log☇︎
101600+ entries in 0.757s
asciilifeform: but i dare say i have a handle on 'technology' vs 'magic'
mircea_popescu: then the design is for a magic item
mircea_popescu: even your "primitive man won't stray" argument is broken, as you stop midway. a) the point of his following your recipe is that he got off lazy butt ; if he doesn't, he doesn't AT ALL. why would he get off lazy butt JUST AS FAR as you imagine he would and no further ?
asciilifeform: i would have a bit of a tougher cookie on my hands
mircea_popescu: (note how you keep trying to brace yourself against unstated convention, "of course you would understand this is not the item because that'd breach symmetry and we have a convention re symmetry")
asciilifeform: hard enough to give a stone 1 edge.
asciilifeform: at any rate, 'resistance of medium', this is not a place where a primitive axe-maker is likely to wander into
mircea_popescu: wasn't clear that part is intentionally meaningful. fine, consider same item with a single such spoke
mircea_popescu: but you communicated axe and i ended up with a flanged mace. http://www.therionarms.com/reenact/therionarms_c1306b.jpg << is this your axe ?
mircea_popescu: this sounds like a flanged mace ?
asciilifeform: when you ~think~ you have reduced the item to a recipe of dead words
asciilifeform: anyway i was not there, and cannot say how much the entire story was simply a cover for embezzling half a bil usd
mircea_popescu: so this was a technology yes
asciilifeform: they spent, supposedly, a few 100 mil, massive failures
asciilifeform: as it turned out to have a hidden dependence on an impurity which was present in the feedstock at the time
asciilifeform: a sort of styrofoam
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: good evidence that it was indeed a product
mircea_popescu: i always thought it to be a sort of snipe pee.
mircea_popescu: meanwhile, "shit an atom of gold and i'll pay you a dollar" is easy. "shit a brick of gold and i'll pay you a billion" is very fucking hard. etc.
asciilifeform: to technologize is to break apart magic and make it repeatable - e.g., damascus steel was magic (gotta be in the right time, right place, use iron from here-and-here, and whisper the incantations yer grandfather taught you for good measure, and be of pure aryan blood, and ....) but then somebody builds mass spectrometer and today you can buy a damascus knife from helsinki
mircea_popescu: to take a simple illustration : make this matchstick exactly 1 mn thick within 0.1% tolerance throughout it's length and i'll pay you a dollar is hard. make this rod of molybdenum 1 mm thick within 0.0000001% tolerance and i'll pay you a billion is easy.
mircea_popescu: and by this measure, a good chunk of what you regard one is really the other and back again.
mircea_popescu: in fact, a useful heuristic to distinguish magic and technology, is that as the stakes increase, magic gets harder and technology easier to do.
asciilifeform: thus far thread seems to compress to a very discouraging http://btcbase.org/log/2016-05-19#1468598 ; mircea_popescu: 'me an' the other wizards got vastly moar powerful!1111' asciilifeform: 'waiwut how' mircea_popescu: 'yer puny brain will never apprehend the smallest part of it' ☝︎
mircea_popescu: but if it's actually useful to do, it can't fucking be done worth a shit.
mircea_popescu: then you can say like the butcher that moved into village and introduced hygiene, "i am a better surgeon than the guys in paris"
mircea_popescu: it's not surprisingly easy to do it usefully. it's very easy to do it when no one's doing it and there's a lot of low hanging fruit,
mircea_popescu: it's a technology, right ? by ytour notions of tech, math is the supertech. so then ?
mircea_popescu: but try it prospectively, like a math teacher on a grad program. pick which kids do good work and which waste their lives.
mircea_popescu: it is, to a degree and after a fashion, a talent.
asciilifeform: but if mircea_popescu is a gifted telepath, clairvoyant, and spirit-summoner and proposes to use 'technology' to describe his abilities, imho this is abuse of terminology.
mircea_popescu: and who promised you such barrier as "a jungle far away" ?
mircea_popescu: do me a favour and don't go all religious freak on me, absence of proof / proof of absence stew etc.
asciilifeform: but until then technology is a communicable thing.
asciilifeform: 'ain't no magic on this here planet' is a religious proposition, yes.
asciilifeform: a stage magic trick is a technology, yes
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform there is a much much better example in your own experience. recall the matchsticks ?
mircea_popescu: so you're a little miffed, and suspect us of collusion. so then we capture a random inuit woman, and i spend some time with her,
asciilifeform: there is a less comical example of this, historically - damascus steel.
mircea_popescu: and then i call a girl over, and she tries it, and there it is! a pretty one too.
mircea_popescu: you think i'm joking, but presently i demonstrate : i put a finger on my nose, and frown, and fart, and soon enough there it is, another one.
mircea_popescu: and i explain to you that i discovered a way to create them by farting.
mircea_popescu: now then, after a moment of this, you wish to know how the fuck is it possible that these animals live here ?!
mircea_popescu: let's do a thought experiment. suppose i invite you to spend a week at my north pole hunting lodge, where, contrary to what you might expect, we spend our time hunting large floating worms of delicious carnation. with me so far ?
mircea_popescu: so then reactor is a technology ?
asciilifeform: this formulation is simply a change of coordinate system
asciilifeform: the making of prussian-style soldiers, folks with very narrow role in life and bonsaikittened brain, is also a technology.
mircea_popescu: "role in life" is not a thing.
asciilifeform: naturally, it is not his role in life. but their hardware is so flimsy that if cut off from the mothership for a month, they will die.
mircea_popescu: "functional literacy", it's a thing.
mircea_popescu: and for that matter, when you have sex you get a child, which is yours, even if you have nfi how cunt works. nor does she.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform but in a discussion of indian tribes, the smaller trbie with guns that wipes the larger tribe with tomahawks HAS, in fact, deployed the technology.
asciilifeform: all he has is a thing he found on a dead englishman.
mircea_popescu: it is not clear technology is an "informational" thing. seems apt to say technology is a productive thing.
asciilifeform: recall the thread about the indian firing a rifle ?
asciilifeform: there is prolly a madman to whom every animal with 4 legs is dog.
asciilifeform: having golden meteor fall in your back yard is not a technology.
mircea_popescu: inasmuch as it allowed the swedes to pretend to being a nation for absolutely no other discerinble reason,
mircea_popescu: you'll be lucky if you ever release 1% of a rather large inmate population.
mircea_popescu: dollars to donuts, if you arrest everyone who ever said "quantum computing" on an webpage, and keep them locked up in solitary until such a time they can explain what it means, scientifically,
mircea_popescu: and there exists a lobby there proposing that for this reason, it is not really, properly technology.
mircea_popescu: there's a space between these two.
mircea_popescu: just as long as you admit to an increase of maximal-possible-mojo per capita, and to a decrease in marginal utility per capita, you're basically admitting the premises.
mircea_popescu: well no, not necessarily. but on the other end of the same chasm, it may not be a case of "either this leverage is universally accessible or stfu"
asciilifeform: this was a testable hypothesis re: observables.
mircea_popescu: the particular is not a public matter. but the thing we were discussing, ie, leverage, and its impact of citizenship, and the way this drags out citizenship out of the commoner's reach, is.
asciilifeform: well is it, to use mircea_popescutronic analysis, a matter 'for the forum' or 'for the gynaecaeum' ?
mircea_popescu: i don't give the first inkliong of a shit as to whether it could "rightfully" be called technical, inovation, or pornography. that's a concern for kids debating superman-vs-spiderman encounters.
asciilifeform: yeah but it is also possible that mircea_popescu benefits from scratching his toes just-so when he wakes up. this is not a technical advance as generally understood, because the recipe is useless to anybody else.
mircea_popescu: well, they've been sticking to it for a decade+ by now.
asciilifeform: ergo not a technical advance, any more than eruption of mt vesuvius was.
asciilifeform: but the reason i dun see the 'let's 3% tax' as a technical advance, is that it was not a deliberate act, but a concession to collapse of inca empire. it was done ~to~ the folks who did it, like an earthquake.
asciilifeform: low tax is now a technical advance?!!
asciilifeform: (i was sent to sit on a committee of sorts, with him in it)
mircea_popescu: for instance, i'm deliberately keeping my ongoing "war on the web" as far as attacking forums goes on a very low roar. not that i couldn't scale it up and end ~any web-based forum, owing to the incredible incompetence of the scammers involved. but then, millions of derps would in a voice go "ok so these are bad, what should we do ?"
mircea_popescu: this is where one writes code as a young man that then makes them famous for rest of life, the c and whatnot of our time. you see what i mean ?
mircea_popescu: plenty of other good ones ( asciilifeform you recall reporting on that group pushing 20 year old schweizer as "wai of footure" at some conference ? ), but the more important point is, that this is a fine field for innovation as it stands. it's very far from "settled science", where the logical move is to simply import the universally accepted library and move on.
mircea_popescu: it's not very much clear there's anything much there besides the usual marketing crapolade. i dunno how familiar you are with this phenomena, but let me dig a fine example out of the log.
mircea_popescu: anyway, Framedragger golang is not liked here because we don't own it, and we don't like usg.google more than we like usg.anything, and because it seems quite well engineered to work as a baited hook for the usg chump works. ☟︎
mircea_popescu: finance is a different story from chumpatronics, why teh haet.
asciilifeform: and so i am not interested in a crypto lib that calls out to google crapolade.
asciilifeform: realize that 'golang' is not simply a language, but a set of libraries that is used by pretty much 100% of the extant soft implemented therein
mircea_popescu: turns out also that this has to be a personal conclusion.
asciilifeform: turns out it is 100% a waste of time to study certain things.
asciilifeform: but this was a mistake.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: on the contrary, there isn't a reference implementation.
mircea_popescu: Framedragger doesn't mean much more than, "the correct path is to take a decent crypto lib, a distributed-hashtable-storage thing from one of the p2p torrent tools, and make a real social media app" ☟︎
Framedragger: > There's just no life in this idea as originally thought out, a browser thing.
mircea_popescu: then in 1660... one's either a noble or not worth the mention, and this reduces to a few percent again.
mircea_popescu: by 1160, which catches us in paris, we're up to a leverage of maybe as high as twenty, and so "most men" is good enough an approximation. about 60-70% really.
mircea_popescu: the year is now 660, and we're in londinum. a man can replace the work of maybe two, give or take. the mean is one-something, and "everyone" is someone.
mircea_popescu: so, year is 160 ad, we're in rome. maximally, a man can replace the work of about fifty or so men, give or take. the mean of this is say 25. about 10% of the population can reach this, and lo and behold - about 10% of the empire's population is citizens!
mircea_popescu: let's take a retrofitted historical walk.
mircea_popescu: nah. i disagree. usa was first to pretend like underage male fuckwards are "worker bees", which only can be meaningfully attempted for ~a certain kind~ of software. what we reference here as the web.
mircea_popescu: the very deeply ignorant approach is rather notable, to my eyes. derps seriously think that's how genetics works, much like a baby perceiving his environment as a photographic still rather than a dynamic equilibrium and so faceplanting self once an hour
mircea_popescu: in another view, what's nailing monsanto is called "so you thought you were smart, eh ?". heck, plants've been here a while. odds are whatever random unwashed derp in our colonies comes up with, they've seen before.
asciilifeform: BUT was restructured as a chumpatron some time quite recently (90s?)
asciilifeform: the thing nailing monsanto has a name, 'epigenetics'
mircea_popescu: spoeaking of which, found a SPLENDID leather collar with metal spikes in local pet shop. top notch stuff, 12 bux.
BingoBoingo: You know, I bet the local farm supply store would have had a better ball gag than all those porno stores...