mircea_popescu: everyone's afraid of dying, to some degree.

mircea_popescu: reality diverges much more slowly thay representation. but this inequality offers no challenges to the validity of either reality or representation. they are what they are, they do what they do.

mircea_popescu: when you first expand your sex life to include a woman, you vividly remember her, and everyhing, minute detail. and once it further expands to include two, still. and three, and slightly dimmer four. by six its growing steadily dimmer, and maybe by the 7th is the first time you start losing track of them.

mircea_popescu: V1 is the set of the set containing the empty set.

mircea_popescu: fortunately, mathematics is simple. V is the set of all sets. by convention, the first index, V0, is the empty set. ☟︎

mircea_popescu: are you familiar with the von neumann set ? ☟︎

mircea_popescu: and it just goes on from there, "the real number 4 is the root of polynomials in my daily life and so i believe in it ; but the number 4+i priviledges the properties of abstract spaces over things much more important to us and therefore...i do not consent to its existence." hurr.

mircea_popescu: and on the other hand, "the number four told me to headbutt a door!". really, it did ? i suppose, perhaps, if the number four is followed by a double-sifr and occurs on your blood test result sheet right where the locals wrote "glucemia" it may be said "the number four told me to stop eating icecream", but it is rather forcing the point.

mircea_popescu: and in this perspective, arguments as to the existence of gods become truly amusing. even in a world in which, through some strange workings of happenstance, no set of four items did in fact exist, nor ever had, and supposedly never will... there's also no number 4 ?

mircea_popescu: apollo the symbol strives to mark down the discovery of apollo the god, much like ٤ stives to mark down the number 4. you wouldn't know it to look at the poor thing, but it is what the ~actual~ arabic numeral for a set of four items looks like.

mircea_popescu: but to continue, is the number 4 like that, one man made, another perceived ? how about fire ? was fire invented, like "the united states of america", like any fine story ?

mircea_popescu: "i gotta borrow trinque for a minute. i scrubbed the expiry off my pgp key, which of course makes a new pubkey even if it is the same modulus as before" not "i gotta borrow trinque for a minute. i have a refreshed (nonexpir) pubkey as of 5 min ago"

mircea_popescu: now do me a favour and also deliver the habit of sorting what you say in order of node importance!

mircea_popescu: i read 2 lines out of 3 before throwing a fit.

mircea_popescu: asciilifeform your plan on transfer of authority among keys relies on what exactly ? an unnanounced, ad hoc scheme whereby the weakest link is your continued voice in chan ?

mircea_popescu: "but they're both written down with letters". so what if they are. if i shoot an hour of a woman fucking half a dozen men, thereby i've constructed a woman ?

mircea_popescu: they're different concepts, they do different things, what sort of code results from randomly switching if and for calls around ?

mircea_popescu: how's this unlike there being an equivalence between if and for ?

mircea_popescu: the answer doesn't have to be correct, moreover can't even be. it helps the bleating kids if it is meaningful. to them.

mircea_popescu: you don't make a very good teacher, even as you're a fine engineer!

mircea_popescu: the brightest minds among the sheep in classics class will ask why, when apollo's arrows rained on them, did not the victims shoot him back ?

mircea_popescu: man, thinks and therefore is, artifact, willed therefore here, but god is here before any will, and its being outside the possible scope of any will. which is why the ancient literary convention of the hero's journey : gods can't change. they don't give up smoking.

mircea_popescu: to be a god they must have purpose without purpose ; both observably and demonstrably the Central Committee (which is what this is) do not.

mircea_popescu: in any case, no, the clay colossi are all that - machinery, golums. ☟︎

mircea_popescu: i would say it is improper, because the fundamental quality of a god is that it's not constructible, much like no woman ever came in the shape of a lego set, be the parts delivered together or scattered in the landscape. conversely if you prefer, it is not proper because gods contain the metaphysical equivalent of a teleological dimension.

mircea_popescu: what rms thought, in his amusing naivite, to be defending hadn't in fact existed for a decade by the point news of it reached him. fruhlingserwachen, the steiner offensive.

mircea_popescu: and it is a hope based on something, right or wrong. "is russia more complex than gcc ?"

mircea_popescu: "it could buy russia" does not mean - it could. it means - if anyone on our side has a prayer - them.

mircea_popescu: this apple, nsa, whatever, nobody gives a shit, but this "apple" is the empire's last hope, half-Alphabet-half-AAPL-half-contractors whatever it is. ☟︎

mircea_popescu: much more so than windows, which is entirely indistinguishable from yahoo, or time warner, or ibm.