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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,
mircea_popescu: the best chemistry lab, were it to be maintained as a collection of bottles going "stuff" "Good stuff!" "REagenT" etc
mircea_popescu: well yes, fortunately i've cut to it by now. but listen, you gotta be much better at packaging stuff.
mircea_popescu: it's also necessarily going to remain there, and for great benefit.
mircea_popescu: "the human's inability to fully comprehend the parsing and syntactical schemes they're able to create" << this is actually a generally valid point, and about half of all problems of humanity come from this impedance mismatch.
mircea_popescu: dude, that thing's lengthy, and not directly obvious why i'd care ?
mircea_popescu: btw, anyone read "[Date: 1601.] Conversation, as it was by the Social Fireside, in the Time of the Tudors." ?
mircea_popescu: jurov: when putin arrives everyone will be caught with pants down << everyone still there, at any rate.
mircea_popescu: and yes it had a half bowl top and a fat cylinder butt
mircea_popescu: only thing that ever scared me. but i'd quit the room in a hurry
mircea_popescu: that's what it is. parents suspect children are about on the level of c programmers, and try to avoid any situations where reality emulates the c compiler.
mircea_popescu: like, most of 'em. "are you sure you wish to forever lock yourself in ? well...that's what you're doing"
mircea_popescu: perhaps because parents are so acutely aware of the type of divorcement between meaning and action that trips up children.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform funny enough, it was heard of in 80s romania. parents insistently warning kids not to do it!
mircea_popescu: decimation you know, i had an old zil fridge at some point in romania, and the thing had been running for ~25 years, and it never ever leaked.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform that should be some pretty cool steel, that happily takes 100 degree differentials over decades.
mircea_popescu: that's another thing. hire a plumber so he tells you what to do ?!
mircea_popescu: leaving alone the weirdness of keeping most of your capital in a nonproductive asset (hey, that's made to be through purely government interventionist means), not even pretend like you're managing it ?
mircea_popescu: decimation but if one's principal equity is the house, a la us, then it makes sense.
mircea_popescu: and in principle can heat/cool to any arbitrary temperature, as long as your compressor's up to it.
mircea_popescu: decimation yeah heat pumps seem a lot better deal than any alternative, yet the least commonly used.