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   Juggling With Eggs (jugglingwitheggs@mstdn.social)'s status on Monday, 26-Jan-2026 03:25:16 JST Juggling With Eggs

   So today I popped in to that well known high street newsagent and stationers that has recently changed its name for no apparent reason.

   As I hadn’t been for ages, I scanned the current affairs magazines…and well, was somewhat surprised to see Hungarian Conservative alongside the Spectator and Private Eye. Not many copies sold it seemed…

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   iced depresso (icedquinn@blob.cat)'s status on Wednesday, 30-Jul-2025 13:54:35 JST iced depresso
   • @ indicates a command is incoming.
   • @@ escapes the command character and inserts a literal at-sign instead.
   • {...} represents a parameter to a command which is textual data. There may be more than one parameter. Textual data may have escapes such as @{ or @} to include a close brace as literal character when there is an imbalance.
   • [...] represents a parameter to a commend which consists of Lisp. This is implementation-defined. Lisp data may have escapes such as @[ or @] to include a literal closing bracket when there is an imbalance.
     • These are stolen from Scribble but we omit some of the rather creative ideas for escaping blocks. We’re not writing a whole Lisp module here we’re just structuring data.
   • All block based commands start with begin <name> and are finished with end <name>. This allows dumb processors to understand blocks in a document without actually understanding what the processor is going to do with it.
     • Contrast to Texinfo where you have to know in advance that some commands are blocks and some are not.
   • Brace and bracket groups are presumed to be balanced. This means count up every time you see [ or { and count down on ] or }. Escapes are only needed if there is intentionally an imbalance of these symbols for some reason.
   • As a special case, @c indicates the command until end of line is a comment.
     • Comments may also be a begin/end block but this does not involve any special handling.
   • All else should be considered plain text. Plain text must be read with all whitespace exactly intact as the parser sees it. The user or backend will ask if they want any special whitespace processing (such as paragraph formatting) to occur.
     • Authors should use semantic whitespace. This means one sentence per line in a file. One or more consecutive blank lines indicates a paragraph break.

   Latex is very similar but the command character is replaced with \ instead of @. I have no problem with processors allowing this via a flag. In such cases the command character is changed all semantics should remain the same (ex. changing the command character to $ means $$ and $[ are the escapes.) These alternatives are considered non-canonical.

   Examples@author{Blob Fox} @begin comfy @blanket @fropnicate[:deedle (forp 47)] @end comfy Rationale

   Scribble’s creative idea for escapes makes it agitating to parse with readily available tools. Skribe’s syntax is too anemic. Markdown and Asciidoc are specialized for specific kinds of text markup and are not suitable for meta-modeling or writing documents outside their assigned domain. Texinfo’s toolchain is dated–but the syntax is objectively simple and rather easy to build around.

   Latex and Booklit are mostly fine

   References

   • https://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/manual/texinfo/html_node/Command-List.html
   • https://barzilay.org/misc/scribble-reader.pdf
   • https://booklit.page/
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   🎓 Doc Freemo :jpf: 🇳🇱 (freemo@qoto.org)'s status on Thursday, 10-Oct-2024 19:59:24 JST 🎓 Doc Freemo :jpf: 🇳🇱

   in reply to

   @amerika

   > This is not objective per se, since it does not consider IQ and mental health issues.

   Sure it is... people with high IQ and are poor have a harder time getting out of it than people with a high IQ and not poor.. same as people with health issues. So the statement that a person being poor will have a harder time getting out of it than if that person were not poor is objectively true. There is no situation where being poorer would not be harder to get out of then if you werent poorer.

   > And what if the answer is simply mental health problems and low IQ stemming from biological unfitness?

   If someone is poor due to being mentally incapable of working, or some other health issue then that person would still have a much harder time getting out of their shitty situation than a person who has low IQ but happened to inhereit a trust fund worth a billion, no matter how stupid they may be the person with the money will still have as good a life as possible while the poor low IQ person will almost certainly die.

   > Most people who are poor are poor for a reason.

   As someone who has taken in about a dozen poor people from the streets and invested in them to get them back on their feet I can say this logic is not entierly true. Yes ther eare many people who are poor for a reason, for most those reasons are a lack of oppertunity, lack of access to schooling or good parenting, or traumas experienced from war. There are some people who are poor out of sheer luck.

   Not sure how it changes anything i said just because there is an explainable reason for many people to be poor, reasons that often are out of their control, or if it is in their control they havent had access to the resources to know how to control it (like financial education).

   > Equity tends to mean equality of outcome, to use your phrase, because that way the individual is subsidized.

   Not at all, the people who started using the term Equity in the context of social unfairness specifically coined it as a contrast to equality of outcome. See the meme i posted, which is the meme that started the whole "equity vs equality' conversation. As you can see they very distinctly show that equality and equity are different concepts (though i dont think the meme clearly explains what they are)

   > I think the subsidies accelerate the self-destruction of a society.

   As discussed it would depend ont he subsidies. If you are giving money to someone solely based on their age or race I'd agree. If you are doing it based on poverty then it would depend on how that money is used. If all you do is hand a poor person a sack of cash it wont fix the underlying problem, so i agree that is not a good approach.

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   Chris Alemany🇺🇦🇨🇦🇪🇸 (chris@mstdn.chrisalemany.ca)'s status on Saturday, 27-Jan-2024 01:06:18 JST Chris Alemany🇺🇦🇨🇦🇪🇸

   in reply to

   @pluralistic As someone who moderated "OS Battlefront" forums on Ars Technica 23 years ago I can confidently say there have always been cultists on both the Apple and non-Apple side (be it Microsoft, Linux, Android, whatever...) since the advent of the PC (happy 40th, Mac)

   The most important thing when it comes to technology is if it works for you. Many people use Android because it works for them. Many people use Apple as well for the same reason.

   As an Apple user, I am glad the EU has forced Apple into loosening its grip a tiny bit. I am also glad that Apple has always, since its inception, prioritized a strong link between its hardware and software as a way to maintain a very high standard of 3rd party software. It has some serious drawbacks the EU has now attempted to deal with, but I also believe it has indisputably worked and in the end both these facts will make the experience better for Apple users from here on.