asciilifeform: just about everyone (except the usual suspects) can 'agree to have' the folks cranking out debased fiat currencies, but they are not the only (and possibly not even the most interesting) 'counterfeiters'
asciilifeform: $widget-prime is normally some debased/inferior version
asciilifeform: well, the real boojum (as described, for example, by mircea_popescu) is that the optimization folks did not put the task as 'build $widget using less steel, rubber, hours of slave' but 'build $widget more bezzleprofitably' which usually leads to 'build $widget-prime and try to pass off to chumpers as genuine $widget'
asciilifeform: (herr kokkarinen, before anyone asks, did not)
asciilifeform: well, they also tend to use their barbershops as homes. in the sense that many academics keep personal blog-type material on the same site.
asciilifeform: often, even now, as 'postscript' turds
asciilifeform: no, on their official university www, typically
asciilifeform: but among generic u.s. mathemasturbators, unaffiliated with nsa et al, it is quite common to post 'preprints' on www.
asciilifeform: us-academia or 'intelligence komyoonity' ?
asciilifeform: kept around, permitted to work on problems in his circle of interests among his own kind, but generally kept away from anything 'jewel'-like.
asciilifeform: the author is likely an 'outer circle' man.
asciilifeform: about on par with a receipt for pizza at the office.
asciilifeform: 'confidential' is the lowest level of classification in usg.
asciilifeform: (an internal report marked 'confidential' should be regarded as a public document for the purpose of this statement.)
asciilifeform: at any rate, i can imagine only with great difficulty that a usg cryptologist of any actual stature (that is, creator of, or even privy to, a 'crown jewel') would be permitted to make public so much as a newspaper ad for a dog walker, much less a document pertaining to his profession.
asciilifeform: it isn't even 'cold psychopath' or the like. it is the basic tone of voice of the 'mean gurlz' who are, between sentences, cackling at the 'goodies' their gurlz club is privy to
asciilifeform: and it sounds very much like certain other persons
asciilifeform: reading the ancient 'cryptolog', i can almost hear a tone of voice
asciilifeform: if question specifically concerns 'animal magnetism' - difficult to answer. most of the chumpatronic work involved, i doubt would win from this stratagem. i, for instance, have never (to my knowledge) been within musket distance of a live cryptographer (of whatever variety)
asciilifeform: i'd have picked him based on his 'street cred' from his service in the '90s crypto wars
asciilifeform: not being one of the designated chumps in question, i'd ask for a subverted greybeard. but i am not a doctor of chumpatronics, and may be naive here.
asciilifeform: 'Desmedt referred to a letter written by Marty Hellman criticizing NIST. I had all but forgotten about Hellman; he has not been active on cryptologic scene in many years, and I've always had doubts about his moral principles (by contrast, I regard Rivest as being above all this dirt).'
asciilifeform: Apocalyptic: hence, i'd take with 'grain of salt'
asciilifeform: Apocalyptic: the paper in question is not only of 20 yrs. vintage, but officially released (not in any sense leaked)
asciilifeform was going to link jurov to kalman reti's film about smbx machine, but noticed that it was recently censored.
asciilifeform: but even a gift of a solid gold toilet is no guarantee that the recipient of said gift won't prefer the kitchen sink.
asciilifeform: once you remove the overwhelming incentive to do stupid things, you generally see less of them.
asciilifeform: jurov: it is always possible to crap in the kitchen. but folks who own a toilet, typically do not.
asciilifeform: native os was implemented in 'zetalisp', a symbolics-proprietary predecessor of modern common lisp, yes.
asciilifeform: (for some odd reason, folks ignore the fact that 'symbolics' os happily ran fortran, pascal, ada, and yes, even c - code - on same box, and the proggys could share data structures)
asciilifeform: sorta how a unix box with dynamic libs wishes it worked
asciilifeform: on account of there being precisely one routine, used by everything on the box, which is responsible for character rendering; another for the input handling; etc
asciilifeform: i cannot say for certain what these things would 'weigh' on such a machine, but can definitely bet that they would weigh considerably less (in terms of code complexity or sheer physical space) than on modern arch.
asciilifeform: the dog eats and eats so the fleas can live.
asciilifeform: whose continued bloat is considered an immutable fact of life
asciilifeform: there is a kind of 'bezzle' or, more precisely, 'dekulakization' dynamic involved, where cpu designers are really labouring to extend the life of idiot software ecosystem
asciilifeform: so, as described in my 'going nowhere' article, the modern winblows pc is in fact less efficient for virtually any practical purpose than its predecessors two decades earlier, despite a titanic amount of effort poured into the cpu micro-optimizations☟︎
asciilifeform: one of the things i often, usually to no avail, try to explain to people, is that there is no such thing as 'efficiency.' there is only efficiency -at- something.
asciilifeform: if you did computer-anything engineering in school, you probably remember 'mips'
