asciilifeform works with items such as logic analyzer, pc emulators, etc. and ~needs~ 16-32 GB of ram, for instance, and the fastest cpu available. and yes, it has to be portable.
asciilifeform: kakobrekla also explained, non-ips lcd is agony to look at.
asciilifeform: can't help but wonder if they belonged to him.
asciilifeform: phf: interestingly, around the time dr. b retired, i fished a full ru set of knuth's aop from the library's garbage bin, along with a few dozen other (some, crumbling from age) maths texts, also ru
asciilifeform: (from my familiarity with the - very few - primary sources, it is accurate.)
asciilifeform: he was a true master of teaching a kid exactly how worthless of a worm he is.
asciilifeform: it would not be an exaggeration to say that if it were not for this man, i would be a 'respectable' dunning-krugerized waste of space somewhere, with delusions of 'knowing maths'
asciilifeform: trinque: there is not a handy answer to 'what should culture man stuck in a dying civilization do'☟︎
asciilifeform: trinque: familiar with 'what do you expect me to do? -- no mr bond, we expect you to die!' ?
asciilifeform: some equilibria are very stable. egypt carried on for well over 5,000 yrs
asciilifeform: trinque: they had ~1500 years to 'shape up'
asciilifeform: there are no germans today, as surely as there are no romans.
asciilifeform: then they lost a war and got culturally annihilated and enslaved by the anglos.☟︎
asciilifeform: yes, every last 'phreedom fighter' in the desert.
asciilifeform: to the point of being cattle for washington.
asciilifeform: they are no good even at basic literacy and opsec.
asciilifeform: but this is not interesting to me personally.
asciilifeform: since mircea_popescu is asleep, i will have to fill in for him and point out that cockroaches COULD develop civilization after ten million years of inhabiting the burned-out husks of the skyscrapers.
asciilifeform: and if it were to be fought, it will be fought with museum pieces from 1950s (all modern aircraft, for instance, are) and the next war will be fought with bow and arrow.
asciilifeform: trinque: too lazy even for proper war.
asciilifeform: not the least reason for this is that research PER SE is now a lemon market.
asciilifeform: the dope lord who funds groundbreaking research is an imaginary animal.
asciilifeform: a gigantic stone on which you can build a skyscraper also 'handles great organizational complexity'
asciilifeform: fact is, dealing dope is rather like, e.g., smelting aluminum, but much more so: attracts eminently practical types with zero imagination. by necessity.
asciilifeform: trinque: aha, get to the moon by stacking chairs. i'll watch.
asciilifeform: 'Grow up, graduate, marry, start a family, buy a house, have an accident, get seriously ill for a while, or a number of other very expensive things people actually do all the time, and the value of your work starts to get very real and concrete to you, at which point giving away things to be "nice" to some "community" which turns out not to be "nice" _enough_ in return that you will actually stay alive, is no longer an option.'
asciilifeform: 'All of this "code sharing" is an economic surplus phenomenon. It works only when none of the people involved in it are in any form of need. As soon as the need arises, a lot of people discover that it has cost them real money to work for the community and they reap very little benefit from it, because they are sharing value-less services and getting value out of something that people take for granted is hard to impossible.'☟︎
