Show Idle (>14 d.) Chans
← 2016-06-18 | 2016-06-20 → ↓
asciilifeform: i'm still not convinced that there's been any net leakage of 'turkey dollar.'
BingoBoingo: Just wait till the real DAOist posts pics of all their turkeys
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform that goes without saying, for you.
asciilifeform: this is rather like, e.g., rutherford's observation that electron doesn't fall out of its orbit by radiating away energy, and hence is not analogous to orbiting moon.
mircea_popescu: well no but it's part of the asciilifeform apodicticology, "nothing that ever happens could disrupt usg".
asciilifeform: something is missing in the model.
asciilifeform: if usg were bleeding turkey dollars, the successive iterations of altpump would lose vigour.
mircea_popescu: how's that follow ?
asciilifeform: alternatively it isn't a closed system
mircea_popescu: no, on the contrary, the more it bleeds the more vigorous it gets.
asciilifeform: and is powered by elsewhere.
mircea_popescu: fish similarly, the better it's hooked, the more it struggles.
asciilifeform: possibly.
mircea_popescu: and not "closed system", uses own kidney fat.
mircea_popescu: which is an externality.
mircea_popescu: the immense piled wealth 1850-1950 keeps on unwinding.
asciilifeform: i predicted, for instance, that there would be a usgtronic alt backed by actual fiatola. which hasn't happened yet.
asciilifeform: possibly - next cycle..?
mircea_popescu: takes a shitload of stupid to get a world power into african level. took the russians what, a half century to unwind the last four tsars (stalin being the 4th)
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform nobody cares enough about fiat. all backing will be through bitcoin, because bitcoin has monopoly on currency now.
mircea_popescu: they lost that war, years ago. it's on trilema actually.
asciilifeform: well how the hell do you back a scamcoin with actual bitcoin
asciilifeform: can only work with at least mildly broken bitcoin, e.g., the timelock thing
mircea_popescu: can "work" the same way everything else they do "works".
a111: Logged on 2014-11-13 19:06 asciilifeform: bip64, aside from complicating the protocol and giving relevance to the gavin shitgang, is also a jam-tomorrow chumpatronic engineering structural element
mircea_popescu: for as long as willing to pretend, works fine.
asciilifeform: pretendjuice is finite resource
mircea_popescu: pretendjuice is the least finite of all resources. even today, after all the men are dead and all the women long raped into usefullness, the hittite empire pretend still lives, unsung and alone.
mircea_popescu: in a language not even understood, under many layers of dirt, the capital of name unknown never fell.
asciilifeform: for instance, i recently went, in usa no less, to an airport, and was shown into an actual airplane which actually burned some actual petro and actually flew. whereas if pretendjuice were not a finite resource, i would probably have been sat down in a cardboard box and 'zoom, zoom'
asciilifeform: but this would not leave sufficient juice left over for pretending other pretenses
mircea_popescu: there is that. but the clockwork of pretense doesn't actually prevent the general point.
mircea_popescu: you ARE given a paper which "shows" you "own" house. right ?
asciilifeform: this is possible because the scarce juice is saved for it.
asciilifeform: and not otherwise.
asciilifeform: (it is not scarce in the sense that there is little of it, but in the sense where it is strictly finite and conserved)
mircea_popescu: i don't think it's a matter of scarcity necessarily. that the sea flows through fjords does not mean the sea is finite.
mircea_popescu: no, just, respects the shape of larger items.
asciilifeform: looking at the religions of the past (the selfsame inca empire, my recent kick) i've come to suspect that the overall 'belief load' typical human can carry is roughly constant
asciilifeform: across various times/places
mircea_popescu: this may be a valid theory.
asciilifeform: just like the weight of knapsack a healthy young bloke can march with is roughly same today as in rome
mircea_popescu: how do you scalar the belief load tho ?
asciilifeform: this camel you only know when it's back breaks.
mircea_popescu: incidentally : no camel back ever breaks. the animal won't stand if it ~thinks~ it's overloaded.
asciilifeform: if camel had only slightly more forebrain, and were more like man, it could break.
asciilifeform: could convince itself to try to carry the overload.
mircea_popescu: there's some dispersion re this property in nature. some animals will eat themselves sick. some won't.
mircea_popescu: doesn't exactly relate to brain.
mircea_popescu: (horse won't, pig will, cow won't, rabbit will, etc)
asciilifeform: depends, roughly, on the scarcity of food they coevolved with.
mircea_popescu: more like variation i think. rabbits, pigs, all have this boom feeding thing.
mircea_popescu: "now is the time to eat"
asciilifeform: that would make sense.
asciilifeform: but, to revisit mircea_popescu's earlier observation, the pretense does have to respect the shape of the larger item.
mircea_popescu: anyway, if you're doing palace economy studies, the inca are a dubious, mostly backward in fact and hallucinated in theory and description example. meanwhile, the late bronze age anatolia, levant and golden crescent are much better studied, understood and documented.
asciilifeform: minoans, iirc.
mircea_popescu: they were ~all palace economies, they were all wiped in the ~same half century cca 1300 bc, as the iron age begun
mircea_popescu: not just. hittites, minoans, egyptians, you name it. all fell the weight of the greek-ish "people of the sea"
asciilifeform: same re the inca, simply the iron age 'began' late for them, had to sail across the pond.
mircea_popescu: pylos, mycene, knossos, troy, hattusa, tarsus, ugarith, qadesh, byblos, there's many dozens more, all towns that were major centers [of palace economy] and were never heard from again.
mircea_popescu: in fact, the classics agree, if mostly tacitly, that the loss was indeed greater, culturally, than the end of the roman empire.
mircea_popescu: pretty much all the "ancient towns" that did make it, memphis to tyre and sardis etc were rebuilt after being sacked at that time as well.
mircea_popescu: (and to niniveh, assur, babylon in the east)
mircea_popescu: but the important point is that the highly centralized, redistributive socialism of the 1300s gave way to a very independent, village-centered economy of the early iron age.
asciilifeform: pet sayeth: 'possibly archaeologists in many cases found mondo palace and concluded - 'palace economy', centralized'
mircea_popescu: (its evolution in turn based on a very simple notion, directly accessible to the very simple minds then roaming the earth - as quarry taken is to be distributed by the hunt boss, so everything is a quarry and so everything is to be split up. this works for non-pastoral societies quite well, but when it runs into the better organised, smarter and generally more effectual shepherds and riders they get raped.)
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform that's not the whole story, but yes, "pharaoh" means great house, for one thing, and it's not practical given the resources of the time to build a great house in any other system.
asciilifeform: 'convinced re the minoans given as we have writing, less so re others'
mircea_popescu: (memorably, a pharaoh of the period speaks of the HORROR of the SEVEN!!111!! ships that came and ravaged his lands. imagine - seven's enough, not even a thousand warriors' worth.)
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform we have plenty of egyptian writings, yes. also cuneiforms variously, and aramaic mention.
asciilifeform: the '7' could be a '1, 2, 3, many' item.
mircea_popescu: could, but likely is not.
asciilifeform: or 7 fleets, etc.
mircea_popescu: lemme see if i can find it.
mircea_popescu: a here we go!
asciilifeform: lol, 'you have reached the limit for viewing!'
asciilifeform: ALL PAGES
asciilifeform: motherfuckers.
mircea_popescu: anyway, the situation at the time is very much reminiscent of the current usg palace economy. one warrior is more than a match for many thousand "upstanding citizens". if seven ships worth 1k people sporting kalash with infinte ammo landed on us west coast, which consisted of "start-up culture" only, the result would be very much what happened at the end of the bronze age, or for that matter at the end of the aztec empire.
mircea_popescu: cortes burned the whole thing with what, five hundred men ?
mircea_popescu: shit, i could DEFINITELY burn down the ~10mn strong buenos aires with a thousand people, that were actual people ie, the sort one'd run into back in the yugoslav war days.
asciilifeform: and mircea_popescu could probably kill WHOLE HERD of cows with pocket knife. and then what.
mircea_popescu: and then rape the daughters and tie them seven to a pole and so on. what.
asciilifeform: 'ecologically dirty'
asciilifeform: gotta make moar somehow.
mircea_popescu: the point being - that not only is the palace economy drone incapable of living as an effectual human being. it is much more importantly UNWILLING TO BECOME ONE. which is the main point.
mircea_popescu: which is why and wherefore the wot will spread at the point of the sword and no other way.
asciilifeform: eh, grown people don't 'become' anything.
asciilifeform: they can change coats, that's pretty much it
mircea_popescu: intelligent people become anything they wish, which is incidentally the only definition of intelligence worth the mention. if not "social sciences" useful.
asciilifeform: this is so, if your 'tallest tower' is doghouse height.
mircea_popescu: not in the slightest. one doesn't follow from the other.
mircea_popescu: fwiw, i wasn't BORN a bitcoin-whatever.
asciilifeform: no pro go player worth the mention was anything other than playing full time from age 7 or so.
asciilifeform: and ditto for 1,001 items.
mircea_popescu: go isn't worth the mention.
asciilifeform: so doghouse.
mircea_popescu: not so doghouse. so "no stupid shit" house.
asciilifeform: no culture.
mircea_popescu: no palatial-style masturbation pretending to be culture.
mircea_popescu: plenty of culture, of the genuine kind.
asciilifeform: when you throw out the 'pretense', what's left? scythians on horseback, 'first ya pillage, then ya burn!1111' yarrrrrrrr
mircea_popescu: point in case : there isn't a 1% as much bitcoin-culture in all the usg.mit, usg.whartever sponsored "teams" and "think tanks" and etc of what's here.
mircea_popescu: what now ? your doghouse theory just died, turns out the doghouse's the other way.
mircea_popescu: how about computing ? the whole century's worth of palace cs yielded... 500 boatloads of "culture" and nothring right, proper or even usable.
asciilifeform: all of the components of everything we're now doing, from the basic maths to the semiconductor, are product of what mircea_popescu derides as 'palace wankery'
mircea_popescu: the ~only thing the palace does is lie.
asciilifeform: heaviside, for instance, was certainly no scythian.
asciilifeform: nor maxwell (though he could ride a mean ride)
mircea_popescu: it lies convincingly for some, but this happenstance doesn't speak in favour of their intelligence.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform not product in any sense. everything we use is the accidental byproduct of what the palace would have wanted to but didn't manage to "bring under control".
mircea_popescu: we're standing on the shoulders of unreasonable and naught else.
mircea_popescu: "why won't you be reasonable, mr X!" "because i'd like to do something!"
asciilifeform: intersection of palace and scythian.
mircea_popescu: not so at all. disjunction of palace.
mircea_popescu: "everything but the palace".
asciilifeform: the folks who never ended up with palace - e.g., pashtuns - sum to 0.
mircea_popescu: this is a very scarlet herring.
mircea_popescu: incas also sum to 0.
asciilifeform: seems like you need the sinkhole.
mircea_popescu: does not seem that way, no.
mircea_popescu: you can produce examples of subhuman populations. be they there or here or anywhere, they're still subhuman, and sum to 0.
asciilifeform: where are the wholly unpalaced who sum to >0 ?
mircea_popescu: you'll have to define your terms. how about, the cussacks ? the danubian pastoral communities ? the northern carpathians woodworking culture ? what do you wish to see ?
asciilifeform: maxwell's equations.
asciilifeform: or, failing that, some element of 'what differentiates us from the monkeys'
asciilifeform: (maxwell's a good proxy as any for this)
mircea_popescu: the reason you can't see it there has to do with the definitions rather than with the fact of the matter.
mircea_popescu: i for instance count philosophy as such "differentiates" us. you apparently only count a narrow definition of math-engineering ?
asciilifeform: i deliberately picked easy case.
mircea_popescu: it only appeared in one place, thus therefore if you claim that one place was "palatial", then boom, and if you claim it isn't, then equally boom.
asciilifeform: for clarity.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform the fact still remains you picked something that only ever appeared in one place.
mircea_popescu: this moves the discussion to a debate as to the true substance of that place.
asciilifeform: can pick different example, also interesting:
asciilifeform: jp shinto temples apparently had peculiar quasimathematical ritual
asciilifeform: where, at one point, they pretty much derived elementary differential calculus.
mircea_popescu: re "towers of hanoi" ? "early blockchain! by priest hand!"
asciilifeform: however it was done as part of pointless 'glass bead game' and summed to 0.
asciilifeform: (partly on account of their complicated 'isolate these folks from all reality', partly because they did not simultaneously pursue artillery...)
mircea_popescu: anyway. you'll have A LOT of trouble proving 1800s england was a "palatial economy". tax was ~inexistent at the time.
asciilifeform: cambridge was a quite centralized thing.
mircea_popescu: not so. it was on the contrary, quite autonomous thing.
asciilifeform: in the sense that it was full of a buncha blokes who didn't sow or reap.
mircea_popescu: no king ever told them who to elect, for instance.
mircea_popescu: that's not a criteria. you don't sow either.
asciilifeform: nor have i been lately a-piratin', yarrr
mircea_popescu: in any case : a marginally acceptable definition of "palace economy" is : tax over 50% of gdp. by this rule the usg, eu etc qualify. nothing else in the world does.
mircea_popescu: inca does qualify. nothing in europe pre napoleon does, nor does england crown pre ww1.
mircea_popescu: china qualifies about half the time, in spurts.
mircea_popescu: almost all subhuman congregations of the mongoloids in the pacific islands qualify throughout. and the similarly subhuman aztecs qualify. and most of the north american tribes.
mircea_popescu: fortunately, all this shit was buried.
asciilifeform: i suppose this is sorta like BingoBoingo's 'morbid obesity' - 49+% still 'obeast' but has not tipped the scale, no
asciilifeform: but ~same.
mircea_popescu: there's no 49% discussed here.
asciilifeform: aha, the space isn't flat
mircea_popescu: there's quite an uncanny valley between the 60-80%ish of the "civilised world" and the 5-15% of the rest.
mircea_popescu: there's nothing in between.
asciilifeform: which is interesting.
mircea_popescu: well, also natural. like any celestial body's interdicion area.
asciilifeform: i for one would like to know the curvature of the space.
mircea_popescu: you can have space dust. but NOT in this band around a planet.
asciilifeform: aha, quite like that.
mircea_popescu: so, if it goes over ~20%ish, it crosses event horizon, and rapidly collapses in 60-80%.
mircea_popescu: rarely, a 60-80% thing (soviets) will crack up and re-become 5-15%.
mircea_popescu: which sometimes drifts back to >20 and re-collapses
mircea_popescu: russia seems to be going that way, re putin's out of ideas convo.
asciilifeform: 'best known fact re empires is that they pop
mircea_popescu: this is not so universal. some places/people can't live as independent human beings.
asciilifeform: so they die
mircea_popescu: hopefully.
mircea_popescu: sometimes they shamble on, like teh chinese for instance. i suspect the us is headed that way also.
asciilifeform: there are still, iirc, even, a few eskimos.
asciilifeform: (none, note, 'independent', then or now)
asciilifeform: sumthinglikethat
mircea_popescu: anyway, the insidiousness of christianity, as a jewish sect, is the whole "must take care of the poor" thing.
mircea_popescu: it tends to raise taxes slowly, until in a century or a millenium they reach the 20%ish threshold and then the whole thing's fucked.
asciilifeform: initially it looks like a good deal because cheaper than watching your back
asciilifeform: (or at least 'feels' cheaper, like eric naggum's 'fast bathtub')
mircea_popescu: denying the crap is, at least to my eyes, just as important if not more important than bitcoining.
asciilifeform: interestingly the only wholly alternate ~stable~ solution to same puzzle i know of is... the castes of india
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform the point isn't that one wants the poor to necessarily starve. the point however is that charity may not be centralised.
mircea_popescu: anything else is acceptable, raping infants, eating your wife, whatever the fuck. but DO NOT centralize charity.
mircea_popescu: in fact, if the poor complain that charity as-is is insufficient, you're a thousand times better off simply burning them all down than trying to "optimize" it.
asciilifeform: this is tricky to get wholly right; consider, the english had ~decentralized charity, but it was plugged into a quite centralized church.
asciilifeform: and ended up... where it ended up.
mircea_popescu: i suppose the one point easily missed is that ~the one in need~ is no arbiter of the type, degree and kind of his need! the one GIVING is the sole fucking arbiter as to what the needy needs, when and how much of it.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform i don't think the english had at any point decentralized charity.
mircea_popescu: nor did any christian sect, not ever.
mircea_popescu: the jews possibly did, but only under pressure from russian crown.
mircea_popescu: much like the dope dealing black people in ghetto do today.
asciilifeform: these are all plugged into the usg mains
asciilifeform: usually - directly
asciilifeform: (as per tlp's piece)
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform i perhaps confusingly, meant their own subjective thing, did not mean the bulk of it.
mircea_popescu: ie, when a black person gives something to another black person.
mircea_popescu: obviously they all live on walmartola.
asciilifeform: you will find that most folks distribute their walmartola quite equitably, from their own pov
mircea_popescu: but in that laboratory setting, they still live as humans, and display human behaviours, such as charity.
asciilifeform: like the hunt party.
asciilifeform: or how sov workmen readily 'worked out a bottle for three'
mircea_popescu: except, they charitize correcly : the giver as the sole arbiter of the degree, kind and type of want.
asciilifeform: normally we mention the christians as a socialist rot, but there was also the component of caste / 'dielectric insulator'
mircea_popescu: do tell ?
mircea_popescu: sigh, ima have to read the fucking telegraph to try and guess wha you mean ?
asciilifeform: The rich man in his castle,
asciilifeform: The poor man at his gate,
asciilifeform: He made them, high or lowly,
asciilifeform: And ordered their estate.
asciilifeform: ^ snipped that was Officially Proscribed in the modern liturgy
mircea_popescu: why'd be insulation good ?
asciilifeform: so they won't arc.
mircea_popescu: but explain this. in like words.
asciilifeform: (i.e. jacquerie)
mircea_popescu: such a chinese thinker. all he wants to do is spit out a pictogram.
mircea_popescu: (burbuja means bubble in teh construction worker / hotel maid language)
asciilifeform: i recall the burbuja distinctly.
asciilifeform: as in mircea_popescu's stomach illness bout
asciilifeform: i for some reason inevitably recall the infamous ru army joke re the бурбулятор
asciilifeform: ( a word which has since, in 2000s, come to refer to what americans call 'bong', but was originally without a specific meaning )
asciilifeform: went like this:
asciilifeform: soldier punched hole in a bucket, with nail, and said to sergeant: 'look, my brilliant invention: the burbulator. see, i pour in water, it burbles.'
asciilifeform: sergeant: 'motherfucker. you ruined a bucket. throw it into the skip and go clean latrine for the rest of the month.'
asciilifeform: the next morning, commander tours the base, says to sergeant: 'everything seems ok, but what is this nonsense, they showed me the scrapyard and your men threw out a perfectly fine burbulator!!!'
asciilifeform: it is quite impossible imho not to think of this.
asciilifeform: when burbuja.
mircea_popescu: the problem is, other soldier went "see, sargent prevents torque experiments".
asciilifeform: naturally.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: lulzy re 'quantum computer miner drained mtgox'
asciilifeform: what other burbulations quietly fester in orcish heads, i wonder.
mircea_popescu: and in other lulz, https://opensource.org/definition/ << check out the churchly shit! "no discrimination" etc.
deedbot: [» Contravex: A blog by Pete Dushenski] Rashi and the Big Data time machine. - http://www.contravex.com/2016/06/19/rashi-and-the-big-data-time-machine/
deedbot: [» Contravex: A blog by Pete Dushenski] Bernie’s bang-on: North America’s a shithole and F1 drivers are pussies. - http://www.contravex.com/2016/06/19/bernies-bang-on-north-americas-a-shithole-and-f1-drivers-are-pussies/
mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2016-06-19#1485143 <<< wow, suddenly i'm converted to BingoBoingo 's views, bernie ftw!
mircea_popescu: remarkably, one of the better summaries of the etherape comes from... greek! http://www.bitcoin-gr.org/?p=5351
mircea_popescu: people on the outskirts naively care, i guess is the explanation.
danielpbarron: ;; later tell nubbins` 5c6c63613b0284340d4de49801107afd6cb0f77be925323ce649fce620fbd0d5 and 19dRVts7U1NaiTT69xWtvwXsSJ2yxFxw4M
gribble: The operation succeeded.
mircea_popescu: "I bet if you went to a client and presented a 200 kilobyte site template, you’d be fired. Even if it looked great and somehow included all the tracking and ads and social media crap they insisted on putting in. It’s just so far out of the realm of the imaginable at this point. " <<->> curl 'http://trilema.com' --silent --write-out 'size_download=%{size_download}\n' --output /dev/null
mircea_popescu: size_download=31702
mircea_popescu: i guess it's fortunate i'm not a client.
mircea_popescu: $up iobug
deedbot: iobug voiced for 30 minutes.
mircea_popescu: http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm << incidentally, i REALLY like this website. guy starts copacetic enough but actually takes things far enough. yes, ban any third party service, ads or anything else. website may not load any foreign elements, at all, just like it can't xss.
mircea_popescu: yes "smart" ads etc are not smart nor useful nor productive. yes the whole "online marketing" "community" absolutely must be taken to concentration camp for a month, beaten daily, then sent to cut salt and carry tank barrels.
asciilifeform: a good ad is a dead ad.
phf: i briefly worked for an ad company, was hired to do realtime ad bidding. google and few other companies send you a request. "such and such ad space available, starting bid is this many cents, you have 500ms to formulate a response, how much you want to pay and ad url, we let you know if won." request comes with a tracking id, so by sitting on the pipe long enough and placing losing bids you were supposedly able to both build up user profiles and g
phf: et better idea of ad market, until blah blah
phf: thing is the owner was a micromanaging psychopath, so the project lead, who was trying to build a "rockstart" team and build a "kickass" product, ended up working there long enough to lay the foundation, before burning out, losing his shit, devorcing his wife, etc. but the project was a complete failure, that never the less provided a legitimate front for the company's real operations. they usual array of porn banners, dirty affiliate marketing, f
phf: acebook skins, etc.
phf: so when ad people talk about "smart" ads and shit like that i'm usually trying to imagine what their actual stream of income is.
phf: i mean i'm pretty sure the ad bid system generated at least a handful of public talks at conferences, etc, which i'm sure painted the ad company in most positive of lights.
mircea_popescu: phf the only problem here is that the ~6-800mn mouthbreather population contains a good 20 to maybe 50mn of these hard working, intelligent, dedicated folks. 99.???% of which get burned out by some idiot "boss" working within the imbecile ideological framework they got going there.
mircea_popescu: this is the true engine of change, too much fucking wastage omfg.
deedbot: [Qntra] California City Burns Through 3 Police Chiefs In 8 Days - http://qntra.net/2016/06/california-city-burns-through-3-police-chiefs-in-8-days/
mircea_popescu: lol. sherrifs neh ?
BingoBoingo: Nah, "cities" have police chiefs. Counties have Sheriffs.
BingoBoingo: Although some sheriffs departments have police cheifs too when the sheriff is a figurehead that doesn't run their department.
BingoBoingo: And Louisiana has Parishes isntead of counties so fuck them.
mircea_popescu: yeah but it's like... 1880s style california.
mircea_popescu: they shopt teh sheriff
Bugpowder: Behold!
Bugpowder: Accomplished the technical misson for the day, time to clean the BBQ grill.
BingoBoingo: congrats Bugpowder
Bugpowder: tyty
Bugpowder: Next up mpex.
shinohai: qntra incoming BingoBoingo
shinohai: ;;later tell BingoBoingo http://ix.io/UGw
gribble: The operation succeeded.
deedbot: [Recent Phuctorings.] Phuctored: 627 divides RSA Moduli belonging to 'Paul Tagliamonte <tag@pault.ag>; Paul Tagliamonte <tag@anized.org>; Paul Tagliamonte <paultag@mit.edu>; Paul Tagliamonte <paultag@gmail.com>; Paul Tagliamonte <paultag@whube.com>; Paul Tagliamonte <paultag@debian.org>; Paul Tagliamonte <paultag@ubuntu.com>; Paul Tagliamonte <paultag@fluxbox.org>; Paul Tagliamonte <paultag@opensource.org>; Paul Tagliamonte <ptagliamonte11@jcu.edu>; Paul Tag
mircea_popescu: $up r00s
deedbot: r00s voiced for 30 minutes.
a111: Logged on 2016-06-15 15:08 asciilifeform: 'On Friday, Secretary Penny Pritzker of the US Department of Commerce joined special assistant to the president for economic policy Adrienne Harris and other top White House officials for an event featuring a lecture from Brian Forde, director of digital currency initiative a the MIT Media Lab, and multiple panels on financial technology more generally speaking. Hosted at the Eisenhower Executive Office Build
pete_dushenski: weird that phf's logs differentiate between capitlised words and uncapitalised words. dunno if it's possible to bridge these two islands, but it'd be much appreciated.
a111: Logged on 2016-06-16 16:08 mircea_popescu: ;;later tell pete_dushenski nice job adding references.
mircea_popescu: pete_dushenski iirc if quoted it matches strictly and if not quoted it matches loosely.
pete_dushenski: o hey no one died in an open-cockpit racer this morning in baku. who would've predicted that raising a generation of drivers who've known neither injury nor death, no matter the speeds and stupidity of their crashes, would lead to a buncha fuckin pussies the likes of which are suitable only for perfume advertisements
pete_dushenski: mircea_popescu: tip o' the cap for pumping vitalik's eyes shut yesterday. made for an enjoyable saturday of log reading and trilema comment following
mircea_popescu: apparently there's a LOT of hate for usg/mit/vit-alik butt-erin/doa/etc out there.
pete_dushenski: and that bottle's never been easier to uncork
mircea_popescu: btw, why did the ethereum people misspell "dead on arrival" as "dao" anyway. too much ritalin ?
pete_dushenski: or dexedrine
pete_dushenski: 'dead as obama' may also have been the tongue-in-cheek reference
pete_dushenski: the usg.mit h8 is everywhere. fuck even the shiny glowing untouchable uncriticisable aapl is getting flamed... from their own fanbois no less.
mircea_popescu: end times sorta mob behaviour.
pete_dushenski: i was trying to figure out how to shut off the ios update notifications and stumbled onto 'osxdaily' and couldn't fucking believe my eyes. cook from central casting has absolutely spent every last penny of steve's good will
pete_dushenski: comparisons to msft abounded.
pete_dushenski: rightly so, obv. but if the mouth-breathers are 'getting it', then ya... end of times eh.
mircea_popescu: pete_dushenski so did any girlies wet their panties over your poetry reading ?
pete_dushenski: turns out that ios will also auto-download the update as soon as you connect to wifi (it's a 200+ mb file) and harass you 2-5 PER DAY until you submit to installing it.
pete_dushenski: mircea_popescu: stop the clocks reading ?
pete_dushenski: ios update file can be beleeted, but will still insta-respawn when connected to wifi.
pete_dushenski: i'd like to think so.
pete_dushenski: though i found out that the 5k of ruskie 'views' i sent to that video for shits and giggles... unhappened. they lasted for at least 3-4 months though.
mircea_popescu: how's that work ?
pete_dushenski: ask yt i guess.
mircea_popescu: no but what are you saying ?
pete_dushenski: i paid fiverr guy to 'view' a yt clip 5k times. results were delivered. several months later, yt removed those paid for 'views'. like ethereum 'rollback' i guess.
mircea_popescu: what, like 5 bux for vanity sorta thing
pete_dushenski: this was when i was dipping my toes in 'tmsr pr' idea. basically just wanted to see if fiverr paid views worked, and if so, where they were coming from. turns out that the answers were "yes", "from russia", and "but only temporarily"
mircea_popescu: pete_dushenski makes sense.
pete_dushenski: peanuts, but still.
pete_dushenski: wow, catching up on latest batch of trilema etherpocalypse comments... the spammers and welfarists are out in full force.
mircea_popescu: chasing that spotlight.
Framedragger: http://btcbase.org/log/2016-06-19#1485154 << the author runs and lives off of his small no-bullshit bookmarking and archiving (bookmark/tag sites/PDFs, be able to full-text search later etc) business pinboard.in which has this exotic (to SV crowd anyway) business model called "users pay for the service and the service delivers". i like the guy
a111: Logged on 2016-06-19 14:22 mircea_popescu: http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm << incidentally, i REALLY like this website. guy starts copacetic enough but actually takes things far enough. yes, ban any third party service, ads or anything else. website may not load any foreign elements, at all, just like it can't xss.
pete_dushenski: but how did greek blog get through pingback filter and contravex hasn't in, what, 1.5yr+ ?
mircea_popescu: Framedragger invite him over!
Framedragger: might as well, will see if i can / he responds :)
mircea_popescu: pete_dushenski i actually publish pingbacks, i dun think they make it over for some reason.
mircea_popescu: what ip you send them from ?
pete_dushenski: 23.229.239.2
mircea_popescu: (if it's not === blog ip they fail, due to the "ddos" thing)
mircea_popescu: No results found.
pete_dushenski: strange.
mircea_popescu: i dun really think it's any sort of filter on trilema side. they might not actually make it across at all.
thestringpuller: So, they are trying to prop Ethereum. When the real crash happens...like the Too Big to Fail bailout...
shinohai: christ mircea_popescu at the wave of shitcoin beggars in those trilema comments.
mircea_popescu: hey, they wouldn't let go of mtgox until a year+ later and millions more were lost.
mircea_popescu: a fool and zir money.
shinohai: "I lost my leg in a car accident, collecting some BTC for prosthesis i really want to function normally.
shinohai: Sorry, but I'm tired of sitting at home, I dream to go for a walk."
mircea_popescu: answered him, for great justic.
shinohai: molto bene
pete_dushenski: is that like the black widow ?
Framedragger: asciilifeform: i've accidentally (== i fucked up) imported one mutilated key to phuctor. this key in particular http://phuctor.nosuchlabs.com/gpgkey/EE6E84ED0485E5C4615D47E7BF518A35F1A8DE60C6DFBBF1F60B1911839726CE - guess it can't hurt if it's there, but if/when phuctor reports broken key (that particular exponent is not prime), it's gonna be due to me being retarded and not the key..
a111: Logged on 2016-06-19 21:51 mircea_popescu: https://s32.postimg.org/wa7qdgoyd/Mircea_Popescu.jpg&c=5-a-ZXpYGvIFcg << is this good for bitcoin ?
mircea_popescu: pity no one recalls shtylman anymore.
mircea_popescu: his 2012-stylish cap looked much better than butt-erin's misshod skull.
mircea_popescu: $s bitfloor
thestringpuller: bitdaytrade
deedbot: fwr voiced for 30 minutes.
mircea_popescu: that guy is epic. "we both have the same number of employees : 0.5"
fwr: help me to understand this, MPEx has been sold for 250k BTC, but the website itself is down?
mircea_popescu: it's not down, no.
mircea_popescu: and iirc it was a little bit more than 250k.
fwr: says in the blog post that it's just below that
fwr: I find this incredibly hard to believe that there is this sort of money involved
mircea_popescu: and why would that matter ?
mircea_popescu: ah you meant going private. yeah, 249k and change something.
mats: its the css
mats: if mpex had rounded rectangles fwr wouldn't have given it a second thought
mircea_popescu: it also wouldn't have been worth 100 btc.
mircea_popescu: but i guess power is relatively unimportant, fetish of power is interesting!
mats: maybe its the social proof
mats: what if he had read about it on instagram?
mats: nobody lies in articles on forbes
mats: just having some fun at your expense, fwr.
mircea_popescu: in fairness, the whole mpex/tmsr/etc thing is ~equivalent to a ten ton hammer of pure cognitive dissonance for man on clapham omnibus.
Framedragger: what's the latest mpex url? mpex.co does seem to be down, fwiw
thestringpuller: mpex.site is good
mircea_popescu: well there's a bit of a dns storm, but use old ips
thestringpuller: guess no point in using dns if you have the proxy ips
Framedragger: a yea it's dns related, not just "down". curious
thestringpuller: it's causing coinbr problems tho
thestringpuller: jurov: ^^^
jurov: xoinbr does use ips
jurov: *coinbr
jurov: but they are dying, too
deedbot: fwr voiced for 30 minutes.
shinohai: ^weird
jurov: shinohai what's that?
shinohai: that's what dns lookup for coinbr returns for me
mircea_popescu: common for aws hosted sites i think
jurov: yep it is using aws' loadbalancer
shinohai: oh their version of crapflare or sumthin
mircea_popescu: fact is, there's no practical way to run plain web servers in 2016.
jurov: heh...it's actually quite different from crapflare
jurov: mostly that a bit sophisticated attacker could cause bills for coinbr to skyrocket easily
jurov: which threat has never actually materialized in past 4 years
jurov: go figure
mircea_popescu: there's worse fates.
jurov: i'm missing out on all the conspiracies and fun!!!
jurov: burned raids!
jurov: no mysterious reboots!!!
jurov: coinbr is a failure
deedbot: [Recent Phuctorings.] Phuctored: 1606279610030410747135438525 divides RSA Moduli belonging to '85.14.248.152 (ssh-rsa key from 85.14.248.152 (13-14 June 2016 extraction) for Phuctor import. Ask asciilifeform or framedragger on Freenode, or email fd at mkj dot lt) <sshscan-queries+85.14.248.152@mkj.lt>; ' - http://phuctor.nosuchlabs.com/gpgkey/EE6E84ED0485E5C4615D47E7BF518A35F1A8DE60C6DFBBF1F60B1911839726CE
a111: Logged on 2016-06-19 21:52 Framedragger: asciilifeform: i've accidentally (== i fucked up) imported one mutilated key to phuctor. this key in particular http://phuctor.nosuchlabs.com/gpgkey/EE6E84ED0485E5C4615D47E7BF518A35F1A8DE60C6DFBBF1F60B1911839726CE - guess it can't hurt if it's there, but if/when phuctor reports broken key (that particular exponent is not prime), it's gonna be due to me being retarded and not the key..
jurov: you meant modulus not prime?
jurov: openssh uses exponent like 35 left and right
mircea_popescu: ohohohoh!
mircea_popescu: Framedragger win.
mircea_popescu: oh. i thought sha ball was going in
Framedragger: mircea_popescu: yeah this is only a test. i'll send alf the whole openpgp-wrapped bundle once that's done processing. the above is just a test, and it's a false positive
Framedragger: jurov: no i meant exponent in this case actually, the actual exponent for that key was supposed to be 65537
Framedragger: jurov: but that key is borked due to my hasty scripting, so makes sense that the parsed modulus is not prime, either
jurov: i trial divided whole set by 10000primes.txt, recommend very much to find problems
jurov: no need even to optimize, a ~ hour/gigabyte in plain python
jurov: pypy helped, tho
ben_vulpes: in entirely unrelated /america no es un pais pobre/ news, i have an address outside of portland for the first time in nearly two decades
trinque: ben_vulpes: congrats!
asciilifeform: how many houses has ben_vulpes now ?
a111: Logged on 2016-06-19 17:58 deedbot: [Recent Phuctorings.] Phuctored: 627 divides RSA Moduli belonging to 'Paul Tagliamonte <tag@pault.ag>; Paul Tagliamonte <tag@anized.org>; Paul Tagliamonte <paultag@mit.edu>; Paul Tagliamonte <paultag@gmail.com>; Paul Tagliamonte <paultag@whube.com>; Paul Tagliamonte <paultag@debian.org>; Paul Tagliamonte <paultag@ubuntu.com>; Paul Tagliamonte <paultag@fluxbox.org>; Paul Tagliamonte <paultag@opensource.org>; Paul Ta
asciilifeform: ^ flipolade incidentally. snore.
asciilifeform: though now we learn that cosmic rays are attracted to debian and popular windowmanager devs.
asciilifeform: the sheer variety of nyoooo factz we learned about photons really having charge after all !111111111
ben_vulpes: photon charge, that's rich
ben_vulpes: house count is family secret
asciilifeform: well at any rate, turns out they're steerable in free space.
asciilifeform: somehow.
ben_vulpes: though very much like your btc count
ben_vulpes: "omg none go away"
asciilifeform: congrats on building bunker ben_vulpes
asciilifeform: dun forget the wagner.
asciilifeform: (important component)
ben_vulpes: ty and trinque. notquite bunker, but not mass-produced foamed petro product either, which is quite a score.
ben_vulpes: i find the uneven floor charming.
asciilifeform: lol i have this right here.
asciilifeform: 'unsealed wood'
ben_vulpes: and the gaps in the fence an entertaining project opportunity.
ben_vulpes: but hey the walls are actually hand-done plaster, and the door arches as well.
asciilifeform: buy that hammer drill.
asciilifeform: (or did last owner wire it already)
ben_vulpes: no, 'tis wired. although the breaker labeled 'dryer' does not in fact shut off the dryer's 220.
ben_vulpes: ask me how i know.
asciilifeform: i meant cat6
ben_vulpes: america es un pais pobre! internet will come from 'xfinity wifi', eg some other sucker who paid comcast to have one of their repeaters in his house.
asciilifeform: l0l, and food - from same neighbour's dumpster ?
ben_vulpes: i don't even know where the servers are going to go yet.
ben_vulpes: much less the least inane place to pierce the building envelope.
asciilifeform: ben_vulpes: i typically reuse the landline opening.
ben_vulpes: i did that for a while, when moving frequently. its not really that much of a hassle to get it put in wherever, and to insulate the offense to the skin myself.
asciilifeform: depends what the wall is made of.
ben_vulpes: plus then i don't have to deal with running cat5 through living spaces, because in this povery-stricken part of the world everyone wants their data pipes in the room where children should be playing for some reason
asciilifeform: where i live, telco will drop the fiber and that's it, any extra plumbing is yours to sweat
ben_vulpes: 'fiber'
ben_vulpes: nothere.coveredwagon
ben_vulpes: 'you have died of dysentery'
asciilifeform: 'you have died of death'
ben_vulpes: also good
ben_vulpes: doctor + bullets, always a fun time.
ben_vulpes: anyways, cable company, monopolists of net in my area, deploy 'independent contractors', entirely happy to drill holes through whateverthefuck.
asciilifeform: first nice thing i ever heard about crapcast
asciilifeform: though, many years ago when i used it, they actually neglected to bill me for almost 2 years.
asciilifeform: (yes the modem worked.)
ben_vulpes: why would one expect 'nice' of company whose revenue is biodieseling couch potatoes?
ben_vulpes: their 'business' packages are similarly utter scamolade.
ben_vulpes: with epic contracts and such shitty delivery terms /one must actually do ones own qos over lte or something retarded/
ben_vulpes: there's an entire small industry in the pacnw around internet uptime to arbitrary shitty buildings
a111: Logged on 2016-06-09 23:04 mircea_popescu: does this make sense to anyone outside of yours truly ? asciilifeform ? davout ? jurov ? phf ? trinque ?
phf: i like comcast. it's the people's republic of america people's internet, it works, unless it doesn't, in which case go to competition lol
BingoBoingo: <asciilifeform> buy that hammer drill. << Actually everyone prolly ought to get their power tools before China cuts USia off.
phf: don't worry, u.s. knows how to make drills too http://www.ebay.com/itm/131849335008
BingoBoingo: lol, but does it do masonry?
phf: only if you have a properly sized negro
BingoBoingo: Will have to remember that.
deedbot: [Qntra] Gotomypc.com Goes To Other Peoples PC's Too! - http://qntra.net/2016/06/gotomypc-com-goes-to-other-peoples-pcs-too/
BingoBoingo: Anyways apparently high end cordless tools are actually useful now since Techtronic of Hong Kong apparently OEM's for all the brands it hasn't bough and actually introduced *gasp* BRUSHLESS motors.
BingoBoingo: phf: The push down ratcheting screwdrivers by yankee/stanley are pretty cool, but also discontinued since forever ago.
phf: i also had one of these guys http://goodlinez.ru/userfiles/85.jpg
BingoBoingo: The way it works is instead of weird wrist twisting motion screwdriver allows more familiar jack off pumping motion.
BingoBoingo: Aha those drills look like they can take hammer to make hammer drill
phf: i'm pretty sure i've done that, at least to prime the spot. also as a child that's kind of a natural inclination
BingoBoingo: Seems like one of those intuitive things that comes to functioning people
phf: oh man, i forgot about this thing. i'm pretty sure it was my first exposure to a mechanical object that i used extensively and had to take care of
BingoBoingo: Mine was whittling knife
phf: you had to take that little cover off to put oil in, otherwise it'd run not as smooth, so you kind of learn when to oil it. then periodically you had to clean it fully, because mostly wood, metal and oil would get inside make soup
phf: i have this etched really close up image of drill head in my head that i couldn't quite place until i realized just now that it's that very drill
phf: "boy's first drill" :D
phf: oh nice, i've not picked up that skill until quite recently, maybe a year ago i bought a whittling knife before a trip to alaska and i've been kind of doodling with it since
BingoBoingo: Was a boy scout so rite of passage. Was carbon steel so also required oiling.
BingoBoingo: A few months ago got my first cordless drill. Went with "Ryobi Starter Drill" so the battery would work with reciprocating saw I wanted which comes without battery. Reciprocating saw is wonderful. Drill chuck slips on drill bits all the time so in a futile effort t detach chuck the contents of the drill's gearbox is now scattered on a corner of my desk.
BingoBoingo: Turns out Japanese name simply means China factory cares least for product.
BingoBoingo: At least corded drill still works
BingoBoingo: I am still puzzled by the decision to give cheapest drill a gearbox with 16 clutch settings instead of a chuck that can fucking hold a bit.
phf: i kind of assume those things are not actually designed for drilling, but for accessorizing at home depot
phf: japanese products for american market are all made in china. they are bigger, clunkier and cheaper. authentic japanese item almost always looks and feels more compact, but to acquire one you have to go to weeb websites, or try to wade through export sites with huge markups
BingoBoingo: Next drill will probably be from Milwauke Electric Tool company of TTI of Hong Kong's Shenzen factory
BingoBoingo: And hopefully China likes Milwauke's reputation more than Japan's
phf: i was actually comparing a zojirushi rice cooker that i bought from amazon to the one my jap friend brought from motherland. it's sort of like is somebody designed an item that's supposed to look identical from the distance, but has lower resolution upon closer inspection. missing features, BIG buttons and less of them, cheaper rougher molding. it's hilarious
BingoBoingo: anyways this time I'll probably actually try it in the store before leaving. Get drill, masonry bits, and concrete block then test it in the tool rental area. If people test riding morwers there I don't see why I can't test drill.
phf: "woah is that how you use that thing?"
a111: Logged on 2016-06-20 02:12 phf: i also had one of these guys http://goodlinez.ru/userfiles/85.jpg
asciilifeform: it worx great
asciilifeform: and is nearly indestructible.
phf: i'm trying to ebay one at the moment :>
phf: http://guns.allzip.org/topic/9/1433825.html << that's probably same production line as the one i had
asciilifeform: aha, i have it.
asciilifeform: prolly everybody does.
phf: and by "everybody" you mean people who haven't gotten to throwing out grandpa's toolbox yet, and like the whole 6 of breed Soviet Engineers (two in argentina, one in south korea and the rest in u.s.)
phf: *last of breed
asciilifeform: believe or not, we took this thing to usa.
asciilifeform: along with fucking meat grinder etc.
asciilifeform: i sleep on a pillow made some time in 1970s. by hand.
phf: see you guys were wise, our assumption was that we're going to a better soviet union, not zimbabwe ;)
asciilifeform: (it appears to be impossible to get feathers-but-no-stems pillow in usa)
asciilifeform: we had forward scout.
phf: пух
phf: an alien concept
BingoBoingo: My cousin swiped all of grandapa's tools in that time between the journey from hospital to cemetary.
phf: next thing you gonna say you can build items to specs or something
asciilifeform: you can buy 'down' but it is not same thing.
BingoBoingo: ;;ticker --market all
gribble: Bitstamp BTCUSD last: 756.85, vol: 2785.53262635 | BTC-E BTCUSD last: 725.601, vol: 3278.92698 | Bitfinex BTCUSD last: 758.85, vol: 28377.58695497 | CampBX BTCUSD last: 680.0, vol: 11.0 | BTCChina BTCUSD last: 768.383222, vol: 48353.86460000 | Kraken BTCUSD last: 763.18, vol: 2732.93260472 | Volume-weighted last average: 763.027494952
a111: Logged on 2016-06-20 02:28 BingoBoingo: A few months ago got my first cordless drill. Went with "Ryobi Starter Drill" so the battery would work with reciprocating saw I wanted which comes without battery. Reciprocating saw is wonderful. Drill chuck slips on drill bits all the time so in a futile effort t detach chuck the contents of the drill's gearbox is now scattered on a corner of my desk.
gribble: The operation succeeded.
asciilifeform: i've always almost wanted to put together a 'ithasplasticgears.com' public shame list.
BingoBoingo: asciilifeform: METAL gears actually. plastic box though.
asciilifeform: but today it is ~futile, almost EVERYTHING has plastic gears
asciilifeform: i saw full size lathe with plastic motherfucking gears.
BingoBoingo: Can even pick up these gears with magnet.
BingoBoingo: Which makes the abomination of a chuck even harder to forgive.
asciilifeform: just say no to chinese toolz.
asciilifeform: they do not save money, quite the opposite.
asciilifeform: add up the cost of all of the materials you've ruined.
BingoBoingo: I don't think there are powered tools anymore that aren't chinese.
asciilifeform: and the injured meat.
BingoBoingo: Asking trades people in don't drink club about suggested replacement tools some think a few America brand's tools were improved by being swept into the Techtronics juggernaut, but... will have to see
asciilifeform: power tools with batteries - l0l
mircea_popescu: ben_vulpes> i don't even know where the servers are going to go yet. << hey, at least it's no longer "life in an elevator"
asciilifeform: i always pictured ben_vulpes's flat as similar to my old 'nazi submarine' (complete with storage bulkheads in obscene places, cramming every possible ullage full of goodiez)
mircea_popescu: iirc it was about the floor surface of his car.
mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2016-06-20#1485378 << this is a good point, the good times won't last forever.
a111: Logged on 2016-06-20 02:05 BingoBoingo: <asciilifeform> buy that hammer drill. << Actually everyone prolly ought to get their power tools before China cuts USia off.
BingoBoingo considering brushless 12 volt because easier to source replacement for if li-ion batteries dry up.
a111: Logged on 2016-06-20 02:12 phf: i also had one of these guys http://goodlinez.ru/userfiles/85.jpg
mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2016-06-20#1485404 << likely. back when i was in the us a decade ago, a very visible 1/3 of tools had a very nailpolish-and-high heels value
a111: Logged on 2016-06-20 02:32 phf: i kind of assume those things are not actually designed for drilling, but for accessorizing at home depot
mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2016-06-20#1485426 << i had duck down pillows in boston. you just don't know enough womenz :D
a111: Logged on 2016-06-20 02:45 asciilifeform: (it appears to be impossible to get feathers-but-no-stems pillow in usa)
mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2016-06-20#1485428 << very unalien. puf in romanian, down in english
a111: Logged on 2016-06-20 02:45 phf: пух
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: only theoretically.
asciilifeform: if you buy 'down pillow' in modern usa you get bag of shit.
asciilifeform: even if for $1000.
mircea_popescu: yeah well
mircea_popescu: actually it wouldn't surprise me for it to be illegal to own.
mircea_popescu: "part of animal"
BingoBoingo: "migratory bird"
asciilifeform: the shit pillows with the feathers-cum-stems are ubiquitous.
mircea_popescu: they're prolly mayo nose hairs.
asciilifeform: https://web.archive.org/web/20160304015907/http://www.team.net/mjb/hawg.html << mega-classic re shit toolz, surprised that it isn't in the l0gz
mircea_popescu: uh log breaks the url
asciilifeform: ohforfufcssake.
phf: (almost fixed that one)
mircea_popescu: BingoBoingo really, 21 yo should be broke.
phf: mircea_popescu: c'mon we are reminiscing, "in soviet union men wrought tools out of steal and built bridges that lead to god's own gates! women made pillows that were feather but light than feathers and as you lay on those pillows you needed to sleep for five minutes, but it was as if you slept ad libitum"
mircea_popescu: and the toilet paper and dishwashing steel wool were interchangeable!
BingoBoingo: mircea_popescu: sure, also abducted. But note it is latest salvo in Gawker Media's "Trust us, we don't suck that much" campaign
asciilifeform: nah that's here in good old phreeeeeeeeeedomland
phf: same GOST for both
phf: (also can be used as re-entry burn up flak on ballistics)
mircea_popescu: BingoBoingo vaguely reminds me of a badling ballmer going apeshit (literally, grunting and chimping out) on stage to try an' retain some attention if naught else.
mircea_popescu: dear god these people produce such trite prose. unreadable.
BingoBoingo: mircea_popescu: It's a well trod and very lulzy path
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: developersdevelopersdevelopersdevelopers!!!11111
BingoBoingo: mircea_popescu: And not that the unreadability to them is a virtue. They can all discuss it with the confidence it was unread.
mircea_popescu: heh i guess there's that.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform eeexactly.
mircea_popescu: I myself used a Hole Hawg to drill many holes through studs, which it did as a blender chops cabbage. I also used it to cut a few six-inch-diameter holes through an old lath-and-plaster ceiling. I chucked in a new hole saw, went up to the second story, reached down between the newly installed floor joists, and began to cut through the first-floor ceiling below. Where my homeowner's drill had labored and whined to spin the hu
mircea_popescu: ge bit around, and had stalled at the slightest obstruction, the Hole Hawg rotated with the stupid consistency of a spinning planet. When the hole saw seized up, the Hole Hawg spun itself and me around, and crushed one of my hands between the steel pipe handle and a joist, producing a few lacerations, each surrounded by a wide corona of deeply bruised flesh. It also bent the hole saw itself, though not so badly that I couldn'
mircea_popescu: t use it. After a few such run-ins, when I got ready to use the Hole Hawg my heart actually began to pound with atavistic terror.
mircea_popescu: But I never blamed the Hole Hawg; I blamed myself. The Hole Hawg is dangerous because it does exactly what you tell it to. It is not bound by the physical limitations that are inherent in a cheap drill, and neither is it limited by safety interlocks that might be built into a homeowner's product by a liability-conscious manufacturer. The danger lies not in the machine itself but in the user's failure to envision the full cons
mircea_popescu: equences of the instructions he gives to it.
mircea_popescu: A smaller tool is dangerous too, but for a completely different reason: it tries to do what you tell it to, and fails in some way that is unpredictable and almost always undesirable. But the Hole Hawg is like the genie of the ancient fairy tales, who carries out his master's instructions literally and precisely and with unlimited power, often with disastrous, unforeseen consequences.
mircea_popescu: sounds juuust about right.
mircea_popescu: but yes, unix is possibly the last os the user was genuinely terrified of.
mircea_popescu: at least - until bitcoin.
asciilifeform: lel i bet i win by 1 pastespew
mircea_popescu: nah it's like 100s of lines!
mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log-top-posters?start-date=2016-05-20 << apparently this has been going on for a while nao!
asciilifeform: i still recall when arsebot was king.
mircea_popescu: yeah srsly.
mircea_popescu: anyway, i'm for bed. laters.
asciilifeform also. bbl
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