asciilifeform: anyway i'm not convinced that ~anyone actually ~chooses~ to become a naggum

asciilifeform: like folks live in any other butugychag.

asciilifeform: until died.

asciilifeform: only that plenty of folks, incl. apparently the late naggum, lived in it.

asciilifeform: trinque: i did not say it was a mega-promising career choice.

asciilifeform: trinque: mighty fine answer. but you left out the broomstick.

asciilifeform: sure.

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: again i had this, and it was a real laugh, read the fine print sometime.

asciilifeform: where a few k/mo is your WHOLE RECEIPT ?

asciilifeform: trinque: a motherfucking consulting gig ??

asciilifeform: i had this, it was a joke

asciilifeform: it was cheap ?

asciilifeform: retain one ?

asciilifeform: trinque: ever hire lawyer ?

asciilifeform: naggum and stack were similar in that actually getting all of the support they were 'supposed to have to run business' would likely have ~wiped them out~ financially and still put them no farther away from statal rape

asciilifeform: why do you suppose people fuck goats?

asciilifeform: or eat raw.

asciilifeform: in a mud pit.

asciilifeform: if you can't afford a pot, you will cook it on open hearth yes.

asciilifeform: the c,d,e buttons are actually connected to something, for him.

asciilifeform: but this is interesting to mircea_popescu because he ~has~ the maneuvering space.

asciilifeform: naturally.

asciilifeform: how was he to get ~unfucked~.

asciilifeform: how much good this did ?

asciilifeform: yes, an accountant could have - and probably did! tell naggum that he was fucked.

asciilifeform: over here in usaschwitz folks learn to - yes, not even try

asciilifeform: it is precisely the 'overcivilized' thing

asciilifeform: would have learned to not even try, and then what, spend life working for racal norsk ?

asciilifeform: and if he had learned..?

asciilifeform: granted, to mircea_popescu on mt olympus none of this is relevant

asciilifeform: and from whom they then take whatever isn't bolted down

asciilifeform: it is relevant to the man who has to pay and hasn't with what

asciilifeform: (they would not believe that he preferred to work 2-3 mo./yr in actuality)

asciilifeform: i.e. what he 'could have earned'

asciilifeform: and it wasn't a slap on the wrist, it was - iirc - a pretty penny

asciilifeform: tax expert would have somehow settled the 80% norwegian tax, assessed ~based on profession~, rather than actual receipts, into something sane?!

asciilifeform: ?

asciilifeform: pop 2nd round into his head

asciilifeform: the one option was, i suppose, to go stack.

asciilifeform: so then. what should he have done against the tax inspectors.

asciilifeform: but admit, this is 0 use to a naggum.

asciilifeform: and yeah i recall, in logz, 'whichever hungry london barrister buys'

asciilifeform: just hiring lawyer for a week would wipe out ~99% of usaschwitz inmates

asciilifeform: kiss job good-bye, etc.

asciilifeform: in usa, at least, 'individual' is more often than not sunk on the very day he has to so much as ~appear~ in court.

asciilifeform: srsly you need a certain amount of mircea_popescutronium to 'jurisdiction shop', appear in court, etc.

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: except you did not do it from the position of being a pauper.

asciilifeform: naggum fought alone.

asciilifeform: *night

asciilifeform: 'nigh phf

asciilifeform: it is not actually hard to massively improve on cadr, much of its gnarl was that it had to be made of 74xxx and of weird amd ALUs available at the time

asciilifeform: )

asciilifeform: (again this number is missing several 0's, but for sake of argument.0

asciilifeform: the thing is that neither of these concerns really interests anybody who has a spare 500k

asciilifeform: there is also the advantage i described earlier, re 'specificity of diddling'

asciilifeform: can run x86 proggies today, and have the option of proper lispm later

asciilifeform: the advantage is that you keep the design space.

asciilifeform: ergo it ain't happening.

asciilifeform: and i have no reasonable expectation that anyone could recoup the costs.

asciilifeform: it'd be quite a bit more than 500k

asciilifeform: (modern vendors succumb to the temptation to put a great many special-purpose parts in fpga, e.g., multipliers, even whole cpu cores, etc. i am specifically not talking about their rubbish.)

asciilifeform: thing consists largely of sram.

asciilifeform: structure is very regular.

asciilifeform: (put a quartz glass window in it, like 1980s eproms)

asciilifeform: fpga is also nice because, in principle, it can be optically inspected

asciilifeform: (if small.)

asciilifeform: but just a die with a number of conventional cpu.

asciilifeform: also 'greenarray' i will nitpick is not an fpga

asciilifeform: aha but macroscale.

asciilifeform: even if enemy supplies ~all~ of the cubes.

asciilifeform: handily solves 'diddle' also - which cube will the enemy sabotage ? how does he know which one will hold what part of your circuit before you assemble them ?

asciilifeform: picture 1,024 'cubes of computronium'

asciilifeform: where 'computer' is simply this mass, of how many of these things you screwed together and attached dc power supply to.

asciilifeform: but one where the physical package is brought out to a 'nuts and bolts' thing that you can screw into an aggregate, tiled, without making pcb

asciilifeform: analogously, the correct thing to make today would be not merely fpga,

asciilifeform: (if they had to try to make ~it~ they would quickly fight with swords again)

asciilifeform: just as afghanis make kalash with hand tools, yes, but do not worry about getting ammo, it is gettable

asciilifeform: my take on it, is that if you are using some industrial product in this, it absolutely has to be something available in MASSIVE qty, readily

asciilifeform: quite.

asciilifeform: you did not make anything, really, and you relied on a supply chain that is quite likely unstable, esp. if you become 'interesting' ☟︎

asciilifeform: but then the act is only scarcely different from using fpga.

asciilifeform: conceivably if you start with a sufficiently prepped product, you can 'vlsi at home'

asciilifeform: (in many modern plants, the things are purchased pre-prepped)

asciilifeform: or did someone do all of this already

asciilifeform: chemically prepare the cut wafer ?

asciilifeform: cut the wafer ?

asciilifeform: do you need to melt and refine the si ?

asciilifeform: phf: it again depends.

asciilifeform: i.e. there is no effective way to subtly sabotage the thing if you do not know the victim's intended circuit layout.

asciilifeform: fpga also plays well with my 'specificity of diddling' theorem.

asciilifeform: (fpga only became a seriously practical thing, really, in 2000s. you will find them from '90s but on MASSIVE boards with dozens of the same unit)

asciilifeform: unfortunately it would have to be on a reasonably recent density, to be useful.

asciilifeform: the by far least idiotic item to make.

asciilifeform: if i could make one thing, on a traditional si process, it would be an fpga.

asciilifeform: not even.

asciilifeform: and as it stands, 'hobbyist' semiconductor is roughly in the same place as hobbyist space travel.

asciilifeform: costs of chip fab as we know it, and of orbital launch, are even comparable. ☟︎

asciilifeform: unenviable field to live in.

asciilifeform: as it stands, it has a good chunk of the difficulty of space colonization but with ~none of the 'sexappeal'

asciilifeform: phf: 'give a damn' in the serious financial sense.