Re: Project website

[Tim Daly]

Axiom is dead. The site got no traffic. I don't have github access anymore

due to Microsoft's multi-factor "protection". It was a good 24 years.

It was fun while it lasted. The last effort was a new parallel construction

of "Category, Domain, Proof" which integrated LEAN proofs (e.g. about Abelians)

as a separate, connected hierarchy, enabling proofs of algorithms like the GCD. 

That will never see the light of day.

The real cause of death is my lack of management skills and objectionable personality.

I thought the point of research software was to innovate, not polish. Nobody agreed.

Adding proofs and being literate were too radical. Dick Jenks would have succeeded.

My real frustration is that the several hundred people who contributed in large and

small ways over many years don't seem to even get mentioned. Credit is so easy

to share. Axiom would never have been re-created without effort from people like you.

At least I personally say "Thank you, Camm."

Tim

On Wed, Feb 5, 2025 at 12:50 PM Camm Maguire <ca...@maguirefamily.org> wrote:

Hi Tim!  I hope this note finds you well!

Just noticing that axiom-developer.org appears to be inaccessible.
Github appears more recent.  What is the best way to keep current with
axiom?

Take care,
--
Camm Maguire                                        ca...@maguirefamily.org
==========================================================================
"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."  --  Baha'u'llah

[Dima Pasechnik]

Hi Tim,

why don't you allow someone who has GitHub creds all set to manage it for you?
It's very easy to keep your push access to GitHub repos, just let this
someone upload your public ssh key there.

Dima

> --
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[Tim Daly]

William,

> the hurdle for newcomers to learn it would be quite a challenge.

The point of the literate programming effort was to capture the expertise

for future developers. The question was how to keep Axiom alive once

the core developers (e.g. Bronstein) are no longer available to answer

questions. The ideal case would be to give the literate sources to someone

and they would be able to maintain and extend the code. Since the system

is built from the literate documents they would always be up to date.

> Any chance that Axiom may be discovered by the AI community?

I built a machine with a GPU board, downloaded and ran 71 LLMs to

rank them on their ability to "Prove the greatest common divisor theorem".

The game was to find the LLMs that were best suited for the proof task.

Proofs share a lot of characteristics of games. They have a state space,

they have a limited number of actions (tactics), they have intermediate

metrics (substeps solved), and they have a well-defined goal state. All

of these characteristics make reinforcement learning for proofs using  the

Bellman equation an ideal case.

The Axiom game was to construct the Category-Domain-Proof hierarchy

so that within the Proof inheritance chain there would be an "LLM function"

that would assist in proving Axiom's algorithms. With the latest open source

Deepseek-R1 this is probably possible. Unfortunately I don't have the resources

to run the larger models. My home office is already 10F degrees above the

rest of the house :-) The largest model I tried ran for 28 days.

Another issue is that Axiom's Proof hierarchy has embedded definitions but the

LLMs don't know how to use them. The necessary but unavailable step is

self-modifying systems so that the definitions can be used without unfolding

them all the way down to the primitives. Hopefully test-time training will allow

this but again I don't have the resources to try this. I looked into creating a

modified Word2Vec table with "math words" but then I'd have to train a new

fundamental model which is again a resource issue for me.

There is so much research still to be done. Where are the graduate students

when you need them? :-)

Hope things are well with you.

Tim

On Wed, Feb 5, 2025 at 2:52 PM William Sit <ws...@ccny.cuny.edu> wrote:

Dear Tim and Camm:
Sorry to hear the loss of accessibility to Axiom. These days, it is difficult to keep up with even ordinary computing needs, and impossible to give attention to technical projects. You both have dedicated for decades to maintaining and improving Axiom. Somehow, Axiom might be "rediscovered", but the hurdle for newcomers to learn it would be quite a challenge. 
We need to feel satisfied in having contributed to progress in computer algebra and at our age, relax and let the fate of Axiom fall wherever it may. Nonetheless, I am still optimistic.
Any chance that Axiom may be discovered by the AI community? I tested Copilot (by MIcrosoft) on a simple math question and it gave me a wrong answer (with a detailed wrong proof), although it accepted my correction. The question was: Is the inverse of an order-preserving bijection between two partially ordered sets also order-preserving? Would Axiom be useful to provide a correct answer (which is "no", and give a counter example)?

Regards,

William

---

From: axiom-developer-bounces+wyscc=sci.ccny...@nongnu.org <axiom-developer-bounces+wyscc=sci.ccny...@nongnu.org> on behalf of Tim Daly <axio...@gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, February 5, 2025 2:16 PM
To: Camm Maguire <ca...@maguirefamily.org>; Tim Daly <axio...@gmail.com>
Cc: axiom-dev <axiom-d...@nongnu.org>; Barry Trager <bmtr...@gmail.com>; Ralf Hemmecke <ra...@hemmecke.org>; Waldek Hebisch <heb...@math.uni.wroc.pl>; fricas...@googlegroups.com <fricas...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: Project website

 

[Tim Daly]

> So undertaking lengthy rewrites is risky. AXIOM maybe suffered also
> from this Netscape mistake.

The "theme" of the open source version of Axiom is "The 30 Year Horizon".

Unlike the other computer algebra systems the goal was to make Axiom

the "research platform", more "computational mathematics" than computer

algebra. Anybody can "polish" code if the focus is on creating "product".

Axiom's failure is essentially due to my personal faults rather than the

attempt at lofty research goals (after all, what's the future for?).

Tim

On Wed, Feb 5, 2025 at 4:53 PM Svjatoslav Agejenko <svjat...@svjatoslav.eu> wrote:

Hello !

AFAIK parts of AXIOM live on in forked project FriCAS:
https://github.com/fricas/fricas/tree/master

So efforts of Axiom contributors lives on.


AFAIK people who know very well lisp, math and have plenty of free
time are hard to find, so barrier for would be contributors is high
indeed.

I think literate programming and AI is good combination. I noticed
that when writing good comments/explanations in my code, AI suddenly
becomes much more useful. It understands better what is happening and
can help more. I think that AI will make it cheaper and easier to
understand existing large systems, contribute to and maintain open
source projects. So FriCAS might get good boost or even AXIOM might be
resurrected by mostly AI assisted maintainer(s).

AFAIK Netscape Navigator died largely because company undertook huge
codebase cleanup/rewrite and they went long time without new
releases. By the time they finally got new version, they were not
relevant anymore.

So undertaking lengthy rewrites is risky. AXIOM maybe suffered also
from this Netscape mistake.


Best regards,
Svjatoslav

On Wed, 2025-02-05 at 19:52 +0000, William Sit wrote:
> Dear Tim and Camm:
> Sorry to hear the loss of accessibility to Axiom. These days, it is
> difficult to keep up with even ordinary computing needs, and
> impossible to give attention to technical projects. You both have
> dedicated for decades to maintaining and improving Axiom. Somehow,
> Axiom might be "rediscovered", but the hurdle for newcomers to learn
> it would be quite a challenge. 
> We need to feel satisfied in having contributed to progress in
> computer algebra and at our age, relax and let the fate of Axiom fall
> wherever it may. Nonetheless, I am still optimistic.
> Any chance that Axiom may be discovered by the AI community? I tested
> Copilot (by MIcrosoft) on a simple math question and it gave me a
> wrong answer (with a detailed wrong proof), although it accepted my
> correction. The question was: Is the inverse of an order-preserving
> bijection between two partially ordered sets also order-preserving?
> Would Axiom be useful to provide a correct answer (which is "no", and
> give a counter example)?
>
> Regards,
> William

> From: axiom-developer-bounces+wyscc=sci.ccny...@nongnu.org
> <axiom-developer-bounces+wyscc=sci.ccny...@nongnu.org> on
> behalf of Tim Daly <axio...@gmail.com>
> Sent: Wednesday, February 5, 2025 2:16 PM
> To: Camm Maguire <ca...@maguirefamily.org>; Tim Daly
> <axio...@gmail.com>
> Cc: axiom-dev <axiom-d...@nongnu.org>; Barry Trager
> <bmtr...@gmail.com>; Ralf Hemmecke <ra...@hemmecke.org>; Waldek
> Hebisch <heb...@math.uni.wroc.pl>; fricas...@googlegroups.com
> <fricas...@googlegroups.com>
> Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: Project website
>  

Svjatoslav Agejenko
WWW: http://svjatoslav.eu

[Tim Daly]

>why don't you allow someone who has GitHub creds all set to manage it for you?

There is nothing there to "manage". Feel free to gain control if you can.

>It's very easy to keep your push access to GitHub repos, just let this
> someone  upload your public ssh key there.

I don't have an SSH key to the Axiom repo. While Microsoft was

busy locking things down I was busy writing code and struggling

with navel gazing about how to merge proofs with the Category

Domain hierarchy. Since this was such a deep and fundamental

change I was not pushing updates so I was not paying attention.

Mea Culpa.

Tim

[Qian Yun]

Hi Tim,

Thank you for making Axiom open source, otherwise it will remain
as a dead commercial product.

I've known Axiom for over a decade and contributed to FriCAS for
over nine years, it's a great project and it's been a fun journey
for me.

I'm sorry to hear the status of Axiom repo and website.
I have a proposal to reduce the damage of this, and to
extend the heritage of Axiom: would you like to endorse
the FriCAS project? (I mean, could you write an email
about this, and I will link it to Axiom github issue page,
so that people noticing about Axiom can also notice about
FriCAS, after all, currently Axiom has more stars than
FriCAS on github.)

Thank you Tim, again, for making Axiom open source, and
working on it for decades.

- Best,
- Qian

> Just noticing that axiom-developer.org <http://axiom-developer.org>

> appears to be inaccessible.
> Github appears more recent.  What is the best way to keep current with
> axiom?
>
> Take care,
> --
> Camm Maguire                                       

> ca...@maguirefamily.org <mailto:ca...@maguirefamily.org>

> ==========================================================================
> "The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."  -- 
> Baha'u'llah
>

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[Tim Daly]

In my professional opinion FRICAS is a fine project doing excellent work.

I hope it continues to achieve its goals. I wish it only success.

> Thank you for making Axiom open source, otherwise it will remain
> as a dead commercial product.

Axiom was never intended to be a commercial product. It was a research project.

Releasing it was forced on the project by IBM. The open source Axiom project goals

were also research, not commercial. The target was "computational mathematics"

not "computer algebra" as witnessed by, for example, the project goal of proofs.

I mentioned the demise of Axiom on this list as it seemed like some might find

it an interesting event if only for historical reasons.

Tim

[Tim Daly]

Arthur,

I remember our conversations from the distant past. You did excellent work

making Axiom quite portable based on your lisp and other modifications.

Unfortunately I spent a lot of time with Bill Schelter and did work on AKCL

including various Axiom optimizations so I essentially removed all that you did

in order to work with what I knew. Sorry about that.

I am really sorry to hear that Albert Rich died. We corresponded quite a bit.

I co-authored a rule-based system at IBM Research based on Forgy's RETE

as the basis for the Expert System offering. Rich and I discussed improving 

the rule-based machinery in Axiom to include his work. He did amazing work.

> hypothetical keen new generation could cut their teeth on would be good.

The "chance" you describe is a fork. We've already seen how that evolves.

The literate programming goal was to make it possible for someone to be

able to maintain and modify Axiom without contact with the original developers.

It was intended to "make Axiom live". The current sources build from the books

(pamphlet format is just latex renamed). I collected a few research papers

and got permission to re-create them in one of the books. Unfortunately I only

expanded certain algebra domains in literate form. I did insert bibliographic

references in the algebra sources when I could find the papers.

> A "30 year horizon" surely involves a project being reinvented and
> reforged anew

It is not possible to do deep research such as adding proofs using

the Axiom/SPAD combination. The parser/compiler is too fragile

for such deep surgery. So relative to my "research focus" fricas

is an effort devoted to "polishing". Worse I've introduced dependent

types which really complicates the inheritance logic well beyond what

the current compiler can handle.

The SANE version of Axiom is wildly different from the github version.

For example, the source is now all pure common lisp using CLOS.

It is also restructured from the ground up to include a LEAN Proof inheritance

tower parallel to the Category-Domain towers. (I spent many years as a visiting

scholar at CMU working with the CS and Math/Philosophy related to LEAN)

So you can see that for the last decade I've drifted quite far from the git repo. 

Worse, I've drifted from the SPAD world. Given that i was vilified for removing 

BOOT code I expect the non-existing Axiom community would not approve.

Thus none of the code hit the repo.

> So having a reasonably definitive "here lies" archive with at least
> workable build scripts and pointers to the easier tasks that a
> hypothetical keen new generation could cut their teel on would be good.

The last tombstone above the current Axiom work is in git.

There is also a tombstone on Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom_(computer_algebra_system)

The git repo built and ran tests without errors when last I checked (a long time ago).

It uses a known-good tar copy of Camm's Lisp which he has changed since then.

The X11 replacement (Wayland) seems to be spreading rapidly but I don't know if

Wayland will support Axiom's X11 code. Code rot happens.

Most amusing is that Axiom runs on Windows :-)

Tim

On Thu, Feb 6, 2025 at 4:58 AM Arthur Norman <ac...@cam.ac.uk> wrote:

> I mentioned the demise of Axiom on this list as it seemed like some might
> find it an interesting event if only for historical reasons.
> Tim

It is absolutely that. But one possibility for software is the chance (not
necessarily huge, but still there) of a Phoenix Event where a new piece of
work emerges from what may have looked like mere charred remains of the
previous one. If a small group from a younger generation started from what
you have now they might have different priorities from yours, but one
might hope that the literate style you have got things on might make it
easier for them to get going than would otherwise be the case.
A "30 year horizon" surely involves a project being reinvented and
reforged anew and in legend the new players are typically not just ones
who have been easy epprentices of the old master!

So having a reasonably definitive "here lies" archive with at least
workable build scripts and pointers to the easier tasks that a
hypothetical keen new generation could cut their teel on would be good.

I mostly look after Reduce these days. You have described the sort of
stuff I do in terms of "product" but I do not think that way - I think in
terms of "service" so that those whose research (or develpment!) is in
physics or engineering etc can use Reduce as a tool. So I get a
research-buzz second hand if you like. But as regards "dead" projects I
note that Albert Rich had been working on a pretty individual project
where the concept was to see how much of computer algebra could be
expressed as rewrite rules (rather than in imperative style). You do not
need agree that this was going to succeed - just that he spent much time
on it. He died a year ago. There is a sensible snapshot of his "RUBI"
indefinite integration stuff and it is a snapshot not a perfact version
since he expired while still working! But I (among others) have been
having a go at reviving it in ways that are not at all all in the
direction he was working. RUBI is a lot smaller than Axiom but maybe
somebody will be able to pluck a component from Axiom for good use
elsewhere. And again if they do it will be a really interesting test of
the literate philosophy to see how that helps them!

Regards

Arthur (from ages ago when Axiom was shipped by NAG)

[Tim Daly]

> Way back then typical computers were a lot

> smaller and fitting in Axiom in on other than "jumbo" ones was "fun".

Yes, it was. The reason the "compress" database exists was due to my work

putting Axiom on a then very-new thing called a "laptop". It had to run under

DJGPP on DOS with 4k of memory. Good times. Worthless now, of course.

> So it is in effect a new project and if there is a non-existing Community
> then their approval is moot and 100% unimportant. But not seeing all your
> work preserved somewhere would feel criminal to me.

History shows that certain ideas, such as proving computer algebra algorithms,

are "ahead of their time". Eventually the LEAN proof crowd will need algorithms

and the computer algebra crowd will need proofs so they will overlap. Future

researchers will do this "as a matter of course" since they will have PhD students

that need ideas to pursue.

As for the "criminal" aspect, my code is "breadboard quality", meaning you need to

know how CLOS works in great detail and how Axiom inheritance works and how to

layer Lisp code expansion "all the way to the metal" and how the LEAN proof

checker is implemented in Verilog for the FPGA paired with expanded RISC-V

instructions. The code would be worthless to anyone else. I code to understand

and then, having understood, rewrite it correctly (for now). The code is more like

building a garden than a house.

> That surely is because you did not have a full 1000 years to work on it
> and not enough other like-minded folks chose to join in.

Beyond the 1000 years you underestimate (:-)  I am not smart enough to understand

Bronstein and Trager's research enough to explain it. I just recently got a handle on

Clifford algebras and how they differ from Grassman algebras. I am "quite slow", have 

a really bad memory, and take forever to learn. So my "literate explanations" of the Risch

algorithm would likely be "not even wrong". I worked in robotics for years so explaining 

Denavit-Hartenberg matrices was easy as they have real physical meaning.

> I already said that learning from what you are doing on types would be desirable.

The key issue with dependent types is that you need to compute algebraic properties

while constructing the type you need to compute your problem. My "canonical problem"

is computing Unums[0] for doing limited arithmetic (witness the "configurable computing"[1]

floating point effort in neural nets) as part of a type e.g. Matrix(Unum(8,3)) and whether

the inversion algorithm should work in Unums or integers. The results differ.

Even worse, I converted BLAS and LAPACK to common lisp and spent a lot of time

pondering what Unums would mean for precision.

The whole "computational mathematics" field is dense with hard problems.

I am having a grand time being lost and confused but learning a lot.

Fun times.

Tim

[0] End of Error Unum Computing 

https://www.amazon.com/End-Error-Computing-Chapman-Computational/dp/1482239868

[1] Configurable Computing for Floating Point https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.15073

On Thu, Feb 6, 2025 at 12:50 PM Arthur Norman <ac...@cam.ac.uk> wrote:

On Thu, 6 Feb 2025, Tim Daly wrote:
> Arthur,
> I remember our conversations from the distant past. You did excellent work
> making Axiom quite portable based on your lisp and other modifications.

Thank you for the kind words! Way back then typical computers were a lot
smaller and fitting in Axiom in on other than "jumbo" ones was "fun".

> Unfortunately I spent a lot of time with Bill Schelter and did work on AKCL
> including various Axiom optimizations so I essentially removed all that you
> did in order to work with what I knew. Sorry about that.

No need to apologise. As your various emails explain your objectives were
veery specific and indeed ambitious.

> I am really sorry to hear that Albert Rich died. We corresponded quite a
> bit.
> I co-authored a rule-based system at IBM Research based on Forgy's RETE
> as the basis for the Expert System offering. Rich and I discussed improving
> the rule-based machinery in Axiom to include his work. He did amazing work.
>

He is remembered!!!!

>> hypothetical keen new generation could cut their teeth on would be good.
> The "chance" you describe is a fork. We've already seen how that evolves.

I think a form while a system is still alive is one thing. A fork when the
system is otherwise dead still needs to take some care to retain credit
for and memory of the earlier work, but it is much harder to say that it
is doing active damage.

> The literate programming goal was to make it possible for someone to be
> able to maintain and modify Axiom without contact with the original
> developers.
> It was intended to "make Axiom live". The current sources build from the
> books (pamphlet format is just latex renamed). I collected a few
> research papers and got permission to re-create them in one of the
> books.

Indeed but it is then fairly extreme to insist that the "someone" wishes
to make their modifications follow exactly the path that their
predecessors would have in an ideal world.
Well my interest might not be in recreating all of Axiom but in mining it
for ideas and components in a sense after the style where you collected
research papers authored by others to incorporate. It is way too long ago
that I looked inside Axiom but I suspect there is algorithmic content that
may do better than some existing alternative systems, and from a
practical person's perspective explositing those elsewhere would avoid
the work being lost if Axiom is not there to host it. In many respects
the type schemes and levels of abstraction that drove Axiom from early
days also needs not to fade from memory if the system dies. If in working
on that I ended up ready to adopt a more literate mode of work than I use
at present it would have educated me!

> Unfortunately I only expanded certain algebra domains in literate form.
> I did insert bibliographic
> references in the algebra sources when I could find the papers.

That surely is because you did not have a full 1000 years to work on it
and not enough other like-minded folks chose to join in. With Reduce I
find it really painful that the open source ideal that co-developers will
flock to join in work on an interesting projecy can be a bit of an
illusion!

>> A "30 year horizon" surely involves a project being reinvented and
>> reforged anew
>
> It is not possible to do deep research such as adding proofs using
> the Axiom/SPAD combination. The parser/compiler is too fragile
> for such deep surgery.

Fair do.

> So relative to my "research focus" fricas
> is an effort devoted to "polishing". Worse I've introduced dependent
> types which really complicates the inheritance logic well beyond what
> the current compiler can handle.

I already said that learning from what you are doing on types would be
desirable.

> The SANE version of Axiom is wildly different from the github version.
> For example, the source is now all pure common lisp using CLOS.
> It is also restructured from the ground up to include a LEAN Proof
> inheritance
> tower parallel to the Category-Domain towers. (I spent many years as a
> visiting
> scholar at CMU working with the CS and Math/Philosophy related to LEAN)
>
> So you can see that for the last decade I've drifted quite far from the git
> repo.
> Worse, I've drifted from the SPAD world. Given that i was vilified for
> removing
> BOOT code I expect the non-existing Axiom community would not approve.
> Thus none of the code hit the repo.
>

So it is in effect a new project and if there is a non-existing Community
then their approval is moot and 100% unimportant. But not seeing all your
work preserved somewhere would feel criminal to me.

>> So having a reasonably definitive "here lies" archive with at least
>> workable build scripts and pointers to the easier tasks that a
>> hypothetical keen new generation could cut their teel on would be good.
>
> The last tombstone above the current Axiom work is in git.
> There is also a tombstone on Wikipedia
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom_(computer_algebra_system)
>

Yes but the git version ignores all your more recent work that is really
pushing towards ideals. Your personal interest is not (as I understand
you) in delivering a working practical "software product" but in exploring
the more fundamental issues. It would be hard for anybody to pick that up
or even understand it if what you have been doing over recent years just
sits on your private machine to be eventuallyt lost forever.

BTW I think my views regarding Microsoft and github and 2-factor
authentication may not be identical to yours but I am not terribly cheery
about all such. So for some of what I do for myself I host a git
repository on a Raspberry Pi (!) and a FEW selected people are given
access. And I control everything.

Since I am now retired I do not need to satisfy anybody but myself with
how I spend my time - and I get my kicks more out of supporting other
users with bits of research (less deep and ambitious then yours)
interleaved. But also cooking and eating and wildlife activities...

You say "code rot happens" and for any package unless there is some mut
who is prepared to patch stuff up the rot can be disabling for a whole
community. That is part of where I see myself fitting in!

       Arthur

[Grégory Vanuxem]

+1

For me Axiom is not dead, and more, its name. Scratchpad was as I see
it an experimentation. Axiom the resulting software. Losing this
software name would be a real personal deception (even if it is a
little pedantic name).

My two cents;

Greg

> To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/fricas-devel/CAAWYfq1nEBNrmwQ0NsX8%2Bbm%2Bvhw%3DmC3P0CrxqRhot2EmDpoHOw%40mail.gmail.com.

[Camm Maguire]

Greetings!

Tim, your contributions and reservoir of knowledge are outstanding and
much appreciated -- never doubt it!

Of course nothing lives forever, and rare and precious are the
opportunities to contribute something genuinely useful to others,
however temporary this utility may ultimately prove to be. But if I may
be so bold, there is more than one definition of 'dead'.

For ambitious research and innovation purposes, AXIOM may be dead, only
time will tell. I would offer the humble suggestion that as most of
these innovation ideas are in your head or at most in the heads of a few
others, that they are far more likely to 'see the light of day' if you
can stage them in smallish incremental steps that other 'users' can
build, explore and learn from.

AXIOM as the currently shipped package across all Debian platforms based
on your last 2017 sources is certainly not and will not be 'dead'. It
would be helpful, but not required, if three things were established to
support 'archival' AXIOM, which thankfully turn out to be very easy: 1)
git, 2) simple webpage, 3) download section with historical tarball
releases. Even OpenAXIOM, which AFAICS has been 'dead' since 2013, has
these still accessible. Putting the github question aside for the
moment (see below), one immediately available option is your existing
account on savannah. And the FSF as host is likely far more long lived
and resistant to the Microsoft/2FA 'innovations for your protection'
issues you have experienced.

Where was axiom-developer.org hosted, and where are its contents now?

Arthur Norman <ac...@cam.ac.uk> writes:

> BTW I think my views regarding Microsoft and github and 2-factor
> authentication may not be identical to yours but I am not terribly
> cheery about all such. So for some of what I do for myself I host a
> git repository on a Raspberry Pi (!) and a FEW selected people are
> given access. And I control everything.
>

Bravo. Of course we must have sympathy for the horrendous cybersecurity
issues facing these centralized 'enterprise solution' organizations.
But we can all see where this is going -- "I'm sorry, Hal, unlocking
your toothbrush requires 10FA and you only have 9..." Surely future
historians will marvel how in the face of the Promethean gift of
computing and the internet humanity abandoned the liberating power at
its fingertips in favor of ceding ever more control over its
functioning, communications, and data to centralized organizations and
machines.

Take care,
--
Camm Maguire ca...@maguirefamily.org

[Camm Maguire]

Greetings!

Tim Daly <axio...@gmail.com> writes:

> My real frustration is that the several hundred people who contributed in large and
> small ways over many years don't seem to even get mentioned. Credit is so easy
> to share. Axiom would never have been re-created without effort from people like you.
> At least I personally say "Thank you, Camm."

And please let me reciprocate with a most sincere and heart-felt "Thank
you Tim!"

Poking around a bit, I see the wayback machine has a snapshot of the
website as of 12/27. I also see three git trees, the locked one at
github, one at sourceforce, and one at savannah, all of which appear to
be in sync. If there are any reasons anyone would prefer github, I
would like to hear them, and would be happy to engage support over there
to regain access, though the easiest is surely to open a fresh account
and start again. Otherwise I would suggest for the purposes of
'archival axiom' we centralize on savannah. I still have admin
privileges there, and if there is no objection I will try to update its
content with the last known material. I of course do not intend to
initiate any 'new fork', God forbid, or anything of the like. I suggest
this space be left for whatever initiative Tim and others working with
him may wish to make of it, while allowing for minimal modifications to
ensure the sources continue to build in the face of bit rot. If anyone
would like to assist with this 'archival axiom' refresh, please let me
know.

Take care,