mircea_popescu: there's even dedicated "investment" stupid money chasing such "ideas". not as many as there were in the 90s, owing to a lot of unfortunate interactions with various "transhuman" tards past 20 years, but still some.
asciilifeform: recently there was even a d00d who had entire model f made this way, in a run of 1000 or so
asciilifeform: there used to be a club where various folx pooled dough and bought.
mircea_popescu: hurr durr, you're out 10k for the run.
mircea_popescu: the people you linked re "here is what dbl injection is" will actually do exactly that for you, also. it's not THAT expensive.
asciilifeform: prolly if i desperately wanted custom keys, i'd laser the letters and then cast into acrylic.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform because "stainless steel kbd" is an entertainingly stupid notion ; and what's more it's pecularly stupid in the way your stupid works, i can see it relate to the "fuck you guise, ima live on a boat" and so on. spherical cow sorta approach.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform yes, you first inlay then shape. this is how it's done.
asciilifeform: i dun actually make keyboards. but did once say 'i'd like a stainless steel kbd' and for some reason the reaction is always 'no have THIS instead'
mircea_popescu: and also it's not a matter of " THIS crackpottery of mine - you lot find interesting, but the stubborn boojum". it's a matter of you being more hysterically terrible ad kbd design than at p design.
mircea_popescu: winder/summer/ and the century floods.
asciilifeform: though i have nfi how one would do the inlay such that surface is smooth to the touch
asciilifeform: but yes i thought about wooden keys. probably would want a custom milling rig to make'em ( something like a lens maker's lathe )
asciilifeform: to what stress is the picture frame subject ?
mircea_popescu: there are wood painted icons survived fine (ie, no cracks in cunt mary's face) for 1k years.
mircea_popescu: nevermind the rolex. and nevermind "humidity" bs, wood is not pine.
ben_vulpes: omfg with the moving of goalposts
asciilifeform: let's ask pete_dushenski if there are wooden gears in his rolex
mircea_popescu: dude get out, every shape can be made out of wood cheaper and faster than ~any other way except for ABS injection.
asciilifeform: ( does N subtractions , N nullity tests, and when modulus is maxint ( and therefore at all times ) it reduces to the classical's cost )
asciilifeform: and ftr mircea_popescu your algo takes at least N times more cycles than the classical.
asciilifeform goes 'wtf, THIS crackpottery of mine - you lot find interesting, but the stubborn boojum that keeps 'p' from happening, not interesting somehow '
ben_vulpes: point stands, don't use decorative materials for the precision tracks
asciilifeform: so long as you get the sproing -- worx
ben_vulpes: asciilifeform: why use wood for the piston mating face?
asciilifeform: so that it can get stuck in the piston when humidity goes up 5%
asciilifeform: ben_vulpes: so why wood then
asciilifeform: how would you make the meniscus ?
asciilifeform: ( and 'redefine the shape' is not an answer )
asciilifeform: ben_vulpes: how do you propose to make 200+ identical wooden keys with the proper shape ?
ben_vulpes: can even get the inset bit asciilifeform slavers for
asciilifeform: 95% of the academitards dun even bother with any attempt other than 'how do i montgomery slightly faster'
mircea_popescu: anyway, doesn't mix well with other metals is its main thing.
asciilifeform: nickel is prolly the least biocompatible metal
mircea_popescu: i dunno, maybe. i've little experience with the item.
asciilifeform: well thread was re a hypothetical nothing-spared kbd.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform silver dun tarnish lol, there's such a thing as proper silver. and it has low melting point and easy to work and it doesn't grow fungi.
asciilifeform: ( the thing is widely used in rsatrons which agree to constrain themselves thusly, but is entirely irrelevant in ffa )
asciilifeform: if either condition is false, it will silently shit out garbage.
asciilifeform: specifically demands that the modulus be odd, and that it must be greater than either multiplicand.
asciilifeform: reason is that it demands special forms and therefor is not a general-purpose modexp
asciilifeform: incidentally i dun think i've put into the logs why montgomery's modular mult algo is unusable
asciilifeform: ( in heathen world, if the upper bit of one comparand is set, and the other's corresponding bit is not, you stop right there )
a111: Logged on 2017-09-12 23:11 mircea_popescu: 2. a fine example of how "i work for the web man" rots the brain, is that in an implementation of the above discussed mod-distributiver, the "common" consensus impulse would be to add a test, make sure the list elements respect the condition of <modulus. this however is very much the wrong thing ; and it is a tmsr-graduate level question to explain why and wherefore.
asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2017-09-12#1713184 << in ffaworld, a < or > or == comparison is not only a subtraction (O(N)) but another O(N) test for nullity (xor all the words together)
a111: Logged on 2017-08-10 19:45 asciilifeform: forn00bz: an, e.g., rsa modexp, in ffa, must be representable by a long roll of paper, on it are ops for ordinary 4function calculator, with very patient slave. and roll ONLY ROLLS FORWARD and has finite # of instructions on it, known in advance when you decide the ffa width.
asciilifeform: ( and http://btcbase.org/log/2017-08-10#1696834 probably being canonical statement thereof )
a111: Logged on 2017-09-12 23:12 mircea_popescu: and finally 3. the item there described is not exactly a function. it rather something i'd call a mechanism, a discrete item that does a fully defined thing. as we're looking more and more through ada eyes and constant time things and so on, a study of these mechanisms as an distinct category will prolly be useful. somewhere between conway's cells and commandline utils, they are.
asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2017-09-12#1713185 << the 'mechanism' is... algebra ( see also http://btcbase.org/log/2017-08-10#1696309 etc )
mircea_popescu: run of the mill pantsuit idiocy, but then suddenly "Es que en Rumanía todos se llaman Mircea Popescu. ¿Sabes?"
mircea_popescu: and in other random lulz, http://www.elmundo.es/cataluna/2017/09/12/59b6dd77468aeb545d8b4583.html
mircea_popescu: and finally 3. the item there described is not exactly a function. it rather something i'd call a mechanism, a discrete item that does a fully defined thing. as we're looking more and more through ada eyes and constant time things and so on, a study of these mechanisms as an distinct category will prolly be useful. somewhere between conway's cells and commandline utils, they are.
mircea_popescu: 2. a fine example of how "i work for the web man" rots the brain, is that in an implementation of the above discussed mod-distributiver, the "common" consensus impulse would be to add a test, make sure the list elements respect the condition of <modulus. this however is very much the wrong thing ; and it is a tmsr-graduate level question to explain why and wherefore.
mircea_popescu: 1. if you actually want metal kbd, your choice of steel is probably ill advised. i'd try silver instead. heuristicallyt there's a reason gunsmiths and silversmiths were ~the same people i nthe early modern period ; moreover silver has better properties in the range sough.
phf: http://btcbase.org/log/2017-09-12#1712367 << i've went through many layout modifications, but i finally settled on just having () and [] switched around. it's convenient both for prose and lisp (not so much heathen languages though)
a111: Logged on 2017-09-12 00:50 PeterL: hmm, here's another key I never use, what does "Caps Lock" even do?
asciilifeform: incidentally there are other algos where you pre-bake a thing for a given modulus and save some cycles. montgomery's, for example.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform im pretty sure i read the whole knuth as a teen, so it's likely just memory at work.
asciilifeform: it is ~greater~ number of cycles, by far, if you count the 'tooling' cost of preparing the table for each new modulus.
asciilifeform: it is ok for rsa where you sink it to the bottom of the sea and never intend to change the modulus
a111: 1 result for "\"THE PROBLEM WITH MATH\"", http://btcbase.org/log-search?q=%22THE%20PROBLEM%20WITH%20MATH%22
mircea_popescu: !#s "THE PROBLEM WITH MATH"
mircea_popescu: i'll take your word for it if you say so ; i've not looked at them closely in comparison.
asciilifeform: because we're muxing over the entire list every single time
asciilifeform: except it does exactly as many cycles as the classical method.
mircea_popescu: if you want constant time, you feed the list 9, 0,0,0,0,8,0,0,1. it will do 18, 1, 18, 1, 18, 1, 18, 1 etc.
mircea_popescu: ok. ima just take the 137 tail cuz lazy. 137 is 10001001. we have precalculated that 128 mod 17 is 9, and that 8 mod 17 is 8, and that 1 mod 17 is 1
asciilifeform: i dun get from where you got the 1s
mircea_popescu: precompiled list of all powers of two is then 1.
asciilifeform: then a mod m == a, b mod m == b, etc
asciilifeform: let's take the case where modulus is maxint
asciilifeform: ( additions produce B+W-bit ints, and these get out of hand very quickly)
mircea_popescu: i personally like the formalism of it ; but whatevs.
mircea_popescu: well i have nfi, haven't profiled the thing.
mircea_popescu: whether this approach is actually faster than the current mod of 97 as implemented via knuth is open to discussion, i guess.
mircea_popescu: consider the number 97. is is 1100001. they do mp_mod (2^6, 2^5, 2^0) ; you can do (2^6, 2^5, 0* 2^4, 0* 2^3,0* 2^2,0* 2^1,2^0). the list method will sitll work, but this time in constanttime.
mircea_popescu: but the important point re that, is that whenever they use a reduced matrix we can STILL use the ufll matrix!
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: that's the kochian table approach
mircea_popescu: this may or may not be cheaper ; but in general you would build a list of the pre-calculated mods of all the powers of 2 up to your bitness and save that to save on work.
asciilifeform: except we dun get to use 'where there are 1s'
mircea_popescu: it is also extensible in the sense that if you wish to compute the mod of a 512 bit number, you can cut it up into as many powers of two as there are 1's, feed it into this, and get a modulus.
mircea_popescu: but the original idea was that it is indeed cheaper to mod the parts than the whole sum.
mircea_popescu: well, i dunno how expensiuve addition is and how much it adds to the mod.
mircea_popescu: in any case : you run it until same length list ; smallest int on it will be the correct mod. always terminates, always constat time etc.
asciilifeform: now what happens if the inputs are not coprime ?
mircea_popescu: you feed into my above function the list 6, 9, 15. it adds them : 30. it then writes down 30 -17 ie 13. it then writes down 13 + 17 = 30. it has peroduced a list as long as the original (3 elements), among which the SECOND is the modulus of 1433293 +7926803 +9266137
mircea_popescu: now then : you could do 1433293 +7926803 +9266137 =
mircea_popescu: smallints confuse the issue.
mircea_popescu: you can ALSO do : 349087340 mod 7 = 0 holy motherfucking crap omfg what is this.
mircea_popescu: and what it spits out is the (a+b+c) mod x.
mircea_popescu: not the a itself.
mircea_popescu: what you feed to this algo is the a mod x
asciilifeform: waitasec didja.... add them?!
mircea_popescu: will necessarily have the modulus of the sum. this entire procedure is constant time.
mircea_popescu: alrigthy, so. you take a list of numbers. you add these numbers. you write the result down. you compare this result with the modulus. if the result is smaller than the modulus, you add the modulus to it and write it underneath ; if larger, you substract the modulus and write it underneath. you repeat this step until you have a list of added/substracted moduli to the result AS LONG as the original list of elements. in it, you
mircea_popescu: alright. then let me tell you how to do it, and if you fucking say you did it in july ima buy a plane ticket and hang you by the tallest petard.
asciilifeform: nope. and nobody else does either afaik.
mircea_popescu: now back to the issue. 1. is it true or is it false that currently sums are calculated before the modulus of the result is calculated ?
asciilifeform: ( this is the 'new' karatsuba, simplified, and demands powers-of-two-bitnessed operands. should be easier to read than old.)
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform is the plan here to just keep adding reading material paper over fire ?
mircea_popescu: so, the paste is a division.
asciilifeform: i highly recommend to read the past 1st, it is not long
mircea_popescu: well, let's try and salvage this nonsense through the mafgic of yes and no questions.
asciilifeform: what we do not have -- and don't have because it doesn't actually work -- is the karatsuba cut for modular mult.
mircea_popescu: <mircea_popescu> "it" in 3 is mod ? or what ? asciilifeform> aha mod asciilifeform> i was speaking specifically of the division algo
asciilifeform: i was speaking specifically of the division algo
mircea_popescu: and congrats, you've closed the liar circle on yourself. the only task remaining is to establish whether alf lied when he claimed that mp's distributive-mod algo is already in his ffa since july ; or rather he lied when he claimed distributive mod would actually be useful ; or at some other juncture.
jhvh1: shinohai: The operation succeeded.
asciilifeform: 1) mircea_popescu describes algo for mod. 2) turns out exactly knuths's, that is in existing ffa 3) describes 'do it to each term of a+b+c in karatsuba' 4) this dun work, if it worked we would be bragging about the new 133337 recursive modular mult algo we've got
asciilifeform: i think we missed a step in the thread
mircea_popescu: alf : "probvlem is mod is not distributive" me : "it can be made, cheaply" alf : "no, it can not" me : "here" alf : "oh, i did that back in july". then wtf are you griping about.
asciilifeform: aside from the fact that i already wrote it in july -- nuffin
asciilifeform: it's == to the existing one.
mircea_popescu: the algo is above.
mircea_popescu: some things are just not worth the cycles.
asciilifeform: any other takers?
mircea_popescu: the procedure is both obvious and insistently discussed above.
mircea_popescu: the EXTRA COST of making mod actually distributive is SMALL.
asciilifeform: 'distributive' means that you can do the above. and you can't.
asciilifeform: the fundamental problem is that mod is not actually distributive.
mircea_popescu: that i can believe. though i expect the above is actually cheaper than adding teh numbers first and modding after.
mircea_popescu: so you won't have many passes of it. just as many as elements in list at the most.
mircea_popescu: yes, but this is very cheap here. because the elements in list are < mod
asciilifeform: with the subtract
asciilifeform: any mention of 'if' turns into 'do BOTH and then mux'
mircea_popescu: this will always take the same ops no matter what elements are in the original list.
mircea_popescu: repeat 2 until you have populated a list of equal length, and return the correct element from it.
mircea_popescu: 1. sum the list.
asciilifeform: well yes. but how the hell do i distribute mod. observe in http://btcbase.org/log/2017-09-12#1712923 it dunwork.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform let me write it out then.
mircea_popescu: and this is potentially recursive, in that if you have a 500 bit number with 300 ones in it, you do the mod for 500 terms which are all a power of 2, throw 200 away, keep the other 300 and add them.
asciilifeform: this is still a restatement of the thing i asked for tho. i do not know of a way to distribute mod.
asciilifeform: ( one answer is that at the very bottom of the barrel, where karatsuba hits the basecase comba mult, we permit division )
mircea_popescu: that is not my concern! if there IS a mod, then yo ucan apply it to the terms rather than add them first and apply to result, is all i'm saying.
asciilifeform: before you do, say how to compute the mods without division.
mircea_popescu: is this making sense or should i show the function ?
mircea_popescu: you write by hand a function which takes a list with a promise none of the items on it exceed a mod, and returns the mod of the sum of the sum of the elements, in constant time.
asciilifeform: and from where got the 3
mircea_popescu: just write it all out by hand, the constanttime mod distributivetor.
asciilifeform: and yes you gotta subtract ALL of the words, even if it is obvious that subtractand does not go into the scratch
asciilifeform: if you're taking about the division, we already have this.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform you understand you need AT MOST a single pass of knuth ? because it may exceed the mod but never by more than 3x ?
asciilifeform: ( nao if only modulus were a distributive operation ! then could take mod for each of the 3 addition arguments inside karatsuba, and we'd be golden )
mircea_popescu: but you can also update the old one, easier and safe.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform if you maintain a list of the mod and it squares
mircea_popescu: the exact same will happen again. "oh, you had a consensus ? lol."
mircea_popescu: so the chain forked.
mircea_popescu: rothbart you're perhaps too new to know this, but the PREVIOUS time there was "miner consensus" it turned out the miners that "voted" and "supermajority" didn't give the slightest shit about the whole thing, and did NOT actually implement what they were misrepresented as having supported.
mircea_popescu: rothbart they don't need to do anything.
mircea_popescu: but whatever, i don't mind making money out of mit's "blockchain of the future", like i didn't mind fleecing "ripple" or cashing btc crash. free bitcoin will continue for as long as usg can draw breath, i'm not against. let them lose what they can't invest.
mircea_popescu: (always and everywhere, the stupid poor. to them it makes sense, they've nothingh to lose anyway)
mircea_popescu: the t1 wreckers may yell all they want this "is not right". but in bitcoin longest chain prevails, and so the story ends
mircea_popescu: now then. at time t2, any of those involved, or any third party, simply SPENDS that bitcoin.
mircea_popescu: oin chain. on the basis of these mystery strings, OTHER PARTIES, which ARE IN NO WAY BOUND TO THIS, alloocate wholly imaginary bitcoins to the sort of imbeciles who buy into this scheme (always and everywhere, the stupid poor. to them it makes sense, they've nothingh to lose anyway)
mircea_popescu: let's drop the math for a moment and delve. at time t0, bitcoin works. at time t1, some wreckers under "public pressure" as discussed well in http://trilema.com/2013/digging-through-archives-yields-gold/ attempt to attack this bitcoin that works, by producing an alt-bitcoin, that does not work. the specific way in which the alt-bitcoin thatr does not work "works" is by deeding (exactly like deedbot) some strings into the bitc
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: the classical ffa exponentiator, for reference, looks like http://wotpaste.cascadianhacker.com/pastes/S4dWM/?raw=true . the ~modular~ exponentiator must look like http://wotpaste.cascadianhacker.com/pastes/AiB9t/?raw=true . however it needs 'first, steal the chicken', i.e. FZ_Mod_Mul and FZ_Mod_Square .
mircea_popescu: there is no pow in segwit.
mircea_popescu: but otherwise, prb much like any other windows app does not natively produce data in portable format.
asciilifeform: then yes
asciilifeform: ( because if you are doing anything other than karatsuba for mult of whatever variety, you're sunk )
asciilifeform: the approach i've been (futile, so far) taking is, to find a way to interleave modularization into karatsuba
asciilifeform: and oh did i mention 3) idiot specialforms (e.g. barrett's) , because if mother dropped you as a child specialform constraints on moduli seem like ok idea
asciilifeform: i've been fighting with the modular mult thing since july
mircea_popescu: i tried the haskell approach to "Solving" problems, whadda ya want from me.
asciilifeform: which are the only reason we are able to do anything reasonably efficiently at all
asciilifeform: other than taking away O(1) machine shifts
asciilifeform: and it is not only O(N^3), but when you modularly exponentiate it actually gets done B times, and not to B-sized inputs, but 2B ( because we have a multiply and then also a square, in each step of the B-step modular exponentiation bitwise )
mircea_popescu: 1. multiply x and y ; 2. count bits of result ; 3. count bits of modulus ; 4. multiply modulus with count2 - count3 and test if larger than result. if not, substract. if yes, multiply with count2-count3-1 and do the same. repeat until result smaller than modulus.
asciilifeform: i am referring, of course, to the standard shift-and-substract knuth division, which is in the previously posted ffa
mircea_popescu: ok, how slow is the following heuristicized approach :
a111: Logged on 2017-09-12 18:23 asciilifeform: you have the following primitives : multiplier ( 2 N-bit numbers -> 1 2N-bit number ); adder ( ditto ); subtractor ( ditto ); muxer ( 2 N-bit numbers, 1 single-bit number, yields one or the other N-bit depending on that single bit ) ; logical ops (and/or/xor/not)
mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2017-09-12#1712588 << i freely admit so well formalized this is a tantalizing problem. how slow is the obvious "multiply x and y, substract modulus from result until result smaller than modulus" ?
deedbot: http://qntra.net/2017/09/buttfunex-preparing-for-another-insertion-sorry-for-your-loss/ << Qntra - Buttfunex Preparing For Another Insertion: Sorry For Your Loss
mircea_popescu: srsly, 240 seconds since the microsecond previous n lines ? pshaw.
mircea_popescu: and they do a sort of by-hand injection into hand-made molds, yes.
mircea_popescu: ie, a dentist's lab out of ten probably has a graybeard who could make you the keys for pay. considering what the item costs irl, prolly >1k <10k for the whole key set.
asciilifeform: ( for either )
asciilifeform: dunno if you could get the req'd tolerances without something entirely like injection mold.
mircea_popescu: but way the fuck cheaper than making plastic injection molds for a run of one.
asciilifeform: this, i would buy for kbd. but it is not a low-tech item, not the least bit a 'simply bake, like a pot'
mircea_popescu: (incidentally, fake teeth are a metal cap with a porcelain top. very wear resistent, you chew 30 years on them)
mircea_popescu: yup. except not cost effective so far, porcelains have a century of refinement in dental prothesis supporting them
mircea_popescu: anyway, only reason dentist doesn't bake you a new dentine layer is the temperature involved ; in a lab you can make arbitrarily large un-enammeled tooth.
asciilifeform: they dun have fist-sized tooth afaik
mircea_popescu: yes but why specify a dubious source for it. you want tooth, beat up some antifa hipsters, take their teeth make kbd.
mircea_popescu: (all teeth are the same material, be it a lizzard's or your mom's ; it's a calcium hydrated salt.)
mircea_popescu: ivory is actually not proper part of this discussion. not either very good or very valuable, british "tea" nonsense.
mircea_popescu: but a kg of mother of pearl is cheaper to get than a kg of useful slavegirl. put some shell in a tank.
mircea_popescu: it's not even so expensive, in today's terms. if only we didn't live among anodyne barbarians and the tech stack all rotten away.
mircea_popescu: the important point, however, is that nacre has a young's modulus as high as 100. (young modulus being a reasonable measurement of an aspect of intuitive "brittleness".)
mircea_popescu: in the simplest sense, mother of pearl is discs of calcium carbonate "glass" suspended in chitin (the insect plastic equivalent of celulose ; same thing as makes hair in mammals.)
mircea_popescu: (nacre, if you're curious, is the natural alternative to porcelain ; some molluscs even manage iridiscent porcelain non-nacre lining, which is why gigas pearls are valuable)
mircea_popescu: (and for moar lolz, take http://btcbase.org/log/2017-09-12#1712656 etc. these were meant to be SAT on. "oh, ass is soft" "you think so ?" etc.)
mircea_popescu: these, amusingly, were also driven by similar processes as the pre-usgification of europe, ie "gotta impress the single solitary unique sultan"
mircea_popescu: if you make your key of ebony or some other high quality wood and the letterface out of say mother of pearl, you have a very good wear profile item as well.
mircea_popescu: (and yes, wood is a plastic is the key to ANOTHER side of "you didn't read up on your art in college, you lose" surprisebox. because yes, wood will do the "Doluble injection cast mold". it was the arab world equivalent of chinese china. look up "mother of pearl"
a111: Logged on 2017-08-28 23:27 mircea_popescu: asciilifeform im strictly going by the above "woman will do anything you wanrt provided it is what she ewas goping to do anyway". afaik, spiders do actually make variants of it.
mircea_popescu: (in fact, there's precious few examples known in nature where we actually have the http://btcbase.org/log/2017-08-28#1704342 spider/coli/etc. trees are readily the largest -- "how to get natural item to secrete high quality plastic???")
ben_vulpes enjoying the surprises
mircea_popescu: in this discussion wood is a plastic. and other such intuitively-surprising items.
mircea_popescu: the important categories in this discussion are metals (ie, materials where the electrons don't sit with their atom ; form cloud. these -- always conductive electrically) ; porcelains (or glasses, or ceramics, or how'd you call them) and then plastics (polymerized item).
asciilifeform: ( these are not even fully disjoint concepts; there is even such a thing as 'metallic glasses' )
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform i was discussing the above "intuitive notion of brittleness is useless"
jhvh1: shinohai: The operation succeeded.
mircea_popescu: the reason steel loses out is that the carbon is a shittier oxigen (more valences, weaker valences) and iron a dubious silicate.
mircea_popescu: the microscopic reason it is such a strong material is the oxigen-linked silica crystaline patterns that form.
mircea_popescu: (for the curious : porcelain is heat-rearranged Al2 Si2 05 (OH)4 ; glass is more generally heat-rearranged Si + metal)
mircea_popescu: glass is a kind of porcelain for the needs of this discussion
mircea_popescu: so you have your letterface "A" made out of gold and then the porcelain put around it.
mircea_popescu: you can formulate porcelain so it adheres to a metal lattice stronglier than the actual metal!
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: not grout, but individually lapping on a lathe. nasty.
BingoBoingo: <asciilifeform> i'd incidentally be entirely open to buying porcelain keys, if anyone knew how to make these to the req'd dimensional tolerance, and see what happens << You solve this with grout
mircea_popescu: and what is a spine, or fractured ribs with thereby fine points.
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: if dropped wrenches are part of 'foot traffic' then we agree
mircea_popescu: another problem with the intuitive notion of brittleness is that it is poorly defined in the first place.
BingoBoingo: <asciilifeform> problem is brittle. << Porcelain has a range of possible brittles. There are procelains sufficiently not fragile-brittle to take substantial foot traffic
mircea_popescu: and y'all have to thank bb for mentioning this, because i don't take iron to the wood so to speak.
mircea_popescu: and thus the question was very much in a similar vein to your kbd from before ; and the last time in human (ie, european) history this was the case.