log☇︎
22100+ entries in 0.136s
asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2018-10-25#1866203 << on a good day, i pump away moar than produce... ☝︎
Mocky: apparently kuwait computers are shit and one chick knows another chick who runs "cyber security" for a kuwaiti / iraqi company, has been in there for 30 years, knows everyone in the biz. promised me a kuwaiti business sponsor if I actually know anything about computer security, put her number in my phone for me, and texted her to expect contact from me ☟︎
Mocky: got 3 good leads for qatari introductions. and a kuwait lead thrust upon me
a111: Logged on 2018-10-25 18:59 bvt: well, i did not suggest learning/utilizing C api, on the contrary, a subset of kernel stuff in ada is the interesting thing. it just happens to be currently defined/documented as C code.
a111: Logged on 2018-10-25 18:52 asciilifeform: whole point of using a compiled lang is that this garbage dun have to live in yer proggy !
asciilifeform: it is not possible to live life wholly without exhaust product, errybody exhales, shits, occasionally drops a crumb. but imho good form is to at least recognize that litter is unwanted.
asciilifeform: at the risk of repeating ancient thread -- 'the best machine is no machine', it weighs nuffin, needs no maintenance. and the best proggy, is no proggy at all, if a problem can be solved without writing proggy, it ought to be. erry line of coad can be rightfully pictured as an act of intellectual littering. y'know, like throwing cig butt or bottle on the ground in the park. ☟︎☟︎
asciilifeform: ( if you have a 1460 , it had better include whole ip stack and driver for iron nic, lol )
asciilifeform: for so long as we're stuck on a linux box, i'd rather spackle over the c-ism with 600 ln, than with 6000 .
asciilifeform: bvt: linux kernel is fundamentally retarded, it expects null-termed rubbish, at times, at other times, char * and length, not to mention a pile of untyped ptrs inside structs, really oughta eat ada structs , ada fixed strings, properly typed arrays, etc instead
bvt: well, i did not suggest learning/utilizing C api, on the contrary, a subset of kernel stuff in ada is the interesting thing. it just happens to be currently defined/documented as C code. ☟︎
asciilifeform: whole point of using a compiled lang is that this garbage dun have to live in yer proggy ! ☟︎
asciilifeform: bvt: i do not know for a fact whether it eats same struct as the userland call, or different
asciilifeform: i'd luvv to see a syscall-tronic version of the udp transceiver thing, for instance.
asciilifeform: the obvious alternative to cataloguing the liquishit, is to let it stay in gnat's c frontend where it belongs, a la the udp.c thing.
asciilifeform: ( also to stop the gcc5ism gangrene, but this is a close second )
asciilifeform: i'ma genesisate it as soon as i figure out a workaround
bvt: re syscalls -- fair enough. but imo this shows extreme brokeness of linux portability -- i can't think about a sane reason for syscall numbers to differ across arches.
asciilifeform: the correct end of the funnel to plug, imho , would be a sane flags lib built ~into gnat~, and correct ~per gnat port~
mircea_popescu: i dunno, but this is brewing into a kettle of fish.
asciilifeform: they aint a posixism
asciilifeform: O_DIRECTORY might be a bitch in the fyootoor , i suppose
a111: Logged on 2018-10-25 14:52 mircea_popescu: up to you whether to make a dir or not ; eventually these will end up in that http://btcbase.org/log/2018-10-23#1865314 -- but the only way that happens is if you try things and then productively disagree with people. i've nfi at the moment whether we do or we don't want single temp files in a tmp dir nevertheless, or anything else ; and i absolutely do not wish to ever do (or will ever permit anyone to) sit around and "think
asciilifeform: i suppose if i had a stable of trained seals, might entertain'em/self in this way.
asciilifeform: ( put a/b/c/d/e/f stickers, and you got it )
mircea_popescu: seems a fine way to put in a privkey :D
asciilifeform: i saw a surplus box of this type for sale, not so long ago
mircea_popescu: "in an attempt to simplify computing, alf brings you, the computer that can only be programmed by a computer."
asciilifeform: ( in '50s this was a best-selling 'ram' , but afaik nobody thought to de-rasterize it and make it the whole comp )
mircea_popescu: to quote a lord, "green field all around"
asciilifeform: 'we dun need a 4 ring binder, we dun need a 3 ring binder, we dun need papers, we want information crunched'
mircea_popescu: yes, but there's no rule saying "useful processor eats kW". for all you know it eats mW. there's a lot of eV in a mW.
asciilifeform: and there isn't really a theoretically minimal size for it, afaik.
asciilifeform: ( for n00bz re earlier -- magnetic logic is based on the fact that a transformer core can 'saturate'. ergo you can bake a 'nand' simply from transformer with three windings.
asciilifeform: btw -- and iirc we had the thread -- there are even deeper crackpotteries potentially in the mix : it is possible to have strictly magnetic logic, without semiconductor. if can simply etch fine metal mask, interleaved with insulator, potentially can have a kind of slow 'z80' from miniature toroid logic (as seen in '60s su)
asciilifeform: you want an end product that conducts thermally as well as electrically, or you get a lighter.
asciilifeform: nao missing ingredient, find a carrier medium that you can do this to, that can be doped to semiconduct...
asciilifeform: we're speaking of a pocket-sized apparatus .
asciilifeform: nobody says you gotta only run 1 at a time, lol
mircea_popescu: 1 at a time might be too slow
asciilifeform: picture two planar gels (or whatever carrier medium) at orthogonal to one another, meeting in a thin line. the 'vertical' plane is yer 'print head', containing single steerable 'column' of $ion; the 'horizontal' is yer 'paper'.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: re 'ion pump' upstack , in olden days when asciilifeform worked as academi-grunt in a bio lab, did many long hours of snore at electrophoretic 'blots', where chromatographic rubbish moves along a gel. and thought 'why not bake ic this day, what if you give it 2nd axis to steer the current' etc
mircea_popescu: it's fine for i suppose a fifteen year old, though if it carries into the next year there's already mild retardation involved.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: regularly there's word from some d00d who actually bought surplus gear ( see e.g. linked thread ) and 'omfg, i made a diode!' , typically as far as they get ( and it wasn't even because usg.dhs came for his flourine , afaik it did not )
a111: Logged on 2018-10-25 16:07 asciilifeform: reminds me of process of buying autos in usa. picture, you walk in with chequebook. 'i want toyota' --- 3 hrs later, you MAYBE drive off in a toyota, or more likely yer still fighting over 'no, i do NOT want loan, not at 3%, not 2, not 0 , i want to pay with money'
mircea_popescu: incidentally -- there's a very strong link between http://btcbase.org/log/2018-10-25#1865962 (ie, the naive expectation that money buys you good in reich) and the question of... why doesn't alf have elemental fluorine in his house ? "well, he doesn't want it" "suppose he did ?" "then he'd have to get authorization, like the plants do" "you mean... buy toyota ?" "eeexactly". ☝︎
a111: Logged on 2018-04-30 16:16 asciilifeform: ( for the sake of thread-completeness, what would the ~alternative~ to this story look like? i suggest -- it'd be a process which does to ic fab what 'polaroid' process did to colour photography. find way of etching the circuit from prefab 'sandwich' without caustic baths, sputtering, etc... )
asciilifeform: gotta luvv how even the very name is a lie -- silver ran out there, when , 19th c ?
mircea_popescu: well what the fuck am i gonna do, marry a local and cultivate the pampas ?
mircea_popescu: i suppose it's the intent. leaks like a sieve, not like i don't get done precisely what i want. it takes some screaming, which i got a large store of.
asciilifeform: d00d commissions a 5-story hruscheba-castle in the middle of fucking wasteland. he's bankrupt the second he signs the paper, whether he doubles down later and goes broke-er or not, neh
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform i see it as a form of idiocy.
asciilifeform: at some point he gives up guarding it, as it costs sumthing, and the gypsies move in, i suppose this can be seen as a form of 'sell'
mircea_popescu: this is how a fucking market works, and what it is.
mircea_popescu: yup. owner won't sell "at a loss".
asciilifeform: reminds me of process of buying autos in usa. picture, you walk in with chequebook. 'i want toyota' --- 3 hrs later, you MAYBE drive off in a toyota, or more likely yer still fighting over 'no, i do NOT want loan, not at 3%, not 2, not 0 , i want to pay with money' ☟︎
mircea_popescu: (the spanish reference comes from a famous incident in argentina where mp was trying to buy real estate, and idiot woman at desk's idea of the process was that she's now going to "assess" me. that blew up spectacularily if predictably.)
a111: Logged on 2018-10-25 05:10 asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2018-10-25#1865735 << i took a stab at this 2y ago, was very frustrating on acct of asic-baking not being a 'cash and carry' process like e.g. pcb-baking, but a heavily meat-powered affair where the derps want to 'get to know you' to figure out how much they can fleece
asciilifeform: and the mistake can be in anyffing, incl. a physical interaction between unrelated components that you did not know were possible.
asciilifeform: much moar comparable to satellite biz. a 1-bit mistake costs you coupla $mil.
BingoBoingo: That's an exageration. This is more of a blank slate nitromethane internal combustion engine for freight hauling.
BingoBoingo: Kinda suggests the 2+3 option seems like it could be had sooner than a neutral field of gates FPGA
asciilifeform: iirc we had a thread re 'ic is deeply incatronic tech' hypothesis
asciilifeform: imho the race for 'smallest transistor' has been a disaster of incaization -- in '70s there were thousands of ic makers, in '80s -- hundreds, in '90s -- dozens, today maybe 10 .
asciilifeform: the exact figs can only be obtained by a cn-speaking emissary, i suspect.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: this is actually how existing ic industry worx, a good half of the 'asics' are actually 'hard copy fpga', recall the early miner derps threads.
asciilifeform: there's no 'bitness' in fpga, it's a bag of gates, if you have enuff of them you can made n-bit addder, divider, whatever one likes
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform yes alf, that's what's always the crutch. "give just a little spring in yoru step for insurance against toads in the roads." that's precisely the crutch.
mircea_popescu: now, a 4096 bit native fpga, specifically for rsa-ing and rsa-likes-ing, THAT might be very useful, because there the s-o-d item is major win. ☟︎
asciilifeform: what's the 'crutch' ? not spending a $3mil + 1yr delay if there's bug in layout , like 1970s folx had to ?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: for design that actually fits inside, you end with exactly 'slow asic', with the added win that it's a homogeneous object with no e.g. 'and here is where he will rsa and here is where the low bit of multiplier will live' sabotage target available to enemy mole in vendor plant.
a111: Logged on 2014-06-02 22:49 mircea_popescu: asciilifeform: jurov: smbx had perverse incentives (usg funding that appeared bottomless - until it died suddenly. reagan's 'star wars.') << best way to sink a good start-up is a bad revenue source early on.
mircea_popescu: i believe attempting to go "everything's a fpga because fg worked ok on one" is learning the wrong lesson from fg, in the http://btcbase.org/log/2014-06-02#699427 sense. ☝︎
mircea_popescu: but anyway, for my own use, fpga=wrapper around industrial poverty, somewhat like a painting that came with crayons.
mircea_popescu: there's two possible reasons you don't have a definition for a fpga you're happy with : either we're not yet enough advanced for one (to use, to make, whatever), or that it is ouytright an escher object.
asciilifeform: 'heavy iron head on a wooden stem'
mircea_popescu: i can well define a hammer, one of the simplest devices.
asciilifeform: buncha gates, as many as can fit, and a programmable switching matrix, a la old telco , look up tables made of 4-6 bits of sram that turn a given unit into 'and' , 'or', 'xor', half-adder, straight wire, whichever is necessary. i dun know how to more rigorously define, it is one of the simplest devices, straight homogeneous grid of sram cells plus a couple hundred (thousand, in larger devices) 'express lanes' made of straight metal,
mircea_popescu: this is not a definition. define it.
mircea_popescu: a universal tsmr cpu, even if nothing more than miniaturized/updated z80, would prolly be the one gain here. so we end up with a commodity part to put in things.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: i've outlined several items, historically. will summarize for the l0gz, in order of descending ( per asciilifeform's lights ) universality : 1) sane fpga 2) sane minimal cpu 3) 8192-bit arithmetizer ( a la ye olde weitek! but for ints ) 4) 2+3 , if somehow can be fit into 1 die 5) 1chip carrierless radio ( per thread ) 6) sane ethernet controller .
asciilifeform: this screamingly cries for a cn-speaking fella.
mircea_popescu: whereas the point is at http://btcbase.org/log/2018-10-25#1865758 ; we would like to know how many bitcoin for a run today. ☝︎
a111: Logged on 2018-10-25 05:14 asciilifeform: there's a coupla 'small scale' fabs, but on close examination smell like ripoff, they ship with literally 0 guarantee of yield , and in laughable qty , and with laughable transistor count, and -- to add insult to injury -- die packaging not included, you gotta somehow find someone to do it, somewhere
a111: Logged on 2018-10-25 14:57 mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2018-10-25#1865811 << this is nonsense, no chip packaging costs a benjie wtf. and is the 700 per how many ?
asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2018-10-25#1865831 << it's a hand-cranked 'for small runs' shop, 1 of 2 known to exist. hence the riotous per-unit pricings. ☝︎
mircea_popescu: in any case asciilifeform : i am sure nsa would have no problem spending a coin or two on prototyping this.
mircea_popescu has serious trouble reading that ; and would absolutely not buy anything from a french company anyway.
mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2018-10-25#1865811 << this is nonsense, no chip packaging costs a benjie wtf. and is the 700 per how many ? ☝︎☟︎
mircea_popescu: much like we'll have the luxury of paying taxes (it IS a luxury, if they're correctly used it's way the fuck better to pay a twenny and snow mover to come in than for each to keep in shed, oiled and repaired, own minimover for own driveway) once there's tmsr.gov somewhere. and so on.
a111: Logged on 2018-10-25 13:49 asciilifeform: ssd wear is a thing.
mircea_popescu: about" with a view to "decide" "how it should be". we'll find out the natural way, there's no need for badly written fanfic.
a111: Logged on 2018-10-23 06:31 mircea_popescu: slowly but surely a republican ada style manual is shaping up (and through the exact http://btcbase.org/log/2018-10-23#1865304 process, at that!)
mircea_popescu: up to you whether to make a dir or not ; eventually these will end up in that http://btcbase.org/log/2018-10-23#1865314 -- but the only way that happens is if you try things and then productively disagree with people. i've nfi at the moment whether we do or we don't want single temp files in a tmp dir nevertheless, or anything else ; and i absolutely do not wish to ever do (or will ever permit anyone to) sit around and "think ☝︎☟︎
asciilifeform: the other thing i oughta mention, is the amt of sweat required. if asciilifeform were a free man, could do it in perhaps a year. but at present-day capacity, would not dare to even try.
asciilifeform: which is not so bad, quite enuff for a mips ( or even the old bolix , supposing anyone had the layout for it ) but laughably small for e.g. fpga.
asciilifeform: per my reckoning, you can ~maybe~ fit a '386' in these.
asciilifeform: sooo taking only the lower bounds ( 4mm^2 ; 700 eu. per mm^2 ; 30 eu. per tin can ) and not counting eu fees / taxes / exorbitant shipping couriers , and assuming 25 , we end up with a figure of 3550 eu, 'old toyota' gets you 25 units, some of which may even work...
asciilifeform: a reasonable die is 4-10 mm^2 .
asciilifeform: ssd wear is a thing. ☟︎