asciilifeform: speaking of this horror, whatever the hell happened to that finn
asciilifeform: (and if you count, e.g., 'unreal mode' -- aka 'flat mode' -- 4! if counting smm: 5!!!!)
asciilifeform: (for n00bz/log readers -- x86, unlike any chip made by sane people, operates in no fewer than 3 selectable 'bitnesses', each having registers, instructions and entire address modes not present in the other 2)
asciilifeform: but otherwise works ok. beware of cache (can lead to incoherency between the instructions executed and what probe sees)
asciilifeform: early firmware versions barfed routinely when cpu switched modes, the last one - more rarely, but still did, it is also exacerbated by the braindamage of gdb
asciilifeform: trinque: there is one gnarly moment with those -- mode switches
asciilifeform: because iirc i posted ~everything that is truly needed (other than a couple of undocumented commands, will deal with those some time later in january when 2nd crate is out)
asciilifeform: trinque: were you able to get your probe into battlefield condition, and used ? anything missing ?
asciilifeform: to make it do useful work, is somewhat other problem.
asciilifeform: ~every crackpot eventually writes his asm x86 os.
asciilifeform: (now ~throughput~ is different question...)
asciilifeform: not only could it, but there's been a d00d serving up his www on a pic16f84, via slip, since 1990s...☟︎
asciilifeform: (on an uncrippled box, you can debug starting from 'reset vector' - i.e. from 0th instruction on powerup)
asciilifeform: maybe phf or trinque or whoever, has half of this, and now can more easily come up with other half.
asciilifeform: this is actually why i bothered to clean up and post the sageprobe thing earlier this year
asciilifeform: in terms of the pc 'sow', imho a very promising item could be a handmade scheme in asm that fits in l0 cache. the 'nic question' (discussed in earlier thread) could be finessed in some grotesque way, for instance, consider using SLIP !
asciilifeform: it is not 'woe' to point out that sow's ear makes for very poor silk.
asciilifeform: (even msdos is not fully understood today, and this despite the ~complete~ source leaking in 1998 !)
asciilifeform: even with ~microscopic~ limit it is an exponential explosion of crapolade and unfixable.
asciilifeform: it destroyed 1,001 first-rate people, and will destroy 1,000,001 more. but remains - waste.
asciilifeform: c machine has fundamental, very lethal problems, and i must admit to having come to believe that 'fixing' it is an alluring and ultimately very destructive waste of minds, like perpetuum mobile
asciilifeform: has phf properly absorbed all of it ?
asciilifeform: i'll point out that trb is ~190k tgz.
asciilifeform: there is a linux variant of this very thing, and yes, like a dog
asciilifeform: i suppose 'everybody turns into a swarm of deliberately-maintained sybils' is one way to 'vectorize signature'...
asciilifeform: but their ~weight~ is not machine-calculable.
asciilifeform: signatures, by definition, are the most obvious thing in the world
asciilifeform: 'this proggy thermonuked my entire continent, fuck you' 'oops, you should have learned to read, notice, it was signed by drunk-asciilifeform not by asciilifeform'
asciilifeform: possibly it's the only solution, but i should like to think that it is not, it makes my stomach queasy.
asciilifeform: there is an unpleasant flavour of multiple personality disease, 'tulpa', to this, imho.
asciilifeform: ( and in what particular scenario does this work with 'and you never know'... this one's puzzling )
asciilifeform: it's a new and poorly defined layer of moving parts
asciilifeform: is this to be an agreed-upon thing, or ad hoc.
asciilifeform: well mircea_popescu suggested a 'this is my key for signing legacy c bs'. how many of these does mircea_popescu personally intend to keep ? of what types ?
asciilifeform: if you thought ~that~ was horrid, consider 'now which key is this? asciilifeform 's 'i kinda maybe read this' key ? or his 'this is installed on my reactor' key ? or..'
asciilifeform: incidentally i did think of the 'multiple signing keys' thing, imho it is fairly obvious, but even worse than my vectorizer thing
asciilifeform: asciilifeform: 'i have this here minefield' mircea_popescu: 'so clear it' asciilifeform : 'how' mircea_popescu : 'so, just walk on it' asciilifeform : 'i'd like to keep my legs' mircea_popescu : 'so'
asciilifeform: it was done to standard of 'runs', rather than 'guaranteed correct'
asciilifeform: incidentally i realized that it is misleading to say 'i run gentoo.' because i probably could not recreate it other than from backups of own machines.
asciilifeform: (for any purpose other than 'i found on my disk in 2011, i swear')
asciilifeform: you would have to be a lunatic to sign, e.g., python, bash.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: this is actually how i ended up puzzling over 'vectorized sigs' and other, even less promising leads -- proper, honest-to-goodness signature is a 'heavy' instrument
asciilifeform: both scripting langs are turdalicious, heavy, and ill-defined. i will point out that 8-bit rom basics were seldom >4kB (e.g., 6502, z80 )
asciilifeform: (though imho a fully depythonized one would be more interesting; but it would be sufficiently different animal to deserve a new name)
asciilifeform: iirc there exists a musltronic python. so a musltronic gentoo is afaik in principle possible.
asciilifeform: 'The work by Wuille and others on the SegWit proposal, which moved from testing to launch over the course of 2016, has set the stage for what will likely be bitcoin’s critical development arc in 2017. For Wuille and all the other bitcoin developers in the world, 2017 is on course for a defining year.' << lel
asciilifeform: no need to even be a buffett, if asciilifeform were to move out of his street, 'rents would fall' there.
asciilifeform: 'rents falling' could simply mean that 2 or 3 buffetts moved out...
asciilifeform: (to briefly revisit upstack, for log readers, 'prolog disease' is when a language is designed in such a way that in the course of normal operation, you routinely ask the machine questions which may well be np-hard to answer; and at any rate the correspondence between the algorithmic complexity of your proggy as-written and the resulting instruction stream physically as-executed, is something other than obvious)
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: taken literally, the first can simply take the form of 'iswolf(...) { return 1 ; } ' !
asciilifeform: i caught the tail end of the pascal era in american school.
asciilifeform: (there is also pascal, but there exists , afaik, no reasonably cross-arch compiler today for it. and ada is a variation on the pascal theme anyway...)
asciilifeform: of the type-safe/bounds-safe languages, ada is the only one which fills this description.
asciilifeform: as someone who ~likes~ 'functional' languages, etc., i still must point out that it is a highly questionable business to use a language where there is not a simple, kindergarten correspondence b/w each line of the program and what the machine physically does, for safety-critical equipment.
asciilifeform: am quite certain , in fact, that there isn't one
