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Comment by nanis | Hacker News Reader

I find the writing style tedious: The author expects a reader who does not know about `make` or cross compilers to relate to writing ARM64 assembly for the bootloader.

If I am following along this material, then I don't need all the digressions with close enough descriptions of the tools. Like, if I am reading a home building tutorial, don't explain what a hammer is.

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That’s a fair comment. I suppose I was just documenting my own journey. Before this project I’d written a lot of C and Assembly (albeit not Arm64), but I’d never used make, or a cross-compiler (or git for that matter!). I wrote about what was new to me, originally with the aim of not forgetting, and then later with the aim of helping others who might be in a similar place. I’m sorry if it was irksome in places - I’m learning too :)

Hey, don't take that too hard. I'm actually in tge midst of an LFS build centered on the raspi4, with shaded of learning to write boot code as well, and you can bet I'm scouring everything you wrote.

No one can ever learn anything if no one writes this type of stuff down. sometimes the network of knowledge and laying out the precise line of questions to answer is the best way of charting out and communicating info for learners.

So thank you for writing this!

You’re very welcome :) I owe the Internet’s vast array of content creators a debt of gratitude for teaching me so much. Even those that sent me down the wrong path - it was invariably a data point that helped me to move on…

Small suggestion that I’ve found works great: rather than rewrite the content (which I somewhat agree is tedious to skim over, but wouldn’t have commented like GP, when you know it already), link to the sources you used when learning yourself. Not only does it save you and the reader time, it also works as a handy log of the sources when you need to go back and look up a detail.

Julia Evans pointed this out as a common problem in explanatory writing https://jvns.ca/blog/confusing-explanations/#pattern-2-havin...

Not that unlikely. E.g. in my university curriculum assembly programming came a bit before make, and way before needing a cross compiler.

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