log☇︎
307900+ entries in 0.183s
asciilifeform: or did someone do all of this already
asciilifeform: chemically prepare the cut wafer ?
asciilifeform: cut the wafer ?
asciilifeform: do you need to melt and refine the si ?
asciilifeform: i.e. there is no effective way to subtly sabotage the thing if you do not know the victim's intended circuit layout.
asciilifeform: fpga also plays well with my 'specificity of diddling' theorem.
asciilifeform: (fpga only became a seriously practical thing, really, in 2000s. you will find them from '90s but on MASSIVE boards with dozens of the same unit)
phf: i'm very vague on the whole process, i'll have to read up on it
asciilifeform: unfortunately it would have to be on a reasonably recent density, to be useful.
asciilifeform: the by far least idiotic item to make.
asciilifeform: if i could make one thing, on a traditional si process, it would be an fpga.
asciilifeform: and as it stands, 'hobbyist' semiconductor is roughly in the same place as hobbyist space travel.
asciilifeform: unenviable field to live in.
asciilifeform: as it stands, it has a good chunk of the difficulty of space colonization but with ~none of the 'sexappeal'
asciilifeform: phf: 'give a damn' in the serious financial sense.
asciilifeform: there was a whole world of approaches that people spent their lives on, before cheap semiconductor, and entirely forgotten now
phf: define giving a damn. most people would see something like that as a hobbyist project along the lines of building a cpu out of nand gates, but funding it as an militarized alternative to modern computing?
asciilifeform: it is even worth considering that one could, in principle, compute on something ~other than a semiconductor~
asciilifeform: (last i recall mircea_popescu gave somewhere close to 1/10th of a damn, he is to be commended for this) ☟︎
asciilifeform: the most discouraging part is the utter lack of anybody giving half a tinker's damn.
asciilifeform: but i did not - to date - get far.
asciilifeform: (modified b&w photo process, or at least something not more complicated than doing colour photo at home)
asciilifeform: with the aim of, ideally, finding a way to make integrated circuit in similar ways to how hobbyist can make pcb
asciilifeform: for a while i got into the question of cupric oxide and other exotic semiconductor
asciilifeform: (this is mainly academic exercise, 74xxx do not grow on trees any more than 'opteron' does.)
asciilifeform: but ok for, e.g., calculating dynamics of the tamper in hbomb.
phf: some problems are probably better solvable than others, can perhaps build a st-506<->sd gadget in garage, can't do same with the cpu
a111: Logged on 2015-08-02 16:43 asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: recall that pdp emulator fella ?
asciilifeform: recall the pdp emulator thread ?
phf: well the man who (still) does it for living is not necessarily the ultimate authority, he just does what he needs to do to get those mil contracts cashing in
asciilifeform: would have ended up with a result, too, if 'life had not gotten in the way'
asciilifeform: at any rate, all of these problems are solvable IF SOMEONE CARED TO
asciilifeform: some outfit in texas makes an emulator gadget, it costs 4 figures.
asciilifeform: other than a tall (shrinking, as i understand, today - to nothing) pile of drives.
phf: i know some folk who can restore 3620 drives, but's that's because that's what they do. i'll ask them what their solutions are at the moment
asciilifeform: so i could get rid of the brick and replace with $1 sd card.
asciilifeform: wanted to not merely read the disk, but emulate
asciilifeform: gave up from lack of time.
asciilifeform: i actually spent the first ~6 mo. after i bought the lisp machine, trying to rig up, with fpga, a mechanism to read the fucking disk ☟︎
asciilifeform: real, e.g., 'zero' airplane, exists, in flying condition even somewhere, but do you think it will be wasted on a ~film~ ?!
asciilifeform: then you probably know that NONE of the tanks or planes appearing in ones made in past 40 or so yrs are genuine period.
asciilifeform: like to watch ww2 films ?
asciilifeform: the shell - before anyone asks - has the requisite cabling, ALSO unfindable.
asciilifeform: (though schmidt did sell me an ~empty shell~ of a tape drive, in case i can ever locate the drive raw !)
asciilifeform: contents can only be loaded onto it from tape, and i have neither the tape, nor the tape drive !
asciilifeform: because, among other reasons, if the disk dies, there is literally NO WAY to restore it
asciilifeform: i haven't switched the thing on in some years
asciilifeform: it was quite like that airfield, yes.
asciilifeform: i went to the house, where this was done
asciilifeform: which had been cannibalized, largely, to feed their dozen or so working ones
asciilifeform: consisting of a tall pile of MiGs
asciilifeform: where we talked about the junkyard in the airport in timisoara
asciilifeform: does anyone recall the jet fighter thread ?
asciilifeform: it is quite the same with 10,000 opteron cpu.
asciilifeform: when romans sealed up a vestal virgin who had a fuck, they gave her a loaf of bread and a glass of milk
phf: i didn't realize it until you said it, and it's fucking hilarious, because i'd mock the strategy elsewhere
asciilifeform: and then ... .
asciilifeform: this is a computerized version of the traditional american 'survivalist' lunacy
phf: standardize on 2010 hardware, buy n+1 replacements for all the parts, write program to talk to god
asciilifeform: if they want classic msdos gamez
asciilifeform: phf: that 'future' is here already for iPnohe users, who have to run the js pc emulator in the browser to play gamez
asciilifeform: this is a ~basic, necessary step~ to sanity of whatever any other kind.
asciilifeform: 2) toolchain is not a closed x86 turd, and in fact can run on an arch implemented on SELFSAME CHIP itself.
asciilifeform: it means that 1) design is published and is likely to remain available, no reverse-engineered americrud plox
asciilifeform: it is worth elaborating re what 'sane' means in this case.
asciilifeform: it is the only thing approaching a general-purpose pill against the garbage.
phf: i.e. my cmucl runs on a clearly compromised intel cpu and can even do interesting things. imagine future(tm) where only way to run cmucl is by crosscompiling into x86 emulator inside your web browser ;] ☟︎
asciilifeform: this is why the sane fpga will have to be produced.
phf: naggums have a fit, for obvious reasons, but you can still keep on using that emacs, until "they come for me and noone's left"
phf: right, but on the meta level we're at the MULE point of cancer
asciilifeform: (see thread re 'opteron' etc)
asciilifeform: well in practice the only usable hardware ALREADY is out of print.
phf: end times situation is that there's not going to be usable hardware, because "nobody" needs it
asciilifeform: (how rms left the lisp world, think.)
asciilifeform: it is especially concerning because the 'end times' situation, where usable computer hardware is expensive and you cannot rely on other folks having same one as you, etc. is actually how we ended up with the unix braindamage to begin with.
asciilifeform: the most concerning bit is the hardware extinction.
phf: i'm more concerned that there's very little ground left that's unpolluted on which i can build a house or possibly raise a barn with other people
phf: i'm ok that there exists a superior tool that solves a class of problems. kind of like right now paying for intellij ensures that i can do a certain paid work in the most effective way available. perhaps if i have another interesting lisp project, i'll call alegro people again, etc.
asciilifeform: a race where not only first place but places one through ten thousand went to a single winner.
asciilifeform: it is precisely mircea_popescu's story about zeus throwing the other gods
asciilifeform: ida is a particularly interesting case because it is a TOTAL monopoly ☟︎☟︎
asciilifeform: phf: presently there is nothing else to do
phf: wireshark is a kind of IDA or intellij, can just have them running on your most-sane-dev-box-du-jour
asciilifeform: trinque: because nothing else is likely to exist in our lifetime ?
asciilifeform: thing is, someone will have to maintain the forked (and, in practice, re-write, most of them are quite nearly unmaintainable) proggies. there is not actually a substitute for, e.g., wireshark.
trinque: you've argued too well for burning the thing down all the way to the hardware.
asciilifeform: so there is ~no one to do the burning.
asciilifeform: actually carrying the exercise to a usable-to-other-people, well-documented conclusion is somewhere Nth on the list of things i would do if i had mircea_popescuesque levels of free time
phf: who's going to do the burning ☟︎
asciilifeform: as in, what needs to be fixed, and what - burned with hot irons until not even wet spot remains.
asciilifeform: at any rate my gentoo-depoetteringizer does not magically fix the ecosystem, shat to all hell, no. but what it ~does~ do is to hard-nuke the autopullin crapolade and reveal who is your enemy and who is merely passive victim.
phf: right,puts you back in naggum territory
asciilifeform: if your stomach is strong, and little else to do (who?) can go, try.
asciilifeform: whosoever can be arsed, can try to strip it away.
asciilifeform: at the heart of something like power management there is normally a 500-lines-of-c util that mostly worx, but surrounded for some reason by hairball of rubbish scriptolade
phf: well, it reveals that core infrastructure is rotten, i assume "few proggies" is what's needed on your battlestation, because on a laptop i'm still for example missing power management tooling. even shell script based stuff depends on dbus or somesuch
asciilifeform: and yeah, you will know the idiocies by their mile-long trails of 'pango', 'bonobo', and other strange deps
asciilifeform: (outside of the mega-film)
asciilifeform: just as, walking on the street, you meet men, and flies, but never a man-fly hybrid of questionable species
phf: at the very least the demarcation lines become ~very~ obvious. it's either an old unix hand with one or two libs in dependency tree, or a modern monster that pulls 50 libraries and fails to install because of some poetterlib