asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2016-04-08#1448517 << again, unlike literally the entire whole of rest of computingdom, the old adas are neither less-broken NOR BETTER-supported.
jurov: and the lmao line is badly escaped, too
jurov: (see $currentline-2 in the btcbase log)
PeterL: http://btcbase.org/log/2016-04-08#1448483 << I said the same thing in the other chan a few hours earlier http://log.bitcoin-assets.com/?date=07-04-2016#1443837
asciilifeform: quite unlike the rest of computing, yes, but don't take my word for it
davout: ben_vulpes trinque mats ty, fixed. this particular flavour of retardation has been shot in the head
mats: upon arrival at http://fr.anco.is/2016/bitbet-auction-a-winrar-is-znort987 i am greeted with auth dialog and 'The server says: Fuck you..'
ben_vulpes: much like the language in its explicitness.
phf: i've been getting a lot of not founds to those urls, so hopefully some of the bots are now going to be satisfied
asciilifeform: mthreat: incidentally, the old wot was imported, you oughta be able to voice yourself.
asciilifeform: welcome to the new planet mthreat
mthreat: jeez i take a little trip and there's a revolution
asciilifeform: mod6: for a good example of one that ~isn't~ - see the epic mircea_popescu thread with otp!
mod6: i understand that he realized many cipher text messages were signed with "HH" at the end.
asciilifeform: is there a skipped log line..?
mod6: maybe im not talking about the same thing... turing, while trying to crack enigma
mircea_popescu: ideally the way to do this is, auction master gives out a hash, everyone must include it
mircea_popescu: "yes" only means something among the sort of idiots that'd take that.
mod6: is it a real thing about turing and the HH thing?
mod6: maybe i was smoking crack. got him a bit confused with pascal and the war, and the accounting bit
mod6: oh yeah, leibniz created the 'stepped reckoner' right?
mod6: yeah, thats the thing
asciilifeform: condemned to the pascaline!11
asciilifeform: aha, earliest known clockwork calc is 'antikythera mechanism'
mod6: meanwhile, the 30 years war raged
BingoBoingo: greeks might have made them too
mod6: oh, yeah, probably not the first or anything.
mircea_popescu: who invented the thing is iffy, many people did
BingoBoingo: pete_dushenski: I am tentatively adding the t as per davout's announcement
davout: the payment has just arrived
BingoBoingo: davout: I am not seeing extra spaces in there
mircea_popescu: davout to try and get a final settlement here, i owe you 199.45006789, add to which 13.37 ; you owe me 86 for to be distributed to the shareholders, add to which 4.83378422 from the hotwallet, add to which 3.35043347 (335.04334737×.01), comes to 118.63585027 altogether. that sound right ? winner pay you yet ?
davout: BingoBoingo: the "highest bid at 86 Bitcoin" link has extra spaces
mircea_popescu: mod6 they have it on mouseover.
mod6: so cheers for getting them up and going. :]
mod6: glad to be back reading the logs though.
pete_dushenski: davout: cheers. you're probably not the only one who would've preferred known and (somewhat) trusted owner vs. unknown quantity, but hey money talks and bullshit walks.
mod6: asciilifeform: thanks for the ada link
pete_dushenski: omfg do they ever
mod6: pete_dushenski: hey I did get your message about the weird balance thing. i've seen that myself too.
gribble: The operation succeeded.
mircea_popescu: that was the roaring 2010s tho neh ?
hanbot: didn't i see some pic or other of moscow's main freeway, >15 lanes, absolutely gridlocked?
mircea_popescu: bucharest was in the same position.
mircea_popescu: fortunately no earthquakes. hopefully they mostly fixed it.
mircea_popescu: and tbh, at some point in the 90s moscow was half falling over, actually.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform> like the sov towns in far east that are frozen ghost towns now. << this makes one hell of a trip btw.
asciilifeform: (as do the scum, yes)
asciilifeform: like it or not, 'good things flow to the city'
asciilifeform: note also that the far east ghost towns in su, but moscow is not.
BingoBoingo: asciilifeform: Did not emerge from asphale, about 15-20 feet away from asphalt. Crew that exploded pipe was doing some shit to prep the site for an old folks home.
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: you say this, but i've never seen fireballs emerging from the asphalt.
asciilifeform: like the sov towns in far east that are frozen ghost towns now.
asciilifeform: point being, the time will come when $infrastructure explodes and is not repaired.
BingoBoingo: You'd be surprised where they pipe gas here
asciilifeform: they heat with cow shit.
mircea_popescu: hanbot no, she physically mans the kiosk. like the job someone would be normally hired to do, and get a wage.
mircea_popescu: much like byzantine peasant couldn't construct the orthodox delusion ; much like alf teh bee dog can't construct washington.
mircea_popescu: the only thing she can't do is, construct the mental infrastructure of pretense she subscribes to.
mircea_popescu: hanbot but she has to do the sales as it is!
hanbot: the initiative and work involved in the actual sales is rarely something an old woman can accomplish
asciilifeform: right here they are, i imagine, holding up reagan
asciilifeform: so - them!
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: didja have in ro the old folks holding up pictures of stalin ?
hanbot: mircea_popescu it's possible something like that is the cheaper option for a certain sort of person in a certain sort of context
mircea_popescu: these people are, basically, very dedicated cultists. they WANT a CERTAIN SOMETHING to be how things work. and will disregard and ignore anything and everything else. because they're not, fundamentally, opressed. they're, fundamentally, nazis.
mircea_popescu: the behaviour continues.
mircea_popescu: as evidenced to me and for my needs by the plain fact that even when the actual rational explanation is no longer applicable,
mircea_popescu: which is the problem here. even when it works, the "appstore" didn't work for the rational reason, but for the irrational one.
asciilifeform: it is a lulzy reversal, actually, normally it is i who 'none of these apparent X are true X'
mircea_popescu: and ftr, the woman would make 10x to 100x more selling on street.
mircea_popescu: a similar cognitive process would be to say : a) i don't fuck bricks ; b) another exists ; c) therefore, another fucks bricks.
asciilifeform: like in the 'pioneers land' trilema article.
mircea_popescu: so... no. no folks. no anything. just a snake of pressed shit eating its tail and wondering why the process is lossy.
asciilifeform: but my point was that folks-who-definitely-aren't-me own the whole lot.
mircea_popescu: you think the situation is peculiar to gold ? it is not.
mircea_popescu: nobody there.
mircea_popescu: yeah, they are. again : wizard of oz.
asciilifeform: the owners are not imagined.
asciilifeform: recall the lab robot thread ?
mircea_popescu: "the folks" you speak of are wholly imagined.
asciilifeform: any fly in their soup is a friend of mine.
asciilifeform: the folks who carved up and own the whole fucking universe, are responsible for this.
asciilifeform: it is classic app store - 'don't like it? go sell on the street, keep 100% of the pennies you get'
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform no i know the history of how it ended up in. i'm just saying, it really is pretty stupid, useless and wtf already.
mircea_popescu: dude... what happened to full price for the stock + full wage for me selling it + benefits.
mircea_popescu: in entirely unrelated but omfg i can't believe this - cascadia dwelling derpy mother of slavegirl that wants to think of self as "fiber artist" but otherwise crochets like any old woman since time immemorial, landed what to her appears as a very good deal. she sells her stuff in a senior citizen center gift shop. for a 15% comission. to understand each other : she provides the merchandise. she provides the sales workforce. sh
asciilifeform: ('let the n bits add at once' etc)
asciilifeform: i dug out the 1-bit cpu because i have a weakness for exotic archs that might be amenable to optical or otherwise 'this handful of switching elements' incarnation.
mircea_popescu: i'm unpersuaded. yes the breadbox is neither arbitrary nor undefined in the bug discussion. here however, no such benefit. there is no "size".
asciilifeform: but otherwise registers are a necessary evil, a teaspoon-sized bucket is possible but generally not wanted
asciilifeform: (personally i favour the... trit)
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: you gotta pick some quantum of info for the logic to operate on.
asciilifeform: (you can trivially bit-serial add/subtract, but not mult/div unless by powers of the base)
mircea_popescu: it's not directly clear the notion of bit is even relevant
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: do you recall the 1-bit cpu thread ?
mircea_popescu: you know, thinking about it... what exactly is the rationale even of the concept of "int" ?
mircea_popescu: in other news, http://40.media.tumblr.com/7721937b94021017b390613747b70b10/tumblr_o0f40swxzv1tk9udjo1_1280.jpg
asciilifeform: and these are emulated, pretty elegantly.
asciilifeform: because the kdf9 had ~weird~ (by modern standards) data types, e.g., 96-bit mantissa, etc.
phf: top /r/bitcoin post is about some guy for bought bitcoin for $20 that he forgot about, now has $800k. this is like The Sun style bullshit "found million dollars in gradma attick"
mircea_popescu: "it wasn't a real company because we didn't count for shit in the sale"
asciilifeform: 1ofthesethingz doesn't belong!1
pete_dushenski: phf: if the sale of a bitcoin company for 250k btc didn't get mentioned, a measly 86 btc sale doesn't stand much chance of crossing the lips of the peeple
asciilifeform: with motherfucking sane orthogonal persistence!1
mircea_popescu: phf they mostly get mentioned derisively, tho. it's a sort of templeos/timecube/whatever, they got their alt-reality, sticking to it, nothing happens in it, etc.
asciilifeform: in other 'news', http://users.cis.fiu.edu/~weiss/ada.html << useful data structures stuff
phf: so i don't read hackernews or reddit, they are mentioned here a lot though, so i decided to check if a sale of bitcoin company for 86BTC (damn) is going to get mentioned anywhere. nope. nada.
pete_dushenski: there were no signed bids before that
pete_dushenski: thus, yours was the first bid
gribble: The operation succeeded.
BingoBoingo: ;;later tell davout delete xmlrpc.php from your wordpress install and you will be 95% of the way to securing your blawg
pete_dushenski: heh fr.anco.is shows pingbacks in 'recent comments'. i'll take the free advertising.
mircea_popescu: danielpbarron and thestringpuller also bid
mircea_popescu: the auction
pete_dushenski: aha. was speaking to two other points in s.bbet's history however : peak and present
pete_dushenski: ^updated. realised i'd left the calculated p/e in months rather than the standard years.
mircea_popescu: "Ada.Text_IO is a "package" that comes with Ada. (In Ada 83, the package name is just Text_IO, and for compatibility, Ada 95 also accepts the shorter name.) We'll learn more about packages later."
gribble: The operation succeeded.
gribble: The operation succeeded.
mircea_popescu: (contrary to what noob scientists may think, "a breadbox" is neither arbitrary nor undefined in that sentence)
asciilifeform: the concept pervades physics.
mircea_popescu: anyway, re earlier discussion, i guess it'd be worth belabouring the point that nothing therein contained is an argument against using ada. it's still a great technical solution, for bounds checking, for other reasons, it's still a great practical solution, for native linkability with c object code, for other reasons. same stands for scheme, still best option for a scripting language for bitcoind.
mircea_popescu: lol i guess you're gonna buy a new car with the btc thus saved ?
asciilifeform: if you could kill the shitstack, incl gpu, yes - even browser.
mircea_popescu: this is WHY your "fits in head", btw. well justified cover for the "on the basis of the pi we know, the largest house that can stand is 11 feet tall"
phf: so doing awk through my logs, there's almost 10k lines "missing"
asciilifeform: program that behaves sanely for all time so long as the iron holds up, is a reality. i write'em.
mircea_popescu: http://fr.anco.is/2016/bitbet-receivership-first-progress-report#comment-8471 << so it seems the winner is znort guy, 86 btc bid.
phf: about 2 minutes round time, yeah that's what i'm getting just doing an aggressive reconnect. note that there's possibly a lack of log visibility few seconds before it "quit"
mircea_popescu: Nov 27 03:56:48 * assbot has quit (Remote host closed the connection)
mircea_popescu: btw phf http://btcbase.org/log/2016-04-07#1447752 is actuallyt trivially checked, i have the logs of when it dc'd.
mircea_popescu: anyway. the forever-bitcoin, ready to be buried under the sea or w/e, is not happening. because : "<mircea_popescu> how are you going to define a sorting rule for a type you don't know yet. <asciilifeform> by knowing it ?" is actually inescapable.
mircea_popescu: but at least the whole "technology offers no solution for human problems" intuition now has much better footing in fact.
mircea_popescu: i am left without a solid basis to protest the use of magic numbers in code ;/
mircea_popescu: much of the same substance as rms' "oh, all things belong to all people", ie, lazy reductionism.
phf: of course, general purpose computer was always a device that high cast professional would sit in front in order to do computations, augmented by external systems or additional special purpose interchangeable boards. at least that was a pretty shared vision from engelbard to symbolics before the microcomputer
phf: the person that i was a [big bank] vendor with is actually doing that right now. a trained apl-er and mathematician, having spent few years interacting with [big bank] decision makers now consults on a handshake basis for companies that need a problem solved, but don't care if it comes with a pretty windows gui
mircea_popescu: in short, and to sum up : there may never exist such a thing as the "general purpose computer"
mircea_popescu: cesar, the guy whose name became an office
asciilifeform: captain did not turn knobs on the steam machine himself!
mircea_popescu: before the "mentats" got into depression, heavy drinking and asscrack-cracksnorting.
phf: in which case the kind of machines that the mentats are backed by require very particular characteristics, e.g. power above "novice usability" etc. so lisp machines and apl machines
mircea_popescu: incidentally, this is exactly how the trade houses used to work,
asciilifeform: phf: this remains the only practical thing.
asciilifeform: yes, idiots want this for phreee, without having to UNDERSTAND what they did.
phf: (that's one of the reasons i thought one of the more effective ways of organizing computer human interaction is have an equivalent of dune mentat backed by a computer, i.e. an advisor to decision makers who performs computation and analysis. something like that existed at the height of apl, and i know a handful of now old apl-ers who sat on boards and were responsible almost exclusively for "running the numbers")
mircea_popescu: yes. but it remains impossible for this proggy to be useful in the abstract :)
mircea_popescu: this'd make the "march lords in a wot - take your fief and guard it" naive approach to date actually very well grounded both factually and now philosophically ; and also offer a ready explanation of "why all this shit everywhere!"
mircea_popescu: and there's no way to specify him out of the machine or vice-versa. for reasons that perhaps go all the way to godel
mircea_popescu: or to put it another way : the reason software houses denegerate into makework facilities is much more fundamental than any sort of policy. in point of fact, a numeric computer of the sort we're using is NOT useful in either logic or math but as a shorhand for an actual logician or mathematician that takes the abortive nonsense the machine spits out, and enchants it into actual usable truth.
mircea_popescu: when i say "therefore - we should all eat an onion" you can bring that obhection
asciilifeform: but it is the perfect and in fact traditional excuse for inaction.
mircea_popescu: about which the only thing that can be rightly said is that - it will crash the next larger system.
mircea_popescu: except the larger the things they tried to build, the worse it got. but then they fixed it. because, as alf the greek beedog says, "it IS possioble to make wall that won't leak!!11"|
asciilifeform: the very first thing you learn of a computer, 'this thing has N states, yes, it is a large N, but N is an INTEGER'
mircea_popescu: phf the greeks notably thought they can build things, because they know "the actual value of pi"
phf: except opposite? all the math, until you find out that immediately available reality is finite
jurov: isn't this parallel with old greeks thinking "all numbers are rational".. till they found out they can't?
asciilifeform: the one and only sane fact is that we are stuck with CPU designed when ram was $50/kB.
mircea_popescu: i agree the crisis may only be in my head, but in point of fact i'm getting a whole paradigm reallignment thing, slightly queasy atm.
mircea_popescu: this, if sad, is an insecapable fact of the trade.
mircea_popescu: basically, all the architecture systems architects have managed yet to produce is the equivalent of "we need 10.1k builders - 100 to build and 10k to hold up the walls once we're done".
phf: mircea_popescu: fwiw a lot of vlsi research in the 70s and 80s was about that, how do we make bedrock a lot less engineery, but that all died with microcomputer revolution(sic)
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform in your terms : it IS NOT possible to make abstraction that does not leak until [condition about machine and only machine]. ALL the abstractions you make WILL leak once you run out of BRAIN.
mircea_popescu: phf worse that that, utterly undermines the fundamental reason against many things we supposedly argue against fundamentally.
mircea_popescu: let's work a simple example. suppose the case is that your machine is required to behave coherently with the rule that " among even numbers 2 - 8 is as much of a range as 1-4 is among natural numbers". the MOMENT your solution to this was "simple, just take $i*2", you have in fact c'd it.
jurov: btw, i doubt continuum can be grokked by humas, either
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform you can't define jack shit for a cpu without actually lying somewhere about what you did. is the problem.
asciilifeform: you define the field, and work in it
jurov: mircea_popescu: there's "unum" numeric system that does support ranges, and is improved replacement of ieee floats
phf: alf keeps saying that there are localized solutions to various classes of numerical problems
mircea_popescu: phf me either.
phf: i don't understand why the point mircea_popescu would be so controversial among compscis here, it's sort of the whole point of numerical analysis
asciilifeform: the possible values of a byte ~are~ contiguous.
mircea_popescu: there is no such thing as contiguity or ranges that machines can grok.
mircea_popescu: it is, in places such as ada, "must use contiguity" the EXACT equivalent of "my ai program thinks because the procedure is called <<understanding>>"
asciilifeform: they don't EXIST in engineering.
asciilifeform: represent the ones you can actually produce.
jurov: mircea_popescu: there is, using ranges
asciilifeform: why ALL the numbers ?
mircea_popescu: nothing imaginary about it, it's factual. the sum total of all satoshi in existence once the bitcoin ran its course will not be 21mn, but 131k satoshi less.
asciilifeform: so then ?
mircea_popescu: satoshis are integers. they are not floats.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: easy, just don't use the idiot ieee float
mircea_popescu: and the problem is not, apparently, resolvable by fixing the machines. even if you had ideal machines, they'd still haveto halve blocks, and the results would still conceivably be... this.
mircea_popescu: but in the end, i say this : the difference between 20999999.9769 and 21000000.0000 is the unpayable change. point of fact remains that we can't escape this situation where we draw one thing, and the machine pops up another thing.
asciilifeform: where i can specify EXACTLY how the bits lay down
asciilifeform: the precise handling of bits is, afaik, unique to ada and commonlisp
mircea_popescu: (that is in practice an equivalent of the mantissa trick, it allows you to get out of all sorts of problems)
mircea_popescu: i picked it as a point because of the "abstract number" thing, ie, redefine 4.
asciilifeform: with all of the costs.
mircea_popescu: and this is why it goes all the way down to fortran. the unresolved problems are actually very deep.
mircea_popescu: so then : this is c.
mircea_popescu: no, it sounds like until the day you can machine-represent an irrational quality without rounding, you're lying to yourself about having washed anything.
asciilifeform: thus far it sounds like 'why wash hands after shitting, there are microbes everywhere'
mircea_popescu: has no bearing on the problem that hey, math is still not represented, and some people'd like it to be.
mircea_popescu: the fundamental problem here being, obviously enough, that the FORMALISM used to describe math for and in computers is shit. and yes, on that shitty basis you will never have math, but an engineering-useful hack.
mircea_popescu: to the question "why did they not define EVEN correctly, eschewing this problem they perceive with mod" you answer that " ada is a civilized lang like commonlisp and there is NOT a presumption that integers are machine words !". This objection, if accepted as the correct response, ALSO invalidates using, say, XOR, and for the same reason.
mircea_popescu: sion in parentheses."
mircea_popescu: the problem is this : in ada manual it is said, "So we see that the predicate in the subtype Even cannot be a static predicate because the operator mod is not permitted with the current instance. But mod could be used in an inner static expression." ; it is further said "and, in addition, a call of a Boolean logical operator and, or, xor, not whose operands are such static predicate expressions, and, a static predicate expres
mircea_popescu: also not germane to the discussion.
asciilifeform: and place the bits CPU-independently.
mircea_popescu: this is not germane to the discussion.
asciilifeform: use machine integers when they fit.
mircea_popescu: ie, that the thing as-is is broken, and should be fixed, but other than that the idea is ok ?
asciilifeform: you "can't define this" but nevertheless define THAT,
asciilifeform: <+mircea_popescu> so this is what i mean by "it's a c" : whatever the
asciilifeform: except to the purpose of SHRINKING same.
asciilifeform: and i am NOT interested in further hacking on cpp turd.
mircea_popescu: so this is what i mean by "it's a c" : whatever the fuck you do, it's still going to be an ugly hack where you "can't define this" but nevertheless define THAT, which is just as broken.
mircea_popescu: a math machine is one where you define bitcoin max coins and the sum works properly and the series converges to 21mn
phf: asciilifeform: recall that i spent probably most time here on tinyscheme going as far as writing swank integration and unreleased bignums, i'm saying that you go through phases of "this is how we solve bitcoin". i grok the value of ada, and i grok the value of scheme, but neither are alternative-less. in fact with the amount of skill available, simply hacking on btc consistently we would've been further along
mircea_popescu: but that doesn't change the fucking fact!
mircea_popescu: " people don't like them, but it is also possibly the case that they've gotten as close as possible." <<< we're in exact agreement, here. no alternative known, and not likely possible.
asciilifeform: phf: afaik there still are none!
mircea_popescu: the criteria YOU use for c-ness is not unversal.
phf: alf is deeply infatuated at the moment with ada, so you should wait a few months :p
asciilifeform: the 'even' thing was not a built in op !
asciilifeform: srsly, consider reading the rationale ?
asciilifeform: why do you need the infix claptrap ?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: for the latter, common lisp.
mircea_popescu: there's some shoddy solutions for the first. chiefly, c. people don't like them, but it is also possibly the case that they've gotten as close as possible.
mircea_popescu: there's fundamentally two ways to approach computing : as an engineer and as a mathematician.
mircea_popescu: honestly a proper modern fortran would prolly be worth the time to make. this specifically means upgrading it more towards derive than towards haskell
asciilifeform: jurov: ml (predecessor of haskell) is sorta like haskell but without some of the more egregious mental illnesses
asciilifeform: at the cost of doing 25x moar wurk total.
asciilifeform: motherfucking MONADS
jurov: but that it took the "machine with unlimited memory" abstraction and took it to extreme
jurov: acc. to my hands-on experience, haskell's problem is not the cpu
PeterL: has the leak gotten bigger with time?
PeterL: firefox used to be the best, now it just feels slow and clunky when I try to use it