307600+ entries in 0.197s
mircea_popescu: the ~only reason
they can keep it
together is
that
they get
to define
the
tasks
they want
to solve.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform you imagine
the same would stay
true once every usg item had
to use ipad 6 for lack of alternative, and in ALL applications ? phones, servers, metal detectors, everything, ipad 6 ?
mircea_popescu: phf well he's attributing some agency
to "the enemy", except imo
the wrong sort.
phf: but i'm not attributing any agency
to
the republic, i'm observing and commenting on a
tendency
mircea_popescu: nor do
they have
the optionalities you imagine for
them, it's not a case of "republic, on imperial steroidal vitamins".
mircea_popescu: it's no accident people in
the empire behave like people in
the empire.
mircea_popescu: people in
the empire are dumb enough
to buy,
TO BUY, for MONEY, "copy protection"
that i can
take out with a magic marker. you grok
this ?
mircea_popescu: phf
that's still not
the level of discussion here. yes i'm not entirely blockheaded, i understand
THAT angle of it.
the point is
the other angle however.
take all
the drm adventures : in spite of all
the effort AND proprietary hardware, i can still get any film i want
phf: mircea_popescu: it's
the strategic superiority article's position is what i'm saying. you can rig up ipad
to do crypto for you, as long as you shield it in a bunker, install some
toy language environment on it and spend some
time writing rsa algo in
that
mircea_popescu: as i say : games horridru example for
this closed markets
thing.
mircea_popescu: yes, will say
to you. and i'm
thankful for it, less crud
to compete with. it'll be either buy microsoft fly sim or eulora. hurrr.
mircea_popescu: which is why people in 1800 could live well "writing for
the newspaper" and ditzy sluts
today can't.
mircea_popescu: eulora is a particularly miserable example, in general games by shrewd companies benefit rather
than suffer from locked down markets.
mircea_popescu: phf it's not an equivalent of anything.
the important point here is
that from experience,
this rubber band is very slippery.
there is no such
thing as "tight"
phf: well,
that's an equivalent of running cmucl inside x86 browser virtualization
mircea_popescu: and you'll have
to "forgive" her, because she does your laundry. fuck you.
mircea_popescu: she cooks you a meal like she does every day, i happen
to be in
town, come by and eat it, you come home and oops, she forgot
this
time
mircea_popescu: not
take in
that sense necessarily.
that is
take of
the sort of people who read
trilema and "take" some part
to put on
their own blog.
mircea_popescu: much like any young hussy
theoretically owned by her father is really really desperate
to give
the show away ?
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform what if i, unlike you,
that enjoys people, knows for a fact
that any item
the government nominally owns is mine for
the
taking ?
mircea_popescu: it is
them, after all,
throwing abundant resources in
the chase of a pipe dream.
mircea_popescu: and by we in
this case i mean
to include any and all enemies,
too.
mircea_popescu: phf i insist on
this point
to impress upon
the more decisive elements exactly how weak a basis for discernment we actually have.
phf: so at
this point when i or ascii
talk about general purpose, it is in
terms of negative, a doomed attempt
to undo past 20 years
to continue r&d
that was killed
mircea_popescu: and
the problems with "roughly, means 'machine where you can implement new crypto', for mircea_popescu's purposes" should be obvious
to someone who astutely points out
that
there's no math proof for crypto.
the same
thinking
that works
there works here, it does not follow i need computers redditard can buy
to exist in order for
to have crypto.
phf: well, we don't have a definition, i don't
think "we" have ever arrived at a point where definition can be provided. what constitutes a general purpose computer, which are necessary/unnecessary parts. i'm reading 80s vlsi papers and it's all up in
the air. should
there be math coprocessor or bake it right into cpu, etc. etc. and
then you have a "microcomputer revolution", when bill/steve start selling
this shit
to masses
mircea_popescu: as a matter of fact it may appear, but a negative lacks
the definition capacity.
mircea_popescu: understand : just because you don't get
to have "general purpose hole", it is not automatically
thereby proven "enemy gets black hole"
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform
this stand would be a lot more defensible if general purpose computing made a sense!
mircea_popescu: i
tell you honestly if i were
to go on a mountaintop now, IF i considered
taking a computer AT ALL
phf: now a working cpu comes preinstalled with all
the gunk
that various parties decided is needed, over
the course of past 20 years
mircea_popescu: it's not even clear we even want half
the shit we have.
phf: back
then a working cpu at capacity was
the point, we have floating point here now, gives wider possibility space, etc.
mircea_popescu: if
this is
true
then any handwringing of any sort is an exercise in insanity.
phf: now it's starting
to look
that new hardware, be it for
the select elite or plebs is not going
to be general purpose in
that same sense, because interested parties figured out what kind of constraints are desirable or
tolerable
phf: sure, i don't myself grok
the cause. i'm more saying
that 80s general purpose computer is a
time and place kind of phenomenon
mircea_popescu: this is just one of many possible ideological colors
that may be retrospectively applied.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform and i was
too dumb
to do much with
the machine. such is life.
phf: i'm saying
that 80s general purpose computers existed because of wide open possibility space. "let's built
this generic computron" "alan
turing" all
that
phf: sure, and you can
tell
that
to americans in
the audience, but
that's not
the issue i'm
talking about
mircea_popescu: there were 20+ kids who had a driver drive
them
to school.
mircea_popescu: understand - at some point in my life, "owning a computer" as opposed
to a speccy, or a video game console, was a social selection bar SO HIGH
that out of my entire preppiest-school-in-town it selected for
TWO PEOPLE.
phf: i had computer access back when
they were extremely expensive one of a kind devices
mircea_popescu: adding more engineers
to a late project makes it later ; adding more bipedal mouthbreathers
to anything makes it resemble shit closer.
mircea_popescu: wikipedia is not better for pretending every imbecile is "an editor", it's way
the fuck worse.
the internet did not gain from
the "collected intelligence and experience of
the whole world", it
turned into a cesspool instead.
mircea_popescu: but if i were somehow persuaded
to care - frankly i'm inclined
to believe making computers cow-accessible was a horrible fucking idea.
mircea_popescu: i can see why it's in
the geek ethos. i can't see why i should care.
mircea_popescu: this notion
that "every squishi wizard" must have access
to
the light bolt spell is lulzy,
to me.
mircea_popescu: appreciate, i had a computer EVEN WHEN it was ~5k DM and
the going rate was half-and-half for 5. and i'm sure
that at some point between
then and now, some poor black kid in
the sticks somewhere wanted a computer only
to hear "da fuck ya want dat witey shit fo boe!" from his momma and get
to play casino gems on her knockoff smartphone instead.
mircea_popescu: phf i don't see how
that is different from, "you buy fruit juicer, you can't play dos games on it". yes ?
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform yes. let it be, ~nobody cares about ddos. it is expensive enough
to engage in and we really don't gas.
mircea_popescu: phf i meant something specific : how can a "mode" be "replaced". sounds
to me (prolly proof of my ignorance) like "blue colors have been deprecated in irssi". dude... what ? it's my fucking config file.
mircea_popescu: punkman> could have various proxies, mpex-style <<< yeah,
the republic will start printing bitcoin
to finance an inept war with
the idiot us, because
the us is caught in dreams of its war with
the soviet union and its delusional relevancy
therein.
shinohai: Got a
template you can send me or something? I've just been writing everything in vi
BingoBoingo: Mebbe next
time you can learn
to do
the preet picture on your own.
shinohai: Always on
top of a Preet story :D
phf:
http://btcbase.org/log/2016-04-22#1455447 << i don't believe in
this futureeither, it's orwell silly. but much more realistic is something like what i described above. you buy "current hardware", you can't boot foolinux, because need bios keys, need
to boot redhat. redhat supports your video card, but only in wayland, and
the keyboard only works
through modern-udev. both require vendor provided binary blobs. etc.
☝︎ phf: but freezing effectively implies lockstep freezing of
the whole environment,
to hardware. ("oh we deprecated x11, your code better support wayland. oh
this new video card only supports wayland, since x11 is deprecated, etc."]
☟︎ phf: when
the solution becomes
to freeze
phf: you have a changing subtrate, changing interfaces. you can hot iron parts while it's at a manageable size and localized, but at some point you start dealing with systemd
type situation where
the
tendrils are inside either
the code
that you use OR inside
the subtrate/interfaces part (i.e. connection
to outside world)
phf: then wrote a rant how
that's unsustainable for a single person on account of having essentially
to work as a merge maintainer for a dozen of projects
a111: Logged on 2016-04-12 23:01 phf: freedesktop strategy is
to create an abstraction layer on
top of base
tools
that makes
things "simpler", and
then
transparently switch
the base. in
this case value of gtk & sdl
to wreckers is
that
they both operate on wayland already. sdl seems somewhat sane but i wouldn't be surprised if gnome deprecates
their X support at some point
punkman: maybe even scrap
the website part, publish reports once a week/month
punkman: more important
that phuctoring is uninterrupted
than having 24/7 access
to website