asciilifeform: same result, but many more takers for the latter than the former.
asciilifeform: as for the deliberate alt, it is somewhat like the ancient discussion about whether one would rather be 'scanned in' and shot and ~then~ replaced by the robot running the sim, or to have a neuron at a time replaced with electric one
asciilifeform: the fact that there is no standardized chipset, and that x86 is really a loose collection of mostly-incompatible shitboxes that somehow pretend to run the same soft - matters.
asciilifeform: the fact that x86 cpu has idiot ibm-mandated instructions for doing binary-coded-decimal - MATTERS
asciilifeform: but that winblowz makes the kind of certainty needed to avoid the 'grasping for the handrails' described earlier, impossible
asciilifeform: my point, incidentally, was not that satoshi was a tard (though it may be)
asciilifeform: (leading to a lifelong phobia of that key on the keyboard)
asciilifeform: it is a result of the kind of cargocultism driven by justified and maniacal fear that leads, e.g., c programmers to pepper their code with redundant parenthesis
asciilifeform: while pdp11 with unix - loses linefeeds
asciilifeform: this is why, to return to earlier thread, pdp11 programmed by a single mind who writes every single instruction that the machine will ever execute, can be a jewel that is maintained for generations,
asciilifeform: i happen to believe that we have not yet devised the means for truly separating - conceptually - computer programs
asciilifeform: if something ~requires~ >1 head, it consists of separable things.
asciilifeform: painful process that they are loathe to reopen or examine at all no matter how hard it is to get it right for them.'
asciilifeform: '...But it is the same problem we find in C++. The question to be asked of massive complexity like that is not "what wonderful things did you find out that made this necessary", but "whatever did you _miss_ that made this so horribly complex"? You can sometimes see people who are really, really dumb go about some simple tasks in a way that tells you that they have arrived at their ways of performing it through an incredibly
asciilifeform: at the end of this long process of grasping something that looked intellectually challenging lie only a complexity that resulted from _rejecting_ simplicity of design at a few crucial points. Hell, it still took me years to figure out what alternatives they _should_ have picked up, and by then it was too late.'
asciilifeform: t was the first time I had really serious doubts about the wisdom of SGML's structuring process, because the massive complexity of it all is _completely_ pointless and a result of spreading the semantics so thin that you had to keep mental track of an enormous number of relationships to end up with an idea of what something should do or mean. It does not have to be that way. It was _profoundly_ disappointing to discover that
asciilifeform: d some of the designs and how it would be implemented, and he was quiet for the longest time before he said that I was probably the first person to have understood what he was _really_ trying to accomplish. That would have been _such_ a great thing if it had been, say, rocket science, but it was not. It was a man-made complexity so great that it had required _months_ of brain-wracking to really get my intuition working. Tha
asciilifeform: 'Overriding and updating old information is something I have to work really hard at. The end result of the way I think and the way the standard is defined is that I immediately saw these massively complex ways to do things that "nobody" understood. Take HyTime and what it calls "architectual forms" -- I vividly remember a long walk around a quiet Tallahassee one summer night with the creator of this concept, when I questione
asciilifeform: have to prove that it is unreachable.
asciilifeform: just because a line did not execute in ten billion hours does not mean that it could not
asciilifeform: trinque: see earlier thread today re: coverage
asciilifeform: trinque, ben_vulpes, anyone else with 'clang' -- here's an idea, use the graph-walker solrodar used to determine the subset of openssl (see old thread re: same)
asciilifeform: 'It is mid-boggling that a protocol that "handles assets worth billions of dollars" is defined only by a bloated C++ implementation -- maintaned by one company, that of course will not be responsible for any losses...'
asciilifeform: the main allure, for me, was 1) drepper goes to the furnace where he belongs; no glibc 2) can switch cpu arch by turning a knob
