john_cocktail: but really, I've recently found myself reading the logs and wanted to stop by
asciilifeform: the plagiarist can make a block with higher PoW than the victim, ~every time, since he isn't handicapped by having to compute L(Z)
asciilifeform: (the fact that the original victim could, normally, relay his original faster than a typical plagiarist could hash, is immaterial, it is still a potential vuln)
a111: Logged on 2017-03-01 19:51 asciilifeform: .... another pill against 'waltzers' : Z depends on the ~previous~ block.
asciilifeform: oooh gotta revisit upstack, briefly, http://btcbase.org/log/2017-03-01#1620677 << ~this~ in particular cannot be done as written. else, the first relayer of a freshly mined block could simply steal the work that went into determining luby(Z) and get massive head start on making his own block, which he then relays instead of the plagiarized.
asciilifeform: what are ~all~ of the places where A has the ecstasy, but B does the laundry, where A!=B
asciilifeform: ~100% of asciilifeform's line of thought re 'trbi', from this, to the casks thing, etc., was only 'how to plug the leaks'
asciilifeform: in that one party creates the sharp broken edge, but very other people have to live with the cost.
mircea_popescu: it is, cards on the table, more of a buried lie than ~anything else in the "protocol"
mircea_popescu: counterintuitively enough they actually do.
asciilifeform: think dubloons, rather than pieces-of-eight.
a111: Logged on 2017-02-28 13:11 mircea_popescu: practically speaking on current tech the bitcoin unit of account is probably something like 0.25
mircea_popescu: not sure that's necessary ; the true argument against "amounts" is that well... again, the 0.25 problem ; http://btcbase.org/log/2017-02-28#1619936
mircea_popescu: the ~same should be extended to amounts.
mircea_popescu: here's the idea : currently, you only know the pubkey for a bitcoin address once it spends ; before it spends you do not know its pubkey.
mircea_popescu: how did the tx verify ?
mircea_popescu: not necessarily in these terms.
asciilifeform: which means that i gotta be able to prove that monetary mass is what the mining curve says it is. and not something else.
mircea_popescu: (and -- suddenly have an incentive to, too! because if they don]'t.... fed)
asciilifeform: because if not , you have the fed.
asciilifeform: can third party calculate the monetary mass ?
mircea_popescu: anyway, the idea is you verify balance when spent ; not before.
asciilifeform: i suppose this is why mircea_popescu wanted the 2-input thing.
asciilifeform: esp. if everyone is in the habit of using all of the decimal places of P as an invoice id.
a111: Logged on 2016-10-20 20:37 asciilifeform: ('martian bank' being simply a naive abstraction of 'idealizes swiss bank', where money supply is constant, and i can send from account a1 can send to a2 if and only if i have the privkey for a1, and double-spend - impossible, etc.)
jhvh1: danielpbarron: The operation succeeded.
mircea_popescu: the important point here is exactly this - that it should no longer be possible to meaningfully talk of "payer".
asciilifeform: so long as they are guaranteed to be distinct at every step in time
asciilifeform: ( i can't think of any reason why payee would care if payer A, or B, had supplied the agreed-upon amount )
asciilifeform: i guess this isn't one of the problems.
mircea_popescu: so what's the problem ?
asciilifeform: well not quite, we do store the pgp'd orders
mircea_popescu: even something as simple as -- ammt made it, therefore paid is good enough really.
asciilifeform: or does payee get told the secret over separate (say, rsa'd) channel
mircea_popescu: i dunno, say politically. if you decide to claim tomorrow that there never was such a thing as c3, how do i deal with it ?
asciilifeform: to revisit the smoke grenade -- how do you deal with the unopposability of having paid for something ?
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform anyway, as an entirely idle example : the set of numbers with mpfhf defined on it is actually a fine example in this vein. it ISNT an algebraic structure ; but an algorithmic structure.
asciilifeform: she's in the l0gz
mircea_popescu: fucking art students wasting their life with http://jezebel.com/heres-a-woman-plopping-paint-eggs-out-of-her-vagina-1566693939
asciilifeform: i can never keep the 2 straight.
asciilifeform: i dug for the can-guarantee-avg-case-np-hard? thing -- found zip.
asciilifeform: you will find that many 'wouldn't that be useful..' items are ~entirely absent in the public lit. and no prizes for guessing why.
mircea_popescu: anyway, the useful research in nonalgebraic sets is, at least to my (admittedly limited) knowledge entirely absent.
mircea_popescu: nevertheless.
asciilifeform: there's computables and there's computables-and-doables. unfortunately distinct sets in practice.
mircea_popescu: this item definitely counts for your grand list of trb-isms. on the strength of that, "computable", i ask no more.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: would be interesting to tally the avg case cost of not committing this error.
mircea_popescu: re the above line : all rings are right out, basically.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: how's that. the seekrit, is blown, neh
asciilifeform: say, today, k3, k4, k7, ... , k9 sign. tomorrow, k7, k21, k3, ... , k333. next day, k42, k3, ... whatever. now 'you can't verify that no subgroup...' ~within~ the algo, but someone who has the whole list and notices that only k3 recurrs...
mircea_popescu: there's a very directly computable homomorphism, the item being you know, the algebraic ring.
asciilifeform: ^ where my contention was, you can factor out the signer using multiple sets of shamirized sigs
a111: Logged on 2016-08-30 17:29 asciilifeform: davout: 'ring signatures' are not the promised 'invisibility cloak', but more of a smoke grenade.
asciilifeform: (recall the zero-whatvrs, how many of those alts by now.)
asciilifeform: and the charlatans -- since; and quite vigorously
asciilifeform: the crackpots have been at it since before chaum,
asciilifeform: and yeah this is the squared-circle from couplaedaysago
mircea_popescu: yeah me either
asciilifeform: the good noose : i don't know a proof that you ~can't~ do this...
mircea_popescu: now -- this is the fantasy.
mircea_popescu: for the needs of this contortion, K3, K4, K9, K11 is a subgroup of K3, K4, K7, K9
mircea_popescu: ie, if K3 owns input I5, and if K3 signs I5, then it can be verified that the ring composed of K3, K4, K7, K9 a) signed I5, and b) owned I5 to sign it ; but it can't be verified that any subgroup didn't own I5.
mircea_popescu: Let there be private keys K1...Kn. Let there be uxto associated with these, I1..Im so that any one I is associated with one and only one K. let there be a function S, so that the verification function V(Kx, S(Iy)) is always false, or uncomputable, or whatever whereas V(K1..Kn, S(Iy)) is always true if and only if the K Iy is associated to signed it.
asciilifeform: what's the spendability condition ?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: let's suppose you had ring signature, we have edge of the sword. how does the hilt work ? i.e. you have an output, that is spendable, but you want it spendable by ~you~, not by 1,001 randomly-selected pubkeys.
mircea_popescu: it would be fine if the security actually grew through being snowed in (ie, 0 difficulty to separate them on block 1, and growing from there each block, for all txn)
mircea_popescu: verify the right one signed*
mircea_popescu: whereby you can verify one signed, but to find out which requires unwinding the whole graph.
mircea_popescu: anyway. to get back to the discussion, maybe something in the vein of blum's scheme may be applied to the ring problem
asciilifeform: theeere
asciilifeform: but evidently not with asciilifeform , because it dun turn up there
a111: Logged on 2016-02-06 16:44 mircea_popescu: asciilifeform "- He says current block ciphers suck. Why? It doesn't really become clear from the discussion, which seems to be between two people who have heard a little bit about cryptography, and are trying to outdo each other in what little knowledge they have."
a111: Logged on 2016-02-06 02:49 mircea_popescu: actually the 4 color map thing is in my head just as good if not better than knapsack
mircea_popescu: i'm so fucking frustrated. no mention of hamiltonian cycles, no mention of blum who came up with it, nothing. what the fuck miserable idiot am i, can't reference anything properly.
asciilifeform: the thread.
a111: Logged on 2016-02-05 01:26 asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: played around with a few graph-theoretical approaches (in particular, max-clique problem)
BingoBoingo: <mircea_popescu> 19yo female, bb. that's not occuring. << Frequent occurence. Typical hardware store is full of 19 year old girls. Even in the lumber section. Pinterest is a thing apparently.
asciilifeform: (at least, of the public material!)
asciilifeform: incidentally ~all of the material is circa 1970s.
asciilifeform: i walked compendia of known np-hard/np-complete problems, and found that all of them had same hole
a111: Logged on 2016-03-20 17:10 mats: https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/356/why-hasnt-there-been-an-encryption-algorithm-that-is-based-on-the-known-np-hard
mircea_popescu: where the fuck is that convo
asciilifeform: ( spoiler : can't prove the hardness of magicking ~your particular~ graph. )
mircea_popescu: you may be challenged to either show the hamiltonian in the homomorphic graph, or else to show the homomorphism between the graphs.
mircea_popescu: anyway. the encryption scheme is like this : you generate a large graph with a hamiltonian cycle ; and a homomorphic graph.
mircea_popescu: what the fuck i hallucinated math discussions.
asciilifeform: can't seem to find ~this~, either
mircea_popescu: i derrided it for being impractical but i can't fucking find the discussion
mircea_popescu: and there was a scheme proposed whereby you either show the graphs or the relation ; op keeps challenging you ; each correct response increases the probabiling of truth by a factor of 2
mircea_popescu: well, deciding whether two given graphs are homomorphic is > np.
mircea_popescu: either i must show you A, or else an A - A' relation.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform there's this scheme whereby i create a graph, A and a homomorphism of it A'. you get ot see A', and may challenge me
asciilifeform: because the signing process likewise took in all of'em
mircea_popescu: (note that the decomposition needn't be Vs but will likely be a homomorphism, which POSSIBLY tyakes us straight to the hardest code known to man, the see-or-pick homomorphisms)
mircea_popescu: tsk. not algebraically either. how the fuck would V(all) work so it's not decomposed into Vi(each)
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform re-reading i am pretty much convinced that the requirement that a) signatures are produced pairwise nevertheless b) no pairwise verification function exists yet c) verification works on a group of them is batshit insanity. might as well ask for a 5 smaller than 4.
mircea_popescu: V(K1, S1)=false, V(K2, S1)=false, .... BUT V(K1,K2,..,KN, S1) = true if and only if K1 signed S1 ; similarily with k2 and s2 all the way to n
mircea_popescu: otherwise you leak bits.
mircea_popescu: it's worse than that, by any owner of any k in the list.
asciilifeform: how, hypothetically, would S be produced
BingoBoingo: <asciilifeform> iirc BingoBoingo is normally found in missouri << Southern Illinois
BingoBoingo: <mircea_popescu> hey BingoBoingo were you in georgia ? << That's thestringpuller
mircea_popescu: once stated the pipedream portion is pretty painfully obvious ; but nevertheless, maybe ?
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform this is an "idea" item not a technological object, so bear with me. a "ring signature" is a set of signatures with a) arbitrary cardinality n which has the property that b) while it can be verified the correct signature was offered it c) can't be established wich signature that is.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: it doesn't have to be capped at 2, either, unless you use casks and want to leave room for dozen+ hop stages
mircea_popescu: "all txn are 2 in 2 out" fixed width txn seems nailed down at this point. i can't see how an argument would work that'd offset the evident gains.
asciilifeform: for folx tuned in : it also makes the cask thing possible, but the latter is wholly separate, optional algo, it is possible to use traditional mempools with this scheme
asciilifeform: quite the opposite.
asciilifeform: (and he cannot even begin to work on a block until he knows Z and goes, fetches the required old tx ! no other miner has any incentive to help him do this.)
asciilifeform: as far as i can see, this solves. Z depends on previous block, and the xor'd output is ~covered~ by the hash (and nonce) of the currently-worked-on block. so miner cannot craft his Z, he is forced to suck it up.
asciilifeform: what is the complexity of actually fetching the Nth tx , if you can also make use of the T(...)xorT(...)xorT(...) in every block.
asciilifeform: and we have the luby transform above.
asciilifeform: suppose that tx's (recall, fixed width) position in the block, is also kept inside it. (e.g., tx # 100 will start with a 16bit field containing 0x0064 .)
asciilifeform: now challenge for the reader !
asciilifeform: (either this, or simply replace 'nonce' in the equation, with a Z, that is equal to a hash over the ~transactions in the candidate block~, considerably more painful to waltz than the nonce )
asciilifeform: what remains is to compute the minimal arity for the attack to be impractical. and prove said fact.
deedbot: http://trilema.com/2017/the-story-of-the-scared-slut/ << Trilema - The Story of the scared slut.
asciilifeform: in above example, the 'arity' of the xor is 3. and mircea_popescu will probably answer, when he comes back , that evil miner will waltz the nonce until the 3 necessary tx are the ones that fit in his pocket. but arity doesn't have to be 3.
asciilifeform: theoretically it also means that a tx, as time goes to infinity, will have infinite number of confirmations...
asciilifeform: this also entirely annihilates the possibility that a future enemy could monkey with contents of old blocks by finding hash collisions.
asciilifeform: there is no way to practically compute this value without having a copy of the blockchain. and it also ends up being luby-transformable into any one of the 3 old tx if you have the other 2. a kind of perpetual redundancy in the storage .
asciilifeform: say every new block , to be valid, must contain a tx-sized slot (not covered by the nonce hash, but see below) that is computed as follows:
asciilifeform: ooook try this on for size : suppose fixed-width TX (as discussed earlier.) T(N) is the Nth tx, T(0) is the first tx in genesis block, etc. Tmax is the last tx in the currentheightblock.
asciilifeform goes into the pit, bbl.
mircea_popescu: if you ever get kicked out of engineering tower should prolly try out the arts, become draughtsman
asciilifeform: the one that blooms for a bit, and dies.
mircea_popescu: but just because we're all going to die it does not follow we should go around on stilts and weird beak masks either
asciilifeform: (for instance, can demand that the miner find a Q that depends only on the parts of the block he cannot easily spin.)
mircea_popescu: i dunno. the further you go prng-away from the "quote the nth line in the log", the closer you getr to "my solution to mining is mining+mining"
asciilifeform: open problem. betcha one can find the pill for this.,
mircea_popescu: cheaper to spin the nonces.
asciilifeform: the nonce is Q. miner has to now find an old block that , treated with the above walk, contains F(Q). and point to the block # and the requisite offset .
asciilifeform: the cheat -- works. say your hash is a keccak that eats 512b blocks and produces 512b block.
mircea_popescu: either you cheat or you don't.
asciilifeform: in the same way.
asciilifeform: it can be made as painful as the hashing is to begin with
asciilifeform: (and even then may turn up short, and have to go back for a new nonce)
asciilifeform: say the miner has to find a string in an old block , as part of mining, that fits a nonce-derived pattern.
asciilifeform: didn't mircea_popescu find a new chocolate icecream shop! he oughta go there, eat some, come back with theorem.
asciilifeform: this is an open problem, because 'miners don't need the blocks' is also imho intolerable.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform there is that.
mircea_popescu: besides the point.
mircea_popescu: turn on your livingroom lights, pretend you're "running a node". exactly the same as "bang on keyboard, pretend you're writing"
mircea_popescu: this is an entirely ridiculous misrepresentation of the issue
asciilifeform: anyone can bang on a keyboard, some folx still get paid for it, others -- not.
mircea_popescu: if it's valuable then not everyone can do it and vice-versa.
mircea_popescu: these are strictly contradictory constraints.
mircea_popescu: understand, there's no way to at the same time give nodes marketable data AND make it so any redditard can just pop a node
asciilifeform: an inevitable visaification, The Guild of The Three Nodes, etc, at t-->inf, is a downer.
asciilifeform: but if standing up a brand-new node from scratch, with full verification (rather than dumb bitwise copy of existing node) takes a century...
asciilifeform: if you already live on mars, there is no problem in flying to mars, yes.
mircea_popescu: there is that.
asciilifeform: eventually (given death of moore's law, already long ago) the minimal practical time will exceed the block interval, and then mega-headache.
asciilifeform has been thinking very seriously about how to make http://trilema.com/2016/the-necessary-prerequisite-for-any-change-to-the-bitcoin-protocol correctly; and is quite bugged by the fact that ~verification~ is O(N)
asciilifeform: '@aeliasen @gnupg for fingerprints collisions are not interesting. There is no known preimage attack for SHA1. Keep calm and use OpenPGP.' << lel
pete_dushenski: speaking of learning, "Core exists as dictatorship and tyranny, upholding speech control, colluding to attack people with different views, has become the biggest threat of the long-term development of Bitcoin". ~bitmain miner guy (http://imgur.com/a/mhEEd)
pete_dushenski: online learning though! it's the future.
omraphantom: they have a carpenter friend that was in my state i should meet apparently. i have a furniture blueprint just zero skills lol
omraphantom: but at the same time i'm not saying i won't be doing my course credits
omraphantom: but for now i need to focus on the general education credits
pete_dushenski: omraphantom: aha just getting rolling then. eh no rush to start eng school. a chunk of the guys here started but didn't even finish
omraphantom: when i can't think straight to gewt the seasons right >.<
pete_dushenski: what's the attrition rate at your school ?
mircea_popescu: whoss ah the chip pornographer ? nice.
asciilifeform: so far mircea_popescu is the people-bringin' champ
mircea_popescu: they've been doing this whole "add logos to a printed page" thing for years now, it did 0.
asciilifeform: from shinohai's link , 'Microsoft, Intel, banks form Enterprise Ethereum blockchain alliance'
asciilifeform: re upstack -- i actually have here an earlier mips from imagination co. -- it is notbad.jpg (tested back in the day as potential pogo replacement)
asciilifeform: ...Supermicro's support site—and that firmware is still hosted there.'
asciilifeform: in yet-other western tech, https://archive.is/YcSdC << 'A mid-2016 security incident led to Apple purging its data centers of servers built by Supermicro, including returning recently purchased systems... ... A source familiar with the case at Apple told Ars that the compromised firmware affected servers in Apple's design lab, and not active Siri servers. The firmware, according to the source, was downloaded directly from Supermicro's
mircea_popescu: but in other western technologies, http://68.media.tumblr.com/d10a3976994cae7727aeb3127572ad86/tumblr_mmbrdcBrgU1rgefeko1_1280.jpg
mircea_popescu: there's nothing "Western" about pn np pn stranding.
asciilifeform: actually this is a mega-snoar, looks like the makers used 100% western toolchain, even macrocells
mircea_popescu: wow check it out, a quarter of the baikal chip's unused.
mircea_popescu likes reading the foundation reports.
mircea_popescu: where did they get this "ceo" from, was he the previous VP of ceosunlimitedbocavistatexas.tripod.com ?
ben_vulpes: > we love microchips - that's why we boil them in acid
a111: Logged on 2017-03-01 00:10 ben_vulpes: not the pipes necessarily, but the garden; dog; wife; child; engines of my own...
ben_vulpes: http://btcbase.org/log/2017-03-01#1620306 << to round the thread out, i also enjoy veen's company tremendously
trinque: BingoBoingo: it's actually there, unconfirmed
trinque: rough edges on the new bot yet
BingoBoingo: Not evaporated, differently bothering now
asciilifeform: and then evaporated
asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2017-03-01#1620408 << lel, wasn't he the d00d with the 'btc bank card'
shinohai: mod6: No I was trying to use xmacros to automate some clicks for mircea_popescu and accidentally bought the wrong bundle @ 45 bitcents
mod6: asciilifeform: forgive us for not mentioning your many submissions as of late. we'll be addressing these next month. salud!
mod6: Ladies and Gentlemen of the Most Serene Republic, The Bitcoin Foundation's monthly address: http://therealbitcoin.org/ml/btc-dev/2017-March/000258.html
mod6: yeah, trying to keep up with all these posts. just started this one on "possible trb-i"
mircea_popescu: there's nothing andressen has to contribute to any discussion. if you want copy/paste "ugc" you can just as well use google "ai", for the exact same result.
mircea_popescu: and i do mean this. nobody. tom cook isn't a fucking ceo, and if i replaced him with hillary's daughter there'd be no perceptible difference anywhere.
mircea_popescu: koch is not some coder, he's a sad fuck who lies about where he gets the code.
mircea_popescu: this is the entirety of everyone. stallman is not some sort of graybeard, he's a sad fuck who lied about what laptop setup he is using.
mircea_popescu: i had since opportunity to verify all of them, and they are all false. he's as much of a businessman as any random redditard, which specifically includes pirate, the silk road dork, etcetera.
mircea_popescu: this is the power of the lazy retard, someone somewhere once counted airplanes, they got the conclusion they're msotly full, and everyone's just mindlessly repeating it hence. as per http://trilema.com/2014/a-practical-exercise-for-people-who-cant-afford-airfare/
mircea_popescu: they "ran some tests" in the manner that gave us "hillary is looking past trump" and this was the result.
asciilifeform: the disconnect from actual 'turkey usd' reality must be total.
mircea_popescu: but this is, no histrionics, no rhetorics, no exaggeration, my expert, considered and final view on the matter.
mircea_popescu: and by that fashion, little tidbits of text were "Scored" through you know, SCIENTIFIC !!11 process like "ab testing" (i kid you not, they all do the same basic statistics wronglyt inthe same ways)
mircea_popescu: it most patently is not, in contrast to anything else - which is measurable, but meaninglessly so, the web is not measurable fucking period.
mircea_popescu: at some point when the "web community" faggots were trying to get round two of dotcom bubble inflated with "web 2.0" and similar gimmicks,
mircea_popescu: the "metrics" delusion.
asciilifeform: incidentally, i gotta wonder, who specifically is responsible for the 'fourty-one things THEY DONT WANT YOU TO KNOW about $idiocy' crapolade that has displaced ~all other ads on www ? it even exists in ru .
mircea_popescu: what, because one set eats at fastfood and other set eats at fastfood they are now different ? words may be powerful, but they're not this fucking powerful already.
mircea_popescu: well then...
mircea_popescu: man fired from one can become part of the other and back and forth forever, "i just work here" etcetera. there's no substance i can discern to the proposed classification whatsoever.
mircea_popescu: different, how ? corporations, both, trying to advertise, both, hiring the same fucking tv crews, pr agencies, what is the specific difference ?
asciilifeform: the two groups described virtually never meet , in usa, they have separate lolmarts to shop in, separate fishwraps to read, etc.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform i am not entirely sure that ability to distinguish wasn't more of a symptom of the cockroach working than anything else. "i can distinguish tarantula that bit me from tarantula that did not" is scarcely a quote after linnaeus.
mircea_popescu: "there's only one bug in socialism"
asciilifeform: at one point it was possible to distinguish, at the very least, dextro- from laevo-rotary cockroaches - e.g., the 'ten things canned ammo vendors don't want you to know! and the forty methods of instant prayer healing with colloidal silver!' -- vs -- 'save AFRICA!!1 from climate!'
mircea_popescu: if we took samantha cocks or whatever her name was and made her "a scientist" and took the supurating jeoffrey and made him "an engineer", they'd what ? go right to it without skipping a beat, that's what the "revolving door" even denotes.
mircea_popescu: there has to be some sort of definite difference in something, legs, mandibula, reproductive organs, something somewhere must allow classification in the proper sense to have a classification.
mircea_popescu: i mean the kitchen cockroach is not kitchen cockroach sp as opposed to bedroom cockroach just because that's where they happened to be captured.
mircea_popescu: im not even sure any sort of meaningful speciation has yet been either found, described or howsoever vaguely proposed.
asciilifeform: to 'civilian' -- 'ew, bugs'; but to the d00d who has to pick the right type of organophosphate to spray -- they are 1,001 species.
mircea_popescu: but be this as it may, i can't distinguish nor am i inclined to distinguish j supran's pretense that he engages in "science" from random wanna-be-trilema online publication's pretense that it describes "the mainstream" from random wonderdiet late night cable sleazemarketer's "salvation cuisine" from any of the rest of the gunk. they are exactly the same thing, and the word to denote them exists already. barbar.
mircea_popescu: if nothing else, the anecdote that his perception was so flattened through experience he failed on first pass to comprehend actual monkeys are not physically barbarians just like all the others should be dispositive.
mircea_popescu: the question was as to how many kinds they met. it is altogether likely alexander is the one men who met most kinds of barbarians.
mircea_popescu: they went to india.
asciilifeform: but the greeks only had access to a few types of hurrdurr
mircea_popescu: the etymology of the very word is instructive. barbarism comes from the greek hurrdurr, and it literally as well as onomatopoetically denotes that ... they do not have a thing.
asciilifeform: if some women grew from girls, and others - from abused iguanas, we would probably keep around a word to refer to the 2 types
mircea_popescu: the young girl is not "an alternate woman" but a not-yet-woman.
asciilifeform: dunno that all of the barbarians had ~same~ barbarism, tho. and you need a word to refer to the differences.