asciilifeform: undata: glorious leader given the power... tends to turn it into a masturbation implement << straight to aristotle's 'politics' on what the pill here is.
asciilifeform: asking inventors to always 'independently wealthy' is like asking your computer to harvest all of its energy (and material to create additional parts) from the environment on its own accord. a 'would be nice' scenario, but there are good reasons why it is not practical. machines that can do this exist, they are called animals, and generally have their own problems that prompt people to invent less-general machin
asciilifeform: ^ catastrophically-badly specified engineering problem
asciilifeform: ('El coronel no tiene quien le escriba.')
asciilifeform: 'El coronel necesitó setenta y cinco años —los setenta y cinco años de su vida, minuto a minuto— para llegar a ese instante. Se sintió puro, explícito, invencible, en el momento de responder. — Mierda.'
asciilifeform: chetty: hero - straight to sword. what should mathematicians eat ?
asciilifeform: the machine is actually structured very well to avoid creating conscious malcontents. they happen anyway.
asciilifeform met quite a few genuine thinkers, leaves of living matter in the great garbage disposal of u.s. academia. folks who spend 90+% of their time on 'grantmanship' while fully aware of the idiocy of the entire structure. but had no escape ticket.
asciilifeform wasn't bottle-buddies with kepler, cannot attest as to the degree of enthusiasm with which he sucked the cock
asciilifeform: it is also worth thinking about what kind of cocks folks we regard as 'genuine article' had to suck, in their times, to stay fed. e.g., kepler's tours of duty as court astrologer.
asciilifeform: jurov: the (very fragile!) mechanism at work here is the process whereby the 'flies were separated from the cutlets'
asciilifeform: no one wakes up and thinks 'today i will finance some pseudoscience.'
asciilifeform: whence and whether this goes - cannot say
asciilifeform: i've spent most of a decade trying to extract some nugget of living matter from 'computer science'
asciilifeform: extraction of astronomy from astrology - ditto.
asciilifeform: the one inescapable fact about extraction of chemistry from thousand years of alchemy is that - it is done by chemists, rather than alchemists.
asciilifeform: 'In most (though not all) cases, all a designer must do in order to implement an unfeature is to refrain from tying the user’s hands in a particular way.' - yours truly
asciilifeform: ('lisp' as properly defined is not a programming language, but merely a catalogue of avoided mistakes in the construction of a programming language. see: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=405 )
asciilifeform: ;;google once there was the people terror gave it birth
asciilifeform: (not the literal qwerty, but the 'platonic' qwerty seen as the overall human failing where folks agree on buggy shit and then cement it in place through 'sunk cost')
asciilifeform: ('atlas.' once you know this, it bricks you in the face.)
asciilifeform: it's a perfectly serviceable women's pulp romance.
asciilifeform: (linked earlier) feynman did some entertaining gedankenexperimentation re: how much energy must one actually piss away in order to compute something
asciilifeform: suddenly you end up in a bubble of finite size that's diverged from the rest of the universe << this featured in n. stephenson's mega-tale 'anathem'
asciilifeform remembers some rant (or was it a dream?) where 'dark matter' is universe-sim leaking memory
