asciilifeform: it is known to me, for instance, that usg is presently spending stupendous sums on 'biometric' profiling of typing pattern, for as many victims as possible.☟︎
asciilifeform: as soon as you start putting in the missing pieces to make the system actually usable in practice (e.g., no 15 second delay on 'ls' command) you end up with... linux.
asciilifeform: it is a sort of inverse of the parable with the rabbi who tells schmuck to 'put in the goat and the sheep, in your house, then slowly expel them'
asciilifeform: this is a heuristic you can take straight to the bank.
asciilifeform: Framedragger: you can save astonishing piles of mental cpu cycles, time, sweat, by ignoring the obvious imbeciles, e.g., 'anon on phone'
asciilifeform: (and this is applicable to all variants, 'smart' and 'unsmart' etc)
asciilifeform: lel, 'anonymous' on a device that relies on accurate positional fix to even work at all.
asciilifeform: well, phone can be coaxed into reading www, email, etc.
asciilifeform: and yes, phone belongs to the carrier, in the sense that anyone found selling phonez which do unsanctioned things, and not necessarily limited to interfering with neighbour's phone (say, proper crypto) will Have Problems very quickly.
asciilifeform: and in some cases the two situations are readily distinguishable to naked eye.
asciilifeform: there is waste, and then there is waste: to ask gurl out is one thing, to persist in fucking a hole in a tree and praying to odin to turn it into a girl, unlike the last 9,999 times the hole was fucked, is quite another.
asciilifeform: they ALL have turing-complete thing inside, and update (typically nonpersistent, but not always) blobs inside the vendor's binary drivers.
asciilifeform: and even very humble iotrons are undocumented. last year i did an experiment, tried to find a NIC that is 1) still in production 2) has NO MAGIC BLOBS ANYWHERE. result: 0
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: chip without i/o is ~useless.
asciilifeform: worse yet, there are at least a dozen incompatible arms.
asciilifeform: shinohai: there was phrase 'recent events'
asciilifeform: or is it more of a general-purpose 'you suck'
asciilifeform: shinohai: is there context for this ?
asciilifeform: 'Mr Vancel said the men were shooting at each other before the officers arrived. "This was not a 'come at police' situation they weren't targeting the police at first - I don't assume so - because these were men out here shooting at each other in an empty parking lot until the police showed up and it turned into a gun battle," he added.' << lel☟︎☟︎
asciilifeform: the message, loud and clear, to 'software industry', from the greybears who are the only thing that presently stands between the 'civilized' world and zimbabwe, is: 'kindly die in a fire, nobody needs yer 'progress'.'
asciilifeform: ^ one in a series of many similar lulticles, which neglect to mention the inconvenient fact that folks use mechanical tabulators, vaxen, 8-inch floppies, SOLELY BECAUSE the available alternatives are microshit and drepper
asciilifeform: 'Stanley Quayle, a computer emulation consultant, has seen contractors desperate to find the parts they need. "I have a prospective customer supporting a U.S. missile defense system that is buying parts on eBay," says Quayle. "Any parts they do find are as old or older than their system," meaning they’re sometimes no more reliable than the pieces they replace.'
asciilifeform: 'Sparkler Filters of Conroe, Texas, prides itself on being a leader in the world of chemical process filtration. If you buy an automatic nutsche filter from them, though, they’ll enter your transaction on a “computer” that dates from 1948.'
asciilifeform: wake me up when wilson sells machine that craps out ~these~.
asciilifeform: for the record, the only direction with real promise in small arms field is 'gyrojet', where the rifled and tempered barrel is unnecessary, given a self-rotating projectile, small and quite easily-made rocket
asciilifeform: 'i will sell machine that makes banned rifle part X' but no contemplation of 'so they'll ban part Y which my machine cannot make', or 'why not design a Z which can be made by hand' etc.
asciilifeform: full of 'hope and change' but 0 perspective outside of his peculiar tunnel vision
asciilifeform: or, even, 'But if Wilson wins, he says, Defense Distributed has plenty of material it’s never been able to share—a backlog of homespun, open source weapon innovations, ready to upload.'
asciilifeform: or why he collects megabux of donation simply to give to lawyers;☟︎☟︎
asciilifeform: or why wilson is convinced that usg will not answer simply by changing the rules so that ~barrel~, rather than magazine holder, is regulated;
asciilifeform: e.g., why make the complex ar15 receiver, when one could design a much simpler stamped (or waterjet-cut, etc) item that would take the same barrels;
asciilifeform: it is difficult to catalogue all of the idiocies,
asciilifeform: even the much-hyped 'cheaper cpu cycle' happened only so that it could be eaten up by successive new layers of microshit. and for ~no other reason.☟︎
asciilifeform: virtually all of the technological 'growth' since late '80s, is precisely of this kind.
asciilifeform: these items, including most of what a modern-day programmer is familiar with, are not part of a healthy ecosystem, any more than the various fungi growing on an aids patient are normal parts of human body.
asciilifeform: systems which are designed by actual designers, and actually work, do not breed 'perls'. or 'web2.0 libraries'. or any of it.
asciilifeform: e auto mechanics of the IT industry, all flocked to Perl because they could tinker so well with it with no required knowledge or skills. Thus was "programmering performed by tinkerers" born as a concept, and the tinker toys of the unskilled became better and better.'
asciilifeform: 'In all likelihood, there was no change at all to the labor-intensiveness, but the labor was more "fun" for a certain class of people. Now, industrious retards can be a horrible thing. Over a number of years, close to a decade, Perl accreted bits and pieces from programming languages and became usable in lieu of a programming language by people who lacked the mental wherewithall to do programming. Tinkerers, repairers, handymen, th☟︎
asciilifeform: the ~STABILITY~ implied in an alt-world where software ~actually works correctly~ is Ur-terrifying to the typical maggot, whether of the microshit or 'open sores' variety☟︎
asciilifeform: (incidentally there is the occasional oasis where this is actually the case, there are banks that have been running same mainframe for generations, why do you suppose they are not eager to move to pc ? to microshit ?)
asciilifeform: software would be a thing that is written, for particular application, once, and still used, bitwise-verbatim, 50 years later.
asciilifeform: (because this would leave no room for microshit, or anything like the 'sek000rity industry', or the idiot face of 'software industry' in general, to exist)
asciilifeform: anything but ACTUAL solution to the ACTUAL problem
asciilifeform: not to mention various and sundry 'seeek00000rity mitigations', e.g., the intel idiocy discussed yesterday
asciilifeform: the standard argument in favour of c-machine, 'transistors have a cost', holds 0 water: the modern cpu is nothing like pdp11, and has plenty of transistors wasted on idiot epicycles to paper over the retardation, e.g., page table, tlb cache, etc
asciilifeform: the c-machine pointer mechanism, and its non-boundchecked array access in general, is quite similar to mains wiring prior to the invention of the fuse, where mains socket has nfi that it oughtn't source 300 amps and melt itself, igniting the entire wall☟︎
asciilifeform: where instead of a hardwarized and guaranteed-correct array allocator, bignumatron, etc., there are 10,001 tiny ad-hoc pieces of shit, like the little space heaters, melting carpets, starting fires when you so much as blink
asciilifeform: anywhere other than ~equator, a block of flats without a boiler, plumbing, and radiators, is quite analogous to the c-machine☟︎
asciilifeform: this is a broad subject and i will not attempt to further summarize here, i have an entire www devoted to it.
asciilifeform: and, secondarily, about the proliferation and endless half-hearted reimplementation of essentials like allocators, gc, bignumatron, for the lack of standard hardware-provided faculties
