fsr help

 all because the gemhost disallows requests from http proxies

### applications you can run a computer without an operating system or applications per se, because at that point all youre running is programs. my favourite example of this is the commodore 64, which like so many 8-bit computers had a version of basic on a chip. i dont know where basic ended and an operating system started, because on some machines ive actually worked with, basic on a chip (actually a cartridge, but that essentially let you connect a chip to run things from) didnt give you access to the floppy drive, you had to boot dos and load basic from a floppy to do that. for all i know, basic on the commodore 64 worked the same way. but the c64 did let you load and save from a cassette. but if the hardware is simple enough, the line between program and operating system can get very thin. even with a modern pc, you can still write a single "program" that starts by bootstrapping various codes that an operating system would need- then simply runs the code of that simple program. most people though, prefer the ease and flexibility of using an actual operating system. and at the very least if you add a graphical subsystem to this, you can now run what have come to be known as applications. personally, i think of the line between a program and an application as a line based on the intended audience. an application can still technically be (and technically is) a program, but "programs" are for people who know something about how computers work and "applications" are for people who just want to use the computer. i also wish everyone knew a bit more about how computers work. but education is sorely lacking in this regard. there have been a few times in history when this has improved drastically: when basic and logo were invented, during the microcomputer revolution of the late 70s and mostly 80s, when olpc started offering the sugar platform to users and when sbcs rolled out. all of these events have been good for education, but none seem as ubiquitous as basic on 8-bit microcomputers. of course, i think that was concentrated mostly on the global north, but i think we could have made entire countries computer literate. in the 90s, tech companies seemed to focus on outsourcing to the global south to save costs on labour, while abandoning literacy efforts in the global north because why train future workers you wont hire when you can get them to buy friendlier software instead of writing their own? it has also helped literacy that there is now so much software you can take apart and then try to make your own from, and that the web has made development tools (even javascript, despite every gripe i have about it) so ubiquitous, but i feel like the universal education we COULD have is still lacking in this regard. as if we have all the ingredients necessary but simply refuse to bake anything. there is of course, quite a lot of education regarding computers compared to what there used to be. i think it still has the feel of "we are taking away more than ever with one hand, and giving away more than ever with the other". nonetheless, we certainly have an abundance of applications. we have an abundance of applications and though it might not look that way, a dearth of people to maintain them, and a dearth of necessary education (despite having quite a lot of education that is related some way or another) and i feel this is somehow out of balance. but i dont think its any single factor that is the cause of this imbalance (unless of course, its for-profit software corporations who sponsor their competition, insinuate their demands and pretend its not a takeover, even after their actual plans for takeover were leaked to the public and verified in court). to write this document im using an application, its the application i use more than any other (apart from maybe the web browser) and it was initially written by someone else, at which point i added maybe 50 to 80 percent of the code, then removed 10 percent and redid at least 90 percent of the original code. but it wouldnt have ever been written (not by me) without that initial work taking place first. and if people call it a "program" thats fine, ive written and maintained it like a program and had no ambition to make a hallowed "app" or anything. not that theres anything wrong with that necessarily, but an "application" requires more maintenence than a "program" unless we are going by the common sense notion that theyre the same thing (and an artificial distinction). which is fine with me as well. but if people differ, i think these are the lines along which they make the distinction. i could always be wrong. but this leaves the question of what to call the programs that unix made standardish (or more accurately, that posix made standard) because are they applications? they feel more like programs. but i think you can get away with calling them either one. if you write a shell, then suddenly your program (or application) benefits directly from all the programs that are standard fare on a posix system. ive heard that "no one cares about posix" anymore, and i can honestly say ive never been passionate about it, but if thats because i took it for granted until people started fucking with it, that seems like it checks out. at any rate, my favourite applications are tor browser (because fuck mozilla) and idk, xterm i guess? because xterm is so annoying sometimes but its incredibly fast and comes standard with xenocara. ive used loads of other term windows and xterm is the only one i really bother with. you try as many as possible and see which one is the most amazing in terms of sheer speed. i mean i can think of one or two that MIGHT be faster which actually look or feel worse than xterm, so there you go. as for why i care about raw speed when the output is going too fast to read, i just do. you can choose your own criteria. i do use other applications, of course. i was a lot more interested in them prior to github becoming a monopoly owned by a megacorporation. 200,000 projects moved away from github as a response, but most mainstream projects moved CLOSER instead- like moths to a flame. or lambs to the slaughter. at any rate i much prefer mplayer to vlc, but i actually use a machine thats slow enough (when its running openbsd at least) that vlc can play video "smoothly" and mplayer actually cant. as far as i can tell it should be the other way around, but its not, perhaps due to one of the many interesting security features that openbsd has. there are many speed tweaks for openbsd, including disabling some of the security features. i have no interest in that, i dont have repos full of dotfiles, i try to run applications as close to their default settings as i can stand and as always, there are exceptions. this isnt because im against tweaking settings or because i never liked to do so, its because i spent years doing that and im too lazy to tweak every setting now. ive always admired good defaults, when they exist. application design can make things easier for users, but too much emphasis on it can simply make it harder to create software. obviously good software is nice to use, thats why we should have applications in the first place. but applications follow trends, and following trends makes so many things unstable (unnecessarily, but it depends on the priority- if its following trends, then stability isnt a priority) and when the core of the system starts following trends, i would rather jump ship and find new captains. so we will have the option of stability- and make no mistake, i could use unix system v if i was that determined to do so. i actually LIKE real upgrades to the system over the decades. its a straw man that people like me want everything to stay exactly the same. but the big corporate wishlist from ibm and microsoft has got nothing whatsoever to do with me, i spent years fleeing and i intensely dislike being followed after something like that. so fuck everything they want to do just on principle, but regardless of that i still hate it besides. the sheer control that a properly, reasonably modular system gives you is something ive never wanted to be "liberated" from, which is the sort of "liberation" that application design specialises in when it become militant. i say reasonably modular because there have been attempts at modularisation that were effectively impossible to develop or impossible to maintain, and i guess thats TOO modular but it was worth a try (and worth trying again in the future). monolithic kernels for example, DO seem to be a winner overall. but even monolithic kernels can dynamically load modules. the thing is, the strive for perfection that applications almost seem to deserve credit for doesnt seem like much of a boon to me, when all youre going to do is abandon support in a few years and leave people with no way to maintain it (even if they have the code- its too much) and no way to keep using it without your help. so youre creating disposable perfection at best, and id rather use something "good enough" that i can keep adapting to my needs and that i can keep using as long as i need it. these feel like different paradigms and im only interested in one of these. so even if i admire a good application, i just dont see the point in getting attached. it will be abandoned, it wont get picked back up, the people doing the fork (in the rarest of instances where the fork is even viable) dont understand the culture and will only make it so much more of what you never wanted than the original had. libreoffice is the best example i can think of. its pretty close to openoffice, it has amazing features and theres nothing comparable to it at all. many people need it. all the developers were more or less forced to jump ship from openoffice because of the threat posed by the corporate acquisition. when they left, the threat was neutralised because the developers were the people who made openoffice work. but libreoffice feels bloated and i dont LIKE it compared to openoffice. it does things i cant turn off that just get in my way- in much the way that i despised microsoft office. and it makes even the web browser- an application so overbloated that it seems to dwarf the operating system and all other installed software combined, libreoffice makes even the browser seem lightweight. so i dunno, i really dont. but if i had to make a pdf again (i used to routinely) i cant imagine what else i would use. what id prefer to have is a fork of openoffice that was LIGHTER, not heavier. but whos going to do that? the culture of making things more lightweight is very niche, and the culture of making things more bloated is well supported by- it seems to be everyone. which is funny in a way, because when i moved to all freely-licensed software i thought it was remarkable the way you can always replace something heavier with something lighter and go about your business, while windows keeps doubling or quadrupling in size. ive written software that turns mainstream live dvds back into live cds! and im not going to say that its not like that anymore. its less like that all the time, and i hate it. but i dont seem to be alone in this, its just we dont have the influence or the resources that we used to. meanwhile, someone on the forum has made a fork of openbsd thats designed to be maintained by a single person and thats AWESOME. i mean, i suspect i like openbsd proper A LOT more but we need both imo. i would compare it to coffeescript- a great idea i very possibly wont use, but i love it and it has the potential to influence openbsd development in a positive way. but i do look for applications that are lightweight enough to still be called "programs" and they used to be more common. with amazing modern protocols like gemini and people making their own integrated circuits in workshops/labs at home, maybe we will see a renaissance of things like this. even though vlc plays videos "better" than mplayer on an old enough machine running openbsd, it also crashes a lot. not usually badly enough to bring other things with it, but i think if i had a more up to date machine i would still be using mplayer which i like better anyway. and i would rather teach people to use easier to maintain programs than have everyone feel its necessary to use things that are impossible to sustain in practice, let alone in theory. because we are making our software less and less sustainable, and simply losing all sorts of things we love. the license and source code insist we have the right to maintain our software, but the design assures otherwise. some of it is social engineering around how communities are organised, but everything points to capitalism and the influence of companies that never wanted "communities" to make corporations obsolete. i cant believe how many people are leftists, but when it comes to software they shrug and say "it can be mirrored anywhere"- even though its NOT, and we are still giving MORE and MORE to the people who SWORE to destroy us. its baffling. so yes, i still code. i still use applications when i really need one. im far less enthusiastic about new software, because new software stopped behaving like a zero sum game for years, until the companies who made it a zero sum game managed to assert themselves once again in the domain of their competition. to me this is very, very ugly. but i dont know when or if (i certainly hope it does) its going to change. the main thing i look for is not depending too much on libraries- because many libraries have no intention of lending themselves to stable apis or software that doesnt need to continuously be rewritten, and even some programming languages seem to have no interest in a stable api. by comparison, c can take decades to even deprecate things that literally no one ever used and the author (now deceased after a long and epic and illustrious career in practically inventing modern computing) thought was a mistake early on. none of this is a problem if we stick to 90s corporate models of development, though what they seem to actually want is for corporations to determine what direction software goes in, while a mostly volunteer workforce writes and fixes all the code they paid a few people to put together on their behalf. im uncomfortable with this. but just as the smolweb is a step away from that sort of mentality in web development (bloat and surveillance) i hope to see a similar step away from that sort of mentality in software development. maybe someday. i also sometimes use qemu (same original author as mplayer, i think) and i was very fond of sdl. but in protest of the various megacorporate acquisitions of what seem to be the crown jewels of all freely-licensed software, i only simulate graphics output for my own code using xterm now- set to a very small size. its slow, but im happy with the graphics. note that i was doing that already, with sdl as an option for "real" graphics output. i simply dropped the sdl support. you may think my desktop looks very boring, and i would mostly agree with you. any excitement comes from text or code or music or graphics or video loaded by applications, and not from applications designed to be fancy. but from applications designed to work for a long time so im not constantly revamping my workflow to fit the whims of someone in an expensive suit. they want all the cool points for diy and freedom, but less and less diy and less and less real freedom or control of your computing. no thanks, im good. but make no mistake, i dont hate applications. i hate the applications-only attitude that monopolies want everyone to have, for the benefit of monopolies. so again, no thanks. we couldve done the web this way, we couldve followed the hideous trend of doing everything in adobe flash. like i said, smol web is a nice start. wheres our smol apps? no, not those guys. i mean smol apps from people who arent reactionary fuckwits or the bffs of reactionary fuckwits. maybe thats enough talking about computers for the moment. its been just about a week since i started writing this, the copyright dates are like they are mostly due to the javascript but the writing is all from 2026. so we can wrap this up with something we might as well call one more chapter, lets see how that goes: => in-summary-ha-as-if.html in-summary-ha-as-if => https://fsrhelp.envs.net/ (back to the main page) => https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/fsrhelp.envs.net/ (it wouldve been cooler to do it this way instead) license: 0-clause bsd ``` # 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026 # # Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for any # purpose with or without fee is hereby granted. # # THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND THE AUTHOR DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES # WITH REGARD TO THIS SOFTWARE INCLUDING ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF # MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR BE LIABLE FOR # ANY SPECIAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OR ANY DAMAGES # WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM LOSS OF USE, DATA OR PROFITS, WHETHER IN AN # ACTION OF CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE OR OTHER TORTIOUS ACTION, ARISING OUT OF # OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OR PERFORMANCE OF THIS SOFTWARE. ```