32700+ entries in 0.326s
mircea_popescu: anyway - back to the scam thing briefly - bitcoin does in fact deliver on its "best economics lab ever devised" role, for they capable and willing to look. the whole "didn't start out
as a scam" thing that is pretty much the universal rule of fiat anything, played itself more obviously, more rapidly, in the hands of more naive people less versed in covering it up.
wywialm:
as in your 'millionaire' essay, cash is of no political significance unless its holder or political institutions around him makes it political
mircea_popescu: suppose, alternatively, that tomorrow china declares that apple is banned
as a terrorist organisation, and no azn corp can do business with them.
mircea_popescu: which,
as a sidepoint, is exactly why increased integration (aka, globalisation) comes with exponentially increased instability.
mircea_popescu: how is it, for that matter, different from "you have to accept,
as a hyip investor, that it's not really an investment".
mircea_popescu: this is the defense against the risks problem above usually deemed
as rational. the problem here is that this in practice always devolves to a sort of "when confronted with the number e, i wish to be insulated from the part past the decimal point and underwrite the part before the decimal point".
mircea_popescu: yes, it is frequerntly implemented. but always
as a ponzi to date.
wywialm: it is certainly in some situations a wealth-preserver (or not wealth decreaser).
as with any insurance, it comes at a cost
mircea_popescu: the idea here is that mpex is a strictly correct and strictly complete reflection of bitcoin business, such
as it is.
BingoBoingo: pete_dushenski: I am tentatively adding the t
as per davout's announcement
mircea_popescu: in a stroke of incomprehensible, ancient beings brilliance, minimal value of bitbet
as established by signed contract in 2012 (100 btc) is almost within 10% of liquidation value of bitbet
as established by free market / receiver, of ~89.35.
BingoBoingo: pete_dushenski: Not in the name
as he presented it with the winning bid
mircea_popescu:
as evidenced to me and for my needs by the plain fact that even when the actual rational explanation is no longer applicable,
mircea_popescu: in entirely unrelated but omfg i can't believe this - cascadia dwelling derpy mother of slavegirl that wants to think of self
as "fiber artist" but otherwise crochets like any old woman since time immemorial, landed what to her appears
as a very good deal. she sells her stuff in a senior citizen center gift shop. for a 15% comission. to understand each other : she provides the merchandise. she provides the sales workforce. sh
mircea_popescu: but hey, welfare works for
as long it works, so does this.
mircea_popescu: much of the same substance
as rms' "oh, all things belong to all people", ie, lazy reductionism.
mircea_popescu: in short, and to sum up : there may never exist such a thing
as the "general purpose computer"
mircea_popescu: or to put it another way : the reason software houses denegerate into makework facilities is much more fundamental than any sort of policy. in point of fact, a numeric computer of the sort we're using is NOT useful in either logic or math but
as a shorhand for an actual logician or mathematician that takes the abortive nonsense the machine spits out, and enchants it into actual usable truth.
mircea_popescu: except the larger the things they tried to build, the worse it got. but then they fixed it. because,
as alf the greek beedog says, "it IS possioble to make wall that won't leak!!11"|
mircea_popescu: let's work a simple example. suppose the case is that your machine is required to behave coherently with the rule that " among even numbers 2 - 8 is
as much of a range
as 1-4 is among natural numbers". the MOMENT your solution to this was "simple, just take $i*2", you have in fact c'd it.
phf: mp keeps saying that you don't have a way to solve it
as an abstract
mircea_popescu: and for that matter, among even numbers 2 - 8 is
as much of a range
as 1-4 is among natural numbers.
mircea_popescu: there is no such thing
as contiguity or ranges that machines can grok.
mircea_popescu: it is, in places such
as ada, "must use contiguity" the EXACT equivalent of "my ai program thinks because the procedure is called <<understanding>>"
mircea_popescu: i picked it
as a point because of the "abstract number" thing, ie, redefine 4.
mircea_popescu: so yes, i can understand WHY you'd like it, think you need it, see it
as best or better.
mircea_popescu: to the question "why did they not define EVEN correctly, eschewing this problem they perceive with mod" you answer that " ada is a civilized lang like commonlisp and there is NOT a presumption that integers are machine words !". This objection, if accepted
as the correct response, ALSO invalidates using, say, XOR, and for the same reason.
mircea_popescu: ie, that the thing
as-is is broken, and should be fixed, but other than that the idea is ok ?
mircea_popescu: so this is what i mean by "it's a c" : whatever the fuck you do, it's still going to be an ugly hack where you "can't define this" but nevertheless define THAT, which is just
as broken.
phf: asciilifeform: recall that i spent probably most time here on tinyscheme going
as far
as writing swank integration and unreleased bignums, i'm saying that you go through phases of "this is how we solve bitcoin". i grok the value of ada, and i grok the value of scheme, but neither are alternative-less. in fact with the amount of skill available, simply hacking on btc consistently we would've been further along
mircea_popescu: an engineering machine is one where you define bitcoin max coins
as it's defined, and you end up with a max equal to 20999999.9769 btc.
mircea_popescu: " people don't like them, but it is also possibly the case that they've gotten
as close
as possible." <<< we're in exact agreement, here. no alternative known, and not likely possible.
phf: asciilifeform: well, same way
as no particular alternatives were seen to tinyscheme few months ago
mircea_popescu: there's some shoddy solutions for the first. chiefly, c. people don't like them, but it is also possibly the case that they've gotten
as close
as possible.
mircea_popescu: there's fundamentally two ways to approach computing :
as an engineer and
as a mathematician.
mircea_popescu: recall what our dispute (of sorts) re ada ended up resolving
as ? "hey man - it may pretend it's not like c - but it's like c".
mircea_popescu: "the web"
as a sort of google-run itunes store ? in the grand tradition of the bbs archive ?
phf: correct way is to have n bots running on different machines, connecting to different freenode hosts, talking to each other
as they get messages, and then submitting a shared answer
mircea_popescu: i can't see him
as anything more or anything else than a decoy.
mircea_popescu: in any conflict, there's moderate positions, and then there's extreme positions. if the moderate position is represented (such
as here by rms), the problem is papered over, and things continue until we fall over.
mircea_popescu: and for
as long
as there's a rms to fuck up things, we'll be waiting.
mircea_popescu: we could just
as well have conversed about the pike carrying gate's head.
mircea_popescu: no dickless washington bureaucrat is or could ever be
as bad
as this abominable imbecile.
mircea_popescu: In the years that followed I was inspired by that ideas, and many times I would climb over ceilings or underneath floors to unlock rooms that had machines in them that people needed to use, and I would usually leave behind a note explaining to the people that they shouldn't be so selfish
as to lock the door. The people who locked the door were basically considering only themselves. They had a reason of course, there was somet
mircea_popescu: somehow josling kept parsing
as the name of an activity.
phf: mircea_popescu: gosling, the guy who designed java, is notable for recognizing the right thing, but intentionally committing an atrocity of java
as a language for the corporate programming. in one of his interviews he says something along the lines of "at least we got ~them~ to use a garbage collector". before java gc was an explicitly lisp thing, which is also gosling's pedigree
phf: that's my impression of american "lucrative" corporate jobs though, because people that i know from that place went on to very similar places, and that's what they do. code
as part of special clojure team in a company that's all java, or code in f# for a special f# team in a company that's all .NET. they get drunk during lunch, shit faced on fridays
phf: and yet she exists within your mind
as a placeholder for unwashed masses entertainment, if only we had tlp to write something about that
phf: but to your genuis of marketing point, not having even a decenarian math within flying distance, i don't really see a way out of that one. guys design their systems for the masses, say
as much in public, and yet somehow there's wide adoption, because one has to eat
phf: to be abcl would've benefited greatly from making their java ffi
as nice
as the one in clojure. that is of course a marketing problem, and that's something hicky thought about very carefully
phf: it's not really a secret why java, every time someone like alf starts talking about cogs in the machine the inevitable answer is "duh", that was the whole point, josling says
as much in his early interviews, including the famous "at least we got them to grok gc"
phf: if you're buying your schemes from supermarket, sure, but my point is that technique is available
as part of the dictionary. can do a hybrid from there, i.e. compiled subtrate
gernika: If asciilifeform ever accidentally ends up at the same hotel
as a rails convention, I expect to see a lot of shattered teeth on the floor.
mircea_popescu: even numbers and natural numbers are EXACTLY
as anything
as the other one.
mircea_popescu: 2) why the fuck exactly do you think you can get 3
as 2+1 in "natural" space but you don't see that you get 4
as 2+1 in "even natural" space ?
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform can you explain the concept of "contiguity"
as seen in this ada spec discussion ?
mircea_popescu: someone pretending to do dev work and not being in wot is ipso facto saying "i am a fraudster trying to sell my shit
as software".
davout: might
as well use changetip
mircea_popescu: just
as long
as it's not "o noes, recall 2016 golden age" we're golden.
davout: anyway, i'm genuinely curious
as to how much bitbet will end up selling for
mircea_popescu: tbh, about
as exciting
as s.mg auctions lol. they always make my sunday.
mircea_popescu: gotta appreciate - the us started exactly
as a sort of tmsr of rich smugglers in an england province. conceptually it still sees broadly
as this "gentleman's agreement" things etc.
mircea_popescu: nfi. bout the same fraction of its life
as it takes young male to get his first time house ?
mircea_popescu: PeterL he has a peculiar notion of poor
as "under the weather / skilled immigrant / etc"
trinque: phf: seems if my nick is automagically changed, my welcome hook would notice that and do the ghost
as written