asciilifeform: then in what sense is the result 'emulated ternary box' ?

asciilifeform: it'd be 'cheating'

asciilifeform: because this is no longer emulating an ideal ternary box

asciilifeform: aha but now can't use bignum stack from pgp 1.4, etc.

asciilifeform admits that he was very tempted to do precisely this. but went in for 'absolute minimum of moving parts' for the current experimental item, for reasons which are not difficult to understand

asciilifeform: and what this costs.

asciilifeform: take a sharp pencil and work out how base-n arithmetic is done on a base-m box.

asciilifeform: given that i presently lack a fab

asciilifeform: to be clear, i was speaking of emulated computer, not a physical one

asciilifeform: on a binary machine? yes

asciilifeform: and they are made of what?

asciilifeform: time dimension.

asciilifeform: you wanne live with that?

asciilifeform: cause all of a sudden a shr or shl is O(N) !

asciilifeform experimented.

asciilifeform: gnarly on existing iron. doable

asciilifeform: (working on reducing this)

asciilifeform: the beauty is that with a few hundred bytes of overhead, it can eat standard gpg messages

asciilifeform: prototype is essentially an 'rpn calculator' where you can push bignums on the stack and instruction 0x01 --> 'pop two, multiply, push back' or 0x70 --> modular-exponentiate, etc.

asciilifeform: no hardcoded algos, other than arithmetical. period.

asciilifeform: yes.

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: http://log.bitcoin-assets.com/?date=14-10-2015#1298917 << thread where i sorta spilled the beans on this. ☝︎

asciilifeform: you will see how, and laugh, i predict.

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: i solved this.

asciilifeform: it'll be more of a thing once we get the sha1 out of the loop though.

asciilifeform: naturally

asciilifeform: (considering that there is not a meaningful default for it, even in principle)

asciilifeform: naturally

asciilifeform: the only item that requires manual handling in a correct vtron is keys.

asciilifeform: http://log.bitcoin-assets.com/?date=25-10-2015#1307987 << this is the right thing. ☝︎

asciilifeform: but if funkenstein learns the ropes and remains a contributor, he will need to antipatch himself.

asciilifeform: ^

asciilifeform: (if his key remains in play)

asciilifeform: e.g. funkenstein's latest patch will need an antipatch

asciilifeform: but my current thought is that antipatches will have to be a thing, yes.

asciilifeform: ideally not.

asciilifeform: point is that a malefactor could probably find something public with which to create headache if the mechanism 'takes anything signed like-so'

asciilifeform: 'random' is overstatement.

asciilifeform: plenty of things that don't belong (e.g., nonvdiffs, vdiffs that were not meant for use in anger) have same header.

asciilifeform: diff's header ?

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: what header

asciilifeform: mod6: one aspect which i never fully fleshed out imho needs some thought: when the thing is hooked to a live wwwtron, what is to stop idiots from tossing in arbitrary signed crud from #b-a logs into it ?

asciilifeform: mod6: neato

asciilifeform: aha.

asciilifeform: (vs a protein-diddler)

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: aha. new catalyst takes perhaps a day to try.

asciilifeform: http://log.bitcoin-assets.com/?date=25-10-2015#1307976 << this looks spiffy but what is a cucumber test ? ☝︎

asciilifeform admits to quietly following this subject

asciilifeform: aha, catalysts have come a long way.

asciilifeform: as they were in 1944.

asciilifeform: fischer-tropsch is back in fashion ?!

asciilifeform: this is even (especially?) a problem for coal. if you have noncombustibles in there (and, increasingly, you do) you get ruined furnace, downtime, outages.

asciilifeform: this also.

asciilifeform: at least for usa/eu markets

asciilifeform: http://log.bitcoin-assets.com/?date=25-10-2015#1307955 << it isn't a pure matter of joules, on account of envirowhinerism being a thing. also gotta have 'sufficiently low sulfur' etc. ☝︎

asciilifeform: any more than the ants in your cellar are 'fighting to take your house'

asciilifeform: jurov: they are not, strictly speaking

asciilifeform: for the bloke with bad-habits, baggage, debt, tv - what other thing is possible ?

asciilifeform: homo redditicus would kill worlds for one, no ?

asciilifeform: they just 'aren't people' on mircea_popescu's planet

asciilifeform: plenty of folks

asciilifeform: http://log.bitcoin-assets.com/?date=25-10-2015#1307946 << no upheaval because there is not the vaguest inkling of a threat of anything like a robotic replacement for chix ☝︎

asciilifeform: i have opteron boxes from dell. afaik even this is out of print.

asciilifeform: sop.

asciilifeform: dell today, gone tomorrow

asciilifeform: this is a result of the tower of babel situation re: pc hardware, rather than anything else.

asciilifeform: (1990s)

asciilifeform: but you would actually have to buy the same computer he had

asciilifeform: in principle! some schmuck actually ported sbcl to x86 'bare arse'

asciilifeform: mno that was zetalisp.

asciilifeform: ben_vulpes: sbcl is an interesting beast. there are really two compilers (and before anyone asks, their semantic idempotence is neither proven nor provable) - a bootstrapper, in c, and a battlefield variant, in itself.

asciilifeform: is it so hard to grasp..?

asciilifeform: THIS MATTERS for fuck's sake

asciilifeform: http://log.bitcoin-assets.com/?date=25-10-2015#1307928 << how many lines is ~haskell itself~ ? and of what. ☝︎

asciilifeform: mats: l0l! what is that

asciilifeform: there was some work in this direction, but for reasons which are quite clear (politics of u.s. pharma business) it never went anywhere.

asciilifeform: this is not a bad time to point out that dope tolerance is not a magical punishment straight from god, but a physical mechanism. which could, conceivably, be dealt with.

asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: you missed a long and mighty dope thread

asciilifeform: ^ see also rms on subj.

asciilifeform: ;;google treacherous computing

asciilifeform: or microshit's 'trusted computing.'

asciilifeform: as in 'trusted platform module'

asciilifeform: also - as mats knows - or ought to know - 'trusted' is a usg shibboleth for 'resists attempts at understanding or modification by putative owner'

asciilifeform: but if you enjoy putting a steel door on a drywall room - who am i to say no.

asciilifeform: and yes, you can fandango over ~all~ of physical ram, typically the thing does not care where you put its ring buffer - and you don't need to access pci config to move it

asciilifeform: (e.g., most nics have a - documented or not - provision for dma)

asciilifeform: mats: only thing is, i can do arbitrary dma on just about any box where i can access ~any~ pci device's standard mmio space - no need to screw with the pci config regs

asciilifeform: (can i talk to the nic? does it have dma?)

asciilifeform: it is a crock of shit, because the pretense is trivially shattered in 1,001 ways

asciilifeform: yes, i get that this is the fashion, 'box with no root'

asciilifeform: 'protects from root' what a crock of shit

asciilifeform: (with the possible exception of /proc - but i gotta run strace! what, i have to sudo to strace now?!)

asciilifeform: on an ordinary linux box you already need root for these

asciilifeform: mats: disables how? and for whom ?

asciilifeform: and yes, for every meth-taking erdos or wiener, there are ten million nobodies who think that their sulfurous rancid turd burning at both ends is a candle with lovely light, yes.

asciilifeform: 'my candle burns at both ends, / it will not last the night, / but ah, my foes! / and oh, my friends! / it gives a lovely light.'

asciilifeform: where was that rhyme...

asciilifeform: or jets. or parachute. take your pick.

asciilifeform: aha. dope, as correctly used, is aftermarket shocks.

asciilifeform: take some reconstitutory dopez!