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asciilifeform: OriansJ: you wouldn't want to build a new comp that replicates it entirely. for one thing, iirc could only address 256M , with no possib of expansion

asciilifeform: OriansJ: there's an emulator , though not a cycle-accurate one . asciilifeform is (slowly) gathering the seekrits needed for cycle-accurate reproduction of the orig.

asciilifeform: i have the orig. paper docs, they fill a bookcase, but they're actually all mirrored there.

asciilifeform: OriansJ: 'open source' folx have a professional disease, where they succumb to temptation of redefining a difficult problem into a non-equivalent but easier one

OriansJ: asciilifeform: honestly, the chemicals and the patents are still a mess in that field plus the never could produce a chip that could exceed 100khz ☟︎

asciilifeform: what asciilifeform is looking for, re ic fab breakthrough, is specifically a process that would be to ic what the cd recorder was to cd

OriansJ: asciilifeform: It is a guide for groups of people to pool together resources and setup a 1 micrometer fab to generate trusted chips. Yes it is far from optimal but it is a step in the right direction. ☟︎

asciilifeform: and i do not see anything in the linked recipe to suggest a kitchenable process.

OriansJ: asciilifeform: It isn't about cost because a Custom IC can be done for under $10K today in a 45nm process

asciilifeform: i.e. there is nothing there to suggest that the author has discovered a peculiarly cheap method of fabbing ic

asciilifeform: looking at the 'process steps' docs in the linked page, it seems to be a straight wikipedization of ordinary schoolbook description of ic fab process ☟︎

OriansJ: asciilifeform: it is a project for open source lithography, it currently is at the 1 micrometer process node and limited to around 1 million transistors at this time

OriansJ: asciilifeform: DRAM initialization has a very unique pattern which can be detected very early (long before the DRAM itself is ready)

asciilifeform: OriansJ: if i'm baking e.g. dram refresher -- then quite easily (and very frustratingly, in actual practice did, it is why it is ~impossible to bake a decent dram controller from scratch using fpga that hasn't been 'solved' ice40-style )

OriansJ: asciilifeform: but can you really spot a 1ns delay?

asciilifeform: OriansJ: incidentally, a pattern matcher on i/o pin will affect propagation delay

OriansJ: we can include a hardware block for network and leverage it if it is connected; while letting our customers know about it speeding up network loads

OriansJ: well lets see, we can add a short wave radio but that might be blocked with tempest hardware layers

asciilifeform: ( if this counts as a useful attack, why not answer instead 'coupla gram of thermite' ? )

OriansJ: a hardware rom and a remote trigger

a111: Logged on 2017-02-24 02:36 asciilifeform: veen: let's try a historical angle. according to legend, emperor qin shi huangdi (same d00d as known for taking the 'immortality pill' and promptly croaking) had a palace with 1,500 rooms. and would not tell anyone in advance which one he plans to sleep in on a given night. and which ones he would put cutthroats in, ready to kill anyone who opens door. think 'minesweeper.'

a111: Logged on 2019-04-06 21:51 asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2019-04-05#1907037 << i recommend to read the logs re 'specificity' ( picture yourself baking a sabotaged fpga , for victim whose gate net you do not know in advance. what would you put in it ? )

OriansJ: Sane Iron is a great goal that I believe needs to be done but I also believe that a chain of trust needs to be built to allow Sane Iron to be safe from some classes of attacks.

OriansJ: asciilifeform: just use a generic block type for range checking

OriansJ: asciilifeform: no where did I say null terminated strings; it could be length prefixed strings but support for strings needs to exist in a human readable bootstrap. ☟︎

a111: Logged on 2019-04-06 12:52 OriansJ: and let us be honest here; making it easy to trap on undefined instructions, jumping to a software routine that performs the functional definition of that instruction and returning to right after the trapped instruction. Will allow us to ditch instructions in hardware without fear of breaking our bootstrap.

a111: Logged on 2019-04-06 12:41 OriansJ: Mocky: floating point support is part of being turing complete. We can either bitch about how bad it is (Like the old MIPS engineers) or accept the reality and figure out a why that costs us the least.

a111: Logged on 2019-04-06 00:52 OriansJ: The Branch Delay slot should never been allowed and it just adds complexity to any bootstrap. The Multiply and Divide instructions of MIPS were just a bad idea and the DEC Alpha solution was a much better combination to go. The Exception style overflow pattern in MIPS is pure complexity and waste; the 68K series was so much closer to the optimal (The split Integer register and BCD support was a bad mistake that I am glad Cold Fire

a111: Logged on 2019-03-26 20:05 asciilifeform: bvt: the other thing, is the 3-ring circus aspect of elaborately dethompsonizing a box in order to... bring up 1M+line of linusolade

a111: Logged on 2019-04-05 23:38 OriansJ: As for the operating system floor; there is a micro-posix subset that might be of interest as it would be enough for bootstrapping full operating systems but not complex enough to have anything non-deterministic.

a111: Logged on 2019-04-05 23:25 OriansJ: well, I guess a really important question to ask is at what level of lithography people here actually have trust? (1 transistor, AND Gate in TTL, 100 Gate ALU, 1000 Gate ULA, 10000 Gate Asic, .... FPGA, 1B+ gate CPU, etc)

asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2019-04-05#1907037 << i recommend to read the logs re 'specificity' ( picture yourself baking a sabotaged fpga , for victim whose gate net you do not know in advance. what would you put in it ? ) ☝︎☟︎

a111: Logged on 2019-04-05 23:03 OriansJ: well the only extremely useful feature for bootstrapping hardware architectures have is clean encoding and a sane subset of operations that make working with strings and structs easy to do in assembly.

asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2019-04-05#1907023 << whytheFUCK wouldja want the nullterm-string warcrime to exist on a brand-new arch ? ☝︎☟︎

a111: Logged on 2019-04-05 23:02 OriansJ: bvt: Actually DOS wouldn't be the correct direction as it is actually more complex to implement portably and it's abstraction layer isn't right for a good general bootstrap.

a111: Logged on 2019-04-05 22:53 OriansJ: BingoBoingo: I agree POSIX has a great many flaws but there are some ideas inside of it worth preserving; especially in regards to bootstrapping.

BingoBoingo: hanbot's Costa Rica to Uruguay via WU experiment ended up going through a channel other than WU, so the suspicion is Intra-LATAM WU is fucked

OriansJ: Mocky: Don't get stuck on the idea of Floating point, it is just an example of classes of instructions that are complex to implement in hardware that a proper illegal instruction trap will allow us to move between hardware and software with no one else having to care what we are doing. As we want people programming to standards not to systems. ☟︎

OriansJ: and let us be honest here; making it easy to trap on undefined instructions, jumping to a software routine that performs the functional definition of that instruction and returning to right after the trapped instruction. Will allow us to ditch instructions in hardware without fear of breaking our bootstrap. ☟︎

OriansJ: spyked: well the iCE40 is a good starting point for now and I guess we can agree on that. You are right about not having to be portable but I prefer building a stack that can be used to defend against a Nexus Intruder program class attack.

OriansJ: Mocky: floating point support is part of being turing complete. We can either bitch about how bad it is (Like the old MIPS engineers) or accept the reality and figure out a why that costs us the least. ☟︎☟︎

a111: Logged on 2018-04-16 15:20 mircea_popescu: the best example i can think of is the code on the old handheld calculators. THAT is a general purpose os : it makes no assumption about the downstream, merely fully, cleanly and directly exposes the hardware.

spyked: http://btcbase.org/log/2019-04-05#1907021 <-- the problem with "portability" (in the sense of supporting/maintaining the same software interface across different hardware architectures/configurations) is that it's a convenient lie most of the times. the goal isn't to implement the same DOS for all architectures, but to have some sort of DOS that provides some functionality and otherwise stays out of the pr ☝︎

OriansJ: We definitely don't need hardware support for floating point though (just a set of defined encodings for floating point instructions and a clean exception mechanism which allows an operating system or a library to implement via software routines) ☟︎

OriansJ: The Branch Delay slot should never been allowed and it just adds complexity to any bootstrap. The Multiply and Divide instructions of MIPS were just a bad idea and the DEC Alpha solution was a much better combination to go. The Exception style overflow pattern in MIPS is pure complexity and waste; the 68K series was so much closer to the optimal (The split Integer register and BCD support was a bad mistake that I am glad Cold Fire ☟︎

OriansJ: one minor note; there is a common pattern with structs to load (base + offset) followed by arithmetic/logic with another register and generally writing out to another (base + offset). So it is tempting to put in instructions to do those; but as the VAX has shown, it isn't worth the additional complexity.

OriansJ: As for the operating system floor; there is a micro-posix subset that might be of interest as it would be enough for bootstrapping full operating systems but not complex enough to have anything non-deterministic. ☟︎

OriansJ: well, I guess a really important question to ask is at what level of lithography people here actually have trust? (1 transistor, AND Gate in TTL, 100 Gate ALU, 1000 Gate ULA, 10000 Gate Asic, .... FPGA, 1B+ gate CPU, etc) ☟︎☟︎☟︎

bvt: (iirc asciilifeform has a SU keyboard-driven prom burner, which may be a valuable device for bootstrap)

bvt: yes, with tape writers/serials, os can be delayed much further; persistent storage would complicate bootstrap a lot.

OriansJ: hence why I assumed a hardware mechanism for loading paper tape into memory and setting all registers to zero and then boot; as it eliminates the bootloader and the operating system entirely from the question.

bvt: yes, i agree that a simple and clear boot sequence is a requirement

OriansJ: If one doesn't want to have a boot rom; one needs either a hardware tape reader (which writes tape to memory on power on and jumps to address 0 to run it or a toggle board. A serial bus just moves the bootstrap trust issue to another piece of hardware ☟︎

OriansJ: an 8bit immediate can be very useful for dense code and it would fit most bootstrapping constants if it is signed; support for 16, 32 and up immediates makes supporting compilers for C/Ada easier to write but it isn't a real issue if you have support for IP relative loads of 32bit and up values

OriansJ: actually I am extremely familiar with ARMv7's instruction encodings as I have been porting M2-Planet to it recently (boy it is a shitshow)

OriansJ: well the only extremely useful feature for bootstrapping hardware architectures have is clean encoding and a sane subset of operations that make working with strings and structs easy to do in assembly. ☟︎

OriansJ: bvt: Actually DOS wouldn't be the correct direction as it is actually more complex to implement portably and it's abstraction layer isn't right for a good general bootstrap. ☟︎☟︎

OriansJ: bvt: well believe it not; previously most architectures were easy to encode by hand (PDP-11, PDP-10, Vax, 6502, z80, 8086) but MIPS changed the game by showing with high enough languages one can be brain dead in regards to human understanding of the encoding rules and squeeze a drop of extra performance out.

bvt: re 2, after a restricted ada assembler, should a ada-dos be built? mes assumes that linux kernel is a given, which imho is a big hole in the process

OriansJ: 1) Did you mean in regards to minimal hardware requirements or the set which would make it a host platform worth using after the bootstrap is done and 2) Generally a higher level language such as Ada or C.

bvt: but are there any other features that help the bootstrap? even if this increases hardware complexity a bit

bvt: to my understanding there are two questions: 1. what are the requirements to the architecture 2. what is the first interim stop after a post-M1 assembler? ☟︎

BingoBoingo: OriansJ: Anyways, with my rating you can voice yourself by sending a private message to deedbot

a111: Logged on 2019-04-05 22:26 OriansJ: bvt: well to be honest, an Ada subset would be much easier to implement than a C subset; the problem however is always available contributors.

bvt: http://btcbase.org/log/2019-04-05#1906987 << well, this depends on the subset of ada; re contributors - this is a known issue ☝︎

OriansJ: BingoBoingo: I agree POSIX has a great many flaws but there are some ideas inside of it worth preserving; especially in regards to bootstrapping. ☟︎☟︎

OriansJ: well let me ask it this way; are you planning to use a posix subset or a subset which will portable upon posix and other OS bases? ☟︎

BingoBoingo: But gotta have a fairly hygenic platform to build things from and deploy them on, so trinque has been working on capturing a hygenic and stable one.

OriansJ: Linux is much too big for a bootstrap core piece

BingoBoingo: http://www.loper-os.org/?cat=49 << FFA, the author asciilifeform is dealing with a fever, but he is usually around

BingoBoingo: diana_coman put together a crypto library, ave1 has a leaner GNAT, and asciilifeform has a bignum library and other products.

BingoBoingo: OriansJ: Well right now we have some people working on flensing a minimal linux from Gentoo-MUSL and other people building utilities in ADA

OriansJ: bvt: well to be honest, an Ada subset would be much easier to implement than a C subset; the problem however is always available contributors. ☟︎☟︎

mp_en_viaje: wings are a quaint artefact of the propeller era ; as commercial airliner no longer actually uses propellers, there's no objective reason to stick to the wing design.

mp_en_viaje: the cost to make point c 500 or so km as opposed to the current 10 isn't THAT significant, considering the air is rather thin past the first 5-6km anyway. yes it's expensive to defeat gravity, but not AS expensive, because it scales with square of distance anyway, by the time you've done 10 out of 500 you've done such a large chunk of the work already...

mp_en_viaje: yet it is ~fundamenally geometrically incorrect~ to fly in this manner. the correct way to move from point a to point b is to go to a point c far enough so that A CHANGE OF ANGLE translates in the change of projected position on earth's surface from a to b.

mp_en_viaje: current airplanes have a "flight altitude" because of the wings derpitude, and it's a value in tension between the needs for air friction to support the bucket and the disadvantage of air friction burning fuel.

mp_en_viaje: imagine this wonder : no more wings, airplane is a tube, 20 or 50 or w/e rings, with a dumbwaiter in the middle i guess, people seated around it. a rocket basically, it goes up and then down.

mp_en_viaje: "and when he fell down without glamour or grace but a cry of 'attack!' frozen into his face all of Earth could not find slabs of marble so tall as to carve him as high as he stood in his fall!"

mp_en_viaje: a point of no consequence to most people, who do not have the last 5%. you probably want to keep yours though.

mp_en_viaje: asciilifeform, seriously though, paracetamol, water, whatever it takes, do not deliriumfever. it is a fine way to burn the last 5% of cns.

mp_en_viaje: supposedly "there's a lot of statues available all around, in the shape of marble chunks. all you have to do is get them out -- but careful to not hurt them trying". it's a great story, it's been making the rounds for more than a century, but... what do you do if there actually ISNT such a thing as a chunk large enough ?

mp_en_viaje: "and when he fell down without glamour or grace but a cry of 'attack!' frozen into his face all of Earth could not find slabs of marble so tall to carve him as high as he stood in his fall!"

mp_en_viaje: in other news, the howling beauty of asciilifeform 's latest production haunts me. diana_coman has a point yo, absolutely should be an article on yer blog. not like it's not been done before.

mp_en_viaje: BingoBoingo, thing is, not like the morons are using the pampas for anything else anyway. but no, why use bsas as a port and go inland. let's all move into "capital" and eat each other's farts.

mp_en_viaje: so we turn back and buy two more. buttered pretzels, wunderbar, i hand out a five they give out some coins change.

mp_en_viaje: but anyway, day 1, i'm walking through subway, buy a pretzel at random stand. i take one bite and recall girl off escalator. "taste this!"

BingoBoingo: Like the Uruguayos and their beef. The ones who raise beef are masters of Beef. The ones who don't can't cook in a way that does the beef justice outside of the asado tradition.

mp_en_viaje: just a buncha lebanese (i think) doods, with the dedication, permitting mediterranean tradition to finally meet frankish iron.

diana_coman: asciilifeform: why though not post it on your blog really? can be with title and half a page explanations as to how it's not-the-real-think-just-yet but still there

danielpbarron: http://btcbase.org/log/2019-04-04#1906877 << i don't have selection installed. I add custom id tags when i want to link to a specific thing in my articles ☝︎

mp_en_viaje: http://archive.is/aQ3mE#selection-489.2-489.112 aka "our '''philosophy of religion''' is in fact a church (so as to avoid '''biases''' such as for instance it being a church. therefore, please quote only from our bible."

asciilifeform: fwiw i do find it interesting that when you offer to heathen 'cheap unique' -- to bake a pubkey -- or even to post under the fucking name his progenitors gave him -- typical specimen runs screaming

asciilifeform: if among'em 1 has 'enuff unique', he will not need to glue socks, but instead drive 4 feet of cock into teacher, a la mp_en_viaje , etc

BingoBoingo: <mp_en_viaje> the driver of the error is the desire of having a ~unique~ personality. it is not deemed sufficient, by contemporary man, to merely have the same personality as the entire tableau of orthodox saints. there's too many of those, see. gotta be unique. as it can't be unique and meaningful at te same time (think, can it ?)... all that's left is the getting-drunk-on-tapwater "secret parameters". << On the USG side also likely

Mocky: I've got to step out for a bit now

mp_en_viaje: the driver of the error is the desire of having a ~unique~ personality. it is not deemed sufficient, by contemporary man, to merely have the same personality as the entire tableau of orthodox saints. there's too many of those, see. gotta be unique. as it can't be unique and meaningful at te same time (think, can it ?)... all that's left is the getting-drunk-on-tapwater "secret parameters". ☟︎

mp_en_viaje: there is a ~reason~ that google's (and, by proxy, senior brin's son's son's) genius notion of "intelligence" is ~VERY LARGE~ (if sparse) matrix of values while usg.polizeistaat's notion of "knowledge" is... ~very large~ (if sparse) matris of values (describing eg phone metadata) WHILE AT THE SAME TIME all the people involved, in either of those, and all the people the yever know or will know, firmly believe that ~my true personality~ is not in f