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mircea_popescu: gabriel_laddel i take this is going to be lisp, as in not scheme, not clojure, cl ?
mircea_popescu: gabriel_laddel you seriously thinking of implementing a sane pgp ?
☟︎ mircea_popescu: i think we're in the mental institution. they're outside. cheaper this way, more of them.
mircea_popescu: we know this to be true, because you can have mmorpgs.
mircea_popescu: in any case : the space of things physics has to represent is in point of fact narrower than the space of things computer programs have to represent.
mircea_popescu: when put together with the nix discussion on github it gives me spots on the spline.
mircea_popescu: anyway : the quote you took carries a certain meaning in its original context (physics - esp "natural" is a term of art in physics) and is an entirely different thing in the new context (coding). i fully agree with the quote as it is on the source blog
mircea_popescu: all the various foregoing rants are not directed at you personally as if you were somehow in ther wrong on some score.
mircea_popescu: you know it's not your trial for being a badman, this.
mircea_popescu: aye, i suspect notation and structure are actually closer married than we generally realise.
mircea_popescu: it's even difficult to establish what kids of infinite are involved.
mircea_popescu: the right structure is that structure which expresses the sum total of all the concepts in can express in the smallest total count of expression units. note that both fields being infinite, this is a difficult comparison to evaluate.
mircea_popescu: mebbe i should dig that article where i murder some guy over leaving out the outside paran or something.
mircea_popescu: (ps. the lisp notation of basic arithmetic would win "least likely to succeed" "ass-ugliest award" from a vast majority of all the people who understand basic arithmetic. it "doesn't feel right" for almost anyone. 3+4 does.
mircea_popescu: which is why a flimsy repackaging of "popular advice" that doesn't even work on the fucking plane is horribru. not only it doesn't work in practice, but the mind that tends to make such confusions is probably in a very poor state to think about anything.
mircea_popescu: dna is exactly this : worst code ever, wouldn't even parse, let alone compile.
mircea_popescu: so yes, you can do just fine as a human interacting with humans on broken structure. just as long as it's broken in tolerable places.
mircea_popescu: re game of balance : fucking is an extremely poor metaphora for what we're doing here, because computers are actually turing machines, whereas cunts are not.
mircea_popescu: but you, in your own description (well, in their description which you seem to underscore) of "how to meta-structure" in fact revert to what is the equivalent of pattern matching.
mircea_popescu: just you know, pattern match and all will be well (when it's truely well)
mircea_popescu: after all... when you hit the language with regexp just right you know.
mircea_popescu: but in any case : what do you figure is the difference bewteen "When you strike the natural structure, a sort of resonance occurs" and "perl is a fine way to do nixos" ?
mircea_popescu: gabriel_laddel i actually was kinda disinterested in fucking as a young adolescent, was taught by older girls.
mircea_popescu: the entire basis for that quote is the reverbalisation of the concept that "when true love comes around you'll know". empirically, most people do not.
mircea_popescu: the fact of it being a pile a kludge is an excellent indication of it not being the best way, but rather heuristic in nature.
mircea_popescu: listen here : the fact that it feels right is no indication of it being the best way.
mircea_popescu: what the fuck already, if the planet crossed through a bogon ray one evening in 1988 and made everyone's brain essentially batrachian in nature i could never know.
mircea_popescu: these kids are so fucking stupid i can't believe i've just read "when you meet the right someone it'll feel special" in code-words.
mircea_popescu: What you hope to find is the natural structure of what you're describing — a structure that affords a really beautiful, simple description. When you strike the natural structure, a sort of resonance occurs, in which various subsidiary problems you may have had with your description just melt away, and the description practically writes itself."
mircea_popescu: "Suppose you're trying to find the best way to structure your description of something. (Examples: choosing the structure for a computer program to perform some task; or choosing the structure for a theory of physics.)
mircea_popescu still vividly remembers this event when he was maybe 13 or so. this kid "got really psised off" and was going to hit me. every time he launched his fist, he also closed his eyes. every time i'd dodge and he'd mash his fist into the nearby wall. his hits got softer an softer, but he never figured out why exactly he's not making contact.
mircea_popescu: it doesn't exist 30 years later, which 30 years have been spent doing what exactly ?
mircea_popescu: the sad reality is that the earlier "linux is a failure but doesn't have to stay that way" is slowly coming to the sobering reality that "it is a failure and systemfuck it."
mircea_popescu: "There are very few classics in the field of computing. We are at the very beginning of this journey and it hasn't even begun to get interesting yet. IMHO, the Cathedral vs. Bazaar isn't in anyway a dilemma or a classic. Linux was a failure 20 years ago, it is a failure today and any posturing otherwise is just that. "
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform i didn;'t mean you, i'm stikk in shock over the quote above
mircea_popescu: let's just assume that it's ok to override the user imperatives. because.
mircea_popescu: like you know, plaintext emails and unauthed telnet. because "who would ever hijack an account!"
mircea_popescu: no but this is out and out "everythingwillbefineism" imported back into the software stack.
mircea_popescu: "For instance, for ELF executables, we set the RPATH in the executable such that it will find a statically determined set of library dependencies at runtime, rather than using a dynamic mechanism such as the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable to look up libraries" holy shit.
mircea_popescu: only correct solution to political problems, b-a ness.
mircea_popescu: in MPWorld this is implemented as a sort of api, and languages either talk to it or are stuck doing 100% of the work themselves.
mircea_popescu: "Examples: at what point is appropriate to leave package management up to a language's ecosystem? Is there ever a reason to? " << one hell of a problem.
mircea_popescu: kids are expecting to do it and do it well but it's never taught. it's not like expecting virgins to fuck like pros on their first date. it's more like expecting tramps to ballet. spontaneously.
mircea_popescu: the problem starts in 5th grade. there should be a class called Abstraction.
mircea_popescu: i imagine you know, if you can't say it for yourself, you're stuck trying to find people to support you
mircea_popescu: and somehow these natural and necessary modes of speech are "forbidden". /rant.
mircea_popescu: fuck (not heck. fuck!) it's probably even why people don't enjoy writing comments and specs. because they require "this is great" and "im so fucking proud of this" ands "i bet you wouldn't have come up with this in five lifetimes" to be either worth reading or worth writing
mircea_popescu: it is i suspect off this festered, metastasized modesty that people can't make good summaries, introduce anything properly or generally package well
mircea_popescu: (much like people falling imagine everyone's looking when in fact nobod ycares, so the guy caught overstating his competency imagines the world ended when really - people just had a laugh).
mircea_popescu: there's nothing wrong with saying "i am great", in principle. competent people do not in the slightest mind the nude affirmation of your naked competency. the error on the topic is amusing, but not the end of the world
mircea_popescu: that the idiocy of puritanism imposing "modesty" upon the coder (on top of chastity - which by the way, there's nothing great about not "raping" women, being a nice guy, great sense of humor etc. that's a drone.) limit people's ability to do crucial things for their success and the world's hygiene.
mircea_popescu: and since this is here, allow me to rant, not in your direction particularly but in general,