21st century, known as the Age Of [Shit](shit.md), is already one of the worst centuries in history, despite only being around for a short time. How unlucky it is to have been born in such a shitty time.
21st century, known as the Age Of [Shit](shit.md), is already one of the worst centuries in history, despite only being around for a short time. How unlucky it is to have been born in such a shitty time. In this century there exists no more [good](good.md), there is just [evil](right.md) opposed by [another evil](pseudoleft.md) and people no longer even know what good means, they only support one of the two evils, thinking it's the good; there are rare few who support some kind of third evil that's not one of the two major evils, but all in all there is nothing but evil.
@ -18,7 +18,26 @@ There exist **tools for bypassing censorship**, e.g. [proxies](proxy.md) or encr
## Examples
TODO: wikipedia, google, fediblock, DVD codes, copyright, ...
Censorship is so frequent that it's hard to give just a short list of examples, especially [nowadays](21st_century.md), but here are a few:
- [Encryption](encryption.md) provides mathematical ways of implementing censorship in communication.
- [Copyright](copyright.md) enables authors to censor their works at will and enforce this censorship legally, for any reason whatsoever -- this also subsequently leads to further censorship by media hosting websites such as [YouTube](youtube.md), to mass deletions of valuable works from public archives and so on.
- [Wikipedia](wikipedia.md) practices very strong censorship, it has a list of banned sources (calling it by an euphemism of "deprecated" sources) which include even such big media as Daily Mail, furthermore a lot of things which average Wikipedia editor dislikes are censored, e.g. the url to the controversial site 8kun (https://8kun.top) must not be mentioned in its article (take a look at page source comment, March 2024). Content Wikipedia deems harmful to someone will also be censored, resulting in removal of many valuable information you would want to find in an encyclopedia.
- [Political correctness](political_correctness.md) is based on censorship, a great part of it is retroactive censorship and rewriting of old works, for example some populist German book publisher refused to publish the Winnetou books, a classic and important work of art, under claim of "racism"; similarly iconic books like *Ten Little Niggers* by Agatha Christie had to be crippled and renamed; the famous series Futurama is commonly censored by broadcasters (deleting words like *Jesus*, *bastard*, ...). The examples here are countless. This is used for political censorship, for example on the Internet it's extremely hard to publish any opinions not aligned with the currently ruling [pseudoleftist](pseudoleft.md) ideology because terms of service of any social media platform or even website hosting company have to forbid so called "[hate speech](hate_speech.md)" which just means anything not aligned with the ideology.
- Pseudocommunist regimes of the 20th century practiced very strong censorship, e.g. in Czechoslovakia all public [art](art.md) such as music and plays had to pass an ideological review before being approved for performance.
- Child pornography is nowadays unfortunately completely censored, it is mandatory to be censored in most first world countries
- Mass shootings come with attempts by governments at censoring the messages sent by the attacker, sometimes even their names; one example for all can be the 2019 Christchurch shooting by Brenton Tarrant whose manifesto, called *The Great Replacement* (downloadable e.g. at Anna's Archive), was being forced down off of the Internet following the attack.
- In mainstream "[science](soyence.md)" censorship is nowadays part of standard publishing process, known under the euphemism of *[peer review](peer_censorship.md)*.
- [Google](google.md)'s search engine has very strong censorship and political bias built-in, it's done mostly by downranking targeted sites to make them practically unfindable, in some cases downright blocking sites altogether. Some of the affected sites include [Encyclopedia Dramatica](dramatica.md), Metapedia, Infogalactic, 8kun, Sanctioned Suicide and many others.
- Censorship enjoys big popularity on the [soynet](soynet.md), e.g. there is the infamous fediblock list of blocked [fediverse](fediverse.md) instances.
- China very intensively applies censorship to the Internet, especially in regards to the country's official ideology and [history](history.md), using the so called [great firewall](great_firewall.md). China also does weird funny kinds of censorship like removing bones from video games. Why do they do it? No one knows. Germany similarly for some stupid reasons replaces blood in video games with green liquid, ruining the games.
- North Korea is probably the most isolated country in the world, it prevents essentially any information from behind its borders from reaching its citizens, it even completely blocks the [Internet](internet.md) and rather established its own intranet ([Kwangmyong](kwangmyong.md)).
- Japanese hilariously blur genitalia in porn.
- Any so called "[private](privacy.md) information" of individuals is nowadays in many countries required to be censored from the public.
- In 2007 there was an infamous attempt at censoring the AACS DVD encryption keys (09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0) which allowed to circumvent [DRM](drm.md).
- [Nazis](nazi.md) publicly burned [books](book.md) they deemed harmful (e.g. for having been written by [Jews](jew.md)) -- though this was more of a public theatre, it was also indeed partially an act of censorship.
- Circa 2019 [reddit](reddit.md), until then quite highly [free speech](free_speech.md) website, completely turned around and launched a censorship tsunami that destroyed thousands of communities, all just to make the site more advertiser friendly.
@ -14,6 +14,8 @@ Drummyfish has a personal website at [www.tastyfish.cz](https://www.tastyfish.cz
Photos of drummyfish: [young](https://cloud.disroot.org/apps/files_sharing/publicpreview/4E36WS5ZN42pasg?file=/me/156%20-%20sQNYr3g.png&fileId=122364667&x=1280&y=800&a=true), [older](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/26/Drummyfish_profile_photo.png) (after being confronted with real life) and [naked](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Drummyfish_naked_all_sides_beard.png).
Drummyfish experiences a lot of discrimination but still doesn't hate his discriminators. As a straight white male in [21st century](21st_century.md) drummyfish is a victim of regular discrimination and racism in form of social revenge for historical events he has nothing to do with. Drummyfish is not covid vaccinated -- for this he was sorted into the second class of citizens during the covid pandemic and experienced another form of discrimination, e.g. what today would be called a "verbal abuse", segregation and so on. He never had covid. As a [Slav](slav.md) he comes from an ancestry of slaves, so in [America](usa.md) he would be called a [hero](hero_culture.md).
Drummyfish's real name is Miloslav Číž, he was born on 24.08.1990 and lives in Moravia, Czech Republic, [Earth](earth.md) (he rejects the concept of a country/[nationalism](nationalism.md), the info here serves purely to specify a location). He is a more or less straight [male](man.md) of the [white](white.md) [race](race.md). He started programming at high school in [Pascal](pascal.md), then he went on to study [compsci](compsci.md) (later focused on [computer graphics](graphics.md)) in a Brno University of Technology and got a [master's degree](msc.md) in 2017, however he subsequently refused to find a job in the industry, partly because of his views (manifested by [LRS](lrs.md)) and partly because of mental health issues. He rather chose to stay closer to the working class and do less harmful [slavery](job.md) such as cleaning and physical [spam](spam.md) distribution, and continues [hacking](hacking.md) on his programming (and other) projects in his spare time in order to be able to do it with absolute freedom.
{ Why doxx myself? Following the [LRS](lrs.md) philosophy, I believe information should be free. [Censorship](censorship.md) -- even in the name of [privacy](privacy.md) -- goes against information freedom. We should live in a society in which people are moral and don't abuse others by any means, including via availability of their private information. And in order to achieve ideal society we have to actually live it, i.e. slowly start to behave as if it was already in place. Of course, I can't tell you literally everything (such as my passwords etc.), but the more I can tell you, the closer we are to the ideal society. ~drummyfish }
@ -10,7 +10,7 @@ A **formal language** is defined as a (potentially infinite) set of strings (whi
## Classification
We usually classify formal languages according to the **[Chomsky](chomsky.md) hierarchy**, by their computational "difficulty". Each level of the hierarchy has associated models of computation ([grammars](grammar.md), [automatons](automaton.md), ...) that are able to compute **all** languages of that level (remember that a level of the hierarchy is a superset of the levels below it and so also includes all the "simpler" languages). The hierarchy is more or less as follows:
We usually classify formal languages according to the **[Chomsky](chomsky.md) hierarchy**, by their computational "difficulty". Each level of the hierarchy has associated models of computation ([grammars](grammar.md), [automatons](automaton.md), expressions, ...) that are able to compute **all** languages of that level (remember that a level of the hierarchy is a superset of the levels below it and so also includes all the "simpler" languages). The hierarchy is more or less as follows:
- **all languages**: This includes all possible languages, even those that computers cannot analyze (e.g. the language representing the [halting problem](halting_problem.md)). These languages can only be computed by theoretical computers that cannot physically exist in our universe.
- **type 0**, **recursively enumerable languages**: Most "difficult"/general languages that computers in our universe can analyze. These languages can be computed e.g. by a **[Turing machine](turing_machine.md)**, [lambda calculus](lambda_calculus.md) or a general unrestricted [grammar](grammar.md). Example language: a^n where *n* is not a [prime](prime.md).
@ -18,6 +18,8 @@ We usually classify formal languages according to the **[Chomsky](chomsky.md) hi
- **type 2**, **context free languages**: Computed by e.g. non-deterministic pushdown automata or context free grammars. (Deterministic pushdown automata compute a class of languages that is between type 2 and type 3).
- **type 3**, **regular languages**: The *easiest*, *weakest* kind of languages, computed e.g. by [finite state automata](finite_state_automaton.md)s or [regular expressions](regexp.md). This class includes also all finite languages.
Note that here we are basically always examining **infinite languages** as finite languages are trivial. If a language is finite (i.e. the set of all strings of the language is finite), it can automatically be computed by any type 3 computational model. In [real life](irl.md) computers are actually always equivalent to a finite state automaton, i.e. the *weakest* computational type (because a computer memory is always finite and so there is always a finite number of states a computer can be in). However this doesn't mean there is no point in studying infinite languages, of course, as we're still interested in the structure, computational methods and approximating the infinite models of computation.
Note that here we are basically always examining **[infinite](infinity.md) languages** as finite languages are trivial. If a language is finite (i.e. the set of all strings of the language is finite), it can automatically be computed by any type 3 computational model. In [real life](irl.md) computers are actually always equivalent to a finite state automaton, i.e. the *weakest* computational type (because a computer memory is always finite and so there is always a finite number of states a computer can be in). However this doesn't mean there is no point in studying infinite languages, of course, as we're still interested in the structure, computational methods and approximating the infinite models of computation.
Also bear in mind these classes aren't exhaustive, there exist more classes and there are still undiscovered/unproven classes of languages, the Chomsky hierarchy enumerates just the important ones. For example regular languages have a further subclass of star-free languages.
**NOTE**: When trying to classify a [programming language](programming_language.md), we have to be careful about what we classify: one thing is what a program written in given language can compute, and another thing is the language's [syntax](syntax.md). To the former all strict general-purpose programming languages such as [C](c.md) or [JavaScript](javascript.md) are type 0 ([Turing complete](turing_complete.md)). From the syntax point of view it's a bit more complicated and we need to further define what exactly a syntax is (where is the line between syntax and semantic errors): it may be (and often is) that syntactically the class will be lower. There is actually a famous [meme](meme.md) about [Perl](perl.md) syntax being undecidable.
@ -16,7 +16,7 @@ Around 50 AD Heron of Alexandria, an Egyptian mathematician, created a number of
In the 3rd century Chinese mathematician Liu Hui describes operations with **negative numbers**, even though negative numbers have already appeared before. In 600s AD an Indian astronomer Brahmagupta first used the number **[zero](zero.md)** in a systematic way, even though hints on the number zero without deeper understanding of it appeared much earlier. In 9th century the Mayan empire is [collapsing](collapse.md), though it would somewhat recover and reshape.
Year 476 is set to mark the fall (political split) of Roman empire and by this the end of Antiquity and **start of Middle Ages**, a time during which technological [progress](progress.md) and [art](art.md) is seen to stagnate a bit. Rome had been [collapsing](collapse.md) slowly but in its downfall it greatly resembled our [current western society](21st_century.md), it became split, people got spoiled, lost sense of morality, women started to demand [more power](feminism.md) and so on -- Roman empire was basically like the ancient times [US](usa.md) (with a similar relationship to Greece as US has to the older, wiser Europe) with highly [capitalist](capitalism.md) practices ([free trade](free_trade.md), ads, banks, insurance, even industries that achieved quite high mass production, ...), imperialism, [military](military.md) obsession, fascism, constant political fights, pragmatic thinking (e.g. rhetoric, the art of manipulation, was greatly preferred over excellence at [art](art.md)), mass entertainment and huge competitiveness -- this all led to its demise.
Year 476 is set to mark the fall of Roman empire (last roman emperor deposed) and by this the end of Antiquity and **start of Middle Ages**, a time during which technological [progress](progress.md) and [art](art.md) is seen to stagnate a bit. Rome had been [collapsing](collapse.md) slowly but in its downfall it greatly resembled our [current western society](21st_century.md), it became split, people got spoiled, lost sense of morality, women started to demand [more power](feminism.md) and so on -- Roman empire was basically like the ancient times [US](usa.md) (with a similar relationship to Greece as US has to the older, wiser Europe) with highly [capitalist](capitalism.md) practices ([free trade](free_trade.md), ads, banks, insurance, even industries that achieved quite high mass production, ...), imperialism, [military](military.md) obsession, fascism, constant political fights, pragmatic thinking (e.g. rhetoric, the art of manipulation, was greatly preferred over excellence at [art](art.md)), mass entertainment and huge competitiveness -- this all led to its demise.
In 1429 Persian mathematician al-Kashi computed [pi](pi.md) to about 14 digit accuracy which was a great leap in this discipline.
@ -10,6 +10,8 @@ Regular expressions are widely used in [Unix](unix.md) tools, [programming langu
From the point of view of [theoretical computer science](theoretical_compsci.md) and [formal languages](formal_language.md) **regular expressions are computationally weak**, they are equivalent to the weakest models of computations such as regular [grammars](grammar.md) or **[finite state machines](finite_state_machine.md)** -- in fact regular expressions are often implemented as finite state machines. This means that **regular expressions can NOT describe any possible pattern** (for example they can't capture a math expression with brackets in which start brackets have to match end brackets), only relatively simple ones; however it turns out that very many commonly encountered patterns are simple enough to be described this way, so we have a [good enough](good_enough.md) tool. The advantage of regular expressions is exactly that they are simple, yet very often sufficient.
**Are there yet simpler pattern describers than regular expressions?** Yes, of course, the simplest example is just a string directly describing the pattern, e.g. "abc" matching exactly just the string "abc" -- this is called a *fixed string*. Notable subclass of regular expressions are so called *star-free* languages/expressions which are regular expressions without the star (repetition) operator. Star-free expressions can be used as a [simpler](kiss.md) variant to regular expressions, they may still describe many patterns and are easier to implement.
