I’m getting strong rest of the owl vibes from a lot of what you say.

So for example, you say you need strong allies. Well, list some candidates! China? They have a policy of non-intervention, so don’t count on it. Cuba? Not very strong. The US, or some other nation that’s captured by the owning class (Netherlands, France, Germany, etc)? Fat chance.

Same with the focus having folks join unions more. I think it’s a great outcome to strive for, but how do we achieve that goal? On a systemic level we see union membership dropping, and that’s no coincidence, because more and more anti-union legislation is enacted across the board in Europe and America. And that in turn is no coincidence because the people who really don’t want us to unionize have enough money to lobby this legislation into existence, and they happen to own the media, so they’re also doing a good job of convincing us that it is against our interests to join a union. Voting a pro-union candidate into power is incredibly difficult for the simple fact that campaign funds are a pretty decent predictor of electoral success, and guess who has the money to contribute significant amounts to those funds? Not me.

The education thing too is pretty great, but it assumes that some worker-friendly entity already has control over the education system. How do you get there? And education only goes so far of course. At some point folks leave the educational system, and their main source of information becomes the media. I’ve seen well-educated folks be completely convinced that there is no genocide in Gaza, and I could not blame them, because for the first year no major outlet would even utter the word. How do you prevent the media from being captured by the owning class?

Ultimately the problem is that the opponent has the means and willingness to use violence to quell your movement. And they’ve shown time and again that they will use these means, and history shows it works (Allende, the Spanish anarchist revolution, the Paris commune, Indonesia’s takeover by Suharto, Lumumba, etc). How do you defend yourself effectively against a violent aggressor without resorting to illiberal means yourself?

Yeah! And we need to do it in a way where the incredibly rich and powerful who have a vested interest and desparate need for us to fail won’t kill our movement! In the past and present, any socialist movement was met with

• death squads
• propaganda
• military invasions
• assasinations of heads of state
• funding, arming, and training the opposition
• economic sanctions
• so, so much propaganda

all funded by the absurdly wealthy to make nations fail and make them more amenable to re-exploitation by the owning class.

Any ideas on how to defend ourselves against this phenomenon which occurs over and over again?

They did fail to demonstrate knowledge of lexicographical order, which this exercise seems to be aiming for with the inclusion of pond and pumpkin, so I think it’s a bit cynical to consider failing the student on this a means of opression or subjugation.

Quickest way to get a test suite so tightly coupled to structure rather than behavior that even just looking at the tests wrong makes them fail. But technically you do get test coverage I guess. Goodhart’s law in action.

Every big change is ultimately just a series of small changes. It takes skill and engineering chops to be able to break up big ideas into small steps with quick feedback loops, but it can be done. Usually worth the effort too.

Unfortunately, often that’s a complex idea so it can be somewhere on the order of an hour before they stop coding and try compiling.

Maybe I’ve been lucky with the people I got to work with so far (and I definitely am), but I know of no professional software engineer that would voluntarily subject themselves to such a long feedback loop. I guess some of the juniors try to work this way sometimes, but they learn fairly quickly not to. The best ones I know work incrementally. Small change, run, small change run, and so on.