asciilifeform: hey hey, http://btcbase.org/log/2016-11-23#1572755 ☝︎

asciilifeform: what exactly did adlai think a month ago, that rates would stay magically ~frozen for all eternity ?

asciilifeform: with exchanges riding ye olde goxcoaster nowadays.

asciilifeform: and needs oiling ?

asciilifeform: adlai: dontcha have an arbitragebot that oughta be running in redline now

asciilifeform: (forward-then-backward)

asciilifeform: ben_vulpes: your screenshit looks like it could very well have come from bramcohenalgo

asciilifeform: adlai, that is

asciilifeform: d00d must be back on the sauce ☟︎

asciilifeform: it's the sort of crackpottery that could have made its way into git toolz

asciilifeform: ben_vulpes: i have nfi how these work, but maybe bramcohen's algo (linked earlier)

asciilifeform: when mircea_popescu wakes up, he might have a less gentle and more memorable way to phrase this truism.

asciilifeform: adlai: fork was not made to pick yer nose with

asciilifeform: adlai: why you gotta abuse

asciilifeform: this dun look like phf's

asciilifeform: where didja get the colours ben_vulpes

asciilifeform: link

asciilifeform: dunthinkso

asciilifeform: adlai: ,@ eats a list neh

asciilifeform: ben_vulpes: http://experiments.mostafa.io/public/needleman-wunsch << graphical nw demo

asciilifeform: folx will do ANYTHING!111 to avoid cracking a book.

asciilifeform: http://bramcohen.livejournal.com/73318.html << small lul re folx with crackpot difftrons

asciilifeform: monkeys -- to the monkey house.

asciilifeform: adlai: nobody said 'we'll have multiple monkeys writing'

asciilifeform: waiwat

asciilifeform: aha

asciilifeform: unless folx ~really~ pine for the tabs fix thing...

asciilifeform: trb will probably remain in trad style 4evar

asciilifeform: (it is a form of whitespace)

asciilifeform: newline has ~0 syntactic meaning in lisps.

asciilifeform: magical-newlines (unix diff) and parens-sexpr (lisps) is a pretty heavy impedance mismatch.

asciilifeform: ben_vulpes might see what i mean

asciilifeform: the reason i keep coming back to this thought is that unix diff results in some pretty barfy lisp vpatches.

asciilifeform: because it mandates that no one ever use a programming lang where +++ occurs, etc.

asciilifeform: i do see the merit of nailing it down. but imho unix diff is retarded.

asciilifeform cleans 'a' key

asciilifeform: etc

asciilifeform: foo.mirce_popescus_neato_difftron.vpatch

asciilifeform: foo.unix.vpatch

asciilifeform: (any well-formed patch representation is, in principle, convertible to any other)

asciilifeform: incidentally i'm not entirely convinced that v gotta be married to a particular difftron to work.

asciilifeform: and pedigree-preserving.

asciilifeform: it was a somewhat pathological example. but i will point out that in this system , mircea_popescu's tab-corrector patch would be 100% human-readable.

asciilifeform: (i don't even disagree, that they ought to be.)

asciilifeform: 'patches must be superbly-commented works of knuthiana' is promisetronic.

asciilifeform: my diff is about a dozen chars.

asciilifeform: can you read it ?

asciilifeform: here's gedankenexperiment. take file of aaaaaaaaaaa.....aaaa (1MB worth.) add, 512kB in, a 'b'. how long is your unix diff ?

asciilifeform: iwhat..?

asciilifeform: (iirc it was mircea_popescu !)

asciilifeform: 'muscle memory, thinking man's worst enemy', who said.

asciilifeform: it only looks easy because you are familiar with it.

asciilifeform: and see how many states.

asciilifeform: has mircea_popescu ever tried to implement traditional unix diff ?

asciilifeform: 3 state.

asciilifeform: it ain't a blob

asciilifeform: why not 1 magical char instead of entire fucking magic words like +++.

asciilifeform: and why magic newlines.

asciilifeform: why have any more mutilation of the text than necessary ?

asciilifeform: (it so happens that the original happened on a uuencoded shit, tru)

asciilifeform: same mine.

asciilifeform: incidentally you will blow up on the +++ mine if you try and diff a vdiff. ☟︎☟︎

asciilifeform: separate issue

asciilifeform: it was valid ascii

asciilifeform: it wasn't a blob.

asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2016-12-11#1581252 ☝︎

asciilifeform: during FUCKGOATS release.

asciilifeform: didn't i post , right here, a well-formed-to-naked-eye-but-not-to-vtron vdiff ?

asciilifeform: and sure as fuck you can tell

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: like pkzip, or just about any format since 1962

asciilifeform: but any octet is legal inside a proper counterstate.

asciilifeform: (throw it out)

asciilifeform: any characters found not in one of the 3 above states, make the entire diff nonwellformed.

asciilifeform: or rather, it is a literal string, and ought to be subsumed in one of the above forms.

asciilifeform: \\4 does zip.

asciilifeform: or a \+4\ (add four) or \-4\ (lose next four)

asciilifeform: (retain)

asciilifeform: which can be a, e.g., \4\

asciilifeform: or you meant of \4\

asciilifeform: the count.

asciilifeform: *many

asciilifeform: because the machine knows how may to skip.

asciilifeform: incl. \ , 991\\\\\235\9824 , etc.

asciilifeform: the ....... in \N\....... can be ANY octets.

asciilifeform: no, see,

asciilifeform: the one thing i consider a major win here, compactness aside, is the freeness-from-inbandmagic.

asciilifeform: (for the colour viewer thing)

asciilifeform: incidentally iirc phf's vtron internally converts diffs to something quite like this form

asciilifeform has not so many entirely new idea.

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: really idea is stolen from teco

asciilifeform: (he'd have to for either kind)

asciilifeform: esp. if ben_vulpes makes a proper aligner.

asciilifeform: worth a try, costs 0.

asciilifeform: i dare say that a colourized, phf-style viewer can make the suggested char-differ quite readable in comparison with ye olde unixdiff.

asciilifeform: incl. heathenries.

asciilifeform: diff gotta eat any 7bit-clean rubbish.

asciilifeform: that's not a general-purpose diff nao, is it.

asciilifeform: and it's a 1 to an I etc.

asciilifeform: when 1 'line noise' character, somewhere in a 140-char line, changes.

asciilifeform: go and diff, e.g., some perl code, and see if you still agree.