Runxi Yu

Do we have any good reasons to trust our moral intuition?

Wed, 16 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Let us first make a distinction between two notions of trusting moral intuition. One is that moral intuition is self-evident and that people would arrive at a set of common moral judgments or principles. Another is the notion that moral intuition is idiosyncratic to each individual.

There has not been consistent agreement over what is moral or what is ethical throughout history. Moral intuition does not persist completely across time periods: prior to the mid-20th century, homosexuality was denounced in almost all jurisdictions and cultures often with explanations that attempt to argue that homosexuality is “obviously” wrong—an appeal to intuition—yet we now condemn such discrimination. Neither does moral intuition align across cultural and geographical regions: capitalism and individualism are predominant in some regions of the world while socialism and collectivism are predominant in others; liberty is considered an inalienable principle in some, but as a mere means to collective efficiency in others. These are, of course, political ideologies; but they are often enforced through moral coercion and enjoy similar arguments on their “obviousness”.

There seems to be, however, a set of basic moral intuitions that seems present in the mind of each “civilized” person. Moral patterns often explained with intuition such as “killing people is wrong, other than self-protection against perpetrators who already exhibit an extreme threat” may seem universally acknowledged. But that is an illusion: it is easy to dismiss the seemingly exceptional case of war and extremism, but the existence of serious notion of “proudly and fearlessly killing enemies” as a single counter-example falsifies the hypothesis that the so-called principle aforementioned is universal. While an analysis is warranted on each individual principle that claims to be universal, I doubt that any such claim would be supported.

Even if a generalized principle such as “murder is wrong [...]” is universal, it does not naturally follow that each person yields an equivalent result for every individual case where a moral judgement is made, on whether killing at a particular moment with a well-defined context, is wrong.

Therefore, it is difficult, if not impossible, to discuss moral intuition in terms of a collective intuition of a group. I shall proceed assuming that we refer to individual intuition in this essay.

When we consider whether we should trust something, we must first declare for what purpose is this trust being contemplated. I will iterate through them and discuss each, in the following sections.

Making a moral judgement

The core of my argument is that individual moral judgements of specific events are ultimately made by intuition.

Many philosophers traditionally labelled as moral intuitionists such as Prichard believe that moral intuition is self-evident [@prichard]. I have discussed my rejection of this view in the introduction and I dissent his implicit assumption that moral judgement is nearly universal. But he is right in saying that moral judgement needs no proof. Let us then take a look at some alternatives to individual moral intuitionism, and I shall then discuss why these are less consistent and less correct than moral intuitionism.

What if we stick to moral frameworks such as Bentham’s utilitarianism, Mill’s revision of utilitarianism, Kantian categorical imperatives?

I, as an individual, reject some parts of them and accept others. The common process of developing or considering the validity of an ethical principle often consists of testing moral dilemmas based on intuition, and, in doing so, refining the principle or rejecting it when it yields a result or reasoning that we consider “absurd”. For example, I reject Kant’s absolute prohibition against lying, as I intuitively find it absurd to forbid myself from lying to a murderer who threatens to find and kill my friend—I make the hypothesis and imagine potentially contributing to my friend’s chance of death for the sake of not telling lies, and I assert, intuitively, that it is not worth it. I also reject dogmatically applying Bentham’s utilitarianism due to intuitive counter-examples, such as the intuitive immorality of pushing a heavy person off a bridge to stop a runaway trolley (as described in [@justice 21]). Therefore intuition on individual cases is the basis that gives birth to moral principles and framework.

Never have I seen a moral framework or principle that has a meticulous proof or reasoning on why it is correct, from first principles. And this is precisely because these first principles do not exist without intuition. For example, @kant-intuition [2] claims that Kant is a moral intuitionist as his reasoning for categorical imperatives cites the need to “[feel] pleasure or […] delight in the fulfillment of duty” [@gmm]. Any judgement on a contextualized real event by an individual is ultimately moderated by intuition, notwithstanding the thought-process that the individual uses at surface level.

Ethics and morality

What distinguishes ethics from morality is that ethics are values that are culturally and collectively upheld, while morality stems from an individual’s sense of what is “good” and what is “bad”. The process of the formulation of ethics could vary, although they generally carry the goal of the preservation of a collective group such as to form the basis of social order.

Intuition is naturally idiosyncratic even within one community expected to possess similar ethics, which contraindicates the possibility of intuition as a trustworthy source of ethics. The goal of ethics is not the same as that of moral judgement; ethics attempts to produce generalized principles in a society that can provide consensus, stability, and collective prosperity. That is not a goal that individual intuition can attain, and is better suited for analysis of evidence and social conventions.

Conclusion

Therefore, pertaining to the moral judgement of individual events, moral intuition is not simply trustworthy; it is the method of judgement that oversees all other methods of moral judgement and the development of moral frameworks or principles. But if the purpose of using moral intuition is the analysis of ethics, then the answer is a clear no.

Bibliography

Dieter Schönecker. 2013. “Kant’s Moral Intuitionism: The Fact of Reason and Moral Predispositions.”

Kant. 2012. Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. Translated by Mary Gregor and Jens Timmermann. Cambridge University Press.

Prichard, H. A. 1912. “Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?” 21.

Sandel, Michael J. 2010. Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? Farrar, Straus; Giroux.

Error handling

Tue, 20 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I haven’t found a single language with error handling to my liking:

C: errno sucks and I haven’t seen anyone that disagrees yet, and the thing some libraries like OpenSSL does with its custom error type and detecting the underlying errno is even more annyoing
Hare (and to some extent, Rust, though I haven’t gotten to really know Rust yet): IDK, it just feels really unnatural to me (I’ll see how I could explain in the future)
Go (and to some extent, Linux x86 asm): Hella boilerplate (especially in Go without macros)
Python, and most other VM’ed languages that use exceptions: Functions in between the throw’er and the catch’er don’t get a say in what’s going on, which also means as a catcher you don’t know where that ValueError came from (was it in integer conversion or decoding or what?)
Haskell: Kinda a mess, see Hare/Rust for Maybe/Either; see Python for exceptions; error can only be caught in IO monads which isn’t the majority of stuff in idiomatic Haskell
POSIX shell: I’ve basically taken it to define a function a that runs its arguments and exits on failure (which is the most appropriate thing to do for simple scripts), but handling $? is still kinda hellish, and don’t even mention set -e

But at the same time sometimes I find exceptions to be very useful (e.g. say I’m handling a command in a network connection, and I want a catchall “command failed” that I could trigger by throwing an exception; I could emulate this with a goto up the stack but that also doesn’t feel right)

Declaring languages in project titles considered useful

Sat, 17 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Often times I hear people say that it’s unnecessary, or even harmful, to declare the language/framework in a project’s description. I dissent from this argument based on one very simple fact:

They are a useful filter to determine which projects I wish to prioritize taking a look at, which projects I could possibly hack on, and which libraries I could use.

I do not enjoy cloning a repository and figuring out that it only supports C++, when I was looking for a C library.
Anything written in Go is, in my experience, quite pleasant to hack on. Most Go code I read is quite idiomatic and well-documented. (Except, of course, for the usual shenanigans surrounding error handling and zero values.)
Python code generally has a wide range of quality to expect from.
I am willing to hack on projects written in Rust, but I need to spend extra time to do so, along with ensuring that I have my more powerful laptop nearby as compiling and using Rust is particularly painful on my slower machines running OpenBSD.
I am generally unable and unwilling to hack on projects written in Node.js, Ruby on Rails, PHP, C#/.NET, C++, and many other languages/frameworks.
I cannot run server software written in Node.js due to RAM constraints.

I am familiar with particular languages and “frameworks”. I don’t always have the time to learn something completely new to hack on a project. Many of the “stereotypical” performance characteristics of certain languages/frameworks (yes, Node.js) are quite representative of most programs written in it.

Free Software is still important for our environment

Sat, 17 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Recently I got to operate a Windows 11 machine. It was a ThinkPad T14 produced in 2020, with 16 gigabytes of RAM, a relatively recent Intel Core i5, and a 512-gigabyte PCIe SSD. This is much more powerful than one of my usual computers, a ThinkPad X220i.

When I opened taskmgr I was met with about 200 processes¹. Opening a new window in explorer, the file manager, takes about 5 seconds to respond, and an additional 5 seconds in a blank window. Windows updates have taken more than 20 gigabytes of valuable disk space in C:\. Compiling an average 20-page LaTeX document with pdfLaTeX takes 40 seconds.

Compare that to a 2013 Dell Latitude E6440, with 4 gigabytes of RAM, an Intel Core i5 from 2013, and a 1 terabyte SATA SSD. That Dell runs smoothly with the same Firefox/LyX/pdfLaTeX workflow, even with the most heavy-weight desktop environment available, GNOME 45 on Fedora Workstation. Compiling the same LaTeX document with pdfLaTeX takes 8 seconds.

A 2013 laptop is able to outperform one from 2020 in almost every aspect other than video decoding. Except that, of course, the hardware isn’t at fault. It’s the endless amounts of bloat and inefficiency in software.

The mentality of the vast majority of computer users seem to be “it is imperative that I switch to a new device every two or three years”. But it’s not like these users switch to a massively more resource-hungry workflow every two or three years: most of them browse the web, write documents², and watch videos online. That is not a heavy-weight workflow. My claim is that it is ridiculous to require these people to switch to a new computer every two or three years.

According to the United Nations Institute for Training and Research, “A record 62 million tonnes (Mt) of e-waste was produced in 2022, Up 82% from 2010; On track to rise another 32%, to 82 million tonnes, in 2030; Billions of dollars worth of strategically-valuable resources squandered, dumped; Just 1% of rare earth element demand is met by e-waste recycling.”

Of course people are going to purchase new devices and let their old ones go to waste, if they are unable to use their workflow due to terrible programming practices and planned obsolescence.

Programming languages

Wed, 24 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve recently read Drew DeVault’s blog post, How I decide between many programming languages. I figured that I should write my own.

C

Pros

Simple.
Interoperable with almost all other languages.
Direct access to system calls (well, for most system calls that I’d use, anyways).
Good ecosystem, and most packages I’d use are in my system’s repositories. Using the system package manager is the only way to sanely manage dynamically linked libraries.
Flexible macro system. Yes, there are pitfalls, but it’s flexible enough for my needs and it’s not that hard to remember to add parenthesis.

Cons

Null terminated strings are objectively bad
Footguns do exist, and there isn’t anything like borrow checking or automatic reference counting. These aren’t strictly necessary, but are obviously helpful.
errno is bad. (My opinion holds that the proper alternative is multiple return values, though I also believe that the langugage shouldn’t make it easy to accidentally ignore errors, nor should error handling have too much boilerplate.)

Go

Pros

Easy concurrency to write quick and relatively-scalable network services in.
Well-designed standard library, and a generally good ecosystem (with an non-insane language-specific package manager, which I find acceptable since Go libraries are statically linked).
The best garbage collector I’ve seen in garbage-collected languages.

Cons

The way zero values are handled are really bad.
I’m not a fan of the automatic conversion between pointers and values.
Go’s error handling doesn’t sit right with me. (I am not for exceptions, just to be clear.)

Python

Pros

Code is easy to write.
Good-ish ecosystem.

Cons

Code is hard to maintain.
Really slow.
The global interpreter lock guarantees that threading is a pain. asyncio also sucks, and there aren’t many libraries written for trio.
Dynamically typed, and no, mypy doesn’t magically solve everything.

Shell scripts

Pros

Good for gluing my desktop together, automating day-to-day tasks (both on the desktop and administering servers), and generating Makefiles.

Cons

A lot of bad advice on the web, and many people write disgusting scripts.
Arrays are not available in standard POSIX shell, and life is a pain without them.
A sufficiently complex shell script that interacts with the network is going to have remote code execution vulnerabilities.
I wanted to say “dynamic typing” here. “No typing” is probably more appropriate.

Common Lisp

Pros

Really flexible. Best for, well, list parsing.

Cons

#'i-still-dont-get-the-point-of-having-two-namespaces.
Dynamic typing.
Quicklisp confuses me.
))))))))))))))))))))))

Lua

Pros

Probably the best general-purpose scripting language.
Easy to use as an extension language.
Lua tables are really versatile.

Cons

The lack of real threads is a huge pain. No, coroutines are not threads. (Though, no other scripting language has sane multithreading, so… fair enough.)
Generally lacking ecosystem.
1-based indexing sucks.
I still prefer curly braces over end.

JavaScript

Pros

None. I wouldn’t use it if there are saner alternatives in browsers, e.g. if WASM could access the DOM.

Cons

Quirks surrounding automatic type conversion and equality testing.
I don’t see any compelling reason for this language to exist outside web browsers, yet Node.JS exists.
NPM.

Using chroots as simple containers

Wed, 26 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Please note that what I am about to do isn’t actually containerization or isolation. It merely separates trusted code such that it would generally not pollute the host system. Chroot is generally not a security measure; for example, processes inside the chroot could easily escape with /proc/x/root for a PID x that runs outside the chroot.

Often times I want to install a program that is not available in my current distribution (e.g. the Soju IRC bouncer is not available on Debian Bookworm, but I want to use a distribution-packaged version instead of running go build myself because I want to receive updates), or perhaps I want to run something like rustup without the fear of polluting my system. But I don’t want to use Docker or LXC because they feel too complicated.

I ended up creating Alpine Linux chroots. Specifically, Alpine Linux Edge, because the edge/testing repository is huge and frequently updated. There’s an article called Alpine Linux in a chroot on the Alpine Linux wiki that provided the steps that I use in my scripts. (The official alpine-chroot-install scripts exist but haven’t been updated for quite a while.)

The rxchroot scripts

Check the Git repository linked above for the complete set of scripts; here is a short explanation from excerpts of the script.

The first step, of course, is to create the chroot. Basically:

umask 022 # or something else that ensures unprivileged users could access the chroot
curl -LO "https://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/main/${arch}/APKINDEX.tar.gz"
tar xvf APKINDEX.tar.gz
curl -LO "https://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/main/${arch}/apk-tools-static-$(sed -n '/P:apk-tools-static/{n;p;}' APKINDEX | cut -d ':' -f 2).apk"
tar -xzf apk-tools-static-*.apk
./sbin/apk.static -X https://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/main -U --allow-untrusted -p "${chroot_dir}" --initdb add alpine-base
cp -L /etc/resolv.conf ${chroot_dir}/etc/
mkdir -p "${chroot_dir}"/etc/apk
echo "https://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/main" > "${chroot_dir}"/etc/apk/repositories
echo "https://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/community" >> "${chroot_dir}"/etc/apk/repositories
echo "https://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/testing" >> "${chroot_dir}"/etc/apk/repositories

Every time the chroot needs to be used, some special directories must be mounted. Don’t double-mount though as that often causes issues.

mount -o bind /dev "${chroot_dir}/dev"
mount -t proc none "${chroot_dir}/proc"
mount -o bind /sys "${chroot_dir}/sys"

Then just enter the chroot:

chroot "${chroot_dir}" /bin/ash -l

And perhaps install stuff:

apk add build-base soju vim

I’m running on a Debian host, and perhaps I want to start services in the Alpine chroot with systemd:

# alpine.service ###############################################

[Unit]
Description=Alpine chroot mounts
Wants=network-online.target
After=network-online.target

[Service]
Type=oneshot
RemainAfterExit=true
User=root
Group=root
RuntimeDirectory=/alpine
ExecStart=/root/rxchroot/alpine-chroot-activate /alpine
ExecReload=/root/rxchroot/alpine-chroot-activate /alpine
ExecStop=/root/rxchroot/alpine-chroot-deactivate /alpine

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

# soju.service #################################################

[Unit]
Description=soju in an Alpine chroot
Requires=alpine.service
After=alpine.service

[Service]
Type=simple
User=root
Group=root
# Fix the userspec to match the Alpine UID/GUID
ExecStart=/sbin/chroot --userspec=101:102 /alpine /usr/bin/soju
ExecReload=/bin/kill -HUP $MAINPID
Restart=on-failure

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Since a chroot doesn’t have its own kernel and all system calls pass through the host kernel, network services open ports as if they just run in the host system.

Please stop mocking Down’s Syndrome

Sun, 09 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

It has been a while since the onset of this rather unfortunate pattern, but the use of “唐” and its derivative “🍬” to address whatever day-to-day behavior that they seem to be used to refer to, is quite infuriating.

Down’s Syndrome is a genetic disorder. Patients nearly always have some type of disability. Mockery and discrimination towards people with Down’s Syndrome is therefore a type of ableism.

Please stop clowning around with exlamations that create random and unsupported references to Down’s Syndrome, or, in fact, any other condition that may correlate to disabilities. This behavior is disgusting, profoundly disrespectful, uneducated, rude, impudent, etc. It demonstrates a toxic and arrogant lack of empathy towards people with Down’s Syndrome.

But what about freedom of speech?

Interesting point, but mind the difference between what is legal and what is right. By the text of the statutes this may be legal, but note the historical background of the 1st amendment—note that most clauses relating to freedom of speech intended to disallow limitations on political speech as to prevent a tyranny of government. I don’t see how shouting “Down’s Syndrome” at everything fits into any valid political purpose.

Linked lists as paths?

Tue, 28 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

~runxiyu_    hax: also, imagine a world where paths are linked lists rather
             than strings
&hax         linked lists nah just use dir reading all the way
~runxiyu_    hax: ?
&hax         next = opendir(this);
&hax         *opendir(this, name)
~runxiyu_    hax: no
&hax         :D
~runxiyu_    hax: Honestly though I think linked-list (or "slices" or whatever
             it's called nowadays) would be pretty good at preventing directory
             traversal attacks?
~runxiyu_    i mean
~runxiyu_    why interpret strings?
&hax         not really, because directory path manipulation relies on
             hardlinks/symlinks in the path
&hax         in that sense I mean
~runxiyu_    hax: i mean, in an imaginary new system
&hax         problem: .. is actually useful
~runxiyu_    where symlinks don't exist. symlinks confuse the heck out of me
&hax         symlinks are weird yes
&hax         but still hardlink of .. and .
&f_          both "-1"'s are supposed to be EOF instead..
~runxiyu_    hax: ?????
~runxiyu_    I'm not sure how hardlinking directories work
~runxiyu_    I don't think that's possible
&hax         runxiyu_: it escapes via say
             "blahblah/whatever/../../../../../etc/passwd" or the likes
~runxiyu_    how do the inodes even record those
~runxiyu_    hax: oh, so it's not a hardlink issue, it's a .. issue
&hax         the problem with fixing that is you still need a notation of "go
             back a dir"
~runxiyu_    actually true
&hax         well links that go to a different dir in a different path contain
             the same problem
~runxiyu_    hax: .. = pop(pwd())
&hax         hmmmmmmm
~runxiyu_    well ok it's not fair to assume that everything is written in a
             "proper" programming language
&hax         what if someone creates a literal `..`
~runxiyu_    but sane shells should have sane vector manipulation
~runxiyu_    hax: sounds fine to me (again in an imaginary new system)
&hax         well, now you can only access it via "untrusted" input paths
&hax         because "trusted" ones get evaluated
~runxiyu_    ?
&hax         if you impliment `.. = pop(pwd());` in the shell
~runxiyu_    hax: I mean firstly I'm hypothesizing a system where all paths
             are linked lists / arrays / vectors / whatever, and "." and ".."
             mean nothing
~runxiyu_    hax: oh, I meant, instead of using "..", use "$(pop $(pwd))"
&hax         you need a way to designate "back", in a human-usable fashion
&hax         and pop pwd isn't really good since there's many other contexts
~runxiyu_    hax: that sounds like the task of the human-used program, not the
             operating system's structure
~runxiyu_    filesystem's
~runxiyu_    i mean
&hax         yes, I mean conflicts are an issue
~runxiyu_    well true
~runxiyu_    but eeehhhhh
&hax         I don't require that the OS uses even strings at all, but you
             still need human-usable ways of getting back a dir and such
~runxiyu_    "conflicts with how shells might represent them" doesn't sound
             like a good reason to clutter up the operating system's path
             representation with string interpretation
~runxiyu_    mhm
&hax         "shells have no good way for humans to interact" does sound like
             a good reason to clutter up the operating system's path
             representation with a few exceptions or such
&hax         main point being, changing the representation won't fix the
             exploits
&hax         unless you also make it less useful
~runxiyu_    hax: well, modern shells also interpret "~" specially
~runxiyu_    and that seems... really useful
&hax         yes
~runxiyu_    "why not use $HOME?" -> "why not use $(pop $(pwd))"
&hax         because /~/foo/bar isn't //home/user/foo/bar
&hax         and you can't sanely require escaping ..
~runxiyu_    hax: is there a time you actually need to specify
             /home/me/../another_user in a shell?
~runxiyu_    i feel like .. is similarly not really useful other than in the
             beginning of a path
&hax         runxiyu_: there are times where /path/to/something/../ is often
             used
~runxiyu_    by scripts or by humans
&hax         probably more the latter
~runxiyu_    huh?
&hax         er, former*
~runxiyu_    sounds like a case for $(pop $(pwd))
~runxiyu_    though perhaps humans would use ../../../testing/thing
&hax         yes that I do use often
~runxiyu_    but that's beginning-of-relative-ish-path
&hax         but how do you access ../../literaldotdot/testing/thing
~runxiyu_    hax: can i log this conversation and put it somewhere public
~runxiyu_    hax: hmmmmmmm
~runxiyu_    hax: good point
&hax         and sure
~runxiyu_     /save
&hax         anyways, linked lists is fine, but trying to `not have ..` for
             `security purposes` won't really help anything
~runxiyu_    mainly because of human shells though
~runxiyu_    idk
~runxiyu_    and i mean, why have special names at all?
&hax         . and .. aren't special names, they're just a reference in the fs
             to the dir before them (as far as I know)
&hax         probably not written on disk ofc, but in the kernel's mapping or
             whatever it's called of it
&hax         *to the dir and the dir before it
~runxiyu     well if applications tell kernel to "check the path '..'" and the
             kernel sees that and treats it specially
&hax         does it
~runxiyu     if it's "the kernel's mapping"?
~runxiyu     .. then in the perspective of anything above ring 0, it's
             essentially a special name
&hax         I mean as in like the cache of the filesystem
~runxiyu     hax: ???
~runxiyu     why do filesystem caches have anything to do with this
&hax         essentially a special name sure
&hax         because kernel reads fs -> insert '.' and '..' dir into it with
             reference, carry on

Some random log about transphobia and rationality

Fri, 25 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This page is a mess. It is too emotional, some of the content hasn't been vetted properly before I wrote them down... it's probably not a worthwhile read. Expand the summary tag if you really want to read it.

Content warnings: Science mysticism, bigotry, transphobia, vomit, Descartes, Hegel, questioning existence, rationalism, intuitionism.

Yesterday at my summer school we were watching a spiderman-related movie. I have no idea about how these works relate to each other, so that’d my best effort at describing it. I wasn’t paying full attention, but I heard a school teacher teaching that there are many parallel universes in a quantum physics class. This is likely a reference to the Many Worlds Interpretation. It’s an interpretation and teaching it as “the truth” bothers me a little, but I suppose that’s not too bad on its own. But later in the movie there was “time traveling through dimensions” where the “dimensions” are described as parallel universes under Many Worlds. I don’t understand quantum mechanics, but this is still utterly senseless in my basic understanding thereof, i.e. the non-communicating nature of “branches” (although I dislike this terminology I find it intuitive) and it breaks energy conservation laws (though arguably this is not really a law, prohibiting actions which may bring empirical evidence to falsity it). We also discussed, in the light of Dr. Davies’ lecture, on how most films prematurely depict characters into a structural binary opposition between the benevolent and malicious. We didn’t finish watching the movie, but it was an interesting discussion.

Further content warning: Things are about to get much worse.

I was coming out of the classroom, the other groups who went shopping or on tours came back at around the same time. I was going to the place where we check-in to being on-campus. Near the steps of the cafeteria I heard A saying to B, that A believes that B is a right-wing extremist. B is my roommate who holds relatively different political beliefs than I do, such as antifeminism. Without much context, I told A that saying people are “right-wing extremists” is ad hominem and should be avoided, even though I knew that I would probably disagree with whatever B was talking about.

I was tired of politics for the day. I already took four US Letter size pages of notes during the day, in two precepts, one seminar, and three lectures, most of which were about political philosophy. So I just listened in to what another group were talking about, which if I remember correctly had to do with their shopping trip and was not political. Then I heard B shout, loud enough to frighten me quite a bit, that “IF YOU WERE BORN MALE YOU ARE MALE, IF YOU WERE BORN FEMALE YOU ARE FEMALE, IT’S COMPLETELY INVALID TO CHANGE IT.” and “THERE ARE ONLY TWO GENDERS”.

Before, when talking peacefully, I was fine discussing about my opinions (clearly completely opposite from B’s), and considering B’s arguments on traditional family values, even if I consistently believe that these values have no merit in contemporary society and are inherently misogynistic, which was also encapsulated in his express support for patriarchy. But this time, when I heard it shouted out loud, I couldn’t take it anymore.

I felt sick. I almost threw up immediately; I went to a bathroom and vomited, not a lot, but I still did. It’s a weird feeling of bring completely alienated, worse than any normal dysphoria that I could conceive.

I asked a random member of staff, if they had vomit medications. They said no, asked me if I knew why I was feeling sick, and offered to chat with me for a while after I explained the course of events. They are also nonbinary, and had similar experiences. We agreed on the argument that cisgender people who do not experience gender dysphoria or euphoria cannot soundly assume that the trans condition is fake and made up, as it is a personal experience, not a external trait.

Gradually the conversation shifted to whether it’s necessary to prove my own existence. (This deviates from the transgender-related discussion; proving my own existence in terms of my mind, is different from proving my, or the general concept of, transgender experiences, but it’s nevertheless a topic we landed on.) I mentioned Descartes’s Cogito Ergo Sum, and we discussed what “existence” means in this context. The conversation moved on to other parts of the Meditations. They interpreted the Third Meditation as not an argument for God in the religious sense, and described it as something resembling that, in my opinion, resembled my understanding, from today’s precept, of Hegel’s absolute spirit. He stipulated the existence of an entity that is the state of the world which could be interpreted as either ideal or current, rather than a conscious coherent person-like entity being the deity. I’ll probably have to re-read Meditations with this caveat in mind (or perhaps with a literal s/god/something/i and at least try to understand Hegel which would be challenging.

Later on, I explained my argument that in general I do not accept assertions that are unreasoned, and I suppress the “gut intuition”, even for seemingly basic assertions such as “I exist in a physical world”. The teacher explained why they believe that rationalism is an inconsistent theory, and importantly, that personal experiences cannot be rationally deconstructed and attested, nor do they have to be rationally proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

And perhaps this is when things start clicking for me. Perhaps I could, under my own conscious will and conscience, whether free or controlled, loosen my grip on rationality, logic, and proof.

Forge Workflows

Thu, 10 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I generally use my own Git server for my projects. I also use my sr.ht account for issue tracking and mailing lists, and their Git for some projects too.

Regardless of whether I’m using my own infrastructure with plain Cgit and plain mailing lists (except that my mailing list manager is slightly broken for now), or the slightly better-integrated environment sourcehut provides, a contributor who wishes to submit some of their commits may simply do the following with git-send-email:

Configure git-send-email (only once!)
Clone the repository to a local directory
Make some changes and commit
git send-email HEAD^ --to='~runxiyu/public-inbox@lists.sr.ht' or something similar

This is much easier, imo, than the pull-request workflow popularized by GitHub (which is proprietary by the way) and similar forges:

Register an account on the forge (once per forge)
Click “fork” on the repo’s Web interface
Clone the fork to a local directory
Make some changes and commit
Push
Go back to the Web interface to create a PR (which often involves clicking at least three buttons)
Delete your redundant fork once the PR is merged and your repo is not really useful anymore

Why do certain people hate on sourcehut? Really convenient workflow IMO.

Gender-inclusive pronouns in Chinese

Tue, 01 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Summary

“他” uses the “人” (person) radical, and should cover all people, because not all people are male.

“他"字的偏旁为单人旁，应该要涵盖所有人，因为并非所有人皆为男性。

Details in English

In contemporary English, the traditional plural pronoun “they” is often used as a gender-inclusive singular pronoun, alongside the feminine singular “she” and the masculine singular “he”. However, there is no equivalent in Chinese. “他” is considered a masculine pronouns in contemporary Chinese, despite its “人” radical and its history of traditionally being a gender-inclusive pronoun until the 1920s. This article argues for the reclaiming of “他” as a gender-inclusive pronoun.

Prior to the May Fourth Movement and the broader New Culture Movement, “他” was a generic pronoun for all entities, including people of any gender, and inanimate objects. In the movements’ efforts to “modernize” the Chinese language and culture, a separate feminine pronoun “她” was created by the poet and linguist 刘半农, becoming an established linguistic norm after the Chinese Civil War. (A separate “它” was created for inanimate objects; however this has little relevance to the arguments in this article.)

A distinct feminine pronoun “她” along with “他” being a masculine pronoun poses three problems: (1) the annoyances caused by the lack of a inclusive placeholder pronoun, (2) the reinforcement of gender binary normatives and the lack of a neutral pronoun, and (3) the marginalization of the feminine from the concept of personhood.

When referring to a placeholder of unknown gender in contemporary English, singular they pronouns are often used, such as in “someone left their laptop here”. Such colloquial conversations are generally unproblematic as all normative third-person pronouns in Mandarin sound the same: tā. However, in written contexts, many use “他/她” resembling “he/she”. Aside from how this reinforces gender binary and alienates women (see the next two paragraphs), it is visually unappealing (as half-width slashes look particularly distinct from full-width CJK ideographs and break typographical uniformity) and adds unnecessary syntactic sugar.

Individuals who are not comfortable with any gendered pronoun often prefer singular they pronouns. (I do not wish to turn this article into a detailed discussion of non-binary gender, please read Leah Rowe’s article “Better respect for non-binary people, in defense of human rights” if this concept seems unfamiliar.) The status quo of “她” being solely a feminine pronoun and “他” being solely a masculine pronoun reinforces gender binary and leaves no gender-neutral/inclusive pronoun for non-binary people who would prefer such pronouns.

The more fundamental issue with “他” as a masculine pronoun lies in its character composition and etymology. “他” is a compound character consisting of a “人” (person) radical and “也”, while “她” consists of a “女” (female) radical and “也”. Limiting “他” as a male pronoun assumes the male gender as dominant in “people”, and marginalizes other genders, most prominently the female gender, as groups distinct from “people”. This aligns with the development of the “她” pronoun as a distinct subset of what used to be covered by “他”. I believe that a character’s composition should not be deceptive to its meaning, and therefore, the “他” with the “人” radical should describe any person, not just any male person.

While I believe that “他” should be truly gender inclusive, its current masculine standing does make it similar to Generic he to some extent. I dislike generic he as it reflects bias towards men, but an inclusive “他” does carry these risks. Therefore I propose that those who prefer a unique masculine pronoun may choose to use one with a “男” (male) radical instead. While “男也” (read that as one character) has not been given a Unicode code-point yet, I find this solution to be much more ideal than stereotypical generalizations with “他”.

Details in Chinese

现代英语中，传统的复数代词 “they” 常用作性别包容的单数代词，伴以 “she” 作阴性单数代词及 “he” 作阳性单数代词。然而，汉语中却没有等效的词语。现代汉语将"他"视为阳性代词，尽管其偏旁为单人旁，且在二十世纪二十年代以前，其曾有过用作性别包容性代词的历史。本文的论点为，将"他"恢复为性别包容性代词。

在五四运动及更为广泛的新文化运动以前，“他"曾通用作所有实体的代词，包括任何性别的人，及无生命的物体。这场运动为中国语言和文化的"现代化"做出了许多努力，其中之一就是单独创造了一个阴性代词"她”。这个字由诗人、语言学家刘半农创造，并在国共内战后成为了公认的语言规范。（对无生命的物体，也创造了一个单独的"它”；但这与本文的论点无关。）

在"他"作阳性代词时，分立阴性代词"她"，引发了三个问题：（1）因缺乏包容性占位代词而产生的困扰，（2）强化了性别二元规范，缺少了中性代词，及（3）将女性在人格概念中边缘化。

现代英语中，常常使用单数 they 代词来充当未知性别的占位词，例如 “someone left their laptop here”。这种口头对话一般不会出现问题，因为普通话中所有规范的第三人称代词发音都相同：tā。然而，在书面语中，许多人会像 “he/she” 一样使用 “他/她”。除了强化了性别二元论、排斥了女性（见后两段）外，这在视觉上也不显美观（在全角 CJK 象形文字中插入半角斜杆尤显突兀，且破坏了排版的一致性），还添加了不必要的语法糖。

有些人并不喜欢分性别代词（我在这个 commit 前亦是如此），所以他们常偏向使用单数 they 代词。（我无意图在本文详细讨论非二元性别，如果你不熟悉这个概念，请阅读 Leah Rowe 的文章 “Better respect for non-binary people, in defense of human rights”）“她"单独用作阴性代词，同时"他"单独用作阳性代词，这种现状强化了性别二元论，并使得偏好性别中性或性别包容性代词的人无法使用这类代词。

将"他"用作阳性代词，更为关键的问题在于这个字的组成及词源。“他"字由单人旁和"也"组成，而"她"字由女字旁和"也"组成。将"他"限定为男性代词，假定了男性在"人"中占了主导地位，同时还将其他性别（最明显的是女性）边缘化，将其视作有别于"人"的群体。自从原本被"他"涵盖的这个子集有了单独的代词"她”，前述问题也随着这个代词的发展而发展。我认为，一个字的构成不应该欺骗它的含义，因此，单人旁的"他"应该用于描述任何人，而不仅仅是任何男性。

虽然我认为"他"应该要具有真正的性别包容性，但这个词目前男性化的程度，使得它在某种程度上类似于将 he 通用化了。我并不喜欢通用化的"他”，因为这体现了对男性的偏见，但包容性的"他"确实也有这些风险。因此，我提议，偏好使用单独的阳性代词的人，可以转而选择一个有男字旁的字。虽然"男也"（读成一个字）目前还没有 Unicode 码点，但比起刻板地将"他"字一般化，我认为这才是更加理想的解决方案。

The Chinese translation was written by Peaksol. Thanks!

Setting weird keysyms in sway

Tue, 11 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Under the Sway Wayland compositor, we could set set xkb_layout and xkb_options for keyboards in order to do weird key mapping related things. Many people use caps:ctrl_modifier and caps:escape in xkb_options (see xkeyboard-config(7) for other options) to make Caps Lock function as an extra Ctrl or Esc key.

If all you want to do is do a relatively common modification like that, chances are that xkb_variant and xkb_options already has what you want, and you should just set that.

But if what you want isn’t covered in the standard XKB files, hear my story. I personally wanted Caps Lock to function as an additional Shift key, which isn’t covered in xkb_options. (caps:shift doesn’t differ much from normal Caps Lock, make it confusingly documented and doesn’t make the Caps Lock function as an extra Shift.)

On X11, I would simply use xmodmap -e "keysym Caps_Lock = Shift_L". Now my Caps Lock functions as an extra Left Shift. Works just alright.

But now that I switched to Wayland, Sway in particular, xmodmap for X11 isn’t going to work. What I ended up doing was the following:

$HOME/.xkb/symbols/gbcustom

default partial alphanumeric_keys
xkb_symbols "basic" { // leave "basic" in-tact unless you know what you're doing
	include "gb" // or whatever base layout you use, most likely "us"
	name[Group1] = "English (UK) Customized";
	key <CAPS> { [ Shift_L, Shift_L, Shift_L, Shift_L ] };
};

Note that here, the “key” lines are in the form key <X> { [ A, B, C, D ] } ;, where “X” is the keycode symbolic name of the physical key you want to press. In my case, it is CAPS. Check /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/pc and /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/latin, or the relevant files for your keyboard configuration, to look up the keycode symbolic name from the name you’re used to. (Looking up Shift_L in symbols/pc gets you to LFSH, which is what you would use in place of “X”. A is triggered when X is pressed alone, B when it’s pressd with Shift, C with AltGr, and D with both AltGr and Shift.

$HOME/.config/sway/config

input "1:1:AT_Translated_Set_2_keyboard" {
	xkb_layout "gbcustom"
}

Of course, replace “1:1:AT_Translated_Set_2_keyboard” with your actual keyboard identifier listed in swaymsg -t get_inputs. And reload Sway.

There might be better ways to do so, but I’ve got this to work. For these unusual setups, it is a bit complicated and not as straightforward as adding a xmondmap line to .xinitrc. Hopefully things would get better as Wayland matures.

This GitHub issue and jman’s article on this were extremely helpful. Thanks to brocellous for pointing out the solution involving custom options.

Another, potentially better method involving defining custom xkb_options, propsed by brocellous:

$HOME/.xkb/symbols/customsymbol

partial modifier_keys
xkb_symbols "caps_lshift" {
	replace key  {
		type[group1] = "ONE_LEVEL",
		symbols[group1] = [ Shift_L ],
		actions[group1] = [ SetMods(modifiers=Shift) ]
	};
};

$HOME/.xkb/rules/evdev

! option = symbols
  custom:caps_lshift = +customsymbol(caps_lshift)

! include %S/evdev

$HOME/.config/sway/config

input "1:1:AT_Translated_Set_2_keyboard" {
	xkb_layout "gb"
	xkb_options "custom:caps_lshift"
}

On racist jokes

Fri, 17 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

(This page was originally written as a response to an event that occurred in my year group at school. It has since became less of a current issue but my point still stands.)

The use of the terms “black” and “black slave” as insults is:

profoundly disrespectful towards the millions of black people that have been abused, discriminated against, and treated unfairly, in the past and the present
ill-considerate towards people who are experiencing racism
demonstrates a toxic and arrogant lack of empathy towards the disadvantaged.

A common argument to make here is that “consider how you would be discriminated against when you become the minority, you wouldn’t appreciate such jokes on your social group”. Although we head in the same general direction, I do not agree with this frame of mind. Discriminatory jokes are wrong, independent of the possibility of the discriminator being held to the same activities in the future.

The argument to “take this easy as these are just jokes” is ridiculous. The mere act of descriptive terms for a specific social group being used as a “joke” undermines the seriousness of the social issue. Find something else to joke about. Not something like racism and other forms of discrimination.

It is similarly bad to direct hatred towards others who fight against racism.

“Really” is a confusing word

Fri, 27 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Often times when the word “really” is used in as an adverb in an assertion or proposition after a word that expresses negation, it may be useful to replace it with “in some sense”, and seek to ask or clarify “in what sense”. It shall be recognized that questions that arise may be legitimately hard to answer, but it may be still beneficial to consider them.

The same applies for “actually” and similar words when used this way, though in my experience, people tend to use “really” this way.

Random Thoughts on Purple Hibiscus

Sat, 10 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

These are some random, unorganized thoughts on Purple Hibiscus, particularly around the bildungsroman of Mama.

Adiche wrote in chapter one that Mama polishes the figurines often, especially after episodes of family violence, suggesting that the figurines were of symbolic importance to Mama. After they were shattered as Papa flung his missal at Jaja and missed, “it was not just the figurines that came tumbling down, it was everything”, suggesting that the figurines symbolizes family unity. This indicates a critical change in Mama—from someone that views herself as a “wife” and a “woman” and truly believes that Papa is correct in violence and punishment and that such violence is justified, to a person who understands the importance of independence and freedom and opposes tyranny.

I believe that this sudden change is uncanny when considered from a relatively logical perspective. The figurines merely symbolize the family environment, and logically it makes little sense that Mama would perceive “the figures broke” as a fundamental change in the family environment—in real life it’s hard to imagine someone being so sensitive to symbolism. I will need to look through the novel again, but I do not currently recall prominent foreshadows of Mama’s perception of the family environment falling apart in the story’s timeline before Palm Sunday. These might just be subtly hiding somewhere waiting to be picked up by the cautious reader, but if such foreshadows are actually present, Adiche may be hinting at the tendency for people to not consciously realize or to intentionally hide subtle feelings until a point where the pressure could not be held any more, and emotional, irrational acts of desperation inevitably commence, reflecting on the futile nature of humans trying to approach rationality but failing to do so. Alternatively, a simpler explanation would be that Adiche is trying to highlight the sensitivity to seemingly irrelevant symbols of emotional and irrational side of people. I believe that both of these are possible interpretations of the novel on first read, but some close analysis in the future or further knowledge of context, such as Adiche’s family and cultural background, may be in favor of one particular explanation. I’ll see when I get to reviewing the whole novel, and I believe I shall take extra care on the part after Mama comes to Aunty Ifeoma’s after Papa breaks the bible table on her and causes another miscarriage and her exact actions on Palm Sunday.

Further on in the novel, Mama then commits the “desperate act” of poisoning Papa to death, after which she experiences another change in personality. She becomes fairly robotic and rarely displays emotions, which in and of itself could be considered an unnatural emotional state. This reflects how constant emotional pressure, and likely her own guilt of killing a supposed “loved one” tends to make people numb and hyposensitive to emotional stimuli, creating depressive dissonance. Kambili’s anger for Mama, but ultimate understanding, the former of which hasn’t really occurred before in the entire novel suggests how even after turmoil in constant domestic violence and unhealthy family relationships, death is ultimately empty in its very nature. This in turn reflects that Kambili, who may be considered to be in the most healthy mental state in the her inner family, is able to understand and perceive emotions from the perspective of others and appreciate how there is a sensitive and kind part of everybody. However, I’m not sure how this interpretation could extend to political violence, which is routinely compared with against domestic violence and religion throughout the novel. It could be argued that Adiche wants to present the inevitability of power dynamics in modern society, but I doubt that that’s the actual point of the novel.

(Then there’s Jaja getting into prison and the weeks before he gets out of prison and such, which gets messier.)

Math, Science, and Philosophy

Mon, 14 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Utilities developed in mathematics are often used to apply theories of the sciences, such as the use of basic arithmetic, calculus, complex analysis, and everything in between in empirical/experimental sciences such as physics. We often take for granted that mathematics as we know it today would work in the sciences. However, considering my impression of math as formally being a creation and natural sciences being mostly observant, it is worth questioning the linkage between these subjects, and whether our use of mathematics, especially in the prediction of theories of physics, is logically linked to the physics itself, or just so happens to a coincidence which we ought to explain.

This article attempts to address these questions, but cannot provide a full answer, for which extensive research would be required which time does not allow for. Rather, this shall be treated as a brief brain-teaser, which discussions may evolve from the text itself, or from the various editorial footnotes and bugs. I would like to, afterwards, complete this article and make it comprehensive and structured, but I’ll need ideas from the discussion.

Invented or discovered?

Initially, it feels like mathematics is a pure invention of the human mind. Formal definitions of mathematical systems (albeit unsuccessful in creating the complete and consistent system intended) such as that presented in Principia Mathematica do not refer to any tangible objects and are purely conceptual. Deriving theorems from axioms and other theorems, applying general theorems to specific conditions, etc. are all, formally, abstract activities with little reference to the physical world.

However, humans do not truly invent ideas out of pure thought. The basic building blocks of our analytical cognition, which may be in some sense considered “axioms” of our perspective of the world, result from us observing the world around us, finding patterns, which then evolve into abstract ideas. Consider the possibility that the formation of numbers as a concept in mathematics results from humans using primitive ideas that resemble numbers to count and record enumerations of discrete objects. Then as people had the need to express non-integer amounts, concepts such as fractions and decimals (or primitive ideas and representations thereof), were born. Previously discrete concepts, numbers, are now used to represent values on continuous spectrums, such as volume, mass, etc. But then consider an alternative world where we are jellyfish swimming through blank water: although this concept of volume is applicable to blank water, it is arguable whether the numeric representation and thus the concept of numerical volume would exist in the first place with the absence of discrete objects. This is an example on how human sense perception affects the process for which we invent concepts in mathematics, even if the formal definition thereof does not refer to tangible objects, not to mention how many mathematical constructs such as calculus were specifically created to solve physics problems but is defined in terms of pure math.

Ultimately, even formally defined axiomatic systems have their axioms based on human intuition, which in turn is a result of empirical perspective observing of the natural, physical world.

Additionally, let’s take the time to appreciate how well often mathematical concepts, formally defined by human intuition and logic, map to experimentally verifiable physical concepts. This further suggests how natural sciences has an effect on mathematics. (See Section [applicability-in-science] for details.)

The way I like to think about whether math is an invention or a discovery is: The system of mathematics is formally an invention, but the intuition that led to the axioms, and what theorems we think about and prove, are the result of human discovery. There are both elements to it, and a dichotomous classification would be inappropriate.

Applicability in Science

Despite how mathematics was likely inspired by tangible perception, the vast majority of modern formal mathematical constructs are defined theoretically. In fact, as seen with the use of complex Hilbert space in quantum mechanics, mathematical concepts are sometimes developed much earlier than a corresponding physics theory which utilizes it extensively. It is impressive how formal creations of humans’ intuition for beauty in pure math has such a mapping and reflection in the real world and how physics tends to formalize empirical information in a concise and rationalized manner.

This naturally leads us to a question: How is math used in experimental/empirical sciences? Why? Is that use consistent and based logically, or would it possibly be buggy?

I believe that mathematics has two main roles in physics. The first is calculations, often as an abstraction of experimental experience into a general formula, which is then applied to specific questions. With the knowledge that F = ma and that a = 10 m/s², m = 1 kg, we conclude that F = 10 N. But many times this involves or implies the second role of math in physics, because calculations depend on corresponding concepts, and sometimes the mathematical utilities themselves are developed from physics but are defined in terms of pure math (such as calculus): physicists analogize mathematical concepts with tangible physical objects and physics concepts, and think about the physical world in a mathematically abstract way. For example, the SU(3) group which finds it origins in the beauties of pure math (group theory is inherently about symmetry), is used extensively in the physics of elementary particles to represent particle spin.¹ But for the latter of these use-cases, I am skeptical. Mathematics as we know it is incomplete (Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem, in summary, proves that any system of mathematics with Peano Arithmetic cannot prove all true statements in its own system), possibly inconsistent (Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem, in summary, proves that any system of mathematics with Peano Arithmetic cannot prove its own consistency), and is somewhat unpredictable (Turing’s halting problem, basically saying that it is impossible to, without running the algorithm itself, predict whether a general algorithm would halt or would run forever, and thus there is no general algorithm to predict whether an algorithm will halt in finite time). We haven’t found major loopholes for inconsistency yet, but it is astonishing howmathematics, a system of such theoretical imperfection, is used in every part of physics, not just for its calculations but also for representation of ideas down to the basic level. I find this to be uncanny. What if the physics theories we derive are erroneous because of erroneous mathematical systems or concepts? I believe that part of the answer is “experiments”, to return to the empirical nature of, well, empirical sciences, and see if the theories actually predict the results. But there are tons of logistical issues that prevent us from doing so, not to mention the inherent downside to experiments: a limited number of attempts cannot derive a general-case theory (take the Borwein integral as an example: a limited number of experiments may easily conclude that it’s always π while it’s actually less than π after the 15th iteration). So then, we turn to logical proof. But then because mathematical logic is incomplete, we are not guaranteed to be able to prove a given conjecture, which may be otherwise indicated by experiments, to be correct.

Note that I am not arguing that physics derives its concepts from mathematics; I believe that physics has chosen the part of math that it believes to be helpful for use therein. However, these have strange and unforseeable implications.

The addition of mathematical concepts into physics doesn’t only bring the maths we want to bring over, it brings all relevant definitions, axioms, logic, proofs, theorems, etc. all along with it. Once we “assign” that a physical entity is “represented” by a “corresponding concept” in mathematics, we can only abide by the development thereof. So although physics originally isn’t guided by mathematics, the act of choosing the part of math that’s useful in physics puts physics under the iron grip of mathematical logic, which is inconsistent and potentially incomplete, as contrary to the realistic and observable nature that physics is supposed to be.

I had a brief chat with Mr. Coxon and he aclled how the existence of neutrinos were predicted “mathematically” before they were experimentally discovered physically. I do not know the history of all this, but Mr. Coxon said that physicists looked at a phenomenon (I believe that was beta decay) and went like: “where did that missing energy go”? and proposed that there was a particle called a neutrino that fills in the missing gap. (Alternatively, they could have challenged the conservation of energy, which leads us to the topic of “why do we find it so hard to challenge theories that seem beautiful, and why does conservation and symmetry seem beautiful”, but let’s get back on topic…) Then twnety years later neutrinos were “discovered” physically by experiments. Mr. Coxon said that it looked like that mathematics predicted and in some resepct “guided” physics. Personally I believe that this isn’t a purely “mathematical” pre-discovery and it’s more of a “conservation of energy, a physics theory was applied, and math was used as a utility to find incompletenesses in our understanding of particles.” I think that I’ve heard (but cannot recall at the moment) two cases where conceptual analysis in “pure math” perfectly corresponds to the phenomenon in physics discovered later which again makes me question whether math played some role in the experiment-phenomenon-discovery cycle of physics. I guess I need more examples.

I remember that Kant argued that human knowledge is human perception and its leading into rational thought and reason. To me this sounds like the development of math, but in some sense this could also apply to physics, though I still believe that physics theories even if reasoned require experimental “testing” (not “verification”) for it to be acceptable in terms of physics. THis leaves me in a situation where none of the ways of knowing that I can understand, even if used together, could bring about an absolutely correct[tm] theory of physics. See, reason is flawed because logic may fail, not to mention when we are literally trying to define/describe novel physics concepts/entities and there aren’t any definitions to begin with to even start with reasoning and all we could do is using intuition in discovery. (Pattern finding in intuitive concepts would require formalization to be somewhat acceptable, but not absolutely ground-standing, in the realm of reason.) And then, experiments are flawed because errors will always exist in the messey real world (and if we do simulations that’s just falling back to our existing understanding of logical analysis). So now we have no single way, or combination of methods, to accurately verify the correctness of a physics theory, which by definition of physical is representative of the real world, basically saying that “we will never know how things work in the real world”. That feels uncanny. Also, how do I even make sense of a physics theory to be “correct”? It’s arguable whether any physics theory could be correct in the first place. If Kant is correct then all our theories of physics is ultimately perception and having biology in the form of human observations in the absolute and hard-core feeling of physics is so weird.

Random Ideas

Here are some of my random ideas that I haven’t sorted into fully-explained paragraphs due to the lack of time to do so. However, I believe that the general point is here, and I would appreciate a discussion about these topics.

How is it possible to know anything in physics? Experiments can be inaccurate or conducted wrongly or can be affected by physical properties completely unknown to us, and mathematical proof can be erroneous because of systematic flaws and/or false assumptions about the representation of physical entities in math.
Gödel’s theorems only tell us that there are true statements that we cannot prove, and there may be inconsistencies. My intuition suggests that these statements and inconsistencies would be in the highly theoretical realm of math, which if accurately identified and are avoided in physics, would not pose a threat to applied mathematics in physics.

However, it shall be noted that any single inconsistency may be abused to prove any statement, if consistencies were to be found in math: Suppose that we know a statement A (i. e. physics is squishy) is both true and false. Thus, A = 1 and A = 0 are both true. Then, take a random statement B (let’s say “Z likes humanities”). Thus we have A + B = 1 where + is a boolean “or” operator because A = 1 and 1 + x = 1 (x is any statement). But then because A = 0, thus 0 + B = 1, which means that B must be 1 (if B is zero, then 0 + 0 = 0). Thus, if we can prove that “physics is squishy” and “physics is not squishy” (without differences in definition), then we can literally prove that “Z likes humanities”. Other from not defining subjective things like “squishy” and “is” (in terms of psychology), we can’t get around this easily, and everything would be provable, which would not be fun for physics.

Bugs

No citations present for referenced materials. Thus, this article is not fit for publication, and shall not be considered an authoritative resource. The addition of references will massively improve the status of this article.
The ideas are a bit messy. The structure needs to be reorganized. Repetition is prevalent and must be reduced to a minimum.

Acknowledgements

Multiple documents were consulted in the writing of this article, which sometimes simply summarizes ideas already expressed by others. Please see the attached reading materials for details. Works of Eugene Wigner were especially helpful.

Contributors include many YK Pao School students and faculty. Insightful conversations with other students, such as MuonNeutrino_, have given me great inspiration in the ideas expressed in this article and discussions are still ongoing. For privacy reasons other names aren’t listed, but I would be happy to put names on here at request/suggestion.

I’m not exactly sure about this, though, I can only comprehend it slightly superficially as I don’t have much experience in particle physics or in special unitary groups, yet. ↩︎

The Old Web was Better

Sat, 22 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

When I go to an average “modern” World Wide Web site with the default configuration of Lynx, a wonderful plain text Web browser, I am usually greeted with things like example.com cookie: some jibberish Allow? (Y/N/Always/neVer) for which I’d press V a couple times. Then, I would press C-f or page-down a couple times to scroll past a giant navigation bar full of nested lists, a few HTML login forms, multiple search bars. Then I’d see the actual text of the article I’m looking for. Or sometimes, the site would show “Please enable JavaScript to view this page.” or some Cloudflare prompt saying that I need to enable JavaScript to solve a proprietary CAPTCHA to view the page because they have detected “unusual activity from my network”. Or I would be met with a blank page. If I decide to visit the modern Web with a “normal” Web browser such as Firefox or Chromium, with a default install, I’d get a ten-megabyte load of a bunch of fancy advertisements at the top of the page, a giant navigation bar that’s really colorful to distract me from what I actually want to see, some pop-ups wanting me to fill in my email address to sign up for their newsletter (which as people say would usually be weekly HTML email spam), flashy advertisements on the side bar, and when I finally scrolled past the header part of the page, a few hasty paragraphs with large paragraph separations unreadably wrapped in a narrow column. All to display a few kilobytes of actual text, and rarely a few hundred kilobytes of useful images.

The Web, which people often refer to as the aggregate of human knowledge and high-speed distribution of information, has turned into a degenerate mess of advertisements, JavaScript, slugishness, tracking and profiling, security holes, and slowness. In summary, the modern Web is painful.

I’m looking back towards the 1990s, where Websites would be like this one. Simple (X)HTML, plain text, or another lightweight markup language. No ads, trackers, JavaScript, popups, Software as a Service Substitute etc. Just distribution of information and ideas, as gophertext, plain text, or simple (X)HTML. As simple as that—basically “use the simple defaults of your Web server program and don’t bother with huge management systems”.

Though, some semi-modern things are good. MediaWikis, for example, while their behind-the-back workings of mulplitudes of PHP mountains, SQL databases, and recently JavaScript-infested visual editors are extremely unelegant, they do provide a consistent simple user interface, without many browser requirements, for users to distribute useful information with. Just not loads of JavaScript and margins and paddings and ads, please.

It would also be better if more people were to have personal Websites to express themselves with, rather than relying on centralized social media giants, who once again display a bunch of ads and wraps articles/“posts” at 30 columns to make people uncomfortable reading comprehensive ideas and get them inclined to write short illogical rants and personal attacks. Tuxiversity and LandChad.net are useful resources to get started with.

The same applies to the Internet more generally. Don’t send huge, clunky HTML emails. Simple chat protocols like IRC. Whatever.

Free Hardware

Fri, 21 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In “free software” and “free hardware”, the “free” in “free computing” does not refer to price; it refers to freedom and liberty of users.

This section is mainly for posts on hardware hardware designs. Without which, no computer user is free.

In fact, access to schematics, boardviews, datasheets and any other documentation is critical to software freedom.

—Leah Rowe, founder and lead developer of Libreboot

We can’t make free software, especially bootloaders and operating systems, if we don’t have knowledge of how hardware works. In modern day computing we do understand how to design kernels for most architectures such as x86 and aarch64, but this is not enough—without extensive research into how components in a specific piece of hardware interact with each other, we may be able to accomplish simple tasks such as running an OS on it, but the right to repair is severely restricted, and we can’t check if the hardware is doing nasty things, or replace parts of it should it be so.

What are Free Hardware Designs?

Hardware designs that meets the following conditions are free hardware designs.

The design files, for example 3D models and circuit diagrams, are available under a free license;
All verilogs of FGPAs, if any (it is wise to use FGPAs for the sake of condition 5) are available under a free license;
The documentations of interfaces of the hardware, such as data sheets, are available under a free license;
The hardware is fully functional with no proprietary software;
The hardware is designed to be easy to tinker around with (including improving and reparing, e.g. being modular) and contains no tivoization.

Here, a free license means that the user may use, adapt and/or redistribute the work for any purpose, similar to the four essential freedoms of free software. The design and documentation is like the equivalent of “source code” in software.

We have found no hardware that have/meet all of these requirements (i.e. full certification) now.

What are the Benefits of Free Hardware?

You can be ensured that your hardware is not spying on you or doing anything nasty like that, because you and your technical friends can audit what’s going on, reprogram the FPGAs, etc.;
You can get fully free software operating systems on your hardware to work properly and use all the features that your hardware has, without ever running a nonfree program, so you more easily get the benefits of free software;
You can easily create your own software or operating system that interacts with the hardware given enough expertise and good documentation;
You can create your own version of the hardware as you wish, for example for friends who are in need of hardware but cannot afford commercial ones, since circuit diagrams, 3D models, and verilogs are available;
You can upgrade the parts on your own, thus cutting down on e-waste, helping protecting our land from plastic, helping protecting our environment which we all live in and depend on;
You can rely on 3D models and circuit diagrams when you’re integrating hardware into a new project, for example your own computer case, without taking the trouble to measure everything and create your own model for an exact fit.

How Can I Help?

Users

If you’re just a normal computer user, kindly ask the manufacturer of your hardware for design files and datasheets. Show manufacturer that you care about your freedom to hack the hardware.

When considering purchasing new hardware, prioritize free hardware. At this stage it is extremely rare to find any, but still be on the lookout. Please, if you find any that seem to be trustworthy, tell the community about it.

Hardware manufacturers

When you create a hardware design, use the GNU General Public License, version 3 (please add “or later”) or the CERN Open Hardware Licence Version 2 - Strongly Reciprocal license! CERN 2.0 is a strong copyleft license for hardware designs, similar to the spirit of the GNU GPL, which is more widely used in free software. The GPL is not specifically designed for hardware designs, but it seems to be work for hardware designs, at least RMS’s lawyers believe it’s okay. CERN 2.0 is more complicated and has more legalese. However, since the GPL can achieve most of CERN, discussion is needed for which to use and whether letting yet another license proliferate is good. Using these licenses ensures that it is illegal to take your design and make proprietary hardware (or designs thereof) out of it.

If you’re wondering how you could profit, see the FAQ on profits.

Frequently Asked Questions

What would be the incentive for hardware manufacturers to continue develop hardware and innovate?

You may profit from providing support to end users who don’t know how to deal with hardware.

However, profit isn’t the goal, when you see people developing good hardware and software. When profit is the goal of a project or company, people often ignore the social consequences they bring about to people.

How would developers gather the resources to develop hardware? Developing hardware is expensive.

This is an issue. However, people in the free software community—who probably also support free hardware—would probably be more than happy to support you.

It should be noted that many or most of the expenses of developing hardware today comes from patents. Software patents make developing software exceptionally hard as developers cannot be passively (i.e. with no extra work) ensured that they’re not infringing patents just by not copying others’ work—they need to actively look for works similar to theirs and check if these are patented, leading to an exponential increase in development cost, which we can already see with people patenting technologies to speed up the free RISC-V architecture, leaving others with slow versions of the architecture as the way to speed the processor up is patented. (This is yet another reason to use copyleft licenses.)

How would this affect me, a normal computer user who doesn’t understand how my hardware works?

There are certainlly people who would understand how the hardware works, and possibly tinker with it, given free documentation, design files and datasheets. It is impossible for everyone to be a computer expert; however, free hardware and free software grant people collective control over their computing, with the freedom to redistribute modified version of the original work.

Many markets, especially the computer hardware market down to the basics such as the architecture/chipset-like level, are Economics of Scale, meaning that the cost of production per unit decreases as the total number of production for one entity. This naturally gives rise to oligopolies, also known in the technology industry as companies like Intel and Microsoft.

An oligopoly is a market structure in which a market or industry is dominated by a small number of large sellers or producers. People often confuse this with monopolies, for which the latter Francis Wayland defines as “an exclusive right granted to a [hu]man or a monopoly of [hu]man, to empoly their labor or capital in some particular manner”, which cannot exist in a free market (i.e. free of government regulations). The technology industry in most countries is an oligopoly, not a monopoly.

The harm of oligopolys (and monopolies, which are similar in this context) are commonly discussed in Economics, such as the lack of competition causing prices to be solely in control of one economic entity, who may set insane prices in seek of profits, which is especially harmful for products that serve basic human needs, such as food and water. And in modern times, technology is often a necessity for daily life, exacebating the harms of a relevant oligopoly market.

There is yet another practical harm of a oligopoly technology market: about the rights of users. When CPUs are produced by almost solely Intel, AMD, and a few others, they are now free to add their backdoors and “management engines” into the CPUs that we users use daily, and their seek for profit pushes them to do so. We now have to work with spyware in our computer hardware, and we can’t do anything about it, because the oligopoly nature of the market doesn’t allow us common people to monitor, produce, develop, or otherwise deal with our own technology except for the “expected usages” that the oligopoly superimposes on us.

One way out is to decentralize the development and production of CPUs and related goods. Individual cities and towns should be able to produce computers, from the very basics, for their own people. And I know this sounds like an anti-internationalisation self-sustaining propaganda chiche economic outcome, but if you think about it, such an essential part of life (like technology) would be better served by people who’d be less likely to massively implement spyware that would be of any use to them.

Initiatives to decentralize development of CPUs and other computer components, such as LibreSilicon, have existed for a short time (in comparison to the time that Intel and AT&T have existed). We’re nowhere near what Intel could make, however, partly due to the insane patents around their technology. Patent trolls exist and often target free software and free hardware projects, and thus applying the idea of copyleft as it works for copyright, to patents, may aid practical development. And at this point, we can’t really develop upon existing foundations, so we have to ignore pre-existing knowledge and develop our own architecture and CPU from the start, paying attention to copyleft licenses and copyleft-in-patents to hopefully prevent patent trolls from taking over the world again. (This is also what the Evosaur project is attempting to do.)

Effective-ish online communication

Sat, 17 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

These are some general recommendations that I believe make communicating with me, at least, easier and/or more effective, including communication conventions that make my life easier. Please note that what I prefer may not be what others prefer and shall not be treated as a general guideline for communications, although many of these are common in the free software community.

Write a descriptive subject for emails. Do not send emails with an empty subject or no subject header. The subject should be give the receiver a brief idea of what the email is about.
Send complete information. When telling me something or requesting something, please provide complete background information, knowledge required, and other relevant context. This prevents back-and-forth communication along the lines of “and now I need to know … but you didn’t tell me that so can you please give that to me”. Providing context defragments conversations which increases efficiency.
When using instant messaging such as IRC, do not split one sentence into multiple messages (unless, of course, if your message exceeds the character limit). Fragmentation reduces readability.
Do not use excessive emojis.
Be direct rather than polite. As the sender, do not use polite expressions like “you did quite well in that presentation” when in reality, the sender believes that the presentation is not “quite well”. Direct critique and suggestions are very welcome here. Politeness is acceptable if it does not interfere with honest conveying of information.
Don’t ask to ask.
Use plain text email. Both hard-wrapped and non-hard-wrapped emails are acceptable. If you do hard-wrap, please wrap at 72 characters for English. Chinese, if hard-wrapped, should be at approximately 36 characters. Non hard-wrapped emails should specify format=flowed according to RFC3676.
Interweave the original message with the response when replying to an email and remove irrelevant parts (i.e. greetings, closings, signatures, etc.) of the quoted original email.

Democracy: Some fundamentals

Thu, 28 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Unless otherwise specified, “democracy” in this article refers to representative democracy. “Country” can additionally refer to other regions that have people and its own policies, such as a state, provinces in some countries, etc.

We usually think of “democracy” as people influencing the policies of the country by electing trustworthy experts that serve their interest to make actual decisions about running the country. This type of democracy, representative democracy, has evolved from direct democracy aging back two thousand years ago as created by Athens in Greece. Representative democracy is more scalable than direct democracy and also avoids some forms of populism and uninformed decisions as its the experts in the field that are making the actual policies.

The Chinese term for democracy is “民主”. The first character, “民”, means “people”; the second, “主”, ascin “主人” means “owner”. You could understand it as saying “the people of the country own the country (and thus get to decide on its affairs)”. But at the same time, “主” as in “自主” means “do things themselves”, i.e. the right not to be interfered by others while doing their own business.

This is, of course, not the proper definition for democracy; democracy is just saying that the general public ultimately runs the country. But we could take the time to appreciate how with democracy we usually end up with liberty and how we take personal liberty for granted.

In any case, both democracy and liberty are important in a long-lasting prosperous system of society. Note my wording in the first paragraph, that the decisions of elected experts are for “running the country”—I specifically mean issues that deal with either the general public (such as public health and the environment) and things that would be otherwise hard to solve personally (such as enforcement of contracts and crimes). The “will of the people”, represented by the government, have no business doing things like banning freedom of thought or mandating people not to smoke in their private property. Only when things affect others such as smoking in public should the government, or the will of the general public, have any say. And of course, people should take responsibility for their own private deeds. It is argued that a lung cancer patient who got lung cancer by smoking excessively doesn’t deserve medical insurance from taxpayers; but for cases where an illness isn’t caused by a identifiable private decision factor, medical insurance and support should be given. (In practice the distinction is subtle; this is also a very controversial topic.)

People overemphasize the importance of democracy. In fact, democracy is in my opinion less important than liberty—though in practice indeed liberty wouldn’t survive for long without democracy.

Note that abortion and similar subjects may fall into the scope of government. Some opponents of abortion believe that fetus is human life and thus abortion is murder and shall be outlawed. The “privacy” and “personal liberty” arguments don’t stand up well against this as it’s no longer a personal matter when another human life is supposedly on the line. I oppose the abortion bans that Republicans in the US are placing in many states for a different reason.

Modern populism (which is a poorly-defined term but does have the following general scope) gives the power of deciding everything that happens in the country to the people. This is bad in two ways. (1) The general public often make uninformed and un-thought-through decisions and are easily influenced. (2) The government, in this case directly the collective decision of the people, is stepping its feet into the personal lives of people. While it is democratic, it doesn’t give people liberty, creating a tyranny of the majority, and at the same time making uninformed decisions which are better made by experts which people elect.

Abortion

Tue, 26 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This was written quite a while ago and I should update it sometime…

In 1973 the Supreme Court of the United States of America ruled seven-to-two in favor of Roe’s rights to abortion against a healthcare official of the state of Texas. Roe argued for abortion with “privacy”, derived from the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution. As the U.S. has a precedential judiciary system, this effectively legalizes abortion across the country.

However, as Roe’s case was argued for based on privacy rather than body autonomy or similar rights, it left a question into if abortion is indeed a right that women should have. After all, if someone is accused of murder, the suspect’s privacy is not a reason to not investigate the case further. Those against abortion often believe that abortion is murder, and thus the privacy argument wouldn’t stand long.

In 2022, the Supreme Court overturned this precedent, and now the abortion rights of women in the united states are in a void. This memo focuses on discussing the notion of abortion itself, and briefly comments on the decision of the Court.

Some people believe that because fetus is human life, and abortion is nonvoluntary (as in nonvoluntary by the life terminated) termination of human life, thus abortion is murder and is unacceptable.

This reasoning is flawed—nonvoluntary termination of human life, even when the decision-maker understands the consequence of their action, may or not be murder.

Involuntary termination of life isn’t always murder. Consider yourself an average person in the United States. You live on paychecks and you’re living an average life in a comfortable house. You noticed a poor person, without food, proper clothes, or shelter, sleeping in the street, almost frozen to death. You took them home, giving them food, clothes and shelter. But one day, out of whatever reason you decided to stop supporting that person and remove them from the house back onto the street. You understanded that they will have a hard time finding foot, shelter and clothes. They deceased because of the cold.

The poor person was life, and your decision did cause their decession. But is this murder? Man-slaughter? Any kind of statutory offense? No, not really, it’s merely termination of voluntary support that you provided for another person.

There is a subtle, but eventually significant difference between helping a person down the street and voluntary pregnency. (Involuntary pregnency is basically “alright, here comes a person at your doorstep, you MUST help them and keep them alive”, there’s not much to discuss there in my opinion.)

In the last example, the ethicalness of terminating support would be different if you and the person receiving help signed an explicit contract giving you the responsibility to help them but you terminate the support when the contract is still valid.

Indeed, the fetus did not sign a contract with the mother that obligates the mother to carry to term. But similarly, children don’t sign contracts with their parents to take care of them, but we consider parents who don’t take care of their children and such to be child abuse. But they are different.

A scientific definition of life which includes bacteria, fungi, parasites, plants, animals and many other forms of life doesn’t seem inherently valuable to us—almost all of us don’t feel bad killing bacteria with an ultraviolet lamp, don’t feel bad killing plants for consumption, and don’t feel bad stepping on a mosquito. Many of us don’t feel bad consuming animals for food. We value human life because it allows us to pursue what we want and live a life. But a fetus cannot do that: though the fetus is biologically a human, it doesn’t have the very characteristics that make the life valuable: It doesn’t have meaningful brain activity and cannot pursue what it wants.

Abortion is just okay before the cerebrum (the part of the brain responsible for thinking) develops, which is usually at the end of the second trimester. Abortion after meaningful cerebrum activity is detected should be considered with care because at that time the fetus’s life would be considered valuable.

On Free Software, Education in China and the COVID-19 Pandemic

Tue, 26 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This was originally an email to the Libreplanet-discuss mailing list.

I am a secondary school student from Shanghai, China. This email discusses the problems I discovered in the Chinese educational system, in terms of students’ right to freedom in computing and options to control the COVID-19 pandemic from the standpoint of a person living in China.

When COVID-19 broke out in 2020, students were required to watch lecture videos produced by the city’s education department for twenty minutes, then join the Tencent Meetings room to discuss in their own class for 10–15 minutes.

Watching the videos wasn’t an issue for me. Our apartment has cable TV, where the videos are broadcast; there was also a website that played the livestream without JavaScript. However, Tencent Meetings presented a problem to me.

At the time, I run Arch Linux. (Currently, I run Hyperbola GNU/Linux-libre, a Free Software-only distribution, which would have made this even harder.) Tencnet Meetings, claiming to support “all operating systems and platforms”, only supports Windows and macOS. (I wonder how they passed the resolution to display that statement, I believe that they have many programmers who use GNU/Linux.) (As of October 2021, a classmate noted that there is a “Linux versuon”.) School required Tencent Meetings, therefore I went through a hard process to setup QEMU running a Windows 7 virtual machine—I believed that 7 would be slightly better than 10 in terms of privacy, though as always with nonfree software, I can’t really know for sure. It was slightly unstable, which is an annoyance, for example the connection from the Windows audio server to pulseaudio would stop working from time to time, but it was acceptable. Though my setup was okay (in the perspective of my school), it left me in a psycological crisis about education and freedom. More on that later.

Offline classes resumed in May 2020, as most of China has minimal cases of COVID-19. This freed me from using a proprietary non-privacy-respecting bloated piece of software in a virtual machine, but it did not free me from teachers’ requirement to use WeChat (think of it as the equiv of WhatsApp in China), Xiaoheiban (A proprietary classroom information distribution system), or other pieces of nonfree software.

Similar to the beliefs stated in the GNU Education project, I believe that schools and educaion are a means of sharing information and knowledge. I understand that meeting software and lesson management software are used as means of distributing knowledge, rather than the knowledge being distributed themselves. However, I believe this doesn’t lead to the argument that the mandate of proprietary software usage is just, for three reasons as below.

There are always going to be curious students who wonder how the trchnology works. Proprietary software denies them this right.
The usage of proprietary software when young may implant dependence on it in the future.
Education is a right and a responsility. Mandating nonfree software in education adds unjust responsibilities on students.

Point 1 and 2 are explained well in the Education section of the GNU website, therefore I am not going to focus on them. Focusing on the third point:

Under laws of almost all countries, citizens have the right to an education. Traditionally, this involves going to school, meeting teachers and classmates, listening to classes, taking notes, passing exams (I have strong opinions that exam systems ought to change to better represent individual talents, but this is out of scope of this memo.) and finishing homework. Students loose a slight bit of their time and freedom of movement (as in, it’s not easy to move to a house 100 miles away from school), in exchange for being educated.

However, with schools requiring the use of nonfree software, in effect students are required to give up their privacy, and digital freedom, both crucial rights in modern society, as the effect of needing to use nonfree software. The right to education has effectively turned into an exchange for other basic rights. This is not acceptable.

Furthermore, in countries like China, 9 years of education is mandatory for children. I understand this law as a means to the goal of creating a knowledgeble and educated society, which is good. However, when mandatory edication mandates nonfree software, it deduces to “children are required to use nonfree software”. So, being a child here is pretty unlucky, because there goes your right to privacy, your independence, and your freedom, because of a law that’s supposed to help society.

We need to stop using nonfree software in education.

In th beginning of this email, I mentioned COVID-19. You might be wondering how the Chinese government fully put the pandemic under control in just 5 months, which is seemingly impossible if all you know is how the US dealt with this situation.

The answer is that the Chinese government is implementing strict contact tracing. This is extremely easy because of the prevaliance of survillance. Many would argue that this is a benefit of survillance, which I believe to be true. However, no comparisons were given between losing privacy and increasing the risk or infection. Briefly inspecting this idea in my head, it’s really hard to think about—privacy and freedom is important in the long term, at the cost of many lives in the pandemic. The lives of these dead are gone—they lose not only privacy and computing freedom, they lose their lives, which costs them their opportunity to pursue their dreams in this world, and they have no freedom of choice, speech, etc as they aren’t alive. Once again, this is hard to wrap my mind around, therefore I would especially like to invite the community to discuss this.

The contact tracing system used is not Free Software. At first I didn’t understand why (except for the explanation that they want to profit from harming citizens which is hopefully just a hypothetical “explanation”), but I noticed that the authenticity and accuracy of the system may be affected if users are allowed to modify their software. This seems to be the core of some problems with regards to software freedom—here, the user is not running software to complete their tasks. Rather, it’s the government’s way to maintain public safety, therefore I believe that whether users should be able to modify software in these conditions is up to discussion. Back to the point, since a green-code proof from the system is needed to get in a lot of places, a person basically needs to use proprietary software to live a normal life (to get into coffee shops, for example).

In the US and other countries, things aren’t that good either. For one, the pandemic isn’t controlled well. As a consequence, a lot of places require negative COVID tests to do stuff. A thread on the LibrePlanet mailing list discusses this issue, as a lot of these tests require nonfree software on users’ phones. Note that this thread spans several months long, as it is a hot discussion, so look in the september and october archives too. The thread explains the implications clearly, thus I am not discussing it here.

Additionally, I heard that some US courts require Zoom for online cases, therefore it seems that a person’ right to judicial justice comes at the cost of digital freedom. I can’t confirm this, but if that’s true, I’m truly disappointed at the judicial system, even though I’m not a US citizen.

I am looking forward to a freer society, or at least one where the above problems get solved.

Pragmatic Use of Nonfree Software

Tue, 26 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Abstract

Free Software is undoubtably a good thing for society. However, modern computer users are stuck in the proprietary “ecosystem” for historical reasons. This document describes the justification and best current practices of using proprietary platforms to spread the ideas of Free Software.

Status of This Memo

This document describes the author’s viewpoint. This does not represent the ideas of the Free Software Foundation or any other entity. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

Introduction

Readers of this memo probably understand the ideals of the Free Software Movement, and avoid proprietary software when possible. However, as most outsiders are unaware and are deeply buried inside the proprietary dystopia created by mostly multibillion-dollar technology corporations, our methods of communicating with the masses are ineffective.

In February 2022, the author decided to permit limited usage of nonfree chat platforms to hopefully spread our ideas to the general public. This was attempted by registering a Discord account, creating a Guild called “Free Software Introductions”, and setting up a basic Discord-to-IRC relay to #fsi on both irc.andrewyu.org (now irc.runxiyu.org) and irc.libera.chat.

One of the communities that he knows about, the VF-Technic Minetest community, primarily uses Discord as a means of communication by players not in-game. As the users inside are Minetest players, a Free Software voxel sandbox game, similar to but much more flexible and freedom-respecting than Minecraft, it is believed that the users have some contact with Free Software, although they might not understand the freedom part of the issue, i.e. they might be thinking in terms of “open source” instead, and do not understand the harms of nonfree JavaScript and services like Discord. After sharing the invite link in the VF-Technic Guild, some people joined, and we’ve partially converted two users.

Justification

There are numerous free replacements to proprietary services such as Discord, such as Internet Relay Chat, the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, the Matrix protocol, and email. As Free Software activists, we generally prefer these protocols over nonfree services. This section explains the reasons to consider nonfree services and protocols.

Generally, users on IRC and XMPP have a fair understanding of the Free Software Movement, and it is quick and easy to inform them what we mean by “free”, “the four freedoms”, and similar ideas. For users on the Libera Chat IRC network, which by far has the most users of any network, it is exceptionally easy to introduce a user into the #fsf channel for discussions with people supporting Free Software. Introducing ignorant users on these protocols and platforms are a day-to-day simple task. Furthermore, the amount of users we can reach on these protocols are rather limiting. Libera has around forty thousand users according to the `LUSERS` command, and considering the fact that around 90% of these people aren’t ignorant, there isn’t much we can do.

Matrix users, in particular users of the matrix.org homeserver, typically know but don’t completely understand Free Software. Rather than using Matrix IDs to identify users, the Matrix specification specifies that third-party platform identities, such as email and GitHub, are how users should be referenced both internally by servers and shown to other users. This is obviously an increadibly foolish idea, especially considering the use of centralized identity servers (similar to X509 certificate authorities) for 3PIDs. These are our first targets, but these should also be easy to get the idea across.

It is true that Libera Chat and similar IRC networks, though multi-centered in a technical way (i.e. multiple IRC servers form an IRC network), the network is politically centralized, controlled by one entity, Libera. The Internet Relay Chat server-to-server protocol implies that servers fully trust each other and are expected to not send damaging commands, which in turn implies full trust between server operators, no federation, and political centralization. The privacy policy and network policy of Libera Chat are non-intrusive, therefore the use of which is acceptable and is promoted by the FSF. (Obviously, most methods of using IRC do not involve nonfree software.)

We currently find it hard to continue spreading basic knowledge among the masses through free communication protocols.

Those that have never touched Free Software are often on giant proprietary platforms, and take these as universal methods of communication. Many people go months before checking their mailbox (physical or electronic), refuse to use XMPP or IRC for its age.

There is one special case where using some nonfree software, and even urging others to use it, can be a positive thing. That’s when the use of the nonfree software aims directly at putting an end to the use of that very same nonfree software. The author believes that the following fall within this scope:

Developing a free project that requires nonfree environments to bootstrap.
To spread awareness of software freedom issues to users in nonfree environments.

As almost all types of development can be done on most types of BSD and GNU operating systems, the author hasn’t found any software that fit this category. Extending the interpretation allows for using nonfree software’s behavior as a reference in Free Software development, though an arguable programming practice, may help the community to progress by understanding common features that users of nonfree services use.

The latter is more interesting, as explained above our methods of spreading awareness is limited. Conservative usage of nonfree platforms may bring us more users, and chances for more of the general public to be enlightened.

Current Practices

Activists MUST NOT list such nonfree services in “Contact Information” pages on their website or similar sources, unless followed by a explanation that the purpose of the nonfree platform is to introduce users thereof onto free protocols and to eventually exterminate the nonfree platform. Whenever these references to nonfree platforms appear, the author MUST present free methods of communication. Activists SHOULD pragmatically use as many of the popular free protocols as possible, to ensure that opportunities of introductions are not lost. In cases involving competition between free and nonfree protocols and platforms, ethical concerns (i.e. enabling talking to a new user on any ethical platform) MUST take precedence over technical concerns (such as disliking the XMPP protocol for its inefficient use of XML).

Communities for introducing users to Free Software on nonfree platforms MUST be bridged to a free protocol in some obvious way, in order to minimize the usage of nonfree platforms even for the purpose of communicating ideology to new users and allow members of the Free Software community refusing to use nonfree platforms in any way to participate. Usages of nonfree platforms, besides part of the user-introduction process that must happen on the nonfree platform, SHOULD be avoided. Free clients, if available, SHOULD be used, although many times usage is technically cumbersome.

When both (all) sides of the communication are happy using a free protocol, proprietary platforms MUST NOT be used.

During communications with users of nonfree platforms, activists SHOULD ask them what features of the nonfree platforms are attractive to the user, besides having more users. This allows the community to take usage by the general population into account when developing new software or specifications.

For example, the author created a Discord Guild called Free Software Introductions, which is one-way-puppeted to #fsi on irc.andrewyu.org (currently dormant), which is then one-way-puppeted to Libera. The relay system is sort-of messed up, but it’s working. Inviting new users to such Guilds (https://discord.gg/7CYp7ntww7) when perse refuses to or is ignorant on how to use IRC helps conveying our ideas to users, but as the author has made their own “sacrifice” already, there exists less of a need for other existing Free Software activists to join and use it instead of free protocols.

Technical Limitations

The old and centralized nature of IRC, the insane 3PID recommendation of Matrix, the bad routing and efficiency of XMPP, and the lack of documentation on PSYC, has led us to develop a new protocol, Internet Delay Chat, which aims to be free, modern (i.e. support for channel groups and shared permission sets, non-text data with MIME types), sane (i.e. TCP, UDP and SCTP-based, instead of HTTP POST APIs) and simple.

Outsiders may point at these actions as cringeworthy because we are depending on things we are against to achieve our goals. In this situation, showing them this article should suffice.

Conclusion

The Free Software Community is constantly evolving; the majority of computer users haven’t heard of us. While we improve our software, it is important that our ideology and philosophy is sent out of our internal circle. This demonstrates the necessity for momentarily sacrificing our own principle for the greater good while minimizing the harms of such pragmatic usage of nonfree software.

Informative Links

Richard Stallman on this issue

Home
Runxi Yu
Public Domain

WeChat sucks

Tue, 26 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

WeChat is a instant messaging program by the Chinese technology giant Tencent. It is insanely popular in Mainland China.

It sucks.

WeChat’s client program is nonfree software.
Many of WeChat’s features are Service as a Software Substitute.
WeChat’s servers are nonfree; the service is centralized.
Tencent suspends WeChat accounts for sending “politically sensitive chats”.
Information collected by WeChat is given to the police of the PRC without court warrants.
etc.

Similar problems are present in other popular Instant Messaging services such as WhatsApp, Discord, Tencent QQ, etc.

Runxi Yu

Do we have any good reasons to trust our moral intuition?

Introduction

Making a moral judgement

Ethics and morality

Conclusion

Bibliography

Error handling

Declaring languages in project titles considered useful

Free Software is still important for our environment

See also

Programming languages

C

Go

Python

Shell scripts

Common Lisp

Lua

JavaScript

Using chroots as simple containers

The rxchroot scripts

Please stop mocking Down’s Syndrome

Linked lists as paths?

Some random log about transphobia and rationality

Forge Workflows

Gender-inclusive pronouns in Chinese

Summary

Details in English

Details in Chinese

Setting weird keysyms in sway

On racist jokes

“Really” is a confusing word

Random Thoughts on Purple Hibiscus

Math, Science, and Philosophy

Invented or discovered?

Applicability in Science

Random Ideas

Bugs

Acknowledgements

The Old Web was Better

Free Hardware

What are Free Hardware Designs?

What are the Benefits of Free Hardware?

How Can I Help?

Users

Hardware manufacturers

Frequently Asked Questions

What would be the incentive for hardware manufacturers to continue develop hardware and innovate?

How would developers gather the resources to develop hardware? Developing hardware is expensive.

How would this affect me, a normal computer user who doesn’t understand how my hardware works?

Effective-ish online communication

Democracy: Some fundamentals

Abortion

On Free Software, Education in China and the COVID-19 Pandemic

Pragmatic Use of Nonfree Software

Abstract

Status of This Memo

Introduction

Justification

Current Practices

Technical Limitations

Conclusion

Informative Links

WeChat sucks