GNU project.

I considered trying to improve the manual, but why would I dedicate time and effort to a language that I don't know and whose community can't follow it's own advice?

Consider the following:

"Make sure your manual is clear to a reader who knows nothing about the topic and reads it straight through. This means covering basic topics at the beginning, and advanced topics only later. This also means defining every specialized term when it is first used." https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/GNU-Manuals.htm...

Most of these points: https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/gnu-press/GNU-Press-styleguide...

Maybe at FOSDEM this year, people could do a Hackathon and knock out some basics, like defining acronyms or using terms only after they're defined.

PS: every Python tarball for quite a while has instructions for building the documentation, including in info format


In case someone is reading and wonders:

RnRS - Revised n Report on Scheme (where 1 <= n <= 7)

These are basically Scheme Editions. R5RS, R6RS, and R7RS are the ‘big ones’ that are commonly referenced, R7RS being issued in 2013 (5 — 1998, 6 — 2007).

SRFI - Scheme Request for Implementation

SFRI is basically an informal standards type document. SFRI’s are typically used to request a common library feature for implementation (more useful before R6RS which essentially introduces a functioning standard library for scheme. Most implementations acknowledge that they implement SFRI #n as a quick reference for what ‘extras’ are in their shipped stdlib.

Note that I think parent may have been rhetorically asking, or asking with heavy sarcasm. Also, I agree that the Manual is not written that well. It is pretty big, but if Guile is going to continue playing a role as the ‘Scheme of Record’ in GNU and in Linux more generally, it should meet modern expectations for documentation.


> Note that I think parent may have been rhetorically asking, or asking with heavy sarcasm.

Probably neither. It is what you ask when you read the guile manual. Scheme documentation in general is surprisingly bad, considering how simple it is compared to a complex language like Rust for instance. Books like SICP are good for the academically inclined, but are too verbose for anyone learning scheme for a specific purpose like scripting.


I have not read guile docs, but clear writing just doesnt get the emphasis it needs in engineering. Tla+, and Nvidia are two other software areas i sometimes wonder about. Also, when I use a product i want a user guide, technical guide, and a few white papers each in their own pdf. I do not want to see info atomized across 62 million links on 43 million different web pages. Part of clear communication is about composing the parts into a whole. Links ruin that.

Now apart from that I enjoyed the article advocating for guile. I thought it made some compelling points.


For those with no previous experience with Scheme, how does one learn Guile? Are there recommended books or MOOCs? Is familiarity with Emacs effectively a pre-requisite, as it happens with most open-source lisps?


Try Racket instead, much better documentation.


Excuse me if someone already asked and I missed it: how does one prepare for such a world?

Is it some Viktor Frankl level acceptance or should I buy a copy of the Art of Electronics or what?

Advice welcome.


I don't think there is anything more than the standard advice. Just stay curious, make friends/build a community, keep learning, stay healthy. Why not get the AoE? you can also, check out "Practical Electronics for Inventors": AoE assumes you have some Electronics background imo. But seriously, I don't get the doom/gloom: things are going to be rough ... but maybe they won't? Many things I learned I did for their own sake! Things have always been uncertain and absurd I guess we might as well embrace it!


(also get age of empires)


Hahah absolutely!! Man that brings back memories.


GPT3 was released in May 2020. Its been nearly 5 years.


The first digital camera was released in around 1975? Digital cameras overtook film camera sales in 2005, 30 years later.


Why is gpt3 relevant? I can't recall anyone using gpt3 directly to generate code. The closest would probably be Tabnine's autocompletion, which I think first used gpt2, but I can't recall any robust generation of full functions (let alone programs) before late 2022 with the original GitHub copilot.


The article doesn't talk about how did it got so bad.

It just says "decades of neglect". It gives little vignettes of bad experiences and a quote from a French person saying the French would revolt.

Any actual explanation?


Germany ate the captialism/markets/privatization for everything bug. If one wants to be optimistics it is that we are currently figuring out how to construct competitive markets (e.g. Flixtrain/Austrian/French rail is starting to compete on the rail network managed by DB).

In the decades they converted the German rail service (DB) into a stock company (AG) that is 100% owned by the state. The plan was to make it profitable then IPO it. So DB started to stop investing in order to become profitable short term. It never became profitable, so couldn't be floated. Now it also has a large infrastructure neglect debt on top (and is still 100% owned by the state with this weird structure with a CEO).

If it were a startup, one would just let it fail (creative destruction). Since it is obviously critical infrastructure, they should really have thought of this before. But same could be said about banks before 2008.


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