trinque: or sign a copy of your whole wot and deed if you prefer, though mp makes it clear that habitually doing so has hazards.
BingoBoingo: shinohai: What 6 dollars? This is not December 2012!
shinohai can now buy 2 bottles of Night Train for the price of 1 ether
trinque: as I pondered the thing it also brought from the dark recesses of my mind the "semantic web"
trinque: aka shared global mutable schema is hard
trinque: right re: immutable, hence there is no extensibility proposed
ben_vulpes: does the lispy lordship have opinions to share about cl extension libs like "alexandria" and "metabang-bind"?
☟︎☟︎ trinque: iirc phf has mentioned alexandria
trinque: and they dare call the "great firewall" oppressive
trinque: inb4 every deedbot published item is a terrorist hash
a111: Logged on 2016-12-05 17:57 mircea_popescu: ie, "intellectual property", or a misplaced expectation of control.
BingoBoingo tried a couple drafts on the fake news about pedo pizza being "attacked" and decided not to spread unconfirmed rumours and innuendos about what smells like a false flag
BingoBoingo: I mean "shooter" conviced of pedophile pizza but doesn't shed pedophile blood?!
mircea_popescu: Ehrsam wrote: "There is nothing that bitcoin can do which Ethereum can’t." << aha. bwahahah. how about not falling over every week ?
mircea_popescu: trinque apparently this was the first time you commented under that name. i dunno, i thought i saw you before. anyway, should go straight through next time.
jhvh1: BingoBoingo: Bitstamp BTCUSD last: 751.0, vol: 5686.78288839 | BTC-E BTCUSD last: 751.66, vol: 5245.82133 | Bitfinex BTCUSD last: 752.23, vol: 8504.58373911 | BTCChina BTCUSD last: 767.412464, vol: 1470969.48600000 | Kraken BTCUSD last: 753.04, vol: 1733.8489545 | Volume-weighted last average: 767.191299207
a111: Logged on 2016-10-11 20:26 mircea_popescu: no, i'm implying that nobody in plato's cave knows how badly the cave sucks until someone comes in riding a pegassus
shinohai: "I'm gonna quit using gpg, but you can contact me using signal + tor!"
shinohai: Works for cloudflare, nuff said
mircea_popescu: whatever, he gets at least 2 encrypted mails a year i get about two dozen an hour.
mircea_popescu: why does he figure himself as a "perfect user" i have nfi - before a business comms system works for you, YOU GOTTA HAVE A BUSINESS.
mircea_popescu: random schmucko bum-student dun have a business ; or any business here.
mircea_popescu: "I never ever ever successfully used the WoT to validate a public key." ie what we do here multiple times a day ?
☟︎ mircea_popescu: oh, he's trying to sell whatever other nsa altpgp. myeah, whatever.
shinohai: >>> 09:20 +shinohai Works for cloudflare, nuff said
shinohai: Their "Crypto Expert" or whatevs
mircea_popescu: schmucks really came a long way from the 80s. srsly, consumer-mentality based fud "oh noes, i worry about my key! government should come and give me certainties! putin influenced elections! guns kill people!"
mircea_popescu: just go make a littoral self-rape ship, this software/internet stuff is a waste of your talents, folks.
Framedragger: ah, well it seems he did make progress with short ID bruteforcing, that's gotta count for something.
Framedragger: "If you need to securely contact me, your best bet is to DM me asking for my Signal number" << hmh.
mircea_popescu: hurr durr, they were doing pgp subversion research and picked his hanno bock to publish some results.
mircea_popescu: notice how he glued himself to heartbleed (which, unlike the normal hanno bockian crap, was a surprise to the empire).
mircea_popescu: that's kinda what they do, whenever something moves without hitler they try to barnacle on it.
mircea_popescu: anyway, i guess all this gives a very interesting answer to the "how does tmsr gpd compare to fiat states gdp". apparently they produce 2 gpgrams/year/capita, and consist of what, 1k of the herbivores ? meanwhile ben_vulpes 's thing deals in what, dozens/day ?
jhvh1: mircea_popescu: 2 * 1000 / (24 * 365) = 0.228310502283105
mircea_popescu: Framedragger guess what, toddlers drinking bleach die just like adults do.
Framedragger: right, right. and also the whole "incompetence ~= malice" thing.
phf: why does he go through song and dance of "officially" abandoning his key, if he has by own admission no counterparties?
phf is confusedly observing native's rain dance of "sekure comms"
scriba: Something went wrong while attempting to read the log.
scriba: Exception: ['utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0x92 in position 5709: invalid start byte]
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform well, ubuntu repackages debian every 6 mo or so
mircea_popescu: (they "commit to security updates within 9 months". fancy that wonder.)
phf: Framedragger: fwiw the logs have properly reffed the original link, no need for a second one
mircea_popescu: anyway. 10.04/10.10/11.04 are squeeze ; the rest up to 14.04 wheezy and then jessie.
mircea_popescu: and they always package "sid" (ie, devel) as opposed to stable
jhvh1: shinohai: The operation succeeded.
Framedragger: (the 79.98.25.168 pop is interesting tho, as some of these hosting-company-i-use boxen get provisioned with everything installed, and i'm sure as fuck that "not all" customers regen ssh host keys. so there may be more pops, or other interesting goodness. probably the whole /16 is worthy of getting properly port-scanned, lots of broken stuff there i'm sure - if anyone has time etc)
mircea_popescu: phf for the obvious reason, the horde of consumers want to do what other people have done. the idea is for terrorists to not be able to communicate with upstanding, law abiding citizens, not the other way around.
mircea_popescu: gotta stop the spread of "fake news" and other burgeois propaganda.
mircea_popescu: obviously... except until www gets involved and you have escaped code points vs bytestream
mircea_popescu: aanyway. the moral broadly speaking is that there's a windows-niggers-and-other-idiots python ("windows-niggers-and-other-idiots" which is how you decode "3" in unicode) and a normal people python which finally became stable cca 2010 and thanks god.
a111: Logged on 2016-12-06 02:33 ben_vulpes: does the lispy lordship have opinions to share about cl extension libs like "alexandria" and "metabang-bind"?
phf:
http://btcbase.org/log/2016-12-06#1578252 << the two are different beasts. alexandria by design is a set of helper functions that wouldn't be out of place in the standard (complete with sometimes obtuse names!), some like with-gensyms doplist flatten iota if/when-let i've seen reimplemented all over the place. bind is more of a everything and kitchen sink replacement for builtin operators
☝︎ a111: Logged on 2016-12-06 02:33 ben_vulpes: does the lispy lordship have opinions to share about cl extension libs like "alexandria" and "metabang-bind"?
jurov: mircea_popescu: no and iirc i never used them
phf: ben_vulpes: if you were to use bind everywhere you can use it (e.g. as a replacement for let, destructuring-bind) your code is going to look sufficiently different that it's not clear if you're even programming in common lisp at that point. makes the result less readable for other cl programmers, and code becomes harder to future proof. the tradeoff is generally seen as not worth it (too intrusive for little payoff)
jurov: mircea_popescu: just looked into storage to be sure, nope. but by time screens came out, i got scared by amounts you(plural) invested into eulora and gave up on it
mircea_popescu: they kinda became rare and are selling for crazy, 500%+ premiums.
mircea_popescu: anyway. any tool bps or stuff ? many things went up a lot.
jurov: i doubt it, gave up on creating tools long before that
jurov had once amassed almost-significant amount of eulora stuff ... in a claim that vanished :D
mircea_popescu: anyway, you should prolly go through your inventory and hold a garage sale / auction. prices changed a lot since a year ago
shinohai: I had nearly all my stuff in claims until I found out they vanish sporadically, so back to Electron it all went.
phf: this happens to squats all the time, but i don't think that the fatalities are as high in civilized world, because people tend to understand what they get into when they squat. sucks, because it's likely to make getting warehouses for legitimate use trickier in the future
trinque: asciilifeform: suppose vectored sigs exist, and having provided a weasel route through V, nobody ever actually swears to an item in full.
trinque: no, but it invites them to the party
phf: i know a guy who lives in a shipping container (actually mutliple shipping containers welded together) in that area, but he built it himself, he works with steel and propane and is generally a competent person (he lives on his shop grounds). when i read the story i though maybe a warehouse rave caught on fire, but apparently the idiots were living there? it'll just make the authorities take a closer look at oakland warehouses and fuck
phf: things up for not idiots
BingoBoingo: asciilifeform: This is why electric code now includes puzzles like "arc fault" circuit breaker.
diana_coman: fwiw I kept trying to digest asciilifeform's proposed categories, but I must confess I would still have trouble deciding on one or another; basically my clear categories would really be binary: I'm USING this or I WILL NOT USE this; the rest I would rather expect to be sorted by competence meaning that one who wants to write a patch for eulora would better get a "I'm using this" from someone involved with eulora, not from his t
diana_coman: eacher of computer science, no matter how great/capable that teacher might be
mircea_popescu: diana_coman that part, of "who", is kinda baked in the design as it is, because of the .seals
trinque: and the -1 doesn't undermine the opposability with "eh, I never actually read this" and etc
trinque: the signed curse would be stood by in court / at the gallows, whereas something like "I am responsible for some of this" is what, the part that killed my goat, or "always not that part" ?
a111: Logged on 2016-12-06 14:23 mircea_popescu: "I never ever ever successfully used the WoT to validate a public key." ie what we do here multiple times a day ?
trinque: point being the "I am responsible for some" becomes meaningless because no one will ever be pinned down by that.
mircea_popescu: Framedragger "using the wot to validate a public key".
mircea_popescu: seems this is exactly defined as "get X's key from Y you trust". observe :
Framedragger: and how the hell do you know that what thing-calling-self-deedbot gave you over fleanode is thing-you-requested?
mircea_popescu: not only is it done, and done tons, contrary to his "never" : but it is eminently administrable and accountable, as i just proved.
Framedragger: hmm. i mean, sure, it just.. seems awfully promisetronic, to peruse local lingo.
mircea_popescu: "promisetronic" in the sense of "not rippletronic/ethereumtronic/etc" is a good thing.
Framedragger: oh, sure, i understand that the scheme as currently implemented *actually works* :p
trinque: as far as the lying wire is concerned, that's solved by a different gadget
☟︎ trinque: wouldn't be appropriate to approach that ad hoc
Framedragger: mircea_popescu: but what oftentimes ends up happening when you request key from deedbot is that the requester then promptly uses that key to encrypt $text, and ping recipient with a public url to $text. the fact that there's been no mitm, i think, only shows that the lizards do not find this place important enough (for better or worse, etc)
mircea_popescu: Framedragger what happens when you go to a bar and order a drink is that the bartender pours you a drink.
mircea_popescu: the reason is that large scale crime syndicates don't... think bars important enough ?
Framedragger: hmh. i guess it counts as "key verification" then. hm
mircea_popescu: see, allowing a well tailored pyramid of risk eating is not bad. it's good.
mircea_popescu: maybe i have a really important message and i send it 2nd, what.
a111: Logged on 2016-12-06 17:03 mircea_popescu: Framedragger because if it isn't, X will complain.
mircea_popescu: then the whole thing was badly designed and whoever deserves to lose.
Framedragger: (this whole "request key before i encipher" seems weird to me at any rate. store the keys, have some out-of-band way of verifying them, and use them when needed. but i understand that the current mechanism is useful, and iirc i must have used it myself, even)
phf: i think key reliance here is very much ~wot~ very similar to how otc used to operate. i.e. if there's no identity outside of key, then key-identity-trust are all tied together. nobody sends anybody sensitive command/control/comm without knowing them first. i had a version of asciilifeform's key for years, and my knowledge of asciilifeform was build on multiple verifications of asciikey-asciilifeform-rating entity
a111: Logged on 2016-12-06 17:03 mircea_popescu: Framedragger because if it isn't, X will complain.
a111: Logged on 2016-11-18 01:06 asciilifeform: !!key BingoBoingo
a111: Logged on 2016-09-28 20:31 shinohai: !!key thestringpuller
Framedragger: (i guess WoT trust had been simply deferred to deedbot until those points in time, etc)
mircea_popescu: 1st seems more like spot check and 2nd i'm not sure the two did have a prior relationship
mircea_popescu: Framedragger understand, it makes 0 difference that you "exist" in the sense of, have a tight relationship with your gf. existence is solipsistic, you exist to X once X bothers to get your key.
shinohai: I didn't have a prior copy of thestringpuller 's key in that instance.
trinque: aim moar www at home directories!
mircea_popescu: dude wtf, isn't all www run off a "public_html" or similar homedir ?
Framedragger: i bet `GET /../../../../etc/passwd` still works often enough :p
Framedragger: mircea_popescu: ya but iirc folx have attempted to crack things, and maybe it was some shitty hashing scheme before? dunno. but i've seen similar in old logs
phf: passwd didn't actually have passwords in it, encrypted or hashed, for many decades. even classical unixes have switched to shadow, which is usually not readable by anyone but root
Framedragger: ahyeah, i also remember reading about folx extracting /etc/shadow due to bad file permissions, god knows why
phf: well shadow for a longest time was md5 hashed (on linuxes anyway), so there was a nice window where you could with some craftiness extract passwords out of it
phf: actually i'm wrong it's not even md5, it's a version of DES
phf: actually i'm wrong again, crypt takes special $id$salt$encrypted format, where id is 1/2/5/6 for md5/blowfish/sha256/sha512. on the box where i looked that up all the passwords are $1$
phf: it's a glibc2 variant, i wonder what openbsd does..
mircea_popescu: phf ubuntu has a bunch of "rtkit:*:15016:0:99999:7:::"
mircea_popescu: supposedly... * means "account disabled" and null means no pw needed.
mircea_popescu: yeah not a very good scheme. anyway, convention is pw field uses $ver$pw, and i see ubuntu sets it to 6.
mircea_popescu: (salt, it should be pointed out, is nonsense leftover from the "md5 is broken and that's ok" days. if your hash needs a salt you need a new hash.)
phf: asciilifeform: i think it's specifically to prevent rainbow tables
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform incidentally i intend to use this in eulora - have the privkey file encrypted, and have both a client-wide settable prefix and a password
phf: also those flags are not separate, but in the same field. difference between "anyone can login" and "can
mircea_popescu: "set this if you want only this machine to be able to run your account", long time a holy grail of high-value game accounts
phf: "can't login" is literally one symbol. obviously i've seen that on compromised machines, somewhere in that large column of of id:*:... there would be a random system account with :: go look
mircea_popescu: yes, but you'll be able to set the salt in config, is the point.
mircea_popescu: not some sort of genius thing ; but leaps anmd bounds above what eg blizzard offers.
mircea_popescu: anyway ; still not entirely convinced as to WHAT to use to encrypt the eulora-privkey with.
mircea_popescu: i was thinking maybe someone gets abused cs done in time.
mircea_popescu: anyway - even if the client src is published - it will ship with pw_prefix = "" pw_suffix ="". if you edit these and recompile your pw won't work on stock or anyone else's client, and there's no rule you have to compile on the exact machine you use. you can keep the src in your safe and run object code.
mircea_popescu: yes one could dissect it to find the cappers and fuck your pw, but this is a lot less easy than most anythingelse.
a111: Logged on 2016-10-24 16:26 mircea_popescu: "Avoid easy selections, such as qwerty or password. If you want to pick an easy-to-remember but somewhat unique password, consider a variation of a word, such as a1rPl4nE for airplane."
mircea_popescu: poor BingoBoingo is oppressed by a manifest news drought.
shinohai: Last month was my driest since I started.
BingoBoingo: mircea_popescu: Seriously. "How the redditards live" made today's paper.
mircea_popescu: that looks a lot like a crate full of electronic parts.
BingoBoingo: mircea_popescu: Though Governor elect's wife robbed in "nice" part of StL is awful lulzy
mircea_popescu: anyway, this is very lulzy because a VERY similar fire in bucharest resulted in a govt shuffle.
BingoBoingo: I await Twitter and startup creatures complaining about more street people.
jhvh1: BingoBoingo: The operation succeeded.
shinohai: It waz cazalla ... in the outback ... with a lead pipe.
a111: Logged on 2016-12-05 16:01 asciilifeform: mats ?
a111: Logged on 2016-12-06 16:31 asciilifeform: phf: the funny bit is: if fire safety laws were to be enforced in usa, most if not all of the suburban idiotboxes would be condemned and bulldozed
mircea_popescu: certainly high density overvalued property (ny, sf, etc) is unmaintained to standards.
mircea_popescu: this is perpetually the case, the people who live in high density live there because they can't afford lower density ; but the needs of various countermeasures are greater the higher the density (exponentially).
mircea_popescu: so if poorfag gets a dollar, he's much more likely to apply that dollar towards going further away from the high density rats nest than towards getting the very high density rats nest closer to habitable standard.
mircea_popescu: and so the plague, and the great fire of london, and so on.
mircea_popescu: really, the notion that buenos aires is a CITY is ridiculous on its face.
mircea_popescu: you realise it's about five times the size of new york ? it's a village.
mircea_popescu: as in, orcs flooded new york ; bereft of any means to do anything ; ended up in harlem.
BingoBoingo: Lettuce not forget to lol at "artists" thinking themselves better than the building trades
deedbot: Guest13734 voiced for 30 minutes.
deedbot: Guest73114 voiced for 30 minutes.
phf: tmsr, the third group
mircea_popescu: ^ idiots managed to fuck up their site ; all links to answers are 404
shinohai: Probably because they paid someone from fiverr to admin their servers! :D
mircea_popescu: no, no. more bezzle : the new jersey lawyers get to pretend like they ACHIEVED ; the eff get to pretend like they mattered ; the students get to pretend they were cool.
BingoBoingo: lol "But there’s something special about Comet Ping Pong, and it’s that distinctive character, sadly, that may have allowed the campaign against it to fester. Comet is, after all, D.C.’s weirdo pizza place."
mircea_popescu: this is the true cause of us law prolixity / enforcement sparsity.
BingoBoingo: "In the venue’s all-ages policy, a time-honored practice of radical inclusion in the D.C. punk scene, they see a cover for pedophilia."
phf: in russia punk scene was also all age, you just showed up. here it means that everyone's allowed, but none's allowed to have fun
mircea_popescu: phf i dunno wtf punk schene this is, but children were never allowed anywhere near, to my knowledge.
phf: mircea_popescu: well, define children? an pissed tike in a dirty косуха could be of any age for all anybody cares. but certainly not in a sense of "child-friendly outing"
mircea_popescu: enforced through the dual a) must be able to handle being punched b) must have tits approach.
mircea_popescu: phf male children, you crack lightly nose bleeds / eyes leak.
mircea_popescu: im npot even aware people were allowed to be married ; let alone have children. really, punk fathers ?
mircea_popescu: pretty sure the guy reads the log with some sort of frequency.
☟︎ phf: "sorry-for-you-loss cutthroat meritocracy"
phf: oh yeah, of course i remember it as "everyone was children", but there was a cutoff point. "younger brother" sort of thing
phf: dc punk scene reminds me of this story i read at some point by an отморозок trying to run some hustle in london. at some point he says he saw some suspiciously clean looking skinheads, so was about to go "how are you brothers" until he saw that the two were holding hands. after that he goes on a long rant about how london skinheads are all fags, etc.
mircea_popescu: to my eyes the whole "social media" is running out of attraction juice, but what do i know.
mircea_popescu: phf ironically punk (90s, romania) was uncharacteristically tolerant of faggotry. discreet, but present. "rockers" much less tolerant.
BingoBoingo: asciilifeform: This particular heathen iirc visited befor
mircea_popescu: "kids will virtual currency too" ? what is this, illiterate indians will preet as well ?
phf: "The Disrupt Hackathon is a 24 Hour event preceding the annual Disrupt London conference organized by TechCrunch."
mircea_popescu: pedophile old men like paul graham & friends used to CORRUPT the athenian youth
mircea_popescu: but on the other side of the coin, "As you probably already know, but my trademark thoroughness still obliges me to say, AI stands for "Artificial Intelligence" and comes in two flavors, "deterministic" (like minmax) and "statistical" (like SVM). The combined efforts of various researches lead to an important breakthrough in this field, known to meteorologists as "the AI winter". This is the season when you can't get any VC m
mircea_popescu: oney if you mention AI anywhere in your business plan."
mircea_popescu: "If the thing is even remotely close to "intelligent", you can no longer issue commands; you must explain yourself and ask for something and then it will misunderstand you." << he's wrong, incidentally. intelligent and obedient are not in any way orthogonal, a matter i have verified experimentally to my satisfaction.
mircea_popescu: yes but if he is seriously contemplating a distinction along those lines his whole piece just exploded into unrelatable islands.
mircea_popescu: as the idea is to make ai not a"i". THAT we already have.
mircea_popescu: well it's also not clear the interface/drill bit dichotomy is supported by his piece.
mircea_popescu: i must confes : that i am not sufficiently an idealist to presume some sort of "human-brain-substance" that's somehow irreproducible in any other paradigm than via cunt-perl.
mircea_popescu: i guess in his terms this makes me an ai weenie. you know, like hofstadter.
mircea_popescu: i can grant that ai is a psychiatric issue of plenty of computer programmers ; i can even grant that it is perhaps best to pretend like ai is "impossible" in the sense he means to perhaps cure the idiots.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform the brain is a shambling horror of cells.
mircea_popescu: understand that in order for the cunt to work, you don't have to understand its parts and mechanisms. iraqi "elite forces" use bridges and cartridges just fine even though they evidently can't make either.
mircea_popescu: people who believe in immaculate conception manage to reproduce just fine etc.
mircea_popescu: now then : the issue of arbitrarily hard ai existing / being produced is separate of same being produced ~by you~. for any definition of you.
mircea_popescu: but then again : the most hardcore anti-ai stance, and the one to which i vaguely subscribe, is to observe that the 1 is entirely illusory
mircea_popescu: see the "your brain is not a thinking mechanism" discussions.
mircea_popescu: yes, but the approaches "ever tried" have been "ever tried" in a short period of history which is chiefly distinguished by the incredible quality that NONE of the approaches tried, in ANY fields, worked to any degree or produced anything of interest.
mircea_popescu: be they "how to run your household" or "how do do war and diplomacy" or anything else ABSOLUTELY.
mircea_popescu: the same 60-70 years that failed to produce anything woreth the mention in ai also failed to produce an even vaguely coherent model of the state, or of any sort of identity in any field, or of you pick it. not even their distribution models work.
mircea_popescu: perhaps rsa. though i'm entirely unconvinced it's not to be found in medieval arithmetics.
trinque: it's entirely possible - and I think likely - that what counts for human intelligence does not run in a single human head
☟︎ mircea_popescu: we agree, hence my various stances on language and its effects.
mircea_popescu: (classical antiquity take on it - they didn't have radios)
mircea_popescu: anyway, the idea was similar - war is won by the shovel means same thing, that indirect effects drown out direct effects.
a111: Logged on 2016-12-06 22:21 trinque: it's entirely possible - and I think likely - that what counts for human intelligence does not run in a single human head
mircea_popescu: "i've never seen anything remotely as annoying as prolog, with the notable exception of makefiles, running on top of a wonderful inference engine of their own" << ahaha!
jhvh1: BingoBoingo: Current Blocks: 442245 | Current Difficulty: 2.867657668205504E11 | Next Difficulty At Block: 443519 | Next Difficulty In: 1274 blocks | Next Difficulty In About: 1 week, 1 day, 10 hours, 29 minutes, and 24 seconds | Next Difficulty Estimate: None | Estimated Percent Change: None
mircea_popescu: (this is my stock question to cut the new age-y idiots at the knees. "oh ant colony optimizes" "what ?". sooner or later they realise they can't actually SAY what the fuck it is, because it's not a scalar ; nor a vector nor a bitfield. yes they optimize something, now put it in a hard typed language. what is it ?)
phf: asciilifeform: i think the ant one is the algo book, where's eberhart is an overview
jurov: ants supposedly optimize paths to food. but slime mold can do it too, without pheromone trails that have potential to make cycles
mircea_popescu: jurov this "ants optimize paths to food" is like saying "trump won the election". o, really, he did ?
mircea_popescu: it works as a retrospective, "looking at this anthill, it becomes evident it mostly managed to feed itself historically". yes. so... what.
jurov: they could use drunk walk or quantum bogosort or something.. they don't
phf: i think that's one of standard thinker childhood experiences, making a closed loop in the ant pheromone trail
mircea_popescu: this country has a lot of foraging ant species. i enjoy watching them. on numerous occasions i have observed individual ant dragging acer type seed.
mircea_popescu: the general impression is of an ant that decided to take up yachting
mircea_popescu: the sail blows in the wind, topples it, the animal will happily spend half an hour spinning in a dime's area.
mircea_popescu: you'd think they had wind back in 50`000`000 bc back when ants were a hot new gizmo.
mircea_popescu: but apparently... the acer seed / wind combo hasn't needed any optimization or anything hence.
mircea_popescu: contradicts my naive expectations as to what "optimization" is.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform what, so they didn't have samarae where the ant came from ?
mircea_popescu: how about we just agree that the data type of the optimized variable is not computable.
mircea_popescu: yes, they optimized. what ? von kaman's underpants, that's what.
jurov: i can only guess neurons are too expensive and having extra to avoid above spinning is not...optimal
mircea_popescu: jurov yes, but the trouble is not only that your guess is not formal - it's that your guess is not formalizable.
mircea_popescu: you know, data type. that i can put in an ada-like manual and write a compiler for.
mircea_popescu: and the anthill optimizes for the ... pointer to the function which is... the element of the anthill ?
mircea_popescu: what's this, "i'll make sure the turing machine don't ever stop, i'm having too much fun" ?
trinque: if it were optimizing solely for energy it would be better off not existing
jurov: maximize biomass of the species?
mircea_popescu: anyway - the reason the yaching ant is such a good example is because - it COULD just fucking cut off the god damned sail. couldn't it ? just drag the seed without the air drag ?
jurov: anyway, if it's not optimization, what does mircea_popescu call the its-not-doing-drunk-walk phenomenon?
mircea_popescu: there's no requirement that the world makes sense in my categories, see.
mircea_popescu: "anthill optimizes for anthood" is a very true if not particularly useful statement. and the type of "anthood" variable could be... "anthillyness".
jurov: "could fucking cut off the sail" is formalizable but "having extra neurons to be able to do so" is not?
trinque: can't really said to be optimal, just that various other anthills were less so
mircea_popescu: trinque this doesn't explain why ants aren't like trilobytes see. most species are extinct, ants are uniquelly successful at the game of life.
trinque: at any rate the AI thing is exactly "discover the meaning of life"
mircea_popescu: except things like dog vomit, or the previously discussed black alcohol modl. they've been here fopr a long long time now.
trinque: might be entirely natural to fart around on a planet for a while then get knocked by some rock onto the next one
trinque: who said those molecules give a shit about you
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform there's some possibility their spores made it out into outer space.
mircea_popescu: there's planets with wild volcanoes of ethylene in our very solar system. red dwarf may make them rather pleasant.
mircea_popescu: but afaik nobody has done serious work on "order species by spore resistance to proton beam illumination".
mircea_popescu: which should prolly be a decent grant topic for the curious.
mircea_popescu: if they did produce anything useful in the above vein i've never seen it.
mircea_popescu: in general they were directed at "interesting" things which didn't include fungi
mircea_popescu: yes, but there's a very few fungi that are industrially relevant
mircea_popescu: which is why i say, not much seriouys work done on the actual topic.
mircea_popescu: governments, turns out, tend to waste their resources.
mircea_popescu: (actually, for they reading to educate : most fungi live in more or less mutualistic relationships with lichens ; a few with trees, which are advancedlichens)
mircea_popescu: <mircea_popescu> i dunno, output a list of 10k items ? <
mircea_popescu: there's a good few millions of species ; 10k would be a negligible dent.
mircea_popescu: they are some of the most diverse biota, possibly 5 to 50mn different species.
mircea_popescu: and to round off the "fungi are interesting" general literacy thread - the way most (and the most) poisonous mushrooms work is through a substance that inhibits extremely selectively rna polymerase 2. this makes the affected cells unable to reproduce, and hence the "eat destroying angel, get cramps/diarhea in three days, drop dead in 7" effect.
mircea_popescu: since recently dna understanding improved significantly, and the workings of the immune system, esp in its binding functions, became more understood ; and since complex molecule synthesis muchly developed as well, a universal cure for cancer based on the principle of getting alpha-amanitin bound to a specific tumour cell seeking protein seems altogether very feasible.
mircea_popescu: there's been various successful tests, including prostate-cancer-rat achieving complete remission through 1 iv application. so we have maybe 50-50 chances to see a ~general~ cure for cancer within our lifetime.
mircea_popescu: which is the deep reason for a major redistribution of research resources from other fashionable causes to cancer in thepast decade, as cartman aptly observed.
mircea_popescu: (general here means exactly the same it does when i say we have a general cure for infection. it's not that nobody can die of infections ; but that there's antibiotics, which mostly work.)
BingoBoingo: <asciilifeform> eh pretty much every half-useful attempt at cancer has been 'bind $poison to $selector' << That's essentially all of pharmacology. X fucks Y receptor
mircea_popescu: anyway, i dun recall the specifics but i think this may have been grafted not endogenous