asciilifeform: Framedragger: it was picked as example !
asciilifeform: Framedragger: if you're building for a unixlike, you're stuck with pthreads
asciilifeform: trinque: except that it doesn't enable anybody -- if autoconf fails to find the headers, you are just as fucked as ever, gotta sit and puzzle out what environment flags to give it so that it has a sporting chance
asciilifeform: the living mushroom, with his beard having crumbs from 1985 in it somewhere still. and his circle.
asciilifeform: it is not a mystery that such a thing originated from people with NO concept of hygiene.
asciilifeform: to expand: say your proggy uses, i dunno, pthreads. wants to know where to find the header. WHY does this turn into a MB of scriptolade liquishit ? rather than a 1liner, that tries to find it and if not finds, prompts the user ?☟︎
asciilifeform: (big heavy thing, with msdos box attached, no less.)
asciilifeform: at asciilifeform's first (dis)honest job, there was a scintillator counting machine based on this principle.
asciilifeform: if you wanted to be even more clever, could use strictly beta detector, and rely on the fact that the things go in two opposite geometric directions every time.
asciilifeform: 1 photon sets off 2 detectors ~equally well as 1.
asciilifeform: ( now, good q is 'why do this?' and answer is -- 'you get analogue rng that is VERIFIABLE, just like the digital board in fg.' because you can pick up decay from below/above the board !!)☟︎
asciilifeform: there is, however, a correct part for this : 'PIN diode.' i have an experimental setup with one. at some point we might offer a fg rng module based on it. but not yet.
asciilifeform: (whereever you are -- there is background gamma)
asciilifeform: now the other, moar exotic, approach, is that you can try to extract mass entropy from background gamma
asciilifeform: it is one of the two reasons we aren't selling one (the other being, that it is difficult to get even mild isotope, through post office)
asciilifeform: upstack mircea_popescu had the right notion, though, it is difficult to build a decay rng that does not rot.
asciilifeform: but yes, the taper off to zero is at a few m.
asciilifeform: ( if it were 'm' : tesla's 'death ray' -- would work. )
asciilifeform: ben_vulpes: 'surprise!' -- it doesn't
asciilifeform: ( or your own parser, for that matter ! )
asciilifeform: tx format was exhaustively described therein.
asciilifeform: ben_vulpes: see my ada snippets from last week, pasted here
asciilifeform: phf: that's whole planet. with possible exception of japan -- country of nursing home.
asciilifeform: ben_vulpes: it isn't hard to do, no; i have it (tentatively) working right here. but -- it ~is~ O(n).
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.
asciilifeform: a former neighbour -- also, and ditto
asciilifeform: phf: yeah -- my mechanic is from buenos aires, and excellent conversation
asciilifeform: ben_vulpes: what precisely are you thinking of attempting?
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
asciilifeform: i'ma bbl, gotta change gask mask canister; and pet has been 'come to bedroom!111' for 2hrs nao..
asciilifeform: it makes 0 sense to merge the categories.
asciilifeform: i have plenty of 'c machines' right here that cannot run trb (on account of 'too small addr space' or 'too slow clock', take your pick.)
asciilifeform: ben_vulpes: titanium car would work quite well.
asciilifeform: it is related in that it makes 0 sense to include 'c' as part of its identity.
asciilifeform: to become legitimately 'an algorithm', rather than 'this thing a particular moron shat out'
asciilifeform: not speaking of machines here, i dun have a 'large comp that ain't a c machine' to even test with.
asciilifeform: the drooling idiot's 'i will Define By Implementation!' horror.
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.
asciilifeform: not one that has 64k of addr space, say.
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..)
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: 0. but it is imho odd to describe the process as 'fixes c machine'
asciilifeform: ( this also ignores the -- screamingly evident -- fact of trb being ~algorithmically~ defective. as explored on several occasions here. )
