asciilifeform: the newer ones have compartmentalized air supplies for individual lots - a bit like dirigible ballonettes.

asciilifeform: i've never once been inside - didn't have clearance.

asciilifeform: btw, phun phact: they're under 24/7 armed guard, in any respectable shop.

asciilifeform: (little buggers all catch something at once. esp. if they're immunocompromised for whatever reason.)

asciilifeform: this can happen overnight.

asciilifeform: one of the worst occasions is when a mouse farm dies

asciilifeform: when you're in bio business, you have to be prepared that your working capital can literally croak.

asciilifeform: managed what?

asciilifeform: we have those already: chinese postdocs. they don't always cut it, though.

asciilifeform: it's also a game of 'e. coli simply can't be persuaded to piss out X.' or 'croaks trying.'

asciilifeform: very much so. a place i worked went broke partly because we couldn't get a necessary transfection going.

asciilifeform: camouflage.

asciilifeform: btw, when will the drug aficionados get around to the fabled 'THC tomato.' that'd be something to write home about.

asciilifeform: pesticide/herbicide

asciilifeform: there's also the more prosaic fact that 99% of gmo work is for: pesticide resistance.

asciilifeform: reptilia? is back?

asciilifeform: nah, he'll just gather a group of flunkies in his office and shout 'nein nein nein nein nein!'

asciilifeform: jurov: firefox is a turd.

asciilifeform: jurov: a very peculiar definition of 'going fine.'

asciilifeform: (http://jheusser.github.io/2013/02/03/satcoin.html)

asciilifeform: it could also look like a beefy off-the-shelf intel box running a successful version of 'sat-coin.'

asciilifeform: but the webcams are cheaper.

asciilifeform: it could also look like a 1m by 1m cube of gallium arsenide optical logic, bathed in liquid He

asciilifeform: *imagination

asciilifeform: happily unwrapped on christmas day and plugged in by unsuspecting (and satisfied) people.

asciilifeform: say 100,000,000 consumer webcams with a little strange mixed into the network asic.

asciilifeform: an 'exahash' looks rather different

asciilifeform: dexX7: some people have no imagionation:

asciilifeform: lying around in a lab, answering quizzes while being injected with strange.

asciilifeform: nobody took the offer because, as i understand, grunts didn't want to burn through their paid leave.

asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: i believe those were the 'limited studies.'

asciilifeform: afaik it (ketamine, not malaria) was being tried as a 'ptsd' cure.

asciilifeform: easy to get. they stuff an arm into a sort of chamber filled with 'anopheles.'

asciilifeform: dub: there were also ads for 'agree to be given malaria.' ☟︎

asciilifeform: most of the 'take a phone #' tabs remained in place. very few takers.

asciilifeform: phun phact: one of my old workplaces, a military lab, had ads hanging in the lounges, offering decent $ (around a thousand if i recall) for being given ketamine.

asciilifeform: the point of the exercise was to illustrate a fact.

asciilifeform: you can cheat by tossing a coin, say. but it's gotta be a perfectly fair coin!

asciilifeform: everybody try it on your cat. or wife. or other pets.

asciilifeform: for the crypto/information-theory buffs: http://www.loper-os.org/bad-at-entropy/manmach.html

asciilifeform: sure why not!

asciilifeform: not my idea. attributed to johnny von n, but i was given it by my brother, who plucked it from an ancient soviet textbook.

asciilifeform: (starts counting letters in phrases from memory, flips coins, etc.)

asciilifeform: human usually loses unless he cheats

asciilifeform: keeps score.

asciilifeform: it goes off and changes weights on markov chain.

asciilifeform: you tell it if it was correct

asciilifeform: computer says '0' or '1'

asciilifeform: you say '0' or '1'

asciilifeform: the way the game works:

asciilifeform: i did at one point, lost the code

asciilifeform: enjoy

asciilifeform: http://www.loper-os.org/p.cpp

asciilifeform: nubbins`: ever play with 'von neumann's mind reader' algo ?

asciilifeform: nubbins`: anything attached to a human brain is a terrible source of entropy

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: as vonneumann-debiasable as anything else

asciilifeform: if you're ok with a glacially-slow entropy source, just expose a DRAM chip to sunlight, with deliberately inadequate refresh cycles, wait for radiation bit-flippage.

asciilifeform: point is, a piece of garbage that may seem 'random' to the naked eye can have all kinds of nice predictable patterns if one knows where to look.

asciilifeform: plug it into an oscilloscope and instantly see what i meant.

asciilifeform: think of all the periodic audio where you now stand. pc fan. wind. your breath. etc

asciilifeform: that's not even counting non-audio signals that the amp picks up (mains hum, for one)

asciilifeform: nubbins`: not that you can't use audio as an entropy seed, but most of it is incredibly periodic

asciilifeform: for the impatient: it wasn't about crypto per se, but still mandatory.

asciilifeform: the digits of 'pi' pass every test of entropy you can think of. (save one!)

asciilifeform: it's not a philosophical question at all, re: the bits. their 'security' is a function of the bits and of the enemy's brain. if he knows (or might easily learn) them, they might be entropic, but not suitable for crypto.

asciilifeform: cryptographic 'randomness' is a matter of provenance (as in this: http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/lawpoli/colour/2004061001.php) rather than entropy per se.

asciilifeform: until everybody understands that cryptographic suitability is an entirely non-mathematical property of the bits (vs. entropic quality, an easily-quantified one) - people will be confused.

asciilifeform: just not publicly and loudly.

asciilifeform: look to me like they're happy to be pwned.

asciilifeform: point, in that it isn't about blood per se, except to demonstrate intent. but which euro nation has banned u.s. OS on gov. hardware?

asciilifeform: so, not poodles? maybe occasionally ill-tempered ones, but where's the bite.

asciilifeform: wake me up when they start publicly hanging us signint agents when caught in the wiring closets.

asciilifeform: that's the sort of thing i was talking about.

asciilifeform: they agreed to move their freq. band away from u.s. gps, so it could be jammed separately.

asciilifeform: seems like the galileo people caved

asciilifeform: couple of years ago

asciilifeform: if i recall, the question was posed as 'give us an off switch or your sats get added to the target list.'

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: what was the EU's answer to the U.S. demand for root privs on Galileo (EU GPS equiv.) ?

asciilifeform: if dogs could speak, there would probably be talk among poodles of building their own walking parks and ditching humans.

asciilifeform: mod6: whatever happened to that fellow?

asciilifeform: banca, money changer's bench. thought everybody knew that one.

asciilifeform: or, alternatively, destroying it.

asciilifeform: https://complexityzoo.uwaterloo.ca/Complexity_Zoo

asciilifeform: everybody loves nphard, but the rest of the complexityzoo needs love too

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: that'd be just a special case of altcoin, no?

asciilifeform: built-in mining future

asciilifeform: metacoin...

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: already fun!

asciilifeform: sure, with a field for memory constraint, why not.

asciilifeform: sorta how the original btc protocol wanted to

asciilifeform: just bake a Forth of sorts in there

asciilifeform: not really hard at all

asciilifeform: say i want a certain hash bruted, and i say 'trade ya 100btc for 10000 hash-X-crack-coin.'

asciilifeform: laughing? it would instantly let you convert, say, btc, into arbitrary parallel computations

asciilifeform: here's an idea: generalize the altcoin concept and bake a turing-complete workfunction spec right into the protocol.

asciilifeform: smart money's on 'slavecoin.'

asciilifeform: 1st fellow to bake an altcoin that's actually interesting will win (something.)

asciilifeform: Luke-Jr: sdram plus fpga which does nothing but sCrypt, vs. a general-purpose pc?

asciilifeform: everybody knows that you can get FPGA+sdram socket boards for pocket change, right?

asciilifeform: nubbins`: incacola is a cheapo soda sold in the u.s.