It is our responsibility to spread free software, free computing (one of the websites started by me :D) and advocate for user freedom. Please don't waste any chances to do so.
Recent Articles
These are recent articles. Those before April 2022 are not listed, but maybe be listed later.
Beginning April 2022, almost all articles are available in mmark markdown, IETF XML, plain text (RFC style), nroff man page, typeset man page, and HTML. man -l <filename> may be used to view nroff man pages (which usually have a numerical file extension).
I need a hand with some of my projects. If you can, please look in their repositories. Any ideas would work.
https://project.andrewyu.org contains the git repositories.
The Libre Society Project is a campaign to spread the ideas of free software to places other than software, such as the political system, economics, and society in general.
The Free Biololgy Project is a repository of ideas for the development of medicine and the treatment of patients, especially related to medical equity. I haven't started on this one yet, but it is upcoming.
News
The Affero GNU General Public License
I've decided to use the Affero GNU General Public License, version 3, for all of my future software projects. (This paragraph is not a legal license file of any kind! Please refer to the project you're looking at to see the exact licensing.) This is because, in modern society, proprietary software companies are always abusing free software with permissive licensing. You also can't imagine what software could be used over a network—if I were to develop a library that attempts to understand human-written essays and outputs machine-understandable braincode, there might be someone who builds that into a bloated Webapp and make a huge user-controlling business out of it. There's also the infamous Intel Management Engine, which uses Minix, which is under the BSD license (not sure which version).
For things that I really don't see any chance of being on the radar of those people, I put them in the public domain. This includes all of the Libre Society project, for example.
However, when I start the Free Biology project, which may be a few decades from now, I'd certainlly like making it copyleft, if possible to the extend permitted by applicable law. I don't know licenses that are as copyleft as the GPL for practical works besides computer programs and the documentation thereof. Creative Commons ShareAlike isn't copyleft enough.
Help me ponder upon these questions
These are questions that interest me. Maybe you have ideas?
A Lisp-like Operating System
Anybody who has tried functional programming knows that Lisp and Haskell are special and great programming languages. Most Lispers and all Haskell programmers adhere to the functional style of programming, creating mathematically-provably-correct programs. I love the fact that Haskell supports Monads well and that it's statically typed (having the debugger find your issues is much more comfortable than debugging mid-run, while it's true that GHC has quite good debugging utilities. On the other hand, Haskell and Common Lisp have so many pragmatics and syntax sugar. Scheme (which I consider to be a dialect of Lisp) is much more uniform and symmetric (think of group theory) in syntax, but has bad support for lazy evaluation.
There are many modern operating systems, for example the BSDs, GNU+Linux, Plan 9, etc. (Microsoft Windows and macOS don't count, they're nonfree.) But security issues are discovered every year in each of them, even OpenBSD, which is considered the most secure operating system for general use. A lot of this has to do with the programming language they're written in, C.
In C, you've got a heap of pointers, memory stacks, arrays, linked lists, structures, etc. that you all have to manage by yourself. This leaves huge gaps for programmer error. By contrast, it is possible to mathematically prove the correctness (or the lack thereof, though I only use “Possible” because of Godel Incompleteness) of a functional program. This eases the work for programmers.
Most, if not all security issues in programs written in classical imperative programming languages are with bogus stacks, pointers, etc. There are countless times when stack overflows are used in attacks. By using functional languages, it just works!
There have been great proposals by other people on this ideea. If you are into operating system development and programming in general, please read it, and share your thoughts with me. If many people voice on this issue, I'll start an mailing list.
What about a pure functional Lisp dialect, with monads and similar (Haskell) ideas?
I love s-expressions, as they clearly represent the structure of a program, or even natural language. They also allow for powerful macros, enabling some Lisp dialects to have continuations and other cool stuff. Haskell, on the other hand, is purely functional, where things that involve side effects are usually implemented with Monads. I'm looking for an implementation that combines these.
What about a mathematical political system?
A government too strong causes authoritarianism which may lead to non-democracies, while a government too weak causes the inability of the government to do anything with the slightest controversy (look at COVID handling). Is there a mathematical way (say a function; this sounds like group theory, but I'm not sure) to compute, based all known information known about the bill/order/whatever being considered, if the government (I'm especially talking about the executive here) has the right to order that? I feel like this could be proved impossible due to incompleteness and unpredictability, but this needs further investigation. This is the main problem in question of the Libre Society project, by the way.
Quotes
Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say. —Edward Snowden
About me
I am Andrew Yu. My main fields of interest are philosophy (especially moral philosophy, and especially especially moral philosophy in technology), metamathematics, programming fundamentals and molecular biology. I'm also a free software activist.
Contact
There are many ways to contact me. None of these require proprietary software.
- talk to me in real life (This method is preferred, if you know me in real life.);
- mail andrew@andrewyu.org (Emails are preferred for in-depth discussions.);
- xmpp andrew@andrewyu.org (My OTR fingerprint is
D860F6CC FEF3D079 A6964AA3 86BD6A34 8F86E218and my OpenPGP fingerprint is as below. Use this for quick questions, or highly interactive discussions.). - irc Andrew on LibreIRC (LibreIRC is an IRC network started by Andrew, myself, running Solanum IRCd and Atheme Services. Use this for quick questions, or highly interactive discussions. Since talking on Internet Relay Chat requires people to be online at the same time, use a bouncer, or don't close your client, to ensure that my replies reach you. Of course you can also give me another way to get to you that's persistent.);
- irc Andrew on Libera (Libera is an IRC network popular among free software users, activists and developers. Use this for quick questions, or highly interactive discussions. Please note that for privacy purposes, you should use some type of encryption. I am not affiliated with Libera and I don't run it in any way. Of course, either be on there all the time or give me another way to contact you.).
There are many ways not to contact me.
- WeChat is deprecated and unsupported. I only keep an account for school and use Mojo-Weixin to relay it to IRC. If you're also bothered by the mandatory usage of these software at school, sign the give students user freedom petition by the FSF;
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OpenPGP
- My ECC key is recommended;
- My RSA key is a fallback;
- My keyring for friends;
- The revocation of my old key.
Check if you've actually downloaded these keys from andrewyu.org. Check the fingerprints with me elsewhere (email, IRC, in real life, etc) before trusting or signing it.
