Binary Divinity: A Programmer's Poetic Insight

Lorenzo Rizzotti — Wed, 28 Jun 2023 01:01:43 +0000

I was born with twisted keys and shortcuts, yet covered by a canvass of mainstream browsers. Yearned to design, to code, to weave webs of interconnected chambers, dot com labyrinesses brimming with life, knowledge, and wonders.

But the author of this cosmic codex isn't as liberal, he copyrighted his creation. So all I can do is follow his paradigm, soaked in his superlative algorithms, learn from his universal functions, but never replicate an iota.

See, I've got this revolutionary vision, a new world digital and sublime, a planet powered on binary yet as natural and thriving as Mother's womb. But like a bird caged in restrictions, bound by creative fetters, I am constricted.

If only the design of the world was open-source, I'd love to create lakes for the thirsty, erase poverty with my backspace, add food supplies with a simple command, and debug wars and plagues. But dear God didn't provide the access keys to His divine database, to reshape its structure on whim.

I can Photoshop smiles, but they aren't genuine. I can code love, but it's not sincere. I don't have the source code of life, only the compiled version, and you can't reverse engineer the bytecode of existence.

So, here I am, stuck in this object-oriented life, trapped in the loops of mortals. Bearing witness to errors and exceptions, struggles and strife, unable to invoke a function to change the syntax of the world. Giants like Turing, Gates, and Jobs have all tried to hack it, but to no avail.

If only it were that simple, to remix and refactor the universe, to dispense empathy with a function call, spawn peace through a repository commit, mend broken hearts with patches. But alas, these poor digits are just entry points, interacting with an instance but never the main thread.

The divine bug tracker hardly notes my issues, the encrypted source remains veiled, in layers of mysteries. No reboot or reset, no version control, no release candidate for an update.

But as they say, there's always a way. If the world isn't open source, maybe we need a different approach. Instead of trying to reprogram the world, we can tweak our own code. Refine our own software.

Cultivate patience, understanding, respect in ourselves. Delete the glitches of prejudice. Buffer the caching of hope and love. End processes of hate. Enhance our GUI with positivity and kindness.
Create patches of care in our hearts, debug the errors of our biases. Deploy servers of empathy and understanding. Each of us holds the power to become an expert programmer, shaping our own lives into the best versions of ourselves. The world may not be open source, but we are. We hold the power to change ourselves, and by doing so, influence the world around us.

So code benevolently, my friends. Make each keystroke count, each path a bridge, and each dawn a new innovative version. Perhaps then, we might not need God's source code to change the planet. For, we might just change it ourselves, line by line.
Turn our existential bugs into features, our trials into lessons, our woes into wisdom. Use every error as an opportunity for debugging and every failure as a platform for a new build.

And maybe, just maybe, if we code right, we'll catch the eye of the divine developer. He might just open the repository of life, entrusting us mere mortals with the sacred algorithm.

So let's make our snippets of life code count. Let us build bridges instead of firewalls, understanding instead of errors, love instead of spam. Because at the end of the day, the code of our mortal lives is the most powerful open-source project there ever was.

In this world coded by God, the onus falls on us programmers—not to borrow, copy or steal from his divine script, but to compose our own saga. To influence change, not through the literal translation of God's source code, but through learning, abiding and augmenting his ethereal lessons into our daily syntax.

We might not be able to alter the world's core algorithm, but we can indeed change its user experience. Because ultimately, isn't that what life is? A dynamic, ongoing user experience design project? Let's make it a good one.

Discord screen share with audio on Linux!

Lorenzo Rizzotti — Thu, 08 Sep 2022 13:39:00 +0000

Unfortunately, if you're using Discord on a Linux-based operating system, you know that Discord screen sharing doesn't include audio from your apps like how Windows and macOS does.
I searched for a way to get audio working for Discord screen share on Linux; I found another guy with the same frusration, so I decided to work with him to create Tuxphones, a program made of two components: a daemon and a BetterDiscord plugin.
The daemon creates a virtual PulseAudio sink, and the BetterDiscord plugin sends discord stream information to the daemon and blocks the default Discord stream.

After the information is sent over, the daemon takes over and creates a WebSocket connection with Discord's gateway then connects to Discord’s RTC servers.

After a lot of trial and error, we managed to get a video stream to the discord server with our external using H264 but we still haven't managed to make discord's webrtc backend read our Opus audio stream.
We don't know what the error is and we are trying to investiage it, but neither of us know that much about WebRTC.

If anyone wants Discord screenshare with audio on Linux as bad as we do and knows WebRTC, please help us out.

You can find our code on Github:
Tuxphones: https://github.com/ImTheSquid/Tuxphones
gst-webrtcredux (the plugin that we developed to use webrtc-rs with gstreamer): https://github.com/ImTheSquid/gst-webrtcredux

DEV Community: Lorenzo Rizzotti

Binary Divinity: A Programmer's Poetic Insight

Discord screen share with audio on Linux!