log☇︎
103900+ entries in 0.815s
asciilifeform: as a matter of fact it is.
mircea_popescu: that is not a definition.
asciilifeform: it is a term of art.
mircea_popescu: it is not clear a "general purpose hole" may exist.
mircea_popescu: it's like a general-purpose hole.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform this stand would be a lot more defensible if general purpose computing made a sense!
mircea_popescu: it'd prolly be a dos box.
mircea_popescu: i tell you honestly if i were to go on a mountaintop now, IF i considered taking a computer AT ALL
phf: now a working cpu comes preinstalled with all the gunk that various parties decided is needed, over the course of past 20 years
phf: back then a working cpu at capacity was the point, we have floating point here now, gives wider possibility space, etc.
mircea_popescu: was a time and a place, let it be.
phf: sure, i don't myself grok the cause. i'm more saying that 80s general purpose computer is a time and place kind of phenomenon
mircea_popescu: there were 20+ kids who had a driver drive them to school.
mircea_popescu: understand - at some point in my life, "owning a computer" as opposed to a speccy, or a video game console, was a social selection bar SO HIGH that out of my entire preppiest-school-in-town it selected for TWO PEOPLE.
phf: i had computer access back when they were extremely expensive one of a kind devices
mircea_popescu: adding more engineers to a late project makes it later ; adding more bipedal mouthbreathers to anything makes it resemble shit closer.
mircea_popescu: wikipedia is not better for pretending every imbecile is "an editor", it's way the fuck worse. the internet did not gain from the "collected intelligence and experience of the whole world", it turned into a cesspool instead.
mircea_popescu: but if i were somehow persuaded to care - frankly i'm inclined to believe making computers cow-accessible was a horrible fucking idea.
mircea_popescu: appreciate, i had a computer EVEN WHEN it was ~5k DM and the going rate was half-and-half for 5. and i'm sure that at some point between then and now, some poor black kid in the sticks somewhere wanted a computer only to hear "da fuck ya want dat witey shit fo boe!" from his momma and get to play casino gems on her knockoff smartphone instead.
mircea_popescu: phf i meant something specific : how can a "mode" be "replaced". sounds to me (prolly proof of my ignorance) like "blue colors have been deprecated in irssi". dude... what ? it's my fucking config file.
shinohai: Got a template you can send me or something? I've just been writing everything in vi
shinohai: Always on top of a Preet story :D
a111: Logged on 2016-04-22 04:33 mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2016-04-22#1455101 << i have a difficult to explain and perhaps dubious proof as to why this imagined future is not a possible future.
phf: you have a changing subtrate, changing interfaces. you can hot iron parts while it's at a manageable size and localized, but at some point you start dealing with systemd type situation where the tendrils are inside either the code that you use OR inside the subtrate/interfaces part (i.e. connection to outside world)
phf: then wrote a rant how that's unsustainable for a single person on account of having essentially to work as a merge maintainer for a dozen of projects
phf: he forked and maintained his own mule-less emacs, wrote i believe a unicode based i18n module for it, etc.
a111: Logged on 2016-04-22 03:45 mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2016-04-22#1455044 << i don't comprehend how this can even be a thing.
phf: http://btcbase.org/log/2016-04-22#1455256 << http://btcbase.org/log/2016-04-12#1450737 same strategies in a scope of a single codebase. naggum came up not for his later escapades (i don't know much about that) but because of his early attempts to fight a braindead internationalization module "MULE" ☝︎☝︎
punkman: maybe even scrap the website part, publish reports once a week/month
asciilifeform: consider, phuctor is a public service, it makes 0 coin
mircea_popescu: to go to Heaven yet at the same time are likelier to make a Hell of earth."
mircea_popescu: "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims will be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely
mircea_popescu: just like high-performance designer chemistry jumped fro mbeing a well funded uni lab only thing back in 1996 to being accessible to random spammer with a desire to sell temporarily "legal" psychoactives.
a111: Logged on 2016-04-22 02:14 asciilifeform: you did not make anything, really, and you relied on a supply chain that is quite likely unstable, esp. if you become 'interesting'
a111: Logged on 2016-04-22 02:02 asciilifeform: (last i recall mircea_popescu gave somewhere close to 1/10th of a damn, he is to be commended for this)
mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2016-04-22#1455176 << my damns are a complex echafaudage of roots and smoked mirrors and etc. hard to say how tall what is. ☝︎
mircea_popescu: and there's no great american novel ; nor a french dictionary. what of it.
trinque: asciilifeform: sure, and your blog is a big part of why I ended up interested enough to hang around
trinque: in what I'd say is a rather despotic society
mircea_popescu: so blair would like an audience. fine. good. i didn't wet my bed as a child.
asciilifeform: because your thoughts are never entirely your own. Philosophers, writers, artists, even scientists, not only need encouragement and an audience, they need constant stimulation from other people. It is almost impossible to think without talking. If Defoe had really lived on a desert island, he could not have written Robinson Crusoe, nor would he have wanted to. Take away freedom of speech, and the creative faculties dry up. Had the Ge
asciilifeform: Why is this idea false? I pass over the fact that modern dictatorships don't, in fact, leave the loopholes that the old-fashioned despotisms did; and also the probable weakening of the desire for intellectual liberty owing to totalitarian methods of education. The greatest mistake is to imagine that the human being is an autonomous individual. The secret freedom which you can supposedly enjoy under a despotic government is nonsense,
asciilifeform: 'The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside. Quite a number of people console themselves with this thought, now that totalitarianism in one form or another is visibly on the up-grade in every part of the world. Out in the street the loudspeakers bellow, the flags flutter from the rooftops, the police with their tommy-guns prowl to and fro, the face of the Leader, four feet wide, glares from e
asciilifeform: orwell actually had a bit re this:
a111: Logged on 2016-04-22 01:28 phf: i.e. my cmucl runs on a clearly compromised intel cpu and can even do interesting things. imagine future(tm) where only way to run cmucl is by crosscompiling into x86 emulator inside your web browser ;]
mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2016-04-22#1455101 << i have a difficult to explain and perhaps dubious proof as to why this imagined future is not a possible future. ☝︎☟︎
mircea_popescu: a mile deep, you'll feel it alright.
asciilifeform: reality, able to keep up an attitude of the completest indifference, no matter what happens. A storm that would sink all the battleships in the world would hardly reach you as an echo. Even the whale's own movements would probably be imperceptible to you. He might be wallowing among the surface waves or shooting down into the blackness of the middle seas (a mile deep, according to Herman Melville), but you would never notice the dif
asciilifeform: 'For the fact is that being inside a whale is a very comfortable, cosy, homelike thought. The historical Jonah, if he can be so called, was glad enough to escape, but in imagination, in day-dream, countless people have envied him. It is, of course, quite obvious why. The whale's belly is simply a womb big enough for an adult. There you are, in the dark, cushioned space that exactly fits you, with yards of blubber between yourself and
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform yeah it's a kinda usable/powerful metaphor to work on i thought
mircea_popescu: prolly should be a sf world.
trinque: +asciilifeform │ you did not make anything, really, and you relied on a supply chain that is quite likely unstable, esp. if you become 'interesting' << this is the wrong strategy.
mircea_popescu: insurance is very much a history-driven business
asciilifeform: wat's a peripheral pest ?
mircea_popescu: eventually settled, took a coupla years.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform you can actually insure against the tax thing, yes. you just have to have a large enough operation.
BingoBoingo: If you want to start a fiat business your first expense isn't insurance it is a lawnmower.
mircea_popescu: and by trims i mean a list. civil judgements for accidents, including hunting! included.
mircea_popescu: yes, it was a nicety thrown in because shipping insurance deals. whatevs.
BingoBoingo was actually considering opening fiat business as a hedge next year. You just gotta look at businesses with lower minimum costs.
mircea_popescu: and re the fine print... there's a lot of suckers and retail in there. last i went to the states, i got full insurance, from lloyds of london no less. for, if memory serves, #159.
asciilifeform: it is a kind of outer barbed wire they get stuck in and shot by the guards.
asciilifeform: anyway i'm not convinced that ~anyone actually ~chooses~ to become a naggum
asciilifeform: trinque: i did not say it was a mega-promising career choice.
trinque: sorry, *there is a minimum expense involved in running a business and you can't get around that fact.
mircea_popescu: there is nothing wrong with this - people do it all the time. venice was entirely built out of the fact that a boat took on average 3.5 merchants
mircea_popescu: there exists a hole in this "single derpy consultant business".
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: again i had this, and it was a real laugh, read the fine print sometime.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform you have to appreciate : in nature, there exists such a thing as a hole.
asciilifeform: where a few k/mo is your WHOLE RECEIPT ?
asciilifeform: trinque: a motherfucking consulting gig ??
mircea_popescu: it's workable for most entry level needs. gotta shop around a little.
asciilifeform: i had this, it was a joke
trinque: wtf is a business if you can't pay a few grand to a lawyer per month?
mircea_popescu: you know you can generally get a basic package kinda similar to insurance.
mircea_popescu: you ever took a good look in goat's eyes ?
asciilifeform: in a mud pit.
asciilifeform: if you can't afford a pot, you will cook it on open hearth yes.
mircea_popescu: the notion that you're going to run a business, but not have counsel, not have tax and accounting support, not have etc etc is like you'll cook a meal for a wedding without stove or pots or pans.
mircea_popescu: do you understand this ? about a third of my mail EACH DAY is various people in various jurisdictions telling me "mr popescu how do we proceed in the following situation : X. A does so and so B does so and so [C, D , E]"
mircea_popescu: look, the dilemma here isn't "either i be eunuch or else i go fight for odin as a berserker"
mircea_popescu: what if he started flying a plane without ever learning math ?
mircea_popescu: point stands : if you aren't a businessman, and don't have business skills, why are you starting a business ?
mircea_popescu: how do you perceive what he did (hurr durr i'm going to be a business) is different from average tardstalk forumite (hurr durr i'm going to be an exchange) ?
mircea_popescu: the term "slap on the wrist" is a business call. it stands correct as it is. your "pretty penny" is a housewife call. it's not relevant how much it is.
asciilifeform: and it wasn't a slap on the wrist, it was - iirc - a pretty penny
mircea_popescu: "man should not discharge rifle into boat". who the fuck told him he can run a consulting business without a tax expert ? even accountant level.
mircea_popescu: this is how this works : if it is your field of expertise, you have legal team ready to go. either you're a complete imbecile, or woe be upon whoever gets involved. if not your field of expertise, you're either prosecuting in which case generally you want to assign the matter ; or else you're in deep shit.
asciilifeform: but admit, this is 0 use to a naggum.
asciilifeform: just hiring lawyer for a week would wipe out ~99% of usaschwitz inmates
mircea_popescu: it's one thing to try and run a marathon. it;s another thing to try and run a marathon with pneumonia.
asciilifeform: srsly you need a certain amount of mircea_popescutronium to 'jurisdiction shop', appear in court, etc.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: except you did not do it from the position of being a pauper.
mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2016-04-22#1455044 << i don't comprehend how this can even be a thing. ☝︎☟︎
a111: Logged on 2016-04-22 00:37 asciilifeform: there is apparently nothing more alluring to the vermin than a not-yet-verminized ecosystem
mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2016-04-22#1455022 << it's not JUST that, also needs another ingredient, a special flavour of "open". geek-open, when people aren't comfortable with humiliating idiots. ☝︎
phf: ok, i'm going to sleep. this was an entertaining conversation, even if a recap of many past threads
asciilifeform: the thing is that neither of these concerns really interests anybody who has a spare 500k
phf: so what's the advantage of fpga based architecture as opposed to someone hypothetically investing quite a bit more than 500k into a high density risc, etc.?
asciilifeform: it'd be quite a bit more than 500k