log☇︎
138500+ entries in 3.451s
phf: me neither, but i thought that was norm. also makes me think that bullpen programming offices are a conspiracy
asciilifeform: i, for instance, can't think about any deep problem when in a place where human speech is happening, or bodies are in motion. ☟︎
phf: re heaviside i don't grok how he could work in a hot room
asciilifeform: phf: interestingly, around the time dr. b retired, i fished a full ru set of knuth's aop from the library's garbage bin, along with a few dozen other (some, crumbling from age) maths texts, also ru
phf: hehe, i too had to take it twice. i skipped a semester to take it with brin again, and "applied myself" that time
asciilifeform: he was a true master of teaching a kid exactly how worthless of a worm he is.
asciilifeform: it would not be an exaggeration to say that if it were not for this man, i would be a 'respectable' dunning-krugerized waste of space somewhere, with delusions of 'knowing maths'
phf: reminds me of michael brin stoping and erasing a proof midway explanation while loudly proclaiming "you idiots wouldn't understand this anyway", but then his son, sergey brin, presumably outfitted umd data centers, etc.
asciilifeform: trinque: and now you get to enjoy the cardboard set of a software industry, aha
asciilifeform: phf: didja miss the part where he lives in brazil and has to fight off complains from little gurlz who NEED their straight-A marks ?
trinque: you're talking to a guy who dropped out of university when he realized he'd fallen for a cardboard movie set of a university
asciilifeform: trinque: there is not a handy answer to 'what should culture man stuck in a dying civilization do' ☟︎
trinque: phf: haven't found starfleet yet, nor even a used Firefly in a junkyard
asciilifeform: then they lost a war and got culturally annihilated and enslaved by the anglos. ☟︎
trinque: phf: the germans weren't that great once upon a time, then they came around
asciilifeform: not the least reason for this is that research PER SE is now a lemon market.
asciilifeform: a gigantic stone on which you can build a skyscraper also 'handles great organizational complexity'
asciilifeform: because it is a fundamentally countereconomic act.
trinque: that's just a metaphor
trinque: I've seen men before that fixated on a desired end result so much that they didn't bother with the intermediate steps at all.
asciilifeform: 'Grow up, graduate, marry, start a family, buy a house, have an accident, get seriously ill for a while, or a number of other very expensive things people actually do all the time, and the value of your work starts to get very real and concrete to you, at which point giving away things to be "nice" to some "community" which turns out not to be "nice" _enough_ in return that you will actually stay alive, is no longer an option.'
phf: well, i have a 2.4 box that runs "if your dodgy stack fails, this must remain" operations, like email, sms, incidentally that is also last version i can find my way around (pretty sure massive amd/intel commit blogs came later), but it's impractical to use it as main system, unless you go to extreme measures of "my gimp 1.2 is as good as your photoshop" rms style
asciilifeform: 'All of this "code sharing" is an economic surplus phenomenon. It works only when none of the people involved in it are in any form of need. As soon as the need arises, a lot of people discover that it has cost them real money to work for the community and they reap very little benefit from it, because they are sharing value-less services and getting value out of something that people take for granted is hard to impossible.' ☟︎
trinque: a businessman might begin with creating the network device, then later try to build a boy that needs no bubble
asciilifeform: trinque: this is a common misconception. has nothing to do with attacks.
asciilifeform: hell, increasingly difficult to get a stationary box that runs blobless.
asciilifeform: but go an find a ~portable~ box with high-res ips lcd, with RECENT cpu, that runs without blobs.
phf: desktop linux destroyed linux as a system for professional workstations. poetering (or whatever) made his name on desktop-ification of subsystems that were supposedly "hard for common user"
phf: this is also roughly the period when people running various unixes on their thinkpads imho decided that as long as you have to deal with shitty code, might as well use a mac, which let you run same userspace, at the time still had an opensource kernel, etc.
phf: in ~2015~ it's a different story, and i'm not arguing the value of gentoo here
asciilifeform: phf: the point of gentoo, in my view (i've been on it for more than a decade, freebsd before that) is to BANISH CRAP from machine
phf: funkenstein_: when gentoo came out it had a reputation of being a "ricer" os, like how people put spoilers on cheap cars to make them "racing cars". all you need to know is how to tweak a few flags, and then spend a night watching a compilation log. of course these days ~even that~ is an arcane skill
asciilifeform: funkenstein_: you are running a closed turd
asciilifeform: then you may as well have a crapple.
funkenstein_: qubes on a lenovo box here at the moment
funkenstein_: 12 year old girl installed debian on a dell box the other day
funkenstein_: once i moved to only open source software I have to install linux on a few laptops every month
asciilifeform: funkenstein_: since you apparently missed the whole thread, the reason is TO HAVE A PORTABLE UNIX BOX THAT EVEN SORT-OF WORKS ☟︎
funkenstein_: as I see it the reason to have a crapple is you can pretend to know nothing about computers
asciilifeform: kakobrekla: funny thing is, a number of the other folks where i work got top-of-the-line 'macbooks' - one had spontaneous lcd crack a few weeks later, the other - reboots by itself...
asciilifeform: thing is, i can entirely predict, i think, what mircea_popescu will say: 'your life choices are wrong, you should not need a laptop'
kakobrekla: and ips seems to be quite scarce among non apple. sux0r. i cant see a tn anymore.
kakobrekla: i have a few x220 (which seem better than x230 which the girl uses)
asciilifeform: i shit thee not, a machine that suddenly decided that it won't even get through 'grub' 9 out of 10 times, but runs winblowz just fine. a year into its life.
assbot: Logged on 12-09-2015 10:18:46; phf: ascii_field: mircea_popescu: go give ben_vulpes a unix and laptop co-designed with it, then he can throw away the crapple << there's three apples in my mind, 90s one, the early 2000s one when programmers migrated from linux to a unix that Just Works, and the post iphone explosion apple. the first two are dead (10.10 is the final reason i froze my setup and migrating my entire stack away). but my point is that
asciilifeform: 'Unlike BitCoin or cash payments, Taler ensures that governments can easily track their citizen's income and thus collect sales, value-added or income taxes. Taler is thus a currency for the mainstream economy, and not the black market.' ☟︎
asciilifeform: '(2) Significant or Highly Sensitive Matters. A development or circumstance involving an intelligence activity or intelligence personnel that could impugn the reputation or integrity of the DoD Intelligence Community or otherwise call into question the propriety of an intelligence activity. Such matters might be manifested in or by an activity...'
asciilifeform: http://log.bitcoin-assets.com/?date=12-09-2015#1271218 << eventually they will cut their losses and demolish. but not yet, because the empties are a kind of bezzle of their own. ftr a good fraction of the town where i live consists of recently built and almost wholly empty dwellings. ☝︎
williamdunne: Can someone please give me a signed message to test something with? It can be filled with any old garbage, but has to be a key not on my machine, and saves me the hassle of creating, deleting, importing pubkey to test one message
ben_vulpes: well, 'tis a book about licklider iiuc
asciilifeform: a great many of licklider's papers are on www.
ben_vulpes: asciilifeform: do you have a ware of "the dream machine"?
ben_vulpes: i have a whole company that does this.
asciilifeform: l0l srsly ? i thought ben_vulpes was a travelling www consultant
ben_vulpes: Using 'if' or the ternary operator as a function is quite common in perl. Using data structures to control flow is common in perl. Trying to learn C# after learning perl was like running head first into a brick wall. I'm really glad this guy is trying to make programming a bit more perl-like." ☟︎
ben_vulpes: along with not carrying a mobile phone.
ben_vulpes: i do dream of having a workstation though, and the lifestyle to support it. ☟︎
assbot: Logged on 19-08-2015 00:18:24; asciilifeform: cabbie: 'this ford is a piece of shit. stalled again.' mircea_popescu: 'i have a solution!' cabbie: 'oh???111' mircea_popescu: 'here, have this broomstick.' cabbie: 'how do i drive customers on that, feed my family' mircea_popescu: 'you misunderstand, my good man. you stuff it in your arse.' cabbie: 'and... how does this feed by family?' mircea_popescu: 'no, you sit there with it in.'
funkenstein_: NO! So I was confused for a decade or two
funkenstein_: "a line is self-similar, now you know fractals"
funkenstein_: "a number like 2 is a rank zero tensor, now you know tensors" ☟︎
funkenstein_: but the trouble is it is also taught wrong in a similar way
nubbins`: i have a wii u, but not a 3ds
nubbins`: there's a Lemmings-esque game out for Wii U and 3DS; purchase one version and get a free download code for the other version ☟︎
nubbins`: any of you nerds own a nintendo 3ds? ☟︎
shinohai: I feel better knowing the Federal Bumbling Idiots kept me safe from a college professor.
asciilifeform: the 'pocket heater' in that thread was a gnarly and proprietary (does not exist in public record at all outside of that courtroom) item.
asciilifeform: http://log.bitcoin-assets.com/?date=12-09-2015#1271077 << nono! not THAT pocket heater! this one has nothing to do with the common household object (they are sold for about a dollar in public kiosks in usa) ☝︎
mircea_popescu: a classic.
punkman: not too hard to find a proper stone oven around here, though I don't have one at home
mircea_popescu: you just can't do it on a metal surface is all.
mircea_popescu: stick a slab of somerock or other in the oven
punkman: never seen that in a shop indeed, sounds like a good idea
mircea_popescu: the former home made because srsly i have never seen a restaurant that made edible white pizza
mircea_popescu: <phf> you mean like a bell pepper pizza? << absurdly the us figure spicy salami can be propperly called "pepperoni", which is normally a veggie.
cazalla: tbh was more trying to bait you into a maddox is the best/worst discussion
phf: mircea_popescu: "Fractal -- from Wolfram MathWorld mathworld.wolfram.com/Fractal.html‎ A fractal is an object or quantity that displays " << wolfram's "new kind of science" is all about "this one thing i generated kind of looks like this complicated process, maybe they are related? i feel like they are!"
phf: you mean like a bell pepper pizza?
phf: ascii_field: mircea_popescu: go give ben_vulpes a unix and laptop co-designed with it, then he can throw away the crapple << there's three apples in my mind, 90s one, the early 2000s one when programmers migrated from linux to a unix that Just Works, and the post iphone explosion apple. the first two are dead (10.10 is the final reason i froze my setup and migrating my entire stack away). but my point is that maybe you guys are just arguin ☟︎
punkman: http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9628942/if-you-want-a-genuinely-humane-approach-to-refugees-follow-tony-abbotts-australia/
phf: mircea_popescu: iirc that was before ukraine. << that was indeed before ukraine. i saw a few of my well trained, but otherwise bummy friends with "business" go oh well party is over and switch to sberbank financial analyst positions or somesuch.
mircea_popescu: byzantium when it fell to the turks was 4-5 villages lost among pastures surrounded by ancient walls, and american english is similarly a huge complex architecture maitnained by the remnants of a leper colony
mircea_popescu: i don't think as many people lived the bible as a whetstone in their life during the whole history of christianity
mircea_popescu: In fact, even the term “word problem” is not used in Russia, because the word “problem” usually means a word problem, while non-word problems are called “exercises”. << exactly correct ftr. the difference was even enshrined as such, in the ro equiv of "standards" cca 60s.
mod6 to bed, have a nice evening all.
trinque: so this will keep the guy going until I find time to write a better IRC handling core
trinque: gonna fiddle with it a bit, but yeah, I'm getting a little observer going that'll go kick him in the ass when appropriate
mircea_popescu: (and if you're doing that, pretty much every bright 12 yo kid has been playing mentally with the peano curve while taking a shit and following the tiling, but didn't know it's called that. so you could of course tell him.)
mircea_popescu: (ironically, the concept can be correctly introduced - if one's willing to take the geometric route, and in so doing miss out on most understanding available in the topic - by first explaining what a tangent is and then demaning a closed continuous curve be drawn that allows no tangents. good enough for a bright 12yo, plus minus. but otherwise, fractals are of analytical rather than geometrical interest.)
mircea_popescu: jesus fucking christ no english speaker can produce a definition of this concept.
mircea_popescu: "A fractal is a never-ending pattern" quoth "fractalfoundation.org".
mircea_popescu: From: Boris Subject: Fractals What is the definition of a fractal?
mircea_popescu: "A fractal is a figure with repeating patterns containing shapes that are like the whole but of different sizes throughout."
mircea_popescu: in what fucking alternate universe may a definition include the word "or"
mircea_popescu: "A fractal is a natural phenomenon or a mathematical set that exhibits a repeating pattern that displays at every scale." via en.wikipedia. or in fucking definitions, THIS IS ALLOWED NOW!
mircea_popescu: not to mention that the number 1, as well as the number 0 and the number 78 are "self-similar" on all scales, in a technical sense or not.
mircea_popescu: the geometric notion of the point, and the geometric notion of a line, and the geometric notion of a plane, and the geometric notion of wolfram's mother impaled on a triple cheeseburger ALL SATISFY THIS DEFINITION ☟︎
mircea_popescu: "Fractal -- from Wolfram MathWorld mathworld.wolfram.com/Fractal.html‎ A fractal is an object or quantity that displays self-similarity, in a somewhat technical sense, on all scales. The object need not exhibit exactly the same structure ..." ☟︎
mircea_popescu: "fractal Definiciones web Un fractal es un objeto geométrico cuya estructura básica, fragmentada o irregular, se repite a diferentes escalas. El término fue propuesto por el matemático Benoît Mandelbrot en 1975 y deriva del Latín fractus," blablabla.
mircea_popescu: "The authors of “standards” want to reform American mathematical education, but actually only aggravate its main shortcoming: vain ambitions and contempt for consistent, systematic and thorough study." << this is a societal problem. Obama is not an accident, but an archetype.