141100+ entries in 0.051s
mircea_popescu: ie, when decidable, not useful ; when useful, not decidable.
mircea_popescu: this "is_technology" function is never as usefully decidable as schoolteachers like to pretend.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform there is a much much better example in your own experience. recall the matchsticks ?
mircea_popescu: but you still can't, and marry her, and learn inuit, and still can't, and what now ?
mircea_popescu: so you're a little miffed, and suspect us of collusion. so then we capture a random inuit woman, and i spend some time with her,
mircea_popescu: and then i call a girl over, and she tries it, and there it is! a pretty one too.
mircea_popescu: you think i'm joking, but presently i demonstrate : i put a finger on my nose, and frown, and fart, and soon enough there it is, another one.
mircea_popescu: and i explain to you that i discovered a way to create them by farting.
mircea_popescu: now then, after a moment of this, you wish to know how the fuck is it possible that these animals live here ?!
mircea_popescu: let's do a thought experiment. suppose i invite you to spend a week at my north pole hunting lodge, where, contrary to what you might expect, we spend our time hunting large floating worms of delicious carnation. with me so far ?
mircea_popescu: and the important point here is that no agent may be universal ; and no universal may have agency. which is why god can't act.
mircea_popescu: fine then, let it be so. to me the difference is that i perceive the "you" to be universalizing in your statement.
mircea_popescu: no. it picks you up, in that some can and some can't ; some do and some do not.
mircea_popescu: in and of itself, it's "natural phenomena" or "magic" or what have you.
mircea_popescu: that's the point. technology is technology only in context.
mircea_popescu: and for that matter, when you have sex you get a child, which is yours, even if you have nfi how cunt works. nor does she.
mircea_popescu: us army grunts notably don't know how the fuck their shit works.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform but in a discussion of indian tribes, the smaller trbie with guns that wipes the larger tribe with tomahawks HAS, in fact, deployed the technology.
mircea_popescu: it is not clear technology is an "informational" thing. seems apt to say technology is a productive thing.
mircea_popescu: yes, there's madmen and there's people, and technology need not be describable to madmen to be technology.
mircea_popescu: but once yo uspeak of madman you're either granting my point or else going full "no true scotsman"
mircea_popescu: fish in the scania is the equivalent of lace in luxembourg.
mircea_popescu: inasmuch as it allowed the swedes to pretend to being a nation for absolutely no other discerinble reason,
mircea_popescu: and what's wrong with that ? are you derriding the pulley system on the grounds of how trite the rope is ?
mircea_popescu: so then. accessibility is no sort of criteria for technology.
mircea_popescu: you'll be lucky if you ever release 1% of a rather large inmate population.
mircea_popescu: dollars to donuts, if you arrest everyone who ever said "quantum computing" on an webpage, and keep them locked up in solitary until such a time they can explain what it means, scientifically,
mircea_popescu: and there exists a lobby there proposing that for this reason, it is not really, properly technology.
mircea_popescu: tell you what, something as finely technical as, the lorenz contraction, still is not "universally accessible". in fact, it is outside of the purview of ~all us schoolchildren.
mircea_popescu: because, as per the discussion of "ideas" : in my hand it's an idea, in derp'\s hand is nothing, for derp may not have ideas.
mircea_popescu: ah, but no, i do not accept this requirement that the DESCRIPTION be universally accessible either.
mircea_popescu: just as long as you admit to an increase of maximal-possible-mojo per capita, and to a decrease in marginal utility per capita, you're basically admitting the premises.
mircea_popescu: the very point being that it's not universally accessible.
mircea_popescu: well no, not necessarily. but on the other end of the same chasm, it may not be a case of "either this leverage is universally accessible or stfu"
mircea_popescu: it ended up illustrated with minutia, but it is not the illustrative minutia.
mircea_popescu: the particular is not a public matter. but the thing we were discussing, ie, leverage, and its impact of citizenship, and the way this drags out citizenship out of the commoner's reach, is.
mircea_popescu: what i strictly care about is, doth it or doth it not make it easier for me to send fifty men out of their houses, behead their offspring and claim their women.
mircea_popescu: i don't give the first inkliong of a shit as to whether it could "rightfully" be called technical, inovation, or pornography. that's a concern for kids debating superman-vs-spiderman encounters.
mircea_popescu: ah but you see, this is thevery thing we're discussing. ~I~ benefit from it, and it empowers me. that'd be what i'd care about.
mircea_popescu: well, they've been sticking to it for a decade+ by now.
mircea_popescu: yes, of course, life taking place in nature, its discoveries are DONE to it
mircea_popescu: in this sense chloroform was done to the discoverer, not the other way around.
mircea_popescu: right ? so you're part of the 55th civilisation to discover cellphones. do you care about the other 54 ?
mircea_popescu: context matters, who the fuck cares what lenin's nep did.
mircea_popescu: but as per our discussion of monsanto, if your idea of "innovation" in humanities is alligned with "absolute first", you can't even PERCEIVE humanities, let alone meaningfully interact with em.
mircea_popescu: (to be specific : the idea that "small corps are the driver of economy, and should get massive tax breaks" is entirely past 30 years.)
mircea_popescu: i also count all SORTS of things, including 3% corp tax in romania, for instance. wasn't there in 86
mircea_popescu: but should one be able to answer "use this thing"... well then. different matter altogether.
mircea_popescu: can't quite answer "get fucked" to something like that, not unless you're prepared to follow through and holocaust them all.
mircea_popescu: for instance, i'm deliberately keeping my ongoing "war on the web" as far as attacking forums goes on a very low roar. not that i couldn't scale it up and end ~any web-based forum, owing to the incredible incompetence of the scammers involved. but then, millions of derps would in a voice go "ok so these are bad, what should we do ?"
mircea_popescu: this is where one writes code as a young man that then makes them famous for rest of life, the c and whatnot of our time. you see what i mean ?
mircea_popescu: plenty of other good ones ( asciilifeform you recall reporting on that group pushing 20 year old schweizer as "wai of footure" at some conference ? ), but the more important point is, that this is a fine field for innovation as it stands. it's very far from "settled science", where the logical move is to simply import the universally accepted library and move on.
mircea_popescu: it's not very much clear there's anything much there besides the usual marketing crapolade. i dunno how familiar you are with this phenomena, but let me dig a fine example out of the log.
mircea_popescu: that aside, the IDEA of ipfs, as far as can be distinguished, is not necessarily bad.
mircea_popescu: anyway, Framedragger golang is not liked here because we don't own it, and we don't like usg.google more than we like usg.anything, and because it seems quite well engineered to work as a baited hook for the usg chump works.
☟︎ mircea_popescu: notrly. finance is basically "engineering for large systems with complex parts"
☟︎ mircea_popescu: finance is a different story from chumpatronics, why teh haet.
mircea_popescu: back to the arts : no, not really. finance, believe it or not. and other things. few of which are "palpable" in the sense that farm derp could put hand on
mircea_popescu: turns out also that this has to be a personal conclusion.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform right. which is my point - if you don't like golang pretend there isn't one. you can't invalidate design by "bad implementation" wtf.
mircea_popescu: you can implement shit in whatever the hell you want. the reference implementation for cramer-shoup is in malbolge.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform dude i'm going to make the REFERENCE IMPLEMENTATION of your next girlfriend in golang and what'll you do then.
mircea_popescu: Framedragger doesn't mean much more than, "the correct path is to take a decent crypto lib, a distributed-hashtable-storage thing from one of the p2p torrent tools, and make a real social media app"
☟︎ mircea_popescu: however they may ebb or wane individually, of interest to man is the sum total.
mircea_popescu: you wish to think in terms of your chosen art, which is meaningless. it's not always the same art that provides the additional leverage.
mircea_popescu: the amount of work you CAN replace has been monotonously increasing since about then, mind.
mircea_popescu: then in 1660... one's either a noble or not worth the mention, and this reduces to a few percent again.
mircea_popescu: by 1160, which catches us in paris, we're up to a leverage of maybe as high as twenty, and so "most men" is good enough an approximation. about 60-70% really.
mircea_popescu: the year is now 660, and we're in londinum. a man can replace the work of maybe two, give or take. the mean is one-something, and "everyone" is someone.
mircea_popescu: so, year is 160 ad, we're in rome. maximally, a man can replace the work of about fifty or so men, give or take. the mean of this is say 25. about 10% of the population can reach this, and lo and behold - about 10% of the empire's population is citizens!