You’ll get there. If you’re struggling to remember what to do and in what order… I’d say keep things simple. Re-visit the needed concepts. In case of a number guessing game, that’ll probably be conditions, loops, input and output, storing numbers. Make sure you understand each if those individually.

First, write a program which just echoes the input. You could write a separate program which just has two fixed numbers and compares them. You can then extend it to also read one of the numbers from user input. And you’re half-way there.

Also make sure you can do those simple things half a day later, without the textbook opened.

I’d tackle the loops seperately (if that’s contained in this example). Get comfortable with them. Start with a program that just counts from 0 to 99 and outputs all the numbers. You can then combine that with other concepts, like output “tomato” if a number is divisible by 6. Or if it’s less than, greater than or equal something.
And if you don’t get the loops… Just tell the user they have 10 tries and copy-paste your code ten times. That’ll do it as well. And you can work your way up from there.

I think once you have a grasp of what all these things do, and you did a few super simple things with them on your own, it’ll be more clear what to do with more complex things. In this case probably: loop. And inside of that loop, ask for a number, compare it to the secret number, and decide what to output on a condition. That’s roughly an average number guessing game. I think you just need to tinker a bit more with each of the 5 concepts that get combined here.

Hmmh. Yeah some people add it to the mix. I mean we’ve had revolution happen. It’s not like it is just a theory. I guess people just need to pay attention in history class. Learn what reform and revolution is… Consequences thereof… And it’s not like we’re close to anything like that. At least not here.

I think that bible tale mostly showcases how people already knew thousands of years ago, how life is a constant up and down. And you have to find ways to deal with it. It’s probably not exactly about that. As far as I remember they also had weather patterns back then and effects on agriculture. Plus it’s an old story about God’s supposed favorite tribe, their hardship and how they were able to prevail. It’s not the same thing as the doomerism baked into Christianity, due to early days and those teachings.
Probabably also doesn’t matter unless we invite Peter Thiel over. CDU isn’t really Christian in any way. At least not on a federal level.

Huh. What country does that?

But yeah, it’s similar here. Back in the day, I’d just go to a museum, theme park, zoo, fair, adventure forest… In modern times you’d book online, have to arrive within some designated time slot, maybe create an account, pay online… You can try to just go there, but there’s some chance it’s packed or whatever and they don’t let you in. And nobody wants to waste half an hour driving there, so everybody does the online reservation ordeal for all kinds of minor things.

Yes.

I think Deutsche Bahn is exemplary for stinginess. We need to invest money. And that’s been an issue for a long, long time. But it’s the same story with other infrastructure, the power grid, schools… Digital infrastructure… It pays off later. We could have done it 20 years ago. But we keep being stingy, and the situation with the trains is a good example for that.

You’re right. I meant more the point of system collapse. When we get an uprising. I think it’s a bit of an unholy combination with what the Americans call Christians and the fascists.

By the way, Christianity also teaches us about the 7 good years which will be followed by 7 bad years. And vice versa. Way back then, the Israelites needed some words of encouragement. Maybe we need, too? But I’m super annoyed. Cutting investment into a brighter future and instead investing nearly every third € of taxpayer money into war is unlikely to fix society and infrastructure. We need to do better than that, because some time soon, I’d like to see some turning point and things start to improve again. For some time it looked like we were going to do something about energy and climate change. They promised to fix a few old laws about families and sexuality. Be less stingy and finally try to fix the run down parts of infrastructure. But then geopolitics happened, also Merz’s hyperfocus on appeasing the lunatics. And now improving Germany in any way got demoted to some backlog item. Yet, in reality it’s more important than ever.

But I’m more or less just annoyed because we’re not even that bad off. We had a lot of technological advancements and the energy situation seems fixable. I bet the industry would like some cheaper energy as well. Our society isn’t as broken as in other places. 84% of my neighbours don’t vote for any extremists. We even started to point out a few long-term issues. I think we’re still in a comfortable position to do something about it. We just need to do the right thing.

Considering the USA is way ahead of us, I’d say it’s just a long long way until a country reaches rock bottom as desired. There’s some ideas on how to expedite doom. But it’ll also take some more time to get Skynet up and running.

Hehe, yeah we, the people who are legible to vote in Germany and/or the people who have to face the consequences 😅 Idk every time I look around in my neighbourhood, there’s a lot of really nice people. The well-off ones seem to be able to do the maths on the heat-pump thing and they don’t even need any stupid laws about heating. We also have some nice things. Especially on a local level. Not only where I live. But there’s definitely some brain-dead people as well. A lot of morons who can’t operate their car, bicycle… I’m a bit split on the general intelligence level of the population. I personally think there’s (still) a broad majority of people with functional brains. But it’s complicated…

Based on Merz’s approval ratings, I’d say Sabine and Michael know.

Dunno why politics always has to be like that. Even before electing him, we already knew he has a certain kind of personality. And he was going to take away money from the families and working class. Don’t invest in a brighter future, just some right-wing populism. And maybe build a dozen or so new power plants of the stupidest and most expensive sort to deal with energy. Came a bit of a surprise to me, they also actively sabotage the healthcare system… But I mean everyone is invited to board a train, visit the doctor’s and see how it’s like. Or have a look at their energy bill. All of this isn’t really a secret.

Well. Maybe some time we should elect someone who fixes the structural problems. And not just make it worse every year.

By the way, I don’t know if that’s what a normal German protest looks like. I mean I’ve seen the news as well, it’s definitely a thing. But we’ve also had protests in my city and they didn’t look anything like that. No violence or vandalism from the protesters, and no police brutality or chasing people either. Just saying your mileage may vary, depending on where you live.

Sounds like that. We also had the trains being sabotaged where I live, and allegedly there was some open letter by the climate activists. Dunno if those like every commuter to take their fossil powered car to get to work for two days, but hey… Guess identity politics and cheap propaganda doesn’t necessarily have to make sense.

An electricity substation […]

Wasn’t that all alleged and suspected? And in reality nobody knows who they are and if they even did that? Last time I checked all these claims were completely unclear whether that’s the leftists, anarchists, a psy-op from the right or even Putin’s henchmen?!

It’s a very involved discussion to be had. There’s the difference between what should be, and the reality of what people do. And I’ve been trying to convince people for decades now. And it’s hard to impossible across the board. I’ve seen how we slowly moved from blogs, Linux forums, more open messengers to WhatsApp, asking Linux questions on Reddit and just not writing genuine personal blog articles any more. I think it’s been a constant decline for like 15(?) years now? And that’s across generations. Even the boomers enjoy WhatsApp for example. It’s hard for me even to convince anyone to move to Signal, which isn’t that different from user perspective. They’re already all comfy within a silo. Yeah, and now -for some reason- the youngest people don’t even own a laptop anymore. They kinda need the apps. And they’ve been taught to be at the receiving end of consumerism.

Also kinda hard to find allies to start some kind of revolution. I like how PieFed for example expands on the concept we have here. MBin as well. But mainstream opinion here is something alike a Reddit clone. The majority of the audience wants(?), needs(?) that.

And I feel “for free” regularly isn’t a good point to lead with. From the average person’s perspective this isn’t about cost, they’re not even aware internet platforms cost money. As Google, Meta or X or the Chinese don’t take money from the average user either. Nevertheless, they provide them with all kinds of features. So in my opinion we need to advertise with other distinguishing features and sort out cost some time later.

I’m not sure if that’s how internet platforms work as of today. It’d be a nice idea, for sure. And I think we have some all-in-one platforms. Or at least platforms who aspire to do a lot of different things. But other than that, I think it’s kinda the same situation in the commercial internet. X does shorter public messages, Reddit does threaded discussions. YouTube does longer videos. Instagram does enless scrolling through short clips and images… And group chat rooms will be on Discord or WhatsApp. Classified ads and garage sales will be yet another platform… There’s some blurry lines, for example YouTube can do image stories. But it’s designed in a weird way and not really mainstream. They do short clips but you kinda switch modes when doing that and all younger people rarher stay on Instagram and TikTok anyway. People announce their events on Instagram all the time but it doesn’t specifically help with the use-case. One thing they all have in common is some vaguely similar commenting system. It’s social media after all. But I think they all focus on a specific subset of things. I know Elon Musk has some dream of providing an everything-app. But he can’t do it either.

I wonder what average people even like. I kinda liked the early idea behind social media platforms like Facebook. You could send memes there, talk to friends or strangers, sell old stuff, talk about your pets in some group. or whatever. Maybe there’s some space for one of our platforms which isn’t occupied by a lot of competing platforms…

Ridiculous. We need to develop one [new] universal standard.

Sounds alright. Yeah, I’m asking because we have some wave of new accounts popping up in the Fediverse, promoting some entirely vibe-coded “privacy” or “selfhosting” stuff. And those aren’t worth bothering because those regularly don’t run.

Is the project coded by AI? Or humans? Or a combination thereof?

I’m fairly sure if it’s a layer like WINE, which is not an emulator, it won’t be able to run software for a different architecture. I mean if it only translates the system calls, you still need software that runs on your CPU. Otherwise it’d be an emulator / virtualization.

But is Apple going to stop distributing software for x86 soon? It’s been a mere 3 years since they (still) sold x86 Mac Pros.

Isn’t there a bunch of good monitoring solutions and all you need to configure is, X should be reachable, or it should answer with a HTTP status code 200. And that’s the needed effort per service?

Idk which monitoring software is best of as today, here’s a list: https://github.com/awesome-foss/awesome-sysadmin#monitoring--status-pages

I guess there’s lots of edge cases, though. Testing for example whether some web form still triggers an email in your inbox is probably something that requires custom logic.