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mircea_popescu: asciilifeform geometry doesn't really matter until physics decides d^x is a factor :D
mircea_popescu: (contrary to what noob scientists may think, "a breadbox" is neither arbitrary nor undefined in that sentence)
mircea_popescu: anyway, re earlier discussion, i guess it'd be worth belabouring the point that nothing therein contained is an argument against using ada. it's still a great technical solution, for bounds checking, for other reasons, it's still a great practical solution, for native linkability with c object code, for other reasons. same stands for scheme, still best option for a scripting language for bitcoind.
mircea_popescu: lol i guess you're gonna buy a new car with the btc thus saved ?
mircea_popescu: idioter yeah loads of btc moving since mpex sale. hold tight, you'll get it.
mircea_popescu: this is WHY your "fits in head", btw. well justified cover for the "on the basis of the pi we know, the largest house that can stand is 11 feet tall"
mircea_popescu: Nov 27 03:58:53 * assbot (~assbot@unaffiliated/kakobrekla/bot/assbot) has joined #bitcoin-assets
mircea_popescu: Nov 27 03:56:48 * assbot has quit (Remote host closed the connection)
mircea_popescu: anyway. the forever-bitcoin, ready to be buried under the sea or w/e, is not happening. because : "<mircea_popescu> how are you going to define a sorting rule for a type you don't know yet. <asciilifeform> by knowing it ?" is actually inescapable.
☟︎ mircea_popescu: but at least the whole "technology offers no solution for human problems" intuition now has much better footing in fact.
mircea_popescu: i am left without a solid basis to protest the use of magic numbers in code ;/
mircea_popescu: but hey, welfare works for as long it works, so does this.
mircea_popescu: much of the same substance as rms' "oh, all things belong to all people", ie, lazy reductionism.
mircea_popescu: im thinking it was actually a delusion, driven by peculiar circumstance that was both exceptional and unlikely to repeat.
mircea_popescu: in short, and to sum up : there may never exist such a thing as the "general purpose computer"
mircea_popescu: even in countries far distant in time and space, that couldn't rightly spell it./
mircea_popescu: before the "mentats" got into depression, heavy drinking and asscrack-cracksnorting.
mircea_popescu: incidentally, this is exactly how the trade houses used to work,
mircea_popescu: so it does. for reasons better understood now, at least by me.
mircea_popescu: yes. but it remains impossible for this proggy to be useful in the abstract :)
mircea_popescu: this'd make the "march lords in a wot - take your fief and guard it" naive approach to date actually very well grounded both factually and now philosophically ; and also offer a ready explanation of "why all this shit everywhere!"
mircea_popescu: and there's no way to specify him out of the machine or vice-versa. for reasons that perhaps go all the way to godel
mircea_popescu: or to put it another way : the reason software houses denegerate into makework facilities is much more fundamental than any sort of policy. in point of fact, a numeric computer of the sort we're using is NOT useful in either logic or math but as a shorhand for an actual logician or mathematician that takes the abortive nonsense the machine spits out, and enchants it into actual usable truth.
mircea_popescu: when i say "therefore - we should all eat an onion" you can bring that obhection
mircea_popescu: about which the only thing that can be rightly said is that - it will crash the next larger system.
mircea_popescu: so yea, i would say this is very much equivalent. we CAN'T actually make computer systems. and every time we try to make a larger one, we're stuck re-calculating a sort of "pi"
mircea_popescu: except the larger the things they tried to build, the worse it got. but then they fixed it. because, as alf the greek beedog says, "it IS possioble to make wall that won't leak!!11"|
mircea_popescu: phf the greeks notably thought they can build things, because they know "the actual value of pi"
mircea_popescu: i agree the crisis may only be in my head, but in point of fact i'm getting a whole paradigm reallignment thing, slightly queasy atm.
mircea_popescu: basically, all the architecture systems architects have managed yet to produce is the equivalent of "we need 10.1k builders - 100 to build and 10k to hold up the walls once we're done".
☟︎☟︎ mircea_popescu: asciilifeform in your terms : it IS NOT possible to make abstraction that does not leak until [condition about machine and only machine]. ALL the abstractions you make WILL leak once you run out of BRAIN.
mircea_popescu: phf worse that that, utterly undermines the fundamental reason against many things we supposedly argue against fundamentally.
mircea_popescu: let's work a simple example. suppose the case is that your machine is required to behave coherently with the rule that " among even numbers 2 - 8 is as much of a range as 1-4 is among natural numbers". the MOMENT your solution to this was "simple, just take $i*2", you have in fact c'd it.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform you can't define jack shit for a cpu without actually lying somewhere about what you did. is the problem.
mircea_popescu: it's well established for ~3 centuries now, i kinda feel like leibniz already.
mircea_popescu: and for that matter, among even numbers 2 - 8 is as much of a range as 1-4 is among natural numbers.
mircea_popescu: there is no such thing as contiguity or ranges that machines can grok.
mircea_popescu: it is, in places such as ada, "must use contiguity" the EXACT equivalent of "my ai program thinks because the procedure is called <<understanding>>"
mircea_popescu: jurov ranges are a sort of abstraction unavailable to computers.
mircea_popescu: there is no way to represent "all the numbers between 1 and 2" in a finite space.
mircea_popescu: nothing imaginary about it, it's factual. the sum total of all satoshi in existence once the bitcoin ran its course will not be 21mn, but 131k satoshi less.
mircea_popescu: and the problem is not, apparently, resolvable by fixing the machines. even if you had ideal machines, they'd still haveto halve blocks, and the results would still conceivably be... this.
mircea_popescu: but in the end, i say this : the difference between 20999999.9769 and 21000000.0000 is the unpayable change. point of fact remains that we can't escape this situation where we draw one thing, and the machine pops up another thing.
mircea_popescu: yeah well. my theoretically-useful example failed the test of practice.
mircea_popescu: (that is in practice an equivalent of the mantissa trick, it allows you to get out of all sorts of problems)
mircea_popescu: i picked it as a point because of the "abstract number" thing, ie, redefine 4.
mircea_popescu: and this is why it goes all the way down to fortran. the unresolved problems are actually very deep.
mircea_popescu: no, it sounds like until the day you can machine-represent an irrational quality without rounding, you're lying to yourself about having washed anything.
mircea_popescu: has no bearing on the problem that hey, math is still not represented, and some people'd like it to be.
mircea_popescu: but all this ~fundamentally c discussion~ which is EXACTLY what it is,
mircea_popescu: so yes, i can understand WHY you'd like it, think you need it, see it as best or better.
mircea_popescu: the fundamental problem here being, obviously enough, that the FORMALISM used to describe math for and in computers is shit. and yes, on that shitty basis you will never have math, but an engineering-useful hack.
mircea_popescu: to the question "why did they not define EVEN correctly, eschewing this problem they perceive with mod" you answer that " ada is a civilized lang like commonlisp and there is NOT a presumption that integers are machine words !". This objection, if accepted as the correct response, ALSO invalidates using, say, XOR, and for the same reason.
mircea_popescu: the problem is this : in ada manual it is said, "So we see that the predicate in the subtype Even cannot be a static predicate because the operator mod is not permitted with the current instance. But mod could be used in an inner static expression." ; it is further said "and, in addition, a call of a Boolean logical operator and, or, xor, not whose operands are such static predicate expressions, and, a static predicate expres
mircea_popescu: ie, that the thing as-is is broken, and should be fixed, but other than that the idea is ok ?
mircea_popescu: so then are you saying ada shouldn't allow either mod or > ?
mircea_popescu: how are you going to define a sorting rule for a type you don't know yet.
mircea_popescu: it's true that haskell tries and splendidly fails at being not-this.
mircea_popescu: so this is what i mean by "it's a c" : whatever the fuck you do, it's still going to be an ugly hack where you "can't define this" but nevertheless define THAT, which is just as broken.