phf: basically the tree viewer is half baked and i'm not eating my own dog food here, so i'm relying on teh public to give me feedback ("phf fucking fix this fucking thing") which so far has not been forthcoming
mircea_popescu: phf i dunno, if there is slow to uptake.
asciilifeform: hey phf -- you ever published the v-viewer ?
phf: http://btcbase.org/log/2017-11-15#1738923 << the underutilized part of patches visualizer is the tree view, it shows what specific file will actually look like when pressed with a specific patch, e.g. http://btcbase.org/patches/programmable-versionstring/tree/bitcoin/src/crypter.cpp as you can see formatting is not particularly good, but it supports highlighting various languages including Ada. so given a normal v-based workflow (is there one?) can get
mircea_popescu: (the a above may seem minor, but both apeloyee and some random noob yest ran into th eexact problem. only one survived it far we can tell.)
mircea_popescu: there's also c) where it helps the mind mature into something that'll eventually be able to usefully v, but that's a secret.
mircea_popescu: the important points here are a) scheduling. if we're in the middle of a conversation, low ranking rando won't make any friends by dumping comments re paste. if you had the decency to put it on blog, he can leave you a comment, which you can read when you have the time. major efficiency boon for everyone.
mircea_popescu: ok so then.
asciilifeform: it has to parse the ada.
asciilifeform: this avoids breaking flow in the reader's head.
asciilifeform: references to code outside of the current page, oughta be automatic links
mircea_popescu: oh thank you mp, i see now what you had been trying to tell me for the past two hours because that's the sort of a mind i am. will fix now!
asciilifeform: does a good bit moar of the job, than pasting a txt ( into wp or otherwise ) and manually grunting to annotate.
mircea_popescu: http://trilema.com/2017/how-the-beastforumcom-private-messaging-function-became-a-paid-user-only-item/#selection-91.5-95.0 << hey mp, shouldn['t this 12 read 19 instead ?
asciilifeform: it's still a fail. but at least has the notion that routines are entities that oughta be pointable to.
mircea_popescu: it does none of the job.
mircea_popescu: no. how do i link the c.
mircea_popescu: how do i do anything beyond "here's a doodle, click 80 times in inept trees of documents like it's 1980 all over again and steve jobs hasn't yet come to put into abject slavery all sorts of retarded academiacs who really thought they had something to say" ?
mircea_popescu: how do i adnotate the s ?
mircea_popescu: how do i fucking link the c ?
asciilifeform: it won't win artistic awards but does about half of the job
mircea_popescu: basically, looks like a tripod site. if i want to link you to the "c" in Read(s,c); what do i do ?
a111: Logged on 2013-12-03 23:49 ThickAsThieves`: It's hard to explain puns to kleptomaniacs because they always take things literally.
asciilifeform: it doesn't do the hierarchical or line-numbering thing tho
asciilifeform finally dug up link to what asciilifeform sees as state-of-the-art wwwtronic ada viewer : http://unzip-ada.sourceforge.net/za_html/index.htm ( they're auto-generated per project )
asciilifeform: this is the naggum-cpp problem all over again -- we do not know, when beginning a project, the ultimate granularity.
mircea_popescu: And in this here FFa post we will be taking Comba Mult version x from y date and together with last week's X, Y and Z, and make this pile
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: knowing into what granularity thing must break, would require being able to tell the future, neh
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform if that's your node level you are well advised to make posts for them rather than for the combo.
asciilifeform: trinque: but let's say i take a routine from earlier ( e.g. unrolled comba mult ) and the rest -- from last week's
trinque: no guarantee the linker *wants* to link your latest
asciilifeform: trinque: not necessarily, could even store the lines individually, rather than as single text string, and generate the html soup in variants depending on number in url
trinque: thing'd have to know the code's AS
mircea_popescu: there'\s as you can see 100s of diff variants
trinque: asciilifeform: reintroducing structure atop the browser's dom isn't sensible, see: semantic web
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform you just tell people "follow the last".
mircea_popescu: (and no, even if it may seem comfortable, the confusion is antiproductive)
mircea_popescu: if you have a problem with confusing phase 2 and phase 3, this blogposting is exactly the pill required to resolve it.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform it is! it is EVERYONES! idea of readable. there's no other fucking readable.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform i think it is the right thing, minus that she should prolly change that Recent Posts divbox to float right with the content rather than be fixed. but this is a one byte fix
mircea_popescu: there's no intention for blogposts to be liquidshit. once published they stay ; you want to change post another one.
asciilifeform: ( even with mircea_popescu's script, if the code is changed, the links are mutilated )
asciilifeform: diana_coman's item is moar or less the right thing, except that it is impossible to link to individual line
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform so if you are, then what she does is correct (minus that overlaid in the way right bar). consider a line like if (!from || from->stackCount < quantity) { OutputMsg(csString("Not enough ingredients for bundling! Bot stopping.")); Error(); return false; } else { worldHandler::MoveItems(from->containerID, from->slot, toContainer, nextEmptySlot, quantity);
mircea_popescu: so you want a) arbitrary long lines on b) arbitrary narrow display in c) fixed point that nevertheless d) do not truncate ?
mircea_popescu: (can trivially set theme to overflow right, ~like her does)
mircea_popescu: http://trilema.com/2017/how-the-beastforumcom-private-messaging-function-became-a-paid-user-only-item/ << dun like the what, spacing ?
asciilifeform: and be present on screen with the discussion.
asciilifeform: and they gotta be discussed individually.
asciilifeform: the logical unit of code is not 'text file' but individual routine. and sometimes, sub-routine
mircea_popescu: like how people did with their FG tests for instance.
mircea_popescu: but this aside : adding the code as text files, linked from the post is perfecty acceptable.
mircea_popescu: neither my bash nor diana's c got truncated ?
mircea_popescu: in preference of 1. a paste,forumdiscussion tuple ; 2. a github/medium/slockit/livejournal/slideshare/oglaf drawing etc ; 3. any other thing.
mircea_popescu: now, 4 can flow to 1 as it can flow back to 3, and 3 can flow to 1 as it can flow to 4 and so on and so forth. but the important point re these four phases is that they must be explicitly followed, for great personal as well as republic-wide gains of productivity and GDP.
mircea_popescu: phase 4, when you are done writing code for A WHILE. it doesn't mean the code's good or bad, it means you personally will be doing other things. in this interval typically people discuss your 3 and stuff happens outside of your hands.
mircea_popescu: phase 3, when you are done writing code FOR NOW. this is traditionally the "refactor break". this is also when you publish, explaining other than the code what you did and why, in detail. this included "i tested so and so -- i didn't test so and so" as it includes "i asume so and so". countrary to patently false subjective intution, this is the MOST valuabler of all the phases.
mircea_popescu: phase 2, when you write code. this is the excited state, "fuck this shit ima bang something out". it's like prototyping, not even clear whether something comes of it after all. many excited discussions here fail to progress past 1, "oh, I SEE what you meant!" is often their death knell.
mircea_popescu: phase 1, when the mind reads. this is the normal state, whether you're trying to understand another's implementration or the republican design or clicking on tit pictures, you're in phase 1.
mircea_popescu: let's understand each other.
mircea_popescu: there's a lot of various mechanisms that conspire to work together, just, gotta get human element to stop orcing it all up
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform esp with the trilema-style js links youi can link to arbitrary spot
asciilifeform: diana_coman: what was the result ?
diana_coman: ftr for the serpent ada implementation I wrote the testing part: grabbed published test vectors and wrote a snippet to eat them up, call the serpent, check results, complain if any mismatch
asciilifeform: i was just thinking about this, this morning, during the 'declare' thread -- wanted to link to a particular item in ffa, and realized that i couldn't
mircea_popescu: the "here's how to add a new activity to foxybot" one does, yes.
asciilifeform: the last link
mircea_popescu: at which point i feel teh urge to also link http://www.dianacoman.com/2017/06/12/o-brave-new-code/ as it's such a perfect dialectic expose of the differences. code-about-code vs code-about-coder.
mircea_popescu: but coding is coder-centric not code-centric. leave aside teh faux modesties of githubs and other usgtardations and set things on their proper footing : coding is all about the coder.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform not a matter of the thing. a matter of you. "ima spend a week banging on this next month, and then maybe i pick it up agaion next year" is the scheduling form ; and this means there's a post sometime next month
mircea_popescu: and more generally -- gotta organize your own process to interop sanely with others.
mircea_popescu: no. that's when you stop altogether. when you stop working on it FOR NOW
mircea_popescu: that's the wrap-up.
mircea_popescu: something like http://www.dianacoman.com/2017/04/13/bundling-with-foxybot/ works a lot better because i can generally handle it on my own and if not can discuss it there, which also helps with scheduling.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform yes but this is notoriously bad arrangement. put them in a single node in a place organized for this.
mircea_popescu: re the "I don't even know whether he tested it or how otherwise;" bit -- this is the sad effect of publishing pastes/github links etc.
diana_coman: oh, certainly; I wasn't under any illusion that ada==pascal, no; there is some danger in the perceived similarity too, basically the "false friend" type
asciilifeform: ( runtime generic instantiation certainly did not exist, and really has no analogous item in any other statically compiled language afaik )
asciilifeform: neither did modular types of arbitrary bitness, and several other minor nuts and bolts of ffa, that i cannot immediately recall.
asciilifeform: the 'declare' construct mentioned earlier, also iirc did not exist in traditional pascal
asciilifeform: ada ( even asciilifeform's 'fascist' ada subset ) is not exactly pascal. imho the most notable departure is the array slice abstraction, which makes for a 90% moar compact ffa ( and applies to almost anything else dealing in bitstrings, for that matter )
diana_coman: aha, I liked it too; but then everywhere I went it was ...java/c/cpp
asciilifeform: ( legend has it, there were three ada contestants, and the pascalist won. nothing is known re others. )
diana_coman finds ada rather endearingly - possibly because it reminds of Pascal
asciilifeform: diana_coman: you can painlessly abolish 99% of where typical cprogramming victim would use a dynamicism, by use of the declare-begin-end construct to allocate statics on the current stackframe
a111: Logged on 2017-11-15 11:34 diana_coman: I don't even know whether he tested it or how otherwise; also not sure if there isn't some way around using Strings.Unbounded
asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2017-11-15#1738857 << his keccak.adb per se, didn't use it. it was in the demo routine, for file i/o ( entirely unnecessarily)
mircea_popescu: and in other mangoes, http://78.media.tumblr.com/116244e0c68c1e3784b273ed517a09cb/tumblr_nm3hvzklBe1u7fo01o1_1280.jpg
BingoBoingo to a lab, then mathtime
BingoBoingo: <mircea_popescu> if more than 1 customers option to pay via wire, the price is lowered by 1% in rounds until only one is left standing. << Now this is interesting
BingoBoingo: <mircea_popescu> so if you pay vat on the racks, see how exactly you qualify to get it back. << More is to be done here
diana_coman: I don't even know whether he tested it or how otherwise; also not sure if there isn't some way around using Strings.Unbounded
diana_coman: I've been playing around with the keccak implementation from PeterL and it seems overall all right
deedbot: 2017/09/16 03:22:27 <PeterL> Why is it that papers written by one guy still insist on using the "We" form for all the things they do?
mircea_popescu: this is pureblood fixing, much like prices were established back when the jews did it, before socialists murdering them all and taking over.
mircea_popescu: if more than 1 customers option to pay via wire, the price is lowered by 1% in rounds until only one is left standing.
mircea_popescu: each of its customers has a choice : can either settle the amt due in bitcoin, at the proposed rate, or else can offer to make wire payment, for the TOTAL amount only.
mircea_popescu: every fixing day (arbitrary day of week we choose), tmsr.isp lists the TOTAL it has to pay, and makes a bitcoin/usd offer. it can be arbitrarily anything, but in practice it'll be the output of !~ticker --market all Volume-weighted last average: bit (which is fucking ridiculous already, we're tracking bitfinex who the fuck came up with this) or else whatever rate whatever exchange the isp uses.
mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2017-11-15#1738838 << actually this suggests to me a grand scheme which'd allow us to produce an ACTUAL bitcoin price! behold the following scheme :
mircea_popescu: (if you do. govts are notoriously iffy about ACTUALLY living up to the part of their promise where money flows back out)
mircea_popescu: so if you pay vat on the racks, see how exactly you qualify to get it back.
mircea_popescu: ie, if you buy a 1mn worth of widgets, 22% vat, and then you sell them, for 1.1mn, 22% vat, you will get back 220k worth of vat to offset your 242k obligation, leaving you with a 22k vat net payment on the .1mn you actually added.
mircea_popescu: o look, they don't. hm.
mircea_popescu: BingoBoingo the problem with vat is that yes it's fucking annoying. but on one hand it generally replaces tarriffs, ie contrary to how annoying it is it has a neutral delta (case of dun shoot the messenger) and on the other hand many jurisdictions offer credible solutions. eg, romania has no vat for corps under a certain threshold, which is why i have corps there.
mircea_popescu: i expect the correct solution will be weekly payments on yearly contracts. otherwise we end up encouraging antieconomic behaviour.
mircea_popescu: b) btc goes to $1. you're now on the hook for the same 3.5k, but if you didn't change the BTC to cash as you received it, you have no way to cover for it. this possibility makes just like a, people not want to pay long term.
mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2017-11-15#1738811 << there's significant FX exposure in this scheme. consider the situations : someone pays you .6 BTC to whatever. a) BTC goes to 1mn usd ; he has now paid you 600k to do work worth 4k or so. this eventuality tends to discourage longer term payments.
mircea_popescu: you just say "VAT". it can not be said, this word, by itself. it must be introduced, and retrospective half-ass, i'm not even gonna mention the % is rather infuriating.
mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2017-11-15#1738805 << see, this is the terrible habit of poor organisation. you don't say "VAT here is x%, and apparently can be avoided in so and so circumstances with so and so riders which works out to a minimum Y value past which it's worth doing".
a111: Logged on 2017-11-15 06:12 BingoBoingo: amoratizing fixed costs (corporation, LACNIC IP address assignment) over 24 months rather than 12 offers little reduction in cost basis
mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2017-11-15#1738804 << mno, you can't get both margins. either you put your whole cost structure into the bottom line, in which case you charge that ; or else you put your recurrents into the bottom line, charge *2 and amortize your fixed costs out of the 2nd part of that *2.
mircea_popescu: (in other lulz : nigeria took over south africa to become africa's largest economy years ago).
mircea_popescu: oh wait, THEYRE JUST WORDS. and yet the usg socialist is not ==== the subsaharan retard. because... DIFFERENCE, just like FAMOUS. they'll give testimony on the difference!
mircea_popescu: somehow the african notion of "famous" does not preclude the need to "give testimony". wouldn't i already know about him if he were famous ?
mircea_popescu: in other lulz : "gerry john gerryjohn151@gmail.com 197.210.45.130 Submitted on 2017/11/14 at 11:16 p.m. HELLO EVERYONE I AM GIVING A TESTIMONY OF HOW I GOT RICH POWERFUL AND FAMOUS TODAY"
mircea_popescu: wer perhaps another user from before used the same nickname too << yes. someone else registered the nick, but didn't set enforcement on it. as a result you can use it (you don't get kicked by nickserv) but can't register it yourself. ask in #freenode if they're willing to move it over to you ; if not, find a diff name and register that.
trinque: could be as simple as billing monthly in advance, calculating bill as u*$operatingCost*1.15/40 or whatever margin atop you think is reasonable. $operatingCost denominated in BTC should be going down all the time
trinque: curious what happens to the price when btc buying power increases, as it likes to do.
BingoBoingo to bed. Hopes these numbers/reasoning receive comment.
BingoBoingo: *244 USD monthly on the desk
BingoBoingo: Doing anything in a Zona Franca would allow for avoiding VAT, but it would put the bill for a commercial address close to the cost of the rack and come with pressure to hire 3 descendants of Italian refugees
BingoBoingo: amoratizing fixed costs (corporation, LACNIC IP address assignment) over 24 months rather than 12 offers little reduction in cost basis
a111: Logged on 2017-10-22 05:20 mircea_popescu: your cost basis is ~200 per server. you can rent them for 3-400 as such, or can give out vpsen, which are more productive. perhaps even "shared" if particularily interested into it.
BingoBoingo: Math is ({[Montly costs of rack + business address + cost of off the shelf corporation (amoratized over 12 months)]/40 rentable rack units} * 12 months) * 2 per http://btcbase.org/log/2017-10-22#1727598 at 6800 usd per BTC
BingoBoingo: For trinque and other parties interested in shipping their own boxes, considering the current cost basis and exchange rates to get a server homed for the first year is looking like ~0.57-0.6 BTC per rack unit (minding that especially power hungry servers may count as multiple rack units despite their physical footprint)
a111: Logged on 2015-08-29 19:03 asciilifeform: trinque: btw it was not clear to the folks who ran the camps, that this naturally-occurring system of hierarchy was a net plus re: net tonnage from the mines. hence the 'vory/suka wars' mircea_popescu referenced, a famous case where su authorities tried to monkey with the 'org chart'
mod6: ah, ok. well... im not sure what the protocol is then for changing your nick in deedbot, but I'm sure trinque needs to assist you with that/
mod6: and if that person grabs it back with 'ghost' or whatever, then you're sol.
mod6: so when you connect to irc do you do the typical 'identify' command with nickserv ?
BingoBoingo: <asciilifeform> i've not worked as a caretaker of the profoundly retarded, neh, so can't say i experienced directly << Do you want to come visit before we depart for our seperate ventures? I can make introductions. Maybe even get you some shifts at the BingoBoingo store.
BingoBoingo: <mircea_popescu> the double entendre is now a triple entente. << You probably wouldn't be interested in Miss trainwreck because height is in the range that is short for you and ergonomic for me
wer: there's this message "This nickname is registered. Please choose a different nickname, or identify via /msg NickServ identify <password>."
a111: Logged on 2017-11-14 15:58 mircea_popescu: (amusingly, the unsupportable and otherwise batshit insane ugc in http://trilema.com/2011/procesul-ceausescu/ is ~100% unsourced copy/pastes from the dude's "red horizons" booklet)
mod6: my first time in .mx many many years ago, i was like "Bimbo Bread? wtf, don't they know..."
mod6: <+ben_vulpes> quit drivin on the sidewalls girl << lel
asciilifeform: iirc mircea_popescu had article where 'they're ceremonial objects, actual functionality in'em is like legs on snake' or similar
asciilifeform: sorta like asciilifeform's discovery few yrs ago, where turned out that e.g. lathe was considerably easier to get in '50s than today, but 'hey , hurr , 3d printers!!' etc
asciilifeform: gotta wonder, how many other 'hey it's soo cheap and available!' technomarvels, on examination would turn up to be exactly same as this
asciilifeform: the only further insult i can think of, is if it somehow were to set the rubbish bin where i threw it, on fire
asciilifeform: oh did i mention that the antenna per se, turned out to be... old lamp cord
asciilifeform: i now recall some anthropologist who had problems giving fiction, incl simple hypotheticals, to some african sad sacks
mircea_popescu: wtf does he need the difference between surround-ing and surround-ant ? mordant is not a word, is it ?
mircea_popescu: has "a conception" of seasons. a sheep's notion of the world surroundant.
mircea_popescu: just as sheep as the sheep.
mircea_popescu: that's the great "progress" of agriculture : the shepherd's sheep were replaced by bypedal farmers.
mircea_popescu: shall we now do the incomprehensible seed ? all the way to the witch doctors, just as good as medicine ?
mircea_popescu: nothing is ever signalled ; not even one way streets. because the local never ventures outside of spaces it knows, so doesn't need signals. why not ventures ?
mircea_popescu: you may, on a novel road, wonder if it's a dead end. i don't wonder that. i know it's a dead end. because no CONCEPTION of grid, see. it's not that they failed to implement it. it's that they don't realise such exists.
asciilifeform: i've not worked as a caretaker of the profoundly retarded, neh, so can't say i experienced directly
mircea_popescu: cuz it's a stretch of the imagination in a way not commonly required to stretch.
mircea_popescu: it can. hence, for instance, no roads here cross. they loop. dja even grok on your own what i fucking mean by this ?
mircea_popescu: dja understand, asciilifeform, what my bizarre address MEANS ? to you, it's just a curio. you readily fail to realise that the CAUSE of that is that local simply has no notion of cartesian space.
mircea_popescu: they both sow and reap in the same way the same things : incomprehensible seeds on uncomprehended space.
asciilifeform: redditus neither sows nor reaps
mircea_popescu: subsistence african farmer is not subsistence african farmer "for lack of opportunities", but for subsistence farmer substance. whether in detroit or durban
mircea_popescu: the problem with "tide lifts all boats" is that where boat is comes as function of boat not function of "tides".
mircea_popescu: davout they're ~same people.
davout: exact same nonsense, "raise funds for marketing campaigns", "ask merchants to accept it", "tipping bots", literally the exact same things
davout: the thing that amuses me, is that they seem to be rehashing exactly the same nonsense as proper bitcoin reddit was doing 3 or 4 years ago
asciilifeform: davout: it is not clear from link, are they begging for donation in proper btc, or shitcoinz
davout: in other lulz goldmines https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/7cvzu6/now_that_the_debate_is_over_lets_finally_make/
asciilifeform: and it isn't as if there is nonchinese equipment for sale somewhere. unless you count the for-usg 'weight in gold' nonsense
mircea_popescu: the double entendre is now a triple entente.
asciilifeform: oh did i mention, the balun crumbled in my hands ?
phf: it might be a sign of old age, that you attract those tiny kittens, and while they talk you're like "jesus fucking christ you're so dumb", but then you tell them to do a little trick and they do it almost correctly, and you're like "oh hey you're educable, neat, what else can you do"
phf: the explanations only make it worse
phf: hehe, somehow i read every single thing that BingoBoingo wrote about the girl as some form of double entedre
jhvh1: BingoBoingo: The operation succeeded.
BingoBoingo: That corresponds to my experience negotiating with the (Cantonese speaking) chinese
BingoBoingo: <mircea_popescu> is this code for "bb got laid" << Nah, she's a white girl. Practically has a Cherenkov glow of warning signs, but is making an effort to stay sober. Is however a source of entertainment watching the petite weapon of mass destruction operate. Much as the BingoBoingo is a valuable customer service lab, driving this kitten around is valuable wmd development lab.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: at some point i'ma 'fan-sub' the thing (unless somebody else gets to it 1st)
mircea_popescu: i guess there's that.
BingoBoingo: Well, mentally when you account for the years lost to dopeism
mircea_popescu: from experience women that failed to make friends by the age of about 13 or so will never manage.
ben_vulpes: quit drivin on the sidewalls girl
mircea_popescu: in other lulz, "sponsor" is how you say "dude paying for the rent" in slang of romanian student/whore (pitipoanca).
BingoBoingo: In further developments, little miss trainwreck has just had a tire swapped on her motor carriage for the 7th time in 2 weeks
BingoBoingo: From the fake oped mines: "Hey, Tech Companies: Knock It Off With the Apps That Let People Change Their Skin Color"
asciilifeform: in other lulz, asciilifeform buys a chinesium hf-to-120mhz upconverter thing for rtlsdr , and discovers that he has to take the thing apart and trace pcb traces, and crosscheck with chipset data sheet, to learn which hose is 'in' and which is 'out' ! they did not bother to label ! ( not even in chinese . )
asciilifeform: i've seen draisines on the railroad many times. but repair trucks, not limo.
asciilifeform: and what even was the reason for such an odd vehicle
asciilifeform: ( in further continuation of the microscopy q : what the everliving fuck happened to the beta ray microscope ? theoretically can do ~same thing as sem, but no need for massive electron gun, million volt power supply, or the vacuum pumps. where is it ?? )
jhvh1: mircea_popescu: Doina Didiv Profiles | Facebook: <https://www.facebook.com/public/Doina-Didiv>; Doina Didiv | Facebook: <https://www.facebook.com/doina.didiv>; Petition · Donald Trump: Americans want their Doina ! · Change.org: <https://www.change.org/p/donald-trump-americans-want-their-doina>
mircea_popescu: (this is 99% of what they did, even the z80 clones were intended for production line control, which it was hard to get one at home0
mircea_popescu: so, in 1962 they had germanium doped transistors. under ~license~ you get this, thomson csf.
BingoBoingo: In other lessons learned today, Montevideo free trade zone offers tax savings... Which at ISP scale would swiftly be consumed by "user fees" to the operator of the zona franca
mircea_popescu: well i had the catalogs by year somewhere
asciilifeform: what did they make in '62 ?
asciilifeform: semiconductor -- was the item about which gave a shit.
mircea_popescu: the pacepa nutteries with assassinations etc -- footnote, if present. then, as now, ~nobody gave a shit.
mircea_popescu: anyway. between this, "tech spying" and a whole lot of coutnerintel and military wankery, you've 99% of ro activity in the cold war. the former half minor in the early part and growing monotonously to come to overshadow latter part by 70s.
asciilifeform: before i fughet, here's asciilifeform's microscopy crackpottery of the day : contact print. consider, 370,000 transistors, on item roughly 1cm x 1cm. attach to standard ccd, say the 25 megapixel sort, and image with e.g. soft xray.
mircea_popescu: but the czechs -- even fewer.
mircea_popescu: like czechs exactly (another major source of soviet such needs)
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform romania was moar industrialized than the soviets, in this sense. had fine alloys. had fine mechanics, everything.
mircea_popescu: think -- the whole romanian section of ms/google etc was... in romania. that previous generation.
asciilifeform: better expert does not necessarily make the necessary spring available in qty.
mircea_popescu: for one thing, 60s and 70s tech was not really advanced enough in this sense ; for the other, ro actually had better experts than the us had. just -- not enough of them.
asciilifeform: it was a problem even for asciilifeform's father, cloning film projectors and discovering that the necessary spring steel could not be had
asciilifeform: i.e. 'where do you plug in the electron microscope in goatfuckistan' problem
asciilifeform: well there was also a (c)
mircea_popescu: that was the level. the problem with the romanians wasn't that they couldn't steal -- of course they could ; nor that it was in any way immoral or dubious to steal -- holy hell, country-in-development trying to catch up with technology, a good half of the techs involved were sympathetic anyway.
asciilifeform: and million other people
asciilifeform: well yes it's what asciilifeform's father did for a living
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform anyway, to put things in readily meaningful perspective : you going "oh shit, we can use this bit i dug up out of bernstein to improve phuctor speed" is 100% what a PRIME example of such "sourced tech" would have been. that the soviets'd have paid for and the whole project involved would be decorated and congratulated after taking however long, 18 months to do it.
asciilifeform: this is something yet else, gotta be saturnism or the like
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: they dun make pinoys like they usedta. 'each user would have their own mini blockcahin of txs and not others'
asciilifeform: lol this fromloper was the saddest one to date iirc
asciilifeform: he describes the usa trips as specifically for the purpose of building cred, to get access to semiconductor goodies
fromloper: Blockchain could be redesign to hold the data and each address and balance over 1 sat. each user would have their own mini blockcahin of txs and not others.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: again not having been there, cannot say. but presumably more watched by politruk, say, in nyc, than in bonn
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform consider : pacepa defected in bonn. why not in new york ? except if there was 0 reason for the spy chief to ever go to new york. and his period item (letter to dana) is knee deep in eurocentric issues. noel bernard, srsly ? who the fuck cares about noel bernard.
asciilifeform: fromloper: what is the problem to which you wish to see 'a solution' ?
fromloper: I have been looking into it and maybe there is a solution. However i am no expert computer programmer
mircea_popescu: the claim would be more presuasive had you referenced it.
mircea_popescu: things don't change just because new generation of lambs came out of pregnant ewes this spring like each othe rspring before it.
mircea_popescu: http://trilema.com/2015/lets-address-some-of-the-more-common-pseudo-arguments-raised-by-the-very-stupid-people-that-like-the-gavin-scamcoin-proposal/#selection-113.0-113.81 << revisit 2015.
fromloper: MP The ever increasing amount of data
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform yes but by the 70s his active duty time was over.
mircea_popescu: me either, nor could he have. anyway, to recap -- dood was chief of ro belin residency. once retired (from field work), about simultaneous with ceausescu ascension, was promoted to strategy role in bucharest.
mircea_popescu: a dubious story altogether.
BingoBoingo: <fromloper> What happened to qntra site << The isp quite on us. Hopefully Qntra returns ~December 15th.
asciilifeform: according to pacepa -- su paid hard cash for what ro was able to lift from, e.g., texas instruments, hewlett-packard, the other giants.
mircea_popescu: but eg, the pdp the romanians cloned was obtaind via soviets. the z80s were all swiss sourced.
asciilifeform: it was the first and last thing to properly speaking happen in usa.
asciilifeform: pacepa describes the afaik factual reason why his master gave a shit : semiconductor
asciilifeform: possibly they kept him in whitehouse basement for 20yrs, whynot.
mircea_popescu: this notion that ra-ra-ra usa-america is very much post 2000 nytimes construction. people in the 60s gave almost no shits about the us, unless like the italians they cxould directly leach.