asciilifeform: not necessarily mega-empire
asciilifeform: firemen get (and deserve) no credit for the relative incombustibility of modern dwellings compared to those of the past.
asciilifeform: similar to sanitation example.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: attempt at solving basic problem of the 'martian bank'
asciilifeform: good compromise - 'northgate' kbd.
asciilifeform: Oct 02 16:43:29 <strp>oh-ho-ho - look who turned out to be completely right. http://www.wired.com/2014/10/code-published-for-unfixable-usb-attack/ and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8400796 << http://log.bitcoin-assets.com/?date=02-10-2014#855577
asciilifeform: chumps will buy anything?
asciilifeform: reel feed is less important when machine is being driven semi-manually
asciilifeform: decimation: more importantly, is the fact that their machines cost money that i don't have.
asciilifeform: the pick'n'place cum pastelayer is the only cut to a 'gordian knot' - namely, can't have the boards populated at a genuine factory (prohibitive cost for small batches) - but can't populate by hand with acceptable yield (very fine-pitch components)
asciilifeform: can't have a part machined, for example, unless there is no possibility of making it to spec with own hands (pcbs with soldermask, vias, hard gold - fall into this category)
asciilifeform: at any rate, hopefully answered the question of why simple-looking piece of junk had to be laboriously cut.
asciilifeform: this setup is in fact available off shelf - but in gigantic version (for use with compressed air shop tools)
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: amd does not sell compilers.
asciilifeform: it is a statement of fact. in that, encountering an animal turd in the forest, you know only approximately what is its composition.
asciilifeform: it's empty, of course.
asciilifeform: hanbot: for me, it's the question of imprisoned now or later.
asciilifeform: hanbot: just like the fellow in space capsule, simply can open air lock and see the stars.
asciilifeform: the picture of usa 'ticking' because of some abstract ideal like 'war' or 'consumption' is mistake. rather it's more like the tissues of a corpse that can ferment anaerobically, living on for days or even weeks past burial
asciilifeform: hanbot: sometimes, calculation is fairly simple. you're in a box. outside - vacuum of far space.
asciilifeform: hanbot: if you meant luxuries - cars, houses, etc. - americans are having a fine time 'letting go' of these, with a little help from an imploding economy and hungry creditors...
asciilifeform: гулаг == главное управление лагерей и мест заключения ~= 'main management of camps and places of confinement.'
asciilifeform: gun is just one example.
asciilifeform: that's tame compared to the gedankenexperiment. ordinary 'entrapment.'
asciilifeform: but how to prove that you didn't make a particular non-compliant item
asciilifeform: (americans simply replaced one or two shells' powder with tetryl, resealed container, and left it for enemy to find as a trophy)
asciilifeform: i believe thestringpuller is asking for a known impossibility - a mechanical angel.
asciilifeform: i will be, for at least another ten minutes, then i go & take break from computer, cut a little aluminum
asciilifeform: or is this another 'basic stamp' where 'pr0gr4m w1th0ut pr0gr4mm1ng like a l33t ch1xx0r' affair ?
asciilifeform: how hard is it to plant a micro in a breadboard or simple pcb ?
asciilifeform: moldysnizz: this particular item (trng) is a very simple but safety-critical (hence amount of effort spent on it) component of a larger apparatus.
asciilifeform: as for this entire thread - being pessimist, imho any software project which appears to call for this level of organizational complexity - is a lost cause.
asciilifeform: (example not necessarily applicable to given domain, but specifically of folks taking actual responsibility for their actions)
asciilifeform: Diablo-D3: it downloads a turd, needs space to decompress it
asciilifeform: Diablo-D3: well, to upgrade without a connected computer, yes
asciilifeform suffered fair share of employment as undergrad research grunt of various stripes
asciilifeform: decimation: available. 'ebay' for example.
asciilifeform: it would be fairly simple to include a pattern match for 'magic bus cycle' or 'magic instruction' on built-in-cpu that will, e.g., short supply to ground.
asciilifeform: it is virtually impossible now to buy a pure fpga.
asciilifeform: what can one accomplish on fpga, knowing nothing about your opponent's future purpose for it, with a small turd ?
asciilifeform: it's a leper's bell for grantsmanship and chumpatronics of the most tedious sort.
asciilifeform: bounce: i posit that it must be presumed intentional. the shitgnomes hide behind the impossibility of logically proving their guilt.
asciilifeform: these people are walking around, alive, and worst of all - continuing to churn out code. which unwitting chumps will actually use.
asciilifeform: that's the intended implication, at any rate.
asciilifeform: 'Authorities said Friday that the hard drive of a computer used by Frein provides evidence he had been planning an attack for years. They said Frein's Internet searches included sites on how to avoid police manhunts.'
asciilifeform: this mirrors the (almost-contemporary!) soviet mistake
asciilifeform: (it is virtually impossible to touch with finger and make less than full circle on readout)
asciilifeform: punkman: http://www.toolstop.co.uk/components/com_virtuemart/shop_image/product/51831_PDG01I.jpg << test gauge. needle moves vertically.
asciilifeform: chetty: farnsworth didn't need a decade of free time. raster scan, fortunately, was a fairly simple item.
asciilifeform: chetty: i was speaking more generally of employment with usg rather than proper soldiering as such
asciilifeform likes to suggest pondering theological implications of a glassed middle east
asciilifeform: decimation: approximately - food stamps are given to groups, rather than people. not formally, of course - but in practice.
asciilifeform: likewise, for dataflow cpu fabric (the only truly reasonable way to build a computer) - existing logic synthesis methods are unsuitable.
asciilifeform: just as 'bentley' does not compete with 'toyota'
asciilifeform: decimation: it is important to understand that lm was a specialist instrument - like the most elaborate electron microscope.
asciilifeform: when we are talking about a sword that a man can swing - or a computer system that 'fits' inside a single brain comfortably - this is a fundamental difference.
asciilifeform: even the best swings would be from among a very small set of simple strokes.
asciilifeform: or squadron could contain enemy wrecker, imperceptibly and unprovably spoiling a swing
asciilifeform: and they would work in synchrony, but of course imperfectly - and occasionally at cross purposes
asciilifeform: laugh, laugh. but most of what you expect from your computer is not -mathematically- more complicated than 'hello world.'
asciilifeform: decimation: mp added a c) if i recall: 'kill and bury the pyramid builders, blind the architect'
asciilifeform: 'If you're a defendant, you don't get to claim your fingerprints miraculously appeared at a crime scene... If you're a bookkeeper, you don't get to say money miraculously disappeared from your company...'
asciilifeform: if you create a 'heartbleed' - you are a вредитель. and whether you did it intentionally, given the impossibility of proof - does not matter.
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: it is used, for example, by bios prior to dram init sequence.
asciilifeform: simply not a very good idea.
asciilifeform: if cold end is below room temp - can condense.
asciilifeform: (why never caught on? answer: anything that can go below room temp. can have problems with condensation.)
asciilifeform: dignork: tcpdump...
asciilifeform: but once you add fools (who can also be liars, but let's not complicate unnecessarily) to the mix...
asciilifeform: if they're the 'greek' type, that are simply 'not gate', then - sure.
asciilifeform: there is a particular species of chumpatronium, what one might call a chumpassal (chump, vassal)
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: the unsettling discovery is that mass-derp can continue far longer than the example under consideration. e.g., 'crypto ag' still exists, multi-$b, 'unknown' ownership, and... multi-decade loyal customers.
asciilifeform: 'to take but one simple example: suppose you thought of the new millennium when you wrote your application back in 1972 -- not only wouldn't you be invited to the party, those who knew you had done it right from the start and who probably laughed at you at the time would positively hate you now, and they sure as hell wouldn't tell people about you. and the more stupid they are, the more important it would be to
asciilifeform: e war zone, you'd rush to the war zone to join the feeding frenzy, right? so, to complete the grim picture, software in our society is diseased, the activity you read about are all about cleaning up the disasters and surviving the equivalent of plagues, and it just takes a tremendous amount of people and work to keep the whole system from dying, like the incredibly stupid year-2000 problem.'
asciilifeform: incidentally, it is because the prisons are run as a miniature copy of the entire empire
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: think millikan's experiment is a clusterfuck? in computer 'science', folks like lenat are schoolbook-famous for experiment that not only have not but cannot be replicated with available data.
asciilifeform: this doesn't even tough upon the very special chumpatronic clients who are admitted, to flounder about in 7+ years of too-precious-to-flunk limbo.
asciilifeform: and mit rubber-stamped the bsd license release of the original cadr stuff, once priced at $maxint
asciilifeform: by the time these things changed - he was fully occupied in operating an obvious chumpatron
asciilifeform: we don't know if it was eurisko or just doug l. and a lisp prompt.
asciilifeform: the schoolbook telling of the 'eurisko' project - open an encyclopaedia of computing, traditionally it is mentioned as a seminal work - suggests this.
asciilifeform: decimation: i tried, back in the day, was not impressed with result.
asciilifeform: and might be interesting to compare the dtic-online version to mine.
asciilifeform: Darkstone1: if this is even remotely possible to do to you - and probably necessarily so if your bot is less complicated, than, say, 'eurisko' - give up.
asciilifeform: to continue the oscillator analogy: nitwits running simple bots will show up as 'line spectra'.
asciilifeform: berndj-blackout: nope. to run with the mechanical analogy, the system has a certain amount of 'dampening'.
asciilifeform: where you know that opponents are running, e.g., simple arbitrage bots, but each has a 'stop-loss' threshold
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: runaway complexity may be intrinsic in von neumann paradigm.
asciilifeform was never obsessed with 'spec' - but does think that one must arrive at what question is being answered before attempt is meaningful
asciilifeform: also it is possible that i used a bad example. man has indeed invented hydrogen bomb. but securing 50 years of turdolade by 'fixing mistakes' is more akin to jumping 1km. no athlete has jumped 1km, and beatings will not create one.
asciilifeform: which stone in the roller << this is the basic premise behind 'many eyes' theory, - and we know it is empirically false.
asciilifeform: yes, they exist. yes, olympic athletes have lifted two metres high for two minutes.
asciilifeform: (who, of late, have actually been selling a computer in that shape.)
asciilifeform: bounce: people still pay for security (see size of computer security industry) yet are getting none << obligatory >> http://www.loper-os.org/?p=1299
asciilifeform: peristaltic pump also stretches the tube if the business end is clogged (as it inevitably becomes)
asciilifeform: decimation: you can, but you get odd behaviour - considering that you aren't pumping a fluid in the usual sense
asciilifeform: i keep waiting for someone here to suggest 'use peristaltic pump'
asciilifeform: no need to control pressure to any great extent, that's the whole fscking point of pos. disp. pumps.
asciilifeform just emerged from ~4 hrs of lathe work, does in fact appreciate the difficulty of apparently simple things. but the extant computing stack - is still a pile of shit.
asciilifeform: the only thing intrinsically necessary is a compact way to tell the photomask printer what to do...
asciilifeform: very few of these things feel 'impressive' after you learn just how intrinsically simple all of our tech stack is
asciilifeform: jurov: similar machines - but entirely mechanical, no computer - existed since early 20th c., and are still used by american politicians to 'sign' documents.
asciilifeform: !s incompetence
asciilifeform: not everything is malicious << see the ancient thread (mp's?) re: whether it is useful to distinguish between sufficiently incompetent 'rangers' and actual scammers
asciilifeform: mats_cd03: complain to the fellow who inserted the 'bug'
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: deliberate use of non-optimally-compact representation was justified with 'humans will read and write it without having to, horrors, use a program.'
asciilifeform: (note that you could just as easily end up eating a dog turd from the market and a blade of grass from the dump)
asciilifeform: 'choose from where you will eat $mysteryobject - from vegetable market, or city dump.'
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: importance of pedigree is proportional to information poverty.
asciilifeform: (they're 'victorian' gentlemen by comparison)
asciilifeform: the menacing zek on the cover is a real riot, considering how sympathetic the creatures in this book are (compared to russian zeks described in corresponding tomes)
asciilifeform: !up mp_colonist
asciilifeform: mp_colonist: he would also immediately grasp the present situation as 'nithlings' ('pederasts' to russian prisoner, ??? to english) took control and force people to behave as if they were people and their honour had weight
asciilifeform: never touch computer.
asciilifeform: magoscientists complaining about how magomagicians aren't doing magoscience right << obligatory: 'monday begins on saturday' (strugatski brothers.) << exists in english!!
asciilifeform: decimation: if you are inventor, gruntwork (of the kind involved in achieving almost anything substantial with existing computer systems) is a monumental torture.
asciilifeform: decimation: this might actually go straight to mp's piece about good knight/conqueror and good father being different animals
asciilifeform: mp_colonist: clearly 'platonist' - thinks that particular bit of magic 'works when you plug it in.'
asciilifeform: mp_colonist: the man is a geologist (as far as i can judge - a good one) and an amateur scholar of crackpottery. no pretenses at being a monumental philosopher.
asciilifeform: mp_colonist: write to him! dollars to doughnuts, he'll have an interesting answer.
asciilifeform: mp_colonist: dutch is the same guy who did the symmetry-groups thing. he has an astonishing spectrum of strange.
asciilifeform did not exhume this item to praise 'mathematica' but to bury it - it's an example of something everybody else should have copied and used as permanent baseline for anything new, like kalashnikov.
asciilifeform: decimation: university labs are given a 'complete package' with instrument libraries, etc.; students forced to use.
asciilifeform: that isn't really a complete picture.
asciilifeform: decimation: of course, users of 'matlab' will say 'sure! we're same.' -- like 'glbse' vs 'mpex'...
asciilifeform: !up mp_colonist
asciilifeform: mp_colonist: it only became interesting after ver. 6 or so.
asciilifeform: (forget 'w. alpha', it's a clown show) mathematica - is example of a product for which not even a vaguely passable (to aficionado) alternative exists, at any price point
asciilifeform: mp_colonist: proverbial adamantine indestructible cock.
asciilifeform: mp_colonist: wolfram corp. is quite unlike a restaurant
asciilifeform: mp_colonist: i am very glad they did not fix. relying on black box turd for a critical piece of mechanics was stupid, and it was necessary to pay with suffering for it (did.)
asciilifeform: mp_colonist: i did sign off on ~7kBez worth of wolframiana. but did not expect the same level of fellatio as the folks who we paid 40k/seat. and got what expected.
asciilifeform: mp_colonist: perhaps out of spite. they flew sales-muppets to my lab hoping i'd buy a mega-cluster's worth of licenses. i didn;t.
asciilifeform not enamoured with dutch's examples specifically - but his formula is sound.
asciilifeform: !up mp_colonist
asciilifeform: mp_colonist: lol! what sort of turtle is this.
asciilifeform: jumped on the systemd bandwagon << and you're using this on your own free will ?
asciilifeform: nobody seems to ask 'who're the new girls in high-temperature metallurgy'
asciilifeform: herr wolfram's megalomania did not happen in empty space. he has a total, watertight monopoly on something - just as steve jobs did.
asciilifeform: mp_sails: just here in this channel, you'll turn up at least two, perhaps three people who, as boys, understood virtually the entire 'ms-dos' say.
asciilifeform: mp_sails: museum - collect apparatus from a generation ago. not because 'clean', but because can be studied with considerably lighter effort.
asciilifeform: mp_sails: x86, but trivial retarget.
asciilifeform: mp_sails: for the practical and immediate - BingoBoingo's approach. (curate a museum)
asciilifeform: mp_sails: on account of becoming ever more reluctant to put it to the torch
asciilifeform: mp_sails: investing in existing infrastructure, paradoxically, makes us all the more fucked - imho
asciilifeform: mp_sails: only to have whole edifice poisoned by a subtle multithreaded 'bug' in kernel, or small 'mistake' in cpu microcode.
asciilifeform: mp_sails: not merely huge workload. journey to the moon on stacked chairs - unless done correctly - i.e. bonfire of the computations.
asciilifeform: mp_sails: 'it's all in one strand!'
asciilifeform: mp_sails: precompiled << for what. (e.g., which libc? and who volunteers to grok and sign that? etc)
asciilifeform: mp_sails: new meaning for 'drumhead court-martial'...
asciilifeform: mp_sails: The20YearIRCloud: 3 other people << try 33.
asciilifeform: mp_sails: i'm gonna guess you hadn't paid for dedicated 'horns' on multiple sats...
asciilifeform: i dare say mp_sails probably seemed quite a bit more insurable than a usaschwitz inmate - from appraiser's point of view
asciilifeform: mp_sails: a story about buying insurance, to be truly educational, has to involve... actually invoking the policy.
asciilifeform: mp_sails: demand-side subsidies are a ratchet - who wants to be the first to have a repeal apply to him, and starve...
asciilifeform: mp_sails: actually, prior to herr obama, they could afford insurance (actual insurance against, e.g., sudden injury) but not the 'insurance' that most usaschwitz inmates speak of (not an insurance at all, but a scheme where someone - usually employer - pays so that a plebe can actually get medical care of any sort, which, as result, is not affordable in any other way)
asciilifeform: modern computing "just works" << lol!
asciilifeform: xmj: this is roughly the situation of modern computing.
asciilifeform: most computer systems have no business really existing.
asciilifeform: karl friedrich gauss was also an impressive chap at 16, if in different ways, yes
asciilifeform: legal representative will point out errors in ancient fortran code, or resolder a loose component?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: one of my jobs is indeed a company i co-own - but the only customer is usg, and the office is required to be within a few km of a particular institute.
asciilifeform: kakobrekla: traditionally, even 'tele-'whatever work in usa requires at least an occasional physical visit, simply to make sure you haven't republikfluchted, apparently
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: what's he to do in argentina? teach the pampas cats and ocelots common lisp ?
asciilifeform: ' Physical components are in great condition, vacuum testing and electronics replacement is underway.'
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: 'On January 31, 2009, Bauman reported that ZVUE fired him and the rest of the staff and replaced them with a new team. Furthermore, Bauman claimed ZVUE are falsely using his name in connection with new material, making it look as if Bauman is still employed...' (pediwikia)
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: the actual impedance of a stepper almost never matters
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: not entirely complete mount bracket for this: http://imgur.com/Cd4Kghs
asciilifeform: student exercise. prove that the minimally-braindamaged implementation of hardware finite-precision floating point requires a base of 'e'.
asciilifeform: decimation: halfway on the road to african method - sit in a tub of own shit and call it a 'computer'
asciilifeform: this is an important definitional point.
asciilifeform: where we're really trying to simulate an analogue computer, for some gnarly physical model
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: the extreme computational poverty of the 20th c.
asciilifeform: and then you say 'british admiralty's logarithmic human calculators were merely emulating this here computer, on account of lacking one'
asciilifeform: but instead an entity which simulates the behaviour of one where possible (in much the same way a tcp/ip telephone attempts to behave like a traditional electric telephone.)
asciilifeform: just as in, for example, common lisp.
asciilifeform: on a proper computer, e.g., 'quicksort' or 'newton-raphson method' are distinct entities. and there are no 'programs' as such, only a graph of circuit linkages.
asciilifeform: this is how we got these things that we call 'computer' even though i can't flip a switch that stops all cpus and shows me all the places 'quicksort' is mentioned on the machine and which ones got invoked in the last 7 days.
asciilifeform: sometimes - a chimp finds a loose brick, and you have a little infestation problem.
asciilifeform: example of mr y and his thought process - http://lesswrong.com/lw/y3/value_is_fragile
asciilifeform: chinese system did then - and afaik, still does - select, with mind-boggling efficiency, for the uncreative 'human computer' type.
asciilifeform: moriarty: in point of fact, given correct hardware design ('dataflow' machine) neither compilers nor 'parallelism' as conventionally understood - are necessary concepts at all.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu, others : http://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2012/09/12/not-all-programmers-alike/#comment-3728 << smbx for the impatient.
asciilifeform: e.g., a crowd of simple 'visual basic' bots each playing arbitrage and programmed with a 'stop-loss' threshold
asciilifeform: !s chumpatron
asciilifeform: xmj: more fun - ferret out simplistic bots and rape them.
asciilifeform always wonders, on first meeting a trading bot enthusiast, whether he considers basic game theory and contemplates counterpoint rape-bot answers to his strategies.
asciilifeform: moriarty - lisp on x86 pc is 'lisp' in much the same way 'holy roman empire' is the roman empire.
asciilifeform: bounce: Forth is an example of 'lisp' re-invented by an outsider. there is another example - 'refal'. (soviet)
asciilifeform: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/07/my-navrozov-moments.html << linked from above, mr mold's explanation (written presumably before the chumpatron re-swallowed him, this time - for good.)
asciilifeform: haskell is an american chumpatronic masterpiece.
asciilifeform: (^ above is a terrible oversimplification. lm was not simply about language, but the entire interface.)
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: the final doom of smbx corp. was sealed by 'ai winter.' in turn, the demise of the lm ensured that there would be no 'spring' - because carrying on the work in a non-homoiconic language is much like attempting algebra with roman digits.
asciilifeform: i used to be rather into the idea of 'hard ai' before realized that we don't even know how to build a computer.
asciilifeform: i'll be impressed when they build something - anything.
asciilifeform: attempts at what ?
asciilifeform: currency can survive about five minutes with a dead usg << more complicated. reichsmark outlived reich by a few years (until occupying armies got their shit together)
asciilifeform: whoever bumped off the girl, the Sg gov happily covers for him.
asciilifeform: next year, after binge of dope in cia operative station: 'trial of cocaine baron takes bizarre turn after evidence - bag from his toilet tank - turns out to contain treatise on suicide methods. kilo of cocaine found in pocket of shitcoin ceo who jumped from tower.'
asciilifeform: but an 'official' price will exist, if only for the consumption of the faux btc press
asciilifeform: a 'gulch' or 'compound' or whateverthefuck the turdmeister of the day calls it - doubly so if pitched with fanfare to the drooling hordes - is an elementary honeypot, whether deliberately built as such or not.
asciilifeform: beck gulch << what an old chumpatron, snore
asciilifeform: speaking of whizzdum - recently read about 'luer's connector' and discovered that some of today's medicine men are campaigning to have it abolished. because dumbshit orderlies can't be trusted not to plug an x hose into a y port (e.g., x == blood 'in' and y == piss 'out')
asciilifeform wonders why folks always say they'd like to be 'employable' rather than 'fed and sheltered'
asciilifeform: just as unrelated q: anyone know of a laptop comp. currently on the market which isn't a complete piece of shit? (everything i see either has display with < 1080 lines, glossy, or both - imho unusable.)
asciilifeform: employ a mentat.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: if you're thinking of a sequel, might be interesting to go into the biological hooks made use of by a qualified ce (chumpatronic engineer)
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: re: chumpatronics? it was very spiffy.
asciilifeform: so, there's a compliant bank in the loop.
asciilifeform: so you get a vacuum that is about as good as the water's vapour pressure at the room's temperature & pressure. not bad. cheap. if you remember school - you used this 'medieval' gadget.
asciilifeform: water is pumped from a tank up, and then flows down a pipe back into the tank. in the down pipe, there's a spigot to the side, where a vacuum forms - water carries away air.
asciilifeform: so, for the record, what i'll call 'buterin's waterfall' - picture a water-powered vacuum aspirator pump, of a kind used in school chemistry class.
asciilifeform: (some people see this as something which has already happened, but that's besides the point of the example)
asciilifeform: or, also trivial example, that chinese sub off the californian coast.
asciilifeform: ^ trivial example
asciilifeform: chances are, vintage unit. otherwise, he'd probably succumb to the temptation to post photos of hand-crafted phonograph.
asciilifeform is not entirely awake but will attempt explain
asciilifeform: as i understand, they are simply baking on painting the tape 'dark enough' with arse-mouth lowball bids.
asciilifeform: had a thought. usg's btc price dampener strategy has no clear endgame - the 'ethereum' thing will carry on while the usd printing press runs, because it stands to reason they are running both the sell and -buy- ends of the machine. 'arse-mouth system.'
asciilifeform: hasn't worked correctly till about 2004 >> imperial collapse isn't terribly great for satellite constellations. as usa will soon discover.
asciilifeform: 19bn bezzlars? try to spend that much empty paper and buy one rocket.
asciilifeform: temperamental machines, they were, not where you'd stuff a precious handmade '40s nuke
asciilifeform: jurov: x86 is not scar tissue because it is popular, but because it genuinely sucks, and sucked from day 1 compared to virtually all known alternatives.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: simple heuristic. folks who incorrigibly piss in apartment lobbies, elevators - 'orcs.' those who don't - 'humans', or 'germans' if you like.
asciilifeform: and what his plan is for the recruited chump.
asciilifeform would much rather see computer cost (and worth) 50k then wheeled coffin
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: herr jobs is credited with resurrecting the company, but he actually strangled it and turned the taxidermied skin into a kind of animatronic dinosaur.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: steve jobs - as described in my 'hypercard' piece - was a master of chumpatronics, not of electronics. when he returned from exile, he zapped pretty much all r&d personnel, killed every project, smart or foolish, replaced all apple tech with repainted 'next'.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: bad example, 'pi' is a pseudo-open turd
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: hook it with any number of tablets and watch a film with your friends << verboten, order of usg dept. of copyrasty (riaa/mpaa/etc)
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu, kakobrekla: it is important to remember that mac product actually died. it is deader than many other dead things, even, because got hollowed out and taxidermied.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: who complains? vegetarians ?
asciilifeform digs for ancient report of zoologies who lost fingers, toes, nose, ears, eyes, cock to chimps in one evening. beasts he worked with for a decade, who decided to have some sudden fun.
asciilifeform did not personally measure chimp strength, cannot guarantee results.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: nontrivial - chimp has >2x the strength of a man gram for gram (muscle fiber quirk. they get greater synchronicity in fiber motion in place of our precision.)
asciilifeform vaguely recalls the zoology lesson - if condemned to choose what animal to be locked with unarmed, and choices are chimp and, e.g., grizzly, or lion - pick the mega-carnivore. at least quick death.
asciilifeform: just as, in the words of an old sage, 'a kill file is simply a file containing list of people you are going to have killed.'
asciilifeform is actually rather fond of analogue computing as a concept, and as it once existed, but has yet to meet a 'meatware' proposal that isn't transparently grantsmanship.
asciilifeform: jurov: turing's apparatus is not even a particularly good abstraction for electric computer. much less 'wet' kind.
asciilifeform: why even bring this up: the 'answer' - physical structure of properly folded protein - is 'computed' instantly.