Notices by Janneke (janneke@todon.nl)

A long time ago there was this Spitting Image show with the running gag [where is]"the brain of the president".

[Why] isn't there something like that nowadays, it could be interesting to see his reactions to a show with muppets.

@jarno *lol*

@jarno als je minder wast, dan is-i toch juist leger?

@funkylab @barrelshifter sure, but we have things like stage0's M2-Planet that are bootstrappable and can compile my GNU Mes project written in simple C.

C++ simply wouldn't be an option.

@barrelshifter (simple) C is #bootstrappable, C++ is not.

You know why we Germans are so pedantic about data protection? Someone around 90 years ago went through all records available, selected people with certain criteria, with the help of IBM, and then killed them all.

We don't want to be on any list.

And now the US Gov and Musk are trying to get access to all data they have about every person and put them into a big fat DB and run AI over it.

I am afraid what they will do with that.

@shriramk @ahfrom A miserable little sequence of miserable little characters.

@Lana @billjurgensen and return the 700.000 kidnapped children?

@b0rk that seems useful (unless maybe when you're running a shell inside de Emacs, you prolly don't want a GUI browser to spawn, bt that's details).

Which reminds me, I believe there was a proposal to add up, previous, next semantics to html and it got rejected.

One of the amazing things about info (esp in emacs) is that you can read the whole document just by hitting the space bar. For, next screen and next section alike. No such thing exists in web browsers today. Similarly you isearch or regexp-search, go to node, jump to index entries. Once you're used to it, using HTML documentation becomes terribly cumbersomenin comparison.

@b0rk of course, especially at the time, the (projected) LilyPond user base included musicians rather than programmers.

@b0rk thank you! It's all generated from [tex]info and is thus (mostly) also browsable offline as info pages.

If only the #GNU project would have taken this up, have improved and standardized it. Twenty years ago.

also this guidance on command line arguments is great, I didn’t realize these things came from the GNU project and I really appreciate them https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Command_002dLine-Interfaces.html#Command_002dLine-Interfaces

(via @zwol)

(3/?)

@b0rk I found that I had to implement a simple, #bootstrappable C library for my GNU Mes project. The glibc info pages would explain things about libc functions and give hints, for example when better to use another function, where the man page would just list the return values and the parameters.

@b0rk we have been living in mostly different bubbles.

When I read "We will use Emacs as our editor" and I realized that was the single one statement that I had a problem with (being a happy VI user for some years), it occurred to me that this was probably caused by a problem with my perspective.

I then spent three summers to try to learn Emacs. That's some 25y ago. I can't say whether it was having context aware info pages with just a keystroke away next to your program text, being able to copy stuff without even having to glance at your mouse. Or whether it was the automagial (re-)indentation of code. Or something like the debian-changelog-mode when creating a Debian package.

Together with a friend I went to create GNU LilyPond which was often praised because of its documentation. I now hear similar praise about our Guix manual.

@luis_in_brief @b0rk because info tells a story, has an introduction, and explicitly includes learners as their audience. Whereas man pages (at least in the 90s) attempted to not spend a single character too many?

@b0rk yeah, the info experience outside of emacs is pretty terrible. I believe there was a short period where GNOME/Yelp would seamlessly present info pages.

Info manuals tell a story, for power users and learners alike. Link between different concepts. Usually have a tutorial. All of that is missing, for example--not wanting to single out one non-gnu project-- in an avalanche of manual pages.

If you want to learn about Linux (the kernel), wouldn't it be amazing if there was a manual for that? There is one for the Hurd.

@b0rk Just imagine how amazing it would have been if there would have been an info manual for Linux and for git?

@b0rk

https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/GNU-Manuals.html#GNU-Manuals

"GNU Manuals
The preferred document format for the GNU system is the Texinfo formatting language. Every GNU package should (ideally) have documentation in Texinfo both for reference and for learners."

Info manuals usually have a philosophy section, an introduction, a tutorial and describe the relationship of the software with other softwares. Some manual pages nowadays also give examples, but in the 90s the main feature of a man page, as I experienced it as a newbie, was terseness with no regard for (dare I say a elitist disregard?) for learners like myself.

@b0rk in '94 I used (sun's) db and a friend asked me why I didn't use gdb. It was such an amazingly different experience, the gdb ui seemed to be designed with care---dare I say love?---for an actual human (me!) using it.

I went to read all of gnu.org, the philosophy (empowering the user instead of keeping them ignorant), the coding standards (info instead of elitist manual pages, no arbitrary limits, etc ...) and decided I wanted to be part of this.

The reason some of us prefer to say GNU/Linux is rooted in the idea that even people that have been using "Linux" for decades, may not have heard about GNU.

I've been hoping the fediverse would become much more popular for quite some time now but I'm no longer sure if that would be so great after all. Not in its current form anyway.

I'm getting more and more interactions that are assuming bad faith, often from people not following back.

Yes, I surely could---and probably should---try to be more careful and precise in my toots. But amongst friends one often doesn't need such precautions.