log☇︎
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mircea_popescu: phf that argentina is essentially a scam. it never existed ; much like vhs america never existed.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform argentina ? it's great for a week, and for a month. it's horrible for longer because the people are such subhuman shits.
phf: asciilifeform: i think the main objection is that it's a country of millenials, lota pretense, not much doing
asciilifeform: and i dun give a nanofuck that 'nightclubs there are small and crowded'. su circa 1975 had 0 nightclubs and i'd pick it over anywhere in known solar system, yes i would.
ben_vulpes: asciilifeform: walking the blockchain in search of payments to a pubkey or pubkey hash, and indexing those in some manner (accounting for spends) such that they can be reconstituted into a transaction later
asciilifeform: a former neighbour -- also, and ditto
phf: i know a few argentinians through yoga jet set crowd, and they are pleasant and fun company if nothing else. i prefer them to americans or germans most of the time
asciilifeform: ( i will say, 0 of the things that drove mircea_popescu barking mad about the place, bother me at all. then again i was there for a week.. ) ☟︎
asciilifeform: phf: it left a pretty good-looking corpse, phf
deedbot: http://www.contravex.com/2017/04/03/who-needs-to-learn-languages-when-you-have-google-translate/ << » Contravex: A blog by Pete Dushenski - Who needs to learn languages when you have Google Translate?
ben_vulpes: doesn't sound like much of a surprise
asciilifeform: to become legitimately 'an algorithm', rather than 'this thing a particular moron shat out'
asciilifeform: it has to cease to be a cpp proggy.
asciilifeform: not speaking of machines here, i dun have a 'large comp that ain't a c machine' to even test with.
mircea_popescu: i don't see how it'll seriously run on anything besides a c machine for the mid term.
asciilifeform: at any rate this is a bizarre line of thought. trb (or rather, bitcoin, the existing network) has any kind of long term future ~strictly~ if it can be entirely separated from the cpp abortion.
mircea_popescu: no. it encompasses any iotem that is a computer.
asciilifeform: this is not much of a definition, it encompasses more or less any comp that is large enough
asciilifeform: ('nqb' for instance is about half of a zero-otherpeoplescode implementation of same.)
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: it ain't 'the software', either, it's a set of algos, they do not even take much paper to describe.
asciilifeform: trb (the currently existing item) could quite conceivably run on entirely different type of machine, under emulation (smbx , for instance, shipped... believe -- a c compiler, in genera. along with fortran, ada..)
mircea_popescu: c machine does have a specific meaning, and it is "item which runs trb."
asciilifeform: 'c machine' has a specific meaning, refers to the type of cpu that traces descent to the transistor-impoverished 1970s, when bounds check was seen as unaffordable luxury.
asciilifeform: this in fact is a practical definition of 'turd' in our context : item that, massage it as you will, is still fundamentally broken by design.
mircea_popescu: in any case : it's work done upon a portion of the c machine. what more is needed to qualify ?
asciilifeform: not a single second of time spent reading or massaging shitoshi's liquishit, contributed anything whatsoever to the c machine problem.
mircea_popescu: it is trying to fix the trb, which is a component of the c machine, defined as "runs trb"
asciilifeform: presently i suspect that mircea_popescu has a correct understanding of thompson.
asciilifeform: BUT the unfortunate bit is that there are ALSO a variety of ways to end up back ~in~.
asciilifeform: 'it wouldn't do.' 'only a terrorist would.'
asciilifeform: but mircea_popescu has it, there is a variety of ways to break out of a hypothetically thompsonized universe. but -- for some reason -- ~entirely 'not done'.
asciilifeform: the one where 'i can read an eprom without a comp. and write it without a comp. now where is your thompson bomb.'
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: it is conceivable that no one now living has ever used a 'pre-patch' gcc. that's the idea, that 'gcc' is not in fact defined by its src, but by the aggregate of 'the published src' + 'the extant sets of built gccs'
mircea_popescu: well ok, so the understanding of the thompson bootstrap problem is that it's not an absolute bar to bootstrapping, but a possible pitfall ?
asciilifeform: 'perceive a change' how ?
mircea_popescu: either i get to use my tool frist, in which case i can perceive a change ; or else i don't get to use my tool first, in which case -- prediction is necessary.
mircea_popescu: because if "patch after used" then it's created a partition which i can use ; and if "predict" then the inf-in-being is rightthere.
asciilifeform: and it'll be a 1 byte difference in 1 place.
asciilifeform: well, if using ANY 'old world' soft -- gcc, emacs, linux kernel, bsd -- that's a 'won't'.
phf: i don't think it's a problem for an arbitrary chain. i was more thinking lizard hitler patches compiler to specifically fuck with rotor3 chain
asciilifeform: or nudge a stack so it overflows if magic number present.
mircea_popescu: the hope that it'll always find a way to do what you want it to do in front of my boundless requests is essentially the root of government.
asciilifeform: phf: the basic theorem involved in breaking out of a thompsonism is specificity-of-diddling.
mircea_popescu: ad-hoced it above. the thing which thomson describes, which is a very fundamental "specificly diddlable" process. "man in his cave" sort of thing.
asciilifeform: the standards group stopped short of 'any compiler that shits out a bitstring different from the official one for a particular cpu, is nonconformant', however.
mircea_popescu: what does exist is a version whereby the secret can be built ~on the basis of~ given inputs.
mircea_popescu: the problem with this, however, is that the magical hash-with-checksum function ~does not exist~. it's part of trilema sf for a reason.
mircea_popescu: phf the premise ("1 item can be compromised") is true ; this however is not a ~systematic~ concern. the reason it isn't a systematic concern has everything to do with the imaginary concept of "the hash with checksum". suppose 1) a hash function existed which 2) contained a secret which 3) allowed the possessor to distiguish possible inputs into two classes and then on the basis of the result know whether the input that led to
asciilifeform: anything that eats a maybe-inspected input and produces a never-inspected-but-is-executed output.
phf: in this case control of the bootstrap machine is at the very least equivalent to "if i compile a source, would the behavior of the binary correspond to what the compiler specification fully or not"
mircea_popescu: please put a terminator when you're done and i'ma do my best to ignore the interlopers!
asciilifeform: and such a gadget is not, save for the eprom, in the usual sense 'electronic'
asciilifeform: it is not difficult to build a gadget that dumps an eprom to paper tape
asciilifeform: dun have to take my word for it, can try it yourself, burn a decade like i did.
asciilifeform: trinque: the x64 box that 'you can get the docs for' is , as i learned experimentally and very painfully -- a strictly imagined item
phf: mircea_popescu: i'm not saying that it's going to be infected. i'm saying that's what trust means in a bootstrapping problem. if you're not concerned about that angle, you can relax trust requirements significantly.
asciilifeform: trinque: problem is that every gb nic in existence needs a blob.
asciilifeform: it isn't a 'separate matter', it is a lifetime of liquishit pumping
asciilifeform: trinque: the flaw is that you gotta support a megatonne of liquishit for even nic to work -- dma, page tables, etc
trinque: right, so that's a separate matter
trinque being an idiot in these matters, has a very stupid (and unfinished) scheme in x86-64 asm
phf: gcc has a long living nsa hack that modifies some pattern in a malicious way, etc.
asciilifeform: let's say that every machine that ever saw a linux kernel tarball, since, say, 2002, patched it.
mircea_popescu: i think we're not talking of the same thing. so, i have, for the sake of argument, a 50k line bcc, which builds c and doesn't optimize. it's my bootstrapping compiler. it runs on musl, say. i fire up a pogo, put this on, and proceed to build a kernel during the next week.
phf: you can design a malicious bootstrapper that will compromise the bootstrapped code
phf: mircea_popescu: trust in bootstrapping problem is a specific concern that comes from ken thompson's "reflections on trusting trust"
a111: Logged on 2017-02-24 02:36 asciilifeform: veen: let's try a historical angle. according to legend, emperor qin shi huangdi (same d00d as known for taking the 'immortality pill' and promptly croaking) had a palace with 1,500 rooms. and would not tell anyone in advance which one he plans to sleep in on a given night. and which ones he would put cutthroats in, ready to kill anyone who opens door. think 'minesweeper.'
asciilifeform: ( the other is to build system out of movable blocks in such a way that it becomes conceptually impossible to build a proper 'surprise' )
trinque: moving the counterparty problem under a microscope where human can inspect it is not equivalent to the other given cases
mircea_popescu: if i come up with random "will you phf guarantee to me that if i swab her cheek on so and so date there won't be a spermatozoid in the microscope field", you'll just shrug.
a111: Logged on 2017-03-20 20:46 mircea_popescu: in other lulz, the state of casual gaming is completely fucked up. so other than utter throwaways, stuff that looks like someone's undegrad project, the ~entire market of ipad-likes (stuff that works in the browser, or else via a "light" client for windows/mac, or else as a ipad/android etc app) is wholly like this :
phf: mircea_popescu: i think nature of bootstrapping problem is that you have to choose a bedrock that you can affect, and that bedrock falls under counterparty problem. if your bedrock is hardware, then it's foundries that you trust. if your bedrock is a "a unix" then you need to trust a large binary blob. yes you can construct a rube goldberg that gives you unix from bedrock without having trust, but we don't have anything like that
ben_vulpes: myeah, still took the americhanskis a few decades to figure it out, and most haven't yet.
mircea_popescu: because rakim is stuck bagging my compras for a fucking reason. and nobody asks him which way the world goes.
ben_vulpes: asciilifeform: sterling: "i'm astonished that i will probably outlive the 'personal computer'. what would anyone want one of those for these days anyways. 'hey you, do you want a personal computer? you can...compute on it! in private! nobody would ever know!' it just doesn't sell to the touchscreen zombies, no offense to present company."
asciilifeform: but on the other hand, at some point the pain will begin to be felt, 'i want to build emacs but where do i get not only it but a box that'll build pre-poettering emacs at all, and where do i even get the gcc that still builds it'
mircea_popescu: seems a doable waypoint.
mircea_popescu: i seriously don't see the problem with "i trust this pared down version of tcc - it builds a very slow blob but it does build it - and these tools which i read myself"
phf: lisp machine fwiw doesn't solve bootstrapping problem either.. have to trust a binary blob that you got from your l1
asciilifeform: is that very soon it will be impossible to build a usable comp on demand.
asciilifeform: it is physically impossible to do an honest job of such a thing.
asciilifeform: phf: we had at least one thread re subj. basic idea that anyone who claims to understand a million-line proggy, is a liar.
mircea_popescu: run a "who can wriote the shortest c compiler".
mircea_popescu: one possible approach would be a... non-optimizing compiler, let's call it a bootstrap compiler.
asciilifeform: it would be interesting to produce a patched gcc that is happy to build with, e.g., borland c circa 1991.
trinque: neither is ideal, which would be a progressive bootstrap from machine code up
phf: mircea_popescu: yes, the "you don't actually need a machine, just gcc and userland"
trinque: any of a wide array of options is a different situation than "needs frozen same item as being built"
asciilifeform: phf: problems that cannot be solved, are to be properly compartmentalized -- consider a house with a toilet, vs one where the occupants shit where they stand.
asciilifeform: whereas if the debian util needs ~a working debian box~, it solves ~nothing~
phf: that pretends like bootstrapping problem doesn't exist though. "step 1 find a unix box you can fully trust!1"
asciilifeform: (sed; make; possibly a few others)
trinque: in this case needs a debian sitting there, yes
derpshart: https://thecontrol.co/stablecoins-a-holy-grail-in-digital-currency-b64f3371e111 <-- lulzy idea for alt coin (ethereum token ofc) tied to price of "special drawing rights"
phf: asciilifeform: that's a bootstrapping problem though. at least at the time that i'm speaking off, it was ~expected~ that you would do a custom build of some of your packages, and they whole deploy process relied on source packages being built by not-package-author
asciilifeform: trinque: i stopped reading the 'nows' a while ago.
mircea_popescu: because "Freedom" dontchaknow, and self-determination, and everyone can just be a bum.
mircea_popescu: ben_vulpes the history of linux is not like the history of a respectable item. it's like "the history of the human biofilm on the floors of grand central station, 1817-2017".
asciilifeform: phf: which is why a serious answer is to go 'full biosphere'
ben_vulpes: asciilifeform: pete_dushenski was bitching about a box not eating cdrom recently