* Joel Reicher <joel.reic...@gmail.com> [2025-01-11 17:16]: > I understand your point, and I've never said the understanding should only > be through books. I only said the attempt should begin with the books in > order to respect and assist the attempts of the authors.
I fully agree on that in general. Though I remember times from 1999 when I was dismissing various Emacs versions and switching from one to another, mostly to find out why it was crashing. During that time, there was a lot of information for me, and I simply couldn't grasp it. There was a bunch of new terminology and many misunderstood words. From the viewpoint of my personal experience, I still struggle to understand many details in the manual today, even after 25 years. I have to study new terms and clarify them, which is why I have endorsed the integration of a dictionary in Emacs. On my side, I have some statistics on how many words I have defined and clarified through Emacs over the last few years. See it attached. Here’s a corrected version of your text: How many times have I not found those terms in the manual? I skipped too many various resources, and now there are Stack Overflow and Large Language Model (LLM) knowledge bases, online books about Emacs, and a plethora of information. Then I am now in an environment where people do not even read books. They have smartphones and access to knowledge, but do not read anything of quality on the Internet and do not read physical paper books. Everything must be explained verbally. Students in schools in East Africa verbally discuss issues, but when you ask if they have any books at home, well, maybe a Bible or Quran, which they have never read. Can you imagine that difference? As you know, mailing lists need not be answered; many questions may remain unanswered. I do not consider it "traffic," as we currently do not have much traffic; in fact, we have less people now than before. Basically, we need more people asking questions on that mailing list. We need socialization, not automatization. Soon, websites may not be searched for knowledge, as each phone will already have Wikipedia, Britannica, and other resources built in through tensors from Large Language Models (LLMs). That will drive many people away from socialization. We need them. -- Jean Louis
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