Beauty is an attribute that makes something extremely appealing. In [technology](technology.md), [engineering](engineering.md), [mathematics](math.md) and other [science](science.md) beauty is, despite it's relative vagueness and subjectivity, an important aspect of design, and in fact this "mathematical beauty" has lots of times some clearly defined shapes -- for example [simplicity](kiss.md) is mostly considered beautiful.
Beauty is the quality of being extremely appealing and pleasing. In [technology](technology.md), [engineering](engineering.md), [mathematics](math.md) and other [science](science.md) beauty is, despite it's relative vagueness and subjectivity, an important aspect of design, and in fact this "mathematical beauty" has lots of times some clearly defined shapes -- for example [simplicity](kiss.md) is mostly considered beautiful.
Beauty can perhaps be seen as a [heuristic](heuristic.md), a touch of intuition that guides the expert in exploration of previously unknown fields, as we have come to learn that the greatest discoveries tend to be very beautiful. Indeed, beginners and [noobs](noob.md) are mostly concerned with learning hard facts, learning standards and getting familiar with already known ways of solving known problems, they often aren't able to recognize what's beautiful and what's ugly. But as one gets more and more experienced and find himself near the borders of current knowledge, there is suddenly no guidance but intuition, beauty, to suggest ways forward, and here one starts to get the feel for beauty. At this point the field, even if highly exact and rigorous, has become an [art](art.md).
Bloat is a very wide term that in the context of [software](software.md) and technology means extreme growth in terms of source code size, complexity, number of [dependencies](dependency.md), [redundancy](redundancy.md), unnecessary or useless features (e.g. [feature creep](feature_creep.md)) and resource usage, all of which lead to inefficient, badly designed technology with bugs and [security](security.md) vulnerabilities, as well as **loss of [freedom](free_software.md)**, waste of human effort and great obscurity and ugliness. Simply put bloat is burdening [bullshit](bullshit.md). Bloat is extremely bad and one of the greatest technological issues of today. Creating bloat is bad engineering at its worst and unfortunately it is what's absolutely taking over all technology nowadays, mostly due to [capitalism](capitalism.md), commercialization, consumerism and incompetent people trying to take on jobs they are in no way qualified to do.
Bloat is a very wide term that in the context of [software](software.md) and technology means overcomplication, unnecessary complexity and/or extreme growth in terms of source code size, overall complexity, number of [dependencies](dependency.md), [redundancy](redundancy.md), unnecessary or useless features (e.g. [feature creep](feature_creep.md)) and resource usage, all of which lead to inefficient, badly designed technology with bugs (e.g. [security](security.md) vulnerabilities), as well as **loss of [freedom](free_software.md)**, waste of human effort and great obscurity and ugliness. Simply put bloat is burdening [bullshit](bullshit.md). Bloat is extremely bad and one of the greatest technological issues of today. Creating bloat is bad engineering at its worst and unfortunately it is what's absolutely taking over all technology nowadays, mostly due to [capitalism](capitalism.md) causing commercialization, consumerism and incompetent people trying to take on jobs they are in no way qualified to do.
[LRS](lrs.md), [suckless](suckless.md) and some others rather small groups are trying to address the issue and write software that is good, minimal, safe, efficient and well functioning. Nevertheless our numbers are very small and in this endeavor we are basically standing against the whole world and the most powerful tech corporations.
[LRS](lrs.md), [suckless](suckless.md) and some others rather small groups are trying to address the issue and write software that is good, [minimal](minimalism.md), safe, efficient and well functioning. Nevertheless our numbers are very small and in this endeavor we are basically standing against the whole world and the most powerful tech corporations.
The issue of bloat may of course appear outside of the strict boundaries of computer technology, nowadays we may already observe e.g. **[science bloat](science_bloat.md)** -- science is becoming so overcomplicated (many times on purpose, e.g. by means of [bullshit](bullshit.md) science) that 99% people can NOT understand it, they have to BELIEVE "scientific authorities", which does not at all differ from the dangerous blind religious behavior. Any time a new paper comes out, chances are that not even SCIENTISTS from the same field but with a different specialization will understand it in depth and have to simply trust its results. This combined with self-interest obsessed society gives rise to [soyence](soyence.md) and large scale brainwashing and spread of "science approved" propaganda.
@ -27,7 +27,7 @@ The following is a list of software usually considered a good, typical example o
- [IDEs](ide.md) such as [VSCode](vscode.md) or [NetBeans](netbeans.md).
- Big [game engines](game_engine.md) such as [Unreal](unreal_engine.md), [Unity](unity.md) or [Godot](godot.md).
- Practically all commercial [games](games.md) made in the [21st century](21st_century.md) such as [World of Warcraft](wow.md), Call of Duty etc.
- [Neural networks](neural_network.md) aka "AI".
- [Neural networks](neural_network.md) aka "AI" that is forced into everything nowadays.
## Small Bloat
@ -81,4 +81,5 @@ The concept of bloat can be applied even outside the computing world, e.g. to no
- [clothes](clothes.md)
- house decoration
- [cars](car.md)
- using languages other than [English](english.md)
Free (as in freedom) culture is a movement aiming for the relaxation of [intellectual property](intellectual_property.md) restrictions, mainly that of [copyright](copyright.md), to allow free usage, reusing and sharing of [artworks](art.md) and other kind of [information](information.md). Free culture argues that our society has gone too far in forcefully restricting the natural freedom of information by very strict laws (e.g. by authors holding copyright even 100 years after their death) and that we're hurting art, creativity, education and progress by continuing to strengthen restrictions on using, modifying ([remixing](remix.md)) and sharing things like [books](book.md), [music](music.md) and scientific papers. The word "free" in free culture refers to freedom, not just price -- free cultural works have to be more than just available gratis, they must also give its users some specific legal rights. Nevertheless free culture itself isn't against commercialization of art, it just argues for rather doing so by other means than selling legal rights to it. The opposite of free culture is [permission culture](permission_culture.md) (culture requiring permission for reuse of intellectual works).
The promoters of free culture want to relax intellectual property laws ([copyright](copyright.md), [patents](patent.md), [trademarks](tm.md) etc.) but also promote an ethic of sharing and remixing being good (as opposed to the demonizing anti-"[piracy](piracy.md)" propaganda of today), they sometimes mark their works with words **"some rights reserved"** or even "no rights reserved", as opposed to the traditional "all rights reserved".
@ -56,7 +56,7 @@ In hacker culture the period between 1943 (start of building of the [ENIAC](enia
In 1945 the construction of **the first electronic digital fully programmable computer** was completed at University of Pennsylvania as the US Army project. It was named **[ENIAC](eniac.md)** (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer). It used 18000 vacuum tubes and 15000 relays, weighted 27 tons and ran on the frequency of 5 KHz. [Punch cards](punch_card.md) were used to program the computer in its machine language; it was [Turing complete](turing_complete.md), i.e. allowed using branches and loops. ENIAC worked with signed ten digit decimal numbers.
Among hackers the period between 1961 to 1971 is known as the **Iron Age of computers**. The period spans time since the first minicomputer ([PDP1](pdp1.md)) to the first microprocessor ([Intel 4004](intel4004.md)). This would be follow by so called *elder days*.
Among hackers the period between 1961 to 1971 is known as the **Iron Age of computers**. The period spans time since the first minicomputer ([PDP1](pdp1.md)) to the first microprocessor ([Intel 4004](intel4004.md)). This would be followed by so called *elder days*.
On July 20 1969 **first men landed on the Moon** (Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin) during the USA Apollo 11 mission. This tremendous achievement is very much attributed to the cold war in which USA and Soviet Union raced in space exploration. The landing was achieved with the help of a relatively simple on-board computer: Apollo Guidance Computer clocked at 2 MHz, had 4 KiB of [RAM](ram.md) and about 70 KB [ROM](rom.md). The assembly source code of its software is nowadays available online.
@ -78,7 +78,7 @@ Around this time [Internet](internet.md) is not yet mainstream but it is, along
At the beginning of 1991 [Tim Berners-Lee](berners_lee.md) created the **[World Wide Web](www.md)**, a network of interlinked pages on the Internet. This marks another huge step in the Internet revolution, the Web would become the primary Internet service and the greatest software platform for publishing any kind of information faster and cheaper than ever before. It is what would popularize the Internet and bring it to the masses.
On 25 August 1991 **[Linus Torvalds](linus_torvalds.md) announced [Linux](linux.md)**, his project for a completely free as in freedom Unix-like [operating system](os.md). Linux would become part of [GNU](gnu.md) and later one of the biggest and most successful software projects in history. It would end up powering Internet servers and supercomputers as well as desktop computers of a great number of users. Linux proved that free software works and surpasses proprietary systems.
On 25 August 1991 **[Linus Torvalds](linus_torvalds.md) announced [Linux](linux.md)**, his project for a completely free as in freedom Unix-like [operating system](os.md) kernel. Linux would become part of [GNU](gnu.md) and later one of the biggest and most successful software projects in history. It would end up powering Internet servers and supercomputers as well as desktop computers of a great number of users. Linux proved that free software works and surpasses proprietary systems.
After this very recent history follows, it's hard to judge which recent events will be of historical significance much later. 1990s have seen a huge growth of computer power, video [games](game.md) such as [Doom](doom.md) led to development of [GPU](gpu.md)s and high quality computer graphics along with a wide adoption of computers by common people, which in turn helped the further growth of Internet. During the 90s we've also seen the rise of the [open source movement](open_source.md). Shortly after 2000 [Lawrence Lessig](lessig.md) founded [Creative Commons](creative_commons.md), an organization that came hand in hand with the [free culture](free_culture.md) movement inspired by the [free software movement](free_software.md). At this point over 50% of US households had a computer. Cell phones became a commonly owned item and after about 2005 so called "[smart](smart.md) phones" and other "smart" devices replaced them as a universal communication device capable of connecting to the Internet. Before 2020 we've seen a huge advancement in [neural network](neural_network.md) [Artificial Intelligence](ai.md) which will likely be the topic of the future. [Quantum computers](quantum.md) are being highly researched with already existing primitive prototypes; this will also likely be very important in the following years. Besides AI there has appeared a great interest and development of [virtual reality](vr.md), [drones](drone.md), electromobiles, robotic Mars exploration and others. However the society and technology has generally seen a decadence after 2010, [capitalism](capitalism.md) has pushed technology to become hostile and highly [abusive to users](capitalist_software.md), extreme [bloat](bloat.md) of technology causes highly inefficient, extremely expensive and unreliable technology. In addition society is dealing with a lot of serious issues such as the [global warming](global_warming.md) and many people are foreseeing a [collapse of society](collapse.md).
Holy war is a perpetual passionate argument over usually two possible choices. This separates people into almost religious teams. In holy wars people tend to defend whichever side they stand on to the death and can get emotional when discussing the topic. Some examples of holy wars are (in brackets indicated the side taken by [LRS](lrs.md)):
Holy war is a perpetual passionate argument over usually two possible choices. This separates people into almost religious teams that sometimes argue to death about details such as what name something should be given, very much resembling traditional disagreements between religions and their churches. In holy wars people tend to defend whichever side they stand on to the death and can get emotional when discussing the topic. Some examples of holy wars are (in brackets indicated the side taken by [LRS](lrs.md)):
- **[tabs](tab.md) vs spaces** (spaces)
- **[vim](vim.md) vs [emacs](emacs.md)** (vim)
@ -11,7 +11,7 @@ Holy war is a perpetual passionate argument over usually two possible choices. T
- **[KDE](kde.md) vs [GNOME](gnome.md)** (neither, both are [bloat](bloat.md))
- **pronunciation of [gif](gif.md) as "gif" vs "jif"**
- **[Windows](windows.md) vs [Mac](mac.md)** (neither, this is a normie holy war)
- **[GNU](gnu.md)/Linux vs [Linux](linux.md)**
- **"[GNU](gnu.md)/Linux" vs "[Linux](linux.md)"**
- **[copyleft](copyleft.md) vs [permissive](permissive.md)** (permissive, [public domain](public_domain.md))
KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid!) is a design philosophy that favors simplicity, solutions that are **as simple as possible** to achieve given task. This philosophy doesn't primarily stem from laziness and a want to save time (though these are valid reasons too), but mainly from the fact that higher [complexity](complexity.md) comes with increasingly negative effects such the cost of development, cost of [maintenance](maintenance.md), greater probability of [bugs](bug.md) and failure, more [dependencies](dependency.md) and more [security](security.md) vulnerabilities. This stance is related to technology [minimalism](minimalism.md).
KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid!) is a design philosophy that favors simplicity, solutions that are **as simple as possible** to achieve given task. This philosophy doesn't primarily stem from laziness and a want to save time (though these are valid reasons too), but mainly from the fact that higher [complexity](complexity.md) comes with increasingly negative effects such as the cost of development, cost of [maintenance](maintenance.md), greater probability of [bugs](bug.md) (e.g. [security](security.md) vulnerabilities) and failure, more [dependencies](dependency.md). This stance is related to technology [minimalism](minimalism.md).
Apparently the term *KISS* originated in the US Army plane engineering: the planes needed to be repairable by *stupid* soldiers with limited tools under field conditions.
@ -8,8 +8,8 @@ Apparently the term *KISS* originated in the US Army plane engineering: the plan
- Using a [plain text](plain_text.md) TODO.txt file instead of a dedicated [bug](bug.md) tracker.
- Creating website in plain [HTML](html.md) instead of using some complex web framework such as [Wordpress](wordpress.md).
- Implementing a web left-right sweeping image gallery with HTML [iframe](iframe.md) instead of some overcomplicated [JavaScript](js.md) library.
- Using a trivial [shell](shell.md) script for compiling your programs rather than using a complex build system such as [CMake](cmake.md).
- Implementing a web left-right sweeping image gallery with HTML [iframe](iframe.md) instead of some overcomplicated [JavaScript](js.md) library. { Example stolen from [reactionary software](reactionary_software.md) website. ~drummyfish }
- Using a trivial [shell](shell.md) script for compiling your programs rather than a complex build system such as [CMake](cmake.md).
- ...
Compared to [suckless](suckless.md), [unix philosophy](unix_philosophy.md) and [LRS](lrs.md), KISS is a more general term and isn't tied to any specific group or movement, it doesn't imply any specifics but rather the general overall idea of simplicity being an advantage ([less is more](less_is_more.md), [worse is better](worse_is_better.md), ...).
@ -30,6 +30,8 @@ This is a Wiki for [less retarded software](lrs.md), [less retarded society](les
This wiki is **NOT** a satire.
Yes, everything is **UNDER CONSTRUCTION**.
Are you a failure? Learn [which type](fail_ab.md) you are.
**Before contributing please read the [rules & style](wiki_style.md)! By contributing you agree to release your contribution under our [waiver](wiki_rights.md).** {But contributions aren't really accepted RN :) ~drummyfish }
@ -10,15 +10,17 @@ Suckless is pretty cool, it has inspired LRS, but watch out, as with most of the
## Attributes
Notable attributes of suckless software include:
- **Being [free software](free_software.md)** with the preference of **permissive [licenses](license.md)** such as [MIT](mit.md) and [CC0](cc0.md).
- **Extreme [minimalism](minimalism.md) and minimizing [dependencies](dependency.md)**, elimination of any [bullshit](bullshit.md) and **[bloat](bloat.md)**. Advocating [Unix philosophy](unix_philosophy.md), [KISS](kiss.md) etc.
- **Configuration of software is part of its source code** (`config.h`) and change of this configuration requires recompiling the software (which is extremely easy and fast with suckless software). This removes the need for dealing with config files which requires special libraries, file systems and extra code.
- Mainly using two [programming languages](programming_language.md): **[C](c.md)** (C89 or C99) for compiled programs and **[POSIX shell](posix_shell.md)** for scripting.
- Mainly using two [programming languages](programming_language.md): **[C](c.md)** (C89 or C99) for compiled programs and **[POSIX shell](posix_shell.md)** for scripting. Some also use languages such as [go](go.md) or [lisp](lisp.md), but they're in minority.
- **[Forking](fork.md) and [compiling](compiling.md) by default**, software is distributed in source format (no binaries), every user is supposed to create a personal customized fork and compile/customize the software himself.
- Mods (extension/addons) are implemented and distributed as **[patch](patch.md) files**. The idea is to fork the base version of the software and then apply patches to make a unique, completely personalized version of the software.
- **Typical upper limit for [lines of code](loc.md) of about 10k**, mostly just about 1-2k. This makes software easy to understand, modify, fork and maintain.
- **Focus on the technology itself** without mixing it with [politics](politics.md) and other [bullshit](bs.md) such as [COCs](coc.md).
- Not aiming for mainstream popularity, being a bit of an **elite club**, in the good sense -- suckless is for expert users who understand, handle and create non-mainstream technology without handholding. Trying to be normie friendly would just lead to software and community that looks like the mainstream software and its community.
- Not aiming for mainstream popularity, being a bit of an **elite club**, in the good sense -- suckless is for expert users who understand, handle and create non-mainstream technology without handholding. Trying to be normie friendly would just lead to software and community that looks like the mainstream software and its community. { My view on this is that it's not that suckless WANTS to be an elitist club for its own sake; the issue lies in mainstream technology being hostile towards ethical software -- using ethical software nowadays requires one to be very tech savvy, hence it's not suckless who is discriminating but rather those who create mainstream technology. ~drummyfish }
