asciilifeform: i've a sack of piano keys, circa 1890

asciilifeform has a diamond cutoff wheel somewhere

asciilifeform shoves a larger crate of israeli gas masks

asciilifeform kicks a small crate labelev 'nuvoton'

asciilifeform: The catch on my suitcase was broken, so I buckled it shut with a big leather strap. Twice

asciilifeform: a job to do, and no job was any better or any worse than any other.'

asciilifeform: 'Did that give you a lot of satisfaction?' I said.

asciilifeform: at Auschwitz. In his tender care, literally millions of Jews were gassed. Mengel knew a little

asciilifeform went there, once, as a schoolboy

asciilifeform drove on what must've been a 20km solid strip of ice today

asciilifeform is not 'car guy' despite - or perhaps because of? - spending a rather extraordinary amount of time in cars

asciilifeform used to have a 'subaru'

asciilifeform: and overcooked it a wee bit.

asciilifeform: i'm actually the only person i know who keeps an apple box 'for testing xxxx on apple once in a blue moon' without sitting on it all the time

asciilifeform: if yes, gpggram a post box addr and i'll mail you.

asciilifeform: i've a dead one with intact lcd.

asciilifeform: vendor repair for a few hundy, iirc

asciilifeform: looked like a botulismed tin can

asciilifeform: it is very well preserved but survived a burst (yes) battery

asciilifeform: the only apple box currently in my collection is a circa-'09 'air'

asciilifeform: iirc pete_dushenski is a hereditary apple user, ought to deeply grok this ^

asciilifeform: that was probably a first and a last.

asciilifeform: 'In July 2013 I told the NSA-affiliated conference organizers that I was having some problems in getting my visa, and gently asked whether they could do something about it. Always eager to help, the NSA people leaped into action, and immediately sent me a short email written with a lot of tact: “The trouble you are having is regrettable…Sorry you won’t be able to come to our conference. We have submitted our program and

asciilifeform: in 'twinkle', you just have a led in each and a phototransistor on top.

asciilifeform: in a von neumann machine, you'd have to individually address and ask each cell what its output is, to take the sum, like a total idiot

asciilifeform: i'll add that neither 'mark and sweep' (stop-the-world in its basic form) nor 'reference counting' are necessary on a dataflow machine

asciilifeform: but yes, garbage collection will have a terrible reputation for at least another half century on account of the state-of-the-art half a century ago when john mccarthy invented it, 'stop the world'

asciilifeform: to anyone who gives half a fuck

asciilifeform: e.g. a 'nursery'

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: it isn't about the money. talk to a 30+ year apple user. the kind that stuck to it 'through thick and thin'

asciilifeform: which would be, on such systems, the only means for crafting a self-referential data structure

asciilifeform: i suspect that a sizable majority of apple users, if offered the choice between using winblows and being buggered with a thermos, complete with handle, every night,

asciilifeform: 'My wife got through her Master's on a G3 iBook, and we paid to have its motherboard replaced twice for the same graphics issue, a little over a year apart. Having to pay for the first repair sucked, but sometimes those are the odds. Having to pay to repair it a second time due to identical symptoms a couple of months after the initial repair warranty was up was a kick in the teeth, and was a good indicator that there was some ☟︎

asciilifeform: on the strength of a reputation that has long been entirely, thoroughly baseless.

asciilifeform: and sure, he could join a class-action and possibly get $10 seven years later.

asciilifeform: the screen developed a hairline crack right in front of my eyes

asciilifeform: colleague of mine bought a $3k 'macbook' a few mo. ago

asciilifeform: if it doesn't - that is to say, doesn't match fucking 1980s state of the art - it's a turd.

asciilifeform: whatdidjathink, they'd run a one-off with leaded solder just for you?

asciilifeform: they give you a board with the same ticking bomb

asciilifeform: and the repairs -are a scam-

asciilifeform: the apple gpu thing is a true plague

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: reference counting... [david moon tale] ...but sure, it'd be great if it worked << there are quite a few systems which used reference-counting in garbage collector (other than in the demented c++ and apple systems, it is generally used in a garbage collector to determine 'what's garbage?'.) appears in, e.g., wolfram's 'mathematica.' down side: cannot have circular data structures.

asciilifeform: usually a month or two after warranty expiration.

asciilifeform: i had half a dozen die in precisely this way on my watch.

asciilifeform: good way to make a resistor randomly between 100k and 1Mohm

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: if can't solder this, should ask a friend. it is a first class bitch to debug pogo w/out a serial console

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: ...there's very few people outside of b-a with brains working worth two shits... << l0l! or were you just thinking of the 'non-marginal' folks who don't 'depend on paycheques'

asciilifeform: mod6: thanks for posting a tarball << it contains a 12MB turd (mostly nulls) that can be booted to show that netbsd boots on pogo and diddles the network. that's all

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: it doesn't NEED soldering, you can just glue it in contact, with conductive paste << Nnn-o. conductive glue is a -waste of time and money- unless you're making cheapo resistors

asciilifeform: jtag is a protocol for directly reading/flipping bits in the cpu, eeprom, ram.