asciilifeform: mike_c: i vaguely recall some joker who wrote a complete 386 pc emulator in about 1k of perl. that's the kind of thing being spoken of, i think.
asciilifeform: 'Do you also lecture people with Down's Syndrome on how they could learn to write 10,000 line Perl scripts if they just take it one step at a time? For some things there seems to be some minimum takeoff velocity.'
asciilifeform: the notion that every male of the species can turn into mircea_popescu by effort of will is, at the very least, misguided. i catch quite a bit of crap for insisting that virtually everyone can, e.g., learn mathematics - so i sympathize. but it's still mistake.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: it's almost like you read a guide to survival in the arctic, and said 'wtf is this nonsense, just take compass and march south'
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: you're not in the market for a trambourghini, either, as i understand.
asciilifeform: drool, unfortunately, is the correct explanation for a number of things.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: as i understand, he was discussing why the robots are inevitable from a market standpoint (there are quite a few paupers, and they all want wheels. so we get trambourghini.)
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: mocsny wasn't pushing for mixed footraces, so much as torturing some bozo who was obsessed with the 'injustice of exclusion'
asciilifeform: if i remember, these folks don't go the pure squatter route, but actually make contact with megacorps and their lead marketing monkeys
asciilifeform: now the interesting part. as i recall, the company in palahniuk's comedy actually exists...
asciilifeform: GlucoCure, I read. InsulinEase. PancreAid. Hemazine. Glucodan. Growdenase.'
asciilifeform: 'I ask him, Why sometimes not? “The way this works is we copyright every conceivable combination of words, Greek words, Latin, English, what-have-you. We get the legal rights to every conceivable word a pharmaceutical company might use to name a new product. For diabetes alone, we have an inventory of one hundred forty names,” he says. He hands me stapled-together pages from out of his briefcase in his lap.
asciilifeform: oducts that are still in development,” he says. “And that includes you.” ... “We’re a total concept marketing slash public relations organization,” he says. “Our job is to create the concept. You patent a drug. You copyright the name. As soon as someone else develops the product they come to us, sometimes by choice, sometimes not.”'
asciilifeform: '“Just name a disease,” he says, “and we have a cure ready for it.” ... The pills for AIDS look just like the pills for cancer look just like the pills for diabetes. I ask, So these things really aren’t invented? ... “Of course they’re real,” he says and plucks the first two bottles out of my hands. “They’re copyrighted. We have an inventory of almost fifteen thousand copyrighted names for pr
asciilifeform: 'just_mice' << hypothetical future electric rodent shop
asciilifeform: decimation: to make this clearer: the digits of 'pi' pass every test of 'entropic quality' you can think of. except, naturally, the fact of them being the digits of 'pi.'
asciilifeform: decimation: the suitability of a number sequence for use as 'cryptographic entropy' is not a mathematical property of the sequence. it is a property of the aggregate of the sequence and the world in which it lives - i.e. whether the sequence is, or can easily become, known to the enemy.
asciilifeform: (frame the hash operation as a logical 'sat' system, work backwards to exclude regions of possible input state space based on known output bits)
asciilifeform: the enemy now knows something about bit N by knowing bit N-k.
asciilifeform: likewise, given that (by design!) a 'cryptographic' hash will be computed in such a way that every bit of the input affects every bit out the output,
asciilifeform: thus, the set of possible outputs has a 'hole'
asciilifeform: it is quite possible (for want of a proof, i cannot declare definitively) that certain bitstrings can -never- get spat out
asciilifeform: note that that last part is (afaik) discussed - nowhere, by no one.
asciilifeform: dignork: two separate issues. one - by papering over the problem. two - hashing introduces a correlation between bits, that may be useful to enemy who devoted serious effort to studying the hash in question.
asciilifeform: just as, e.g. the digits of 'pi' will.
asciilifeform: without being the least bit useful cryptographically
asciilifeform: the sequence will pass 'diehard' and whatever tests of 'entropic' you like
asciilifeform: dignork: hash is a good way to close your own eyes on problems with the rng
asciilifeform: gives unbiased output at the potential cost of never terminating (in that case you know for a fact that your entropy source is defective)
asciilifeform: dignork: the correct answer is von neumann's 'fair coin' algorithm.
asciilifeform: the fellow who grows up there. until escapes.
asciilifeform: it was explained in his posts, somewhere
asciilifeform: chetty: this, afaik, is the 'official' position of the various u.s. protestant churches.
asciilifeform: m grew up in a 'fundie' church, and stayed in for some years after he no longer believed - to pick up chicks.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: moscny lived in usa. 'flood' is to be understood here to be the 'fundamentalist' one, complete with mandatory drowning dinosaurs.
asciilifeform: i used to real quite a bit of (mostly vintage) sf. 'anathem' mostly killed my brain receptors for this. because now nothing stands up, ends up giving me exactly the kind of indigestion mircea_popescu describes above.
asciilifeform: stephenson's piece is about a parallel universe where philosophy actually took off (in the sense of massive 'sharashkas' being built sometime during what corresponds to our 'roman' period)
asciilifeform: one of those things that screams from every page 'this was written by an encyclopaedist who gnawed through the leather straps'
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: that 1 book (mentioned above) is probably the only truly interesting piece of sf produced in usa in... 30? yrs
asciilifeform: (for those who haven't read neal stephenson's tale 'anathem' - in it, there lived folks in specially designated reservations who were permitted only to think and study, and were let out to wander around for a few weeks once in a decade, century, or millenium - depending on what order they belonged to)
