asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: i think nearly as well when walking, and spent many years trying to construct something like a 'walking computer.'

asciilifeform finds that he thinks better horizontally (in all possible orientations) but has never come across a computer that he could actually put to use in that position.

asciilifeform: there is always a little leak.

asciilifeform: ever smell even a humble laser cutter ?

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: i can't imagine a home chip fab would smell much better.

asciilifeform: ideally, i would teach it only to those who had never programmed a computer previously.

asciilifeform: a language that i don't even care to discuss because it cannot be meaningfully executed on existing hardware.

asciilifeform: and you would not stand to make any of it back. it would have to be a purely narcissistic pyramid built for the self-aggrandizement of some king.

asciilifeform: as if after a global thermonuking.

asciilifeform: i wouldn't mind a car that runs on farts, if it were possible at home.

asciilifeform: note, there was a where to flee.

asciilifeform: nothing remotely resembling a 'chip printer' is conceivable with presently-known physics

asciilifeform: the way i understand it, a 100% open fpga, produced in a thousand factories of mutually-antagonistic owners, is the one and only way to 'open computer.'

asciilifeform: which is actually more analogous to a teletype (slow, ponderous, you would not want to print a book's print run on it)

asciilifeform: back to chip thread, for a spell - we're roughly in the situation of ancient china, which had printing but not movable type

asciilifeform: technically if you were to write a logic synthesis tool today, from scratch, it would still be 'warez'

asciilifeform: ideally, a from-scratch rational reimplementation (that ignores patents on best-known algos, yes)

asciilifeform: i'm not convinced this is a usg-dependent phenomenon

asciilifeform: there will -never- be spare capacity for a counter-economic project.

asciilifeform: at least, for a silicon chip, that cannot be made in a cellar

asciilifeform: it is never enough to reverse engineer a particular item.

asciilifeform: i did tell the tale, of how on one occasion someone succeeded in mostly reversing a particular chip

asciilifeform: otherwise it would be a simple matter to learn how the mystery meat module works and remplement.

asciilifeform: and their ability to carry out this 'air merchant' trick is entirely tied to a maximally-closed chip architecture.

asciilifeform: they virtually never end up in consumer products except as a result of extreme haste (rushing a prototype to market)

asciilifeform: decimation: notice that all known fpga manufacturers (xilinx, altera, lattice, a few others) have the same business model ☟︎☟︎

asciilifeform: it's a market of, what... 10 people.

asciilifeform: it is simply wasteful for any extant mass application - does a dildo need general-purpose switching matrix logic ?

asciilifeform: decimation: that line was a 'the mask fell off' moment in that article.

asciilifeform: as i may have once explained, the chicoms have not done this and should not be expected to ever do it, because fpga is profoundly useless in a mass consumer product.

asciilifeform: a forcibly blown open 'xilinx' soft/hard stack would be a good start though.

asciilifeform: incidentally, there once lived upon the good earth a group of people who carried on development of entirely open computer hardware, prying open closed turds whenever they felt necessary without even breaking a sweat

asciilifeform: would have to give enough of a shit to fund, but not enough to attempt to direct. this will happen shortly after pigs fly.

asciilifeform: because this is a situation where anything short of 100% is equivalent to 0%.

asciilifeform: pci is a paragon of transparency compared with any extant fpga

asciilifeform: that is, something so laughably and irredeemably inadequate for its nominal purpose that its very existence is a troll.

asciilifeform: 'novena laptop' is a hardware troll

asciilifeform: and end up with a crate of scrap

asciilifeform: a gizmo, ships with a linux variant

asciilifeform: decimation: hell knows how many entirely-closed industrial turds contain a bsd

asciilifeform: not that someone could not, hypothetically, link a blob into an openbsd kernel and try to persuade folks to use it. but the result would probably be: laughter.

asciilifeform: the only way to prevent this kind of situation - a pure scorched earth approach

asciilifeform full of wrath re: google profiting off all of the work that folks put into linux, to create the abortion spoken of earlier; a deliberate hardware troll.

asciilifeform: but this tale was not about a 'proper' laptop, but attempt to glue together a portable-with-keyboard that isn't x86 and therefore can actually achieve some serious runtime on battery

asciilifeform: and non-x86 modern portable having keyboard is such a rarity that could not be passed up

asciilifeform: bought that thing >1 yr ago, because could not resist an attempt at a laptop that is entirely solid state, can be carried in one hand, and runs 12+hrs on a charge

asciilifeform: but go and try to set up a normal gentoo, in such a way that all of the necessary peripherals (gpu, power controller) actually work.

asciilifeform: the real insult is that the manufacturer's stock os is: a bastardized gentoo.

asciilifeform: only remembered 'systemd' now because happened to switch on a machine in my collection, a 'google chromebook a15', based on single-chip 'arm.' afaik, no clean (traditional init) linux distro has ever been published for said machine.

asciilifeform: a bag big enough >> :