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mircea_popescu: this isn't even some big secret, millions of people know.
mircea_popescu: as it is today, chinese plants run two shifts a day to make iphones for apple and one shift to make bootlegs for themselves.
mircea_popescu: we've already agreed this "general computer" is idiocy, what's all the agitation about. it still is.
mircea_popescu: in short, we're ideologically in this funny position where on one hand we want to bake bitcoin miners straight into silicone, and this is fine and good ; then enemy wants to make signable hardware and THIS IS EVIL. but it is on one hand what we do, on the other hand unavoidable due to the idiots and on the third hand perfectly ignorable. so they make theirs and we make ours and whoopdedoo.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform for the same reason roman youth was retarded. because people are born retarded and it washes off slowly.
mircea_popescu: no, the reason there's no folks younger than 20 here is because folks younger than 20 are retarded.
mircea_popescu: so you find a discarded mp-signed bios and turn it on and it prompts you to make a key and heck... wtf is this.
mircea_popescu: maybe she meets phf at the weekly chaikowski teas or whatever they do.
mircea_popescu: and then we have gosspid and bitcoin and they have ms fly sim. win-win.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform think about this for a second. so ms makes its windows key ; and i make my short run mp key. why not ?
mircea_popescu: trinque but that wouldn't be a "general purpose" item would it ?
mircea_popescu: it's already most of the way there as it is, hence all the butthurt.
mircea_popescu: while you can rely on 1 you have one environment, and it's what the boys here miss. not "general purpose computer"
mircea_popescu: there's a huge difference at work between situation 1. "i'll explain what he did AND I KNOW he'll apologize" and 2. "i won't even explain because i know he won't even understand".
mircea_popescu: much like your idea of sql here is, "well fuck it, wot"
mircea_popescu: they could actually engage in coding so much so permisionless fs were better.
mircea_popescu: absent the ovester feminists and other idiots who wanted to cheerlead because it was popular,
mircea_popescu: this is evident in, for instance, rms' early writings about "hacking" at mit or wherever.
mircea_popescu: trinque the idea more or less is that once you get rid of the power rangers, maintenance becomes 10k easier a task.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform but you two just agreed above it's hopeless!
mircea_popescu: and the whole discussion re systemd above is quite germane : even "with" this so called "general purpose in the sense of we dunno what exacrtly" computer of today,
mircea_popescu: the only problem being, of course, that the cure to living among idiots is to stop living among idiots, it can't be resolved with some sort of peculiar computing choice or other.
mircea_popescu: the fact is that living among idiots damages the brain. ask ustard kids about us history, you'll hear some lulz.
mircea_popescu: so THIS is perhaps the strongest argument i see against my earlier position.
mircea_popescu: and make no mistake : he is intelligent, and actually a good programmer.
mircea_popescu: no but i don't say to disparage. i say to explain. for him, this makes sense.
mircea_popescu: for local flavour : the man runs lamp locally like a sort of super-excel.
mircea_popescu: they ACTUALLY are "well i can't tHI?NK about this bs!"
mircea_popescu: imagine that, he found bugs in my fucking client, and i mean that plural. yet... in the end... he can't work with it because he's from windows, and the requirements that puts on him are not merely "well you gotta convert to sql for mysql"
mircea_popescu: basically, guy's problem is that eulora is unworkable because IT IS NOT CENTRALIZED ENOUGH.
mircea_popescu: and in the end ? alikim "the trouble" or rather a sad fact is that instead of maintaining one resource everyone maintains their own
mircea_popescu: runs into trouble with data interchange, such as for instance going from csv to sql takes him hours of hand labour
mircea_popescu: yes, him. so guy comes in, he's well spoken and clearly competent, has a lot of experience wit hgaming. strictly in windows.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform speaking of microshit and all that : the experience of this alikim fellow in #eulora constituted a shattering moment for me. so, let me summarize :
mircea_popescu: and the ploy to convince them that the way into the future is "being anonymous", and especially THE FACT THAT IT WORKS is no end of high comedy
mircea_popescu: in some manner or other, "common man" that "just wanted to" will crash against the wall of "wot or take a hike"
mircea_popescu: it came to its bitter end, in wikipedia articles, reddit and twitter opinions, and so on and so forth.
mircea_popescu: "we" as in, the relevant part of the species, tried this whole "every life is precious - every life is sacred" thing. because we got scared of ww2, and bla bla.
mircea_popescu: there's absolutely no reason to have computers in shop like bread and porn mags.
mircea_popescu: today, they are. they will not be able to support this. no matter what you do, they aren't smart enough for it.
mircea_popescu: anyway, the economic issues are incontrovertible. the "general computer" as killer micro is an 80s thing because white people were not mentally ill and mentally retarded then.
mircea_popescu: man that wrote on paper was chinese. your ancestors wrote on hide.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform not only maglev : but the driving TRAIN. and for this reason.
mircea_popescu: phf it's not "but everything's always open", it's more "the reason this space is closing is because losing relevancy, and you'd be fools to focus on it if true"
mircea_popescu: trains that work vertically are also called elevators.
mircea_popescu: there is a definition of train, quite mathematical : if the driving power is transmitted via tyre, you have a car. if transmitted via rigid assemblage - track. if transmitted via rigid assemblage working against a rail - train.
mircea_popescu: there is no way, nor could there be a way, for you to put these two in a syllogism.
mircea_popescu: they are not even the same kind. open is a measure of an undefined property.
mircea_popescu: let's start with something simple : open and closed do not stand in opposition.
mircea_popescu: you understand that just as there's no bridge between "this is what math says" and "this is what our cryptosystem does", there's no bridge between the words you use ?
mircea_popescu: now hush about all this and go make me actual homomorphic encryption so i can compute platform-independent.
mircea_popescu: "oh, this seems really hard to me - it must be impossible!"
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform you are engaging in the behaviour you derride re folks making cryptosystems, and in spades!
mircea_popescu: under discussion was not "the closinbg of computer" but "the measure of open"
mircea_popescu: so much so the more astute artists actually use it as a characterisation device.
mircea_popescu: which is in all times and places the universal characteristic of geekdom
mircea_popescu: this is directly resultant from thermodynamics, and allows no exceptions.
mircea_popescu: so as time goes by, any arbitrary definition of open must converge to closed.
mircea_popescu: you don't know what to measure, because open means, definitionally, exactly this.
mircea_popescu: phf your measure of "open" is always going to be flawed, in the sense that it's a version of "general fights last war".
mircea_popescu: the argument is here that a) that joke passed for serious back then ; b) there can not be such a thing as "serious" in this application.
mircea_popescu: take that away, you're back to literotica runs on bbsomeshit
mircea_popescu: the ~only reason they can keep it together is that they get to define the tasks they want to solve.