I never understood the Handmade Network. AFAIU, it came from people who watched Casey Muratori's Handmade Hero, a game developed on video over several years from scratch. But Casey, as far as I know, didn't start the Network and it never seemed to align with the intent of Handmade Hero.
The purpose of Handmade Hero was to show people that they are capable of making a game themselves and to learn things which have a reputation for being too hard. There was, of course, an emphasis on the hard things being hard because of complexity introduced by things like OOP, C++, etc. But the main purpose always felt like education and enablement. Casey's a great teacher and the videos are very informative.
The Network, on the other hand, was some weird "we want to make stuff by hand", whatever that means. That's fine. But that's not what Casey spent like 7 years doing. He didn't do it "just cuz". Instead, it was to teach and share. That seemed lost on the Network.
As a result, it seemed just like a less toxic Suckless project without the focus on making a new ecosystem. It was just a forum to say, "Hey I made this thing", all the while co-oping the feel-goods from Casey's Handmade Hero.
It's a large community of programmers whose values align with those demonstrated in Handmade Hero. Naturally not all of those programmers are going to do carbon copies of Handmade Hero. Some make and publish their own software that is developed with similar values in mind (e.g. File Pilot, 4coder, Odin). Others just enjoy programming that way for fun and like to discuss their hobby projects with other like-minded people. This shouldn't really be surprising; this is to be expected of any online community.
To be fair, Handmade Hero also seems like a project designed to co-opt unearned feel-goods. Maybe one of the goals was to teach, but another goal was to actually ship a game, and he took pre-orders for it before eventually abandoning development. It turns out it's a lot easier to talk about making good programs than it is to actually make them. I do think it is possible to make high-quality handmade software, but being performative about doing so rather than just doing the thing is probably counterwise to ever actually just doing the thing.
The goal was always, first and foremost, to teach. This is super obvious from the announcement trailer alone[1], where he says the point of the project is to pass on a way of life that inspired him. If Casey wanted to make money from a game he wouldn't have bothered with thousands of hours of Twitch streams.
I for one feel like my 15$ spent on Handmade Hero were well served by having access to the source code and the breadth of video that annotates every line of code. I think anyone that looked at he proposition that Casey made as something more than a way to support him, was naive.
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.
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.
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...
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?
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