asciilifeform: phunphakt : asciilifeform bought his first soldering iron on setting foot in usa, and the various junk to do with it, at ye olde ratshack
asciilifeform: can still do -- at lolmart. which is how it died -- or how westinghouse died, usg decided that 1 GE suffices
asciilifeform: ( who pays for the servers, the censor monkeys, etc. ? )
asciilifeform: a little like how reddit lives on, unharmed by the depth of its -ev
asciilifeform: it was a sort of canary - dying co. since 1990s, propped up by hell-knows-what, 'brand value', 'must maintain business-as-usual', i have nfi
asciilifeform: not only this: the very same ratshack actually died once (i went to the same liquidation sales, bought the furniture, etc) and then somehow came BACK from the grave, (no prizes for guessing how -- printolade) undead, to live for another 3y☟︎
asciilifeform: these were the folx who sold resistors etc for their weight in gold. and when this did not bring in megabux, added phone and various rubbish.
asciilifeform: in other lulz, the venerable rat shack, american retail chain, that survived great depression ( founded 1921 ) -- is finally dying. ( for 2nd time ! 1st time had last-minute reprieve, a telco bought it )
asciilifeform: 'the fact that the back wheels were attached to the outside of the body rather than any kind of axle, as per the latest fashions and discoveries of French technology at the time' << l0l!!!
asciilifeform: the lulzy bit is that lem's future is the actual one -- where buncha idiots get brain-wrecked into believing themselves robots , while similar number of similar idiots -- believe that they are served by robots, etc
asciilifeform: and nobody can remember even why it ever appeared.
asciilifeform: upstack : iirc in one of n. stephenson's tales, future spamola is decoupled entirely from human hands, is shat forth by long-unmanned and fully autonomous self-propagating 'ai virii'
asciilifeform: 'purpose' in this sense is not an attribute of the object, but of the object-and-maker system. see also the thread re 'rng entropy'
asciilifeform: i can still observe sharpened stick and guess, likely correctly, that it was made so as to go into flesh; vs different stick, that - again correctly - i will say broke off a tree, by the wind.
asciilifeform: 'we do what we must, because we can' (tm)(r)(valve)
asciilifeform: iirc this roman custom is somewhat misunderstood by modern folx -- they actually thought they were fixing a rusted ~luck~ by offing the ~unlucky~
asciilifeform: though, further twist -- the ~original~ elbrus was a spiffy superscalar machine that actually beat usa state of the art at the time (cdc)
asciilifeform: believe or not, the copies were of 2 types, the ones made by smart folx who gave a shit -- were in many cases equals, or even actual improvements (e.g. su single-chip pdp) . the others... were done by same folx who pilfer ru budget today
asciilifeform: pre-90s -- another matter; runs on magnetic cores, transistors the size of your thumb, barbaric but it'll likely still work when archaeologists dig it up
asciilifeform: afaik ~all ENTIRELY-post-su-design ru mil gear -- made by lowest bidder, runs winblowz, good largely for parade
asciilifeform: ( post-su ru Official tagline, 'government without ideology', is hence quite sad joke )
asciilifeform: and as, interestingly, china's likewise did
asciilifeform: ( phunphakt : putin recently proclaimed another $maxint grantolade tranche for 'proper clean ru os and iron' . i dare to predict that it will evaporate without a trace just like the last N times . )
asciilifeform: and whether to fund berkeley genderschool or not
asciilifeform: hey, theoretically he also decides whether to import aztlan or not
asciilifeform: well possibly it has something to say re mod-exp
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: actually it was infuriating, i only needed that 1 pg !
asciilifeform: if the crate had not taken as long as it did, to come -- would have saved quite a bit of time.
asciilifeform: had, among other things, almost literally my multiply-with-carry thing
asciilifeform: unrelatedly, 'finite precision number systems and arithmetic' (kornerup & matula, cambridge press) is mega-b00k, the only one i've found on subj that is NOT a mere plagiarism of knuth, has useful algos for e.g. carry-free ops, hardwarizations☟︎
asciilifeform: it ain't a rhetorical flourish, either -- nubbinses live life entirely same as a roach : set of reflexes
asciilifeform: ben_vulpes: when's the last time an insect asked you something
asciilifeform: ua: do you only sell servers, or run an isp ?
