asciilifeform: AND in that it does not mutilate the payload!
asciilifeform: in that it does not pretend to be usable as-is without unpacking,
asciilifeform: and ascii-armour is an entirely distinct thing (really just 'uuencode') from 'clearsign'
asciilifeform: as soon as 'nice to have' transitions into 'this does not and cannot possibly work as intended but we'll use it anyway' you open the door to perdition.
asciilifeform: there cannot be a reasonable way to do an unreasonable thing.☟︎
asciilifeform: 'clearsigning' is one of those 'dwim' retardations that folks apparently will have to burn themselves on painfully, again and again and again and again, until they finally grasp the futility
asciilifeform: 'clearsign' kinda worked for documents intended to be STRICTLY human-readable, where newline crud doesn't have much of an impact
asciilifeform: i could go on and on with the braindamage
asciilifeform: 4) you have to de-crudify a signed file before it can be used
asciilifeform: 3) if your file is 7-bit clean, it WILL get mutilated somewhere from point A to point B, just about guaranteed, so whole exercise was pointless
asciilifeform: 2) now you have to care about endian - how to represent the magic length word ?
asciilifeform: 1) you can no longer transmit a file of unknown length through a signing widget and sign at arbitrary moment. gotta compute the length in advance
asciilifeform: because if you have a magic format, suddenly you have severely circumscribed choices
asciilifeform: so you are not signing what you thought you were signing, but a transform
asciilifeform: and since gpg is retarded by virtue of having to ride on top of 7bit-clean turdmailz etc., it happily mutilates strings to make'em signable
asciilifeform: with 'clearsign' - i can only sign certain strings which don't contain the escape magicks.
asciilifeform: let's approach mathematically. with detached sig in gpg, i can sign ANY bitstring which fits in the machine.
asciilifeform: the boojum in building a sane-anything is that it will have to be financed with your lunch money.
asciilifeform: troying the disk, importing a virus from a disk, or letting Word destroy your day's work.'
asciilifeform: 'look at Microsoft. nobody in their right mind would want their buggy shit. what Microshit users want is something entirely separate from the products. Microshit is _not_ user-friendly, but it is marketed as user-friendly, and then other software products, far more user-friendly, are made to look as if they missed the whole point about what "user-friendly" _is_, namely to look cool in nice colors while you're crashing and des
asciilifeform: '... A physical calculator (and not a touch-screen app on a tablet) has something that the surrogate doesn't. For one thing it does not require you to do GUI context switching. It does not compete for mouse (or keyboard) with the other tens of open programs. I find this invaluable. On the other hand, touch screens take away tactile feedback. This gives the same bland taste as the soft power-off switches.' << yes!
asciilifeform: ore inefficient, using more and more RAM and CPU to do the same things. Since right now, I am very low on money, this means I am stuck using Xcode 6.2, and trying to not misclick anything when I plug the testing devices and iTunes nag me to update them... because if I allow them to get updated, I will have to upgrade Xcode, OSX, and the entire machine, and right now sometimes I can't afford even food ...'
asciilifeform: 'For some reason, completely unknown to me, Xcode is ALSO tied to OSX version, For example Xcode 6.3 requires a OSX version more than Xcode 6.2, despite having no huge differentes between the two and Xcode 6.3 don't requiring any new OS capabilities that Xcode 6.2 didn't already used anyway. But every time you update OSX and Xcode, not only they sometimes explicitly require a new machine model, but they also get increasingly m
asciilifeform: VariaVarietatis: how the hell would i know.
asciilifeform: (anybody recall the race condition 0days in linux kernel circa 2011 ?)
asciilifeform: who doesn't love a good ol'fashioned race condition bug
asciilifeform: and ~despite~ this, the source is still peppered with 'critical section' locks etc
asciilifeform: client walks the fd's and sees if socket 'needs service' and gives itself over to it wholly until whatever operation (however long it takes) is complete
asciilifeform: (it is a sort of 'cooperative multitasking', a la win95 !)
asciilifeform: the whole polled socket thing is deeply braindamaged
asciilifeform: one idiot can trivially monopolize a node.
asciilifeform has been looking at the socket handling, and it is imho the most urgent crock of shit ~after~ the leak
asciilifeform still loathes bdb and would like to see it go, asap
