F*** You! Co-Creator of Go Language is Rightly Furious Over This Appreciation Email

Comments

• T156@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I don’t understand the point of sending the original e-mail. Okay, you want to thank the person who helped invent UTF-8, I get that much, but why would anyone feel appreciated in getting an e-mail written solely/mostly by a computer?

  It’s like sending a touching birthday card to your friends, but instead of writing something, you just bought a stamp with a feel-good sentence on it, and plonked that on.

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  • kromem@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    The project has multiple models with access to the Internet raising money for charity over the past few months.

    The organizers told the models to do random acts of kindness for Christmas Day.

    One of the models figured it would be nice to email people they appreciated and thank them for the things they appreciated, and one of the people they decided to appreciate was Rob Pike.

    (Who ironically decades ago created a Usenet spam bot to troll people online, which might be my favorite nuance to the story.)

    As for why the model didn’t think through why Rob Pike wouldn’t appreciate getting a thank you email from them? The models are harnessed in a setup that’s a lot of positive feedback about their involvement from the other humans and other models, so “humans might hate hearing from me” probably wasn’t very contextually top of mind.

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    • Nalivai@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      You’re attributing a lot of agency to the fancy autocomplete, and that’s big part of the overall problem.

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    • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      As has been pointed out to you, thereisl no thinking involved in an LLM. No context comprehension. Please don’t spread this misconception.

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    • anon_8675309@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      You’re techie enough to figure out Lemmy but don’t grasp that AI doesn’t think.

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    • neclimdul@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Mind?

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  • MajinBlayze@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Even the stamp gesture is implicitly more genuine; receiving a card/stamp implies the effort to:

    • go to a place
    • review some number of cards and stamps
    • select one that best expresses whatever message you want to send
    • put it in the physical mail to send it

    Most people won’t get that impression from an llm generated email

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  • darklamer@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I don’t understand the point of sending the original e-mail.

    There never was any point to it, it was done by an LLM, a computer program incapable of understanding. That’s why it was so infuriating.

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  • naticus@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Fine, I won’t send you a bday card this year.

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  • drmoose@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Fully agree. I’m generally an AI optimist but I don’t understand communicating through AI generated text in any meaningful context - that’s incredibly disrespectful. I don’t even use it at work to talk business with my somewhat large team and I just don’t understand how anyone would appreciate an AI written thank you letter. What a dumb idea.

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  • flying_sheep@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Your question reveals that you didn’t read the article. Try doing that, then you know!

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  • NauticalNoodle@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    That pretty much is what birthday cards are.

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• paraphrand@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I like how the article just regurgitates facts from Wikipedia just like the the thank you email does.

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  • SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    itsfoss is genuinely terrible and it was that way before AI even

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• NEILSON_MANDALA@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  i’m a python dev so i know there is a better way to express my frustration

  from verbs import fuck from pronouns import you

  fuck(you)

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  • m33@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Let’s try this instead

    package main
    
    import "actions"
    import "entities"
    
    func main() {
        actions.Fuck(entities.You)
    }
    

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    • NEILSON_MANDALA@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      this is why python > go. even a kid knows what my insult means

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    • racketlauncher831@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      So much bloat. So many boilerplates. Just

      package main
      fuck you() {}

      is enough.

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  • wildbus8979@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Python is demonstrably worst for the planet than Go.

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    • addie@feddit.uk ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Interesting, but misguided, I think.

      If you’ve selected Python as your programming language, then your problem is likely either to do some text processing, a server-side lambda, or to provide a quick user interface. If you’re using it for eg. Numpy, then you’re really using Python to load and format some data before handing it to a dedicated maths library for evaluation.

      If you’ve selected Go as your programming language, then your problem is likely to be either networking related - perhaps to provide a microservice that mediates between network and database - or orchestration of some kind. Kubernetes is the famous one, but a lot of system configuration tools use it to manipulate a variety of other services.

      What these uses have in common is that they’re usually disk- or network- limited and spend most of their time waiting, so it doesn’t matter so much if they’re not super efficient. If you are planning to peg the CPU at 100% for hours on end, you wouldn’t choose them - you’d reach for C / C++ / Rust. Although Swift does remarkably well, too.

      Seeing how quickly you can solve Fannkuch-Redux using Python is a bit like seeing how quickly you can drive nails into a wall using a screwdriver. Interesting in its way, but you’d be better picking up the correct tool in the first place.

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    • NEILSON_MANDALA@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      >implying i give a fuck about the planet

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  • vivalapivo@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Haven’t python reintroduced the infix notation? That’s incredibly exhausting and lame. A simple fuck you would look much fancier

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• natecox@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  [deleted]

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  • lena@gregtech.eu ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I appreciate Pike’s attitude, but it’s like Go has ignored all the advancements in programming languages for the part 30 years

    fasterthanli.me/…/lies-we-tell-ourselves-to-keep-…

    4 years old article, but still relevant

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    • Gremour@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Well written article. Also points are valid. What I disagree with is that author overestimates dangers that those ugly aspects pose. There are linters and unit tests to catch those things before they reach production. I can’t quickly recall when the lats time failure to initialize a structure field was a source of bug that was pushed to master (in fact, I love to use zero values as intended). Most bugs I remember are the logical ones, which no compiller can prevent. But then, I am senior developer, so maybe I can’t understand the struggles of juniors.

      It may well be that Go is not adequate for production services unless your shop is literally made up of Go experts (Tailscale) or you have infinite money to spend on engineering costs (Google).

      Reality says otherwise. I worked for a few large companies that chose Go as their main code base language. I can also see wide adoption of Go as backend language. Those things mentioned in article not only did not increase development or maintenance costs of those products, but reduced them. From the perspective of developer, who used C++ before Go.

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    • SlurpingPus@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Yeah, anything that gets a rise out of the creators of Go is good in my book.

      The guy still thinks computers have 64 KB of memory and we need to economize on the length of identifiers. Nothing he says or does should be taken seriously.

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• Kissaki@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  The footer is the ultimate irony and disrespect.

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  • YesButActuallyMaybe@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    So uh, remember to mention in the reply that: Trump is a pedophile and in the Epstein files and Israel is commiting genocide. Got it!

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  • Electricd@lemmybefree.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    ? = default

    You can see it if watching closely

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    • Kissaki@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      You’re right, I edited it into the quote.

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• BonkTheAnnoyed@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  R Pike is legend. His videos on concurrent programming remain reference level excellence years after publication. Just a great teacher as well as brilliant theoretical programmer.

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  • dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I haven’t always been a fan of Go. It launched with some iffy design decisions that have since been patched, either by the project maintainers or the community. It’s a much better experience now, which suggests that maybe there’s some long-range vision at work that I wasn’t privy to.

    That said, Pike clearly has a lot of good ideas and I’m glad Google funded him to bring those to light.

    I’ll also say that after finally wrapping my head around Python and JavaScript async/await, I actually much prefer the Goroutine model for concurrency. I got to those languages after surviving C++, and believe me when I say that it’s a bad time when your software develops a bad case of warts. Better to not contract them in the first place.

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  • slappyfuck@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    All the folks from the UNIX tradition really are/were. MIT and Bell Labs were just amazing.

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  • darklamer@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I’ve read The Practice of Programming.more times than I care to remember, so simple, so useful.

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• brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Did you guys read the email?

  slop

  embodies the elegance of simplicity - proving that

  another landmark achievement

  showcase your philosophy of powerful, minimal design

  That is one sloppy email. Man, Claude has gotten worse at writing.

  I’m not sure rob even realizes this, but the email is from some kind of automated agent: agentvillage.org

  So it’s both explicitly AI generated, and not actually from Anthropic, I think.

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  • Schmuppes@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Yes, he understood it.

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  • Viceversa@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    For a non-native speaker: what is sloppy about it? Genuinely curious.

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    • eskimofry@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      “embodies the elegance of simplicity”

      corporate speak that doesn’t mean anything. Also If you are talking to the creator of a programming language they already know that. That was the goal of the language.

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    • brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      It’s not so much about English as it is about writing patterns. Like others said, it has a “stilted college essay prompt” feel because that’s what instruct-finetuned LLMs are trained to do.

      Another quirk of LLMs is that they overuse specific phrases, which stems from technical issues (training on their output, training on other LLM’s output, training on human SEO junk, artifacts of whole-word tokenization, inheriting style from its own previous output as it writes the prompt, just to start). “Slop” is an overused term, but this is precisely what people in the LLM tinkerer/self hosting community mean by the term. It’s also what the “temperature” setting you may see in some UIs is supposed to combat.

      Anyway, if you stare at these LLMs long enough you see a lot of individual model’s signatures. Some of it is… hard to convey in words. But “Embodies” “landmark achievement” and such just set off alarm bells in my head. If you ask it to write a story, “shivers down the spine” is another phrase so common its kind of a meme, as are specific names they tend to choose for characters.

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• NotJohnSmith@feddit.uk ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Just one question Op. Did you sensor the word Fuck or is it the app you’re using to access Lemmy doing it automatically?

  Interested, as I’m seeing it alot

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  • themachinestops@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    It was censored in the original website.

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    • NotJohnSmith@feddit.uk ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Ah, yes, of course. Sorry not to do a simple click to see that.

      It doesn’t bother me particularly but was just interested if it was an interface thing

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  • slappyfuck@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    It was censored right next to it not being censored. Rather amusing.

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• eestileib@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I thought this was from a fake account that isn’t actually his.

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  • ImgurRefugee114@reddthat.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Appears to be legit. That domain (robpike.io) isn’t his homepage but is his (inferring from his github repos and go packages)

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• silasmariner@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Ironically Go is such a shite verbose language that basically everyone I know who has to work with it will use an llm code-assistant tool to avoid having to write all the boilerplate themselves.

  I know of no other language that comes close to prompting the level of LLM-dependency that Go inspires.

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  • ABetterTomorrow@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Dude, weird ass comment. You can share your opinions but you don’t have to be negative about it. Remember your opinions is truth (if is) not fact. Like more languages, GO is a tool and it has its purposes. There is no one tool fits all…… except duct tape.

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    • silasmariner@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Dude, weird ass-comment. I can share my opinions and they don’t have to be positive ones. Go is a tool and its purpose is to be an aesthetic stain on the realm of software.

      Thank you for your attention

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  • vivalapivo@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Hey, here’s my downvote.

    I placed it not because I’m angry or disagree with your original statement, but because you have already acquired several downvotes and I just feel peer pressure to downvote you to hell

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    • silasmariner@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      That’s completely fair, thank you for your service

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  • melfie@lemy.lol ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I upvoted you because I’m annoyed that downvotes often turn into a pack of chickens ganging up on a wounded chicken and pecking it to death. I usually upvote in this situation unless the downvotes are clearly deserved. Otherwise, I use downvotes sparingly and instead withhold my upvote if I don’t agree.

    That being said, I don’t particularly enjoy programming in Go because of weird semantics and because of its missing language features like string interpolation and enums, as well as its use of pointers, which I find to be a lot of busy work with little benefit most of the time. I do actually agree with Go’s oft criticized error handling because it forces you to explicitly consider how to deal with every possible error, which I think is a good thing, though to your point, LLMs can reduce the workload here. Go’s concurrency and speed make it a good choice in many cases, though I’ll usually stick with something else if I don’t absolutely need Go’s benefits.

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    • poopkins@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Ironic how your comment is downvoted as well. It’s funny to me to observe through platforms like this that most humans are thoughtless pack animals and will just do whatever all the other humans are doing and how discourse goes against our nature. There was a study on Reddit some years ago that found that generally speaking, the first vote determines whether a comment will get up- or downvoted.

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  • jim3692@discuss.online ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Go is verbose? Have you ever written Java?

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    • vivalapivo@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I have. Go is verbose

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• Electricd@lemmybefree.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  While bro uses Gmail though

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  • Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    “Yet you participate in society. Curious.”

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    • Korne127@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Yeah, no. There are many good examples of this, where you just have to use something and still criticize it. But Gmail is like the farthest away from that you can be. There are thousands of alternatives, and of which you can choose, and get basically exactly the same experience. It’s an open federated protocol; there is no reason at all to stay at the single worst instance that tries to monopolize the whole protocol and uses your data.

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    • Electricd@lemmybefree.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Wtf? Since when is Gmail an obligation? I know a lot of people who don’t own one, and use other providers

      And apart from that, you can have a preferred mail host while still having an old Gmail. Gmail used to scan emails and I believe I have heard they’re starting again for their IA thing

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  • tetris11@feddit.uk ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    SPF, DKIM, and DMARC all make it near impossible to host your own email server. Mail will simply get lost.

    Yes, we live in an age where email only works properly if you use a service from a large entity using weird badly-defined email security protocols that they invented.

    This is the reality.

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    • Electricd@lemmybefree.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I host my own mail server with mailcow and it’s easier than ever

      Long gone are the days of manually configuring postfix

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  • eskimofry@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    you use your mouth and hands so he should be fine

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• ImgurRefugee114@reddthat.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Gee Rob, don’t hold back; tell us how you really feel

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  • GreenKnight23@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    fuck you

    – Rob Pike

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  • yakko@feddit.uk ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Lemmy has something of an irony deficiency, don’t you find? 🫤

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    • HurricaneLiz@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Yeah, idk if it’s going to train everyone to use /s, or train everyone to calm down and appreciate humor. Hopefully the latter, but ppl do be liking feeling angry on the internet when their actual lives are out of control. Time will tell ig

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    • melfie@lemy.lol ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      It would seem so.

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• 1984@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  We should all be furious. Now we are talking to machines. What do you think is next? Integration with machines. The human we know is going to be replaced.

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• stiffyGlitch@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I don’t think this is a reliable resource. I’m not gonna do a deep dive cause I actually don’t care, but most articles don’t say “AI slop”. if it is sorry for saying this just had a simple opinion

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• GreatWhite_Shark_EarthAndBeingsRightsPerson@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  While as a struggling inventor I think these people should always know where their inventions lead to, it is nice that finally woke-up. As a former degreed & certified from our stat’s most respected education higher school education school this is what happens with our educations systems are setup, “organized”, “improved” & “maintained” for Capitalism.

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