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<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
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<title>Andrew Yu's Website</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/style.css" />
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<body>
<h1>Andrew Yu's Website</h1>
<div id="nav">
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.andrewyu.org">Home</a></li>
<li><a href="https://blog.andrewyu.org">Blog</a></li>
<li><a href="https://project.andrewyu.org"><span class="alert">Projects</span></a></li>
<li><a href="https://git.andrewyu.org">Git</a></li>
<li><a href="https://pub.andrewyu.org">Users</a></li>
<li><a href="https://lib.andrewyu.org">Files</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div id="main">
<div id="campaign">
<p>New Hampshire might be incorporating software freedom into its law! This would be a huge victory for the Free Software Movement. Please take the time to read <a href="https://www.andrewyu.org/nh.html">https://www.andrewyu.org/nh.html</a>.</p>
<p>It is our responsibility to spread free software and advocate for user freedom. Please don't waste any chances to do so.</p>
<p>Recent activities you might want to help with: Sign <a href="https://my.fsf.org/give-students-userfreedom">the give students user freedom petition by the FSF</a> and fight against <a href="https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2020/spring/trial-by-proprietary-software">trial in courts with proprietary software</a>.</p>
</div>
<div id="majornote">
<p>I'm currently messing around with my CSS. If you want to see a demonstration of a unusable website, come to the <a href="/lovely">test site</a>.</p>
</div>
<div id="myproject">
<p>I need a hand with some of my projects. If you can, please look in their repositories. Any ideas would work.</p>
<p><a href="https://git.andrewyu.org/">https://git.andrewyu.org</a> contains the git bare repositories. <a href="https://project.andrewyu.org">https://project.andrewyu.org</a> contains the project pages. Usually, their corresponding URLs match with each other (except for the subdomain).</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://project.andrewyu.org/libresociety">The Libre Society Project</a> is a campaign to spread the ideas of <a href="https://fsf.org">free software</a> to places other than software, such as the political system, economics, and society in general.</li>
<li><a href="https://project.andrewyu.org/freebiology">The Free Biololgy Project</a> 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.</li>
</ul>
</div>
<div id="news">
<h3>The Affero GNU General Public License</h3>
<p>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).</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
</div>
<div id="ponder">
<h2>Help me ponder upon these questions</h2>
<p>These are questions that interest me. Maybe you have ideas?</p>
<h3>A Lisp-like Operating System</h3>
<p>Anybody who has tried functional programming knows that Lisp and <a href="https://haskell.org">Haskell</a> 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 <a href="https://ghc.haskell.org">GHC</a> 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.</p>
<p>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 <a href="https://OpenBSD.org">OpenBSD</a>, 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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!</p>
<p>There have been <a href="http://metamodular.com/Common-Lisp/lispos.html">great proposals by other people</a> 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.</p>
<h3>What about a pure functional Lisp dialect, with monads and similar (Haskell) ideas?</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>What about a mathematical political system?</h3>
<p>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.</p>
</div>
<div id="me">
<h2>About me</h2>
<p>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. I'm also a free software activist.</p>
</div>
<div id="contact">
<h2>Contact</h2>
<p>There are many ways to contact me. None of these require proprietary software.</p>
<ul>
<li>radio me at guard frequency (not recommended)</li>
<li>talk to me in real life</li>
<li>mail <a href="mailto:andrew@andrewyu.org">andrew@andrewyu.org</a></li>
<li>irc <a href="irc://irc.andrewyu.org:6697/Andrew">Andrew on AndrewIRC</a></li>
<li>irc <a href="irc://irc.libera.chat:6697/Andrew">Andrew on Libera</a></li>
</ul>
<p>My OpenPGP fingerprint is <code>58BD 7981 2187 1B71 870C 27D9 978B 5891 AD3F 5986</code>. My public key is available at <a href="https://www.andrewyu.org/andrew.asc">https://www.andrewyu.org/andrew.asc</a>. My key is on <a href="https://keys.openpgp.org">https://keys.openpgp.org</a>, but I don't trust key servers, you should just grab my key from my website. Please don't send binary data to my IRC.</p>
<p>Contact me if you would like to sell an old ThinkPad x200 in good shape.</p>
</div>
<div id="randlinks">
<h2>Random Links</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://fsf.org">The Free Software Foundation</a>.</li>
<li><a href="https://stallmansupport.org">Defend Richard Stallman</a>.</li>
</ul>
</div>
</div>
<div id="footer">
<p>This is free and unencumbered software released into the public domain. Anyone is free to copy, modify, publish, use, compile, sell, or distribute this software, either in source code form or as a compiled binary, for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and by any means. In jurisdictions that recognize copyright laws, the author or authors of this software dedicate any and all copyright interest in the software to the public domain. We make this dedication for the benefit of the public at large and to the detriment of our heirs and successors. We intend this dedication to be an overt act of relinquishment in perpetuity of all present and future rights to this software under copyright law. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE. For more information, please refer to <a href="https://unlicense.org/">https://unlicense.org</a></p>
<p>I know that this website is not a program and that HTML isn't considered a programming language. Nevertheless, you can think of the HTML as code—even the plain text I write could also be considered code since languages are a code to give information. Anyways, stuff on here that's supposed to be public (don't try to spoof my htaccess, don't hack my ssh, don't snoop on my email, etc) is public domain, including my projects and my git repos, unless otherwise specified by a file that looks like COPYING, LICENSE or licensing stuff in the source itself. <a href="https://stpeter.im/writings/essays/publicdomain.html">https://stpeter.im/writings/essays/publicdomain.html</a> is a good explanation on why people put stuff in the public domain. However, you might want to see the "Help me choose licenses" section on this page.</p>
</div>
<div id="memes">
<img src="https://www.postitivita.it/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Nyan-cat-NFT.gif" alt="CC BY GIF of the nyan, see src of link for origin" width="20%"/>
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