the bikeshed made of diamonds guix, linux, and gnu in general, are one of many demonstrations of people doing and succeeding at incredibly hard things in the face of escalating huge forces trying to prevent them. I was trying to flash libreboot onto my system but bricked it (the libreboot instructions seemed to say “ignore the errors and reboot” ( https://libreboot.org/docs/install/#thinkpad-t60x60x60tabletx60s screenshot attached as IMG_0066.png ) — never do that, instead read back the flash and see if it flashed right!!), and I ended up externally flashing with an soic8 clip which takes a little delicate handling, and once I figured out externally flashing well (by attaching a multimeter across GND and VCC to detect clip misalignment) _every bios build I tried worked great_ which I had not ever experienced before. I could pick any core boot package and just run it. notably gnuboot’s release candidate worked fine to post my board into grub. I wanted to build it from source on guix and ran into gnat missing on guix, despite gnuboot moving toward guix support. I’ve been having trouble reading all the important resources like build instructions and manuals, and I websearched gnat on guix and ran into a small thread on the topic ( https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2023-07/msg00092.html ). tldr _every modern ada compiler is built by another ada compiler and nobody knows how the original ada compiler was written_, preventing source-based deployment of ada from another language. this almost certainly means that there are bugs or backdoors propagating through all compilers in the ada ecosystem and somebody may likely be benefiting from these bugs or backdoors; considering extensive work and desire to rebootstrap ada could have succeeded by now. Consider the hacker quips of writing novel compilers or operating systems (or even cpus, see the homebrew cpu webring) before breakfast — one can see the results of this meme littering codeforges now as well as academic tracks. And yet, _no independent ada implementations sufficient to bootstrap other ada compilers_?? ada is used in coreboot and hence also libreboot, osboot, gnuboot, canoeboot — _for the graphics backend that shows a pretty-looking high-resolution watermark image_ so if you pull it out, i imagine you get coreboot but it looks like phoenixbios from last century ( attached image.jpeg 1 from dosdays ) rather than a conventional hacker palace ( attached image.jpeg 2 from libreboot ). and who wants their release of coreboot to be the only release without graphics? people, users, want their custom boot splash screens on their advanced bootloaders, so they can show them off and feel good, like a piercing or a hairdo or a shirt I’m guessing that linuxboot and heads might not suffer from this the same way anyway it sadly seems to make sense then for people invested in guix and gnuboot to spend time trying to _write an ada compiler from scratch_, so that people will use software without widespread sourceless bugs “it’s not paint for the bike shed, it’s fortress walls to protect all of us!” of course a language model directed by a hacker could likely write an ada compiler independently [parts dropped/corrupt]
