asciilifeform: 'i want a waveform generator box, i could spend fiddybux on it instead of drink, or hey! neighbour threw out tape deck and...'

asciilifeform: gabriel_laddel: when you're a student and time is 'worth 0', you do things like making own lab instruments out of rubbish

asciilifeform: gabriel_laddel: young folk with time on their hands.

asciilifeform does often wonder whether there exists a black market in old-new stock parts such as toilet valve.

asciilifeform: life is not long enough to make own valves.

asciilifeform: there is no reason for this part to wear out other than on ~geological~ time scale.

asciilifeform: i would bet that it is there still.

asciilifeform: the wc in the flat i grew up in, back on other side of ocean, was 100+ years old. and had ORIGINAL float when i met it. grandfather - cleaned it. copper thing, ancient with patina, quite functional

asciilifeform: i suspect that it actually... dissolved.

asciilifeform: but this - is a new thing.

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu's knife (i also had this knife) or my saw from 2 wks ago, these made sense, the mechanical forces on the atrocious dried snot from which they were made, were formidable

asciilifeform: never seen anything of the kind before.

asciilifeform: https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/31knpB4IfKL._SY355_.jpg << this.

asciilifeform: it's a float valve. it lives whatever pressure the water pipe supplies.

asciilifeform: re chinese engineering, i had a float valve, of the usual type, in toilet - EXPLODE the other day

asciilifeform: 'The bigger problem for China is its workforce. Even though China is graduating far more than 1 million engineers every year, the quality of their education is so poor that they are not employable in technical professions. This was documented by my research teams at Duke and Harvard. ' << gold.

asciilifeform: https://archive.is/IKX4c << further dispatches from the bureau of wishful thinking

asciilifeform: text contains multiple 'and then i went to this empty street because saw girl there once'

asciilifeform: well yes. but elliot at least showed up where there were gurlz. not in refrigerator store.

asciilifeform: but in what imagined universe said crew might conceivably ~need~ these remoras for something, is beyond me

asciilifeform: i could see'em positioning themselves as prospective gauleiters for chinese repo crew.

asciilifeform: that boat sailed in the 1890s.

asciilifeform: i cannot picture anyone, even anglotards, conceiving of such a thing.

asciilifeform: switch how? to move there?

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: the tampons?! how?

asciilifeform: re the capacitors, the chinese story is a lie of omission, i've been swapping caps routinely in hardware made since 1990 or so.

asciilifeform: i shit thee not.

asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2016-08-27#1530468 << oh better still, it takes no fewer than THREE api calls, any or all of which MAY FAIL. ☝︎

asciilifeform: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/womens-blog/2016/aug/27/why-chinese-women-dont-use-tampons << apparently this is nyoozworthy

asciilifeform: 'We can sometimes see decades-old capacitors (such as ones made in the USSR) still working. They are bigger and heavier, but durable and not desiccating. Modern aluminium capacitors serve for about 11 years, if you are lucky, then become dry and quietly fail. I remember early 2000s devices where capacitors failed after 3–4 years of service, and not necessarily low-end devices (one example is E-TECH ICE-200 cable modem worth ∼ 240

asciilifeform: (and about 10x the memory footprint. COST, not save. aha.)

asciilifeform: in other lulz, invoking, md5 hash, using microshit winblowz api, apparently only saves ~half of the lines it takes to write the algo from scratch... ☟︎

asciilifeform: count. Lawyers for Alfaro could not be reached for comment. An FBI official confirmed that agents were present at Alfaro’s home in Maryland but declined to elaborate. College Board spokesman Zach Goldberg said the leak of test questions constituted a crime. “We are pleased that this crime is being pursued aggressively,” he said. He dismissed Alfaro’s criticisms of the SAT test-making process as “patently false.”'

asciilifeform: 'Alfaro had contacted officials of seven state governments in recent months, accusing the College Board of making false claims about its tests when bidding for public contracts with the states. The College Board, he alleged, misled the states about the process it used to create questions for the new version of the SAT, resulting in an inferior exam. He also aired those allegations publicly, largely through postings on his LinkedIn ac

asciilifeform: moar recent völkischer beobachter lulz, https://archive.is/Y7pfH >> 'Federal agents searched the home of a former employee-turned-outspoken critic of the College Board, the standardized testing giant, as part of an investigation into the breach of hundreds of questions from the SAT college entrance exam.'

asciilifeform: i think gribble needs an oil change

asciilifeform: ;;later tell mircea_popescu https://archive.is/rrvO9 << vintage rodgerism lulz

asciilifeform: well this is for when he buys and gets tired!111

asciilifeform: emulated mircea_popescutron sayeth: 'nobody said that letting go of comfortable centralization would be easy.'

asciilifeform: mats: i would buy yours if i had in what to put.

asciilifeform: yes, that koch.

asciilifeform: 'GnuPG maintainer Werner Koch presented the Sunday keynote at GUADEC 2016 in Karlsruhe, Germany. He used the session to push back against the present trends in Internet architecture ... '