asciilifeform wants to know in what roman text these answers lie.

asciilifeform should like the answer to 'how do i grow single-crystal si in jungle conditions, how do i lay down dopant with ion beam sans high vacuum' etc.

asciilifeform: where do you flee from the planet-devourer -if you want to do science- ?

asciilifeform: note, there was a where to flee.

asciilifeform: the ones with actual education, went off to derp in aryan physics or annenerbe etc.

asciilifeform: in contrast, e.g., trofim lysenko's victims were at least intellectually-equipped to understand what was happening to them.

asciilifeform: usg annihilated science to an extent no one ever, i suspect, thought of as possible.

asciilifeform: at least in the english world.

asciilifeform: once you clear away the usg grantsmanship, what mr. mold called 'scientocracy', you realize that actual science mostly 100% stopped around 1960.

asciilifeform: for this work.

asciilifeform: bacterium is almost as much too large as you and i.

asciilifeform: unless some fundamental discovery enabling cellar chip fab were to be made

asciilifeform: the way i understand it, a 100% open fpga, produced in a thousand factories of mutually-antagonistic owners, is the one and only way to 'open computer.'

asciilifeform: which is actually more analogous to a teletype (slow, ponderous, you would not want to print a book's print run on it)

asciilifeform: the closest thing anyone has conceived off to movable type re: chip design is the fpga concept.

asciilifeform: back to chip thread, for a spell - we're roughly in the situation of ancient china, which had printing but not movable type

asciilifeform: very vague, this.

asciilifeform: !s you and the atomic bomb

asciilifeform: if rifles could only be produced in 12 places on the planet, most fighting would still be conducted with spears and axes.

asciilifeform: the secret boojum of chip business is that anything whose production is inherently centralized to that degree, is almost divinely ordained to suck.

asciilifeform: but anyone involved in the patent of algorithms apparatus

asciilifeform: i generally tag all of the parties responsible for this state of affairs as agents of usg, whether they would think of themselves as such or not.

asciilifeform: technically if you were to write a logic synthesis tool today, from scratch, it would still be 'warez'

asciilifeform: costs no more than we're paying now to talk.

asciilifeform: not if you're the designer

asciilifeform: even then

asciilifeform: other than for exotic circuits that reprogram selves, etc

asciilifeform: if you had cheap chip fab, there would not even be much reason to build fpga !

asciilifeform: there would have to be some rational mechanism to bring them into being.

asciilifeform: as in, usg can and will perish, but the widgets spoken of here will not magically appear.

asciilifeform: i'm not convinced this is a usg-dependent phenomenon

asciilifeform: at least, for a silicon chip, that cannot be made in a cellar

asciilifeform: the results must go into soviet-style production by the megatonne.

asciilifeform: it is never enough to reverse engineer a particular item.

asciilifeform: almost as much as the first (and last, and only) xilinx part that had open docs from the vendor

asciilifeform: i did tell the tale, of how on one occasion someone succeeded in mostly reversing a particular chip

asciilifeform: otherwise it would be a simple matter to learn how the mystery meat module works and remplement.

asciilifeform: and their ability to carry out this 'air merchant' trick is entirely tied to a maximally-closed chip architecture.

asciilifeform: (where!? see, e.g, the 'rio pmp' early mp3 player.)

asciilifeform: they virtually never end up in consumer products except as a result of extreme haste (rushing a prototype to market)

asciilifeform: this is because it is quite impossible, as i understand, to really make serious money selling the chips

asciilifeform: decimation: notice that all known fpga manufacturers (xilinx, altera, lattice, a few others) have the same business model ☟︎☟︎

asciilifeform: decimation: the midgets were exterminated, possibly before birth, by patents

asciilifeform: i will not only die of old age but probably manage to fossilize before anyone ever thinks of serving this market.

asciilifeform: just as china (along with the rest of the planet) happily runs winblows.

asciilifeform: for prototyping (the only thing they are presently used for) they are happy to buy the american chips and use their closed turdchains.

asciilifeform: don't wait for the chinese to copy fpga. they have no reason whatsoever to.

asciilifeform: decimation: after it, there could be no mistake as to the nature and motivations of the author.

asciilifeform: decimation: that line was a 'the mask fell off' moment in that article.

asciilifeform: as i may have once explained, the chicoms have not done this and should not be expected to ever do it, because fpga is profoundly useless in a mass consumer product.

asciilifeform: a forcibly blown open 'xilinx' soft/hard stack would be a good start though.

asciilifeform favours the 'year zero' approach, but this is not news

asciilifeform: it was called the ussr.

asciilifeform: and daring anyone to try to stop them

asciilifeform: incidentally, there once lived upon the good earth a group of people who carried on development of entirely open computer hardware, prying open closed turds whenever they felt necessary without even breaking a sweat

asciilifeform: would have to give enough of a shit to fund, but not enough to attempt to direct. this will happen shortly after pigs fly.

asciilifeform: because this is a situation where anything short of 100% is equivalent to 0%.