msp-osd VS scroll

This week, as most weeks, I split my time outside of the day job and my other hobbies and obligations between Discord collaboration, Ghidra, and VSCode:

https://github.com/bri3d/VW_Flash - Flashing tools for select control modules in VW MQB and now PQ35 platform cars. This week I'm working on old stuff: a simpler exploit chain for older Simos ECUs, as well as tweaks to expand support to older DSG control units used in PQ35 platform vehicles.

https://github.com/fpv-wtf/msp-osd - I pushed a rearchitect of this on-screen-display overlay system for DJI FPV Goggles last week that seems to have sorted out a lot of issues - I switched from just passing through the OSD drawing messages from the Flight Controller to a system where the video transmitter maintains the OSD character buffer and sends a compressed representation of the screen state. This makes the system much more robust to packet loss in situations where the Flight Controller sends delta updates rather than frame-at-a-time.

I only really started publishing Open Source projects a year or two ago, and while they're pretty much my worst code by any objective measure, I've met some great people and really enjoy working on these. It's fun making things that achieve a goal without so much pressure of deadlines, stakeholders, and competing priorities.

The root itself only gives you full file system access. But with it you get to modify them. The root is also perfectly safe and you won't be able to tell them appart from unrooted ones. For example stuff like this -> https://github.com/bri3d/msp-osd gives you basically 'canvas' mode on the DJI Goggles (though it's still in it's early development phase so still has some kinks to work out).

Probably not from DJI. However, the guys that rooted the goggles have MSP displayport going. It's not flight worthy just yet, using it takes out the goggle UI so you can't change channels/do anything. However, it's looking pretty promising.

It took me many years to get Scroll (https://scroll.pub/) to the point where I love it and am confident it will be the dominant language for writing going forward (replacing markdown).

I first had to invent Tree Notation (2017), which I got wrong on my first two tries (2012's Note and 2013's Space). Then I needed to invent Grammar (2017), and then I made the predecessor to Scroll called Dumbdown (2019). 2 years after that I shipped the first version of Scroll (2021).

Now we are on Scroll version 58 and it's blazing fast, very simple, extremely extendible, and scales very well.

It was 90% me for a while, but recently been very much a team effort.

It took a while to get right because it's a whole new kind of language, so there were a lot of mistakes that I made and had to undo, and it took a while to figure out exactly what was special about it and how to double down on that.

I recently started 2 new newspapers: https://longbeach.pub/ and http://hawaii.pub/. Very different from traditional newspapers in that they are: public domain, open source (view source on every page), and built using a new language (https://scroll.pub/).

Another cool site I found recently (via the replit guy) is https://www.rootclaim.com/

Very cool way to present arguments.

I'm thinking of taking that, as well as argdown, and building some easy to use keywords in scroll https://scroll.pub/

> Context-free grammars, and their associated parsing techniques, don't align well with real-world compilers, and thus we should deemphasise CFGs (Context-Free Grammars) and their associated parsing algorithms.

I think CFG are highly overrated. Top down recursive descent parsers are simple and allow you to craft more human languages. I think building top down parsers is something every dev should do. It's a simple technique with tremendous power.

I think the source code for Scroll (https://github.com/breck7/scroll/tree/main/grammar) demonstrates how liberating moving away from CFGs can be. Easy to extend, compose, build new backends, debug, et cetera. Parser, compiler, and interpreter for each node all in one place. Swap nodes around between languages. Great evolutionary characteristics.

I'll stop there (realizing I need to improve the docs and write a blog post).

- Uses a new language called Scroll: https://scroll.pub/

Also, put down Markdown and give our Scroll a try: https://scroll.pub

It now powers sites like my own blog (https://breckyunits.com/), knowledge bases like PLDB.com, and our first new public domain daily newspaper called the Long Beach Pub (https://longbeach.pub/1-3-2023.html).

> Java, Go, Javascript, Rust, etc are all regularly written with whitespace, and have tools to enforce such formatting, but they don't derive information from it.

Ah you reminded me. A curious phenomenon I've observed with Prettier in JS and fmt in Go is languages are moving to standardized whitespace, but as you said, not yet deriving information from it. I don't know enough about Java or Rust but I suspect they probably both have adopted a Prettier/fmt like convention where all code is formatted on save. So it seems like we are moving to a world where it will be a simple flip of a switch to then start having popular languages extract meaning from the whitespace.

> Also, Python has existed for decades and still there is little further adoption of indentation-sensitivity. It doesn't seem like a wave of indentation-sensitive languages will be coming any time soon.

I think it's coming big time this year. I think our Scroll (https://scroll.pub/) will catch fire and be the go to language instead of Markdown by the end of the year. Then with the increasing success of TreeBase (powering PLDB and others) we will start to see JSON fall for config formats and document storage databases. A lot more will happen to, data vis will be a big one, but those 2 I'm reasonably certain of happening in 2023.

GoAccess: https://goaccess.io/. I don't miss Google Analytics at all.

Loom. It's not open source I don't think but I'm digging it and excited when a public domain competitor comes out.

Our https://scroll.pub/. It's far beyond markdown at this point. I am able to not only write better but also maintain thousands of pages of content by hand (well, most of the credit for that belongs to Apple M1s, Sublime Text, git, MacOS, and Github). The stuff we are doing with it now would just not be possible with anything else, and what we're coming out with next year is super exciting. It's all public domain.