asciilifeform: it is that. but also imho a reasonable engineering term. it describes the engineering equivalent of obesity
asciilifeform: it's true, whether or not i restate it, lol
asciilifeform: this is the wine-with-chickenshit-subtracted from yesterday's thread.
asciilifeform: this is again the 'i can tell gabriel_laddel from maxwell' . asciilifeform , and mircea_popescu , and any sane folx can trivially distinguish 'less malnutrited japanese' from 'mcfood-eater' transformations
asciilifeform: 'alien problem' is how one says to the folx who maneuver themselves into a dead end, and who very much were architects of their own misfortune, that their problems are NOT 'the problem of all mankind' and that to construct for them 'solutions', such as they would accept, is harmful to the sane
asciilifeform: what's the dysfunctional veneering in saying to the fat-tard 'stop having become fat' rather than 'here is how to rework train seats everywhere' ?
asciilifeform: the gods only dropped heuristics, not revelations.
asciilifeform: 'to pull rabbit from a hat, he must be actually in the hat'
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: it is especially difficult for fathers with... nothing to pick from
asciilifeform: the litmus asciilifeform lives with is, roughly: show him a pertinent item made of 'maths he hasn't learned'; is response 'hmm, lemme disappear for a week into my study and come back' or ... 'I SHOULDN'T HAVE TO !111'
asciilifeform: the saving grace is that it is not , in practice, usually difficult to distinguish the folx who are at least earnestly shooting for maxwellization ( and prepared to acknowledge failure ; THEIR ~personal~ failure ) from the gabriel_laddels
asciilifeform: the memory gymnastics in mpi. and 'for your convenience, we will package the defective transistors separately!11' , i'll call it here
asciilifeform: here's a trivial corpse of an epicycle straight from asciilifeform's desk : normalization in bignummery
asciilifeform: more dangerous is the gabriel_laddel-style confusion, 'i dun need no book-larnin', classical mechanics is for squares, i'ma straight to genius and discovery'
asciilifeform: not that it's a bad example, but 'human rights' is 'easy' bunkum , unlikely to be confused with a physically-existing item except by the deliberately mendacious folks and their useful idiots
asciilifeform: the pantsuit picture is then presumably that somebody 'sat down to impose epicycles' ( in the spirit of 'newton sat down to...' ) ?
asciilifeform: and i find it especially infuriating when they slither into islands of sanity like ada
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: ~whole field consists of 'it works, BUT...'
asciilifeform: ( though will point out, consequences of this type of leak, is early death of the proggy, rather than 'ballons into red dwarf' a la prb or firefox )
asciilifeform: again secondarystack is not implemented as an open-ended (unboundedly growing) item
asciilifeform: it isn't a leak, as such, isn't a heap
asciilifeform: which , as written , requires secondarystackism
asciilifeform: presumably was done to implement 100% of the standard.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: the secondary stack thing worx correctly in modern-day gnat. but i banned it. ( because it makes reading disasmed binariolade harder; reasoning about the semantics of the latter -- also harder; and consumes very scarce, on small embedded chips, memory , imho needlessly )☟︎
asciilifeform: diana_coman: consider, not only 'programmable' but theoretically the only 'indestructible' machine yet built, where you can (at least in principle) replace ALL of the wear parts without stopping
asciilifeform: phf: lemme guess, their beards, were not white ?
asciilifeform: diana_coman: picture, if su survived, you might be designing votingcircuit cpu for e.g. 'buran'
asciilifeform: the free cyrpto is three doors down, Matthew
asciilifeform: ( why ? e.g. naggum's canonical 'if all you need is for something to "work", and you don't give a damn when and how it fails, C++ and Perl is for you. if you care deeply about not having your software fail, you would naturally feel a correspondingly deep sense of betrayal from the authors of both languages -- because they make it so damn hard to express the fact that you do care about the failure modes.' )☟︎
asciilifeform: from what asciilifeform has seen, life is often quite hard for actual-engineers who end up in programmerdom. sorta like shalamov's observation re folx from baltics, not only better-nutritioned and taller to begin with ( by itself gives higher 'idle rpm' ) but whose daily life was 'farther from gulag' , starved sooner than ru folx ( in particular rural )
asciilifeform: it is very grating on the nerves, to read such crapola
asciilifeform: publishers used to pay professionals to do this. and it ~needed~ doing. whereas today one will routinely find 'technical' b00kz that look exactly like microshit-'word' printouts bound and covered, with line and page breaks scattered entirely arbitrarily
asciilifeform: and speaking of this, asciilifeform is almost certainly doomed to properly texize ffa in the end. there are so few things more loathesome than reading MECHANICALLY REFLOWED code. whether line flow or page breaks.
asciilifeform: diana_coman: i am one of those weirdos who still does a large amt of his programming -- and the bulk of his code-reading -- on paper.
asciilifeform as you can see from the pic, uses vertical displays. and when reading serious proggy , tends to send it to printer ! which - guesswhat - doesn't know how to reflow ( and if it did, would mangle indent and create unreadable soup )
asciilifeform: more or less all prog langs give a clean way to multilineize strings
asciilifeform: a real Lisp world would be so much better. however, a real Lisp world cannot win as long as GUILE is the image people have of a Lisp environment, just like Lisp has suffered tremendously from the Scheme people's insistence that Scheme as taught to college students is what they should expect from Lisp.'
asciilifeform: inefficiency are bad for Lisp, which would have done it a lot better had it been in control, but GUILE doesn't do it any better. GUILE combines the worst of both worlds, in an attempt to bring the best of one world to a world where it doesn't really belong. on top of this, it's Scheme, and it's expensive to run, there's so much wrong with it that nobody can use it without fixing some part of it. so, it's going to be a winner, but
asciilifeform: and, to round off the archaeological dig, https://www.xach.com/naggum/articles/3129467830883882@naggum.no.html >> 'the programming environment model in Unix is an imitation of the Lisp machine, and the way it is implemented is through processes and inter-process communication instead of function calls. functions in the Lisp heap are programs on disk in the Unix model. the optimizations that made Unix able to survive this incredible
asciilifeform: https://www.xach.com/naggum/articles/3129441516179845@naggum.no.html << relatedly. >> 'the problem with retrofitting a Lisp or Scheme onto Unix is that Unix really is a C programming environment, and using the C mindset when building Lisp or Scheme applications or systems on top of it loses. the same is true of any other programming language with an environment that takes the role of Unix for C.'
asciilifeform: >> '...when I look at Scheme programs that try to do more than trivial tasks, or at Scheme systems that try to give people a framework to work in, I get the "perl experience" -- heaps of ugly but useful hacks to get some short-term job done. seems to me that the flip side of the "only the most elegant are admitted" argument is that there is no lower bound on the ugliness of what is _not_ admitted, yet necessary to get there in pract
asciilifeform: ( this is almost possibly the first litmus for a n00b : will he read logs when told to ? show symptoms of actually having done so, and learne d? )
