cads: mircea_popescu: re. the showing off, I've often wondered about that myself.

cads: In america, when someone shows off they tend to be an asshole. Keeping your cards close to your chest is often a better social move here, because showing off invites open ridicule.

cads: From my personal experience, for example, when Romanians show off in front of Americans, at best they tend to be perceived as lovable assholes. The fact that many romanians tend to show off only they can back it with something tangible helps in establishing relationships between americans and romanians, but there is often a secret distaste.

cads: I'm romanian, hah

cads: mircea_popescu: yep. And they're also very guarded about their real capabilities, so for example, whereas a romanian might be happy to brag about how little he payed on a car if you ask, asking an american the same question is often a faux pas.

cads: hehe

cads: nice!

cads: mircea_popescu: for salaried upper middle class workers in romania, what is the normal attitude towards revealing their exact salary figure to their coworkers?

cads: Say I receive $100K a year, and I suspect that this is $20K more than the rest of my coworkers in the same position as me, because I'm more skilled. Would it be something I'd brag about?

cads: hehe, perhaps not

cads: mircea_popescu: this is common here in upper management in mid to large scale businesses. My understanding is that when the amounts of money are that large, it becomes profitable to remain private about them. People say "I got the raise!" but don't say how much the raise was.

cads: hah, charming

cads: Atlanta

cads: You? Bucharest?

cads: Chaang-Noi: are you from thailand?

cads: hehe, truffles, are you just used to people ignoring you?

cads: truff1es: I mean, some people are so incoherent in their opinions that I get the distinct feeling that I'm _stupider_ after arguing with them, and if these people consistently attack my positions with poor argument tactics, then I have little to gain from them in way of exchange of ideas, and I ignore them.

cads: truff1es: information from a random variable is what you make of it, true, but if the variable is too random, it's impossible to make knowledge from it, however hard you try :D

cads: truffles, lets put it this way. Consider you talk to 10 people online, and you know that 9 of those people tend to say things that you fine useful, some of the time. But now imagine that the 10th person not only says things that are useless, they also try to mislead you, and they drown out the reasonable words of the other 9 people.

cads: And suppose that after extensive attempts at asking for clarification, the person continues to demonstrate that they do not have your interest in mind - they continue to BS you, and what's worse, arguing with them makes you look like a fool in front of the other 9 people.

cads: truff1es: sure, let me clarify with an example. 9 people are decent people interested in talking about the topic, and the 10th person is just a troll, interested in ridiculing anyone that gives them attention. Say they are flooding the channel, and there are no ops, and you're being distracted from your other 9 contemporaries.

cads: would you not ignore the offensive charachter? Or would you force yourself to take cognitive loss, and manually take the time filter out the useless chatter?

cads: truff1es: giving yourself a cognitive advantage by ignoring the poor information source is a good strategy in these situations - it's not weakness, it's prudence.

cads: oh dear god, for what?

cads: oh what have I done :D

cads: hehe, truff1es I hear what you're saying, but surely even you draw limits at a certain point: consider, one may choose not hang out on 4chan. This is the same as ignoring every single member of 4chan. If you believe you have the capacity to filter out all information by directly reading it, then why aren't you plugged into every chat in the world, filtering?

cads: that was uncharitable, but I hope you get my drift - ignoring someone is just one of the many ways of filtering your information input

cads: I believe that you simply assign a negative emotional connotation towards it because you've been at the blunt end of an ignore or two, and you know how much that stings

cads: I would agree there

cads: nah, I think I may have made a red herring there

cads: truff1es: also, it occurs to me that leaving a chat room is not the same as ignoring everyone in that chat room. Information is not symmetric, in the latter case.

cads: truff1es: If I ignore someone in a chat, they can still see what I'm saying. So it's not the same thing as leaving the chat. Ignore can be used to assert a sort of dominance.

cads: truff1es: In other words, ignore actually can be used as an asshole strategy. is that part of your argument against the desirability of ignore?

cads: I would argue that I have used ignore judiciously many times... but I'd also admit that I've used it a few times in a mean spirit.

cads: *shrug*, in any case, we could philosophize about this all day

cads: any closing words?

cads: it's time to cook some breakfast and get started with the day here :D

cads: haha, mircea_popescu, and what assets have I? Besides my charming good looks, which are hardly fungible ;)

cads: I guess maybe the only claim to legitimacy I have is that I'm genuinely interested in understanding assets

cads: truff1es: good deal. as long as we remain teachable, life is pretty good, I find

cads: just.. don't learn any lessons that are not profitable

cads: mircea_popescu, I read your story - quite the adventure, I see. I admire your tenacity and natural talent, while being relieved to see that you do not yet have it "all figured out", which I feel would be boring for you. I wish you continued prosperity and a future that does not cease to provide interesting situations!

cads: I'm amazed with the care and attention that romanian schools give to the smart kids - here in america, being bright means being ridiculed

cads: thestringpuller: and some nice architecture, to boot

cads: thestringpuller: you are an atlien?

cads: Chaaang-Noi: repaste is here: http://polimedia.us/trilema/2013/my-background-cliffsnotes/

cads: thestringpuller: the real test: do you ever use the word "y'all"

cads: or the phrase "what had happened was..."

cads: mircea_popescu, ThickAsThieves, ty. I love my city, and really, economically, architecturally, culturally, there are only a handful of other american cities that match or exceed it.

cads: at least so I tell myself, lol

cads: thestringpuller: haha, as a recent college dropout, I can attest to the lame college. As a daily marta rider for the last two years, I can attest to the failing infrastructure.

cads: still, there is something rough, vulgar, and thriving about this city that I don't feel when in, say, pittsburg, or saint louis, or miami

cads: imo, hating on atlanta and loving on it are the same practice, so anyways, enough loving on atlanta ;)

cads: oh gosh, the airport... it's like rich white men said, "lets take the poorest sector of the city and put an airport in it. But here's the catch, lets hire _only people from the suburbs, MUAHAHAHA"

cads: actually, there's a lot of that 'white privilege' sentiment going on it Atlanta. That, and the narrow religious views, those are the only things I really dislike about my city.

cads: thestringpuller: one time some black dudes came into my house and beat me and robbed me at gun point. The interrogated me for an hour about where the drugs were (my roommate at the time was a drug dealer - bad fucking choice on my part). In the months after that I found rascist sentiment from around me was taking root in my mind very easily.

cads: so I decided to hate hipsters instead

cads: I despise rascism as a form of extreme mental weakness

cads: but then I realized that my new found hate of hipsters was just as bad!

cads: mircea_popescu: worse, I was a customer. He was a pot dealer, nothing serious, but he had a high profile.

cads: mircea_popescu: I wasn't in a mental state to attempt to compute rational expectations at the time.

cads: thestringpuller: haha, minus the meth

cads: haha, you're going to think me a philistine, but I've not seen the film, despite being a pitt fan

cads: thestringpuller: remember when pinkman is in rehab, convincing others to go back out and use? Yeah, I don't think I was ever that bad off, lol

cads: that's just low, lol

cads: mircea_popescu: aha, another person that notices that google's performance is collapsing under the cascade of data

cads: mircea_popescu: we need another fundamental breakthrough in search engine technology, but soon.

cads: perhaps an incentive structure that doesn't force the search engine firm to degrade its search quality in return for profits

cads: Haha, trading the maiden-hood for the consumer good.

cads: you may be right, strictly speaking - the problem is that people have not yet understood that marketing equals coercion

cads: hah, mircea, for someone with such a pretty mouth you sure are courageous to unleash rape on the world

cads: legal rape would still be abhorrent

cads: hehe, and pardon my joke

cads: mircea_popescu: I would be forced to agree, though in your writeup consider that you are a parent with a daughter. You live in a world where the collapse of the viability of marketing strategies has lead to an unprecedented increase in the productivity and quality of life, on average. And all that you've had to pay is that your daughter got raped 6 times while she was growing up, starting at the age of 6, with her teacher, 9 with a boy

cads: in the town, 11 with a janitor, and so on. You did not have legal resource in these situations, and the 2 men that you secretly had killed, they could put you in jail from beyond the grave if you are discovered. You live in a world of unprecedented prosperity, where vigilantism is prohibited.

cads: is this is acceptable from this peasant father perspective?

cads: granted, and it's also how most animals get pregnant

cads: marketing ;)

cads: mircea_popescu, you know sexual molestation is not only prevalent among females, but also among males. We are truly animals when we allow ourselves to be, and who can estimate the lost productivity due to the social and psychological handicaps imposed by such scarring episodes of violence?

cads: it is perhaps true that if society accepted it the negative impact per rape victim would go down, but the net effect would be negative almost surely, since the new rape-rate equilibrium would be immense

cads: and yet still probably cheaper than the loss due to marketing and irrational consumerism, hah.

cads: also rape can be good if she asks for it in that certain way :)

cads: but that's hardly rape, however much it may attempt to simulate it

cads: hehe, I dunno if that constituted rape though

cads: certainly the men felt that the would not have to answer to rape charges due to the nature of the sex play situation, and she never filed charges, and seems to have chalked it up as "just one of those things"

cads: hehe, lovely girl, and a smart mathematician, the best tit's I've ever... kakobrekla yes

cads: but she's getting married now, sadly :D

cads: haha, if you were a mathematician you'd know just how stupid we are

cads: I once spent 5 hours arguing with her that transfinite ordinals are no obviously inconsistent, against her objections

cads: and then we went to bed, and the next morning she was up proving the basic properties of transfinite ordinals

cads: and had made me pankakes and written "you were right" in whipped cream

cads: the _only_ argument I ever 'won', that girl was stubborn

cads: mircea_popescu: yeah, his name is shawn, and they're pretty perfect for each other - each as stubborn as the day is long

cads: haha, we never did talk about the continuum hypothesis

cads: we got to isomorphism classes between ordered set, and I tried at long length to motivate that the real numbers were not countable, and she kept coming up with silly schemes to try to count them, because to her, at the time, it was absolutely absurd for there two be two infinite sets with qualitatively different amounts of infiniteness

cads: yep, suppose that C_k : N -> R is a counting of the real numbers, then there exists a number x_k such that x_k is not in the image of C_k

cads: x_k is easy to construct for any possible C_k

cads: it was strange, like a cognitive blindspot - I tried what you suggest, and a few other approaches that I invented just during that conversation (which have been useful in similar situation). I lost a lot of faith in her as a mathematician, but regained it in the morning - she was chattering like a bluejay about how she now sees why she was wrong in her reasoning and why I was right: her intuition was that you can't just infinitely exte

cads: nd C_k to C_k', and for some reason just wasn't getting that _forall_ C_k there is an x_k, and that even any C_k' that she could concoct would also have its own fatal x_k'.

cads: mircea_popescu: now wouldn't that have been a sight? two stoned college math students, disproving ZFC

cads: to her credit, her area was in the statistics of neuronal bursting in biological neural networks, and for some god awful reason, basic logic courses at our university do _not_ adequately introduce foundational issues such as ordinals or even set theory as an axiomatic topic

cads: it's like, naive set theory without talking about the axiom of choice, or the axiom of infinity, or the implications.. part of the reason I recently dropped out - if this is what the undergraduate math degree means here, I'm not interested in it

cads: mircea_popescu: haha, you may be on to something

cads: maybe she was on to the truth and I squelched her breakthrough!

cads: I stopped hanging out with her to get sober and start hanging out with a vocalist/painter, and then a year later I found she's engaged - I wonder if she knows I still have sentiment.. it's not something I thought I had

cads: not at the time, and not since I heard she was settling down - I was muddled up back then, and more recently I figured she has a chance at happiness with her guy, and have wished that to her.

cads: It's not a longing sentiment, since we had our issues, and she's still a toker, and I still am sober, thought you're probably right, it would not hurt her to know that I marvel and take joy in the high points of our relationship

cads: brilliant strategery

cads: you're talking to someone that just a year ago found the idea of leverage very exotic, and just 6 months ago was aghast to find out that his financial position has sickeningly leveraged re. his student loans, and decided to put his schooling on panic crash

cads: haha, for me to set aside a slush fund just for women, now that would be bold

cads: but not hard at all, and a fun exercise in personal wealth management

cads: mircea_popescu, I think you've inspired me to put a beginning of a story on my (currently nearly empty) blog.

cads: it will be far grittier than yours, just a start to a possible tale of intrigue

cads: haha, copumpkin I never knew you partoked

cads: not that it's of any consequence (I had to quit, but I don't judge)

cads: also, cool you see you here

cads: hmm, am I right to remember that last we talked ( a couple years ago) you were a grad student in midwest university?

cads: I remember I was writing my college application, and you gave me your encouragement

cads: copumpkin: classes were boring. Substance abuse got unmanageable, and my debt was insane. I'm taking a year or two off to work on my sobriety, to work my same old job as a machinist and deleverage my debt a bit, and to wait and see what happens with higher education.

cads: just pot and alcohol

cads: mircea_popescu: I don't mind talking about my substance problem - I'm amazed and embarrased - I kicked speed and heroin to the curb back in 2007, but I thought pot and booze were fine. It's shameful that those brought me lower than anything else has. It's... refreshing to finally be in a spot where I can say _no_ drug is _ever_ going to be a good

cads: a good investment*

cads: mircea_popescu: I share mostly because from time to time people hear my story, and ask me about how they can get clean

cads: tiberiusiv: absolutely :)

cads: tiberiusiv: it's not something I could address till I admitted, basically

cads: tiberiusiv: you may of course ignore all I have to say

cads: tiberiusiv: and you are not someone that needs to hear what I have to say

cads: tiberius, and if that's true, then I salute you ☟︎

cads: jurov, kakobrekla, you know, the 5th level of troll-fu is trolling the trolls with pure detachment ;)

cads: jurov, I'm not there yet, lol

cads: I mean, you think I'll continue talking to you if I can expect ridicule and if even your contemporaries call you a troll?

cads: Hah.

cads: You can apologize and recover your position or else wither.

cads: mircea_popescu: they're in your feed? or following you?

cads: mircea_popescu: if they were following you, you could make a game of offending them so greatly they unfollow you (and it would be fairly easy to analyze who unfollowed you, and what triggered it, lol)

cads: mircea_popescu: I have the same issue - I followed a bunch of people because they said something cool once or twice about category theory, haskell, or 3d printing, and the rest is all stuff about how their cat is awesome

cads: the only twitter people I actually care to follow are dead authors - @kurt_vonnegut, mostly

cads: benkay: is that so?

cads: it's like "hmm people are still saying mostly pointless things"

cads: kakobrekla: is tiberiusiv still talking :D

cads: kakobrekla: haha, cooool

cads: hah, that's uncanny

cads: incpetion.. "we have to go deeper!"

cads: what script are you using?

cads: kakobrekla: I might need that capability for one of my chat channels

cads: kako, would you mind zapping them to me?

cads: hehe, truly I am a lazy developer (I know full well that there have got to be turn key solutions for chat logging, already)

cads: class :)

cads: kakobrekla: this sounds like a story from a former soviet state :D

cads: hmm, It's an interesting problem. Given some number k of incomplete logs, collected by different people, with different latencies, and hence different orders of message arrival in general, how do you fuse the logs into a single log that has more accurate information?

cads: if k is a large number, you can try to find voting blocs - groups of logs that agree on the same history

cads: you think they log the channels?

cads: in any case, the full problem is an interesting problem in the logging literature and in the AI literature - given some collection of possibly contradictory logs, process them into a single, more trustworthy digest log

cads: the problem of combing two chatlogs taken from different view points is a much simpler instance of that general problem.

cads: hehe, and it's totally unreasonable to apply those techniques, when there'd be nothing to gain that grepping through the collected chatlog as they are would not do just as well, hah

cads: hey, any 3d printing enthusiasts in here?

cads: oh nice, what layout?

cads: or make, really

cads: https://www.xkcd.com/924/

cads: kakobrekla: awsome gantry

cads: kakobrekla: the "vitamins" needed to put together a 3d printer - steppers, controllers, RAMP board, and linear actuators - are only around $300. As soon as your mill is up and running with a mill head, you could fabricate the parts for a 3d printer kit fairly easily.

cads: The 3dp community advises against 3d printer/mill hybrids. A mill needs torque and stiffness, while a 3d printer needs lightness and feed speeds - they use speeds that are rather shocking to people used to traditional mills

cads: so a mill/printer hybrid will perform poorly at least one task :D

cads: haha, how much?

cads: I may _need_ a gantry, but I couldn't pay more than $800 for it, and this would likely be an insult.

cads: considering your sunk cost

cads: it's amazingly rigid looking construction - at least you have a quality product :)

cads: I'm looking at a lower quality offering in the range of $1500, in kit form

cads: kakobrekla: it needs z-fixtures and milling head?

cads: kakobrekla: I hope you do! What kind of ideas did you have planned for it.

cads: inhies: it seems like a lot of rep-rap grade printers end up gathering dust

cads: hrm it pisses me off that the reprap community seems to be allowing large corporations to patentblock all the valuable 3DP IP

cads: they worked their ASSES off to make personal desktop manufacturing remotely feasible, and those high capital jackals are waiting for the market to mature so they can pounce.

cads: the worst part is that if you talk to the open 3dp community about setting up defensive publications, they're all like "heck naw. ain't gonna be no centralized IP control on open 3dp tech"

cads: or, "you have any idea how much it costs to file patents?"

cads: agricultural genetic patents are such horse shit

cads: say my crop gets contaminated by monstanto genetics from a farm up-wind

cads: I'm not liable to damages claimed by the monsanto company

cads: s/not/now

cads: asciilifeform: what's your 3d printing background?

cads: what I heard was a lot about printing guns, without any mention of things like the thingiverse, the form 1, makerbot industry's successes, the fact that the staples is rolling out a 3d printer that will be sold from their stores (the cubify offering).

cads: 3d printed guns is about 1 year old

cads: and the whole topic is only for lunatics

cads: this is like judging bitcoin solely on the characteristics of its use in the silk road.

cads: appplications for 3d printing are amazingly wide ranging. The cubify is a mass produced unit in the $1200 range, intended for crafts and hobbies, school classrooms, children, and so on.

cads: it's also misleading to say that 3d printers require the same CAD/CAM work that mills require

cads: asciilifeform: this is not true - for a well tuned commercial printer, the process of turning a 3d design into gcode is almost trivial. Coding g-code for a cnc mill is amazingly hard for high complexity parts, and often requires the production of specialized tooling and setup costs for each new part you produce

cads: no, you synthesize it

cads: Yep. the print time of a part scales with the part's volume. The milling time of a contoured part scales with the amount of material removed, but more importantly, with the feature count of the surface produced.

cads: benkay: lets talk more about 3dp later - I think there is a great future in personal desktop-based manufacturing, and it seems like 3dp is positioned to bring it to the consumer. There are lots of points of contention I'd love to chat about, but I gotta jet.