asciilifeform: 'Not a single goddamn Hackernews makes the obvious connection to the shit they do at work all day for a living. The tacit consensus: Hackernews isn't bad for creating the tools of surveillance capitalism; Congress is bad for letting people use them.'
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: it's a winblowzism typically found on 'dell', 'hp', similar shitboxes, unpacks a new hdd image from hidden disk partition.
asciilifeform: 'who is stronger, elephant or whale.'
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu when you were a kid, did the local boys also do the 'well ~i'll~ X' 'battle of wits' thing ? 'tomorrow i'll bring a TANK!' 'well ~i~ will bring antitank gun!' '~i~ will bring battleship!'
asciilifeform: ^ asciilifeform: 'say a three megatonne bomb falls, you are 1km from ground zero' mircea_popescu: 'ha-HA! i wouldn't be caught dead near ground zero! foiled!'
asciilifeform: alternatively, say i find that gpg only ever was able to generate 100,000,000 different keys.
asciilifeform: it is the 'sarin' case : finding that you have been fucked, does 0 to unfuck.
asciilifeform: and that we find this AFTER we put pogos on bottom of the sea, and on mars, in cement plinths.
asciilifeform: let's say we find that, e.g., gcc past 3.x embeds an off-by-one-ization in memcpy() , dependant on payload, and that it is triggerable specifically in trb tx processing.
asciilifeform: in the sense where, by the time you have any notice, you also have some serious problems.
asciilifeform: this is more of a sarin than a phosgene.
asciilifeform: a certain drepperism sat for, what, 22 yrs.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: the spot check model is, again, wholly inadequate. if you have ONE debianism or heartbleed etc. it literally does not matter worth a shit how 'clean' the remainder of it may have been.
asciilifeform: there is VERY little that you can say re a multi-MB binturd without spending several $mil.
asciilifeform: i gotta object to the analogy with the egg and rotten kid. this is more like 'which of these children will get which type of cancer, and when.'
asciilifeform: if you have a thing-walled gm tube, you don't need a 'tritium lamp', even, can use a box of 'diet salt' (where it has K instead of Na, and ~0.01% of natural K is K-40, beta emitter)
asciilifeform: theory suggests that the effect will be palpable. possibly visible, even, with naked eye.
asciilifeform: then put the 5T magnet on. and again same.
asciilifeform: ( for extra lulz: C-14's decay -- is a beta decay.)
asciilifeform: !~later tell mircea_popescu any idea whatever happened to 'induced beta decay' ? ( e.g., http://www.wmsym.org/archives/1984/V1/89.pdf ) -- the thing with the 'convert forbidden states to permitted with magnetic field'
asciilifeform: 'gotta support 10,001 incompatible but otherwise equivalent shits' is a serious hell. it plagued armies in ww1 ('hey a trainload of ammo just came. but none of it fits our 7 types of rifle, it's all for that 8th'), the sov icbm forces ('we have parts but not for these 4 types of rocket, they are for 5th') etc☟︎
asciilifeform: trinque: in context, it was either this, or linux dun exist and it's-1995-if-you-want-a-unix-box-buy-a-sun
asciilifeform: 'yeah, what if he has an ISA nic from 1993! gotta support'
asciilifeform: it was an instance of exactly same thing. ANY attempt to paper over 'i have nfi what the user has, let's support 10,000,001 possible braindamages' ends up looking like autoconf.
asciilifeform: trinque: do you recall the linux kernel modules thread ?
asciilifeform: dunno that 'it happened because tricked people with promise of Phreeedom'. it happened as a slime mold happens, as mushroom grows -- because it could, and because no pushback.
