tmsr - Log 2018-03-08

mircea_popescu: * renard_abroad (~mrfox@r201-217-148-155.ir-static.anteldata.net.uy) << check him out. how's teh uruguashos bunnies, mr fox ?

renard_abroad: but also are very strangely short and frequently wearing the kind of makeup that makes skin worse

mircea_popescu: in other lulz of the ongoing fetlife saga, they've MASSIVELY rate limited profile views. check out ~100 people in an hour or so, get timed out.

mircea_popescu: so big deal, right, i have more c blocks than baku had girlfriends. except, wait for it... new accounts require SMS verification! everything must be facebook!

mircea_popescu: sooo... big deal, 1 sent girl to buy a bagful of phone numbers. they cost, no joke, $2.5 here. EXCEPT, of course, they want your "cedula", you know, "por activacion". ☟︎

mircea_popescu: which is not a big deal at all, considering most any shop will sell you preactivated ones nqa anyway.

BingoBoingo: <mircea_popescu> i had no idea how much i actually missed qntra. << Turns out it isn't absence that makes the heart grow fonder, but the return!

mircea_popescu: this entire exercise in idiocy has, practically speaking, resulted in me paying various hard working ticos a grand or so, to the people fucking in the ass the "security" paradigm of pantsuit.fetlife. IN LIEU of having paid that much, and rather more, to the fetlife itself. ☟︎☟︎☟︎

mircea_popescu: but this paradigm where "we will cater to the peniless but opinionated female herd, instead of the rich and actually powerful white male" fucked them over. ☟︎☟︎

asciilifeform: hm i thought fetlife was the usual 'ad-supported' 'phree' crapola, rather than a pay www

mircea_popescu: the "online ads" thing is so fucking dead, alphabet continuing to claim that as income is much more scandalous fraud than anything gaddafi ever did.

asciilifeform: not substantially different from other american 'incomes', e.g. lockheed's , ( i.e. usg prints printolade, sends straight to $designateds )

mircea_popescu: anyway. i guess nothing in the world is harder than fucking groking the http://trilema.com/2014/namecheap-goes-off-the-deep-end-anyone-know-a-decent-domain-registrar/ lesson. especially when one's dedicated his life to not ever groking it.

deedbot: http://barksinthewind.com/2018/vtools-c-interop-other-fixes/ << BARKS IN THE WIND - vtools C interop, other fixes

deedbot: http://www.dianacoman.com/2018/03/08/eucrypt-compilation-sheet/ << Ossasepia - EuCrypt: Compilation Sheet

deedbot: http://qntra.net/2018/03/nationalist-dissident-group-leadership-incarcerated-in-britain/ << Qntra - Nationalist Dissident Group Leadership Incarcerated In Britain

ave1: diana_coman, I'm reading through the eucrypt / RSA code and see that the 'get_random_prime' function will open and close the random number generator itself. I would like to open the entropy source once and reuse it, but maybe there is good reason to do it like this and I should not attempt to do it differently?

diana_coman: ave1 there is open_entropy_source which simply opens it and returns the handle; then you can use it for as long as you want, with get_random_octets_from (rather than get_random_octets)

ave1: Yes, I understand that part. I'm looking at 'get_random_prime'. Which will be called twice to generate a key-pair.

diana_coman: to answer the question directly: you can certainly do it with reuse; the reason I avoided it there is because otherwise the caller needs to handle/be aware of the entropy source per se; which did not really belong in the caller

diana_coman: you can certainly do it the way you describe - I don't see a hard reason against it if you are all right with passing the handle around/keeping track of it everywhere; other than that, the functionality itself should be fine

ave1: I'll have to think about it, I do not want to make changes that make things more complex for "reasons" and then more complex enzovoorts enzovoorts. And then end up with PGP ☟︎

diana_coman: for completeness: there is in fact a performance penalty for opening/closing the entropy source repeatedly, so from this point of view yes, you'd want it open and reused; that being said, it's not a massive penalty and atm I can live with it

diana_coman: heh, there is that slippery slope; and note that in all that there, it's still that darned mpi that is the biggest part and I am absolutely not convinced it has to be THAT big

diana_coman: but for now it survives as it is because there are so many other things that are more pressing, sigh

ave1: I've started on http://btcbase.org/log/2018-02-28#1786498, in Ada code and now I'm debating if I shouldn't just move the code to C as the eucrypt interface is C. But then maybe eucrypt will move to FFA someday in the future and Ada will be a benifit. (Working on code with lot's of C calls in Ada is not nice...) ☝︎☟︎

a111: Logged on 2018-02-28 15:57 mircea_popescu: ave1 you should ; also read through the eucrypt thing, ima (for instance) need someone to package it into a cmd line gpg replacement as soon as next wek.

diana_coman: trouble with the future is that it is...the future; I'd have gladly avoided C all together but unfortunately mpi is in C and then eulora relies on a lot of C code still

diana_coman: as to trying eulora: it's not time consuming really; I guess the initial jump can seem intimidating until you figure out what is what and what to do

a111: Logged on 2018-03-08 14:23 ave1: nice code BTW, very easy to read and understand.

mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2018-03-08#1787216 << it seems rather, that first you should evaluate the http://btcbase.org/log/2018-03-08#1787207 and see if indeed it makes sense, or it's just the proverbial "first notion that formed in head upon quarter seccond's apprehension of $item" ; if indeed it is needed, legitimately, then the next step is to make a file handler that eats your file as you want it on one hand and emulates fg ☝︎☝︎☟︎☟︎

a111: Logged on 2018-03-08 14:27 ave1: I'll have to think about it, I do not want to make changes that make things more complex for "reasons" and then more complex enzovoorts enzovoorts. And then end up with PGP

a111: Logged on 2018-03-08 14:20 ave1: I want to use a single "entropy" file.

mircea_popescu: this a) would be actually simpler, in engineering terms, than the other possible approach your mind immediately ran to (simple, here, is a term of art -- it includes all costs, maintenance, readability, etc) ; and b) it keeps complexity where complexity belongs, which is to say upon the shoulders of the thing that wanted it in the first place.

mircea_popescu: it is not an idle comment to observe that the universalist nature of pantsuitism manifests here exactly as everywhere -- their sad, broken cargocultish tech-ersatz does exactly what their sad, broken fake of an economy etc : rolls up the small costs into a larger one to be paid "in the future", which to them is a term of art specifically meaning never.

mircea_popescu: but just like we don't do the esthlos "o hai guise, i contribute half hour every third week between my radiomodelling hour and my watching cheerleader sports in the den" github dev model, we also don't do the "we'll underwrite your complexity under our brand" torvalds approach.

mircea_popescu: whole fucking IDEA of a kernel was exactly this, "fuck you $vendor, if you need a whole programming language to init your pos peripheral YOU support it ; we'll just grin from the sidelines while the marketplace drives your inanity out of itself".

mircea_popescu: sadly the idiots team up faster and easier than thinking people do, so instead of linux driving nvidia out of business, the vice-versa occured.

mircea_popescu: (this team-up disparity, incidentally, can readily be explained in republican terms ; it all revolves around http://trilema.com/2017/the-practical-costs-of-hallucinated-freedom/ -- specifically, thinking people need a much larger sunken cost to evaluate their choices and come to the correct conclusion they got none. this is a lot more evident to idiots. as this disparity flows from the definitions of terms...) ☟︎

mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2018-03-08#1787224 << i don't expect eucrypt will ever move to ffa. this is in no sense a disidence, or any negative comment on ffa whatsoever. they are intended and designed as very different usecase solutions -- note the speed differential incumbent. eucrypt works as a "good enough" item, it principally intends to support a game, and same-level crypto needs. it's consequently to be light, fast, and ~r ☝︎

a111: Logged on 2018-03-08 14:38 ave1: I've started on http://btcbase.org/log/2018-02-28#1786498, in Ada code and now I'm debating if I shouldn't just move the code to C as the eucrypt interface is C. But then maybe eucrypt will move to FFA someday in the future and Ada will be a benifit. (Working on code with lot's of C calls in Ada is not nice...)

mircea_popescu: we will evidently have a ffa-based, canonical gpg replacement. EVENTUALLY. until such an eventually, i don't feel so great recommending anyone gpg (or, heavens help us, http://btcbase.org/log/2018-01-22#1774477 -- just as i had to do, and recently). so a drop-in, eucrypt-based, "good enough" item is more than useful. ☝︎

a111: Logged on 2018-01-22 23:49 mircea_popescu: hey shinohai where was the official kleopatra sauce ?

mircea_popescu: and that "good enough"... anyone reading through teh discussion of gpg in eucrypt comments, or in channel for that matter can readily grok just how fucking uselessly broken gpg is. yet "good enough" for everyone else.

mircea_popescu: ave1 is your dancing around the entropy problem with files etc driven by the fact you don't have a fg, incidentally ? ☟︎

asciilifeform read the log just nao, and can't quite figure out whether ave1 was attempting to implement a mechanism similar to asciilifeform's ch8 ( http://www.loper-os.org/?p=2175 ) or something entirely else

mircea_popescu: "the log" being today 70 lines or 2k words. i don't think this ever happeend before in teh history of irc.

phf: i think i might've still used yet another ada/c interop. it's not the char_ptr, it's interfaces.c.pointer

mircea_popescu: i thought that kitty item is a bot at first, which is why i said hi. it's a woman.

phf: i think i'll write it up separately, because i like the approach. you have a generic package pointers, that you specialize with C types, like Interfaces.C.Pointers (Index => size_t, Element => char, Element_Array => char_array), and then you do explicit pointer arithmetic using procedures on that.

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: legendarily, in '90s ru baseball bats were sold errywhere, but no one had ever seen the ball or the glove...

phf: so ada95 only has from_c/to_ada, using char_ptrs/char_array, pointers only appear in ada2000. ~maybe~ they ran into limitations of that interfaces, that are somehow imposed by the spec, that we're missing (but running into effects of that), so to address the issue they introduced yet another method. ☟︎

phf: common lisp sidestepped that issue by not standardizing the ffi at all, and there are still hairy parts in all the implementations. there's fundamentally folly in talking to C word, which you have to do on C's terms

mircea_popescu: im not sure i understand the problem. explain this to me, why can't i talk to c world on my terms ?

phf: you can, of course, symbolics did it by writing own c compiler, that targeted genera. but "we" don't have our own os, or our own c compiler. so whatever calling conventions, data representation conventions and such that C imposes and that are baked into compiler/kernel/architecture is what you have to write to

mircea_popescu: but why can't you just have a tolkienring class, in c, that spits out proper data ?

mircea_popescu: "you can only talk to orc in barbar" problem was traditionally resolved through "extrateritoriality", ie make a base and shoot the orcs that fail to grok what perimeter means.

mircea_popescu: "hong kong", as in, "what trade happens in your country will happen in english and as per english law" would be the opposite of "unicode", conceptually.

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: the directly analogous to 'hong kong' algo would be (brace yerself) separate processes for ada and c-crapolade, connected via ipc (under a unixlike, prolly 'domainsocket'). because otherwise, they live in same process, and if c-crapolade is entrusted with making e.g. a valid adastring, it can lie about the length and hose the ada routine, or simply fandango over address space as c-crapolade is wont to, and so forth. ☟︎

mircea_popescu: asciilifeform a lot of interfacing problems are actually exposed by ave1 's comment above, which could also be read in the general form of "hey, the fundamental problem of electric communications (ie, how to make file and socket work together) is STILL unsolved".

phf: i don't think that explanation quite addresses the analogy, though that would be the concern

mircea_popescu: evidently "entropy" requires, conceptually, a socket. a file is thje opposite of this, and the opposition is rendered by the word "specifically". a socket and a file differ in that files have lengths, sockets have widths.

phf: in this case though hong kong would be if we could beat the authors of c code into providing ada conformant interfaces for us. because if you're the same person who's writing ada and who's writing the interop code (in ada or C, it doesn't matter) you're still "talking in orc"

asciilifeform: there are several interacting problems. one of which is that the fundamental mechanism baked into c for dealing with arrays (where it is not possible to mechanically calculate the length of an array ~at all times~ because it is not in fact stored anywhere ) is broken in the most fundamental way possible

mircea_popescu: phf i can't resolve the antecedents, what is "that" in "that explanation" and what is "that" in "that would be the concern" ?

mircea_popescu: in any case, the english didn't force the chinese to understand what contracts are. they just gave ~themselves~ passports and acted as if they were in england.

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: you can 'emulate ada' in c, sure. but 'array's length is kept ALWAYS right next to the array' is not part of the language's fundamental abstractions. and os api (any and all of'em) don't follow it; and libc; and so on.

mircea_popescu: phf back upstack, the argument can be brought that lisp failing to standardize [the only item that actually needed it] the ffi is actually why lisp failed ; both as a standard and as a technical solution.

mircea_popescu: certainly closer to the actual hot core of the mess than "oh, commercial blabla, and then the involved idiots had "egos" aka http://btcbase.org/log/2018-03-08#1787242 ) ☝︎

a111: Logged on 2018-03-08 16:13 mircea_popescu: (this team-up disparity, incidentally, can readily be explained in republican terms ; it all revolves around http://trilema.com/2017/the-practical-costs-of-hallucinated-freedom/ -- specifically, thinking people need a much larger sunken cost to evaluate their choices and come to the correct conclusion they got none. this is a lot more evident to idiots. as this disparity flows from the definitions of terms...)

asciilifeform: c,cpp, not only do not have 'standard ffi' ( try an' link libs made by microshit, say, to gnu's, or intel's ) but not even has standard... integer handling ( e.g. overflow is ~undefined~ condition ), didn't seem to hurt its, if one dare use the word, 'successes' ☟︎

phf: lisp failed to even identify the need for ffi, when it was standardized i don't think there even were lisps that could or needed to ffi, since they all ran on lisp machines ☟︎

a111: Logged on 2017-06-03 02:41 asciilifeform: you can't actually write a nontrivial c proggy without undefined behaviour.

trinque: could still be said that it helped kill lisp, if getting lisp to take root takes longer than c.

mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2018-03-08#1787294 << but one wouldn't so dare. yes, i'm aware what passes for theater among the huts has more in common with punch and judy and organ grinding than anything. speaking of which -- yesterday my coffee wasd disturbed by chorus of overexcited pubescent girlies. ☝︎

a111: Logged on 2018-03-08 17:51 asciilifeform: c,cpp, not only do not have 'standard ffi' ( try an' link libs made by microshit, say, to gnu's, or intel's ) but not even has standard... integer handling ( e.g. overflow is ~undefined~ condition ), didn't seem to hurt its, if one dare use the word, 'successes'

mircea_popescu: they had been to the "theater", in the very coquettish baroque building here, where i have coffee. the play was some "Bram stoker's dracula" production, but of course it had nothing to do with it, and you can tell by the following sign :

mircea_popescu: the lead was a YOUNG man. whereas stoker's dracula is fundamentally the old guy.

asciilifeform: trinque: lisps on cmachine may or may not have ever 'lived'. rather than 'killed'. extremely hostile environment , where the conventions of civilized life are unavailable , os api passes unbacked promises around, barfs mid-op in midst of arbitrary ops without any error handling, etc ☟︎

mircea_popescu: what they did, referentially, as hanbot cleverly pointed out, is they called it "bram stoker's dracula" because the coppola version, which is what spawned this modern nonsense of young-male-vampire, CALLED it that. they have nfi who coppola was, or stoker for that matter. they just COPIED THE STRING.

mircea_popescu: hence, successes. strikes me as the c-ing-est, most adnotated, meaningless drivel approach possible. innit ?

mircea_popescu: (the social milieu in which old men had, and alone had, the gold to pay for squeezing the manna out of the young hussies, which even created "dracula" the original in the first place, is of course long gone under the weight of http://btcbase.org/log/2018-03-08#1787190 idiocy) ☝︎

a111: Logged on 2018-03-08 00:22 mircea_popescu: but this paradigm where "we will cater to the peniless but opinionated female herd, instead of the rich and actually powerful white male" fucked them over.

mircea_popescu: asciilifeform quite. anyway, to summarize : some idiot (from argentina -- and you should have seen his overwhelmed, $10 an hour cafeteria worker expression when the herd of pubescent latinas pinned him against the wall) and some other idiot (luis whatever, the director) COPIED THE STRING "bram stoker's dracula" from a coppola production, unaware of either coppola or stoker, or even the MEANING of the ' possesive convention.

mircea_popescu: yes well. not what we're talking aboot. and now i shall proceed to reread this monsterball.

mircea_popescu: also fucking terrible comments interface you got there ; how do i know how many there are ? before clicking on the article ; and how do i visually separate them, and why aren';t they numbered and so on. ☟︎

mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2018-03-08#1787272 << and maybe they never said anything about this anywhere nor is there anyone in charge of the project i could ask and he could point me to the log line nor anything else. bloody fucking hell. maybe. maybe i fucked their mothers and they never told me they got caught, and now i have a bunch of idiotic sons with congenital clap. ☝︎

a111: Logged on 2018-03-08 17:21 phf: so ada95 only has from_c/to_ada, using char_ptrs/char_array, pointers only appear in ada2000. ~maybe~ they ran into limitations of that interfaces, that are somehow imposed by the spec, that we're missing (but running into effects of that), so to address the issue they introduced yet another method.

mircea_popescu: if "hey doods, we're making a major fucking design change for these reasons" doesn't get prominently communicated, then what the fuck does ? "girls can code" !?

mircea_popescu: "It is very important for Ada 95 programs to be able to interface effectively with systems written in other languages. To achieve this goal we have supplied three pragmas for interfacing with non-Ada software, and child packages Interfaces.C, Interfaces.COBOL, and Interfaces.Fortran which declare types, subprograms and other entities useful for interfacing with the three languages." reads to me like "it is very important for

mircea_popescu: soldier to be able to effectively shoot enemy ; to achieve this goal we've provided some .45 caliber bullets, an array of nato-chambered rifles and a copy of alf's favourite panzer manual." holy fuck who thinks like this!

mircea_popescu: and sorry for the lengthy pastes, but guess who doesn't have the sense to permit /#selection

mircea_popescu: http://www.adaic.org/resources/add_content/standards/95rat/rat95html/rat95-author.html << anyone kind enough to email the guy who says he always answers email, ask if he's willing to take an interview over the things and matters surrounding the decision to upgrade ada95's from_c/to_ada with pointers, and if he's willing have him join here ?

a111: Logged on 2018-03-08 17:41 asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: the directly analogous to 'hong kong' algo would be (brace yerself) separate processes for ada and c-crapolade, connected via ipc (under a unixlike, prolly 'domainsocket'). because otherwise, they live in same process, and if c-crapolade is entrusted with making e.g. a valid adastring, it can lie about the length and hose the ada routine, or simply fandango over address space as c-crapolade is wont to, and so forth.

a111: Logged on 2018-03-08 15:46 mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2018-03-08#1787216 << it seems rather, that first you should evaluate the http://btcbase.org/log/2018-03-08#1787207 and see if indeed it makes sense, or it's just the proverbial "first notion that formed in head upon quarter seccond's apprehension of $item" ; if indeed it is needed, legitimately, then the next step is to make a file handler that eats your file as you want it on one hand and emulates fg

a111: Logged on 2018-02-14 15:02 mircea_popescu: (this is the deep, and political meaning of the rowhammer class of attacks : it has rendered amazon's business entirely worthless ; much like basic physics make tesla be a paper-only usg venture, so now the last remaining flagship. all hopes now pinned on googles artificial "intelligence" [and i guess "quantum" wank].)

mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2018-03-08#1787295 << yes. a problem very much similar to raising a middle class girl in such poverty of stimuli she can't then cut it on her own, once off father's seclusion tank. ☝︎

a111: Logged on 2018-03-08 17:51 phf: lisp failed to even identify the need for ffi, when it was standardized i don't think there even were lisps that could or needed to ffi, since they all ran on lisp machines

mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2018-03-08#1787303 <<< the problem here is very much like the problem of http://btcbase.org/log/2018-01-31#1778809 : you look at item, call it "c machine" and think anachronistically it stands the test of time. it does not -- at the time lisp failed to properly specify, what became retrospectively "the c machine" did not exist yet ; and a different outlay of powers in the field / attractors on the table ☝︎☝︎

a111: Logged on 2018-03-08 17:55 asciilifeform: trinque: lisps on cmachine may or may not have ever 'lived'. rather than 'killed'. extremely hostile environment , where the conventions of civilized life are unavailable , os api passes unbacked promises around, barfs mid-op in midst of arbitrary ops without any error handling, etc

a111: Logged on 2018-01-31 14:37 mp_en_viaje: there's absolutely no cause oher than historical accident that real ended at 16 bits.

asciilifeform: re the process separation -- it is moar of a cardboard wall than actual wall, yes. i for one still prefer cardboard to no wall at all between toilet and kitchen.

mircea_popescu: contrary to the claims "lisp is not a perl, commonlisp is a specification not an implementation" in thee 1984-1994 interval lisp was exactly a perl. it didn't have to be a perl, though, it could have been well specificed from the beginning.

asciilifeform: re the standard ffi, the lispm folks, as i understand, saw it as an instance of http://trilema.com/2016/unicode-is-fucking-stupid-the-definitive-article/#selection-187.80-187.399 , and i'm not convinced that they were wrong ☟︎

trinque: a sort of allergic refusal to engage the world strategically as it is, battle already won in mind.

trinque: not that the world gives happy endings down any branch; we'd perhaps be loathing what lisp might've become as much as java, had it "won" ☟︎

asciilifeform: the correct algo, i suspect, is not to lament an abstract 'lisp' that 'became' wrong thing, but to simply confiscate whole stack from the heathens.

asciilifeform: (neither easy, not quick, nor cheap, but whoever lives to the end of this, will not ask after 'ffi' etc)

asciilifeform: trinque : out of curiosity : do you see, e.g., asciilifeform's amputation of all microshit #ifdef... crapola from trb, as mistake ? 'fails to strategically engage the world-as-it-is' ?

asciilifeform: just how near to the level of monkey, are men to drop, to 'engage' with monkeys ?

trinque: apparently low enough to learn c++, which I refused to lift into my head nearly all my career until trb.

ave1: http://btcbase.org/log/2018-03-08#1787233, good point, I have been thinking of other ways. The basic use case is to have a way to test the key generation (and other operations) in a repeatable way. With a live random generator this is impossible. Also time is a factor here, with a correctly primed file, I can generate a key in a second, without it can be a process that takes from 6 seconds to an hour (empirically determined) ☝︎

asciilifeform: to learn per se is harmless, supposing you're decently good at mental compartmentalization. asciilifeform for instance worx with high-pressure liquishit from undocumented guts of winblowz kernel, ~daily. perhaps it is lethal eventually, but observe, not yet dead. ( would you say it has visible effect on style of asciilifeform's publications to date ? would you know, re the winblowz, if asciilifeform did not confess it ? ) ☟︎

asciilifeform: ave1: there you are. did you ever read my ch8 ? is the item you are trying to make, identical to the one seen there ?

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trinque: asciilifeform: I don't think you take my meaning. Killing bacteria is a fine thing if you do it; the lisp guys didn't. Another strategy is engulfing bacteria and making it part of your digestive process, with all the added complexity and risk that entails.

ave1: The discussion revolved around the functions that use the random number generation code in eucrypt.

asciilifeform: trinque: the interesting bit is that the bolix folx did 'make gut bacteria', they had a c and even fortran compiler shipped with the box

asciilifeform: was actually quite a feat, all of the various compilers were able to freely exchange data structures ☟︎

asciilifeform: ( phf , i suspect, knows more re: exactly how this was built, than i , if yer curious re detail )

ave1: http://btcbase.org/log/2018-03-08#1787249, this also, although I can work with /dev/urandom just fine. I just needed to turn remove the tty call. ☝︎☟︎

a111: Logged on 2018-03-08 16:33 mircea_popescu: ave1 is your dancing around the entropy problem with files etc driven by the fact you don't have a fg, incidentally ?

asciilifeform: ave1: the reason i wrote my mechanism as seen in ch8, is not only that it was the simplest physically possible that i could think of , but that i regard any invocation of randomola where i cannot substitute a known value for testing, as a serious problem -- how is one to know that the proggy actually does what is claimed with the randomola ? rather than, e.g., 'lose' some (or all of it) along the way and take a constant as the 'rando

mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2018-03-08#1787344 << this is wrong, not because of the bacteria, mind you, but because it fails at the paramount task of language, which is to articulate the model. ☝︎

a111: Logged on 2018-03-08 19:02 asciilifeform: the only 'common language' one can find to talk to bacteria -- is bleach.

mircea_popescu: when i respond to random idiots in here i don't do so ~because of the idiots~. i do so because the statement is valuable and important to people who aren't the idiots. much like flint makes fire not because of the shitty whatever that hits it, but because ~IT~ is flint.

asciilifeform: that's the problem tho, if you could articulate a useful model of the c shitsoup, it would not be shitsoup, but merely another civilization with which one could potentially make commerce, like with japan say

mircea_popescu: it's not a matter of articulating c "in such a way as to make it a civilisation", it is a matter of articulating WHY it isn't.

asciilifeform does not, then , disagree. but thought that orig thread was re 'they did not make a standard ffi to talk with c-land, and thereby perished'

mircea_popescu: "they did not make a standard ffi; and thereby perished." , no purpose involved, forget "to", there's no to.

mircea_popescu: but they missed the opportunity to make sense of themselves, for themselves. and if this specifically didn't kill them, the root it belies i reckon nevertheless did.

asciilifeform: so can haz a hypothetical contrary ? i.e. how would it have looked to have 'standard interface' to a thing which itself has no intention of obeying any standards ? ☟︎

mircea_popescu: mind that there's two classes of response to "why ... ?" : one is "because..." and the other is "i never thought of this before...". there's no "topurpose..." in there notably, there's just the two, and one of the two will always be the case.

mircea_popescu: and i very much suspect any man who ever answered a why with "so that...". because really now.

asciilifeform: if you ask a c programmer why he thinks it is acceptable to define , e.g, string, as 'pointer into a potentially infinite row of crapola, maybe someone forgot the null terminator' he will ~always bring back answer of 'stfu, terrorist' (i.e. 'never thought about it, and don't intend to')

mircea_popescu: if i ask hanbot 's pitts anything they always say "woof", also. great pits they are.

asciilifeform: unfortunately wrong animal : c programmer is not a pitt, but moar of a caged mouse, ~incapable of toilet training, will leave trails of droppings where he goes.

mircea_popescu: you definitely can train mouse. it's, very amusingly, more intelligent than cat.

asciilifeform: afaik this particular trick cannot be taught to mouse. but asciilifeform is not an expert.

mircea_popescu: (horse also more intelligent than dog, in turn because auroch more intelligent than old wolf, and in general, the herbivore than the preditor. somehow.)

asciilifeform: ( even in human it is very difficult, perhaps impossible, to distinguish lazy-intelligent from stupid )

mircea_popescu: the alternative explanation being that preditor eats protein, herbivore carbs. brains work on carbs.

mircea_popescu: in this view, that you can teach parrot "to speak" and it ALSO eats fruit... well... not coincidental.

mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2018-03-08#1787348 << depends entirely who'd it won it with, i guess. certainly smgl winning with naggum didn't work out (though a good argument can be brought that's not nearly what happened there). ☝︎

a111: Logged on 2018-03-08 19:08 trinque: not that the world gives happy endings down any branch; we'd perhaps be loathing what lisp might've become as much as java, had it "won"

mircea_popescu: ave1 i will say the "test harness for rsa/etc" is a very solid usecase for file-fed fg-emu.

mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2018-03-08#1787356 << and yet we know in case of satoshi. there's at least one lost intellect of great promise in that cemetery. ☝︎

a111: Logged on 2018-03-08 19:27 asciilifeform: to learn per se is harmless, supposing you're decently good at mental compartmentalization. asciilifeform for instance worx with high-pressure liquishit from undocumented guts of winblowz kernel, ~daily. perhaps it is lethal eventually, but observe, not yet dead. ( would you say it has visible effect on style of asciilifeform's publications to date ? would you know, re the winblowz, if asciilifeform did not confess it ? )

mircea_popescu: notably, the question of "no wheelies on black ice without helmet" isn't decided on the basis of whether you survived ; but on the basis of whether anyone didn't.

asciilifeform: in so far as anybody ever knew, there was not a second, nonwinblowz, side to shitoshi. microshit mind to the hilt.

asciilifeform: i'd compare it to english -- harmless to learn for talking to folx on the net, but just about lethal as a mothertongue

asciilifeform: even aside from shitoshi, historically i've found 'microshit as mothertongue' people to be ~instantly recognizable (from their output)

a111: Logged on 2016-01-21 13:29 asciilifeform: 'if i make it what i think is the right size, it crashes!111'

mircea_popescu: you know, incidentally, what is the old word for "' people to be ~instantly recognizable (from their output)" ?

mircea_popescu: yes, but this "poor mastery of book learnin', relying on endless tomes of tico brache measurements" thing -- very much what the engineer started off as.

mircea_popescu: uncle al even has a portrait of three of these, making a super-unitary efficiency engine.

deedbot: schmidty voiced for 30 minutes.

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: not readily. he spent 20+yrs flaming perpetuum-mobilists, alchemists, aetherists, etc., will need a bit moardetail to remember which piece this was

mircea_popescu: he was young, sent to write some article or w/e. the salient points were that this was a 2 stroke engine, and the doods were inferring power on the basis of torque but measured on a different circumference.

mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2018-03-08#1787367 << indeed. the sort of items that gag me from lambasting the item ; though they're rarely held up as major points by the proponents. ☝︎

a111: Logged on 2018-03-08 19:32 asciilifeform: was actually quite a feat, all of the various compilers were able to freely exchange data structures

a111: Logged on 2017-07-30 04:22 mircea_popescu: asciilifeform who had that great story about the three dorks in a garage inventing a super-efficient engine over 20 years of playing around throiugh the process of miss-measuring torque ?

mircea_popescu: honestly i'd re-read it, showed the signs of a great novelist in the rough. rather clemens-like.

mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2018-03-08#1787370 << hey asciilifeform mind sending our last remaining FG to this fine fellow ? we'll book it on teh goodwill line. ☝︎☟︎

a111: Logged on 2018-03-08 19:33 ave1: http://btcbase.org/log/2018-03-08#1787249, this also, although I can work with /dev/urandom just fine. I just needed to turn remove the tty call.

mircea_popescu: meditation upon http://btcbase.org/log/2018-03-08#1787343 yields the interesting result that problem spaces are not continuous. problem spaces are discrete, and there exists such a thing as problem spans. ☝︎☟︎

a111: Logged on 2018-03-08 18:59 asciilifeform: re the standard ffi, the lispm folks, as i understand, saw it as an instance of http://trilema.com/2016/unicode-is-fucking-stupid-the-definitive-article/#selection-187.80-187.399 , and i'm not convinced that they were wrong

mircea_popescu: this then induces two possible errors in aproach. the situation where the solution is over-span, which we generally call "overengineered" ; and the situation where the solution is under-span, which is pluriously referenced as jwz's error, but is not substantially different from http://btcbase.org/log-search?q=spreading+works or the airplane that can take off, and flies well, but can't land.

mircea_popescu: the architectural model is particularly useful : building 80% of an arch, or in general whatever sub-unitary percent of the arch will not result in something that stays up. the span must be exactly covered, because a sub-span arch, no matter how well done in the parts that are in fact done, will nevertheless collapse under the weight of the absent portion.

mircea_popescu: in these terms the infantile "i only want to solve problem Y defined as 80% of the actual problem" readily shows its infantilism. good and well that you want to build an os without a socio-political model ; but what you want dun enter into this.

esthlos: http://btcbase.org/log/2018-03-07#1787167 << got it, thank you for helping to beat the pantsuit out of me. now I'll shut up and be useful ☝︎

a111: Logged on 2018-03-07 19:21 mircea_popescu: now less excuses, none of this "my pantsuit existence comes before the republic" ever again and more productivity. MUCH more productivity.

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