asciilifeform: and the overall friction of their presence is a permanent irritant

asciilifeform: was in a hammock for some hours earlier, thinking about only this.

asciilifeform: but anyway, it is used when conjuring up a block, aha

asciilifeform: classical apparatus has a data structure, 'mapPriority', http://btc.yt/lxr/satoshi/ident?_i=mapPriority

asciilifeform: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3fk3p9/a_single_political_entity_effectively_has_57 << philippino up the thread, naturally

asciilifeform: as for the deliberate alt, it is somewhat like the ancient discussion about whether one would rather be 'scanned in' and shot and ~then~ replaced by the robot running the sim, or to have a neuron at a time replaced with electric one

asciilifeform: the fact that there is no standardized chipset, and that x86 is really a loose collection of mostly-incompatible shitboxes that somehow pretend to run the same soft - matters.

asciilifeform: because wat if you have a 386, aha. ☟︎

asciilifeform: my point, incidentally, was not that satoshi was a tard (though it may be)

asciilifeform: (leading to a lifelong phobia of that key on the keyboard)

asciilifeform: it is a result of the kind of cargocultism driven by justified and maniacal fear that leads, e.g., c programmers to pepper their code with redundant parenthesis

asciilifeform: who had a machine for which this claim could be made, even in principle ?

asciilifeform: are those the work of a fella who truly, deeply understood what the machine is doing?

asciilifeform: and is a bottomless pit of 'nobody could have foreseen's

asciilifeform: this is why, to return to earlier thread, pdp11 programmed by a single mind who writes every single instruction that the machine will ever execute, can be a jewel that is maintained for generations,

asciilifeform: '...But it is the same problem we find in C++. The question to be asked of massive complexity like that is not "what wonderful things did you find out that made this necessary", but "whatever did you _miss_ that made this so horribly complex"? You can sometimes see people who are really, really dumb go about some simple tasks in a way that tells you that they have arrived at their ways of performing it through an incredibly

asciilifeform: at the end of this long process of grasping something that looked intellectually challenging lie only a complexity that resulted from _rejecting_ simplicity of design at a few crucial points. Hell, it still took me years to figure out what alternatives they _should_ have picked up, and by then it was too late.'

asciilifeform: t was the first time I had really serious doubts about the wisdom of SGML's structuring process, because the massive complexity of it all is _completely_ pointless and a result of spreading the semantics so thin that you had to keep mental track of an enormous number of relationships to end up with an idea of what something should do or mean. It does not have to be that way. It was _profoundly_ disappointing to discover that

asciilifeform: d some of the designs and how it would be implemented, and he was quiet for the longest time before he said that I was probably the first person to have understood what he was _really_ trying to accomplish. That would have been _such_ a great thing if it had been, say, rocket science, but it was not. It was a man-made complexity so great that it had required _months_ of brain-wracking to really get my intuition working. Tha

asciilifeform: 'Overriding and updating old information is something I have to work really hard at. The end result of the way I think and the way the standard is defined is that I immediately saw these massively complex ways to do things that "nobody" understood. Take HyTime and what it calls "architectual forms" -- I vividly remember a long walk around a quiet Tallahassee one summer night with the creator of this concept, when I questione

asciilifeform: but there has to be... ~a~ head.

asciilifeform: and that there is not a magical elixir that absolves you of the need to 'fit in head'

asciilifeform: and that if you are using a pile of shit which fits in no one's head, don't be surprised when the inevitable happens

asciilifeform: my position is that this is reasonable, but what is unreasonable is to ever have more respect for a program than its author did.

asciilifeform: in such a way as to guarantee 100% compatibility

asciilifeform: jurov: this kind of thing is at the root of a very old disagreement i have with mircea_popescu

asciilifeform: just because a line did not execute in ten billion hours does not mean that it could not

asciilifeform: 'It is mid-boggling that a protocol that "handles assets worth billions of dollars" is defined only by a bloated C++ implementation -- maintaned by one company, that of course will not be responsible for any losses...'

asciilifeform: the main allure, for me, was 1) drepper goes to the furnace where he belongs; no glibc 2) can switch cpu arch by turning a knob

asciilifeform: mod6: have you had a chance to build 'rotor' ?

asciilifeform: to get a close approximation of one working unit

asciilifeform: it was made by folks who did not have any reason whatsoever to give a fuck re: quality or cost.

asciilifeform: the thing was, in every respect, a 'soviet' production in the stereotypical western sense of the word

asciilifeform: add a zero or so for modern usd.

asciilifeform: so it did not matter that it was a stinking pile of shit

asciilifeform: it is a priceless tour of 1980s chip design, among other things

asciilifeform: can use sd card, with a little soldering

asciilifeform: decimation: if that's all you want, get a 'sinclair'

asciilifeform: so can 'ask' the glass a 64-bit integer, and get another

asciilifeform: that can be used as a one-time pad

asciilifeform: the reason why 'physical function' is that it ought to be precisely a ~function~

asciilifeform: break a glass rod.

asciilifeform: world's biggest unsurprise. of what is there most in a city? shit

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: usually in china they put it through a pig first. but yes.

asciilifeform: 'dirt cookie' was a favourite in chinese cultural revolution

asciilifeform: where he can work 14 hour days for a flat with six of his kind

asciilifeform: back to the earlier observation, the attachment orcs have to the myth of 'the west' is a truly religious affair