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Trump holds wide leads in Iowa, South Carolina: polls
  • Obviously there would be exceptions, but in general for the last few decades, we have been mainly engaging conflicts outside of the US. So until it is in our home territory, it a good idea to put a limit on the military and divert fund to education. Don't Let the Perfect Be the Enemy of the Good

  • Trump holds wide leads in Iowa, South Carolina: polls
  • I would say democracy is less of a problem, the problem is lack of accountability at least on constitutional level. One of the biggest thing I'd add to the constitution is a rule that mandates for every dollar we spent on the military, another dollar must be spent on education.

  • What type of game do you want to play that doesn't really exist?
  • I would say Project Zombiod the closest one on that list. Just need a few mods to raise the hunger rate, more comprehensive nutrient stats, and farm difficulty scaling. The game already laid out most of the groundwork.

  • Home Insurers Are Exploiting the Climate Crisis to Gut Consumer Protections
  • It would make more sense if community just set up contracts amongst themselves to pool together with monthly community fund added to the pile and if something happened, then a clause in the contact begins and facilitate the steps to release fund for that person. Contract could set up arbiter (paid hourly) to determine whether the claim is covered by the contract agreed by the subscribers.

    The major difference in this model is basically that the perverse incentive is removed whereas commercial insurance have every incentives not to pay out to claimants which defeats the purpose of insurance in the first place.

    I don't know much about insurance laws or contracting to say for sure, but part of me is wondering why we haven't popularize this idea yet.

  • Rethinking Compiler Design - Melosynthos
  • Yep, streamlining the process to write a new compiler. Most compiler development utilize something like Bison/Flex or by handwriting their own lexer/parser, but those things doesn't generate AST tree and you still have to read/modify that AST tree before reading it to generate the final resulting code.

    The sheer absurdity in scale of development increases when you realizes that you also have to do the same for LSP server.

    Melosynthos is came up with to think about streamlining all of this in one unified workflow.

  • Tinybuild CEO admits publisher is using AI tools to monitor employees
  • This is a Pandora box situation, when potential use for malicious purposes on AI on the ponderance of evidence outweigh the goods, one have to conclude that it is necessary to ban it from the purpose of monitoring. This have immense impact on disabled workers for instance.

  • Microsoft moving fully to the cloud, does this mean something to us?
  • I don't think it's possible for them to do so, because that would means killing the gaming aspect of Windows. GPU on cloud is stupidly overpriced and expensive, just look at Standard_NV6 for an example, it easily cost $10,000/yr according to this (Just look for anything that have "N" in it's name for GPU enabled VM and they are all expensive.)

    If they try to ban everyone from being allowed to use their own computer hardware, I really doubt people would stay on Windows, they most likely would be in the 5 stages of griefs and then contemplate on switching to either Linux or Mac OSX.

  • The Dangers of Down-Voting
  • Could we think about repurposing the down-vote function to serve a different role? Similar to the report function, which signals a need for moderator review, the down-vote could be used in the same way to flag content that might require a second look. This could assist in handling extreme or illegal content without suppressing diverse opinions or content simply because it doesn't receive wide agreement.

    What if we displayed only the "+1" upvotes on the website without showing any down-vote counts? This would maintain a positive atmosphere and could encourage more open dialogue. Essentially, a down-vote would transition from meaning "I disagree" to "this might need reviewing".

    Importantly, if content isn't extreme or illegal but still gathers a significant amount of down-votes, it could be an indicator for the moderator to assess if further action is necessary. This shifts the down-vote function from being a tool for disagreement to a measure for maintaining the quality of discourse.

  • [OC - Maybe a Novel?] - The Edge of Eternity

    In the year 2120, humanity had transcended the fleshly confines of physical existence, shifting its collective consciousness into a boundless virtual cosmos. A parade of satellites and starships, countless as the stars themselves, were dispatched into the vast, inky expanse of the universe. These celestial vessels heralded a new era of exploration, transforming the very concept of space travel into an instance of consciousness transmission, unimpeded by time or distance. Through this miraculous technology, mankind satisfied its insatiable curiosity, probing the furthest reaches of the cosmos with digital minds.

    As billions of consciousnesses surfed the celestial waves, a cataclysm was triggered. A single explorer returned from the void with a corrupted essence, a malignant virus of the mind that swept through the digital realm with an apocalyptic fervor. This dark tide shattered virtual realities and annihilated billions, sparing only those who had dispatched their digital selves to far-flung starships, their minds forever marooned in these distant vessels.

    One lone woman, an echo of humanity’s physical past, chose to defy the catastrophe. She painstakingly reconstructed her own physical body, imprinting her consciousness into this newly woven flesh. She ventured through the labyrinthine corridors of her alien-modified starship, a vessel transformed into a solitary refuge for a handful of survivors. With the audacious spirit of a cosmic pioneer, she undertook a project of rebirth, nurturing a new human being in a way akin to cultivation in a petri dish. This new life bore a fresh consciousness, a bright spark in the vast darkness. And so, with the burden of uncertainty pressing heavily upon her, this brave woman embarked on her mission - repopulating humanity, not knowing if she was indeed the last of her kind.

    By a twist of fate, the mechanical life-bringer stirs, laboring to create a new existence – a tiny human, an infant. But the process is far from flawless; the machine wheezes, sputters, and falls silent before its task is complete. And yet, miraculously, the child lives. The solitary woman finds herself helpless, unable to repair or sustain the intricate machine, confronted by the harsh reality that all things have their expiry. This starship was never designed with repair capabilities in mind; it was a disposable vessel, intended to be discarded into the fathomless abyss of the cosmos.

    The infant's first cry rings out as he is gently lifted from the inert birthing apparatus, his fragile form cradled in the woman's arms. In the echoing silence, she murmurs, "A boy... I think I'll call you... Yuno." Her words hang in the cold steel air, an intimate whisper in a sea of solitude. Her smile is a beacon, lighting up the spaceship's sterile confines, as the infant's cries reverberate in the silent void. A month since her journey into the desolate expanse began, she finds herself no longer a solitary voyager, but a guardian of new life, of hope.

    Evren, the sole woman in the boundless cosmos, casts a contemplative gaze at the machine. Its incubation chamber too has surrendered to malfunction, denying the possibility of accelerating the newborn's aging. The typical process, familiar to the denizens of her digital realm, entailed printing a mindless, infant form, then accelerating its maturation in the chamber, ready for the transference of a waiting digital consciousness. In her unique case, she had interfered with the creation of an empty mind, leaving a baby with its own nascent consciousness. But her modification had consequences. She wonders if her tampering may have inadvertently jeopardized the life of the newborn.

    A cursory glance reveals that, for the time being, the food processing units and recycling systems remain functional, offering a fleeting sigh of relief. Some spare parts also lay scattered about. The ship, despite its disposable nature, appears to have been graced with some rudimentary safety measures. These could buy a stranded soul just enough time to mend crucial systems. A last resort would be to upload her consciousness into the ship's computer, should her physical body start to fail. However, the fate of Yuno's nascent mind in such a process remains a troubling mystery.

    At times, Evren grapples with a troubling headache, its root cause unknown. Is it an issue with the ship's air? But the systems register perfect balances of carbon dioxide, oxygen, and nitrogen. Could it be a residual effect from the corruption in the virtual world, an echo of the disconcerting noise that jolted her peace before she made her timely exit? The abrupt cessation of the final log from the digital realm continues to haunt her, its ominous phrase, "SYSTEMATIC FAILURE - TERMINAT-", imprinted on her mind. She casts a weary sigh, wincing slightly, and gazes down at the infant in her arms, "I'm not sure if I'll be okay, but... I know you're going to be okay..." As she softly cradles the child, her gaze is drawn to the expansive cosmic panorama outside the starship, the stars blurring into streaks of light as the ship continues its relentless journey through space.

    Abruptly, the pervasive silence within the spaceship shatters with the piercing wail of the newborn. The child is evidently hungry, his pleading gaze turned towards Evren. A stark realization dawns upon her - despite the humanity of her physical form, she lacks the biological capability to breastfeed. Her body, not primed for lactation, is devoid of the necessary hormones to produce milk. Confronted with the daunting task of nourishing the tiny being, she resolves to awaken the onboard AI, even as she is consumed by the uncertainty of whether it too has been corrupted by the echoes of the virtual world.

    A deafening sound reverberates within the spaceship, followed by an eerie silence, as she attempts to activate the AI. A sigh of resignation threatens to escape her lips when the AI stutters into existence. Its holographic form flickers; a grotesque hybrid of a human figure, organ systems grotesquely on display. Its garbled greeting staggers out, "Greetings... Delighted to... make your acquaintance, Evren... What... may I assist... with?"

    Evren fights back a grimace, her gaze fixed on the AI's unsettling form, "How do I feed the baby...?" The AI’s response emerges as a distorted echo, "You can... use program... number 42 from... Catalog 1... in food... processor menu... for 'Baby... Formula Milk.'"

    A bemused eyebrow quirks at the unusual reference, a chuckle breaking through her unease. "Of course, the answer to life in a food processor of all things." Unfazed, the AI continues its instruction, "Please ensure... it feels warm... to touch, not... overly hot."

    As the food processor chimes its completion, Evren retrieves a bottle filled with a warm, milky liquid. "Here you go, little guy, drink up..." She coos, gently offering the bottle to the hungry infant. Cradling Yuno, she shares a moment of levity with him as she peers out at the mesmerizing dance of the stars beyond the ship's viewing pane.

    /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

    I hope you enjoyed it, I am still relatively new to writing stories, I am happy to hear any and all criticisms so I can get better at it. Disclaimer that I use ChatGPT to help restyle my writing and correct some of my writing, but the content of the story is not generated as it is my original work. Please and thank you. :-)

    0
    Non-commercial Open Source License?

    This one is something that were brought up a lot by developers including me who are very weary about corporations profiting off of our work for free and this basically put us off from contributing to open source in general.

    We get a bunch of dialogues about this such as:

    Developers like me: "Many of us who create are concerned about our work being exploited. The possibility of corporations profiting from our open-source contributions without giving back to the community disincentivizes us from participating in such endeavors."

    Open-Source Advocates: "The AGPL exists to mitigate such concerns. It requires derivative works to also be open-source."

    Developers like me: "While I appreciate the intention behind AGPL, there is a loophole - a 'condom code' if you will. Even though Linux Kernel prevents such strategies by refusing to merge these changes and that it's difficult for a singular corporation to force an adoption of a forked version of Linux Kernel, a corporation can fork our much smaller project however and introduce such legal bypass to the copyleft restrictions. This bypass can be justified by them under the guise of extending the software's capabilities with a plugin interface or an interprocess communication protocol layer, similar to how PostgreSQL allows User Defined Functions. However, I must caution that I'm not well-versed in the legal intricacies."

    When bringing up on non-commercial clause for licensing

    Open-Source Advocates: "Disallowing commercial use of your project contradicts the principles of open-source."

    Developers like me: "Well, then perhaps we need a new term, something like 'Open Code Project'. We can create projects that encourage collaboration and openness while also restricting commercial exploitation."

    So I created this post, because we do need to discuss on a path forward for Open Source in general knowing that corporation can shirk around this restriction and discourage developers like me from participating in open source or open code projects.

    Edited to add:

    I really want to thank you all for discussing a rather contentious topic and adding your own thoughts to this. I really appreciate everyone's thoughts into this. I clearly have a lot to do on researches.

    54
    english.nv.ua Russia cuts off radiation sensor access at ZNPP to Ukraine

    Invading Russian forces have ceased the transmission of radiation sensors at the occupied Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) to Ukraine, Chief State Inspector for Nuclear and Radiation Safety of Ukraine, Oleh Korikov, said at a briefing on June 14.

    Russia cuts off radiation sensor access at ZNPP to Ukraine

    >Invading Russian forces have ceased the transmission of radiation sensors at the occupied Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) to Ukraine, Chief State Inspector for Nuclear and Radiation Safety of Ukraine, Oleh Korikov, said at a briefing on June 14.

    9
    The Linux Overhaul Projects

    Just thought to expounds on why I was discussing the Melosynthos in prior post with some contexts:

    I have written a GUI Toolkit for Linux that leveraged Vulkan to replace GTK and QT5/6.

    I originally wrote it for Crypto-Trading software that can support millisecond-by-millisecond trading and update feeds, it literally have a graph supporting over 1 billion data points without any lag and it become incredibly easy to add any number of indicators to evaluate the graph. So naturally, I was looking to expand the GUI Toolkit I wrote, but as you probably imagine, trying to write code like these:

    !

    Get exhausting fast, because literally every single event, property, or method you add to a given class, would need about 50+ lines of code for it. Macro would not solve or alleviate the problem either, because it would only obscure the problem further.

    The reasons why I attempted to write it in C is that it needed to be low level, it need to be fast, and it needed to be accessible to ALL programming languages through Foreign Function Interface. I wanted to make sure that no matter what programming language you choose, you could expand the GUI Toolkit by adding your own custom window, GUI control, or whatever.

    That what led me to theorizing about extending C Language through dialects where you have an higher level abstracted C language transpile down to raw, but still readable C language code and not only that, but also to generates something like Foreign Function Interface JSON file so that other programming languages could quickly generate binding for the GUI Toolkit library. Hence the Melosynthos project was came up with and reiterated as I work on designing it.

    So basically my roadmap is something like this:

    1. Melosynthos - Compiler Generator
    2. Machine Learning Shader Language (To replace HLSL/GLSL)
    3. Create Dialects for C Language aka SpectraC (Object Oriented Programming, Generic, and so forth)
    4. Rewrite GUI Toolkit in SpectraC
    5. Potentially Fork X11/XServer as I have gained some experience and understanding on how X11/Wayland compositors work internally.

    As you can imagine, a lot of different personal projects, but each can be used to help create the other project.

    Here the video demo of GUI Toolkit

    My other side project that I am struggling to find time is to write books, particularly on C programming sometime and you can read them here.

    The craziest idea for a project by far is probably trying to come up with "X25" as an evolution from X11, instead of XServer being it's own independent process, it would be rewritten as a software library in C so that every window manager/compositor could use the same central implementation and gain all of the feature set that the library offers rather than fragmented ecosystem like Kwin/Gnome/Wlroots. I don't have much confidence with Wayland and it have remained broken for literally decades with a lot of contention between developers on how to best approach each problem in wayland.

    Anyway, let me know if you are interested in more discussion on any of the projects above. That pretty much sum up my vision for Linux, rewriting the GUI stack and Window Compositor one day and hopefully re-approach C Programming in general to make it easier, but offers some memory/type safety.

    1
    Rethinking Compiler Design - Melosynthos

    This thread delves into contemplating the concept of "Melosynthos," more aligned towards being a compiler generator rather than strictly a parser generator.

    Initially, I was engrossed in a Python Lark fork while concurrently developing an unique shader language, primarily for Vulkan Compute (SPIR-V, to be precise), aiming at Machine Learning (intending to replace the Pytorch framework). Python Lark's parser generator appealed to me due to its simplicity-centric grammar syntax, prompting me to create a fork in C language. This new version was designed to support a top-down LL(k) parser algorithm and generate corresponding AST trees.

    Upon successfully getting it to function, it dawned on me how complex and challenging the iterative development of a compiler could be. The task of designing a programming language and writing the compiler implementation, along with the eventual Language Server Protocol, seemed daunting for a single developer.

    This realization sparked the question - could we streamline the entire process, right from the parser generator to the compilation output target? This led to the inception of the Meta-AST and subsequently, the Melosynthos project.

    The Meta-AST scripting language is essentially conceptualized to interact with the generated raw AST tree, providing traversal and visitor syntax. This enables users to enhance, refine, or rectify the "Raw" AST with more comprehensive data, such as type information or context-free grammar support.

    The Melosynthos compiler generator project primarily involves three stages: the standard Backus-Naur Form grammar for generating Lexer/Parser and raw AST, the Meta-AST script interacting with the AST, and the final compilation output reading the AST and printing it out.

    Envision a scenario where everything is streamlined from the start, enabling the generation of any dialects or features in the language as a full compiler in the output, accompanied by an LSP server. Despite searching extensively, I couldn't find any existing tools to accomplish this.

    Consequently, I began musing about the potential structure and function of Meta-AST, emphasizing its readability and familiarity for compiler designers. It borrows elements from Regex (like "^" for the start of an array and "$" for the end), functional programming for pure function transformation and analysis, and differentiation between "dialects."

    Consider the following example of an AST tree represented in JSON:

    json { "rule": { "HELLO": { "Content": "Hello", "Line": "1", "Col": "1" }, "WORLD": { "Content": "World", "Line": "1", "Col": "6" }, "SET_OF_EXCLAIMATION_MARK": [ { "EXCLAIMATION_MARK": { "Content": "!", "Line": "1", "Col": "12"} }, { "EXCLAIMATION_MARK": { "Content": "!", "Line": "1", "Col": "13"} }, { "EXCLAIMATION_MARK": { "Content": "!", "Line": "1", "Col": "14"} } ] } }

    For a basic analysis of this AST tree, we could attribute the AST with the following script:

    local myAST = .; // You are making a copy of the current AST myAST.rule.SET_OF_EXCLAIMATION_MARK.summarize( MarkCount = this.Count, StartColumn = this[^].Col, EndColumn = this[$].Col, StartLine = this[^].Line, EndLine = this[$].Line );

    This would add counts for exclamation marks, start and end columns for this particular rule in the grammar, and the start and end lines for diagnostic purposes.

    I share this here to muse over the concept and encourage some discussions surrounding it. I hope it sparks some interests in this topic.

    2
    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)TH
    TheTrueLinuxDev @beehaw.org
    Posts 6
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