asciilifeform: wintel answered the threat posed by 'coreboot' et al by stuffing shitgnomism straight into the silicon (southbridge, and soon cpu proper)
asciilifeform: punkman: but none of them feature 'consumer pc' hardware
asciilifeform: (and before anyone asks, no, it is not a simple matter to build it from source like any other thing. needs an existing gcc configured to play ball in order to bootstrap itself)
asciilifeform: having succumbed to shitgnomism years ago.
asciilifeform: 'gnat' appears to be entirely unbuildable on gentoo
asciilifeform: it was utterly incomprehensible to the uninitiated.
asciilifeform confesses that he could not be bothered to unravel the how-and-why behind that particular wankage
asciilifeform: where the practical distinction between a satisfied user and a spammer who wrote a review in exchange for a bowl of rice and a day's pass from the sex slave farm, is purely academic
asciilifeform: and something like this is quite inevitable when a product degenerates to that level of necessary attention span
asciilifeform: that, if it isn't obvious, is a 'review farm.'
asciilifeform: no idea if this has anything to do with age, or the fact that games industry died.
asciilifeform: but was unable to come up with any plausible 3 whatsoever.
asciilifeform: i must point out that i have no idea whether 1 or 2
asciilifeform: there were two logical scenarios that formed in my head, 1) he did the things he was credited for, and somebody then came and scooped out his brain 2) he didn't, took credit after someone else did, was the kind of fellow selected for this next stage of meritwash
asciilifeform: i was utterly floored by the sheer imbecility
asciilifeform: thestringpuller: background for that article: herr baggett came to my town once, and gave a public talk where he pitched a militantly idiotic 'startup' (nothing whatsoever to do with games, a weird proprietary, closed-source email client with 'new, exciting, unprecedented' spam filter that is a poor clone of 1990s state of the art)
asciilifeform: (how? let's start with those iterations, every single one of which will suddenly need a nonsense variable; all the things that will have to be declared for the occasion, that presently are genericized; etc)
asciilifeform: 2) tearing out 'boost' while keeping the project in cpp will turn it into an unreadable morass of crud that makes the existing turd look like the finest sausage☟︎
asciilifeform: 1) the idea of tearing out 'boost' while retaining the 'satoshi cleanup' concept of therealbitcoin project - is a total impossibility
asciilifeform: but to go back to the basic point of the musical interlude,
asciilifeform: it takes more than one 'blacksmith' and his 'hammers' to ruin that, but eventually - yes, ruined.
asciilifeform: more valuable than any particular microscope, even the rarest, is the -idea- of a microscope
asciilifeform: like the barbarians who carved up roman mosaics for sword hilt 'bling'
asciilifeform: junkyard dogs, the lot of them, who found something valuable and stole a piece
asciilifeform: i, for one, didn't fully grasp the difference until i heard that charlatan (baggett) speak
asciilifeform: yet for some odd reason these activities are lumped in together
asciilifeform: which is entirely not the same thing as a product developed and shipped in a standardized, adult common lisp system (what naggum earned his bread with)
asciilifeform: also note that that outfit, like many others (yes, it isn't in 'nyt', but still existed) wrote a miniature 'college' lisp-flavoured scripting language inside their normal runtime
asciilifeform: you can't really pull out 'boost' and retain the naked-eye-plus-patch-util sense of 'this is visibly bitcoind pre-$10-per but with minor changes' thing
asciilifeform: thestringpuller: if you're gonna go to that level of mutilation, may as well abandon the pedigreed-descent-from-0.5.3 thing and go for rewrite
asciilifeform: less said about these, better sleep at night, l0l
asciilifeform: it's a 'frankensteinian' project by nature, whatcanido.
asciilifeform: especially ones i fished out of the sewers in a hurry, for purposes of experiment.
asciilifeform: thestringpuller: in general, i'm opposed to patching in gavinisms of any description
asciilifeform: thestringpuller: also remember that the 'magic' of gavincoin was that it will work on existing hw, so long as 'everybody agrees' to throw away blockchain history and surrender
asciilifeform: thestringpuller: the idiot crashy one ('classic', with memleak) or the one with questionable patch ('orphanage burner') ?
asciilifeform: as in, there is not a 'free world' si fab.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: see the problem from the perspective in which it actually -is- a problem: not that a billion people own computer that is not a computer (nowhere is it written that we have to care about this) but in the elementary lack of a practical alternative.
asciilifeform: but for practical reasons this has not yet been achieved
asciilifeform: interestingly, intel and microshit have been salivating for a decaee+ over the concept of a cpu that runs not merely mandatorily-signed but encrypted code (to internal key)
asciilifeform: point being that millions of boxes are permanent thralls to usg until key gets out.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: so far problem only exists in winblows/apple world, but it creeps onward - microshit in particular requires it as a condition of doing business with manufacturer
asciilifeform: 'but Richard is seemingly frightened about the compiler competition from LLVM that is out under a permissive free software license.' << fud artist lies through his teeth. rms is not 'frightened of competition under permissive licenses', but is pointing out that organized attack by shitgnomes flying (as always) flags of convenience, is under way.☟︎
asciilifeform: ^ basic kindergarten facts, at this point, i will not bother to expound on them here
asciilifeform: (those who believe that it does not matter what is in the bios so long as you can boot your favourite unix, are mistaken. not only can bios diddle your drives pre-boot, but it isn't even necessary - routines like smm handler run continuously, outside of os)
