log☇︎
203100+ entries in 1.547s
gribble: Error: "isdown" is not a valid command.
asciilifeform: linked article mentions a popular brand among ru police, 'argument.'
BingoBoingo: So... basically a kinder soldering iron alternative...
BingoBoingo: asciilifeform: Russian batons... have a very dildonic look
BingoBoingo: Only outside of a legitimate domicile. Within domicile even a fucking claymore sword is fair game.
decimation: so, usg & friends might arrest you if you carry a stick
decimation: lol " In April 2010 actor and entertainer Darren Day was found guilty of possessing an offensive weapon, namely a Kubotan-style keyring, by a court in Edinburgh.[4]"
BingoBoingo: Everything is fun and games until poorer and more white trash tries to become a precondition for future life
decimation: I found a titanium ring is good for me most of the time, completely anti-reactive to skin and also cheap
BingoBoingo: <asciilifeform> incidentally, i've always wanted a pack of slow-burning steel-tipped 'matches' you could solder with in the field. << SO story with those.
asciilifeform: incidentally, i've always wanted a pack of slow-burning steel-tipped 'matches' you could solder with in the field.
asciilifeform: girl was wearing a shitmetal ring, it broke in half
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: as a student, bought disposable camera (those existed) with flash, late in the night
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: i've a story about those things. ☟︎☟︎
BingoBoingo: <asciilifeform> surely, just once, as a boy? << I did the disposable camera to taser conversion wrapping to get taser voltages.
JorgePasada: Bah, getting kicked out of my friends place. Be back in 30. Been a while since I've been in here.
asciilifeform: surely, just once, as a boy?
BingoBoingo: <decimation> later that year the TRS-80 was a massive sales leader for tandy << If you can point me to someone selling 90+ working samples... may be interested
asciilifeform: you lot never did a wire wrap?
decimation: later that year the TRS-80 was a massive sales leader for tandy
BingoBoingo: <mircea_popescu> in .net vb << In library school I was forced into this bullshit for a semester, final project I couldn't take it. Went FU here's a mono runtime in a jail and Visual C++ 6.0 that compiles to it because fuku
asciilifeform: when i came to usa, i saw a c128 in, of all places, a toy store.
decimation: yeah, he admitted it was 9 lbs of shit in a 5 lb bag
decimation: according to Mr. Herd it was recently surpassed by the 'ipad' if you consider that to be a computer
asciilifeform: a few years later, the company tried selling what was, at the time, an 'actually nice' computer - 'amiga.'
asciilifeform: and this was on account of genuine popularity. no one buried these by the thousand in a desert.
asciilifeform: last i knew, commodore-64 still held the record for the greatest number of a particular design of computer ever built.
asciilifeform: auschwitz to cabbie to repair money to tech ceo with a brain, one of the last.
decimation: incidentally, there's a 2 hour podcast interview with Bil Herd of Commodore here (featuring that annoying australian): http://www.theamphour.com/222-an-interview-with-bil-herd-zany-z80-zygology/
mircea_popescu: even though you can just make a fucking toy factory
mircea_popescu: a pitbull will still try to take your toy
mircea_popescu: see, here's the thing : we had these idiots in romania, too. the sort that could be millionaires as long as the public treasury poured a billion or two in theior pants
mircea_popescu: decimation well at least he knows how to make a small fortune.
decimation: mircea_popescu: he has a business model similar to bitcoin miners: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/nov/05/virgin-galactic-seatholders-ask-for-refund-on-tickets
asciilifeform: decimation: mallery ported it to reasonably-standard common lisps. so it did not die with symbolics corp. however, he stuck a rather asinine license on it.
decimation: as I recall the netscape was pretty much just a ripoff of mosaic
mircea_popescu: it's a fucking derrogatory, it's almost like calling bitcoin's media company "cunt, raw"
mircea_popescu: someone actually thought that "yahoo" is a sane string to associate to your busines.
asciilifeform: 'Bitcoin interests me as an obvious example of a technological jewel tossed around aimlessly by the brutal hands of cave men. I can’t help but picture a flashlight or a radio set, left behind in the wilderness by geologists, to be picked up later by some Stone Age aboriginals; to be fought over and worshiped. Until the batteries run out.' -- your truly
decimation: yeah that's a scary parallel
mircea_popescu: it's a wonder the internet even stil exists.
mircea_popescu: every browser was a pile of shit.
decimation: I remember the original netscape - it was a pile of shit
mircea_popescu: "and the loss to the software company that has to give up two months of sales is even worse." << dat logic. so if i have sex for the first time today, rather than next week, i gain a full week of first time sexings.
mircea_popescu: as joel well points out, we got a mental problem. no comprende como sheeping works.
mircea_popescu: check me out im a quotation slut.
asciilifeform: this actually plays out, as written, in an episode of disney's 'duck tales' i saw translated as a boy
mircea_popescu: decimation that would have been the fucking moment of truth for the cataphract : when someone turned on a giant magnet
asciilifeform: time to think^H blink << 'The lights must never go out, The music must always play..., Lest we should see where we are, Lost in a haunted wood, Children afraid of the night, Who have never been happy or good.'
BingoBoingo: <decimation> yeah I would be pretty scared to operate on someone with a glass blade << In an MRI tube what else can you use? Interventional radiology is lucrative
BingoBoingo: Compare to a modern blade made with powder sintered S30V steel http://www.cutleryshoppe.com/gerberapplegate-fairbairncovertautomatic-cpm-530v-378blackcomboedgeblade.aspx
decimation: yeah I would be pretty scared to operate on someone with a glass blade
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: that particular piece was written while waiting for a locked-up msword turd on a usg slavemachine, also running mandatory usg antivirus, which wedged the disk
decimation: I distinctly remember seeing word on windows and thinking it was a huge step back from wordperfect on dos
mircea_popescu: "it is not rare to see a palpable (and all the more so for its unpredictability) delay between pressing a key and the drawing of a symbol on the screen." << i have never seen this.
asciilifeform: for folks outside of usa, good story re: Al: in washington d.c., there is an enormous obelisk, 'washington monument.' it is tipped with a small pyramid of precious aluminum.
BingoBoingo: * asciilifeform still waiting for obsidian terroristknives << DO you have a budget in mind?
BingoBoingo: A light shiny metal, Napoleon commisioned Aluminum flatware.
BingoBoingo: <asciilifeform> (Al being a creature of modernity.) << Elemental Al was accessible to ancients... at lightining strike sites
decimation: http://video.pbs.org/video/1150578495/ << said documentary with a demonstration of Japanese steel-making
asciilifeform: (Al being a creature of modernity.)
mircea_popescu: come to think about it : the original siege cannon was carried by two dozen oxen, fired twice a day, had to be cooled with hlf a ton of oil and exploded every two weeks killing everyone around
mircea_popescu: it run into a hard wall at constantinople
BingoBoingo: <asciilifeform> primitives succeeded in making steels of a kind, from naturally carboniferous wootz traded along, e.g., silk road << Wootz yes, low hanging fruit. When I read Damascus though I think laminate forging process
asciilifeform: primitives succeeded in making steels of a kind, from naturally carboniferous wootz traded along, e.g., silk road
mircea_popescu: anyway, tardpedia's fascination with the east and white-hating notwithstanding, steel is a western invention.
mircea_popescu: franks are a 800ad affair.
BingoBoingo: The problem is encountering the actual mythical good is always a dissapointment.
asciilifeform: why go through the grind of developing world from scratch, they thought, when you can l33ch l33t w4r3z like a pr0 in 21 days
asciilifeform: people age, and empires - and the 'computer we know' isn't really a separate animal from the u.s. empire.
asciilifeform: this is in many ways a process analogous to ordinary senescence.
asciilifeform: there was a plethora of interestingly-different machine architectures.
asciilifeform: for instance, in the '70s, when there was an understanding that a computer is purchased and comes with own os, and your own men will write literally everything else (often including os) that will ever run on it, until it goes to the scrapyard -
asciilifeform: in many ways it behaves like a non-renewable mineral resource.
asciilifeform: in some of my articles, i mention a concept called 'design space.' it, approximately, means, the set of engineering decisions that are thinkable at a given time.
decimation: in your room-sized FPGA, there is probably a spot for a few 'risc' finite automata
asciilifeform: i could go on, but this could fill a book.
asciilifeform: (intel tried shipping a gizmo without it, now it is known affectionately as 'the itanic')
mircea_popescu: decimation: as I recall it cost around $2k in the late 80's << ahh, the days when a shitty mouse was 100 bux.
asciilifeform: extant cpu archs are quite unlike pdp-10. internally, of course. 90+% of the Si real estate is then used up in papering over this to build a convincing simulacrum of 'c' machine.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform just like cars are a steel banded joining of the walking of people ?
asciilifeform pictures wot search as a graph traversal of personal 'bookmark' collections of wot-people
mircea_popescu: decimation: C is more-or-less a fancy set of macros around assembly <<< this is actually pretty much it.
BingoBoingo: <mircea_popescu> *: asciilifeform opens koraktor, bound in human skin, and searches for a death spell for google << wot based search. working towards it. << Caled it when you asked about crawling millions of urls
asciilifeform: 'technology' - just a word to them.
mircea_popescu: *: asciilifeform opens koraktor, bound in human skin, and searches for a death spell for google << wot based search. working towards it.
decimation: I want someone to draw a cartoon: young man approaches greybeard lounging under a tree: greybeard - why do you laze instead of being productive? - He says: you try to make something useful - off the young one goes through trial and tribulation - eventually, ending up under a tree.
asciilifeform: as a student, i was once told by a greybeard: 'you're young, but know that you have X lines of code in you. after that - log cabin.' ☟︎
decimation: "But suppose everyone wrote their own subroutines? Isn't that a step backward; away from the millenium when our programs are machine independent, when we all write in the same language, maybe even on the same computer? Let me take a stand: I can't solve the problems of the world. With luck, I can write a good program. "
decimation: heh yeah that was a favorite post
asciilifeform: and it takes a supercomputer, of a kind not even yet built, to write a word processor where there are no palpable delays when entering a character. if you believe microshit.
decimation: yeah, I guess in this case the 'cargo-cult' is building a wooden global namespace
decimation: somehow Mr. Moore can write a chip-design tool in a few hundred lines of forth
asciilifeform: butbutbutt... it could be on a locked nfs volume! it could be on an abacus wielded by retarded child! etc
mircea_popescu: <asciilifeform> under rusty old msdos one can, generally, actually program in c << because, again, if i want to kil a ms-dos dependency I DELETE THE FILE
decimation: one of my friends would call AOL every day for a free "introductory" floppy every day
decimation: asciilifeform: here's the link for what you are getting at: http://www.colorforth.com/POL.htm " Now we get down the the nitty-gritty. This is our first clash with the establishment. The conventionsl approach, enforced to a greater or lesser extent, is that you shall use a standard subroutine. I say that you should write your own subroutines. "
BingoBoingo: thestringpuller: Google's Android has a linux kernel and BSD libc
asciilifeform: the point, when there is a point, generally has nothing to do with reading
assbot: Logged on 15-04-2014 18:34:43; asciilifeform: 'we refuse to produce any more C programmers who are a danger to themselves and others.' -- my old dean