asciilifeform: if you give a damn re: what this means, invite one of them in. i can't muster the strength to defend the nonsense, even as 'devil's advocate'
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: mr y & friends believe in an ai equivalent of fermi's 'ignition of the atmosphere' hypothetical catastrophe.
asciilifeform: the others - simply read nth-generation spew from him
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: it is interesting to see how apple corp. (the renamed 'next', not the original) put to use its total monopoly in portable computerized gadgets not immediately discardable as junk to push perverse anachronisms that would have been laughed off if from another (weird proprietary cabling, required closed-source 'sync' apps, etc.)
asciilifeform: in that case even 'visual basic' qualifies!
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu is probably thinking of a hypothetical machine that emulates a living programmer and can be 'made friends with' and spoken to, describing what he wants. in that case - yes
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: 'natural language' for a program makes the same amount of sense as for mathematics. atrociously inefficient and requires very 'unnatural' concessions of rigour or at least standardized disambiguations.
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: the company 'apple' died, in '99, replaced silently with 'next'. but you knew this.
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: didn't happen. not that i don't own enough junk, incl. apples of every period, to fill a small scrapyard - but i wanted living 'butterfly' not zoological specimen preserved in glass
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: as a boy, i often thought that i would grow up, 'have money', and buy an apple computer - at least to try it (the crippled machines at schools, etc. were an interesting diversion, and i imagined that mac is 'rich man's computer' somehow)☟︎
asciilifeform: more as a demonstration of how a programming system ought to behave in the general sense
asciilifeform: actually i did not (as an adult, at least) see any actual 'potential' in it - in the sense of 'what could have grown from it'
asciilifeform: it was quite educational in that respect (in the sense of demonstrating, to anyone with half a brain, the inescapable folly of 'natural language' programming)
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: i must confess that i sometimes regret crapping out that piece. i still get mail from folks who think that i liked 'hypertalk' language.
asciilifeform: the difference - at least, once was - taught in school, wherever folks were introduced to the machine
asciilifeform: for once, i dare suggest that more mundane - most programmers, historically, don't want 'random', but 'random-flavoured but ultimately reproducible' for testing of games, toys, etc
asciilifeform: ;;google tcp sequence number vulnerability
asciilifeform: who recalls the tcp sequence number bugs ?
asciilifeform: never would have conceived of the reverse.
asciilifeform: lol! i imagined that the masturbee must pay the masturbator, in such an arrangement
asciilifeform prepares for a yarn involving mutually-masturbatory use of winblows config menus
asciilifeform: five minute research suggests that folks began to use 'teamviewer' and similar orifices for remote control of winblows/mac machines from toy computer
asciilifeform: (i've quite forgotten, mercifully, what precisely the thing was. large rack-mount apparatus, that drew ~20 amperes at 120 v.ac. mains.)
asciilifeform: i.e. 'k out of n cores most of the time, but we promise that with next fw update xxxxxxx [some horseshit]' etc
asciilifeform: incidentally, the one time i saw an asic miner of any sort alive, personally (it belonged to a colleague) its actual 'hash/watt' was quite impossible to ascertain - worked, let's put it charitably, rather inconsistently
