Linux developers threaten to pull the kill switch...talking about giving people the finger this week...

If you have been following the nerd news these last weeks you may have heard about Linus leaving Linux (temporarily) and implementing the new CoC (pronounced cock) code of conduct thanks to the constant pressure of the ABC of inclusion (LGBTQLMNOP+ groups).

This new code of conduct aims, believe it or not, to change the predominantly white, straight, and male face of programming and it also seems to "mitigate the consequences of dogmatic meritocracy".

That's right, are you white, male, straight or otherwise pull yourself out of the mud? Yes, YOU are part of the problem (also racist, sexist and probably islamophobic).

Bullshit I know, these SJW privileged upper class assholes are pushing for these changes to inspire witch-hunts against good devs like Larry Garfield (cause: sexual fetishes) and give themselves more power over the free speech of people.

Ironic if you ask me because I haven't seen anything similar for oil rigging which is riddled with cis males (but ain't as comfy).

But not everything is lost and that's why this hasn't been a mouth foaming rant because boy I'm proud to know there are devs with balls out there; It seems there's a little detail with the GPL2 license and all those unjustly banned by the new stupid racist ass CoC can withdraw the license to their contributions crippling the Linux kernel project.

I'm not happy that GNU/Linux is being threatened like so, but it was about time we put a stop to this, your politics, skin color, religion and ideas should not matter when developing code, what matters is the code you produce.

Want to politicize our repos and kick out devs just because they don't think the way you do? Let's see how long you last without the contributions of the "deplorables"; let us see how many good contributions your new "diverse", PC stack do (other than changing master/slave or other terms).

My guess...as I've said earlier, everything these PC busybodies touch, if unchecked, crumbles to dust. (EA 😉)

Sources:
https://lulz.com/linux-devs-threate...
https://contributor-covenant.org//
https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/...

"Try Ubuntu Pro beta with a free personal subscription on up to 5 machines.
Learn more at https://ubuntu.c...."

....subscription ads in "apt upgrade" ... WHAT THE F

If you can be locked out of it remotely, you don't own it.

On May 3rd, 2019, the Microsoft-resembling extension signature system of Mozilla malfunctioned, which locked out all Firefox users out of their browsing extensions for that day, without an override option. Obviously, it is claimed to be "for our own protection". Pretext-o-meter over 9000!

BMW has locked heated seats, a physical interior feature of their vehicles, behind a subscription wall. This both means one has to routinely spend time and effort renewing it, and it can be terminated remotely. Even if BMW promises never to do it, it is a technical possibility. You are in effect a tenant in a car you paid for. Now imagine your BMW refused to drive unless you install a software update. You are one rage-quitting employee at BMW headquarters away from getting stuck on a side of a road. Then you're stuck in an expensive BMW while watching others in their decade-old VW Golf's driving past you. Or perhaps not, since other stuck BMWs would cause traffic jams.
Perhaps this horror scenario needs to happen once so people finally realize what it means if they can be locked out of their product whenever the vendor feels like it.

Some software becomes inaccessible and forces the user to update, even though they could work perfectly well. An example is the pre-installed Samsung QuickConnect app. It's a system app like the Wi-Fi (WLAN) and Bluetooth settings. There is a pop-up that reads "Update Quick connect", "A new version is available. Update now?"; when declining, the app closes. Updating requires having a Samsung account to access the Galaxy app store, and creating such requires providing personally identifiable details.

Imagine the Bluetooth and WiFi configuration locking out the user because an update is available, then ask for personal details. Ugh.

The WhatsApp messenger also routinely locks out users until they update. Perhaps messaging would cease to work due to API changes made by the service provider (Meta, inc.), however, that still does not excuse locking users out of their existing offline messages. Telegram does it the right way: it still lets the user access the messages.

"A retailer cannot decide that you were licensing your clothes and come knocking at your door to collect them. So, why is it that when a product is digital there is such a double standard? The money you spend on these products is no less real than the money you spend on clothes." – Android Authority ( https://androidauthority.com/digita... ).

A really bad scenario would be if your "smart" home refused to heat up in winter due to "a firmware update is available!" or "unable to verify your subscription". Then all you can do is hope that any "dumb" device like an oven heats up without asking itself whether it should or not. And if that is not available, one might have to fall back on a portable space heater, a hair dryer or a toaster. Sounds fun, huh? Not.

Cloud services (Google, Adobe Creative Cloud, etc.) can, by design, lock out the user, since they run on the computers of the service provider. However, remotely taking away things one paid for or has installed on ones own computer/smartphone violates a sacred consumer right.

This is yet another benefit of open-source software: someone with programming and compiling experience can free the code from locks.

I don't care for which "good purpose" these kill switches exist. The fact that something you paid for or installed locally on your device can be remotely disabled is dystopian and inexcuseable.

Blisk, a browser with multiple device testing for developers, went from free to subscription model.. Time blocking features that they offered before, for free.

That's suicide. That's how you lose your install base...
Just deleted it and went back to http://material.io/resizer.

It powers nodejs.org. It has 7.8k stars on Github.
It was installed 5x as much on NPM in the last 4 months as it was in the previous 5 years. https://metalsmith.io

I've been doing a lot of outreach to individual users, websites, and related Github projects, yet community involvement is hard to get by. If you value copy-left or free open-source software and are interested in bloat-free nodejs static site generation or build pipelines, please reach out.

I have a full-time job and am thankful for any help, be it feedback on the Gitter chat: https://gitter.im/metalsmith/... maintaining one of the 15+ core plugins, creating starters or writing blog posts.

I used to think that I had matured. That I should stop letting my emotions get the better of me. Turns out there's only so much one can bottle up before it snaps.

Allow me to introduce you folks to this wonderful piece of software: PaddleOCR (https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/...). At this time I'll gladly take any free OCR library that isn't Tesseract. I saw the thing, thought: "Heh. 3 lines quick start. Cool.", and the accuracy is decent. I thought it was a treasure trove that I could shill to other people. That was before I found out how shit of a package it is.

First test, I found out that logging is enabled by default. Sure, logging is good. But I was already rocking my own logger, and I wanted it to shut the fuck up about its log because it was noise to the stuffs I actually wanted to log. Could not intercept its logging events, and somehow just importing it set the global logging level from INFO to DEBUG. Maybe it's Python's quirk, who knows. Check the source code, ah, the constructors gaves `show_log` arg to control logging. The fuck? Why? Why not let the user opt into your logs? Why is the logging on by default?

But sure, it's just logging. Surely, no big deal. SURELY, it's got decent documentation that is easily searchable. Oh, oh sweet summer child, there ain't. Docs are just some loosely bundled together Markdowns chucked into /doc. Hey, docs at least. Surely, surely there's something somewhere about all the args to the OCRer constructor somewhere. NOPE! Turns out, all the args, you gotta reference its `--help` switch on the command line. And like all "good" software from academia, unless you're part of academia, it's obtuse as fuck. Fine, fuck it, back to /doc, and it took me 10 minutes of rummaging to find the correct Markdown file that describes the params. And good-fucking-luck to you trying to translate all them command line args into Python constructor params.

"But PTH, you're overreacting!". No, fuck you, I'm not. Guess whose code broke today because of a 4th number version bump. Yes, you are reading correctly: My code broke, because of a 4th number version bump, from 2.6.0.1, to 2.6.0.2, introducing a breaking change. Why? Because apparently, upstream decided to nest the OCR result in another layer. Fuck knows why. They did change the doc. Guess what they didn't do. PROVIDING, A DAMN, RELEASE NOTE. Checked their repo, checked their tags, nothing marking any releases from the 3rd number. All releases goes straight to PyPI, quietly, silently, like a moron. And bless you if you tell me "Well you should have reviewed the docs". If you do that for your project, for all of your dependencies, my condolences.

Could I just fix it? Yes. Without ranting? Yes. But for fuck sake if you're writing software for a wide audience you're kinda expected to be even more sane in your software's structure and release conventions. Not this. And note: The people writing this, aren't random people without coding expertise. But man they feel like they are.

!rant

For all of youse that ever wanted to try out Common Lisp and do not know where to start (but are interested in getting some knowledge of Common Lisp) I recommend two things:

As an introductory tutorial:
https://lisperati.com/casting.html/

And as your dev environment:
https://portacle.github.io/

Notice that the dev environment in question is Emacs, regardless of how you might feel about it as a text editor, i can recommend just going through the portacle help that gives you some basic starting points regarding editing. Learn about splitting buffers, evaluating the code you are typing in order for it to appear in the Common Lisp REPL (this one comes with an environment known as SLIME which is very popular in the Lisp world) as well as saving and editing your files.

Portacle is self contained inside of one single directory, so if you by any chance already have an Emacs environment then do not worry, Portacle will not touch any of that. I will admit that as far as I am concerned, Emacs will probably be the biggest hurdle for most people not used to it.
Can I use VS Code? Yes, yes you can, but I am not familiar with setting up a VSCode dev environment for Emacs, or any other environment hat comes close to the live environment that emacs provides for this?

Why the fuck should I try Common Lisp or any Lisp for that matter? You do not have to, I happen to like it a lot and have built applications at work with a different dialect of Lisp known as Clojure which runs in the JVM, do I recommend it? Yeah I do, I love functional programming, Clojure is pretty pure on that (not haskell level imo though, but I am not using Haskell for anything other than academic purposes) and with clojure you get the entire repertoire of Java libraries at your disposal. Moving to Clojure was cake coming from Common Lisp.

Why Common Lisp then if you used Clojure in prod? Mostly historical reasons, I want to just let people know that ANSI Common Lisp has a lot of good things going for it, I selected Clojure since I already knew what I needed from the JVM, and parallelism and concurrency are baked into Clojure, which was a priority. While I could have done the same thing in Common Lisp, I wanted to turn in a deliverable as quickly as possible rather than building the entire thing by myself which would have taken longer (had one week)

Am I getting something out of learning Common Lisp? Depends on you, I am not bringing about the whole "it opens your mind" deal with Lisp dialects as most other people do inside of the community, although I did experience new perspectives as to what programming and a programming language could do, and had fun doing it, maybe you will as well.

Does Lisp stands for Lots of Irritating Superfluous Parentheses or Los in stupid parentheses? Yes, also for Lost of Insidious Silly Parentheses and Lisp is Perfect, use paredit (comes with Portacle) also, Lisp stands for Lisp Is Perfect. None of that List Processing bs, any other definition will do.

Are there any other books? Yes, the famous online text Practical Common Lisp can be easily read online for free, I would recommend the Lisperati tutorial first to get a feel for it since PCL demands more tedious study. There is also Common Lisp a gentle introduction. If you want to go the Clojure route try Clojure for the brave and true.

What about Scheme and the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs? Too academic for my taste, and if in Common Lisp you have to do a lot of things on your own, Scheme is a whole other beast. Simple and beautiful really, but I go for practical in terms of Lisp, thus I prefer Common Lisp.

how did you start with Lisp?
I was stupid and thought I should start with it after a failed attempt at learning C++, then Java, and then Javascript when I started programming years ago. I was overwhelmed, but I continued. Then I moved to other things. But always kept Common Lisp close to heart. I am also heavy into A.I, Lisp has a history there and it is used in a lot of new and sort of unknown projects dealing with Knowledge Reasoning and representation. It is also Alien tech that contains many things that just seem super interesting to me such as treating code as data and data as code (back-quoting, macros etc)

I need some inspiration man......show me something? Sure, look for a game called Kandria in youtube, the creator, Shimera (Nicolas Hafner) is an absolute genius in the world of Lisp and a true inspiration. He coded the game in Common Lisp, he is also the person behind portacle. If that were not enough, he might very well also be Shirakumo, another prominent member of the Common Lisp Community.

Ok, you got me, what is the first thing in common lisp that I should try after I install the portacle environment? go to the repl and evaluate this:

(+ 0.1 0.2)

Watch in awe at what you get.

In the truest and original sense of the phrase (MIT based) "happy hacking!"

I created an app that plays background sounds to help people focus/study/relax. It’s free and open source. Feel free to try it.

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Source code here: https://github.com/jenius-apps/....

Managed to derive an inverse to karatsuba's multiplication method, converting it into a factorization technique.

Offers a really elegant reason for why non-trivial semiprimes (square free products) are square free.

For a demonstration of karatsubas method, check out:
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/...

Now for the reverse, like I said something elegant emerges.

So we can start by taking the largest digit in our product. Lets say our product is 697.

We find all the digits that produce 6 when summed, along with their order.

thats (1,5), (5,1), (2,4), (4,2), and (3,3)

That means for one of our factors, its largest digit can ONLY be 1, 5, 2, 4, or 3.

Lets take karatsubas method at step f (in the link) and reverse it. Instead of subtracting, we're adding.

If we assume (3,3)

Then we take our middle digit of our product p, in this case the middle digit of 697. is 9, and we munge it with 3.

Then we add our remaining 3, and our remaining unit digit, to get 3+39+7 = 49.

Now, because karatsuba's method ONLY deals with multiplication in single digits, we only need to consider *at most* two digit products.
And interestingly, the only factors of 49 are 7.
49 is a square!

And the only sums that produce 7, are (2,5), (5,2), (3,4), and (4,3)

These would be the possible digits of the factors of 697 if we initially chose (3,3) as our starting point for calculating karatsubas inverse f step.
But you see, 25 can't be a factor of p=697, because 25 is a square, and ends in a 5, so its clearly not prime. 52 can't be either because it ends in 2, likewise 34 ending in 4.
Only 43 could be our possible factor of p.

And we *only* get one factor because our starting point has two of the same digit. Which would mean p would have to equal 43 (a prime) or 1. And because p DOESNT (it equals 697), we can therefore say (3,3) is the wrong starting point, as are ALL starting points that share only one digit, or end in a square.

Ergo we can say the products of non-squares, are specifically non-prime precisely because if they *were* prime, their only factors would HAVE to be themselves, and 1.

For an even BETTER explanation go try karatsuba's method with any prime as the first factor, and 1 as the second factor (just multiply the tens column by zero). And you can see why the inverse, where you might try a starting point that has two matching digits (like 3,3), would obviously fail, because the values it produces could only have two factors; some prime thats not our product, or the value one, which is also not our product.

It's elegant almost to the level of a tautology.

time to go for full snack development
https://youtu.be/h8fh9R4401g
https://youtu.be/y4w5E8W2f0M

started some open source project for discord bot that provides info for some free game users, through scrapping forum and requesting apis

This is kind of going to be a major refactorized second version, that considers all mistakes of a first version. And going to be much more scalable and easy to maintain.

!rant

I've built a small survey tool on the side. Maybe you want to check it out: https://fastsurvey.de/

It is free when cloud-hosted (by us) :)

Feedback is welcome!