The Great GitHub Escape

2022-07-09, post № 261

version-control, freedom, #git, #proprietary, #seeking-refuge

As so many naturally grown things, my tiny corner of the IT space I inhabit is, too, a local state. A maximum of sorts, it is a snapshot in time of my path meandering this young, unexplored constructed world. Steps are often taken on a whim and thus not pondered on for long, the juicy sign on button all too elusive.

When I first signed on to the then independant Octocat service, it was with little care nor need: my fellow students flocked there out of habit, yet to convincing them of an alternative there was no barrier errected: our project a clean slate, and our university offering a Git server indeed. Now, nigh four years later, my public projects released and shared, the feline bought by one Big Brother and me having taken on a job centered around a repository hosted yonder, a fence has risen.
For long I dreamt escaping, yet where to? Another bloated webby clone with all the same deceptive ties just in a different coat of paint? No; Git’s bible^[1] rightfully proclaims in its fourth chapter this proper unixy task’s ease, yet assumes a healthy management of keys; focussing on one sole project — not managing a few dozens. Coupled with the aformentioned trapping ties, leaving stayed mere a distant dream for months.

Yet dreams come true when acted upon and action ought to be sparked. It was a fortnight past when I first read Drew DeVault’s GitHub Copilot and open source laundering^[2], a text which threw me into an action frenzy: I could no longer bear to take a part in this monopolistic pile of vigilantes, not bear to help their efforts further. Though sprinting off is only half the story: all my repositories now seeking refuge, the question where to grew louder.

With revitalized spirits, one needn’t fret: I coded up a thin SSH-Git authentication layer together with a Dumb HTTP Git protocol layer for public projects around a thousand lines of Go strong. It is called gruau and publicly served by itself^[3], free for anyone to use or inspect and try to break into.

I was pleasently surprised what profound impact the reclaiming of my Git repositories had on my connection with my data. I will surely try to never open a new repository on any of the lock-in services out there again. On the technical side, I found my own shallow plumbing solution to be around twice as fast when it comes to small exchanges which are most likely dominated by handshake overhead. Aside from the moralistic reasons, this increase in remote Git snappiness alone would make me take on this journey again.

I wholeheartedly thank Drew DeVault for sparking the cinder.

One is invited to interpret my account of seeking refuge as a call to action. Yet, a shallow glance of introspection later, I sincerly do not aim to deflect anyone’s life’s trajectory. As such, this post should be understood as an outlet for my wretched digital encounters.

Status quo

2022-06-11, post № 260

poetry, #nonfree, #digitalism

Nine marching rectangles

2022-05-14, post № 259

graphics, #text-graphics

Rasterizing the continuous most often proves to be a delicate enterprise. Going from the unfathomable depths of the reals to a mere finite amount of toggled bits already zaps both completeness as well as dense ordering. Adding to that, the miniscule amount of pixels contemporary displays have to offer makes sharp jumps a frequent occurrence, breaking the illusion of continuity entirely.

With a queasy feeling about the meaning of continuous perception lurking in the back of my mind, at a recent Bill Frisell concert I was inspired to try myself at more organically conducive discrete productions. Layered in between a mighty bass and a whisked drum, both innately transferring their pristinely real movement for me to hear, Mr. Frisell — illuminated by slowly wafting curvy patches — tuned some knobs of digital effects and managed not to break the fake.
A fan of monospaced 2:1 text, I decided to try and imitate the patches’ feel in a more blatently discrete manner. As such, I wrote a marching-squares-based character-targeting renderer for graph slabs which uses only the symbols \._+| @^/.

       ..                .\_.                                                   
     ..                   .^\.                                                  
    ./.                     ||                                                  
    ||                      .\.                                                 
    ||                       ||                                                 
    ..                      .+|                                                 
     ..                     |@|                                                 
     .\_.                  .++.                                                 
      .^\.                .+@|                                                  
        ..._.           ._+@+.                                                  
          .^\___________+@@+.                                                   
            .^^^+@@@@@@@@@+.            .______________.                        
                .^^^^^^^^^.       ._____/^^^^^^^^^^^^^^. ._.                    
                            ._____+@@+^^.                .^...                  
                       .____+@@@@@+^^.                      ....                
                   .___+@@@@@@@@+^.                           .\.               
                .__+@@@@@@@@@+^^.                              .\.              
             .__+@@+^^^^^^^^^.                                  .\.             
          .__/^^^^^.                                             ||             
        ._/^^.                                                   ||             
      ._/^.                                                      ||             
     ./^.                                                       ./.             
   ._/.                                                        ./.              
   |+.                                                        ./.               
  ./.                                                       ....                
  ||                                                     ._...                  
  ||                                  .________________. .^.                    
  ||                               .__++^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^.                        
  ||                             ._++^^.                                        
  .\.                           .++^.                                           
   .\.                        ._/^.                                             
    .\_.                    ._/^.                                               
     .^...               ._..^.                                                 
        .. .__.     .__. .^.                                                    
           .^^.     .^^.                                                        
                                                                                
                                                                                
                                                                                
                                                                                
                                                                                

Source: nine-marching-rectangles.cpp

Brutally approaching blocky arrangements

2022-04-30, post № 258

programming, discrete-optimization, #sokoban, #brute-force, #baba, #c++

Arvi Teikari’s discrete self-referencing puzzler has fascinated with its non-formulaic take on box pushing since its early days as a contest entry in April of 2017^[1]. Whilst its vanilla level set is vast, conceptually coupled as well as thematically aligned, one cannot expect it to exhaustively cover the gargantuan space of world scenarios, even after filtration by solvability and playfulness.

As such, in line with the ever increasing shift in gaming away from the ROM-baked whollistic experiences towards providing loose game-inducing boundaries on internet-driven platforms — dually tending to the consuming player as well as the niche creator in one —, of particular note being Roblox, LittleBigPlanet, Super Mario Maker, its sequel and Dreams, it was a natural step for Teikari to open up their game to become a puzzler engine in late 2020^[2], allowing anyone to tinker with the shifting ways of their visually dissonant purely property-induced worlds.

A stumped Baba.

Seven years

2022-03-28, post № 257

anniversary, #retrospection

For approaching a third of my time on this earth, I have been blogging about my projects, my findings, my poetry, my systems. Looking back on it, reminiscing in distaste about the humble beginnings of graphically oriented slow snake scripting to dubious groking of Unix and numerics, meandering through games neither played nor parodied and taking my first swings at golfing. Dabbling in pixel painting, moving away from imprisoned evaluating. Graduating. Experiencing symbolicism, doubting the physicist’s model’s realism. Writing compilers, construeing languages, calculating Laplacians. Discovering sequences and trails of old — in thought and *ware. Hopping by the GNUs of new, making sense of the legacy that is Berners-Lee’s. Wrestling with what once was freedom. Writing a Bachelor’s thesis. Tasting concurrency, rediscovering simplicity. Loathing light in captured form. Lonely for the depths are known.

Looking back, I am unsure if it was worth it. I sometimes dream to have been born a Unix pioneer, not hindered by the mischief caused by modern datum’s drought for thought. Yet then again — romantically —, glorifying the past immensely, doubt creeps in if in all honesty, life’s discretization is after all not robbery. For should I not be content pondering what is constructed and then wondering why I am yearning for the improbable that is acceptance of the unloggable?

I detest conducted computing. I believe in free software. I think open source is an unjust blanket. I wish to seek asylum in the analogue. I am writing this on my Thinkpad X250 running proprietary WiFi drivers in an editor whose benevolent license I despise. The birds are tweeting.

Tchoukaillon hooks

2022-03-19, post № 256

mathematics, #discrete, #haskell, #functional-pearl

Ever since watching D. Knuth’s talk “Tchoukaillon numbers”^[1] in the Rutgers experimental mathematics seminar back in January of 2022, I was intrigued by the algorithm he presented to iteratively generate the Tchoukaillon arrays ꚓ⁽ⁿ⁾. Their discrete pointwise limit defines a two-dimensional permutation of the natural numbers, whereby pointwise exactly one value is attained more than once. These properties make calculating the discrete limit expressible as a lazy computation:

tcheInf i j = discreteLimit $ \n -> tche n i j

Despite the seeming simplicity of iteratively taking hooks from an -matrix, two-dimensional problems seem to require extra scrutiny when approached with a linear data model, even more so without arbitrary jumps. To not transpose too often — thereby invalidating the previous computations’ linearity — I took the approach of linearly evaluating a micro-DSL to express each finitely wide tche n as finite chunks of tcheFlat n :: [Int]:

tcheFlat 1 = [1..]
tcheFlat n = eval (cycle actions) $ tcheFlat (n-1) where
    actions = concat [[flat (n-m), grab (n-m-1,m)] | m <- [1..n-1]]

tche n i j | j <= n    = (chunksOf n $ tcheFlat n) ## i ## j
           | otherwise = -n

Of course left in the dust by the closed-form formula, D. Knuth’s table’s corner element is computationally viably accessible using this method:

*Main> tcheInf 32 32
2093

Source: tche.hs

The naïve’s shackles cannot be undone.

2022-02-19, post № 255

web, #security, #hsts

Without the intend to trivialize the world of material possessions, possibly the novelty alone makes the many quirks and unseen effects which occur in the presence of information-centric conduct hard to grasp in its entirety. Most bizarrely, the concept of ownership admits only to a loose analogy: expected algorithmic runtimes to reproduce bit patterns. Yet if these expections are broken or systems otherwise circumvented, stolen goods are merely accurately replicated hunks of data; nothing ever gets moved or removed, only copied against the origin’s will. Still, the sig­nif­i­cance is akin to theft, only securing bits requires more than not losing them.

As such, it is no wonder that a tender technology like the web took a long and winded path before reaching present-day hardened cryptographic ubiquity. But the tolls of time and progress are plentiful: from the fundamentally inextensible to the obsolete and the undying facets kept alive through compatibility shims, one of such shims being HTTP-talking sockets whose only assignment is to appeal to the client’s senses and never to talk with them again, referring to their HTTPS comrades which are in control of the sought after pages.
Yet cannot the clients remember? Should the clients even seek port 80? What does it mean to support SSL? To enforce it? Answers to these questions are given by HSTS, yet it too has morphed over the years; and a server’s adherence is not certain.

Vanishing members

2022-01-22, post № 254

programming, #c++, #template-metaprogramming

Inheritance is all about keeping material possessions in the familly. Thus, a child may access non-private parent members:

#include <iostream>
struct A { int v{5}; };
struct B : A {
    void f() { std::cout << v << std::endl; } };
int main() { B{}.f(); }

Even though v has not been declared inside struct B’s declaration, it accesses it through its inheritance ties to struct A. Feeling the need to be polymorphic with regards to the numerical representation, struct A may be changed to a struct template:

#include <iostream>
template<typename T> struct A { T v{5}; };
struct B : A<int> {
    void f() { std::cout << v << std::endl; } };
int main() { B{}.f(); }

Yet hard-baking in the numerical type for the derived struct feels overly restrictive. As such, one might want to build a templated class hierarchy:

#include <iostream>
template<typename T> struct A { T v{5}; };
template<typename T> struct B : A<T> {
    void f() { std::cout << v << std::endl; } };
int main() { B<int>{}.f(); }

What surprised me nearly two weeks ago — when a templated class hierarchy naturally arose — is that the above does not compile.

$ clang++ 2.cpp
2.cpp:4:29: error: use of undeclared identifier 'v'
    void f() { std::cout << v << std::endl; } };
                            ^
1 error generated.