asciilifeform: wintel answered the threat posed by 'coreboot' et al by stuffing shitgnomism straight into the silicon (southbridge, and soon cpu proper)

asciilifeform: punkman: but none of them feature 'consumer pc' hardware

asciilifeform: (and before anyone asks, no, it is not a simple matter to build it from source like any other thing. needs an existing gcc configured to play ball in order to bootstrap itself)

asciilifeform: having succumbed to shitgnomism years ago.

asciilifeform: 'gnat' appears to be entirely unbuildable on gentoo

asciilifeform: it was utterly incomprehensible to the uninitiated.

asciilifeform confesses that he could not be bothered to unravel the how-and-why behind that particular wankage

asciilifeform: where the practical distinction between a satisfied user and a spammer who wrote a review in exchange for a bowl of rice and a day's pass from the sex slave farm, is purely academic

asciilifeform: and something like this is quite inevitable when a product degenerates to that level of necessary attention span

asciilifeform: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B9EKh_lIEAE1O8u.jpg << punkman found this a while ago

asciilifeform: no idea if this has anything to do with age, or the fact that games industry died.

asciilifeform: but was unable to come up with any plausible 3 whatsoever.

asciilifeform: i must point out that i have no idea whether 1 or 2

asciilifeform: there were two logical scenarios that formed in my head, 1) he did the things he was credited for, and somebody then came and scooped out his brain 2) he didn't, took credit after someone else did, was the kind of fellow selected for this next stage of meritwash

asciilifeform: i was utterly floored by the sheer imbecility

asciilifeform: thestringpuller: background for that article: herr baggett came to my town once, and gave a public talk where he pitched a militantly idiotic 'startup' (nothing whatsoever to do with games, a weird proprietary, closed-source email client with 'new, exciting, unprecedented' spam filter that is a poor clone of 1990s state of the art)

asciilifeform: (how? let's start with those iterations, every single one of which will suddenly need a nonsense variable; all the things that will have to be declared for the occasion, that presently are genericized; etc)

asciilifeform: 2) tearing out 'boost' while keeping the project in cpp will turn it into an unreadable morass of crud that makes the existing turd look like the finest sausage ☟︎

asciilifeform: 1) the idea of tearing out 'boost' while retaining the 'satoshi cleanup' concept of therealbitcoin project - is a total impossibility

asciilifeform: but to go back to the basic point of the musical interlude,

asciilifeform: it takes more than one 'blacksmith' and his 'hammers' to ruin that, but eventually - yes, ruined.

asciilifeform: more valuable than any particular microscope, even the rarest, is the -idea- of a microscope

asciilifeform: you can see the results in museum

asciilifeform: like the barbarians who carved up roman mosaics for sword hilt 'bling'

asciilifeform: junkyard dogs, the lot of them, who found something valuable and stole a piece

asciilifeform: i, for one, didn't fully grasp the difference until i heard that charlatan (baggett) speak

asciilifeform: yet for some odd reason these activities are lumped in together

asciilifeform: which is entirely not the same thing as a product developed and shipped in a standardized, adult common lisp system (what naggum earned his bread with)

asciilifeform: also note that that outfit, like many others (yes, it isn't in 'nyt', but still existed) wrote a miniature 'college' lisp-flavoured scripting language inside their normal runtime

asciilifeform: for anything but trivial 'homework'

asciilifeform: is still there.

asciilifeform: cannot speak for the quality, but the demand - was there

asciilifeform: (was game dev in that period)

asciilifeform: talk to a game dev who was active in the '90s

asciilifeform: for so long as that abortion of a language existed.

asciilifeform: you can't really pull out 'boost' and retain the naked-eye-plus-patch-util sense of 'this is visibly bitcoind pre-$10-per but with minor changes' thing

asciilifeform: thestringpuller: if you're gonna go to that level of mutilation, may as well abandon the pedigreed-descent-from-0.5.3 thing and go for rewrite

asciilifeform: less said about these, better sleep at night, l0l

asciilifeform: especially ones i fished out of the sewers in a hurry, for purposes of experiment.

asciilifeform: thestringpuller: in general, i'm opposed to patching in gavinisms of any description

asciilifeform: thestringpuller: that's correct

asciilifeform: thestringpuller: also remember that the 'magic' of gavincoin was that it will work on existing hw, so long as 'everybody agrees' to throw away blockchain history and surrender

asciilifeform: thestringpuller: the idiot crashy one ('classic', with memleak) or the one with questionable patch ('orphanage burner') ?

asciilifeform: as in, there is not a 'free world' si fab.

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: see the problem from the perspective in which it actually -is- a problem: not that a billion people own computer that is not a computer (nowhere is it written that we have to care about this) but in the elementary lack of a practical alternative.

asciilifeform: but for practical reasons this has not yet been achieved

asciilifeform: interestingly, intel and microshit have been salivating for a decaee+ over the concept of a cpu that runs not merely mandatorily-signed but encrypted code (to internal key)

asciilifeform: point being that millions of boxes are permanent thralls to usg until key gets out.

asciilifeform: 'i don't care if they're stoking up the ovens, they'll go in'

asciilifeform: 'but Richard is seemingly frightened about the compiler competition from LLVM that is out under a permissive free software license.' << fud artist lies through his teeth. rms is not 'frightened of competition under permissive licenses', but is pointing out that organized attack by shitgnomes flying (as always) flags of convenience, is under way. ☟︎

asciilifeform: ^ basic kindergarten facts, at this point, i will not bother to expound on them here

asciilifeform: (those who believe that it does not matter what is in the bios so long as you can boot your favourite unix, are mistaken. not only can bios diddle your drives pre-boot, but it isn't even necessary - routines like smm handler run continuously, outside of os)

asciilifeform: ^ the 'won't boot anything not signed by key in antifuse rom' thing - finally arrived.

asciilifeform: rs possibly to be exactly that. Whether that is the case is what I want to find out."'

asciilifeform: 'Other Emacs stakeholders responded with confusion how this could be "a systematic effort to attack GNU packages" and also raised points on how Emacs has support for Microsoft Windows and OS X but wouldn't consider a basic patch for enabling the LLDB debugger to be used. Stallman followed up to say, "These are not similar cases. Neither Windows nor MacOS was intended to push major GNU packages out of use. What I see here appea

asciilifeform: ^ and this is relatively old news, http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTEwMjI

asciilifeform: incidentally, folks recommending freebsd as an escape should remember that it's been colonized: gcc is no longer installed by default there, nor are system bins built with it

asciilifeform: (linked) http://linux.slashdot.org/story/15/01/14/2030259/systemd-gains-new-networking-features << lol, somehow missed this