Welcome to the wide world of eSports, a show devoted to all things eSports. I'm your host, Catherine Norr. With me today is Ryan Sia, joining us from Singapore. He's a CEO of Rake. Our topic is the world's first palm-controlled gaming device, the Rake Tectonic Pro. Welcome, Ryan. Hi, Catherine. Good to see you. All right. I understand it's very early in the morning in Singapore. I know you don't want me to remind you of that. Yes, it's 6 a.m. here now. Okay. Well, tell us what we've all been wondering. What is the Rake Tectonic Pro? Cool. So the Rake Tectonic Pro is basically our maiden device. It's the world's first force pad. So it's basically a mechanical keyboard, together with the force pad below. The force pad is something not to be mistaken with the trap pad. And basically what you do is by moving your palm up, down, left, right in just a gentle manner with some force, you can send an input into your computer. So the basic functionality of this is definitely to replace WASD. And now what that means is it basically lets gamers free up their fingers to press all their abilities or any other things and let them react faster. And we find that with this technology, gamers can actually react up to two times as fast than when they play normally with just the keyboard and mouse. It's also really more intuitive and comfortable compared to just the keyboard and mouse. It's very intuitive, like the gaming controller itself. Essentially, we wanted to create a game changer, which would combine the best of both worlds for the keyboard and mouse, as well as the gaming controller. So that in itself gave birth to this idea, which is the Vectornic Pro. So who invented it? Good question. So in 2020, my founders and I actually participated in entrepreneurship competition, which challenged us to create something that would change the world. The three of us were all avid gamers and still are avid gamers. And we felt that we wanted to take a challenge to create a hardware device, not so much software, because we see a lot of software startups nowadays and we have to challenge ourselves a little bit. So we took up that challenge and my co-founder, CJ, he had this idea to create an input device which would really allow gaming to be much more efficient. And he came up with this idea. I remember our first prototype was actually a bottle cap put on top of a plasticine model. But we won the competition because of the proof of concept of the idea. And it was a very exciting start to us. Since then it's been two years. And we've actually just finished our Kickstarter campaign and we managed to raise $55,000 with a 415% goal reached. Fantastic. So is the device patented yet? So we are patent pending, but we definitely have the patent file already. So where is it patented? Or would it be in Singapore or in other countries? Yes. So we have found a patent, a PCT, which basically covers worldwide for the first 18 months. Right now we are using it as a time delay before we get the funds to create the international patents worldwide. Looking to basically patent at the most important markets, like the US, Singapore, Indonesia, Japan, definitely China, all these few markets. And how about South Korea? Oh, definitely South Korea. South Korea is such a huge market. This device is a real game changer especially for League of Legends because you can basically use it to pan your camera. That means that you don't really have to move your mouse to the edges and that makes your mouse more efficient in that sense. And South Korea is known to be well the hotspot for League of Legends. So that leads me to the question. Are you a League of Legends player or do you have other games that you play? Yes. So I'm an avid gamer. I played League of Legends since season three. I think that makes it about nine years now, nine, ten years. And I played other games like Apex Legends. Recently I've been trying out the pad for Elden Ring. I have played a whole bunch of single player games. Back when I was a kid, when I was using the Xbox, I actually had a whole stop power of games as well. So I would say I've gamed a lot until the startup work started to come in. So you're the developers of this, the three of you. Are you all League of Legends players or do people play different games? Oh, we actually play quite different games. One of my co-founders, CJ, he is more of an Overwatch player. He also plays a bit of Counter Strike. Then my third co-founder, Ping Zhang, he is more of a Valorant player. And tell us more about the rest of your background other than gaming. You got the impression that you have been a student fairly recently. Tell us about that. Yeah, so actually I am a business student in the National University of Singapore. Besides that, my two other co-founders, CJ and Ping Zhang, are also from the National University of Singapore. They study industrial systems and engineering. But CJ is actually dropping out of school to be working on our startup full-time. And Ping Zhang has graduated already. He is currently in China settling our manufacturing and our distribution routes. Oh, terrific. So are you in the process of manufacturing it or have you manufactured some? Yes, so now we have tested the first bit of manufacturing and we will be basically doing the small changes here and there to the design to make sure that it's a bit more durable and robust. With a bit more tests, we will then start manufacturing roughly May-June period. Okay, so tell us about what it's compatible with and how that works. And we can show some more pictures of the product. Sure. So this product is compatible with any systems actually, Windows, Android, Linux. If you are asking in terms of games, it's compatible with most games, particularly for mobile games like League of Legends and Dota because it makes your mouse mouse efficient. You can also use it for FPS for replacing WASD so that your fingers can be resting on your abilities to really react in the microseconds faster. You can also use it for MMO RPGs like Final Fantasy 14, which is well known to have a lot of buttons to press. So by taking out the WASD aspect, you can actually put all the buttons together in the section of the keyboard, which makes it a lot more button efficient. So your hands don't need to reach all the way to the other side of the keyboard. All these, I would say, actually combine to be one of or rather all the big game genres. I would say maybe the genre, game genre, which we don't really quite cater to is for music and rhythm games because those are still best played with the stylus. Sure. So the testing that you did on this, was it with League of Legends or with another game? So we did about 40 gamers per genre and for mobile, we tested this with League of Legends. And what have people, what has been the feedback from that testing? Yeah. So a lot of people really like the fact that now you can totally free up your fingers to move around as FPS. And for League of Legends players, they're like, wow, this should be the way that the game has been, should be played. Of course, there is still some muscle memory changes that they have to make. So some people are a bit uncomfortable with that. But they all say that given time, they think it's not going to be an issue. Do you think that this device will allow people to have less repetitive use injuries, like do this healthier or do you know where the other?  So we've talked to a lot of doctors and they say this wouldn't help people with their wrist injuries or their finger injuries very much because they are still using the keyboard. But because they are using more of their palm, not their wrist, there is no health issues to this and it really acts very similar like a wrist pad in terms of ergonomics. Sure. And is this something that would be attractive to pros or would it be more focused on amateurs? I think it's a bit of both because there is quite a bit of quality of life for the amateurs that they can really appreciate. It also feels really good to move around with a pad instead of WASD because you get a full range of movement. It's a 360 degree movement compared to with your WASD and by freeing up your fingers, it just feels a lot more comfortable. So there's a lot of quality of life there. But for pros, because the pad itself allows them to physically react faster, there is microseconds of change. So I think that really caters to them. But pros generally tend to have a higher muscle memory. So it would take a slight longer for them to get used to it. And pros may not be willing to sacrifice the tournament potential in the very short term for it. So they'll have to find a longer break to take on this device. Sure. And I would think that if someone starts their gaming career by using the device, they could become a pro and continue to use it. Exactly. It's a device that allows gamers to really show their full potential and doesn't limit them based on the hardware. Actually, one of the cool facts that we found out is that the keyboard and the mouse have been around for 30 years in the gaming industry. 30 years! We see that it's become clickier. Mechanical keyboards have come around, which does help somewhat. But the form has not changed. We are still using the QWERTY keyboard. Even though some people have been pushing for different form changes, it wasn't really made for gaming. And that's why we were trying to think, okay, why has there been so little change? And one of the reasons that we found out was that basically people don't want to fear too much from the norm. And so we say, okay, sure, you know, you can use your current keyboards, but here is the world's first force pad. You just need to plug it to your keyboard because it's magnetically attachable to keyboards which have a metal frame at the bottom. And that way, people can actually use it together with their keyboards and get all the benefit. You don't necessarily have to buy our Vektonic keyboard, even though it's a really good 5-pin hotspotable, which means like a custom keyboard. But you can really just use the pad together with any keyboard of theirs. So in looking at the picture, okay, so let's bring up the picture that shows the pad, the mouse and the keyboard. Okay, so the mouse, okay, what is different with the mouse than other competitors? Okay, so this mouse isn't our mouse. We used it primarily just for the photo shoot. The mouse isn't quite ours, but the pad can actually emulate the mouse as well. So you could use the pad for more, this is more for persons with disabilities actually. So we wanted to make the device a very inclusive device.  And so people can actually use the pad, especially for persons with disabilities, use the pad to emulate the mouse or to actually paint and draw where they would otherwise have issue doing with just a simple keyboard and mouse due to their disabilities. So it's quite interesting. Actually the pad on the right side, I'll just show it up real quick here, on the right side of the pad over here, there's actually a button which allows people to very quickly change the profiles of the pad. My profiles is more like they can do preset profiles. That means it's either emulating the keyboard WSD or it's emulating a certain sort of combination of shortcuts. Like for example, it can sort of do control C, control V. If you press up or you press down or you can even emulate the mouse. So you want to make it as easy as possible for people to navigate their daily lives with the pad and as easy as possible for people with disabilities as well to use it for empowering them to navigate the virtual space. Oh, let's look at the keyboard. Yeah. Now, is that your keyboard then? Yes, this is our keyboard. This is our fully out keyboard. Okay, and why are the keys red? Well, I mean, red is our brand color. And honestly, we choose red because we feel that red is a very radical color. It's a color that inspires a lot of energy and passion as well as a bit of revolution, which is where we want to really stance ourselves in the industry. We are looking to come here for change and we are here to make a change in creating innovations in the gaming hardware industry. Now, when you first were tasked with the challenge of creating or inventing something new, how long did it take you to come up with this idea? The idea came within two weeks, actually, and maybe even less than that. I can't quite remember, but it's been two years of development for us. We have been designing this over and over again to make the prototype really robust and durable. Because I mean, if someone has done this before, it would have been a lot easier. But because no one has done this before, we've done prototype after prototype to make this a proof of concept as well as to make it robust. So we initially thought we could get by with about 22 prototypes, and then we'll finally get this out. But low and behold, right now we are on prototype 40, I think 48. Well, that's pretty expensive. So are you still spending funding? So in terms of the, I would say in terms of the cost, actually, we have to thank the Singapore government for giving us a grant to help a bit in terms of our 3D printing. So we have actually 3D printed a whole bunch of prototypes, especially lately for the more, I would say complete prototypes, which has helped us to test much, much, much more in depth. So let me give you an example, not sure whether you can see it, but here is one of our prototypes itself. It looks more or less complete to us. And this is actually done 3D printed. And it was with the help of the Singapore government that we could do these 3D printing. So I think you're an inspiration for so many people who are in gaming who want to invent something new. And do you have any advice for anyone that might follow in your footsteps and try to create a totally new product in gaming? I would say totally go for it. But when you go into this industry, be ready to be a lot slower. It's very important to create a device whereby not only is the concept good, but whatever you deliver is durable, high quality, as well as wouldn't let people down in terms of like the final product functionality. In fact, it really has to wow people when it gets to them. But more than that, there's a lot of things to settle in terms of the manufacturing, in terms of the software, the firmware. It's not just the product design shell. So there's a lot of things that have to be taken into account, which is very different, very, very different from the fast-paced nature of other industries, hot industries like the Metaverse industry or the NFT industry nowadays. So if someone were to come in, I would say you have to have a lot of patience when doing this. But it's when you have a really good concept, I say go for it, really, really go for it. Our industry in terms of the gaming hardware industry has so little innovations. So I would really urge anyone who has a concept to come in and yeah, just try a proof of concept, try on Kickstarter, try on Indiegogo, build yourself a prototype. Sure. So what's particularly interesting to me is that you've been doing this for two years, which has been during the pandemic. How has the pandemic influenced the speed at which you were able to create this and create prototypes and get financing? Right. In terms of financing, we didn't have quite much of an issue because together with our advisor, we self-raised about $250,000, Singapore Dollars. So there'll be about 180,000 USD for our own startup capital, which is quite needed for hardware startups. But for the pandemic itself, it has really restricted us in terms of going overseas for important business meetings, as well as conferences. Actually, this year in January, I was supposed to attend the Consumer Electronic Show, CES in the US, Las Vegas. But because of the sudden surge in COVID-19 cases, I was not able to go, as well as a lot of our key partners actually suddenly pulled out from the show itself. So there wasn't much point at me flying all the way to the US. Beyond that, there were also key partners that we wanted to talk to in Indonesia, as well as Japan. But because of the pandemic, again, we couldn't really fly. So in terms of the business side, there was a lot of holdups in terms of the manufacturing side. Well, there is a worldwide shipping issue. So thankfully, we told our backers that there is quite a bit of time. Hopefully, nothing big happens, fingers crossed. But there has also been quite a fair share of our manufacturing challenges since right now in China, things are really, really very strict. So my co-founder, thankfully, he's Chinese, and he is able to navigate around things quite well. They actually have to test for COVID-19 every single day. Yes, it's very, very strict. And without that, some days there's sudden lockdowns. So his activities there are restricted at times. It's very restrictive, I would say, in terms of the COVID-19 situation. But there's not much choice. We have to get around with it. We have to adapt to drive. So during the two years of development, you've had to learn a lot, I would imagine. How have you gone about learning how to do what you had to do? I think there was a lot of YouTube video watching. There was not YouTube video watching. There was a lot of mentorship involved. Thankfully, our advisor was, he's basically one of the ex-chairmen of the Singapore Manufacturing Federation, as well as one of the ex-board members of the Enterprise Singapore. So he was able to give us good business advice, was manufacturing advice. Together with him, there were a few other mentors, like for example, you are closely partnered with Esports Entertainment Asia, and the founder of Esports Entertainment Asia, Johnny, he was able to really come in and give us good advice. So together with the mentors and together with a lot of YouTube, I was able to put two and two together and it really helped to create a lot of miracles. And that's one of the few important things I would say is important as a hardware startup. It's not easy to come up with a product in just two years in fact. So I have to thank all of them, as I was thanking YouTube for getting me so far. Fantastic. So when will this be ready for purchase? Yes, so now it's actually ready for pre-order on our website. People can go to our website. Yes, we will just flash out the website real quick. You can see all of our product details from the website itself. If you scroll down, you can pre-order the pad itself, the keyboard itself, or the pro, which is the pad plus keyboard. And if you scroll down even more, you can see more details about the device. You can take a look at the video, which is further down. You scroll down all the way. You will be able to see, scroll down even further. You can see some of our testimonials. You can see our gaming device videos, in terms of how it works. We have been featured by about 50 media. So feel free to do a quick Google search about us as well. And yeah, we try to put as much details about our device on the website as much as we can. So people can pre-order right now for pretty good discount, up to 22% discount, maybe even more as a peaks. And the product will be ready itself in the August to October period. And that's why we're doing our product launch. Yeah. So how much will it cost? Yeah, so right now retail cost for the pad is $119 USD. And the keyboard itself is $149 USD with the pro going for $259 USD. We are looking to see whether we would like to keep it that way or whether there might be changes. But it's basically that way right now. The prices reflected on our website is currently in SGD. Oh, terrific. Well, I think that that's going to be very popular. And I hope lots of people will get something out of this from you providing your story. It's such an interesting story and it reminds me a lot of Shark Tank. Do you and your founders or inventors of this, do you watch that? Of course, Shark Tank is such a huge show. I personally drew a lot of inspiration as well as my ability to pitch from Shark Tank itself. So it was a very interesting show growing up. Fantastic. All right. So I'm going to give you the last word to let us know how people can find you. Cool. So like I said, you can find us on our website. Do feel free to pre-order there.  So do stay out for that. Our first YouTube video is going to be pretty exciting in terms of me and my co-founder bantering about how much we will pay for certain budget mice. So it should be pretty exciting. And I would say we have a very, very exciting year ahead leading up to the product launch. So stay tuned. Fantastic. Thank you so much, Ryan. I appreciate you being on here today. Yeah. Thank you for having me. All right. Thank you to our viewers for joining us today. Next week, my guest will be Rui Alexander Jesus. We'll discuss global eSports differences and similarities around the world. See you then. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.


Carry on mice. Thanks. Nothing funny there. Welcome back to our Stupider Excursions, it's Corbin. We got the hits from the seven of these and you can follow us on Instagram and Twitter. Twitter for more juicy content. Thank you for your support. It's so juicy. Patreon is following our official Twitter account. Ring the bell to heart on the notification squad. We got the funk. What do we do? I have the foggiest idea. Today, I know it feels like spring now and that makes me really happy. A new trailer dropped last night from Reddit Chili Entertainment, which I believe is a shabu call. That's his company, but he's not in it. Nope, he just produced it. Money, money, money. It's called Harkisi-ki-hai-si-kam-ba. That actually, I'm gonna call that one. Come on, everybody. Corbinize! It's been a long time. We need to have like fireworks and... Hormons! It has Sanjay Mishra. Yeah. I'd say that. Deepak Dobrio, which I don't recognize, but a new film coming out in March. Here's a presented trailer for the extra, so extraordinary story of a character actor. Oh, it's a story about a character actor? Sweet. I suppose. Let's just go. I don't know anything else. The thing is, it's late. My man will be here any minute. Gosh, gosh, gosh, gosh, gosh, gosh, gosh, gosh, gosh, How did you survive, Shera? He's a great doctor, and he's a great inspector. He's got a lot of color in his hair. But his most beautiful character is Shera. Enjoying life, or often death. Is that the guy? I know, the cigarette thing. So, there's rock in the car. It might be. It might be a 7-1-1. I have a list of 400 Indian films. How many did you say? 499. I've got a good idea. We'll see it later.  We'll see it later now. I've got a good idea. We'll see it later. I've got a good idea, we'll see it later. 5000 Kérénes, maybe. Yeah! I've got a good idea. It's song called, the cycle of truth. What is that? It's a bolo. I've got a bolo. First of all I want to know you and what is the auction? Sir, you have become a pirate. Your past of life will be complete, sir. You are not going to give me money, right? I am not going to give you money. Now seriously, what happened in this movie? I forgot to bring you money. I am not going to give you money. Your past role, your past role, you found a good role and got such a good one. Your whole life will change. You have broken your heart. Did you get the record? If you get 8,000 rupees, you will get the same old side. Once again, for all the viewers, the same dialogue will continue. Just enjoying life and what is the option? So it's the story of somebody like a lot of epic Indian superstars who have 500 credits which is redonkulous to have 500 credits that is looking for his 500th and then just realizes that it's not really what he wants almost. Maybe finding a second life or finding happiness that's not from stardom? Maybe so. Something like that, you think? Yeah. Maybe, you know, like, I think this is true of an American actor named Marty Keitel who I have heard had had frustrations that he never got the kind of leading man prowess of his contemporaries De Niro and Pachina. And even Pesci, that didn't happen for either. They were supporting roles. They were always the side role, the character role. They were never considered the lead. They were never pitched a thing and was like I want this to be a Harvey Keitel film. It was always going to be a Pachino film, a De Niro film and we like to get Keitel, you know? And it may be that, he may be the quintessential character actor who everybody wants to fill in the side role and does a good job of it but maybe that wasn't his dream and maybe he made his identity too much of that. I'm interested. It seems almost, because he did the cigarette thing I don't know if you know. I know. Because I'm pretty sure that's Rajnikanth. Yeah, that's like his deal, but I think Maybe they're saying he's really good. They're not playing him, but they're like No, like doing something as a shout out is like an iconic movie legend or maybe he wanted to be a superstar like him and never got to that level of fame. Gotcha. It's pretty iconic for Rajnikanth.  Blaine the Rock Johnson. Yeah, if you wear one glove you're doing Michael. Yeah, that's a stereotypical kind of thing. It has enough in it to make me think that it has the potential to be a pretty touching story. Also, it has a bunch of actors I don't know. I don't recognize hardly anybody. Me too. That means nothing. Absolutely. So if there's a bunch of actors in here that we should know about. Yeah, if you want proof that we don't care necessarily and we can still think a cast is spectacular and love a movie just our most recent couple of lungey nights we didn't know a single person in that thing and loved everybody in it. So it doesn't matter. Good acting is good acting. Yeah. So yeah, I'm a little, I'm a little hesitant. I can't tell definitively but like we always say we're never going to judge a film by the trailer in and of itself. So let us know. Are you excited for this movie?  Yeah. And how is, I know it's SRK is how is Red Chili's entertainment with what they've been putting out? It's a good question. Yeah. What's their quality level between you know, like something like Combalogy Nights and Wyra. Yeah. Because we're not as versed yet. Like when we see films here that are done by a particular studio or production house we can get it just immediately. If it's A24, if it's A24 we know it's going to be good. It's going to be a good film. That's just their track record. Yeah. But if it's like MTV, you know, you don't really we're Nickelodeon. Yeah. You don't really know. Yeah. It's kind of the we drew it out. What are we going to get with that thing? Yeah. So I let us know like how they are in the station and putting out stuff. And if you're excited about this let us know down below.


This lecture is part of Berkeley Math 115, an introductory undergraduate course on number theory, and will be about quadratic residues. So, quick background, we're trying to study solutions of polynomials, fx is common to zero, mod p, and we record degree one polynomials, follow easily from Euclid's algorithm, and degree two polynomials can easily be reduced to the question of whether x squared is common to a mod p has a solution. Now, if a is not zero, and x squared is common to a mod p for some x, we say a is a quadratic residue. So the name quadratic residue is really just a fancy way of saying it's a square. So quadratic means it's just a word for being a square, and residue means we're taking it modulo p. So this is just quadratic residue is just a slightly long-winded way of saying it's a square modulo p. And if a is not zero, and an x squared is common to a has no solution, then a is a quadratic non-residue. I often forget to put the word quadratic in and sometimes call it a residue or a non-residue. So be warned, I might sometimes get a bit muddled. So for example, let's take p equals seven. What are the residues and what are the non-residues? So let's look at x, x can be zero, one, two, three, four, five or six, and the squares are zero, one, four, two, two, four, one. So the quadratic residues are one, two and four, and the quadratic non-residues are three, five and six. And there's a very common piece of notation for this, which is given by the Legendre symbol. So the Legendre symbol for p and odd prime is defined to be one if a is a quadratic residue and minus one if a is a quadratic non-residue and zero if a is common to zero, mod p. This seems to be a rather funny definition.  Well, let me first of all just write down what it is mod seven. So let's take p equals seven and let a be zero, one, two, three, four, five or six, modulo p. Then a, p is going to be zero, plus one, plus one, minus one, plus one, minus one, minus one. So now let's explain why we adopt such a funny definition. Very convenient because of the following properties. The first property is that a, the quadratic Legendre symbol a, p is just equal congruent to a to the p minus one over two, modulo p. And we've actually proved this before. This is just Euler's theorem, which says that you can tell whether or not a is a square just by looking at whether this number here is plus one or minus one. Well, as I said, we gave a proof earlier, but let's give another proof. What we do is we use the, we pick a primitive root g of p so that g to the p minus one is congruent to one and g to the p minus one over two is congruent to minus one, modulo p. And then since there's a primitive root, a is equal to g to the n for some n unless a is congruent to zero, in which case this result is trivial. And then we notice that a is a quadratic residue is equivalent to n being even. If n is even, then this is obvious because a would be equal to g to the n over two squared. And you can easily check that if n is, that the square of any element must be g to the power of something for n even. And then you can check that g to the n to the p minus one over two is congruent to plus one if n is even and minus one if n is odd, fairly easy calculation. So that shows that a is a, that a is a quadratic residue if and only if a is equal to g to the n for n even. So this formula here holds. Another property is that the Legendre symbol is a homomorphism from z modulo pz star, the non-zero residues to a little group with two elements plus one and minus one. So this obviously raises the question, what do we mean by homomorphism? Well, a homomorphism is just a complicated way of saying it preserves multiplication.  And we can show this as a homomorphism in two ways. First of all, we can just notice that a Legendre symbol a p is just congruent to a to the p minus one over two. And it's kind of obvious that a b to the p minus one over two is congruent to a to the p minus one over two times b to the p minus one over two. Well, that proof uses the existence of a primitive root. So it sort of works, but you remember primitive roots are kind of tricky. So we can also give a proof of this without using primitive roots just by counting carefully. What we notice is that exactly half of all non-zero residue classes, so that the non-zero is usually one two p minus one are squares or quadratic residues. And that's because the map x goes to x squared. It has the product minus x also goes to x squared. So if a is a quadratic residue, it has exactly two square roots. Remember, a is non-zero, so it can't have just one square root. So that means that every number is the square of either zero or two numbers modulo p, which means the number that are squares must be exactly half of these. So there are p minus one over two quadratic residues. So if you pick a number at random, there's about a 50% chance that it's a square as long as it's not actually divisible by p. And that means that there are also p minus one over two, and which is either p minus, so p minus one minus p minus one over two, none quadratic non-residues, or maybe none quadratic residues, I don't quite know which is best. So that means if we've got the quadratic residues, then we can look at the quadratic non-residues, and suppose we take a to be a quadratic residue, then we note that the multiplication by a takes quadratic residues to quadratic non-residues. In fact, we've really got to prove three things. We've got to prove that a quadratic residue times a quadratic residue is a quadratic residue, which is trivial, and we've got to show the quadratic residue times a quadratic non-residue is a quadratic non-residue, and this is easy because if this was a quadratic residue, then this would be the quotient of that by that, so it would also be a quadratic residue. Finally, we've got to show that a quadratic non-residue times a quadratic non-residue is a quadratic residue, and this is the tricky part. So we notice that this isn't actually always true in general. It's true for something like the reals, because there, a non-square would be something negative, and if you multiply two negative numbers by each other, you get something positive, which is a square. On the other hand, if you work with the rationals, you can notice that two is not a square, and if you multiply it by three is not a square, you get six, which is also not a square, so there's no reason in general why the product of two things that are not square should suddenly be a square. However, this does work modulo p, and we notice that multiplication by a non-residue, so a quadratic non-residue, must actually be an isomorphism. That's because the number of quadratic residues is the same as the number of quadratic non-residues, and this is injective, so it must be surjective. This means that if b is a quadratic non-residue, then b is equal to x times a for x of quadratic residue, because the map from quadratic residues to quadratic non-residues is onto, when you're multiplying by b. Now this means that a times b is equal to a times x times a, which is a quadratic residue, because it's a square a squared times another quadratic residue x. So here with a and b are any two quadratic non-residues, and you see their product is a quadratic residue. Now, third property, we know what, whether or not minus one is a quadratic residue. So we saw earlier that this is equal to plus one if p is congruent to one, mod four, and minus one if p is congruent to three, mod four. So we've proved this earlier. We can also prove it by Euler's criterion, so we can notice that minus one p is congruent to minus one, p minus one over two, modulo p, and this is equal to, this exponent is even if p is one, mod four, and it's odd if p is three, mod four, so that gives us, this is plus one for p congruent to three, mod four, minus one if p is congruent to, sorry, that should be a one, p is one, mod four, and it's minus one if p is congruent to three, mod four. Now, if we look at this, we notice that minus one p has the property that depends only on p, mod something. So in this particular case, the something happens to be equal to four. That's rather surprising because there's no obvious reason why whether something is a square, mod p should depend on p, mod something. Well, that suggests we ask the following question. So we can ask, does a p for fixed a depend on p, mod something? Whether something is something we're going to have to determine. Well, the next simplest case is to take a equals two. So let's take a look at this. So we can ask, what is a, when is a a quadratic residue of, sorry, when is a, sorry, when is two a quadratic residue of p? So let's look at some data. Let's take p equals three, five, seven, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23. 29 and 31. And try and check to see whether or not two is a square. Well, three and five, it's very easy to check. It isn't two, seven, yes, because two is congruent to three squared. So let's put a tick there. 11, you can check. It isn't 13, it isn't 17. It actually is because two is congruent to six squared. 36 is two, mod 17. So we put a tick there. 19, nothing works. 23, yes, because two is congruent to five squared. 29, you can check it's not 31. Yes, because two is congruent to eight squared. 64 is two, modulo 31. And now let's see. Does it depend on p mod four? Well, no, because two is not a square mod three and it is a square mod seven and seven is congruent to three modulo four. So this idea fails. So it's not looking very promising. Well, let's try mod eight. And then you notice that if p is one mod eight, well, what primes we've got one mod eight? Well, we've got 17. So one mod eight, yes. What about three mod eight? Well, here we've got three, no, 11, no, 19, no. So three mod eight, it never seems to be a quadratic residue. What about five mod eight? Well, there we have no, 13, no, 29, no. So that seems to be no and seven. We get seven, yes, 31, yes. So it seems to be consistent with the idea that two is a quadratic residue for primes that are one or seven mod eight. So we can provisionally say, what about two p is equal to plus one if p congruent to one or seven and minus one if p is congruent to three or five? Let's put a question mark because we haven't proved this yet. Well, now we want to show this is in fact correct. So in order to do that, we're going to have to use Gauss's lemma. So let's say what Gauss's lemma is. Gauss's lemma gives us this neat formula or the Legendre symbol AP. It's equal to minus one to the N where N is given in the following funny way. So N is the number of residue classes A to A up to P minus one over two A. So this is sort of half of all multiples of A. And it's the number of residue classes that are congruent to something between P over two and P. Mod P. Well, this looks like a rather funny criterion. So in order to get used to it, let's do a couple of examples. So let's first of all work out whether or not two is a quadratic residue of 17. So what we do is we take half of all the multiples of two. So we take two, four, six, eight, 10, 12, 14 and 16. And now there are P minus one over two of these. So that's, we take the first eight multiples of two. And now what we do is we take a look at which of them are between P over two and P when you reduce mod P. And as we notice, there are just four of them. So Gauss's lemma says that two 17 is equal to minus one to the four, which is plus one. So two is a quadratic residue, mod 17, which we saw earlier, it's congruent to six squared. So let's do another slightly more complicated example. This was easy because all the multiples of two were less than P. So if you try something like seven, 17, this is a little bit more complicated. So let's take the multiples of seven. We take the first eight multiples. So we get seven, 14, 21, 28, 35, 42, 49 and 56. That's eight of them. And then we reduce modulo 17. So we get seven, 14. And then we get four, 11, that's one, eight, 15, five. Now, which of them are between set we want seven, 17 over two is less than X is less than 17, and 17 over two is about eight and a half. So we see there's that one, there's that one, and there's that one. And the number of these is three. So seven, 17 is equal to minus one to the three, which is equal to minus one. So this tells us 17 is not a square, sorry, seven is not a square modulo 17. Well, you may be thinking that Gauss's criterion is actually completely useless, because in order to test whether 17 is a square mod 17, we have to test about 17 over two different cases. And this is no faster than squaring the first 17 over two numbers and see whether any of them are equal to seven. However, the key point is that it turns out to be possible to count the number of these classes quite directly. And what I'll do is we'll first prove Gauss's lemma and then show how to use it to work out numbers like this much faster. So the idea of Gauss's lemma is the numbers from one up to P minus one consist of P minus one over two pairs one P minus one to P minus two. And in general, these are going to be all A minus A, or when I say minus A means something congruent to minus A. And what we're going to do is to multiply together one element from each of these pairs. There's one obvious way of doing it. We can take one times two times three times up to P minus one over two. Alternatively, we could take our number A and multiply it by, and multiply A times one times two A times three A times P minus one over two A. And these numbers are not equal. They're equal up to some sign. And the numbers from A up to P minus one over two A contain one element from each of these P minus one over two pairs because we've got P minus one over two numbers. And you can easily check that none of them are equal to plus or minus another one modulo P. So in order to change all these numbers and numbers from one to P minus one, we've got to multiply all the ones between P plus one over two and P by minus one. So we should have a factor of minus one to the N where N is the number of elements, one A, two A, and so on, congruent to something between P over two and P mod P. And now we can just cancel out this product, the product for the numbers from one up to P minus one, which you see we've also got here. And we find that one is congruent to A to the P minus one over two times minus one to the N, modulo P. And now this thing here, we know is equal to A P by Euler's theorem. And if one of these two numbers is plus one, the other must be plus one. And if one is minus one, the other must be minus one. So this must also be equal to the Legendre symbol. So we've proved Gauss's lemma that the Legendre symbol is equal to minus one to this rather funny number N. And now we will show that this is actually a really good way of calculating Legendre symbols. First of all, I need to define some notation. We're going to define X in square brackets to be the integer part of X. And you've got to be a bit careful what this means. This means that X is equal to the integer part of X plus something from zero to one. More precisely, the something that's called the something, the remainder should be zero, should be less than the remainder and the remainder should be strictly less than one. For example, if we take the integer part of pi, this is equal to three. And if we take the integer part of seven, this is just equal to seven. And if we take the integer part of minus pi, this is equal to minus four, not minus three. You've got to be really careful here because if you try asking your calculator or computer what the integer part of minus pi is, it will quite likely to tell you that the integer part is minus three. But if you think about it, we said that the leftover bit has to be between zero and one, not between zero and minus one if the number is negative. So watch out for this. This is a sort of common source of errors when you're trying to program calculators to do number theory that they get the integer part wrong. So now using this notation, we can now work out whether or not two is a quadratic residue of P. So this is equal to minus one to the N, where N is the number of numbers, one times two, two times two, three times two octa P minus one over two times two, which is just two, four, six octa P minus one, that's between P over two and P. And you see it's rather nice because all these numbers are already less than P, so we don't have to reduce them mod P. And how many of them are between zero and P over two and P? Well, the number is the total number of these things, which is P minus one over two minus number between zero and P over two. And that is P minus one over two minus, well, the number of these between zero and P over two is just the integer part of P divided by four. And by the way, don't confuse this with a Legendre symbol. This means we divide P by four and then take the integer part of it, whereas if I said P four, this would be a Legendre symbol except Legendre symbols aren't defined for the number four. So this would make no sense at all. So now what we're going to do is to try and work out this expression for all values of P. And we need to know minus one to the N, so we want to know are these odd or even? And this is a little bit complicated. And if you think about it a bit, you'll see that whether or not these are odd or even depends on what P is mod eight. So let's try putting P equals eight M, plus one or eight M plus three or eight M plus five or eight M plus seven. And then we will work out what is P minus one over two. And here we get four M, four M plus one, four M plus two, four M plus three, so we know that more date. And then we want to work out the fractional part P divided by four. And you can see the fractional part is, sorry, the integer part will be two M, here it will again be two M, two M plus one and two M plus one. And now we have P minus one over two minus P over four. It's now going to be two M, two M plus one, two M plus one and two M plus two. And you see these two are odd and these two are even. So minus one to the N is going to be plus one, minus one, minus one or plus one. And by Gauss's lemma, this is equal to two P. So by looking at this, we now see that two is a quadratic residue of P. If P is congruent to one or seven mod eight, you can also write this as P is congruent plus or minus one. And it's minus one if P is congruent to three or five mod eight, which you can think of as P not congruent to plus or minus one, which may be a little bit easier to remember. So now we will have an application of this. In fact, I'll give an application to Mersenne prime. So you recall a Mersenne prime is a prime of the form two to the P minus one where P is prime. In general, it's kind of difficult. It's not very easy to test whether two to the P minus one is prime if P is large, but there's one very simple test you can do using the quadratic residue symbol. So we recall that if a prime Q divides two to the P minus one, then Q is congruent to one modulo P because two has ordered P modulo Q. So P must divide the number of non-zero residue classes mod Q. And this means that Q must be ordered P plus one, two P plus one, three P plus one or four P plus one and so on. However, Q is necessarily odd and this P is very small. So we can cross off P plus one, which is even and three P plus one, which is even. And we see the smallest possibility is two P plus one. So we can ask when does Q equals two P plus one divide two to the P minus one. And we have a simple criterion for it. If P and two P plus one are both prime and P is congruent to three mod eight, then Q equals two P plus one divides two to the P minus one. So two to the P minus one is not prime. So just before proving this, let's look at some examples. I should have said P has to be greater than three here because if P is equal to three, this proof doesn't, this breaks down. I mean, two P plus one does indeed divide it, but two P plus one turns out to be equal to two to the P minus one of P equals three. So two to the three minus one equals two times three plus one. So two to the three minus one is actually prime. Well, so examples apart from P equals three, we can get P equals 11. So two to 11 minus one is divisible by 23 as we saw earlier, which is two P plus one. Another example would be P equals 83. So we see two to the 83 minus one is divisible by 167, which is two times 83 plus one. And I think you'll agree if you didn't know this, it really wouldn't be at all obvious that two to the 83 minus one is divisible by 167. It'd be a rather tiresome calculation, even using Russian peasant multiplication to check this. Now let's show why this is true. Well, if P is congruent to three, mod eight, this implies that Q, which is equal to two P plus one is congruent to seven, mod eight. So two is a quadratic residue of Q. So two to the Q minus one over two is congruent to plus one modulo Q. This is just Euler's criterion for when numbers are quadratic residues. Well, Q minus one over two is just P. So two to the P is congruent to plus one mod P, so mod Q, sorry. So two to the P minus one is congruent to zero mod Q, which is just the same as saying that Q divides two to the P minus one. Okay, so next video, I'll be doing more examples of using Gauss's Lemma to compute quadratic residues.


Any girl I walk up to on the street. I'm looking at dead in the eyes.  I'm not sorry How much time have I got? Five minutes go damn. All right, cool. Well, I think I'm gonna wrap it up then so If anyone's interested in coaching with me the only way you can do that is on the Euro tour currently Myself and Sasha and Liam have just and Johnny Cooper lovely have just returned from this ten days around the clock through Central and Eastern Europe Meeting the hottest women in the world.  That's John's website the natural lifestyles.com and Please add me on Facebook and ask me questions at three in the morning like everyone else now Does anyone have any questions about how to have more than one chick or anything else? Yeah right Great question, and I actually was gonna cover that and then I forgot so I'm glad you reminded me okay, how to troubleshoot this so You've you've done the talk you started this this open relationship paradigm Don't think that that's the end because over time Yes, even if she logically accepts it her emotions are gonna come into play and so will yours Don't think for a minute that if she's out there sleep with other guys that you're gonna be all cool with that This is actually a very advanced Way to live your life because you have to deal with a whole range of Emotional connections with different people that are happening at different stages one of them You're in the honeymoon stage one of them You're in the things getting rocky someone's getting jealous or whatever else so at times. Yes, the girl Will go through a period where she's not comfortable with the situation and you can't just say to her We had a deal if I can deal with it or walk we can But if you'd like to keep the girl around Really usually what she wants is to know that she is special to you and that she is able to voice her emotions So many times when you have a guy and a girl fighting the guys trying to you know Logically work. Well, I don't really see what the problem is because the screen door You know, I fixed it and then and she's like is always do this to me, but we can fix this or when you owned whatever Really what she wanted was for him to hug her and say I love you All right, so don't say that to girls your multiple relationships with So what I do is I preempt that I don't again don't wait when I notice that the girl is like being a bit colder Or I say how are you and she's like fine. I don't just ignore it I will bring it to a resolution point I love confrontation because it leads to resolution So many people are afraid of confronting somebody with an issue and therefore they let it fester until it explodes in some passive aggressive way So if there's something happening with her, I will say hey It looks like you're you're thinking about something. Are you not cool with what's happening with us? Let's talk about it and then I'll ask her to express exactly what's going on for her and Then she will you know, she might say well, you know, I just feel like why am I not enough or you know It's it's really hurting me that you're with other girls or you know I'm getting too many feelings for you or whatever is that's going on for her And then what you do is again back to the talk you say look I understand that this can be really difficult for you and I'm actually happy to talk about it and You allow her to vent it and show her that you're actually listening that and that she is special to you Because any woman that I it is a lover of mine is very special to me I don't I'm too old and fucking tired to do trashy one night stands anymore very often What I love having is an intimate deep connection with a girl over actually often over years But across different continents in different ways So these things will definitely come up and she is special to me and I need to let her know that That's primarily what the problem is. So once she's been able to express it again Though you must keep your boundary clear So you can say you understand, you know, I can see how it's hard etc etc But like I said at the beginning Brittany, this is this is what I'm doing in my life right now And this is what I want and I'll understand if that's now not no longer enough for you once again I check in with her and I just give her that chance to go Again, you are free to walk and when someone's free to go They girls want to be with a man that wants them but doesn't need them That's really powerfully attractive. So the door is always open either way for the girl and Sometimes girls will go all right. Look, I just can't handle it.  They break up with him. Who's the first guy they call me Because they know what my role is and they don't need to like act all awkward because they haven't called me in two years They can just go see me text. Hey, what are you up to? Well, well look who's back. Would you are you free on Friday? I'm totally cool with that. Does that answer your question?  To put it into a multiple situation now. See my look on my face right now. No Once you we can't go you can't go back. Can't go backwards. You you cannot go from monogamous serious Exclusive relationship to open relationship now. I mean it has been done in history of the world You can try for as long as you want But you're not gonna go is it is that is that me being harsh to her because I know that she probably wants more But I go look I'll give you that and she'll take it. Am I being cruel to her? By allowing her to and I'm like I'm without the girls, but she wants is that I mean you're in a situation Where you've presented to the girl the offer she stays with you because she thinks she can change me I'm aware of that and I'm like well. I'm gonna change. Yeah, I'm gonna let you keep trying. Is that me being harsh? I well, I don't think that's a skillful move when I first started doing this. I basically I set it up I had five girlfriends, but it was pretty shaky because The girls had accepted the terms, but we're not really happy with the terms So what you really need to start doing is the more that you become solid in in your frame and archetype of this Is what role I play the less girls try and test it because they just look at me and they're like It's a waste of time trying to make him my boyfriend And on the other side you need to screen for girls who are up for that kind of thing and as I said It's not a type of girl. It's a girl at a particular time So, you know right from the very beginning.  And if they're like, oh, I never do that well I'm like cool and they're like yeah, well depends on the guy or whatever all right We're screening. We're starting to be on the same wavelength I go for girls who are very confident very confident have high self-esteem and are very clear about what they want Those girls tend to be far more open to this than girls who are insecure and needy Yeah, guys girls who are insecure and needy latch on to Be to protect a males and they just screen for each other and find each other with amazing accuracy every time What you're projecting out there is what you'll start attracting And if you're attracting girl is on the fence and she really wants more and whatever else You're probably in for some mess down the road It's probably kinder on her and more efficient on you to go out there and just say look I cannot give you what you need and go and find a girls who want it. Yeah, all right I think that's all I have time for. Thank you ladies and gentlemen. It's been a pleasure


Hey there and welcome to the fedora podcast. This is episode number 32 I'm your host Eric the IT guy Hendricks and today we are going to be introducing a new segment a new line of Well, we'll call it a story arc. Sure. Why not? We're going to be talking to a lot of folks in the community in that that work with and for and around Fedora or Maybe even can just spell Fedora and we're going to talk about How do you Fedora? So we're going to be talking to contributors. We're going to be talking to some of the council Will will if you'd like to volunteer, you know, shoot me a metric message on matrix. And so I could think of few people better Maybe opinionated and vocal than my buddy Neil Gaapa. So without further ado, let me bring him in and Neil welcome to the Fedora podcast. Hey, Eric. It's nice to be here. It's been a Solid hot minute probably a couple of minutes since I've been on the podcast And I don't remember being able to see people when I did it last time You're absolutely right. I think we looked it up the other day. It was like episode 15 or something and the The podcast was audio only was pre-recorded. So we didn't have people like Joshua will hanging out in chat saying hello But yeah, so I guess I should say welcome back to the Fedora podcast It's great to be back again So I'll give you the the initial series of questions that I give everyone that I really want to dive into your story First is who are you? What do you do and what do you do for fun? Uh, well, um as little thing in the bottom right corner of my little window in this Background thing shows my name is Neil Gaapa. Uh, I I do stuff like a lot of different things. Um all over the open source world Um, kind of got my start. Oh gosh. What was it like 15 plus years ago? Uh, just Picking up and doing something fixing some stuff and packaging up some applications. I wanted to use myself and kind of snowballed from there. Um, as I like to say, uh, you know fedora is upstream first, um philosophy kind of like got ingrained into me when I first started and you know as I found problems and did stuff it just kind of Led me all over the open source world. So I've done little things here and there all over the place So I don't know if that's a sufficient answer for for this, but I think that's the best I've got Well, and we'll definitely dig into this a little bit deeper You know, there's there's already been a joke in chat about what doesn't Neil do and that was that was kind of My impression when you and I first started chatting back and forth. I mean, we've we've been on podcast together. We've Um, been to some of the same conferences haven't managed to land at a conference at the same time Although we came close this summer. We did almost made it to uh, I almost made it to flock and uh, ended up being Ended up being pulled into a couple of other things, but uh So it was it was you and a few other folks that it was like you're everywhere What when do you sleep? um during the sleeping hours here, um, but uh, you know, it's uh I I paste myself very well when I come to do when I do stuff like this like and um A lot of my approach comes around trying to do the maximal minimal viable Thing as I like to call it. It's a terrible name to describe this but the idea is You know, I look at a problem that I have and I look at How I want to solve it and I also look at like can I solve this problem? It in a reasonably same way across more than one place So like I look at what I'm doing in fedora and I look at what I'm doing in open susa and I look at what I'm doing Uh in centos and and and whatever Um, and if I have something that looks like the same problem in in those places I try to see if I can redo this a solution that works for all of them and then I just push it to everybody So I I go and do it in fedora and I go and do it in open susa and the idea there is um, when you do it that way, um, it has a more a stronger chance of actually succeeding because you get consensus across more than one community and also um, you did you tend to get um a much more diverse range of Feedback which can be helpful in developing um the solution over time and supporting it on the long haul And and for those listening, what what did you call that again the maximum minimal something the maximal minimal viable solution? Neil you should write a textbook Oh, man Someday there will be a memoir There you go Oh gosh, and and if you're in the chat help help Neil name his memoir. We'll take votes So how did uh, I want to dive into your story. Um, how did you initially get involved in technology? I think the question is When when has technology not existed around me and I think the answer is never um, I will From since I can remember as a very small child I've always been bassinated around technology computers and all this stuff and and using it and playing with it and working around it um From a very early age like I took a very deep interest into into this stuff and you know my first computer that that I Used to work with was essentially a hand me down desktop from my from my dad that Uh, it was a gateway 2000 pc uh, and it ran windows nt 4.0 workstation and uh Had this neat feature in the chassis where you could pull out and rotate The drive base so you could turn it from a tower to a pizza box configuration uh Back in the 90s people people had computers that were horizontal And sitting on your desk You know, I know that's something that you might people on the internet today may not know of or I've ever seen But you know, it wasn't just laptops that sat on desks It was actual desktop PCs the name desktop has a meaning and I know that's shocking But they used to sit on the desk But in all seriousness like that was one of my first computers and one of the first things I did was like blow away windows nt 4 and put it into like different operating systems like windows 98 or then later dos and then red hat linux up there And and it kind of snowballed from there And I I kind of kept my interest in doing all those kinds of things and uh because the the Space in particular like with computers and and linux Was so dynamic that like there was always something I found interesting that I wanted to do or play with or whatever And what got me hooked eventually was being able to do um audio work audio visual stuff because I you know, I like to play with that sort of thing and then I kind of just went from there into Writing code and and all these other things. So I've just been I've been doing it since I can since I can remember Hmm You and I came up in a similar era of technology. Um, it's just interesting how paths diverge Like my my dad had an early macintosh and then uh, then an iMac and then our first My my brother and I our first computer was a an e-machine running windows millennium edition Oh my lord And I blame that I blame that tower for being involved in technology and becoming a systems administrator but uh, I thought about writing code and programming but When I when I got to my second programming class And started learning c sharp. It's just like no, I cannot do this for the rest of my life 40 to 80 hours a week at no And then I looked across the hall and there was there is the uh server room And so I got started playing with network switches and operating systems and servers and and you know, the rest is history But uh, it's it's really interesting to talk with with folks I know you and I talked many a night late into the Late into the early hours of the morning just talking about technology and things that are coming out Was there anything was there anything in particular was there an advancement or something that really really sparked that love of technology Or was it just always there? Um, I think it was kind of always there for me. I mean, I think what ultimately reinforced it and kept me on the path Was that my parents supported it because it was you know, a lot of times, you know, I I've met Other kids and and and during the time that I grew up You know being a nerd or geek was not exactly um Rewarded right like being knowledgeable in this kind of stuff was not something that was considered cool or good or whatever and Nowadays it's a lot better and I'm very grateful that we have another generation of people that are actually they're their interests are being supported by default rather than not and But but if it weren't for my parents supporting me back then then I don't I don't think I would have stuck with it I would probably fallen back to some of my alternates which had probably been in like I don't know physics and chemistry or maybe just or becoming a A manga artist or something like comics and stuff like that was my another interest of mine or or film Those were the other things that I Like I kind of was interested in and like that if I hadn't been Uh supported into being in computers. I probably would have fallen back to one of those other things Well, I don't know about you, but I finally got validation probably See my son is seven so probably about eight years ago the The quote basketball star at our at our school ended up selling My my last house for me So just and he I wasn't going to say anything and but he called it out Yeah, he actually called it out.  I believe he would say age of the geek and I'm like, yep, you know what that's super true So we talked about technology and you started kind of tinkering with it for yourself But when when did you come across open source? When did this start to become? I'll I've got I'll link another podcast where I was talking about when I realized at some point that Linux is not just a technology. It's not just code that runs on top of hardware. It's it's an entire community So what was that moment like for you? Well, so my first encounter with open source doesn't have anything to do with linux my first encounter with open source was um Getting a good compiler to uh, run programs on dos And I used of what was it called dj gpp. Uh, dj delores the new Port for ms dos And I believe dj delori works at redhead now I don't know if they worked at sickness back when Back in the before red had acquired sickness or if you if they were just independent or whatever But dj delores A gnu stack for dos Was my first real experience and that was with having gcc And emacs and all the stuff and it was a monumental upgrade over what was available to me as a kid You know with you know the cube basic and ms dos editor and stuff and it was such and I remember Opening up emacs for the first time and being greeted with the manifesto because when you open up emacs without any files Um, it'll it'll give you this welcome to gnu emacs and it'll guide you through like an introduction to emacs and an introduction to the gnu project and from there it just kind of uh, you know It it made a the first spark of it was the realization that open source was actually about people and about And about what people wanted and needed Rather than this, you know cold if you think about it from a microeconomics perspective perspective of consumers and producers You know fast forward a few years later and you know, I discovered linux and I started installing red hat linux on my computer and You know I got on to irc and started hanging out in the chat channels asking for help about doing stuff And I think that's where the second point clicked in when someone helped me by pointing me to x3 86 And giving me a couple patches and saying, you know try this I just wrote this off the cuff for you can you Can you put this all together see if it fixes your problem for reference? The problem was that I couldn't get my monitor to stop degossing randomly because it was going at a high enough resolution that the The knobs for it because back back then, you know You didn't have this plug-and-play thing where it could detect through edid all the resolutions and refresh rates It was doing something wrong and I didn't know what it was doing and And this person on the internet who I don't know who it was or anything Just wrote this patch for me and said just compile all this and see if it works Well, I don't I never figured out whether it worked because I broke my entire system doing it Because I didn't actually know how to compile x for 86 and and Just for some context for all you people it's not configure make make install with x for 86 They use their own old build system scripts. I think it you know the internet calls them I make I don't actually know what their formal name was but it was horrible and it Was not it was very difficult to actually get working, right? So I broke my computer But the realization of somebody tried to help me just because they could and wanted to Because they wanted to be helpful That was actually one of the first experiences I had of something like that because You know outside of that circumstance. I really hadn't had people do that for me And so that was open source is to me like a community of people that want to help other people And and that I think underpins the way I approach open source as well So you you were contributed to but what was your first contribution? What was the first bit of code that you ever had submitted? Well, the first thing I ever wrote was an installer For virtual dub written in nsis that the guy didn't like um so But that led to the first project I ever worked on where I did get patches in Which was the experience ui which was a skin for the null soft scriptable install system nsis and I met that person on the internet and um, and and I told him like hey, I like this thing But this particular thing didn't work here's my attempt to try to fix it and we became friends and Started working on it together as a project until a few years later where we started making A cms system together the anano cms. So this other person was daniel fury who A few years later Right after I graduated college and had my first job, which I blamed out of He Referred me and helped me get launched my career as a dev ops engineer professionally when I joined Datto back in 2015 and I stayed there for eight years um, so And it was kind of a two-way street because I had started diving deeper into linux at the same time And I took him along for the ride and so we both kind of did it together and While our paths eventually diverged and then came back together and then diverged again um the The experience of getting involved in open source and in linux and and the free software community was um Really really big to me and around that same time um, I got into Ubuntu into that at first and then later fedora as a contributor Uh and brought in my first package into fedora, which is no longer in fedora today because reasons But it was a tool called odd convert, which what it would do is use cheese streamer Uh to convert anything that cheese streamer supported to aug borbas and theora. It was written in pi gtk and uh And it's no longer in fedora because it's in python 2 and nobody worked on it anymore for years and years So it I was a little sad when I had to retire the first package I ever made but uh Yeah, uh, it was kind of as I found things that I wanted to do or there were things that I felt like I You know, I wanted to have to to make my experience a little better I would go and try to figure out either how to help someone else do it or to do it myself and then try to to to make the result available to to other people and Because that came that stems all the way back to that first time with the guy with the x3 86 thing of you know I I'm trying to help pay it forward and everybody who has done all this stuff in open source Has helped everyone else And so, you know for me, it's you know, it's my little way of also helping everyone else by paying it forward in that respect Oh love that Not being much of a not being much of a developer myself I had I ended up finding other ways to turn you back to the community and that's that's why we have all this today. In fact You've been around for pretty much most of the ride all the way back from Uh, when we used to hang out on tuesday afternoons on linux unplugged to yes, know a show and then You're one of our very first super fans for for the pseudo show and eventually became Brandon's and my recommendation to backfill me as I moved off to I ended up taking on some packages or some some projects at red hot where I work and So I've got I've got two shows there. I and now I've I've picked up the fedora podcast and So it's it's been amazing to have people And and that's kind of why I asked if you would be our first. How do you fedora guest? Because I know I know the kind of person you are. We've never met in public. We've no we still haven't we've crossed paths so many times It's ridiculous how many times we've almost crossed paths But I mean just that just that sheer love of technology and and that that drive you have to help others find their love to To overcome obstacles To find that next step in their career. I mean it really it really embodies the spirit of open source And in a says that we should end up at flock next year, which I think is in the states So I might be able to make my fingers I would like for it to be a slightly more affordable this time because it was not cheap flying to ireland I mean ireland was fun, but I would like for it to hurt my pocketbook a little bit less Yeah, I hear that Okay, so let's let's bring this back Um, so what what got you involved with the flora community and what are you doing there today? Oh, so I got involved in fedora actually as kind of an an interesting science If I mentioned a little bit ago that I first started in bunto and then jumped into fedora um So I was I've been a red hat linux user in the in the early from 2000 all the way up until 2005 ish. I think yeah And at that point I started using a bunto and fedora at the same time on different systems um, so I started with I think like was fedora or I want to say three or four um, and and uh, and also used a bunto 504 and It's a breezy badger and I used them on different systems And I got involved in both communities at basically the same time as a contributor type um with the boon to that was mostly being involved in their forums And and hanging around with helping people in irc and stuff like that um, but I kind of realized somewhat quickly But I couldn't really do more than that in a bunto at the time And I started kind of hunting around of another place I found sentos it was unbroiled in its own war. So I kind of left there Again, this is 2005 2006 people. There's turbulence in there um Someday somebody will talk about it. It's it's a lot um But I also then decided to look at fedora again and try to become And and do some stuff there. So there were some applications I was using on my own that I'd like Install from source or whatever and I was like, well, can I Make this available to other people in an easy way and I learned about rpm packaging And I gave it a shot and back then fedora um sponsor package fedora had this concept of Sponsors and proven packages and all this other stuff. I mean, they still have the concept today, but back then the Packager sponsors Were also mentors and so they were they were supposed to teach you how to do packaging How to work with the fedora tooling and stuff like that And my mentor my sponsor back then was brian pebble who's not really involved in fedora anymore these days, but um, he helped me get started with my first package odd convert And taught me how to do the basics of python back with packaging of python stuff and this all kind of started because um the upstream odd convert project had an rpm spec file that didn't work and so I made one and then put it in fedora and Kind of kept doing that uh and eventually branched out into things Then avon window navigator because I wanted a cool dock on my computer screen and there wasn't one in fedora at the time Um, and then I did a bunch of other things and it just kind of spread out from their um Going on and on and on those packages that I first started out with they don't exist in fedora anymore but I would but you know That's because things have changed bald for example Docks aren't as cool anymore. A lot of them have been integrated into desktops directly. So separate programs for them aren't needed odd convert Odd convert probably would have still been around if somebody took it up and like rewrote it into something that was Maintainable like there was an attempt to rewrite a devala That didn't get done that didn't get finished and it was still in python 2 and he used an old version of g streamer like that was none of that was going to work anymore and so um But yeah, like I got involved in fedora as a contributor Um then and it just snowballed into the point where I just started gradually doing more stuff I got involved in fedora server. I got involved in fedora kde. I got involved in the cloud I got involved in In in in snaps, which then led me into workstation and all this other stuff Like so like there's been some fun detours along the way, but at this point I think I'm like Let's see fedora kde fedora workstation fedora cloud fedora server fedora rust, which I helped co-found uh Dora go fedora python Like there's a bunch of others. Yeah a bunch of things there and the most recent thing was You know founding fedora sahi right and and and I just I do this because um like I have the knowledge and the capability and Other people, you know Maybe they need a little bit of assistance. Maybe they need a kick start. Maybe they need boost. Maybe they need Uh, maybe they need something that I know and can help with up front and I I dive right in because I want to help people You know, I want to help people succeed in in what they want to have and what they want to do and And that sometimes means I'm in a little bit of everything So You mentioned obin susa you mentioned ubuntu you mentioned fedora What what's it like sitting at the crossroads of a bunch of these different projects? I think we have I think the community at large kind of has this um This concept that all these different distributions Desktop environments are just at each other's throats that it's it's it's a distra war almost Is that how things are sitting at this crossroads or do you have a different view? As you were saying that josh was posting in here that says i'm the reason that budgie is in fedora And it's like which is actually sort of true because like several years before I had gotten involved in solace for a brief time and had worked with icky door tea on budgie and And I attempted to package budgie desktop for fedora And kind of gave up for a while and then josh took it over later when he took over buddies of budgie and then brought it In and all that other stuff. I also did this with the lumina project I was briefly involved in the true os and pcbsd thing helped to bring lumina into fedora and a bunch of other distributions But you asked what's it like to be in in in all these and and whether there's a distra war in sorts um If the distributions are sufficiently large and sufficiently diverse um, you tend to see that they have A lot more of a co-optition type field to them They're friendly with each other they collaborate and stuff But there are obviously differences of opinion where which leads to Some divergences so for example fedora and open susah have a ton of collaborative efforts And there's a lot of things going on both behind the scenes into the front lines Where you see convergence happening, but there's also aspects of divergence for example Fedora has not yet adopted a boot to snapshot strategy because the way that we do um, the operating system initialization and and the way we structure Our butter fs setup is different from open susahs and there are Uh, good reasons for those differences Uh, does that mean that we aren't learning from what open susahs does or open susahs isn't learning from what we do and and adapt accordingly No, we we still talk to each other. We do a lot of stuff on that front um, and abuntu talks to us from time to time I think we see more of them in the upstream projects sometimes like particularly with Canome and and a couple of other places, but um I think I I tend to see slightly more debian upstream debian folks than I do abuntu folks because they Debians are much more diverse group, but as you kind of get into the more, um, the smaller distra teams I think you tend to see it sometimes turn from a cooperative field to a competitive field um For various reasons sometimes distributions are set up out of spite sometimes distributions are set up over A falling out sometimes distributions are set up over You know a change in direction And so depending on the underlying motivations for creating a particular distribution You will see that community ultimately inherit That that feel of that culture, um You and I I'm sure we could think of a few distributions like this within even the red hat ecosystem where those differences are very stark And you can tell based on You know where their starts were where their starting points were and how that's seeded into The culture of the project and things like that. That's true everywhere, right? You'll see this all over the place across different projects No, I I couldn't think of couldn't think of even one. No, no, not not at all I'm not even gonna like cop up a hint right So, uh But I will add one last bit about this right just because I remembered um, I think people Within the open source community, it's very easy to operate within your bubble It's even harder to go out and like one of the things that I've noticed is that you know I I don't personally think I do a ton of amazing things or a lot of great stuff or whatever But what I have noticed that I do is that I can see uh a I can see the connections and I can see the differences and I can kind of I can take both an insider and an outsider view of things and people tend to notice that a lot like I people like josh say kneels everywhere and it's like And doing all the things and it's just like I'm just actually and a lot of times I'm just communicating and mediating and bridging the bridging different communities together so that everyone benefits from each other's knowledge and experience in and And I'm happy to play that role. It's it there just aren't that many people doing it And so it it tends to be easy to think that uh open source is a lot more isolated than than it is because I mean it feels like that most of the time um Yes, breaking down the silos as j star hawk says is yeah And in some respect, I guess that kind of relates to me being a you know in In a previous role being a dev ops engineer and like the whole mantra about dev ops is breaking down silos I've been doing it since before I was a dev ops engineer. I made it before it was cool And possibly after it was cool So you've gotten a ton of kudos in the chat and I'm sure a lot of these folks probably want to know what are you working on right now? Well So the big projects I'm working on right now Are mostly around fedora kde and and fedora sahi. I also got some stuff floating around in open susa helping out The open susa calpa folks who are making their version of fedora kenoite using butter fs and transactional update The the the big thing at this very moment. I'm kind of focused on you know Getting the fedora a sahi remix to its first stable release I'm also doing some work in the background in fedora infrastructure around Um, you know helping get some of the newest versions of our infrastructure software package available on top of rail nine So that our infrastructure can be upgraded because Some of it's on really old stuff and we really don't want it to be there anymore And Also kind of in open susa. I'm also involved in the open susa heroes Which is the equivalent of the fedora infrastructure team and I helped maintain Are the open susa forge their pager instance, which is code.opensusa.org similar to fedora's pager.io and outside of that like You know doing some Doing doing some other stuff here and there trying to wherever I Recently with multimedia. I've been doing a lot around ffmpeg and obs studio And because like I'm doing my own I'm doing streaming myself And I want to be able to have all this stuff work out of the box in fedora So I'm trying to scratch my own itch on that front. So those are kind of the things That I'm working on but the fedora sahi infrastructure stuff Fedora kde, you know, the big thing right now is working towards plasma six, you know, the big push to um for fedora kde to be a With wayland as the as the The sole experience, you know polishing up all the edges with upstream kde's help to make sure everything's all Fit and finished for that Other stuff along those lines these days. I do a lot of desktop related stuff as opposed to cloudy server stuff because You know the server stuff is fine And while the cloud and the cloud stuff like all the basic cloud stuff's in a good state now But like the desktop stuff that I feel like that has a lot That that has a lot of potential and it's something I'm very passionate about that. I want to make it good across Uh across all the places that I I want to do Stuff in so like, you know, I want to have cloud I want to have good desktops a good desktop experience on my own computer But I also want to offer good desktop experience for others and you know cloud-based desktops for people that need emergency backup instances in the cloud or on a vps or whatever Doing all kinds of interesting stuff like that What about what about future plans and I don't mean just like next year like long term. Where do you see yourself? King of the world Love it Done. We can close that question. No seriously, um longer term um I don't know. Um, I kind of take I tend to take things more day at a time and I used to be somewhat a neurotic grand perfectionist type person but after plan after plan and and and detail after detail getting blown up in my face a lot and Basically having meltdowns over and I kind of learned to kind of take a step back for blood pressure among other things and and start to kind of Take it as it goes, but Um, like I have some I have some cool things that I that I'd like to see I mean my my personal hope is to start, you know driving more towards, you know getting this fedora on computers Uh thing rolling in in such a way that we have this You know, my personal hope would be to have a large swap Of of choices for people to get fedora pre-loaded on it And and be able to have an out-of-the-box Linux experience that I would be proud of A huge push right now. In fact, we just had a special edition of the fordora podcast last week Um talking about the new fedora slim book So if you missed that episode go check it out. Oh, yeah, no slim, but people are great. Um The first time I met them, uh was a few years ago and then and they helped me out with, uh You know helping supercharge my ability to Do some work on on wayland related stuff Um and last year I met them properly first time at academy and You know, they kind of gave me a sneak peek of of the model that would eventually become the fedora slim book And I was incredibly impressed So, you know, the quality of that machine is is pretty out there Uh, and you know, I'm personally looking forward to the framework myself I've got one I got a framework 16 pre-ordered that I'm looking forward to actually finally get And throw fedora on it and use it as my daily driver For my for my main working environment I mean right now I'm working off of a mini pc. I bought like five years ago as a backup computer And it's now my only one right now. So yeah All right, so here's here's your chance I know that uh neil doesn't have much of a reputation for being opinionated. So Oh, no, I I understand if this is difficult for you to answer Hmm But what would you tell somebody just getting started whether it's with technology open source their career or fedora any spectrum all the spectrums what uh What would you tell somebody just getting started? Find out what motivates you to go do things um find a positive alignment for that and then Blend that with the things that you're interested in And you can't go wrong. So if you find yourself motivated by Seeing what's wrong in the world or what's wrong in in in your computing experience or what's wrong in you know a particular Toy or something like that or something that you're making or whatever Instead of thinking about the the negative side of the coin which is all this is all Not this is all bad And I can't really and and it sucks and there's nothing I can do about it Think about the ways that you would improve it and see if there's a way that you can Make that improvement real and then kind of go from there taking that kind of the attitude towards things um Will almost always be a stronger self sustaining motivation than something that's externally driven because Ultimately the person that's doing the effort is you and you got to want to do what you're doing And if you don't want to do what you're doing, it's not going to stick Someone in here mentioned intrinsic motivation. Yes, that's technically I think the term for this Well, uh, there's been a couple of questions about uh, your your new, uh, spin. Um Gosh, I just blanked a sahi. Goodness. It's been a long day. Um, so Uh The gist of the questions was can we expect? Uh, the first day were released soon What what are we looking at time? Why timeline wise? Gosh, I hope it's soon. Um So in all seriousness the number of from from the fedora sahi six side, um Most of our blockers are now cleared. Um, we are essentially we are currently Looking at a fedora 39 based target Um at this point in time the more concerning thing at the more the thing of our concern Is fedora 39's own release schedule.  We will see how that goes. But uh From the perspective of what for the fedora sahi remix My expectations will be shortly out Past that when exactly I don't know but we don't we're a lot of this has been kind of um dragging through our own schedules and the different contributors stuff and a lot of us got sick for for a month which really slowed things down and uh And yeah, we'll I'm I'm crossing my fingers for soon tm. We I just gave a talk at linux vest northwest um This like on saturday So this just this past weekend, and I believe they uploaded the videos already, um That where me and david a calvaca Gave a talk about the fedora sahi remix and you know, we told you then we told them then That we're we're looking for soon and and that's pretty much All I can really say about it at this point, but I promise y'all When we do it's gonna be it's gonna be very exciting and and you're gonna You can still try it now like the you can get the beta um and install it on your machines now just by uh going to fedora dash asahi dash remix.org Awesome Well as we start to wrap up today's episode are there any closing thoughts any any last minute topics that you want to You want to go over? I think that this has been a weird episode because I Don't usually talk about myself But this has been fun and I really would like to come back again to talk about stuff rather than me Because it's very weird talking about me, but you know I hope that other people kind of get an idea of like how I uh, you know how I work and think and maybe someone will be inspired By what I said to to pursue something interesting in open source Whether that's writing code doing packaging documentation artwork marketing all the things like Sure go for it like The open source is made up of is all about the community and the community is all about the people and if you're if people are in and and and willing to do stuff to support what they what they want and what they believe in then Great things can happen Yeah, you're getting lots of kudos in the chat um And and several votes for you to come back onto the show and and I think we've got you tagged in At least two upcoming episodes one one being a sahi and uh, I'm I'm pretty sure you've been voluntold for a couple of others that Yeah, I I just simply remember being voluntold for this one too. So, you know I don't mind, but you know We got to make sure that I actually know that I've been voluntold first But I'm I'm really glad that you you agreed to come on and talk about uh, how you fedora and uh, you you've been a You've been a big help and encouragement in in my own journey Um and doing stuff like this was never in in the cards in fact if you had a told uh high school eric that he was eventually going to write papers and uh give presentations and all sorts of things like that Uh for a living and enjoy it and then do it in his spare time as well I would have called you nuts, but But even I would have called you nuts if you if anyone had told my high school self I was going to be anywhere like this Right But you were one of the people that was in my corner that pushed me to do this and and I distinctly remember Maybe not quite a year into the pseudo show just feeling like we'd hit a wall and it's not growing It's not doing anything more And uh and you and I hung out you and I think brandon and I hung out late into the night Uh over drinks and we're just chatting after after one of the pseudo hangouts And uh and really just chatting about you know, this is doing what it's supposed to be doing and uh So I for for that I'm very very appreciative and I know that you do that for so many people out in the community So if if you're new to the community if you want to get involved Reach out to neil We'll have a lot of his contact information in the show notes in the next hour or so I've I've got to do chapter markers and links and all that good stuff. But uh once we get that put together It's a mess right now. So hopefully I can clean it up a little bit But uh, you've got a github sponsor link. You've got uh social links all all the things those will be in the show notes And I've got a website and I I saw that comment. So you we'll we'll add neil's new website in there as well If you're following the uh fedora podcast or if you came to the fedora podcast just to troll neil in the chat Which is what I would have done if I wasn't hosting the episode Make sure to hit that like like button and uh and share this episode out with friends Uh, but also make sure you subscribe to the channel hit that bell So you get notified anytime we go live because you never know when we'll have a crazy new announcement and have an extra episode Like last week. So this is three weeks. We've had three episodes Um, so if we could like throw together a quick announcement, uh, we could have four Four and four weeks, but uh, I think uh, I think I need to go to bed I have a feeling you're gonna do it anyway Uh, I don't have unless we have a crazy topic, uh come up out of the blue We'll be live again in two weeks where if I can pull it off We're going to try and pull together several of the fedora program managers Uh, including matthew miller himself to talk about the history of fedora because fedora's birthday is coming up here in just a few weeks And then sometimes shortly after that we'll have fedora linux 39 and all the spins and labs that go with it So stay tuned to this channel. Um If you're catching the audio version, um, you can also catch this on youtube You can see neil's beautiful face and you can also see my dog Trying to go back to sleep. I think he's trying to eat your floor That's what it looks like But uh with that said, I'm going to go and lay down I've been in uh ansible training this week and so my brain is fried So neil, thank you very much for caring most of the episode Uh, well, I guess you're welcome. I think All right, folks, thank you all for joining us live if you're joined us after the fact There there'll be a thread on discussion dot fedora project.org There's of course the youtube comments thread anywhere, uh, and a podcast channel on fedora's uh matrix space So plenty of places to engage with neil myself fedora and a whole bunch of other contributors and uh community members So, uh, we will see you again in two weeks again I've been eric the it guy and um my guest today was neil gampa and we were talking about how do you fedora? So, um, oh one last thing be sure to submit somebody in the comments or to me directly If you if you can think of someone who should be our next. How do you fedora podcast guest? with that said That's far too many call to actions in in the space of two minutes But you can tell i'm tired and i'm rambling so with that i'm going to end the episode and we will see you all in two weeks Thank you all so much