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mircea_popescu: for noobs as you say : calculate the fluid ounces of water to be found in a lake of parallelipiped profile a quarter mile deep, two hundred yards long and six hundred feet wide.
mircea_popescu: kinda why isis will necessarily conquer and exterminate north america.
mircea_popescu: anyway, for completeness : the correct, mp-would-find-satisfying, tmsr etc solution to the lathe problem is : make a lathe that cuts lathe parts. shoot anyone found with threaded items not made by your lathe for a few years.
mircea_popescu: which incidentally is how specificatgion was originally born. "replaceable parts", ww2 tech.
mircea_popescu: and being tired of old wifey is also a win "any way you cut it", except no way you care to.
mircea_popescu: "specification is what happens to art products that are no longer interesting. it is the equivalent of commoditization for resources, familiarity in relationships and failure in civilisation."
mircea_popescu: honestly it doesn't seem anyone has a better idea of what a spec is than "correct metaphora", which is ridiculous, ironic, scandalous and not much to go on simultaneously.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform anyway, your definition of a spec is amply vulnerable. take the time issue : what, ddr can't be specified ? fingering a girl neither ? what happens if the spec asks for a 10 followed by a 11, and ytou get the 10 and silence ? now you got a whole halting problem on your hands.
mircea_popescu: <asciilifeform> unambiguous description of how inputs and outputs relate. << is what i have.
mircea_popescu: but hey, you test it. "as best you can". then nobody believes the results
mircea_popescu: o god almighty he was playing it straight. listen asciilifeform you'll say the exact same thing about your bovaric contraption down the road. "the program is fine the world failed it". need i quote brecht to you ?
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform well, for any possible output, it'll get either accepted or rejected. doesn't get clearer than this.
mircea_popescu: experimential specification, "send a txn see if it makes it through".
mircea_popescu: but the network already and very clearly specifies inputs nad outputs. this meets your definition.
mircea_popescu: so you've just said "the bitcoin newtork is the bitcoin specification" here.
mircea_popescu: then variant and unequivalent implementations of the same spec may exist ?
mircea_popescu: and spec may not discuss internal state, only inputs and outputs ?
mircea_popescu: "don't steal" can not be a spec, only "if you steal you go to jail" ?
mircea_popescu: so a spec is purely descriptive, and in no sense prescriptive ?
mircea_popescu: no generally. the definitive, absolute and no sharp edges or loose parts version, that can be engraved into the ether and forever work without change.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform let's go into a lengthy sidepoint. can you define "specification" for my benefit ? strangely enough the prb tards think some things about what a specification is that diverge.
mircea_popescu: speaking of which, i must say this has been by far the most serious, deep and far reaching argument tmsr yet produced, i sit and marvel at the wonder, all my resources tapped taut and for the first time in many years insufficient to peer through the gloom.
mircea_popescu: there's some problems with the concept of "specification" also that i don't have clear in my mind
☟︎ mircea_popescu: i posit that no matter how good a job you do of it, and i believe you capable of an exceptionally good job, will never be perfect, because it can't be for fundamental reasons.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform i suspect this may be a case where your conscientious intelligence is moreover harmful in the very limited and passagery sense that it took you far enough down a blind alley to make digging out the proper route seem expensive and painful.
mircea_popescu: i do not wish my os to contain as much as a fucking variable declared i don't use. not one.
mircea_popescu: how do you put in "all the parts that are needed by ALL future users" but "no parts not needed by ANY future user" ?
☟︎ mircea_popescu: true static library is really the complete story : ascii's ffz + the various re-implementations of ffz in projects x y and z.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform your idea of static library is practical, but incomplete.
mircea_popescu: "open source" alleviates this like an emergency valve does ; but why the fuck have design processes which create items which rely on emergency valve already. fix the leaks.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform the fundamental problem with the "library" thing is that you are asked to guess what i might wish to do in the future. this is wrong, and unfixable.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform i wouldn't use it in my creations without reading it. i may run it on a box on the basis of wot though.
mircea_popescu: my shamelessly tall statement here being that, "library is the bad thing", outright.
mircea_popescu: but os as fundamentally a library is like woman as fundamentally a syphilis repository.
mircea_popescu: the deep stupidity involved should be directly apparent, but in any case - the system as proposed violates the proper flow of entropy, and as such MAY NOT HAVE ANY MERITS.
mircea_popescu: this idiocy is not only how computing "works" today, but it is also how a good "marxist leninist maoist" party cadre is expected to treat the inept shit they use : he's to import marx.library exactly like you're "expected" to import iosys.blabla
mircea_popescu: meanwhile, the way this continuum is handled in all failed human endeavours (computing among them, with such prideful items as "social science" and so on) is for "all possible uses" of a concept to be "dreamed up" and "packaged" in a "conceptual library" which is then to be used verbatim.
mircea_popescu: there obviously exists a continuum between abstraction and implementation. the way this continuum is handled in ~all (and absolutely all) successful human endeavours is, that a concept is clarified AS A CONCEPT ; and then that concept is applied to situations as an application. like the war, roman arch, et all.
mircea_popescu:
http://btcbase.org/log/2016-06-14#1482510 << whether you can be said to have "written" it, in the manner of genre fiction, is even a separate matter from "having written it" in the manner of code, which means you control it, which is a superset of you understand it completely, which has really little to do with "here's a string i dreamed up now publish it and clal it a book".
☝︎ mircea_popescu: hence the whole "because i can". it's a misnomer : "because it can be done" is proper, the i has no business in there. it'd like to, but that's neither here nor there.
mircea_popescu:
http://btcbase.org/log/2016-06-14#1482493 << word. really, "labour division" is harmful in the same manner jwzism is harmful, if practiced in the manner jwzism is practiced. the criteria for cleavage MUST BE "can these things be cleaved" ; it CAN NOT BE "would i like these things apart". it is and has to remain about the things, not about the people. and in this sense "engineering serves mankind" in the same way "the sun is u
☝︎ mircea_popescu: it's a start. it can not be a standard, however. merely a start.
mircea_popescu: anyway, what started this conversation is that the ratcheting ratcher burnssss.
mircea_popescu: or for that matter, anything you don't feel like reading.
mircea_popescu: it's not been wasted, the time you used reading, it's not been wasted.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform you're trying to save copulation time, seriously now.
mircea_popescu: all the "effort saving" kitchen appliances never made a man yet.
mircea_popescu: shut up, ru army style made men out of a collection of shitheads.