asciilifeform: there we go.
asciilifeform: so inner set for coal cart or the like.
asciilifeform: ah so they have symmetric sets, for variant gauges ?
asciilifeform: for the train to move
mircea_popescu: the track simply has multiple rails.
asciilifeform: they lay sleepers extra-wide in advance ?!
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform you should see the rail here btw. often they have 3-5 rails installed.
mircea_popescu: i don';t think they care.
asciilifeform: incidentally for so long as isis army fights with american gear, they are stuck with monkey units.
mircea_popescu: for noobs as you say : calculate the fluid ounces of water to be found in a lake of parallelipiped profile a quarter mile deep, two hundred yards long and six hundred feet wide.
asciilifeform: do they ?
mircea_popescu: anyway, for completeness : the correct, mp-would-find-satisfying, tmsr etc solution to the lathe problem is : make a lathe that cuts lathe parts. shoot anyone found with threaded items not made by your lathe for a few years.
asciilifeform: but if they aren't ~interchangeable~ you have no industry.
asciilifeform: in the sense of 'each one is precious and unique and handmade'
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform art in the old sense, from artifex.
asciilifeform: i don't WANT a screw as motherfucking 'art object'.
mircea_popescu: "specification is what happens to art products that are no longer interesting. it is the equivalent of commoditization for resources, familiarity in relationships and failure in civilisation."
asciilifeform: (for n00bs: to cut a thread, your lathe needs: a threaded part! itself !)
asciilifeform: and the problem was solved in ways which mircea_popescu would find quite unsatisfying
asciilifeform: where lathe men had considerable trouble specifying threads ~on paper~
asciilifeform: *they
mircea_popescu: so the phone grid can't be specified ?
asciilifeform: (i.e. individual telephone sets, but not 'the phone grid')
asciilifeform: normally, ones you can throw out if they fail.
asciilifeform: if scale small enough - then surely not satisfactorily.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform anyway, your definition of a spec is amply vulnerable. take the time issue : what, ddr can't be specified ? fingering a girl neither ? what happens if the spec asks for a 10 followed by a 11, and ytou get the 10 and silence ? now you got a whole halting problem on your hands.
a111: Logged on 2016-06-14 13:18 mircea_popescu: there's some problems with the concept of "specification" also that i don't have clear in my mind
asciilifeform: to the extent that bitcoin does ~not~ behave this way, it is broken design.
asciilifeform: at any rate, spec is a weak animal when it relies on promise, rather than protocol. ideally you want a simple litmus test for conformance that insta-zaps deviants
mircea_popescu: you didn't say that, either.
asciilifeform: how do you test the network ?
mircea_popescu: o god almighty he was playing it straight. listen asciilifeform you'll say the exact same thing about your bovaric contraption down the road. "the program is fine the world failed it". need i quote brecht to you ?
asciilifeform: can specify 'bitcointron' but not 'the network'
asciilifeform: there is no room for dice rolls in a spec.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform well, for any possible output, it'll get either accepted or rejected. doesn't get clearer than this.
mircea_popescu: but the network already and very clearly specifies inputs nad outputs. this meets your definition.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: only because it presently has no other specification
asciilifeform: since i did not mention timings or analogue characteristics, the two will be equal per the spec.
asciilifeform: e.g., 'the box takes 8 bits as input and sets the 3 bits of output as equal to the number of 1s on the input register.'
asciilifeform: have an example of correctly made spec: the ada ref+rationale.
mircea_popescu: no generally. the definitive, absolute and no sharp edges or loose parts version, that can be engraved into the ether and forever work without change.
asciilifeform: generally, a human language description which unambiguously relates the inputs of a mechanism to the outputs
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform let's go into a lengthy sidepoint. can you define "specification" for my benefit ? strangely enough the prb tards think some things about what a specification is that diverge.
mircea_popescu: speaking of which, i must say this has been by far the most serious, deep and far reaching argument tmsr yet produced, i sit and marvel at the wonder, all my resources tapped taut and for the first time in many years insufficient to peer through the gloom.
mircea_popescu: there's some problems with the concept of "specification" also that i don't have clear in my mind
mircea_popescu: only in given context. which is the problem.
asciilifeform: software is the one animal that ~can~ be perfect.
a111: Logged on 2016-06-14 13:12 mircea_popescu: how do you put in "all the parts that are needed by ALL future users" but "no parts not needed by ANY future user" ?
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform i suspect this may be a case where your conscientious intelligence is moreover harmful in the very limited and passagery sense that it took you far enough down a blind alley to make digging out the proper route seem expensive and painful.
mircea_popescu: how do you put in "all the parts that are needed by ALL future users" but "no parts not needed by ANY future user" ?
mircea_popescu: at the very least any use will only want parts of it.
mircea_popescu: true static library is really the complete story : ascii's ffz + the various re-implementations of ffz in projects x y and z.
mircea_popescu: "open source" alleviates this like an emergency valve does ; but why the fuck have design processes which create items which rely on emergency valve already. fix the leaks.
asciilifeform: a fella who won't set foot on airplane has the luxury of 'i won't fly unless i built the thing'.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform the fundamental problem with the "library" thing is that you are asked to guess what i might wish to do in the future. this is wrong, and unfixable.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform i wouldn't use it in my creations without reading it. i may run it on a box on the basis of wot though.
mircea_popescu: my shamelessly tall statement here being that, "library is the bad thing", outright.
mircea_popescu: the deep stupidity involved should be directly apparent, but in any case - the system as proposed violates the proper flow of entropy, and as such MAY NOT HAVE ANY MERITS.
mircea_popescu: this idiocy is not only how computing "works" today, but it is also how a good "marxist leninist maoist" party cadre is expected to treat the inept shit they use : he's to import marx.library exactly like you're "expected" to import iosys.blabla
mircea_popescu: meanwhile, the way this continuum is handled in all failed human endeavours (computing among them, with such prideful items as "social science" and so on) is for "all possible uses" of a concept to be "dreamed up" and "packaged" in a "conceptual library" which is then to be used verbatim.
mircea_popescu: there obviously exists a continuum between abstraction and implementation. the way this continuum is handled in ~all (and absolutely all) successful human endeavours is, that a concept is clarified AS A CONCEPT ; and then that concept is applied to situations as an application. like the war, roman arch, et all.
mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2016-06-14#1482521 << incidentally, i think this discussion unearthed another sacred idol of computing stupidity, deeply buried. allow me to go into some detail :
a111: Logged on 2016-06-14 05:22 trinque: using openssl as a symbol, to the degree that your program relies on one, you cannot be said to have written any particular program at all
mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2016-06-14#1482510 << whether you can be said to have "written" it, in the manner of genre fiction, is even a separate matter from "having written it" in the manner of code, which means you control it, which is a superset of you understand it completely, which has really little to do with "here's a string i dreamed up now publish it and clal it a book".
a111: Logged on 2016-06-14 05:18 phf: but i haven't seen those problems yet in the bitcoin codebase, the problem that i did see is a certain deliberate apartness of tinyscheme related code, that subtly violate my assumptions in a nagging way that i described above.
mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2016-06-14#1482503 << it violates mine outright, so much so that on the first pass i ~ignored it. i hadn't at the time it's meant seriously, hard to tell what is a minor point and what a major point until discussion actually ends up on them.
mircea_popescu: hence the whole "because i can". it's a misnomer : "because it can be done" is proper, the i has no business in there. it'd like to, but that's neither here nor there.
mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2016-06-14#1482493 << word. really, "labour division" is harmful in the same manner jwzism is harmful, if practiced in the manner jwzism is practiced. the criteria for cleavage MUST BE "can these things be cleaved" ; it CAN NOT BE "would i like these things apart". it is and has to remain about the things, not about the people. and in this sense "engineering serves mankind" in the same way "the sun is u
gribble: The operation succeeded.
shinohai: Morning, #trilema http://i.imgur.com/NVvBtHE.jpg
trinque: thus fuck your hyperlinks; give me the whole thing in one buffer
trinque: someone thinking of a specific problem rather than *the whole problem* sees it from the perspective of maximizing clarity of his own particular domain
trinque: asciilifeform thinking of it from the perspective of "mind amplifier" says in order to represent as much thought as possible, gonna need hyperlinking
trinque: it's whether software is a matter of engineering or of thought.
trinque: fascinating; I have a condensation of the whole conversation now
trinque: with the risk that something about bridge failure may end up causing your building to collapse
trinque: the physical world does not have this confounding problem
phf: in fact lisp is pretty unfriendly to the whole idea of "fire and forget" code reuse
trinque: I should name a specific symbol import and have the code for that import and all deps slurped into the very spot I named it
trinque: even though yeah, it came from the set of all known Xs and Ys
trinque: why isn't my program only the set of code it actually uses
trinque: on one side you have the set of all possible tactics to employ in a given domain
trinque: two categories come to mind; lets say in the context of planning a military operation
trinque: and your signature upon the mud is meaningless
trinque: using openssl as a symbol, to the degree that your program relies on one, you cannot be said to have written any particular program at all
trinque: there's a core philosophical question of "what is a program" which extends from the observation
phf: sure, and the next step might be to trim down openssl as much as possible (which might be not much at all given limited resources) and rebase it into genesis
trinque: I have been arguing that the #include concept (styled (require ...) or whatever you like) gives a person a place past which he may "not have to care"
phf: but i haven't seen those problems yet in the bitcoin codebase, the problem that i did see is a certain deliberate apartness of tinyscheme related code, that subtly violate my assumptions in a nagging way that i described above.
phf: i'm not sure i understand where compromise is. i'm comfortable working with big ball of mud. i see a vpatch as a transition of state of mud to a new state of mud and vpatch is an exhaustive description of what that state transition means. it's signed by asciilifeform which is all the pedigree i need. vpatch itself can come with out of band comment "might be buggy" or "ready for war deployment". there are known problems with that approach that manifest at scale (like for example multiple slightly conflicting version of "utilities" or "math functions" that get copied back and forth, finding bug in one means that the other might remain unpatched, etc.)
trinque: I'd expect it avoids the trap
trinque: and then maybe you're BingoBoingo's druggie, or you're in a pool of blood and piss
phf: i think that a lot of these conversations come to a standstill because they deal with infinities, rather the shaping into a reasonable concrete. it seems proper that slapping new code onto bitcoin should come in a form of wot signed balls of mud, that don't particularly care about preserving all information and pedigrees and such. "i wrote this new math function and it uses this mp code that i lifted elsewhere but shaped enough that only relevant bits remain and for all practical purposes all you see in this patch is all that matters"
trinque: for all I know boost does this very particular thing with memory allocation that obviates some race condition the whole concept has which prevented it from collapsing immediately
mod6: Gentlemen, I must bid you Good Evening. I'll pick this back up with you on the 'morrow. :]
asciilifeform: trinque: it is quite correct to say that no one will ever fully grasp what the original bitcoin actually ~was~
asciilifeform: there is no hamburger --> cow converter.
asciilifeform: you can't do the reverse !
trinque: that what we have is all we have is a tragedy and nothing other
trinque: because of the very thing we're discussing.
trinque: but I have nfi what the fucking thing is, to this day
asciilifeform: trinque: you evaluate it using SAME algo as you use for 'did asciilifeform write his patches or were they given to him by a colonel at ftmeade to pass to chumps'
asciilifeform: and get a wild one from the net ?
asciilifeform: trinque: you would rather not have it ?
asciilifeform: incidentally, at one point i signed 'this is the tarball of openssl circa 20xx from my hdd, sha512==H'
mircea_popescu: anyway, what started this conversation is that the ratcheting ratcher burnssss.
asciilifeform: in the tinyscheme sense.
asciilifeform: hell, we have a ~literal~ openssl in there.
trinque: what requires you to read the whole scroll?
mircea_popescu: it's not been wasted, the time you used reading, it's not been wasted.
trinque: the system is 15k lines long, not 200 or w/e
mircea_popescu: all the "effort saving" kitchen appliances never made a man yet.
mircea_popescu: shut up, ru army style made men out of a collection of shitheads.
asciilifeform: phf: i quite agree that rereading can be beneficial. but NOT forced 'paint the snow heaps white' ru army style.
mircea_popescu: iirc when i wanted to sanitize indents you quashed it mostly on the grounds of exactly this, "i want my diff to still work". well now ?
mircea_popescu: incidentally, this may be the most idiotic cockroach implanted by usg in programmer heads, "save time by not reading"
asciilifeform: if ~i chose to~ - then no, not waste.
mircea_popescu: either it's familiar or it isn't.
asciilifeform: because if i cannot determine mechanically 'this is THE thing that ~i~ wrote' vs 'this is SOME OTHER thing that i must now read with magnifying glass' this wastes potentially weeks, months, years (depending on mass of turd) of my time.
mircea_popescu: i am of the same mind.
trinque: the problem is poorly formed; I would eventually sign off on a function that did RSA
asciilifeform: if i have to diff (or, satan forbid, VISUALLY INSPECT), e.g., mod6's ffz.adb to see what parts he changed from mine, and every single motherfucking time i find that it is nothing at all, then my time is wasted.
phf: i prefer to just loosen the requirements a bit. a failure in a vpatch doesn't need to result in public disgrace, shaming or execution. that might be one of reasons why work came to utter stand still, nobody wants to "sign off" on this or that like it's going to end in the style of diana_coman's story
mircea_popescu: otherwise - hole, night, creeps in.
trinque: I'm reminded of the call-graph thread
asciilifeform: ^ which incidentally is still a thing that must be done, either this way or some other way, because this is indeed a dire problem
asciilifeform: ideally you will specify a MINIMAL set of differences, via patching. supposing that the originating item was by someone in your wot, vs taken from hitler on battlefield
a111: Logged on 2016-06-14 04:29 mircea_popescu: the odds of two projects wanting the same exact verbatim pile of lib-code are ~as good as for a hash collision.
trinque: my actual possible code paths in say trb should be reflected in the code
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform i been sayuing this for an hour now. YOU DONT FUCKING IMPORT THE WHOLE LIB VERBATIM. you take what you need, and adapt it to your project.
mircea_popescu: not altogether a bad side effect, but it is not intentional, merely derivative from sanity.
trinque: the thing on trial here is I just wanted to aes-128 or whatever; I did not want to openssl
mircea_popescu: the odds of two projects wanting the same exact verbatim pile of lib-code are ~as good as for a hash collision.
asciilifeform: the part i disagree is mircea_popescu's apparent insistence that said chances ought to artificially obscure the origin
asciilifeform: possibly what mircea_popescu was thinking is that the operator is NOT absolved of the chore of reading the thing that hashed to B9F2C8885474FD6B4F7D36955799716E68161BE8F8CFCE3640ADE942FE0064A00D64C7DABC3EC36B24797760B99EA6C79D74A8F984DCC3AEAC2EEF183B3ED70B
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform architecture long encountered, and thenresolved, this matter. there are "problems solved for all time", such as, "the roman arch". nevertheless, no architect to date has yet written "roman arch" on a piece of paper.
phf: heh, this is parallel to the unicode conversation actually..
phf: tinyscheme then becomes a space of unknowing
asciilifeform: to me it is the only relevant thing.
trinque: and this is fiat-world division of labor where at some point it is "other guy's problem"
trinque: and so then your program will never fit in your head
mircea_popescu: imports, not moronically includes, but re-writes the code.
asciilifeform: imports by referencing the hash.
mircea_popescu: exactly how "search" is "a problem solved for all time", but when grep got implemented they... cheated it.
mircea_popescu: you write your lib with the cannonical solution ; everyone else imports it that wants it.
trinque: the category is as big as it is, and no smaller
trinque: it is a fucking lie; the category within which you're enumerating symbols is not delimited by file
mircea_popescu: there is no such thing.
mircea_popescu: i personally never got the idea it's part of trb or anything. seemed to me more like a "alf's other project", sort of like the ffz thing.
asciilifeform: phf: it was specifically labeled as a dangerous toy. for the reason you described.
trinque: whether you've structured it as such or not
trinque: question wasn't (I thought) how V works, it's whether #include is a useful tool or a festering fucking sore
mircea_popescu: i suspect this matter requires more private meditation, because there seems to be relatively little common ground.
mircea_popescu: depends on mode, in one mode it builds all the chains it can./
asciilifeform: v as we have it offers NO mechanism for 'and this here file is the longest chain of all of asciilifeform's patches forever'
mircea_popescu: this is not the jesus you think it is.
trinque: because you are considering openssl as the word openssl or whatever function you've imported and it's signature
asciilifeform: unlike the idiot 'linux world' include
asciilifeform: when someone builds on my particular patch, i can never in the future move anything 'from under him'
asciilifeform: their include is BLIND
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform two women which are cuntwise identical ARE STILL DIFFERENT. genetics, their future, etc.
asciilifeform: i fail to see the point in pretending that x1, x2, x3, ... xn which are BITWISE IDENTICAL are different entities.
mircea_popescu: even the notion of "library" is fucktarded. you take the code and apply it to your needs.
asciilifeform: idiot cut and paste lies ~explicitly~ by trying to fool reader into 'x1 and x2 differ' whereas they do not.
trinque: the has does not fucking enumerate what it hashed or you could reverse it
mircea_popescu: and for that matter, without UNDERSTANDING them.
trinque: the include moves concepts from one place to another without enumerating them. it's in that sense a lie by omission
mircea_popescu: whether anyone for this reason or for any other starts behaving intelligently is outside of the scope. nevertheless, the dumb behaviour being stomped out is, by my stick, enough.
mircea_popescu: there's not going to be any of this "o mom look at me i r coder too i included shit from github".
mircea_popescu: if there's ever going to be an end to rotten meat, is through disallowing the processes that create it in the first place.
asciilifeform: but this kind of thing oughta be done ~with thought~ rather than as strange human sacrifice ritual.
mircea_popescu: so then stop hanging on to outdated capitalist dogma that perpetuates the inequality in our society.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform not in the slightest. you ever read a novel TWICE only to discover that hey, i hadsn't gotten it the first time ?
mircea_popescu: for the record - each piece of code should be read more often than it is used.
asciilifeform: the ~necessary~ reactor rod pulling, and not ONE inch moar.
mircea_popescu: apparently i wasn't ~missing~ the point eh.
asciilifeform: is to NEVER have the idiot duplication of identical shit.
asciilifeform: whole motherfucking POINT of v
asciilifeform: v is as strong as the hash function
mircea_popescu: you don't get motherfucking #include.
asciilifeform: but not the only genesis!
asciilifeform: 'ffz', item i am working on now, is the finite field integer library.
mircea_popescu: ignorance of the patches is scant defense.
asciilifeform: if diff x1 x2 is nil, then NOPE
mircea_popescu: there may not be any such "we see". if both you and him introduce "item x", the only approach is to read both.
asciilifeform: then we can see that my item and his have ~same~ antecedent.
asciilifeform: it is worth the mention when somebody else steals precisely same thing (because it was, say, hamlet) and stands a patch on ~it~
phf: well, it attempts to solve same problem that the vectors were solving, i.e. introducing code that you're not ready to reasonably support
mircea_popescu: world is not worth the mention.
mircea_popescu: but understand this clearly alf : the difference between "i produced this" and "i stole this from washington" is nil. if you stole it or wrote it - YOU PRODUCED IT.
phf: well, yes, that's the intent, but i'm saying that i'm not sure there's value in "i found this" when it breaks "i make this part of whole"
mircea_popescu: no such separation is desired. moreover, breaking the tree is outright catastrophic.
mircea_popescu: the pedigree, if it exists, comes from "i asciilifeform read this and i goes off genesis". nowhere else.
asciilifeform: but it is not outside. the signed pedigreed tarball is a vtronic creation (in the respective cases, mine and mircea_popescu 's)
mircea_popescu: the notion that some sort of "pedigree" from outside v is worth two shits is the only fart here.
asciilifeform: using what pedigree there actually is - e.g., mircea_popescu's signed pgp tarball - is part of this.
mircea_popescu: and generally - the whole fucking world burns.
mircea_popescu: there may not exist any sort of pedigree, even as a notion, other than from one of our genesis.
mircea_popescu: possibly because trying to subvert the whole thing by having "multiply loadable libraries" or whatever. in any case : you can trivially just make it depend on genesis and be done wit hthe whole story.
mircea_popescu: same reason someone who wants to participate here starts by reading the log, not by "wholly formed" delusional nonsense.
asciilifeform: it joins the party wholly formed.
mircea_popescu: then no good. and whatever patches reference it should burn.
mircea_popescu: there is no c).
mircea_popescu: it still has to either a) chain off an existing element or b) not be part of the story.
asciilifeform: elementarily, any patch that sprouts matter out of the aether without affecting anything presently standing.
asciilifeform: dun matter what we call it, there can and often will be >1.
trinque: mircea_popescu │ the problems only begin when trinque goes on a jwz rampage "i only wanted the offspring to sprout, not rob the store". << I agree 100% that offspring are in any sane scenario mine to end
asciilifeform: srsly read the code, of ANYBODY's vtron
asciilifeform: how the fuck is this 'state of sin
mircea_popescu: how teh hell would thatr be the case.
asciilifeform: as would be the case in a mircea_popescuated shiva trb.
asciilifeform: of which there can be >1 !
mircea_popescu: the obvious usage is due to it being <project-name>-genesis. but yeah.