Andrew Yu's Website

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Project Help

Hello guys. I currently need help with some of my projects. If you can, please look in their repositories. Any ideas would work.

Help me ponder upon these questions

These are questions that interest me. If I have more ideas on them, I might turn them into projects.

Sudden idea on the Lisp-like operating system

Emacs is an example!

Help me choose licenses

I am currently unable to decide what license should I choose for my programs and other works. I used to use the GNU General Public License. Then I realized that (1) the GPL causes compatibility problems with those who wish to use another [free] license (who do exist) and (2) the GPL restricts on what a user can do with a work. I'm thinking of what freedom actually means—there are freedoms to do things and freedoms from being the object of some other person doing something. Does software which you can't distribute in any form you wish count as free software? I think so. However, as https://unixsheikh.com/articles/the-problems-with-the-gpl.html explains, the GPL is based on coercing people into sharing, but coercion not effective in any field to make people actually share. This is understandable. I might start using the GPL again for my programs (might even be the AGPL). However, you might wanna convince me (if you have good arguments on this) to use a license for my documents and books—I put them into the public domain, and I think that's okay. Please mail me if you have any thoughts on this. But sad examples: Minix was permissively licensed, got abused by Intel. The BSD stuff was permissively licensed, got abused by Apple.

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.

About me

I am Andrew Yu, a secondary school student in Shanghai, China. My main fields of interest are philosophy (especially moral philosophy, and especially especially moral philosophy in technology), metamathematics, programming fundamentals and molecular biology. (To be extended)

Contact

There are many ways to contact me. None of these require proprietary software.

My OpenPGP fingerprint is 58BD 7981 2187 1B71 870C 27D9 978B 5891 AD3F 5986. My public key is available at https://www.andrewyu.org/andrew.asc.

Contact me if you would like to sell an old ThinkPad x200 in good shape.

Caution: This server is quite new, and it seems to be in some dnsbl lists. I'll try to get to you by other means if my email gets blocked. Seems to be an issue with my reverse DNS, which I recently fixed. We'll see. Writing to me won't be affected though.