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mircea_popescu: we are, intellectually speaking, in the bizarre situation of st. petersburg, a small town on the mississppi where for some bizarro enchantment reason all the boys decided the thing to do is dig up the river. and drowned there.

mircea_popescu: nevertheless, the problem here isn't a discrete technological product, be it a font or a bridge ; nor the dysfunctional process that produced it, be it a broken cnc mill or lucent ; but altogether something more fundamental, where young man looking to "go west" decides the west is at the bottom of the lake and proceeds to dig.

asciilifeform: to the point that i got my hands on a rom and pulled that font, and still have it somewhere. unfortunately unusable on any display that i have...

asciilifeform: and when i first saw screenshits of lispm, i was astonished at how readable the text was, on a box with ONE font in ONE size

asciilifeform: not a single time that i bought a new panel with 2-3x the density of the old one, did i NOT have to change my emacs font

asciilifeform: incidentally 'scalable font' technology was imho a failure: ☟︎

asciilifeform: i always assumed that it is a thing folks do when they come of age and build 'the' machine they will work their working years on, to sit down and burn away the shitfonts, among other

asciilifeform: of all the plagues discussed in this thread, i'd say fonts are the mildest, it is at this very minute quite trivial to operate a machine with 2-3 fonts installed , with ~0 surgery ☟︎

asciilifeform: 'As more people with less commitment to quality and much less attention to detail got involved in writing it, its educational value diminished, too. It is like going to a library full of books that took 50 man-years to produce each, inventing a way to cut down the costs to a few man-months per book by copying and randomly improving on other books, and then wondering why nobody thinks your library full of these cheaper books is an in ☟︎☟︎☟︎

mircea_popescu: this is not so different from the problem of, eg, emacs. or plan9. or any software. or any fucking shop in a town, or a mall. why the fuck are there FIFTY fast food offering the same crap in the food court ?

mircea_popescu: instead, those rapidly diminishing returns drive a diminishing of quality.

mircea_popescu: there is absoloutely no reason there should be more than maybe a dozen or so fonts. but there are, because "easy to make", and in spite of the rapidly diminishing returns of "making".

mircea_popescu: so you are essentially looking at a collection of ink spots, until you fall over.

asciilifeform: the sane answer is that machine needs at most 2, fixed and variadic width, and with such a renderer that each can display at any scale without pixillation.

mircea_popescu: a) you can not meaningfully say if you've found a "good" font, seeing how you can't say what portion of fonts youv'e actually seen ; b) the very notion of good font is impossible because in principle all possible fonts were made already in triplicate.

mircea_popescu: consider a simpler problem - you wish for whatever reason to "pick a good font". suppose your "good" is specified. you proceed to... look at fonts, selected by some criteria. eventually you are tired to the point your eyes blur, and haven't seen 5% of the available offerigs in "gothic medieval" from one place. there's more places. when are you done ?

asciilifeform: (postscript is, approximately, a hypertrophied forth) ☟︎

asciilifeform: iirc truetype is a much heavier and more malodorous latrine than postscript

phf: now the question of whether or not designing a font language that simulates movement of calligraphic brushstrokes is a good idea..

mircea_popescu: phf even limiting the matter to ttfs (seriously, postcript is a whole extra layer of crazy) one quickly discovers some very serious conceptual problems. i don't even mean from a technological pov.

asciilifeform: having once attempted a font render engine, asciilifeform knows a bit also.

mircea_popescu: i learned a lot about fonts in my recent foray.

asciilifeform: though afaik 'bones of bell labs' is a small prize.

mircea_popescu: so computer fell in a lake and drowned.

trinque: in reading the source, the bsd folks crapped a bunch of things that should be in a sed-like into cat.

asciilifeform: 13M plan9port/font/shinonome <<< i misread this as 'shitgnome' when it scrolled by and did a double take

phf: i think that's a separate set for their own postscript implementation

asciilifeform: can't speak for others, but i very much do not think i will produce a 52MB tgz of source with own hands before dead.

phf: a graveyard

trinque: they got it a .io for the better to hackernews you with

phf: (it also has a nifty set of astro tools, that i use to chart the skys from time to time, because it's really easy to use and i don't know any better)

phf: well, it's a 93 whitepaper :)

phf: i don't know. it has a whitepaper though

asciilifeform: because i noticed interesting thing, supposedly 'simple' things will have a border beyond which the complexity explodes for 'no reason' , as per the 'cat' thread from 2 yrs ago

trinque: and something quite stupid and forth-y could handle parsing a rudimentary set of possible statements to a db which eats from one serial port, shits to another

asciilifeform: 'diode' is ancient idea, and imho quite self-explanatory, it's a 1way valve, bits go --> but not <-- .

trinque: I've thought having a hardware parser/filter on a serial line where only certain bits can possibly flow over, and only in certain order, would compliment it.

trinque: his serial diode concept being a good example

trinque: though a topic I've been thinking upon a lot is, trigger warnings to asciilifeform, mitigations

shinohai is still trying to source a nice 2005 thinkpad

trinque: seems this runs the risk of continuously being a refugee. "they broke my emacs, so I left for hemlock/climacs/etc, then they broke my X, then they broke my ..."

trinque: I'll be clinging to a frozen emacs version and frozen pile of elisp til valhalla.

phf: breaks my heart all that's been done to emacs. it used to have a strong culture of backwards compatibility. large packages would have compat files compat-19.el, compat-20.el, etc. where's now only latest and greatest work. used to be very non-dwim, now every single package insist on some "smart input" dwimy interaction mode. but all this complexity is broken, things clash and interact with each other in all kinds of funny ways

trinque: at any rate, if I were to invest time in climacs, that is time stolen from learning osdev to put a lisp interpreter on iron, which is time stolen from learning to fab silicon in a garage, which is time stolen from ... ☟︎

trinque: there was a "10 cans of soda" thread

asciilifeform: i've wondered if he doesn't have a secret and dire problem with dope or similar. ☟︎

trinque: I keep hoping for a g_l writeup on the subj, but do not see a blog anywhere

a111: Logged on 2016-11-30 21:12 asciilifeform: re elisp, imho the 'apocalyptic' scale of the problem is overblown, if every d00d were to rewrite the few 100 of elisp that he actually ~uses~, in climacs, or whereever, job would be done in a week.

asciilifeform: ( ever use a fortran to c converter ?? )

mircea_popescu: in principle this should be automatable tro a huge degree

asciilifeform: re elisp, imho the 'apocalyptic' scale of the problem is overblown, if every d00d were to rewrite the few 100 of elisp that he actually ~uses~, in climacs, or whereever, job would be done in a week. ☟︎

asciilifeform: and in a machine with such linkage, corkscrew is almost impossible.

asciilifeform: i have here a b00k on piloting circa 1940, and already then author insists that rudder pedals are obsolete and have killed a thousand men ☟︎

mircea_popescu: anyway. like it or not - it's time for a newmacs.

asciilifeform: but there is also a 3rd piece in emacs

mircea_popescu: "The number of people aboard who can matter-of-factly hack the Emacs internals on the C level is consistently going down, and is already so small they can be counted on one hand. We must make Emacs depend less on people from this small and diminishing group, if we want the development pace increased or even kept at its current level." << this is a very solid point.

asciilifeform: the latter is a native binary for whatever box the thing is running on.

asciilifeform: emacs, in case anyone forgot, is made of 2 pieces - a megatonne bucked of crud written in 1970-era shitlisp, and an interpreter (yes) thereof

mircea_popescu: it also makes 0 sense for it to be a c piece of code, but that's a discussion for another time

mircea_popescu: well, from a system design perspective. it makes 0 sense for emacs to actually save c machine state.

asciilifeform: jurov: i must admit that it has been eons since i set up a prb, and the last one i tested was iirc 0.8.something (which worked with trb)

trinque: this is not a general Q&A

yalehasaquestion: hey, I'd like to know, I've been running a listening node, and I added 46.166.165.30 as a peer -- but I don't look like I'm connected to it

mircea_popescu: may be a matter of curl version also

mircea_popescu: meanwhile according to reddit, theguardian.com is a respectable source and qntra.net is the spamsite. because totally.

mircea_popescu: meanwhile the idiots at the guardian made a begging banner which has an X that is not connected to anything, just drawn on the banner itself.

jurov: i have read that tobacco must be dried slowly (like, a month) otherwise it retains more sugar which burns nastily

asciilifeform also not an expert, but used to work with a d00d who was a serious aficionado

BingoBoingo: jurov: the linked eclipse thing is cigarette shaped fiberglass reinforced paper tube tipped with charcoal. Is a lulzy thing best not stuck in mouth.

asciilifeform: jurov: the lulzy bit is that the 'heated tobacco' thing was a 1970s (and possibly prior) crackpottery

jurov: nope, e-cigs are a thing here

asciilifeform: 'The company's IQOS smokeless cigarette, which is already on sale in over a dozen markets including Japan, Switzerland and Italy, heats tobacco enough to produce a vapor without burning it. The company believes that makes it much less harmful than cigarettes.' << i thought this died in 1970s..?

mircea_popescu: whatever his plans, desires, choices whatever, it seems absolutely certain trump will have a major depression on his hands ; to the tune of "70% of this country's wealth evaporated overnight ; wut do ?!?!"

mircea_popescu: srsly, the world is now a us-iran partnership trying to stand up to a russian-turkey alliance while a very horny europe is drooling cunt juice on one side and a rather geeky china is holding its distance on the other side.

mircea_popescu: <BingoBoingo> Seriously not a single attempt to read any of the linked content to develop context on the venue << i dunno dood, "the serene republic of somalia" etc. they be trynna.

BingoBoingo: Seriously not a single attempt to read any of the linked content to develop context on the venue

trinque: I have a hard time seeing how a single DNS record within the set could accidentally be missing.

mod6: shouldn't be a problem... so weird

mod6: just a sec.

trinque: a clumsy holocaust, if so

trinque: makes me think this is a jihadi decimation strategy, if you can call it that.

mats: half a dozen chix go public with 'hersh raped me when i was 9'

trinque: what a time to be alive

asciilifeform: ( not a situation unique to kurds ! )

trinque grunting out a few things of his own

asciilifeform: anyway, i have neither the time (presently grunting out a much-delayed and urgent item) nor inclination to do the entire backlog (what, 800 of these?! by now) by hand. ☟︎

asciilifeform: ok i'ma end this batch with a real gem :

asciilifeform: http://41.204.196.156/ << www.utiliworx.co.za . 'A variety of market based instruments are currently being traded in the world and these can broadly be categorised as brown, white and green certificates. Brown certificates deals with greenhouse gas emissions like SO2, CO2 etc. and trading in these instruments are also referred to as Emissions Trading. A cap-and-trade regime is generally used to limit the amount of pollutants into th

mircea_popescu: danielpbarron yeah a proper bot mixer would be great

danielpbarron: it's the first step towards making a buy/sell bot

diana_coman: danielpbarron, automating storage retrieval/mixing would be great and it's sorely needed; for starters maybe have a look at the code in botstorage.cpp as that one deals with storage (it was used by an earlier version of the bot to get the ingredients directly from storage)

danielpbarron: which btw i'm gonna figure out a way to automate storage procedures like withdrawing in bulk and mixing

diana_coman: like all stops, it was but a break I suppose; even if a ...hmmmm, 10 years break sort of thing

diana_coman programmed (briefly) long time ago for a French open-source company; with azerty keyboard + unicode support because "clients" mostly French public sector entities -> after that initial experience (in fairness the unicode part was but a very small part of it - the bulk was the overall nonsense of the "endeavours") I just stopped programming all together (I got back into it years later mainly because ...eulora)

mod6: <+mircea_popescu> speaking of above article, can i get a commitment to never signing any V material which includes any non-ascii characters ? BingoBoingo diana_coman hanbot trinque mod6 danielpbarron mircea_popescu mike_c asciilifeform davout ben_vulpes phf jurov << I commit to never signing any V material with non-ascii characters.

asciilifeform: (this is supposed to 'not matter', 'cycles are cheap', but imho a great dark age of slow cpus -- cometh)

asciilifeform: utf8 or any other variadic encoding is an evil thing, makes any nontrivial operation on a string O(N)

asciilifeform: it does, which is how the utf8 fudge happened. btw it was a monumentally wrong cut

mircea_popescu: in principle there is a strong argument to say "alphabet size = machine word size" even if this didn't hold on pre-8 bit machines. and consequently you ~could~ have a type string that always takes 4 bytes and represents whatever the fuck. the problem is that this gives you a 400% memory allocation bloat for that type of string.

a111: Logged on 2016-11-29 14:43 phf: we had a thread when diff was first discussed as a way to do patches (i think maybe before even v), where i was erring on the side of no unicode support on the grounds that if we decide to support unicode we have to, to borrow asciilifeforms, drink the whole spittoon