asciilifeform: 'I think that it used to be fun to be a hardware architect. Anything that you invented would be amazing, and the laws of physics were actively trying to help you succeed. Your friend would say, “I wish that we could predict branches more accurately,” and you’d think, “maybe we can leverage three bits of state per branch to implement a simple saturating counter,” and you’d laugh and declare that such a stupid scheme would

asciilifeform: !~later tell adlai plz consider making some ~use~ of your lispmuscles in a constructive direction. or, failing that, to tune in quietly and looksy-but-dun-touchsy. or you ~will~ end up drummed out, and this time i will not object nor would mircea_popescu et al particularly care if i did .

asciilifeform: even if idiotically, because designer was dropped as a baby

asciilifeform: quite relevant though. it ~chooses~ a variant.

asciilifeform: just a less idiotic encoder

asciilifeform: encoder ought to be aware that it shat a weight of encoderola ~equal to the fucking payload

asciilifeform: there is a famous case of red army d00d who killed dozen+ germans with axe.

asciilifeform: (when it doesn't work, there is usually nobody nearby with a pen, to document..)

asciilifeform: at any rate this is a stretch, most of the executed folk are no kind of desperado, have 0 weapon bigger than a fork

asciilifeform: what if every 'dawn raid' cop had a well-founded fear of claymore mine.

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu had a very spiffy article a while back

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: in usa 'raid' is specifically a 'kick the dig until it bites, then shoot it' exterminator tactic against would-be cop shooters

asciilifeform: '“Somebody may want to ask the question as to why a pre-dawn, forced entry was necessary in this case,” Millar said , adding the public needs a full account of what happened Friday. (We) specifically want to know why a pre-dawn raid was required in a house with two young children.”'

asciilifeform: (a differ that ~doesn't work at all~ on arbitrary textolade is a nonstarter)

asciilifeform: adlai: enlighten me, using earlier a/b sentences, what that'd look like

asciilifeform: lulzy, brits haven't yet picked up the american tradition of cutting off victim's phones before executing a hit

asciilifeform: what exactly did adlai think a month ago, that rates would stay magically ~frozen for all eternity ?

asciilifeform: when mircea_popescu wakes up, he might have a less gentle and more memorable way to phrase this truism.

asciilifeform: adlai: ,@ eats a list neh

asciilifeform: folx will do ANYTHING!111 to avoid cracking a book.

asciilifeform: (it is a form of whitespace)

asciilifeform: magical-newlines (unix diff) and parens-sexpr (lisps) is a pretty heavy impedance mismatch.

asciilifeform: because it mandates that no one ever use a programming lang where +++ occurs, etc.

asciilifeform cleans 'a' key

asciilifeform: incidentally i'm not entirely convinced that v gotta be married to a particular difftron to work.

asciilifeform: it was a somewhat pathological example. but i will point out that in this system , mircea_popescu's tab-corrector patch would be 100% human-readable.

asciilifeform: my diff is about a dozen chars.

asciilifeform: here's gedankenexperiment. take file of aaaaaaaaaaa.....aaaa (1MB worth.) add, 512kB in, a 'b'. how long is your unix diff ?

asciilifeform: it ain't a blob

asciilifeform: (it so happens that the original happened on a uuencoded shit, tru)

asciilifeform: incidentally you will blow up on the +++ mine if you try and diff a vdiff. ☟︎☟︎

asciilifeform: it wasn't a blob.

asciilifeform: didn't i post , right here, a well-formed-to-naked-eye-but-not-to-vtron vdiff ?

asciilifeform: but any octet is legal inside a proper counterstate.

asciilifeform: or rather, it is a literal string, and ought to be subsumed in one of the above forms.

asciilifeform: or a \+4\ (add four) or \-4\ (lose next four)

asciilifeform: which can be a, e.g., \4\

asciilifeform: the one thing i consider a major win here, compactness aside, is the freeness-from-inbandmagic.

asciilifeform: esp. if ben_vulpes makes a proper aligner.

asciilifeform: worth a try, costs 0.

asciilifeform: i dare say that a colourized, phf-style viewer can make the suggested char-differ quite readable in comparison with ye olde unixdiff.

asciilifeform: that's not a general-purpose diff nao, is it.

asciilifeform: and it's a 1 to an I etc.

asciilifeform: when 1 'line noise' character, somewhere in a 140-char line, changes.

asciilifeform: take sentence 'a': 'i'm not fucking learning an aminoacid matrix to be able to use diff i tell you that'

asciilifeform: (imagine diffing a file containing zero newlines)

asciilifeform: ben_vulpes: i'll suggest a 'p-tronic' format for diffs. N\........ specifies N retained-of-a octets (e.g., 5\abcde ) ☟︎☟︎

asciilifeform: adlai: even being a connoisseur and collector of crackpotteries , it was not much to work with.

asciilifeform: there's a sequence-alignment altcoin..?

asciilifeform: ben_vulpes: not a formal one, afaik

asciilifeform: (defun sim-score (a b) (= a b)) ought to work.

asciilifeform: but really you just want to rip out sim-score that's in there and put in one that's a straight =)

asciilifeform: ben_vulpes: you probably don't need a similarity matrix other than the unit matrix for text diffs, now that i think about it.

asciilifeform tore this out of a much larger proggy, and its fitness for any practical use is quite questionable, but ought to get the point across

asciilifeform never had occasion to read or write a phptronic proggy longer than a wp config

asciilifeform: (if a == b : b <= 1; else b <= 0)