ascii_field: assure that any decimalization had enough bits to be precise to a given number of digits). Stephen's aim seemed to be to sacrifice correctness for speed. He seemed clear on that the error was not a problem for him...'

ascii_field: 'My real concern, of course, was not that he was using optimized data structures so much as that he seemed on target to reintroduce numerical error back into a world that we had worked hard to make 'exact' (Macsyma used bignums from Lisp) or at least 'arbitrarily exact' (Macsyma had a derived type called 'bigfloat' that was internally a pair bignums, acting more or less as a ratio but with lots of other hidden bits to

ascii_field: and hired some folks to cough up a gui for it

ascii_field: a certain lisp

ascii_field: what he did was, essentially, steal a usg mega-product - macsyma, the first really universal computer algebra system, thousands of man-years of

ascii_field: anyway, i happen to know more than a reasonable man ought to, about wolframism ☟︎

ascii_field: so he ended up as a mad king of a small kingdom of sorts

ascii_field: the man is a crank who grew up as 'next big physics mind' who ended up coming to nothing. but turned out that he was good at harnessing other folks to pull his imperial cart.

ascii_field: wolfram is sui generis. owns a tame publisher, for instance ☟︎

ascii_field: 'Wolfram, for his part, responded by suing or threatening to sue Cook (now a penniless graduate student in neuroscience), the conference organizers, the publishers of the proceedings, etc. '

ascii_field: how the result was made public, but to claim it for himself. In fact, his position was that the existence of the result was a trade secret. ...'

ascii_field: 'The real problem with this result, however, is that it is not Wolfram's. He didn't invent cyclic tag systems, and he didn't come up with the incredibly intricate construction needed to implement them in Rule 110. This was done rather by one Matthew Cook, while working in Wolfram's employ under a contract with some truly remarkable provisions about intellectual property. In short, Wolfram got to control not only when and

ascii_field: wolfram is a u.s.-based fella though

ascii_field: and before we say 'the americans and their wasted effort on pointless sigint' - let's recall how they set up a whole planet as chumpers who can't access a sane computing system at any price...

ascii_field recalls how richard sorge, perhaps greatest spy who ever lived, still stuck to impersonating a german - rather than japanese - official, while in jp

ascii_field: not sure if this will make sense, but living as a stupid -social- organism takes a lifetime of practice.

ascii_field: this is more of a 'that day was suddenly torn limb from limb by the other shoppers' thing

ascii_field: to get back to original point, that i attempted to make, - division of labour exists, and not everyone is a universal and reshapeable everything.

ascii_field: what is surprising? the thing has roughly 5x the strength of a man, per gram of muscle.

ascii_field: 'when two chimpanzees grabbed his feet and pulled him under a fence into their enclosure...'

ascii_field: iirc there is a hypothesis that it is why they attack - he fails to respond to some important chimp gesture of dom/sub protocol handshake

ascii_field: man makes a terrible chimp

ascii_field: the point, which i evidently failed to get across, is that the man vs chimp contest requires the man to at least get a chance to sharpen a stick, in order to use his advantage over the beast

ascii_field: here i don't have a position as such, only observations

ascii_field: one very important fact is that a 'naggum' - if he is the genuine article - is a -destroyer- of jobs for his own kind, rather than creator thereof

ascii_field: can't speak for mats, but basic idea is that once you leave your meatwot, you are a fungible machine. this is a situation that, as mats put it, 'resets you to entry level' - and overwhelmingly favours the very young ☟︎

ascii_field: it isn't strictly an age thing, beyond a certain point

ascii_field does not, afaik, know anyone in local meatspace who 'doesn't need a job'

ascii_field: i mentioned him at least once as specifically an example of a particularly vile species sometimes called 'digerati' ☟︎

ascii_field: he was, imho, of a particular school of writing where threw shit at a wall hoping that some would stick

ascii_field: i happen to own a copy of most of it

ascii_field: sooner i am a dog.

ascii_field: but no, ellison only shat a few basic prunes.

ascii_field: (a great many - published such figures; turned out, to no one's surprise, fabricated wholesale; then somehow entire brouhaha magicked away )

ascii_field: mircea_popescu: that was more of a 'how dare they make an upvote ring, that's -ours- to do'

ascii_field: mircea_popescu: ellison is interesting for another reason. he is the undisputed emperor of 'wrote a few good stories in the '50s, famous for nothing in particular since'; loudly rants demanding eternal copyright because 'creaaaatorz have riiiiiightz!!111!!'

ascii_field: (iirc britain had a periscopic rifle sight/trigger stick in ww1, for roughly same problem)

ascii_field: and not obviously a bad idea under the circumstances

ascii_field: ak with a curved barrel << krummlauf !