asciilifeform: a blind man may well have a machine with many fewer moving parts than cat, read his balzac.
asciilifeform: still 'counts' for the purpose of automated wotronics ?
asciilifeform: yes but let's suppose that mircea_popescu mistyped, deliberately or otherwise, a character(s) in the string, and wrote 'kye x is ym key'
asciilifeform: because if so, making the declarations 'human text' is hardly an effective barrier
asciilifeform: gedankenexperiment. say i have a billion signed texts, from all over the galaxy, and also a number of keys, can i mechanically query 'documents signed by all of mircea_popescu's known subserviant keys' ? is the notion that anyone trying to do this is by definition up to no good ?
asciilifeform: we are far from the autarkik vplanet.
asciilifeform: all of the extant vtrons, i will point out, run on linux, which is a monstrous horror of the deep that no one in my wot has signed, ditto python, perl, etc.
asciilifeform: or to drink salt water in the lifeboat.
asciilifeform: if you have 'soft' linkages between subservient keys, and no way to 'harden' them for the record, a slick operator could simply shed subpersonalities like snake skins, and there will be doubt in re the contiguity of identity, where there ought be no possibility of doubt.
asciilifeform: actually the relevant mircea_popescu article was another, where he had example of a man who is about to be hanged, but argues that the man who did the crime, is not the one who is bound and led to the gallows
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu has a pretty good exposition of this, not long ago, in the 'opposed' thread
asciilifeform: a rsa signature is a canned, if you will, piece of volition.
asciilifeform: and it is doomed to look quite different, with passage of time, than the maker intends.
asciilifeform: so we have here a suit of armour where the leather straps rot, but the iron -- does not.
asciilifeform: signatures, on the other hand, are not ephemeral but permanent.
asciilifeform: well iirc in mircea_popescu's original sketch, the sole linkage between mircea_popescu-royalkey and mircea_popescu-apocryphakey is a wot rating. and wot as we have it is an ephemeral thing, which relies on ability to interrogate living people, and not only living but near to the interlocutor in wot.
asciilifeform: to not give the enemy a place to stick the knife.
asciilifeform: but what is the best way to make permanent record that ' mircea_popescu's i-found-this-in-back-of-desk-drawer ' key is subservient strictly to ' mircea_popescu royal key ' ?
asciilifeform: phf: mircea_popescu's method , to be used in the battlefield, still needs some means of tying the keys together formally -- and something that doesn't reduce to the horror of gpg's 'subkeys'
asciilifeform: and there are bound to be mistakes, ranging from the harmless lul to the utter calamity, 'oops i used my 'royal alchemist' stamp instead of 'dildolathe operator by appointment to Her Majesty' stamp'
asciilifeform: asciilifeform's grandfather had a gigantic tray of rubber stamps, of what must have been a dozen different shapes, and when signing a document would first stamp it with the rubber that corresponded to the imperial role in which the signing was to take place. this was orc sop. and i suppose the concept is doomed to stick around.
asciilifeform: may as well sign with a phuctored key
asciilifeform: there's no 'fixed form' from a key made on public comp tho
asciilifeform: that a naked, barbaric pastebin would not
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: what does the cafe key provide ?
asciilifeform: a 'helpful' fella can simply repaste it.
asciilifeform: important thing to remember, though, is that once you sign something, it ~exists~, and you cannot control it by selectively posting it to this-public-site but not that-public-site
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: signed-but-non-vtronic snippets are vulnerable to context misplacement.
asciilifeform: phf: recently mircea_popescu suggested a cleaner scheme where everybody has multiple signing keys, and they rate one another, as if they were people. which is probably as mechanized as this will ever get.
asciilifeform: phf: i stabbed at the problem of formalizing a way to specify what it is you actually commit to when signing a patch. it was the 'vectorized' thing, and everybody barfed.
asciilifeform: and also from a comment by mircea_popescu that went something like 'i must be able to put finger on a line of code and get names'
asciilifeform: it was a fairly unambitious generalization from things we had already been doing by hand in trbdom
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: it was how asciilifeform never learned to properly hand-write
asciilifeform: the most, afaik, egregious babel on planet3.
asciilifeform worked in a lab with two dozen folx from india, no 2 spoke same language other than english
asciilifeform: afaik esperantism was one of those crackpotteries utterly thermonuked by ww1, so i have nfi where one would even begin to look for remnants.
asciilifeform: 'ten years in the lab can save you ten minutes in the library'
asciilifeform: which is why i'd like to see ~how~ they were fucked, there has to be some remaining crater to look at
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: sorta why i was specifically curious re what it was that the esperantist ~children~ spoke. the resultant creole, not the original 'megalomaniacal engineer' item.
asciilifeform: phf: why not one op that dispatches, correctly ? is it as if the compiler ever did not know the actual operand's type ?
asciilifeform: common lisp committee was hobbled by babelism, had to stuff in the redundant idiocies, and never got to, say, actually developing streams properly (why the fuck are we stuck with hacks like gray streams? and where is the commonlisp with ~working~ mop ? etc)☟︎☟︎
asciilifeform: phf: pray tell : what does having 'elt' AND 'nth' around, facilitate ?☟︎
asciilifeform: then again finnish had ~0 written word until 19th c
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: aha, urk 'ebonics' is perfectly speakable, just like the american variant, but (until recently) 0 written word.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: iirc most conlangists were not trying to beat french, romanian, russian, etc; but to beat commercial pidgins like english, which suffer from severely limited vocabulary and many nonsensical sharp edges
asciilifeform: same place as 'play go' robot (btw afaik 0 pro games since sedol... as i predicted)
asciilifeform: meat vitalism?! what happened to the robocalypse?!
asciilifeform: i hate to distract mircea_popescu from a good gloat re the impotence of engineer, but i'd like to see where he cuts the subj : viable conlang is impossible because no one remotely understands meat well enough? or, useless, even if it were made ? ... or both ?
asciilifeform: the kibbutz was a bonsaikitten and deservedly vanished. but their conlang! worked!111
asciilifeform: not forgotten, it is lulled at in every work re kibbutzim
asciilifeform: catholic latin was every bit the engineered.
