asciilifeform: programming would perhaps be a similarly honourable profession as piloting, with similar calibre of people, if only it were possible to kill yourself just as easily with mistreated computer as with airplane.
asciilifeform: and another in some proprietary D-like language used at google
asciilifeform: iirc there was even a ~decent one (as far as anyone could tell) in python, in 2012
asciilifeform: nah but srsly as if i did not know about crackpot clients
asciilifeform: (or worse: wants me to think that it is!)
asciilifeform: why would i give half a fuck what some rando thinks bitcoin is !
asciilifeform: davout: chances are there is a crackpot pseudoimplementation of bitcoin in every language, cobol, malbolge, befunge, by this point. they are of 0 interest because not trb !
asciilifeform: ben_vulpes: add '--solipsist' and be done with it..?
asciilifeform: well yes, in the literal martian scenario, 'what do i do if a shell hits my trench?' 'jump up twenty metres and scatter yourself around'
asciilifeform: as i understand, mircea_popescu objects , that this is an imaginary solution to the quadratic, that there is no physically plausible scenario that follows this path.
asciilifeform: somebody ( ben_vulpes ? ) ~did~ advance the argument that if martian lands and has enough hash, and wants to use it to orphan block # 2, he ought to be able to and we ought to live with the result, iirc.
asciilifeform: which was my only argument - that it would be stupid.
asciilifeform: it's a thought experiment ! of course it contains a counterfactual. no one afaik is dumb enough to actually do this.
asciilifeform: it is in re the earlier gedankenexperiment. say trb operators stuck to the 'grandfather's pistol' principle entirely, and kept no record, other than current copy of blockchain, of the past. no checksums, etc.
asciilifeform: about entirely feasible attack on real-life nodes..?
asciilifeform: ng to Qatar in June and was detained last week...'
asciilifeform: g terror groups, but could punish people who fight on the other side, according to analysts. ... “How can I pose a threat to Denmark and other countries by being a soldier in an official army that Denmark trains and supports directly in the fight against the Islamic State?” she wrote on Facebook after officials took her passport. The potential 6-month prison sentence stems from the travel ban violation. Palani admitted to traveli
asciilifeform: in other monkeystans, 'Joanna Palani, a 23-year-old Danish woman, was facing a 6-month prison sentence after fighting alongside Kurdish peshmerga forces in Iraq and Syria, The Local reported. Palani had her passport confiscated last year after she returned to Denmark, and was hit with a one-year travel ban, for violating the nation's so-called "foreign fighter" rules. The regulations were aimed at stopping Danish citizens from joinin
asciilifeform: nobody cares until 'must have problems'
asciilifeform: evidently d00d drank a bit too much, dropped some loose lips re heiling tritler or such.
asciilifeform: s for a lieutenant colonel and a two-star general with 30 years in the Army. And it slams the door on what was once a promising career. Army Secretary Eric Fanning approved the board's recommendation and made the final decision. The spokesman was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly so spoke anonymously.'
asciilifeform: meanwhile, 'An Army major general has been stripped of his stars and forced out of the military after a 30-year military career because of a long extramarital affair and "swinger" lifestyle. An Army spokesman says Maj. Gen. David Haight was demoted by three steps to the rank of lieutenant colonel, a steep and rare downgrade for a senior officer. The demotion will cost him more than $40,000 in annual retirement pay, based on pay scale
asciilifeform: it'll try again, again, why not, why should, from its pov, dirty orcs lord over 200-300 additional years of nonrenewables.
asciilifeform: 'apple' already tried to 'buy russia' in '41.
asciilifeform: let's have the less generous one? for education
asciilifeform: such that the bricks fall on designated untermenschen when possible.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: the death of the 'fat consumer' system is not optional, it's an exponential/runaway growth hallucinatory nonsense. the lizard deindustrialization program is in re the ~controlled demolition~ of same.☟︎
asciilifeform: his obummeristic majesty sits on throne for another month.
asciilifeform: he 'national security' caste is shitting bricks
asciilifeform: https://archive.is/fP5Ce >> 'Trump’s insistence on channeling Putin’s propaganda may reflect a more permanent and creepier mindset that refuses to see Russia as a foe of the West. If the latter, how far will this go — blocking sanctions? Acceding to Russian aggression? The suspicion that Trump is Putin’s lapdog has cast a shadow over his secretary of state nominee, who is distinguished only by his chumminess with Putin.' << t
asciilifeform: so he picks today's, say. and so what if he needs entire year to come up with an orphanator for it. a year from now -- he can feed it to 'in a cave' victims.
asciilifeform: a mitmer has, theoretically, ~infinite~ time to munge any particular block of his choice
asciilifeform: the real question is whether any type of checkpointing is really a permanent pill against this.
asciilifeform: so it is not obvious that 'race -- to the swiftest' is correct answer, anyone who can stuff a node into a solipsist cave, can replay time and orphan early blocks, if there is nothing like 'checkpoint'.
asciilifeform: which remains as simple today as it ever was.
asciilifeform: btw the checkpoints were certainly not there against martians with infinitely fast miner, but against more elementary syncing-node-mitm.
asciilifeform: just as how the genesis is hardcoded.
asciilifeform: where history happened a certain way and blocks <300k or what it was, are physically unorphanable
asciilifeform: well presently trb nodes ~aren't~ operating strictly on 'race to the swiftest', they have the ancient checkpoint thing.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: 'choice' in the sense of that you're stuck choosing how to operate a node.
