asciilifeform: like everybody else.

asciilifeform: sad thing is, they sell 'chickens' now.

asciilifeform: damn

asciilifeform: *cray corp

asciilifeform: some of the (officially released, not leaked) papers of the latter reveal that crap corp. was 'bailed out' as a 'national seekoority' matter

asciilifeform: who doesn't know the old, unofficial and very alliterative slogan of the (traditional) nsa - 'acres of crays'

asciilifeform: as someone who personally had occasion to deal with problems that are not amenable to '1024 chickens,' i miss cray

asciilifeform: invented (among a hundred other things) 'pipelining'

asciilifeform: cray was a titan

asciilifeform: e.g. alexander

asciilifeform: people love stories like this ('mighty hero dies of paper cut')

asciilifeform: 'controlled' as in, say, Chelyabinsk-40 ?

asciilifeform: but i don't blame them for the decline

asciilifeform: i visited recently, to hear a talk, and noticed more girls in one classroom than there ever were in the whole bldg.

asciilifeform: the uni where i studied 'comp sci' has abolished many of the hardest items in the syllabus (or made them optional)

asciilifeform: for instance:

asciilifeform: benkay: re: 'w. in comp.' - the maggots on the corpse, are not the murder weapon.

asciilifeform: (from the 'thinking machines' obituary)

asciilifeform: th threats. Some members of Thinking Machines' board suddenly seemed to realize that the person who had been running the company all those years had no business skills. The board discussed dumping Handler, but she managed to get her biggest enemies there kicked off.'

asciilifeform: n for a CM-5 sweatshirt and then rejected it. While the company was sinking, she focused her attention on putting out a cookbook with recipes from the company's now-infamous cafeteria. Increasingly paranoid, she had a video camera aimed at her personal parking spot and, by some accounts, made people take meetings with her in her parked car. She hired a bodyguard, telling her colleagues that she had received dea

asciilifeform: 'The first round of layoffs had started. Salaries were frozen. Requests for new laptop computers were being denied. Meanwhile, Handler had an enormous marble archway installed in the atrium of the Carter Ink Building. When a national supercomputer conference was held in Seattle, she decided to stay in San Francisco and commute to Seattle from the swank Stanford Court Hotel. She commissioned a $40,000 logo desig

asciilifeform: 'Does this make sense as a career for anyone? Absolutely! Just get out your atlas.'

asciilifeform: (this is not really about women, but about american academia)

asciilifeform: 2nd link is it.

asciilifeform: ;;google phillip greenspun women computing

asciilifeform: perhaps there was a reason for the yoga bed of nails.

asciilifeform: if you never learned the skill of inflicting pain on yourself, it might be hard to start though

asciilifeform: more or less this.

asciilifeform: so in that light, phd students who crib buggy code from stackoverflow and pass it off as a thesis are unsurprising.

asciilifeform: i'm certainly not the first to describe this, but u.s. education system 'bit-shifted'. i.e. 'college is the new high school', and thereby it follows that 'phd is the new college'

asciilifeform: for a while, at least.

asciilifeform: with the trend for centralization (everybody but a few weirdos runs 'arm' chips, compiles c/cpp) it 'works'

asciilifeform: not for 'religious' reasons, but practical ones

asciilifeform: it is in practice almost always a bad thing

asciilifeform: but won't. because 'i can lift it off the net'

asciilifeform: the american kids can't xxxx because, well, american schooling, 'diversity', etc. the eastern kids, they, in principle, could

asciilifeform: there's two separate diseases at work

asciilifeform: but it had the angle of pillorying american undergrads at posh unis

asciilifeform: yes, and this.

asciilifeform: 9 out of 10 india/china

asciilifeform: and these people get Ph.D and 'graduate'

asciilifeform: his several dozen grad students - not one could write a simple program for an embedded cpu.

asciilifeform: some months ago, i spoke with an EE prof (consultation) at a major american uni

asciilifeform: there is a 'gresham's law' / 'lemon car effect' at work with the EEs

asciilifeform: the other notable thing was that this was an ultra-low-end product

asciilifeform: trademark. on yellow plastic.

asciilifeform: note that this wasn't even a patent case

asciilifeform: this incident showed all the symptoms of 'bite of the cornered beast.'

asciilifeform: i doubt that anyone at fluke likes to think about 'the end'

asciilifeform: fluke, naturally, 'will not go quietly into the good night'

asciilifeform: and you can even get calibration certificates for them, for some extra cost

asciilifeform: but now, the chinese instruments are quite usable

asciilifeform: or suffered with chinese crap

asciilifeform: traditionally, if you wanted an 'adult' measurement instrument (multimeter, oscilloscope, etc) you got a fluke or hp (now 'agilent')

asciilifeform: now, for those who do not know, fluke is one of those remaining outfits that... builds things in usa

asciilifeform: there is really no qualitative difference between this and every other 'ip' enforcement action.

asciilifeform: and saying 'we're not the least bit sorry and shall do it again always'

asciilifeform: the next day, they 'apologized' by... supplying a crate of free fluke meters to the victim ☟︎

asciilifeform: tldr - fluke corp. has a trademark on... yellow voltmeters. chinese shipment of yellow voltmeters held up at customs, burned.

asciilifeform: https://www.sparkfun.com/news/1428

asciilifeform: decimation: did you see the recent incident with Fluke Corp. ?

asciilifeform: this particular broom actually fires small-caliber quite well. in every OCR app, for example.

asciilifeform: re: thinking machines, see mp's 'tin woman' essay.

asciilifeform: http://www.inc.com/magazine/19950915/2622_Printer_Friendly.html

asciilifeform: 'Yes, our office was magnificent and yes, a gourmet chef and her entourage came in every day to cook our lunch. The meals were awesome.'

asciilifeform: http://thedailywtf.com/Comments/Thinking-Machines.aspx?pg=3#194568

asciilifeform: see, for instance, this:

asciilifeform: this is a well-known fact. the 'ai winters' were merely the flip sides of 'ai summers', bacchanalia of graft of every variety

asciilifeform: (ianal, but if i recall, it's not actually illegal, but was ruled 'probable cause' for police search)

asciilifeform: unless you're a 'registered' whatever

asciilifeform: re: the dope: simply owning the 'pill press' required to stamp the pictured items is quasi-illegal in usa

asciilifeform: 'eat recycled food. it's good for the environment, and ok for you!'

asciilifeform: (by toggling pins)

asciilifeform: but try getting a sharp 100kHz wave, for instance, out of a 'micro' running java

asciilifeform: this wouldn't even be such a problem if it actually worked

asciilifeform: ('the bad dancer is hindered by his arse.' kudos to the kid)

asciilifeform: i experimented with this myself a few yrs ago, but life got in the way

asciilifeform: there was also a fellow who booted linux kernel on the controllers of dead hdds recently

asciilifeform: forget which was which

asciilifeform: one was an 'arm' variant, the other, a big-endian mips with a couple of custom cores, if i recall

asciilifeform: a little tricky to make sense of what goes on inside, given undocumented regs a-plenty

asciilifeform: i dumped 'intel' and 'samsung's ssd fw. ida eats it up like a champ.

asciilifeform: ah

asciilifeform: decimation: most of them disassemble just fine

asciilifeform: most of them have cheap through-hole solder jobs and protrude almost 1mm

asciilifeform: back in the day, i found that not one of three different pata<->cf cards would fit.

asciilifeform: libretto has the least slack space in the bay of any machine of that period that i've owned.

asciilifeform: if you have a libretto, the drive has to fit. exactly.

asciilifeform: no room for converter

asciilifeform: decimation: i used a 'Transcend' TS64GPSD330. <$100 at the time.

asciilifeform: decimation: you can get PATA SSD drives.

asciilifeform: decimation: as a matter of fact, i did.

asciilifeform: (recognition problems with fixed sets, like OCR, work great)

asciilifeform: re: NNs: their present-day niche obscurity is well-deserved. try using it for any application with regular novel inputs, and notice how it 'forgets.'

asciilifeform: a shoddy rng ends up 'dwelling' in some portions of the state space

asciilifeform: (the other being - gambling)

asciilifeform: (the usual place where people concern themselves with rng quality)

asciilifeform: note that this anecdote had nothing to do with cryptography.

asciilifeform: objectively poor performance.

asciilifeform: nothing mystical about it. poor rng, for the application described above, is like watered gasoline