asciilifeform: or not 100, but the epsilon remnant are 'idle' in the economic sense but fighting guerilla war of one kind or another and can't really afford cultural largesse
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: idle rich << point was, there are still plenty of arbitrarily rich and arbitrarily idle folks. they simply happen to be retarded. afaik - 100% of them, rather than 99 or whatever the historic norm was.
asciilifeform: in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.'
asciilifeform: 'It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle — they are strictly limited
asciilifeform: undata: the sense of "myself" in my head is a very small chunk << see the crackpot work 'society of mind' by marvin minsky.
asciilifeform: undata, ben_vulpes: aside from the titanic effort involved in using mac for serious work, that machine is far too large and heavy for the kind of bed computing contemplated earlier.
asciilifeform: pen + paper << i end up doing a great bit of work with pen and paper, even though ink is not executable and my hands are in agony after ten minutes - simply because it works in places and positions where no computer
asciilifeform: usg has more-or-less 'sat' upon the idle rich << the 'idle' (what does this mean? presumably, not occupied with directing a megacorp?) rich still exist. they spend on coke and orbital flights with hookers, not rebuilding of computing.
asciilifeform: ben_vulpes: macbook air << funny that you mention that machine, because i have the original model. it mostly gathers dust.
asciilifeform: all the way to elaborate, $1k+ hydraulic lift desks with position memory.
asciilifeform: 'standing desk' has come into fashion where i live.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: i think nearly as well when walking, and spent many years trying to construct something like a 'walking computer.'
asciilifeform: decimation: the display, in practice, is the hard part
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: ideally, i would teach it only to those who had never programmed a computer previously.
asciilifeform: everyone i've ever spoken with on the subject ended up mentally mutilating it to fit his von neumman and synchronous cpu preconceptions.
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 wants to know in what roman text these answers lie.
asciilifeform should like the answer to 'how do i grow single-crystal si in jungle conditions, how do i lay down dopant with ion beam sans high vacuum' etc.
asciilifeform: once you clear away the usg grantsmanship, what mr. mold called 'scientocracy', you realize that actual science mostly 100% stopped around 1960.
asciilifeform: unless some fundamental discovery enabling cellar chip fab were to be made
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: if rifles could only be produced in 12 places on the planet, most fighting would still be conducted with spears and axes.
asciilifeform: the secret boojum of chip business is that anything whose production is inherently centralized to that degree, is almost divinely ordained to suck.
asciilifeform: i generally tag all of the parties responsible for this state of affairs as agents of usg, whether they would think of themselves as such or not.
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: costs no more than we're paying now to talk.
