asciilifeform: but even more than this, needs economic underpin for existence

asciilifeform: does need 3phase mains and reasonably room-temp / dehumidified air tho ( vacuum pump )

asciilifeform: eh it aint a holography rig, dun need 4 tonnes of ballast

asciilifeform: i'ma leave this one to the experts.

asciilifeform: ( as i understand , it's a++ real estate, supposing you were to redditbag all of the bipedals )

asciilifeform: just picture, if they'd kept the whore , the argentards might finally have keeled over and mircea_popescu would possibly be done by now bulldozing the ruins and terraforming like mars

asciilifeform: iirc #2 won election in argentina, made 0 diff except aggravated http://btcbase.org/log/2018-11-30#1876396 lulz ☝︎

asciilifeform: afaik ec is a miamistan exactly like the others

asciilifeform: they like the lolcat exactly where he is, i suspect.

asciilifeform: i have difficulty picture how it couldn't, if wanted.

asciilifeform: can't, won't, i've nfi

asciilifeform: for some reason i immediately picture that story where 'abrams' tank was smuggled to su in diplo-crates, piecemeal ☟︎

asciilifeform: ( even supposing i devise a means of teleporting one to BingoBoingostan )

asciilifeform: before BingoBoingo starts to picture where he'd park a 10 m^2 SEM

asciilifeform: let's make a +ev pizarro 1st, lol

asciilifeform: and i aint got 30% of the 400k they'd think it costs.

asciilifeform: i dun think they'd swallow a 'this is worth 500, rly, srsly' 'receipt' for it.

asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: we're talkin' half a railcar

asciilifeform: i still can't fucking believe that d00d. 'my experiment requires 3 litres of virgin tears' 'hey al, i took 300 virgins and ran then rom-coms until they cried 3L, here it is in a mason jar' 'but! reasons!' ☟︎

asciilifeform: ^ somewhere in the old thrds.

asciilifeform: !#s calorimeter

asciilifeform: had all the requisite backroom deals & all, but not the fist-sized benzyl xtal, so no dice.

asciilifeform: sorta how asciilifeform had 'the keys' in 2010 and had all the ducks lined up to run schwartz eotvos, and would have at least achieved some lulz if uncle al had not chickened

asciilifeform: prolly wrong approach overall, at that, really oughta find a ave1 or spyked fella with keys to adult lab somewhere.

asciilifeform: prolly oughta add that surplus SEM in particular ( and similar irons ) 1) generally live in usa 2) dun exactly fit in smuggle-trunk under old shirts ☟︎

asciilifeform: 'pick sumthing! all fresh!'

asciilifeform: lol mircea_popescu phrases it almost as if asciilifeform were buridaning in front of a set table

asciilifeform: ( nor 'where plug in SEM'. it's 'where plug in asciilifeform' )

asciilifeform: hard part is obv. not 'where to put SEM' lol.

asciilifeform: i'd like uruguay, or antarctica, or just about anywhere.

asciilifeform: from there , http://btcbase.org/log/2017-08-29#1705799 << lul for ave1's lang study ☝︎

asciilifeform reminisces re http://btcbase.org/log/2017-08-29#1705687 lulzthread ☝︎

asciilifeform: plus (typically) 3phase.

asciilifeform: the surplus units want 10 or so square metres tho, of decent climate-controlled floor.

asciilifeform: ( 5-10 k u.s. $ )

asciilifeform: if i had the floor space, would just pick up surplus SEM, it costs approx same as ~good~ optic funnily enuff

asciilifeform: neato

asciilifeform had, yrs ago, access to this setup, but sadly cannot afford to re-create it in torture room, was spiffy 'zeiss' thing

asciilifeform: when using mounted slr, focus is solely in the microscope's optics

asciilifeform: ( i'm assuming, with microscope barrel mount ? )

asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2018-11-30#1876667 << proper slr, not soapbox , so loox on that front ☝︎

asciilifeform brb,t-time

asciilifeform: ( hence SEM vs opticals etc )

asciilifeform: sorta why one generally wants to capture 9000x moar detail than 'strictly needed'

asciilifeform: once you have pics, can massage 9000 ways to heaven. but not prior.

asciilifeform: at any rate the q is answerable. (~if~ we had with what to look inside)

asciilifeform: just like i do when laying out PCB for e.g. FG

asciilifeform: naturally designer gave the machine hints as to where to put what

asciilifeform: i dun find it esp. difficult to swallow, ~100% of iron since 1990 or so was made this way.

asciilifeform: hence the 'ns' threads

asciilifeform: supposedly it was 100% machine-genned (possibly the 1st such ic)

asciilifeform: ideally you find the repeating patterns of transistorage and go straight to functional units ( granted this is only practical for bolix, 486, and newer, where there actually ~exist~ these units, as opposed to hand-optimized arbitrary transistorage )

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: it is certainly physically possible to do it that way, but the recognition is at best O(N^2) so one'd need some rather substantial irons; and also correspondingly moar sensitive to specks of dust in photo

asciilifeform: and ~then~ ( and this is what we have, but su reversers did not ) you load the thing into a (fairly inexpensive) fpga and try functional tests.

asciilifeform: rather than 'raw netlist of transistor'

asciilifeform: what one does, is to try to determine the repeating functional blocks ( adders, shifters, srams, etc )

asciilifeform: the reason why the scheme is possible to do at all, is that the transistor is not the fundamental semantic unit of the device

asciilifeform: i was about to answe this:

asciilifeform: would ideally be sumthing that doesn't blow 100 bytes on erry bit of the image like that htmlistic war crime does.

asciilifeform: verily.

asciilifeform: as it is, micrography only good as 'part of balanced diet' along with http://btcbase.org/log/2018-11-29#1876069 intel and the like. ☝︎

asciilifeform: if done sov-style -- can.

asciilifeform: my 'cyrix' worked a+++.

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: fwiw folx did clone e.g. i386. it can be done.

asciilifeform: e.g. 'hey why is power connected to ground, must be a speck of skin in pic'

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: nope, gotta preprocess the thing to get a draft netlist (i.e. what's connected to what) and only then can walk the photos to search for barfolade

asciilifeform: fwiw in su they cloned ic's photographically, without any attempt to actually grasp the contents

asciilifeform: there is no escape from this.

asciilifeform: exactly like trb.

asciilifeform: can only rule this out once 'fit in head' yes

asciilifeform: all that presently exists in the wild is 1) small number of actual 'ivory' machines/cards, where could put cloned ic 2) the software/os stack

asciilifeform: correct.

asciilifeform: ( i.e. you don't, not till you actually bake a working and satisfying cloned circuit )

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: same way you know when http://btcbase.org/log/2018-07-16#1834941 is done. ☝︎

asciilifeform: otherwise 1000 manyears.

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: they do sit with needle. but only ~after~, to correct obvious oopses in ocr.

asciilifeform: ( esp. considering that the transistors were placed by machine to begin with, so they aint in any human-comprehensible order like they are on z80 or 6502 etc )

asciilifeform: a kind of specialized ocr.

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: it's always machined, it's more or less impossible otherwise.

asciilifeform: really this thing oughta be saved for proper SEM . but currently notenuff dough for this pleasure.

asciilifeform: ( sorta like how traditional flatbed scanner worx )

asciilifeform: in pro shops, they use microscope with stepper motor

asciilifeform: ( recall, ~no room for error )

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: stiching is quite cpu/ram-heavy

asciilifeform: aa ok

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: he does : http://www.loper-os.org/pub/bolix_ivory.jpg object dun look removable, but rather like it was inserted from other end

asciilifeform: i was gonna have the thing xrayed, to learn the truth, but this also not done yet.

asciilifeform: possible

asciilifeform: but currently hard to be certain

asciilifeform: SeanRiddle: shrobe's photo suggests that die top is on top of package

asciilifeform: amberglint: indeed, link is in the log

asciilifeform: ( it aint even matter of cost; simply we're dealing with an almost-extinct animal. there's maybe a few dozen of these left in the wild, optimistically )

asciilifeform: if i had 5 or 6 of the 'ivories' i would happily give 1 to SeanRiddle , ftr. but currently must pass.

asciilifeform: SeanRiddle: pro decapper + microscopist runs about 30k. so that's on hold pending asciilifeform actually having 30k to use on proj.

asciilifeform: SeanRiddle: the link 404's

asciilifeform: SeanRiddle: just so you're aware of the orig subj -- the ic we were looking to see decapped is worth mebbe 10,000 $ ea. ( and at that, i have 0 guarantee of being able to find more . ever. ) i have a grand total of 2.

asciilifeform: blowtorch decap?!

asciilifeform: or hm, this one's about a 'Amstrad 40010'

asciilifeform: ever succeeded with a 1um ?

asciilifeform: ( and there are at least a dozen micrographs available )