Show Idle (>14 d.) Chans
← 2016-05-18 | 2016-05-20 → ↓
deedbot: [» Contravex: A blog by Pete Dushenski] A lolz a day keeps the doctor away : CRA edition - http://www.contravex.com/2016/05/18/a-lolz-a-day-keeps-the-doctor-away-cra-edition/
deedbot: [Qntra] Monsanto Embargoes Argentina From Getting Dicamba Resistant Soybeans - http://qntra.net/2016/05/monsanto-embargoes-argentina-from-getting-dicamba-resistant-soybeans/
BingoBoingo: ^ Qntra Farm Report is back! Eat Moar Monsanto!
Framedragger: http://btcbase.org/log/2016-05-19#1468376 << yeah.. because fuck URLs amirite.. i'd think the nadim (of cryptocat) rebased commit history on purpose.. what's funny/sad is that many many stupid people did use cryptocat during those periods of encraption in cryptocat.. too bad for them
Framedragger: http://btcbase.org/log/2016-05-19#1468376 << yeah.. because fuck URLs amirite.. i'd think the nadim guy (of cryptocat) rebased commit history on purpose.. what's funny/sad is that many many stupid people did use cryptocat during those periods of encraption in cryptocat.. too bad for them
Framedragger: ;;later tell Vexual missed your PM, msg me once you're online!
gribble: The operation succeeded.
shinohai: Because being here isn't complete until you have met Vexual.
shinohai: Nice fph archive there BingoBoingo ... I'd love to see a 450 lb sloth attempting to pedal a bike.
BingoBoingo: the politicaly correct term is "couch bison"
shinohai: HehnI actually saw a BitBet tweet this morning, is finally working?
danielpbarron: it's been tweeting for a week or two
shinohai: I guess it got lost in the other noise in mah feed
mircea_popescu: Framedragger much like many many stupiud people use tor.
mircea_popescu: stupid people are no one's concern.
mircea_popescu: "Are you a business man/woman or an ARTISTS,POLITICIANS,PASTOR,ENGINEER,DOCTOR, STUDENTS, GRADUATED and you want to become Rich Powerful and famous, in life or,Are you frustrated in life. What type of wealth do you want? Today is your luckiest day, 'I want to join great Illuminati occult in Nigeria' we are here for those of you that want to join Illuminati Brotherhood in Nigeria and across Africa."
mircea_popescu: apparently that great dream of that (other) great ustardian dreamer (pres. bahamas) is taking shape : the great illumination of africa!
shinohai: ^ dafuq did I just read
shinohai needs more tea this morning.
mircea_popescu: what type of tea do you want ?
shinohai: That black loose-leaf from Iran or China is what I'm making
mircea_popescu: today is your luck day!
Framedragger suspects mircea_popescu is baiting him about tor because he remembers those comments on trilema where framedragger said "evidence or gtfo mircea" ;)
mircea_popescu: wait, you STILL haven't seen enough evidence ?!
Framedragger: maybe i have. look, i know those folks personally, by which i mean, not only over the internets. however, malice/incompetence are the same in terms of effects
Framedragger: so, i'm not gonna argue..
mircea_popescu: aite then.
BingoBoingo: Remember kids, asystole is the most stable cardia rhythm possible.
mircea_popescu: it's a sad day in any man's life, when he's squeezed into admitting that personal connection be damned, incompetence and malice aren't usefully distinguishable.
mircea_popescu: with any luck, it happens young. like for instance through the age-old process of, orcs come through rampaging village, rape everyone, surviving kid is faced with the cold, sad truth that "if those assholes were any good, they'd be still alive".
shinohai: tor convo again? (-_\) #facepalm
shinohai: tor is only gtood for making lulzy Qntra articles!
mircea_popescu: turning into quite teh qntra funkmeister over there, huh shinohai ?
shinohai: I grudgingly admit that mircea_popescu was right as always, that I would enjoy it if I got off my ass and did it.
mircea_popescu: for the record : all the various german terms, funkmeister, funkspielen, etc, are derived off how you say radioing in german, ie, funk (hence telefunken). the reason it's called "spark" is because they needed a name back when sparkgap was the way. and so...
mircea_popescu: meanwhile asciilifeform still hasn't explained why he hates early radio so damn much.
shinohai: Radio was like the first thing I was interested in as a child.
shinohai: I still have an sdr and god-awful yagi hooked up to this day
mircea_popescu: the way the world's going, you might end up using that skillset for reals.
shinohai: Will bve downloading trb blockchain with packet radio xD
mircea_popescu: in truth, if we end up that stretched there's prolly going to be some adjustments made. like - daily blocks.
mircea_popescu: 1mb/day should be within reach for radio.
shinohai: Sadly, in the land-of-the-not-so-free 'tis illegal to send encrypted comms with HAM license. :/
mircea_popescu: by the time this is actually needed, all that'll be about as interesting as soviet rubles.
shinohai: I haven't looked into D-STAR much, but it is proprietary chip, which opens possibility that it is already pwnd at that level, you cannot decrypt message without it.
mircea_popescu: actually come to think of it, someone should write code to turn standard base64 (like comes out of pgp armor etc) into text. have a nice markov-based state machine with a large-ish dictionary and a syntax/grammar checker.
mircea_popescu: crypto goes in, poetry goes out. no fucking law against poetry, is there.
mircea_popescu: the blank verse funkenclub.
mircea_popescu can't wait for mod6 's t now :D
mircea_popescu: its announced presence has rearranged my head, it's really the correct solution for the long sought for job market thing.
shinohai: He is pretty close to having an awesum tbot finished, twas working good last night.
mircea_popescu: you know thinking about it... each irc channel is like whatever, a guy walking down the street. maybe carrying a bag of groceries or a skateboard or w/e.
mircea_popescu: then #trilema, it's like mechaworld. 95% computer by mass.
shinohai: cucked.png
mircea_popescu: nah, dun look like it, chick's all coy and shit.
mircea_popescu: nice qntra btw. and yes monsanto is fucked - the projections were for weed resistance to appear in centuries. it showed up within a coupla short decades. this puts the practical utility of their "genetic research" in serious doubt. in fact they've closed down most "general" projects, focusing on a coupla more promising line, after which it's ~the end.
mircea_popescu: incidentally i have nfi how that worked so well for the weeds. pretty impressive.
mircea_popescu: BingoBoingo "genes Monsanto claims title travels" << claims title to ?
mircea_popescu: toxic either because it is a grass < toxic, either - being a grass and all.
BingoBoingo: ty, fxd
BingoBoingo: Well the thing is the weeds were always resistant
shinohai: I read "toxic Ether"
mircea_popescu: BingoBoingo i suppose that must be the explanation, "carried resistance". ie, they had it, genetically, but not normally expressed. until environment changed and so genetic expression changed to fit.
mircea_popescu: shows teh sort of "scientific research" that happens in the us based labs for the lulzy sham it is. "oh, we treated a crop of grass with this vial and the grass died. ERGO IT WORKS!!! we studied genetics under lamarck et all, don't understand much of anything. what do you mean, cultivate the survivors and see, what do you mean need a chain of witness blocks going down many generations ?!?!?!"
BingoBoingo: Well, and some of them like fucking horseweed seemed to have never really cared much about glyphosate. Then there's Japanese knotweed which glyphosate will kill, but only if sprayed during the first new moon after the autumn equinox.
BingoBoingo: Anyways what I found especially lulzy was putting glyphosate and dicamba in the same bottle and calling it innovation.
BingoBoingo: Dicamba's bundled into a bunch of other commercial off the shelf consumer herbicide products already.
mircea_popescu: but yes, for any republican bioscientists in the making : the scientific way to study something like plant resistance to X is to : 1. create the first generation test environment. this means a witness, and a number of exposures (maybe dosed variously, with other substances too, etc). 2. create next generation environment. this means, your experiment now subdivides into as many experiments equal to 1 as there were tests perfor
mircea_popescu: med. 3. keep doing this, depending on life form, MANY times. at least a dozen for plants, for instance, they express fast. mammals, 100s.
mircea_popescu: this is why it's fucking hard & expensive to do genetic research ffs.
BingoBoingo still wonders why Monsanto hasn't been digging for Diquat decomposing bacteria to make a wunderwaffen
mircea_popescu: BingoBoingo yeah, monsanto is very much apple'd. the original idea seemed promising, in the 90s. sometime years ago, dunno exactly when cuz they've been keeping it secret and i never cared that much, they found out it's a doomed entreprise. ever since then... MON's been pretty much a stock scam.
mircea_popescu: except you know, with much better pr than the usual pinksheet.
mircea_popescu: BingoBoingo bacteria are a whole other game.
BingoBoingo: Right, kinda the pharma model where having a pipeline of things to pattent matters more than anything else.
mircea_popescu: quite so, yeah.
mircea_popescu: they are exactly like the pharma.
mircea_popescu: anyway, looking at their stock the news was first heard by sophisticated investors q3 2015, ie recently.
mircea_popescu: then the chumps bought back in.
mircea_popescu: oh look at that, it's in play, also. bwahahaha.
mircea_popescu: nice move covering it today for srs.
BingoBoingo: Still, the point remains Argentina's only strategy is to void the monsanto glyphosate resistance patents locally
BingoBoingo: And yes, in play today.
mircea_popescu: BingoBoingo i guess we retrospectively discovered what a major point of discussion in the recent bahamas-macri meeting was. and the local socialist fucktards thought they ran off and hid in the countryside because of them. lelz. "reddit we diddit!!1"
BingoBoingo: Seriously.
mircea_popescu: BingoBoingo maybe even worth updating the article for all these tie-ins ?
mircea_popescu: or maybe save for a later re-piece, if it sells or something. eitherway.
BingoBoingo: I will in a couple hours, gotta get a string trimmer and re-piece. Or you know you could do the tie ins from Argentina bsns perspective.
mircea_popescu: if i had any sort of local confirmation or somesuch actual meat. but i've not been investing in connecting to the local agros who the shit cares, and obv el presidente'd rather die than give up this one, and i'm noit about to start torturing elected presidents just yet.
mircea_popescu: so pure speculation at this point, not worthy.
mircea_popescu: who could have predicteded.
BingoBoingo: You know, I bet the local farm supply store would have had a better ball gag than all those porno stores...
mircea_popescu: i did find what i wanted in the end, though.
mircea_popescu: spoeaking of which, found a SPLENDID leather collar with metal spikes in local pet shop. top notch stuff, 12 bux.
mircea_popescu: possibly the most 12 dollars has bought this year anywhere in the world.
mircea_popescu: incidentally speaking of https://voat.co/p/partnerprogram anyone knows the voat people ? i think it's conceivable mpex might list them...
asciilifeform: l0gz dead
mircea_popescu: apparently phf gotta handcrank them, and when he sleeps...
asciilifeform: spiffy l0g
asciilifeform has ~'fivenines'-reliable own l0g
asciilifeform: the thing nailing monsanto has a name, 'epigenetics'
asciilifeform: one of the interesting things is that monsanto used to be an actual 'golden age of usa' chemical co. e.g., produced first commercial LED.
asciilifeform: BUT was restructured as a chumpatron some time quite recently (90s?)
mircea_popescu: in another view, what's nailing monsanto is called "so you thought you were smart, eh ?". heck, plants've been here a while. odds are whatever random unwashed derp in our colonies comes up with, they've seen before.
asciilifeform: well everybody is eventually nailed by 'so you thought you were...'
asciilifeform: but yeah, when substance s is something that kills plant p but not plant p', and therefore may have been secreted by some past p', odds are 'it's happened before'
mircea_popescu: the very deeply ignorant approach is rather notable, to my eyes. derps seriously think that's how genetics works, much like a baby perceiving his environment as a photographic still rather than a dynamic equilibrium and so faceplanting self once an hour
asciilifeform: the more interesting part is that the actual workerbees doing the gruntwerk do ~not~ think this
asciilifeform: and haven't since at the latest - the '80s
mircea_popescu: surely. management problem.
mircea_popescu: much like - lol and behold - soviet empire!
asciilifeform: usa was really first to mass-produce entirely defective workerbees, and afaik they are limited to software
mircea_popescu: nah. i disagree. usa was first to pretend like underage male fuckwards are "worker bees", which only can be meaningfully attempted for ~a certain kind~ of software. what we reference here as the web.
mircea_popescu: the truth of demographics is that underage males are mostly defective by mass. this is unfixable.
mircea_popescu: the soviets had ~the same percentage, but simply killed them./
asciilifeform: yeah but in modern usa 30y is still 'underage'
asciilifeform: somehow.
mircea_popescu: this is also not creation. it is the result of expanding complexity.
asciilifeform: these folks got developmentally frozen.
asciilifeform: complexity of what ?
mircea_popescu: as the maximal leverage avaialble to the individual increases, the % of things crawling out of cunts (which, recall, run perl) that may ever individuate decreases.
mircea_popescu: as the bar to the individuation is fixed ~the mean of the leverage, so obviously as that increases the sigma-ness associated increases also (by about the square root ?)
asciilifeform: where is this 'leverage increases' ?
mircea_popescu: let's take a retrofitted historical walk.
asciilifeform: if anything, leverage pertaining to computer maxed out in '90s
mircea_popescu: so, year is 160 ad, we're in rome. maximally, a man can replace the work of about fifty or so men, give or take. the mean of this is say 25. about 10% of the population can reach this, and lo and behold - about 10% of the empire's population is citizens!
mircea_popescu: the year is now 660, and we're in londinum. a man can replace the work of maybe two, give or take. the mean is one-something, and "everyone" is someone.
mircea_popescu: by 1160, which catches us in paris, we're up to a leverage of maybe as high as twenty, and so "most men" is good enough an approximation. about 60-70% really.
mircea_popescu: then in 1660... one's either a noble or not worth the mention, and this reduces to a few percent again.
asciilifeform: yeah but what part of any of this happened any in past 20y.
mircea_popescu: the amount of work you CAN replace has been monotonously increasing since about then, mind.
mircea_popescu: you wish to think in terms of your chosen art, which is meaningless. it's not always the same art that provides the additional leverage.
mircea_popescu: however they may ebb or wane individually, of interest to man is the sum total.
Framedragger: > There's just no life in this idea as originally thought out, a browser thing.
Framedragger: mircea_popescu: yeah ok i'm afraid i've to agree
mircea_popescu: Framedragger doesn't mean much more than, "the correct path is to take a decent crypto lib, a distributed-hashtable-storage thing from one of the p2p torrent tools, and make a real social media app"
Framedragger: mircea_popescu: yeah... thinking...
Framedragger: asciilifeform: do you have an opinion on IPFS (distributed storage protocol, of sorts)? spoiler: reference implementation is in golang
Framedragger: wonder if ipfs is worth leveraging here
asciilifeform: Framedragger: i think you just answered yer own question
mircea_popescu: was this the merkle data thing ?
asciilifeform: golang --> straight to furnace.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform dude i'm going to make the REFERENCE IMPLEMENTATION of your next girlfriend in golang and what'll you do then.
mircea_popescu: you can implement shit in whatever the hell you want. the reference implementation for cramer-shoup is in malbolge.
asciilifeform: <mircea_popescu> you wish to think in terms of your chosen art, which is meaningless. it's not always the same art that provides the additional leverage. <<< pretty much everything other than the infernal machines has been going to hell, visibly to naked eye. so which art would it be that mircea_popescu was thinking of ?
asciilifeform: metallurgy ?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: on the contrary, there isn't a reference implementation.
Framedragger: yeah generalized merkle DAG
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform right. which is my point - if you don't like golang pretend there isn't one. you can't invalidate design by "bad implementation" wtf.
asciilifeform: until very recently i used to think quite like mircea_popescu above, 'sure, i'll read even if implemented in js'
asciilifeform: but this was a mistake.
asciilifeform: turns out it is 100% a waste of time to study certain things.
mircea_popescu: turns out also that this has to be a personal conclusion.
asciilifeform: sure does.
mircea_popescu: so then.
mircea_popescu: back to the arts : no, not really. finance, believe it or not. and other things. few of which are "palpable" in the sense that farm derp could put hand on
asciilifeform: realize that 'golang' is not simply a language, but a set of libraries that is used by pretty much 100% of the extant soft implemented therein
asciilifeform: and so i am not interested in a crypto lib that calls out to google crapolade.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: chumpatronics quite clearly moved forward! yes
asciilifeform: but what else ?
asciilifeform: (it is the one science that will never stop!11111)
mircea_popescu: finance is a different story from chumpatronics, why teh haet.
asciilifeform: finance as 'improved since 1980' is precisely chumpatronics.
mircea_popescu: notrly. finance is basically "engineering for large systems with complex parts"
asciilifeform brb, phood
mircea_popescu: sort of like how qm is thermodynamics for grown ups
mircea_popescu: anyway, Framedragger golang is not liked here because we don't own it, and we don't like usg.google more than we like usg.anything, and because it seems quite well engineered to work as a baited hook for the usg chump works.
mircea_popescu: that aside, the IDEA of ipfs, as far as can be distinguished, is not necessarily bad.
mircea_popescu: it's not very much clear there's anything much there besides the usual marketing crapolade. i dunno how familiar you are with this phenomena, but let me dig a fine example out of the log.
mircea_popescu: plenty of other good ones ( asciilifeform you recall reporting on that group pushing 20 year old schweizer as "wai of footure" at some conference ? ), but the more important point is, that this is a fine field for innovation as it stands. it's very far from "settled science", where the logical move is to simply import the universally accepted library and move on.
mircea_popescu: this is where one writes code as a young man that then makes them famous for rest of life, the c and whatnot of our time. you see what i mean ?
mircea_popescu: for instance, i'm deliberately keeping my ongoing "war on the web" as far as attacking forums goes on a very low roar. not that i couldn't scale it up and end ~any web-based forum, owing to the incredible incompetence of the scammers involved. but then, millions of derps would in a voice go "ok so these are bad, what should we do ?"
mircea_popescu: can't quite answer "get fucked" to something like that, not unless you're prepared to follow through and holocaust them all.
mircea_popescu: but should one be able to answer "use this thing"... well then. different matter altogether.
Framedragger: yeah i see what you mean. also nice to keep idiots in single basket
Framedragger: re. golang, i understand the sentiment yeah
Framedragger: sounds like amusing examples too, will check later ($dayjob)
asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2016-05-19#1468579 << lulzily, shortly after i wrote this i actually met the man.
a111: Logged on 2016-05-19 15:37 mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2015-04-02#1084144
asciilifeform: (i was sent to sit on a committee of sorts, with him in it)
Framedragger: hahaha
Framedragger: on "Identity-based encryption " ?
mircea_popescu: and, how's he in life ?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: in life he was ~same as all the other greyhairs in the room
asciilifeform: and quite like ~all the other usg academics i spent most of my working life working with.
asciilifeform: tragic figure.
asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2016-05-19#1468573 << i'ma bite this bait. tell me, what constructive thing have improvements in finance in past 30y enabled ?
a111: Logged on 2016-05-19 15:27 mircea_popescu: notrly. finance is basically "engineering for large systems with complex parts"
asciilifeform: bigger yachts for pinksheet sc4mz0rz?
asciilifeform: what did n-way leveraged whateverthefucks improve ?
asciilifeform: bigger yield of uranium ? purer aluminum ? longer cocks ? what.
asciilifeform: less frequent marketpanics ? (quite certainly not)
asciilifeform: all i see is complexity cancer, on which the usual scamvultures feast.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform i count bitcoin, you know.
mircea_popescu: i also count sepa.
asciilifeform: bitcoin is really an electrically-enabled return to 200 bc
mircea_popescu: i also count all SORTS of things, including 3% corp tax in romania, for instance. wasn't there in 86
asciilifeform: low tax is now a technical advance?!!
asciilifeform: are we playing civ1?
mircea_popescu: what's your definition of technical advance ?
mircea_popescu: well yes.
mircea_popescu: (to be specific : the idea that "small corps are the driver of economy, and should get massive tax breaks" is entirely past 30 years.)
asciilifeform: dunno, lenin's NEP had it.
asciilifeform: and i can't fathom it being the first.
mircea_popescu: but as per our discussion of monsanto, if your idea of "innovation" in humanities is alligned with "absolute first", you can't even PERCEIVE humanities, let alone meaningfully interact with em.
mircea_popescu: context matters, who the fuck cares what lenin's nep did.
asciilifeform: not being timeless god on mt olympus, i generally don't do 'absolute firsts'
mircea_popescu: right ? so you're part of the 55th civilisation to discover cellphones. do you care about the other 54 ?
asciilifeform: but the reason i dun see the 'let's 3% tax' as a technical advance, is that it was not a deliberate act, but a concession to collapse of inca empire. it was done ~to~ the folks who did it, like an earthquake.
asciilifeform: ergo not a technical advance, any more than eruption of mt vesuvius was.
mircea_popescu: in this sense chloroform was done to the discoverer, not the other way around.
asciilifeform: '90s post-sov govs did not have the actual option of mega-tax.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: lsd, famously
mircea_popescu: yes, of course, life taking place in nature, its discoveries are DONE to it
asciilifeform: teflon.
asciilifeform: but these transitioned TO technical advances once cemented in place
asciilifeform: and repeated volitionally
asciilifeform: it is not yet clear to me that 'let's 3% tax' has made it to this stage
mircea_popescu: well, they've been sticking to it for a decade+ by now.
asciilifeform: here in the land of 50% tax.
mircea_popescu: ah but you see, this is thevery thing we're discussing. ~I~ benefit from it, and it empowers me. that'd be what i'd care about.
asciilifeform: yeah but it is also possible that mircea_popescu benefits from scratching his toes just-so when he wakes up. this is not a technical advance as generally understood, because the recipe is useless to anybody else.
mircea_popescu: i don't give the first inkliong of a shit as to whether it could "rightfully" be called technical, inovation, or pornography. that's a concern for kids debating superman-vs-spiderman encounters.
mircea_popescu: what i strictly care about is, doth it or doth it not make it easier for me to send fifty men out of their houses, behead their offspring and claim their women.
mircea_popescu: and that - well that, it does.
asciilifeform: well is it, to use mircea_popescutronic analysis, a matter 'for the forum' or 'for the gynaecaeum' ?
mircea_popescu: the particular is not a public matter. but the thing we were discussing, ie, leverage, and its impact of citizenship, and the way this drags out citizenship out of the commoner's reach, is.
mircea_popescu: it ended up illustrated with minutia, but it is not the illustrative minutia.
asciilifeform: iirc the thread was about 'leverage increased, ergo we are awash in surplus people'
asciilifeform: this was a testable hypothesis re: observables.
asciilifeform: or so i thought.
mircea_popescu: how testable ?
asciilifeform: does it reduce to mircea_popescu asserting 'my magic got stronger in ineffable wayz and stfu' ?
mircea_popescu: well no, not necessarily. but on the other end of the same chasm, it may not be a case of "either this leverage is universally accessible or stfu"
mircea_popescu: the very point being that it's not universally accessible.
asciilifeform: i can readily believe that mircea_popescu's magic got stronger, sure. but did he singlehandedly surplus all of the obsolete meatbags ? or did somebody else's magic also get stronger, and if so how..?
asciilifeform: bulldozer is not universally accessible, as it is costly, but its DESCRIPTION is.
mircea_popescu: just as long as you admit to an increase of maximal-possible-mojo per capita, and to a decrease in marginal utility per capita, you're basically admitting the premises.
asciilifeform: that is what distinguishes reactor from hoodoo
mircea_popescu: ah, but no, i do not accept this requirement that the DESCRIPTION be universally accessible either.
asciilifeform: then we have 'my hoodoo got stronger, stfu' ?
mircea_popescu: because, as per the discussion of "ideas" : in my hand it's an idea, in derp'\s hand is nothing, for derp may not have ideas.
mircea_popescu: not necessarily.
mircea_popescu: there's a space between these two.
asciilifeform: well sure, somewhere in that space live, e.g., galois theory, other fine arts
mircea_popescu: tell you what, something as finely technical as, the lorenz contraction, still is not "universally accessible". in fact, it is outside of the purview of ~all us schoolchildren.
mircea_popescu: and there exists a lobby there proposing that for this reason, it is not really, properly technology.
mircea_popescu: are you of the same notion ?
asciilifeform: laugh all you like, i had it in sch00l
asciilifeform: american, no less
mircea_popescu: so did i.
asciilifeform: ~american~ school
mircea_popescu: but this was just about 30 years ago, has it not.
mircea_popescu: dollars to donuts, if you arrest everyone who ever said "quantum computing" on an webpage, and keep them locked up in solitary until such a time they can explain what it means, scientifically,
mircea_popescu: you'll be lucky if you ever release 1% of a rather large inmate population.
asciilifeform: now this, for sure.
asciilifeform: or for that matter 'electrical cures' of 1890.
mircea_popescu: so then. accessibility is no sort of criteria for technology.
asciilifeform: nobody cancelled quackery.
asciilifeform: so it seems like we have:
asciilifeform: 1) live in sovok
asciilifeform: 2) collapse!11111
asciilifeform: 3) ?????
asciilifeform: 4) Pr00000f1t!1111
asciilifeform: ^ mega-technology ^
asciilifeform: fish in the scania was also technology ?
mircea_popescu: and what's wrong with that ? are you derriding the pulley system on the grounds of how trite the rope is ?
mircea_popescu: definitely was.
mircea_popescu: inasmuch as it allowed the swedes to pretend to being a nation for absolutely no other discerinble reason,
asciilifeform: having golden meteor fall in your back yard is not a technology.
mircea_popescu: fish in the scania is the equivalent of lace in luxembourg.
asciilifeform: it is called windfall.
mircea_popescu: and why the fuck not ?
mircea_popescu: everything's called windfall by some people.
asciilifeform: there is prolly a madman to whom every animal with 4 legs is dog.
asciilifeform: does not follow, from this, that it is useless to give different names to species.
mircea_popescu: but once yo uspeak of madman you're either granting my point or else going full "no true scotsman"
mircea_popescu: yes, there's madmen and there's people, and technology need not be describable to madmen to be technology.
asciilifeform: point here is that technology is an informational thing. two folks, with same materials, will come to different fates, because one knows that magnetic field induces electric current in moving conductor, and the other - does not
asciilifeform: recall the thread about the indian firing a rifle ?
asciilifeform: he does not 'have the tech'
mircea_popescu: it is not clear technology is an "informational" thing. seems apt to say technology is a productive thing.
asciilifeform: all he has is a thing he found on a dead englishman.
asciilifeform: when he ~makes own rifle~ - he has the tech.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform but in a discussion of indian tribes, the smaller trbie with guns that wipes the larger tribe with tomahawks HAS, in fact, deployed the technology.
mircea_popescu: us army grunts notably don't know how the fuck their shit works.
mircea_popescu: and for that matter, when you have sex you get a child, which is yours, even if you have nfi how cunt works. nor does she.
mircea_popescu: "functional literacy", it's a thing.
asciilifeform: naturally, it is not his role in life. but their hardware is so flimsy that if cut off from the mothership for a month, they will die.
mircea_popescu: "role in life" is not a thing.
asciilifeform: the making of prussian-style soldiers, folks with very narrow role in life and bonsaikittened brain, is also a technology.
mircea_popescu: not for the folks. for the makers.
asciilifeform: (think of how jp adopted it in 1900s)
mircea_popescu: that's the point. technology is technology only in context.
mircea_popescu: in and of itself, it's "natural phenomena" or "magic" or what have you.
asciilifeform: technology is something you can pick up informationally.
mircea_popescu: no. it picks you up, in that some can and some can't ; some do and some do not.
asciilifeform: this formulation is simply a change of coordinate system
asciilifeform: but entirely true, sure
mircea_popescu: fine then, let it be so. to me the difference is that i perceive the "you" to be universalizing in your statement.
mircea_popescu: and the important point here is that no agent may be universal ; and no universal may have agency. which is why god can't act.
asciilifeform universalizes to alert readerz, not to woodland fauna
asciilifeform: so no, it does not follow that redditus can build reactor
mircea_popescu: so then reactor is a technology ?
asciilifeform: nevertheless, meiji jp 'dutch studies' scholar builds steamship. etc
asciilifeform: aha, is technology.
mircea_popescu: on the basis of what ?
asciilifeform: on the basis that englishmen of 1880 could have built it if it were explained to them.
mircea_popescu: let's do a thought experiment. suppose i invite you to spend a week at my north pole hunting lodge, where, contrary to what you might expect, we spend our time hunting large floating worms of delicious carnation. with me so far ?
asciilifeform licks lips
mircea_popescu: now then, after a moment of this, you wish to know how the fuck is it possible that these animals live here ?!
mircea_popescu: and i explain to you that i discovered a way to create them by farting.
mircea_popescu: you think i'm joking, but presently i demonstrate : i put a finger on my nose, and frown, and fart, and soon enough there it is, another one.
mircea_popescu: so you try... but nothing happens.
mircea_popescu: and then i call a girl over, and she tries it, and there it is! a pretty one too.
asciilifeform: there is a less comical example of this, historically - damascus steel.
mircea_popescu: so you're a little miffed, and suspect us of collusion. so then we capture a random inuit woman, and i spend some time with her,
mircea_popescu: and lo and behold! she does it too!
mircea_popescu: but you still can't, and marry her, and learn inuit, and still can't, and what now ?
mircea_popescu: technology ?
asciilifeform: and yeah, i go home and it dun work 'cause my farts haven't enough molybdenum in'em.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform there is a much much better example in your own experience. recall the matchsticks ?
asciilifeform: and i won't find out what molybdenum is for another 2000 yrs.
mod6: heheh
asciilifeform: a stage magic trick is a technology, yes
mircea_popescu: this "is_technology" function is never as usefully decidable as schoolteachers like to pretend.
asciilifeform: or does mircea_popescu propose that i could not possibly perform the match trick even if told all.
mircea_popescu: ie, when decidable, not useful ; when useful, not decidable.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform what is "all" ?
asciilifeform: all that the inuit gurl was told.
mircea_popescu: ie, exact words ?
asciilifeform: as in, sitting right there.
asciilifeform: no side channels.
mircea_popescu: oh, you were there for the event, throughout.
asciilifeform: i meant, sitting when she is being taught for 1st time
mircea_popescu: and eating the same food, so one'd expect molybdenum to equalize. but...
asciilifeform: and spoken to by mircea_popescu for first time.
asciilifeform: so no dictionary tricks.
mircea_popescu: sure, she's rando, we just ran into.
mircea_popescu: heck, you pick her.
asciilifeform: then unless the trick requires cunt muscles i can duplicate it.
mircea_popescu: and how do you know this ? other than, it happening to be your religion.
mircea_popescu: what proof can you offer ?
asciilifeform: 'ain't no magic on this here planet' is a religious proposition, yes.
mircea_popescu: quite so.
asciilifeform: quite possibly tomorrow we https://xkcd.com/298 .
asciilifeform: but until then technology is a communicable thing.
mircea_popescu: haha no. until then technology MAY be communicable.
mircea_popescu: do me a favour and don't go all religious freak on me, absence of proof / proof of absence stew etc.
asciilifeform: and yeah in some jungle there is witch doctor whose wonderful spirit-summoning tech is not communicable to the filthy white man.
mircea_popescu: and who promised you such barrier as "a jungle far away" ?
asciilifeform: nobody.
mircea_popescu: point in fact, most of what you do is not communicable to "filthy white man". though from what you're saying i take it next you go renting you'll rouse them from their beds to teach lisp ?
asciilifeform: but if mircea_popescu is a gifted telepath, clairvoyant, and spirit-summoner and proposes to use 'technology' to describe his abilities, imho this is abuse of terminology.
asciilifeform: however genuine his talent.
mircea_popescu: and why is that ?
asciilifeform: because wordz have meaningz?
asciilifeform: that is is useful to distinguish the 2 ?
mircea_popescu: i use "technology" to describe my numeric head-mathing, though most gurlz can't do it.
asciilifeform: iirc mircea_popescu routinely taught it to the gurlz
mircea_popescu: it is, to a degree and after a fashion, a talent.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform yes, but not to all :) to selected gurlz.
asciilifeform: and yes, circus weight lifter has strength and he cannot teach the strength
mircea_popescu: anyway - words have meaning ONLY IN CONTEXT.
asciilifeform: erdos cannot teach me to be erdos but can write down the theorems.
asciilifeform: for which he was famous.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform and how do you distinguish the theorems for which he WILL BE famous from the ones for which he will not be ?
mircea_popescu: see, it's easy enough in retrsopect, to confound historical accident and meaning.
asciilifeform: recall, gauss is still open, even.
mircea_popescu: but try it prospectively, like a math teacher on a grad program. pick which kids do good work and which waste their lives.
asciilifeform: ^ this is surprisingly easy
mircea_popescu: it's a technology, right ? by ytour notions of tech, math is the supertech. so then ?
asciilifeform: and generally not-done for wholly political reasons.
mircea_popescu: it's not surprisingly easy to do it usefully. it's very easy to do it when no one's doing it and there's a lot of low hanging fruit,
mircea_popescu: then you can say like the butcher that moved into village and introduced hygiene, "i am a better surgeon than the guys in paris"
mircea_popescu: but if it's actually useful to do, it can't fucking be done worth a shit.
mircea_popescu: recall the example of the esteemed mr shockley, for instance.
asciilifeform: if mircea_popescu is going into 'mathematical creativity has never been and likely will never be technologized' he is preaching to choir.
mircea_popescu: or what, you think he was anti-talented ?
asciilifeform: but on the other hand it is not wholly impossible to write something meaningful and useful re mathematical creativity.
asciilifeform: i assume mircea_popescu read, e.g., polya
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform well the problem with this choir is that it's made of apparent 16 yo girls who spend the night doing all manner of kinky stuff
asciilifeform: or hell, hadamard
mircea_popescu: and the day choir.
asciilifeform: thus far thread seems to compress to a very discouraging http://btcbase.org/log/2016-05-19#1468598 ; mircea_popescu: 'me an' the other wizards got vastly moar powerful!1111' asciilifeform: 'waiwut how' mircea_popescu: 'yer puny brain will never apprehend the smallest part of it'
a111: Logged on 2016-05-19 15:51 asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2016-05-19#1468573 << i'ma bite this bait. tell me, what constructive thing have improvements in finance in past 30y enabled ?
mircea_popescu: in fact, a useful heuristic to distinguish magic and technology, is that as the stakes increase, magic gets harder and technology easier to do.
mircea_popescu: and by this measure, a good chunk of what you regard one is really the other and back again.
mircea_popescu: to take a simple illustration : make this matchstick exactly 1 mn thick within 0.1% tolerance throughout it's length and i'll pay you a dollar is hard. make this rod of molybdenum 1 mm thick within 0.0000001% tolerance and i'll pay you a billion is easy.
asciilifeform: to technologize is to break apart magic and make it repeatable - e.g., damascus steel was magic (gotta be in the right time, right place, use iron from here-and-here, and whisper the incantations yer grandfather taught you for good measure, and be of pure aryan blood, and ....) but then somebody builds mass spectrometer and today you can buy a damascus knife from helsinki
mircea_popescu: meanwhile, "shit an atom of gold and i'll pay you a dollar" is easy. "shit a brick of gold and i'll pay you a billion" is very fucking hard. etc.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform there's not much to go on when one believes there's more substance than marketing to that "damascus" claim.
asciilifeform: well the damascene pattern is there. but no, i did not personally buy these swords and go back in time to 14th c and fight with them for 20y
asciilifeform: if mircea_popescu does, plox report back, i will read.
mircea_popescu: well, they look the same, should be good enough for our technological needs :D
mircea_popescu: anwyay, there's not so much difference between what we're saying. "make it repeatable" as you say is part of parcel of "economy of scale" as i say.
asciilifeform: not simply scale.
asciilifeform: it has to be communicable via dead words.
mircea_popescu: but that's not what you said :)
asciilifeform: in that sense, much of what we think of as technology, has not in fact yet been technologized.
asciilifeform: (recall the 'fogbank' incident ?)
mircea_popescu: repeatable is one thing ; but your idea of communicable is murky at best.
mircea_popescu: which incident is this ?
asciilifeform: $s fogbank
mircea_popescu: gotta get the logsearch already.
trinque: phf: have an API?
mircea_popescu: trinque were you also going to give him deedbot log access ?
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform ah that's an actual thing ?
mircea_popescu: i always thought it to be a sort of snipe pee.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: good evidence that it was indeed a product
asciilifeform: a sort of styrofoam
asciilifeform: with particular neutron cross-section
mircea_popescu: so what's lost here ? very thin foams are well understood
trinque: mircea_popescu: yeah we can work that out too
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: story is, the particulars of making just-that (and it had to be just-that, on account of the detonation process) foam, were never fully written down
asciilifeform: as it turned out to have a hidden dependence on an impurity which was present in the feedstock at the time
mircea_popescu: ah and they can't make it now ?
asciilifeform: but ~no longer~ present in 2000s when they resumed production
mircea_popescu: this smacks of so much disinfo... but anyway.
asciilifeform: they spent, supposedly, a few 100 mil, massive failures
mircea_popescu: so this was a technology yes
mircea_popescu: understood and reproducible. at least generally speaking.
asciilifeform: and eventually had to reverse-engineer old samples and found the missing 'gotta have trace elements x, y, z'
asciilifeform: anyway i was not there, and cannot say how much the entire story was simply a cover for embezzling half a bil usd
mircea_popescu: but the implications for your position are pretty lulzy, wouldn't you say ?
asciilifeform: but it reads like an elementary 'damascus steel'
mircea_popescu: was it really magic ?
mircea_popescu: (think about it - dead words failed to convey it. in spite of everyone's best effort)
asciilifeform: i was specifically citing example of failed technologizing
asciilifeform: (whether real, or fictional in whole or part, i obviously do not know)
mircea_popescu: what is this "Failed technologizing" mean ?
asciilifeform: when you ~think~ you have reduced the item to a recipe of dead words
asciilifeform: but in fact the would-be maker still needs the right unobtainium
mircea_popescu: but this is universally the case.
mircea_popescu: name one item that is not in this situation.
asciilifeform: long division?
mircea_popescu: ok but i said item.
mircea_popescu: tell me ?
asciilifeform: long handle, heavy head with sharp edge.
asciilifeform: can go, make.
asciilifeform: even if yer an eskimo.
mircea_popescu: this sounds like a flanged mace ?
asciilifeform: axe is communicable, hence ~everybody who wasn't genetically damaged, had'em.
mircea_popescu: but you communicated axe and i ended up with a flanged mace. http://www.therionarms.com/reenact/therionarms_c1306b.jpg << is this your axe ?
asciilifeform: i said 'edge' not 'edges' neh ?
asciilifeform: where'd ya get so many.
mircea_popescu: wasn't clear that part is intentionally meaningful. fine, consider same item with a single such spoke
asciilifeform: at any rate, 'resistance of medium', this is not a place where a primitive axe-maker is likely to wander into
asciilifeform: hard enough to give a stone 1 edge.
mircea_popescu: (note how you keep trying to brace yourself against unstated convention, "of course you would understand this is not the item because that'd breach symmetry and we have a convention re symmetry")
mircea_popescu: aha! quite exactly.
mircea_popescu: not even the fucking axe is "fully technologized"
mircea_popescu: because everything everyone ever does has some medium involved.
asciilifeform: well yes, if i were in the position of the hero of that one asimov story where he is trying to communicate what humans look like over radio, but he has no idea even which way their displays scan, or what the hell they use to decode signal in the first place,
asciilifeform: i would have a bit of a tougher cookie on my hands
asciilifeform: (communicate to intergalactic whateverthefucks)
mircea_popescu: even your "primitive man won't stray" argument is broken, as you stop midway. a) the point of his following your recipe is that he got off lazy butt ; if he doesn't, he doesn't AT ALL. why would he get off lazy butt JUST AS FAR as you imagine he would and no further ?
mircea_popescu: the same sort of thought process is involved (for him) when he decides to make the axe at all and when he decides to make singlespoked flanged mace.
asciilifeform: this would happen if he lived in some heavenly vacuum where the purpose of the axe is entirely unclear
asciilifeform: but on the other hand if he knows that it is to cut heads with.
asciilifeform: (heads, trees, ...)
mircea_popescu: but if the "purpose" of the axe (as you imagine it) is unspoken part of the design,
mircea_popescu: then the design is for a magic item
mircea_popescu: no "dead words" form.
asciilifeform: granted it #includes <heads.h>
mircea_popescu: quite very live words.
asciilifeform: and sometimes <trees.h>
mircea_popescu: soon enough you're going to re-discover post-structuralism at this rate, and end up understanding what i meant by context above.
asciilifeform: neh i get it
mircea_popescu: *thumbsup*
asciilifeform: but this is still quite apart from 'my anal telepathy muscles are ineffable and stfu finance made progress'
mircea_popescu: yeah, apart because of how familiar you are with either.
mircea_popescu: this speaks not of it.
mircea_popescu: how familiar you are with making axes vs making aerogels does not establish if making axes or making aerogels is "magic", it just establishes how familiar you are with them.
asciilifeform: noshit.jpg
asciilifeform: but i dare say i have a handle on 'technology' vs 'magic'
mircea_popescu: sure, like aquinas' beauty.
asciilifeform: can be taught - technology. 'must be aryan, and live on mt. parnassus' - magic.
asciilifeform: and recall how it is my profession to cut things ?
asciilifeform: specifically to cut off the parnassus.
asciilifeform: because they are annoying.
mircea_popescu: you know what the literary model for this is ?
mircea_popescu: the grinch.
asciilifeform: possibly.
mircea_popescu: nttawwt.
asciilifeform: relatedly:
asciilifeform: 'In the one-page Errata in the December 1979 issue, I explained that the turkey in the oven is a plastic "channel filler" which captures x-ray energy and explodes with enormous force, purely as the result of getting very hot very fast (ten million degrees in half a microsecond). In the original H-bomb article, I had described the conditions inside the radiation channel in terms of "a gas of photons." For my revised explanation in the
asciilifeform: Errata, which I dubbed "exploding styrofoam," the corresponding phrase would be "a gas of electrons." The implosion of the secondary is driven by matter pressure, not radiation pressure. Incidentally, Dow Chemical complained that Styrofoam is a trademark, like Xerox, and that nuclear weapons do not contain Styrofoam. Point conceded; the foam is generic. ... I like the idea of a nuisance material, plastic foam, as the real secret of
asciilifeform: the H-bomb. It symbolizes the banality of evil which is the essence of the whole H-bomb business. Workaday people doing workaday jobs building doomsday machines based on 1950's technology, while civilization marches bravely into the new millennium, oblivious to the death sentence imposed by a secret technology involving plastic foam. It calls to mind the most famous line from The Graduate, "One word: plastics."'
mircea_popescu: anyway, sounds like some sort of boron carbide.
mircea_popescu: not in any sense plastic.
mircea_popescu: and since it's gas-based, prolly heated by means of the gas being a neutron poison. xenon.
asciilifeform: same mornald as in intro of my old article ( http://www.loper-os.org/?p=1323 ) incidentally.
asciilifeform: *morland
mircea_popescu: i wonder if the logs will end up classified now also.
asciilifeform: Officially !111111
asciilifeform: i shit thee not, this is the actual law in usa since '50s
mircea_popescu looks through his periodic table, that great tool of war.
asciilifeform: which is why anyone with usg 'ts' reading the logz is technically in a state of sin, and subject to disrobing, unless specifically blessed by u.s. DOE 'q clearance' pope.
mircea_popescu: yeah, boron not aluminum.
asciilifeform: (phun phakt, there are 2 wholly separate pyramids of 'clearance' in usa; DOE (atomic) and DOD (pentagon)
asciilifeform: non-transferrable!111111
mircea_popescu: there, the official free world reconstruction of "fogbank" : B4C foam with a xe-135 filling.
mircea_popescu: do the calcs on it beging anywhere close to a critical core if bored one day. "electron gas" exactly.
mircea_popescu: "plastic" my fucking left foot.
asciilifeform: at any rate ru folks were never hung up on no stinkin' foamz.
mircea_popescu: yeah, they used sheepskins.
asciilifeform: among sane folk it is small piece of the cost.
mircea_popescu: in that drawing, "modern security features added to render useless in the wrong hands" prolly means 1kb rsa with exponent 35, amirite
asciilifeform: we had the thread!
asciilifeform: $s permissive action link
asciilifeform: ah damn
asciilifeform: anyway it was the thing where the detonator timings are derived from passphrase that gets piped in through jack on the bomb chassis
mircea_popescu: the notion that you can make a) a physical object that b) does something and yet c) is safe in hands of adversary is so fucking lulzy.
asciilifeform: essentially symmetrically-ciphered firmware
asciilifeform: but famous largely for how most american nukez ~lacked it~
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform problem is i take off that chip and fuzz it.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: fuzz what? it will happily pop, but with wrong timings
asciilifeform: --> fizzl
mircea_popescu: it's a black box circuit, i measure all its outputs for known inputs.
asciilifeform: but idea being, you don't know the desired outputs.
asciilifeform: because they are part of the valuable mojo that went into crafting the thing
mircea_popescu: the other idea being that their chip is shit.
asciilifeform: and aren't actually present in the stolen box.
mircea_popescu: and i'll recover them through any of the numerous cryptanalysis tricks available.
asciilifeform: again, they ~aren't in there~
mircea_popescu: who aren't ?
asciilifeform: the params
mircea_popescu: aren't in where ?
asciilifeform: the bomb.
mircea_popescu: sure. so ?
asciilifeform: iirc the way it worked was that the actual timing constants needed for yield Y, e.g., 'pop squib s1, then after t1 ns, squib s2... then after tN, run neutron gen tube for tN' ns, ...'
asciilifeform: weren't in the box
asciilifeform: you had to key'em in.
asciilifeform: before dropping the bomb.
mircea_popescu: sure. so you have a chip, that takes say 4 inputs, and generates say 3 outputs.
mircea_popescu: i put this chip on a breadboard, and feed all possible input combinations to it, note down all that comes out.
asciilifeform: and ...?
asciilifeform: idea is that to get the desired answers, you have to properly reverse-engineer, and grasp, the bomb geometry.
asciilifeform: which is a good chunk of the work of building the thing to begin with.
mircea_popescu: and then have a physics team to sort outputs in order of likelihood and a cs team to rebuild the chip from scratch.
asciilifeform: originally there wasn't even a chip, just analogue knobs.
asciilifeform: it wasn't a security-by-obscurity thing
mircea_popescu: right, and im well persuaded the current item is just a glorified enigma machine
mircea_popescu: ie, decent physicist takes one look at list of possible outputs and picks the right one.
asciilifeform: 'decent physicist' who took the entire thing apart, measured the actual geometries of everything, incl. thickness of gold plating on the pu pit, etc
asciilifeform: massive headache
asciilifeform: and if you can do this, you probably already own nuke
mircea_popescu: well if i can steal one, also.
mircea_popescu: tey said "wrong hands", they didn't fucking say "reddit's hands"
asciilifeform: whole thing was intended as ~anti-theft~ measure, against 'indian who found the rifle on dead english'
mircea_popescu: i guess the ustards imagines itself in the glorified position where all non-orcs are friendly.
mircea_popescu: come to think of it, tyhe usg aspires to be tmsr in more ways than one, huh.
asciilifeform: this is the explicit doctrine of 'anti-proliferation' from the get-go
asciilifeform: ever since they made peace with the su bomb
asciilifeform: incidentally, iirc the 'enter constants before launch' thing was originally 'dial-a-yield'
asciilifeform: rather than security measure
asciilifeform: it was so that 'hey i have a tank column here and berlin is 50km away, i need moar neutrons and less thermal'
mircea_popescu: come to think of it, the idea of using acetonitrile is very bizarre. much better polar solvents exist ; unless the remarkably high dielectric constant of the substance is useful.
mircea_popescu: i guess it must be.
asciilifeform: likely it was used simply in manufacture
asciilifeform: rather than in shipped product
mircea_popescu: yes. but why use this headache when much better solvents available
mircea_popescu: unless, again, the dielectric is a major part of what "better" means.
asciilifeform: (aggressive solvent, a place where i used to wurk had massive tanks hooked to dna synthesizer, to clean the pipez)
BingoBoingo: Or better solvent ruins it.
mircea_popescu: BingoBoingo can always dilute.
BingoBoingo: What if dilution agents ruin it?
mircea_popescu: i guess.
asciilifeform: you prolly need the polar aprotic aspect
asciilifeform: for the foam-making
BingoBoingo: Or need that solvent to get the exact right contaminants fixed?
mircea_popescu: acetone just as aprotic. or thf.
asciilifeform: PeterL still around ?
mircea_popescu: note how they stand : thf, massively used, because relatively safe - million tons produced a year or such. yet, dielectric < 10
asciilifeform: perhaps he knew why.
mircea_popescu: acetone, barely 20, also rather volatile if not as toxic.
mircea_popescu: of course, dmso would be even dielectrical-er, but hm.
mircea_popescu: o look at that... twice the boiling point. aww!
mircea_popescu: so the boron carbide with xenon filling aerogel production process involves electromagnetics and evaporation. SCIENCE!
asciilifeform: whatever it was, the re-discoverers billed 200+m usd.
mircea_popescu: or maybe dmso was really too toxic (that thing is a riot) and thf acvtually dissolves borones and so ...
asciilifeform: or they couldn't find monkeys willing to dmso
asciilifeform: (see l0gz re asciilifeform and dmso!)
mircea_popescu: does it really taste like garlic ?
asciilifeform: where is the moterfuckign $s
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: 'taste'
asciilifeform: go try yourself.
mircea_popescu: whtwere you doing with it again, spectrometry ?
mircea_popescu: lol ty, i'll pass.
asciilifeform: we were doing 'high throughput screening' of compounds from massive library of random crud
asciilifeform: (in vitro)
asciilifeform: there was robot, which i was reversing and writing soft for, but meanwhile actual work was done by gurlz
asciilifeform: in porous gloves.
asciilifeform: aha, story is in the l0gz
a111: Logged on 2013-11-13 14:20 asciilifeform: we had a beautifully-educational incident with DMSO
mircea_popescu: dude the noise in the logs d'antan
asciilifeform: in other nyooz, re 'ic fab in kitchen',
asciilifeform: 'disintegrated circuit'
asciilifeform: 3218 transistors...
asciilifeform: in otherlulz,
asciilifeform: 'I find it very disturbing that there seems to be very little response from popular OS distributions to this issue. Most do not appear to have issued any package updates to close the shell exploit. Perhaps the opinion is that major new versions will be introduced as part of major distribution releases and it is ok for users to exposed to problems for two or three years.'
mircea_popescu: laaarge train of "unblessed" vulns etc.
mircea_popescu: the sad truth underneath this all is, that the "computer [security] industry" has slowly became dependent on usg-sponsored burnings to the degree that unless weimer and co actually write all the stuff and put it out, they can't do it on their own, in any sort of timeframe.
mircea_popescu: there's now and again cases when actual forces hostile to usg do the whole thing, but when genuine independent research occurs... well. this.
asciilifeform: tends to get phuctored.
asciilifeform: in other slightly time-delayed lulz,
asciilifeform: ^ mr mold gets the hanno boeck treatment
mircea_popescu: why do all these people put so much effort into creating some sort of label/brand/title for themselves anyway
mircea_popescu: dude wtf am i reading.
mircea_popescu: he read unspecified "central texts" and references some william buckley. who the fuck is william buckley ? turns out, a tv show host.
mircea_popescu: $up PeterL
deedbot: PeterL voiced for 30 minutes.
asciilifeform: buckley was iirc the closest thing to organized sanity in his period/usa.
asciilifeform: or hm nm
asciilifeform: that was j birch
mircea_popescu: look. a tv host can not be anything.
asciilifeform: $up PeterL
deedbot: PeterL voiced for 30 minutes.
PeterL: http://btcbase.org/log/2016-05-19#1468999 << not sure why you think acetonitrile is bizarre, I use it lots
a111: Logged on 2016-05-19 17:42 mircea_popescu: come to think of it, the idea of using acetonitrile is very bizarre. much better polar solvents exist ; unless the remarkably high dielectric constant of the substance is useful.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: aha, i mixed him up with birch
mircea_popescu: PeterL they use lots of it, and constantly bitch about how expensive it is to handle.
asciilifeform: it is expensive because osha
asciilifeform: not because expensive.
mircea_popescu: whatever be the case. PeterL presumably has a very legitimate need for it, being in the business of organics. these schmucks making advanced clays however... not so much.
mircea_popescu: either that or i don' tunderstand something.
PeterL: and solubility is not exactly linear with polarity
mircea_popescu: this is true
PeterL: depends on other factors as well
PeterL: http://btcbase.org/log/2016-05-17#1467867 << yes, nursing mothers commonly leak milk. There are adsorbent pads you can put under her bra to adsorb it.
a111: Logged on 2016-05-17 21:54 asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2016-05-14#1466468 << important question that perhaps only mircea_popescu could answer: is there a 'background lactation' ?
asciilifeform: PeterL: discussion was about NON-NURSING women
asciilifeform: and whether ~these~ leak milk.
asciilifeform: thing is a variation on sweat gland, after all.
PeterL: my sister-in-law started leaking after spending a day at the maternity ward when my daughter was born, she had weaned her kid about a year before that
mircea_popescu: this is pretty well known, sure. actually screaming on a reasonable frequency will get recent mommies all lactating in a social setting.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: 'vox' article linked because it is a handy illustration of how usg 't-cells' attack whatever foreign object. mr mold is getting same treatment, for nth year in a row now, as phuctor for past yr. i.e. sprayed in coating of 'pre-discredited, move along' claptrap
hanbot: <BingoBoingo> ^ Qntra Farm Report is back! Eat Moar Monsanto! << is there anti-monsanto graffiti in the us, btw? common theme here. also, "go home obama", from a few months ago.
BingoBoingo: Not yet.
asciilifeform: i will point out that we have 'go home obama' here.
asciilifeform: or at least, had.
asciilifeform: at any rate, with people being idiots, i fully expect 'bring back $1 burgerz, motherfuckers' graffiti after monsanto dies
asciilifeform: and it will be done, by using moar ground up rat meat
asciilifeform: pr0gr3555555.
BingoBoingo: Nah, Bayer pretty much has to buy Monsanto
asciilifeform: has to why ?
BingoBoingo: For the branding
asciilifeform: obummer will push button in his desk and angela merckel's shock collar will go off ?
asciilifeform: if they don't
BingoBoingo: Pretty much
hanbot had to double-take whether there was "unilever" printed over a local "pizzalomo" ad on a building the other day
hanbot: it wasn't, but prolly coming.
asciilifeform: iirc mircea_popescu explained that ar is surrendering to usg
phf: trinque: what kind api?
mircea_popescu: surrendering ? nah, ar is the future of usg.
trinque: phf: to implement a $s
trinque: just whatever's passed to the search page as data
trinque: sexps are fine
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform i dun see how he needs any further spray for any purpose, the substance's self-discrediting enough.
mircea_popescu: i suppose we don't agree on that score.
trinque: anybody built sbcl on musl?
trinque senses he will need his shitwaders for this
shinohai: Went fishing with mircea_popescu , cayght a beauty: http://btcinfo.sdf.org/uploads/TRITON.jpg
BingoBoingo: Congrats shinohai
shinohai: testing a file upload script since I'm ditching imgur for good.
BingoBoingo: Y not move to slimgr?
shinohai: I tried earlier today, was 404 for me :/
shinohai: "Whose a pain in the ass now bitch?"
mircea_popescu: ;;later tell copypaste btw the party's here --> #trilema
gribble: The operation succeeded.
shinohai: https://medium.com/the-coinbase-blog/what-happened-at-the-satoshi-roundtable-6c11a10d8cdf#.o9at5lmmf <<< ok guise classic failed so we're gonna try to scrounge up another set of devs "in the next month or two"
asciilifeform: these won't run out any time soon
asciilifeform: mit is wide.
asciilifeform: 'And if no perfect solution exists they seem ok with inaction, even if that puts bitcoin at risk.' << gold.
asciilifeform: 'Even though core says they are ok with a hard fork to 2MB (they have it on their own roadmap, just very far in the future), they refuse to prioritize it. They prefer to withhold something that could help the network now...' << these folks never give up
asciilifeform: [various derpage re july halving] << can somebody explain why this halving is supposed to be a mega-apocalypse vs the LAST HALVING ??
shinohai: Because Brian Armstrong is an autistic retard.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform many little things, all coincidental.
asciilifeform: in mircea_popescu's picture, is it simply that the termites have gnawed long enough at the support columns ?
mircea_popescu: basically, tmsr has been extremely effectual at murdering usg assets and crippling usg influence in bitcoin, this doth not sit well with them ;
mircea_popescu: they had plans, none of which worked, their cost basis keeps exploding, which is not nice,
mircea_popescu: the chinese are in a similar position mutatis mutandis etc.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform not so much that, moreover simple desperation.
mircea_popescu: recall, the usg & friends, as well as any and all other wanna-be, pretended or otherwise power centers have been regularly humiliated.
mircea_popescu: the options keep narrowing until it's either rage or quit. because obviously the correct and naturally-imposed solution of submit and humbly suck mp's cock is for some incomprehensible reason not on their plate.
mircea_popescu: so the logical expectation is that they'll rage before they quit.
asciilifeform: i did pr3d1ct!111111
mircea_popescu: i guess so.
asciilifeform: unheard-of marvels will be seen, e.g., minerz paid in megatonnes of fresh printolade, thread, & broken glass, not to mine
asciilifeform: possibly the intel cluster will be brought up;
asciilifeform: and other tiltatrons
mircea_popescu: eh, that's not ready.
asciilifeform: (7y is a plenty long time to set up nsa mine, neh ?)
mircea_popescu: they started late, and suck at everything.
shinohai: Coinbase is rebranding their exchange as well -added ETH like all the other hippies lately.
mircea_popescu: shinohai eth is the backup plan, turns out. lulzy shit.
asciilifeform: uncooperative cn minerz will have 'accidental' fires, etc.
mircea_popescu: anyway, asciilifeform, morale at the ant farm is exceptionally low.
shinohai: I'd ask BA for a quote for Qntra, but he blocked me on twatter
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: the ants perhaps desire a stalingrad.
mircea_popescu: they had gavin and all it took was a trilema post to turn him from st peter to a sort of dan quayle. it's not the sort of thing the grunts like to face.
asciilifeform: 'last conclusive push!1111'
mircea_popescu: too used with the "we control the vertical, and the horizontal" usual fare.
asciilifeform: i can picture black 'sectera' phone ringing on hitler's desk, 'ft meade, we need moar time, secp256k1 is still standing' 'lose the other division, or LOSE YERSELF!1211111'
asciilifeform: 'nein nein nein nein nein!111'
asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2016-05-20#1469135 << explain this. i dun see how the cost of generating additional gavins is any higher now than in 2012
a111: Logged on 2016-05-20 00:25 mircea_popescu: they had plans, none of which worked, their cost basis keeps exploding, which is not nice,
asciilifeform: reddit vermin are an ~inexhaustible resource
asciilifeform: and i don't see this 'quit and submit' thing ever being a thing
asciilifeform: it is like expecting hitler to surrender
asciilifeform: he knows that the noose is waiting
asciilifeform: so it will be 1945 all over again, offers of 'separate peace' from himmlers, bormanns, etc. left and right
asciilifeform: none of them adding up to ~anything
asciilifeform: (and who in his right mind would strike any kind of agreement with a gavin or a preet!)
shinohai: Preeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet!
asciilifeform: wants a craaaaaaaaacker
mod6: haha
mod6: think i should get off her first
mod6: think she wants some water
mod6: to put out the blow torch
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform how the fuck are you going to generate "Aditional gavins" roflmao.
mircea_popescu: had one, "fired", fizzled.
mircea_popescu: ironically i fucking warned the idiots when they fired the hearn toothpick. but, too dumb to figure it out.
asciilifeform: sooo they annoint another
asciilifeform: say, whatever dipshit wrote the earlier linked thing
mircea_popescu: that guy was there then.
mircea_popescu: they TRIED to anoint one, to great lulz. dr whateverthefuck.
asciilifeform: so they take buterin. when he's spent, whoever the next one is.
mircea_popescu: eh get out. not how this works.
asciilifeform: they'll go up the cost ladder
asciilifeform: pay, e.g., dan boneh, perhaps, to convincingly play a satoshi
asciilifeform: literate folx are every bit as whore as the imbeciles, merely cost moar
mircea_popescu: look, you're theoretically arguing about things in such a vague distant approach it's not worth the skinning.
asciilifeform: hey it isn't as if i worked in hitler's bunker, my approach is necessarily indirect
asciilifeform: but imho it is possible to say something useful re what will be tried.
mircea_popescu: and if not necessarily useful, in any case entertaining.
asciilifeform: i'd be curious, though, to meet a usg fauxtoshi who is willing to endure 5 minutes of my questions re trb src.
asciilifeform: in public.
mircea_popescu: coming right next after the official usg libertard ideologue steps in here to prove to me how wrong i am about things and matters.
asciilifeform: i've wondered often who precisely they paid, and how much, to set up even a basic 'first 6mo of trb'-level framework for them of understanding how the shitsoup even worx
mircea_popescu: you want the job ? :D
asciilifeform: well i already did the job. right here, for phreeeeee.... it isn't as if hitler doesn't read the l0gz
asciilifeform: but, hilariously,
asciilifeform: $rupturefarms was one of the places where usg bought 'algorithmic vulns'
asciilifeform: for all i know, the folks in the next room were doing bitcoin.
asciilifeform: (though chances are - not; it was not quite so classy)
mircea_popescu: it's gonna be funny as we age, and all sorts of infantile derps are the #78589 satoshi
mircea_popescu: https://ransomwaretracker.abuse.ch/ << apparently this emergent social behaviour is so big it warrants fansites and whatnot
mircea_popescu: $google the war on the web
deedbot hands you a broomstick.
mircea_popescu: truth be told, the scenario is rather plausible. the us has nowhere to turn.
a111: Logged on 2016-05-20 02:40 mircea_popescu: https://ransomwaretracker.abuse.ch/ << apparently this emergent social behaviour is so big it warrants fansites and whatnot
mircea_popescu: easier to explain to the peons why they can't have chocolate this week if there's an "all out total war" going
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform aha
mircea_popescu is kinda amused at all the "oh noes, nuclear war destroys planet as we know it". go for it boys, really.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: sop since '49
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform i vaguely suspect delivery actually worked better in 49 than it does today.
asciilifeform: the subs work.
mircea_popescu: i'd be surprised if they can usefully launch anything by this point.
asciilifeform: i can't speak for usa, but ru regularly test-fires.
asciilifeform: (and even have commercial spinoff for low orbit commercial payload on same)
mircea_popescu: yaya. the mechanics of the thing are against them. you have a very visible (really, in the right spectrum it blots out the sun), slow moving large object. doing what.
asciilifeform: launching from 200m under water ?
asciilifeform: what sun.
mircea_popescu: what, this is a submarine icbm ? travels underwater ?
asciilifeform: vertically.
mircea_popescu: aha. and once it's in air you can see it.
asciilifeform: you have 2 min. to shoot.
asciilifeform: hence the usg obsession with chemical lasers, etc.
mircea_popescu: actually... it takes about half hour to cover its range.
asciilifeform: depends from where.
mircea_popescu: "to cover its range" is not origin dependent.
asciilifeform: but unless you are shooting from ronny raygun's orbiting deathray, you have 2min.
mircea_popescu: if memory serves, it goes for 10k kms at a top speed of maybe 20k km/h
mircea_popescu: and whole shebang is made of fucking epoxy, if you can imagine that. all the structural integrity and shielding of chewing gum.
asciilifeform: american.
asciilifeform: ru - titanium.
asciilifeform: but it is not designed to be shot, no.
mircea_popescu: point remains, the item is in the air for half an hour, during which it is a larger source than anything in the sky in about a third of the spectrum. it weighs a hundred fucking tons, and is about as maneuvrable as a dead whale.
mircea_popescu: how hard do you think it is to put a missile in its path ?
asciilifeform: hard enough that bush's idiots couldn't do it unless the thing beaconed.
mircea_popescu: i'm not particularly interested in defending the us from imaginary attacks
mircea_popescu: it's quite certain who the rogue state is today.
mircea_popescu: and for that matter - a nuke IS a fucking beacon. thermally even!
asciilifeform: when pops
asciilifeform: prior - only neutron.
mircea_popescu: nah. it moves fast in air, large profile, it heats significantly.
mircea_popescu: has none of the mitigation of "invisible" aircraft
asciilifeform: in that sense yeah
asciilifeform: but dummy barrel has same thermals as genuine nuke.
asciilifeform: and costs 100x less.
mircea_popescu: yeah, well, that's where the pain starts : it'd be a wonder if the whole nato fleet can launch a coupla dozen simultaneous.
asciilifeform: at one point it was sop to use separating bus in the cone but supposedly now 'banned under treaty'
asciilifeform: (i fuhget which)
mircea_popescu: anyway. this whole thing... children threatening with holding their breath.
mircea_popescu: fun factoid : the (only!) uk sub actually has a... mile long aerial in tow.
mircea_popescu: visible from fucking sat.
asciilifeform: uk is a joke, as described in l0gz
asciilifeform: (in the uk-sub-leak thing)
mircea_popescu: the us is moving towards it, not away.
mircea_popescu: it's worth a lulz tho. they have to catch bbc or else it may be the case they should fire.
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