modrobert @modrobert@qoto.org

It's Fortran day! Here's a fun general purpose program to compute spacecraft turn maneuvers: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19720023254.pdf

Richard #Stallman a.k.a. #RMS is the founder of the Free Software Foundation (#FSF), author of the original versions of **gcc** and **Emacs**, and perhaps best known for his creation of the GNU Public Licence a.k.a. #GPL.

Thanks to the pioneering work of Richard Stallman, Android has a freely available kernel that can boot it, and companies like Samsung are forced to release their augmented kernel source code to us every month, so that we can build — using Stallman's compiler — a working custom recovery like TWRP.

Richard Stallman is currently under coordinated attack by the cancel culture mob. They have him firmly in their sights and have set their hearts on trying to get him removed from the board of the organisation he founded in 1985, and which has been his life's work.

The reason for the attack is that Stallman is alleged to hold views that are "problematic" in the eyes of his detractors.

My own stance is that to even engage in debate of Stallman's views would be to lend credence to the notion that they are somehow germane to the work that Stallman does in support of free software. I contend that they are not, which is not to imply that the accusations leveled at Stallman would otherwise require intellectual or moral contortion to refute. They would not. Stallman's views, even if they were relevant, have been grossly misrepresented.

The attempted silencing of free speech is always painful to behold, but this ill-conceived attack on Stallman is particularly stomach-turning, given how much of his life he has devoted to the freedom of others, including those who accuse him now.

His contributions to free software and his consistent, uncompromising commitment to his beliefs regarding software freedom have made millionaires of others, including many among his accusers now, while Stallman himself continues to lead a life of subsistence.

#Android would not exist if it hadn't been for Stallman.

Without Stallman, we would not have the assurance that important software like #Magisk will continue to exist long after the project's creator has moved on.

Without Stallman, #TWRP would not now exist.

Were it not for Richard Stallman, most of the cheap electronic appliances and gadgets in your home would simply not exist.

Without Richard Stallman's groundbreaking work, the world would be a different and much worse place.

Now you can do something in return. Richard Stallman needs your support.

Please consider signing the petition below:

https://github.com/rms-support-letter/rms-support-letter.github.io

If you need more background before signing, please take the time to do your own research and reach your own conclusions.

Good news, everyone!

Installing duf (the better df alternative) on Ubuntu and various other distros is now as easy as running:

sudo snap install duf-utility

After the most recent shenanigans by Github, I really want to move my projects off it. At the same time I'm lazy, and it takes some effort figuring out how to do it this.

Ideally I'd like to self-host, that means I have yet another system to keep up to date. Then there is Gitlab, but they are also a US corporation, and while they have done less stupid things in the past, the drama around the telemetry is still remembered.

Then there is Sourcehut which is good but has some issues. On the technical side it's that it has sometimes been quite slow when accessed from Asia.

If you're not following @RoofSlapping why are you even here?

Been working some more on my programming language. Performance is not great, but acceptable in most cases (but since people seem to be happy with Python, perhaps I shouldn't worry about making it performant).

The code base is only 17k lines of Kotlin. That's much less than expected.

It not builds for the JVM, Natively as well as to Javascript, so it's even possible to run it in the browser.

@modrobert @loke The GEOS KERNAL defines the macro (and also uses it). You can change it in my reverse-engineered source: https://github.com/mist64/geos/blob/master/inc/geosmac.inc :)

A photo of Murray the Moray Eel from one of my dives in the caribbean.

#scuba #scubadiving #MorayEel #diving #USVI #Science

1969 Tektronix white paper explains how a mouse works. #retrocomputing https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_tektronixcormationDisplayConceptsJan69_5521470/page/n69/mode/2up

Oh I so love this comment from Reddit:

Computer Science had fantastically approachable textbooks with clear, simple diagrams, as well as practical examples that you could really implement yourself to solve real problems. I noticed however that while the research papers written in the 60s and 70s had a clear, easily readable style, around the late 90s they become riddled with made-up pseudocode unique to each paper and at least 50% Greek letters, because deep in ours hearts we all recognise that we're not proper computer scientists until we learn to program in ancient Greek like the great philosophers did thousands of years ago.

Found in a discussion here: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskPhysics/comments/fek5dd/why_are_textbooks_written_so_badly/fjpyxwu/

I don't think he deserved to be downvoted.