asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: i am ill-equipped to describe it. but presumably there is a reason mircea_popescu has a harem, and not a human chick-sized 'cat door' to let in whoever.
asciilifeform: as soon as the cost of failure is >0, selection becomes a thing -- does mircea_popescu not carefully select harem ?
asciilifeform: reddit is full of folx who 'feel like nothing' because good-at nothing
asciilifeform: this is rather different statement than 'there are no good-ats, anyone can anything'
asciilifeform: gymnasts may not be perfect example. when you have a role where the training per se is costly, you're stuck picking. e.g., pilots; i recently read a quite interesting autobio, 'Обречены на подвиг' ('condemned to heroism', roughly) by su flying d00d / instructor / colonel. described how children having any physical imperfection, even tooth cavity, were mercilessly rejected from flight academy even if they passed all of☟︎
asciilifeform: having 10,000,001 kidz do somersaults is cheap
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu surely was involved in some form of sport, at one time. or knew folks who were. did trainers take the approach 'either body works, or doesn't' ? or did they pick childrenz with the right body type for the contest
asciilifeform: but so far looks to me as if it mostly attracts folk who are good at playing eulora, rather than generalists spilling over into the kinds of projects in motion here.
asciilifeform: afaik we still dun have a tech for producing ubermenschen other than by keeping massive herd of 'average human' around somewhere
asciilifeform: 'robocalypse' is a when, not if, yes, but there are certain obstacles (mainly reducing to 'software sucks', and even 'we don't quite have computer yet')
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: at no point in my head for this thread was 'tuna can', but the headaches of fairly standard industrial robot process over which i presided some years ago
asciilifeform robotization aficionado, has programmable vacuum, etc
asciilifeform: well yes, it consists of 'read error code and throw part # into order form and replace assembly'
asciilifeform: referring here to digging machine ? (a bit of stretch to call 1890s item 'robot')
asciilifeform: elaborate re 'plumbing laid by robot'
asciilifeform: aite. when mircea_popescu called plumber, did robot show up ?
asciilifeform: this 'total robotization' thing, i can see it as a logical conclusion, but it isn't here yet. e.g., how many robots has mircea_popescu , to date, fucked ?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: from whence then comes this 'nothing to do' ??
asciilifeform: take mircea_popescu's proverbial 'twerk chick'. her grandmother - was idle ?
asciilifeform: this is on account of easily-roboticized 'low hanging fruit' (e.g., pcb component placement) and also shortages of human hands created by welfarization
asciilifeform: nor is yield necessarily higher, because Software Sucks
asciilifeform: talk to folx who worked with industrial robots, dun take asciilifeform's word for it: robotization of a process is not 'magical free work while you supply mains current', but replaces 100 fungible gurlz with 1-3 'assembly line phd', which is not always a +ev trade
asciilifeform: otherwise we 'had cheap robots' in 1850, cotton mill
asciilifeform: you gotta take the ~hardest~-to-roboticize industrial processes as the basis for comparison, not the ~easiest~;
asciilifeform: and often i get distinct impression that mircea_popescu is posting from a parallel future on mars : where, e.g., robots are not three orders of magnitude more expensive than well-brainwashed 'work ethic' folx working with bare hands
asciilifeform: (egyptian, rather than ponzi, pyramid)
asciilifeform: ( in all fairness, moon probe, arpanet, etc -- also pyramid )
asciilifeform: if you have a massive project that nobody computes ROI on, and folks throw rotten eggs at anyone who suggests doing so --- pyramid.
asciilifeform: (in 100 zeks, you get a few well-fed блатные and a bunch of dystrophic worker bees )
asciilifeform: you can prevent 'работа стоит -- а срок идет!' by imposing 'no work - no food' quotas, and this was often tried in gulag, but led to unexpected problems
asciilifeform: there are not so many ways to make folks work.
asciilifeform: re 'cheap protestant tricks', and also in re 'argentinians who sit in chair and won't work', a good chunk of the weirdo mass-programming the protestants have been doing for 200+ yrs is precisely to 'make'em work'
asciilifeform: iron, turns out, is not such a handy 'iq test', plenty of folx passed the iron exam and failed everything else.
asciilifeform: so just as iron-age as ol' rotten england
asciilifeform: eh the bantu -- who enslaved them -- iirc had iron.
asciilifeform: and fundamental myth of pygmistan is that magical horn (today replaced with drainpipe, they forgot how to carve wood) that talks to the dead
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: no, it wasn't even that they played 'blitz', but ~memorized game~
asciilifeform: and, BingoBoingo , this is 1000+ yrs before pro wrestling!!111
asciilifeform: ( royal folk dun like to wait for moves ! )
asciilifeform: not as such. though mircea_popescu's asian rituals and 'no optionality' thread reminds me of the infamous 'castle tournaments' in jp, where go players would rehearse same game dozens of times in advance
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: when my time machine malfunctions and aztec priest eats my heart so that quetzalcoatl will shit the sun back out, it will still be semantic game.
asciilifeform: 'mandate of heaven' is about as logically consistent as the proverbial witch-drowning tester
asciilifeform: eh, semantic games. rebel armies surround capital? ooops, must mean he lost mandate of heaven!
asciilifeform: i.e. i have nfi how many parts fact to how many parts propagandistic swill
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: re ^ and the part where the asian folk donated jewelry to motherland's central bank , quite reminiscent of the 'old woman who bought t-34 tank and named it after stalin and her five dead sons' recurring item in ww2
asciilifeform: but it only makes sense to do this to popped boxes, Framedragger's ssh scan requires just 1 SYN, but these other things - 10,001 times moar
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: the things to scan, that very often are found: 80 (http), 443 (ssl), and if either found, the page; if ssl -- the cert id strings (see l0gz for how) , and lastly, ftp (yes, believe or now) and telnet greetings.☟︎
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: i've run into quite a few of these
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: nfi, perhaps overzealous ip blok ban
