funkenstein_: seeing as the same shit keeps coming up.. a certain amount of accepting what we have might be in order
trinque: ascii_field: I do indeed read the logs
ascii_field: but -don't wake me up- if you want to be 'the delusionist'
ascii_field: trinque: the only unsolved problem that would make a palpable difference is the home ic fab. which makes home satellite launch look trivial.
trinque: ascii_field: are there not smaller discoveries which would be useful independently which would build towards the final product?
funkenstein_: the car is a common example
assbot: Logged on 25-02-2015 21:13:46; mircea_popescu: the entire "act from cause not towards purpose" thing on trilema is exactly a vaccine against that.
ascii_field: read the logs.
trinque: didn't seem to work out for them
ascii_field: trinque: 'soviet economics' was the kind of fool who is the only kind who can make sufficiently long bets.
ascii_field: than otherwise.
ascii_field: the only thing i can promise for the $trillion is: more material for the next fella to work with
trinque: so then this sounds like soviet economics at best :D
Chillum: Babe the Blue Ox?
trinque: not a good representative of the solutions nature comes up with
ascii_field: or even the shirt on your back.
Chillum: ascii_field: my point was if someone hacks my camera trigger device they can take pictures and then I will unplug it
trinque: ascii_field: doesn't seem that nature takes these massive leaps
Chillum: well if you want the same thing without wifi just use an arduino
Chillum: it runs C code on the processor
Chillum: mats: through the serial port you can completely rewrite the firmware... though I suppose on the wire it may be running some spyware, but then so could anything
trinque: ascii_field: the idea was you get everything modeled relationally, and then user can reason about schema rather than myriad other representations of structure
ascii_field: there is no incremental path from -committee of crud- to -individual fits-in-head-
trinque: and failed imo because of refusal to do the mundane
trinque: ascii_field: I bring this up because this was a far more incremental change to the stack than you propose, and it still failed miserably
mats: can't securely access the thing
ascii_field: trinque: and where is the man? also dead ?
Chillum: but if you ever wanted to add a webserver to your lamp, this is the device
trinque: ascii_field: the company of course folded because he let a mundane consulting business die because this relational userland he was after was "obviously where computing should go"
ascii_field: the tech level to allow -one individual who can hold the design in his mind- to attempt it - wasn't there yet.
ascii_field: funkenstein_: expecting an answer to this question in a sentence is the height of folly
mats: 16:04:57 <+Chillum> I just got an ESP8266, a $4 chip that has a microcontroller that can run either C or Lua with 512kb memory 8GPIOs and a wifi card with a high level interface. All the size of a SD card and running off 300ma(peak) at 3.3v
funkenstein_: so what's wrong with the 801 tell it straight up
trinque: all these "puppets" and "chefs" exist because that which holds state on unix is flimsy shit
trinque: it was "true" that the system he wanted is far more robust than sed/awk-ing /etc
ascii_field: 'fly to the moon by stacking chairs'
funkenstein_: a lot of the "failures" .. are pretty fucking impressive
trinque: ascii_field | trinque: are you able to see value in the truth as an abstract ? << I had the opportunity to work for a guy that thought the relational database should be central to operating system design
ascii_field: see, idiot derps who do not know the state of the art and say that they do not need to, because taiwan isn't making it and their corner computer store isn't selling it - belong in africa.
ascii_field: funkenstein_: i am always entertained by folks commenting 'he does not know history of computing', when themselves they do not even know most of it, because it happened on the wrong side of the atlantic
Chillum: I am sure big brother has something better though
Chillum: at least little brother has it too
Chillum: one of these and a small battery could record wifi SSIDs and signal strength and time for days
ascii_field: read the link.
ascii_field: funkenstein_: if you know the organism in question, link him to my answer.
Chillum: I just got an ESP8266, a $4 chip that has a microcontroller that can run either C or Lua with 512kb memory 8GPIOs and a wifi card with a high level interface. All the size of a SD card and running off 300ma(peak) at 3.3v
ascii_field: i assume that the discussion concerned my www site, but my points stand even if not.
ascii_field: citing the failures that he and his ilk were responsible for, as proof that problems cannot be solved.
ascii_field: 'that the protection stuff like checking array boundaries and pointer validity can be handled by the compiler just as effectively as it can in hardware, with the running product a lot faster and a lot simpler to build.' << imbecilic garbage
Chillum: people believe all kinds of stupid shit, even the brilliant ones
ascii_field: trinque: are you able to see value in the truth as an abstract ?
trinque: fuck it; god will solve the problems.
trinque: I have my doubts that a mind which believes in the will of allah produces anything of long term value
trinque: ascii_field: also how do you get someone who's sufficiently fanatical to do the project yet rational enough to do it correctly?
ascii_field: trinque: why would any powerful man use himself as another's rocket fuel? << in so long as this is phrased this way in his head - never.
ascii_field: Chillum: the only further comment i have for this is that you will be well-served to read up on actual scenarios resembling your hypothetical. rather then using 'zombie apocalypse' 3d shooters as a mental model.
trinque: why would any powerful man use himself as another's rocket fuel?
Chillum: gladly I live in an area where you could live off the land if you wanted to
Chillum: and any protection it does bring could be gained by someone able to pretend they are poor
funkenstein_: one has to inherently weight the present as more important, it's an endless problem
ascii_field: trinque: which is why i said 'fanatics'. folks who understand that they are human rocket stages and accept this.
Chillum: don't think poverty will protect you from the violent marauders
trinque: funkenstein_: I'm not saying long term projects can't exist; however, I think they're doomed if they do not benefit the participants all along the way
ascii_field: Chillum: markets do not disappear in a collapse, but become 'seller's markets' very quickly. the cost of a ticket on schindler's train was a bag of diamonds. the cost of a ticket on same train after it left - $infinite.
Chillum: idiot schmucks will always go the way of idiot schmucks
trinque: funkenstein_: sure if we substitute my tangible feeling of "being" for some abstract soul which the society may chain to popular groupthink, we can make people do all kinds of things
ascii_field: srsly this is not a secret, there is ample literature on what actually happens to idiot schmucks who think that money is magical
mats: they'll just put a knife in your chest and take it.
Chillum: they may just grab you for your sweet ass
Chillum: ascii_field: same goes for food and other supplies
ascii_field: Even after the fall of the roman empire gold had value << aha, very valuable, but nothing in particular attaches it to your earthly carcass.
funkenstein_: trinque, so it is automatic to care about all times then
ascii_field: 'And so, the answer to the perennially annoying question “How do I invest my money for it to survive financial, political and commercial collapse?” is this: “There is no answer to your question. Try asking a different question, to which there might be an answer.”'
trinque: funkenstein_ | you might as well ask how you make anyone care about what happens to themselves << no, this is automatic for me
Chillum: mats: historically civilizations do collapse so far, and no further. Even after the fall of the roman empire gold had value
mats: buying gold for a crisis is a bet that civilization will collapse this far -- and no further.
Chillum: then just leach off of it
funkenstein_: you might as well ask how you make anyone care about what happens to themselves
Chillum: It would be nice to be born into a society that had spent the last 20 generations engaging in long term planning to make life easy
ascii_field: the actual number is uninteresting
ascii_field: because the only approach that i believe to be correct, will result in something tangible only long after we are all dead.
ascii_field: trinque: the normal paradigm of investment and return fails here
trinque: say I'm the firewall company, I'd not only make my thing, I'd spend money punching holes in everyone else's products all day
trinque: ascii_field: dunno the answer, but the question would be how you increase the visibility of the problem to those that have resources to fund the thing, but don't currently care
ascii_field: trinque: again can't speak for you, but i can't create the customer any more than can create the weather.
trinque: ascii_field: sounds like the kind of thing you'd need an arms race and a benefactor on one side to produce
funkenstein_: and the payee decides what that means i suppose?
ascii_field: but he is not permitted to tell them to stop drinking.
Chillum: retarded sells, just look at the state of movies
ascii_field: it's rather like being a doctor who caters specifically to alcoholics
ascii_field: the basic idea of the thread is that no one is willing to pay - as in, -really- pay - for non-retarded things
ascii_field: the last paragraph.
ascii_field: trinque: so corporatize the "chumpatron", not the lab, and own both >> see my comment to mircea_popescu >> http://trilema.com/2015/on-owning-things/#comment-113503
trinque: you could build a product that's an order of magnitude better than what they offer in your sleep
trinque: they're all rubbish, and all certainly horribly insecure
trinque: to pull an example out of my ass, there are loads of these "managed firewalls" in american businesses
Chillum: (bluing is the discoloration metals show when heated)
Chillum: well as far as compact wealth that is fungible goes it cannot be beat. Bitcoins are great if there is still an internety
ascii_field: trinque: this fails because the subject of the thread is - as i firmly believe - necessarily the work of -one mind.-
ascii_field: Chillum: read it. and understand that the amount of gold that is -yours- is the amount that fits in your body cavities - and, with modern techonology, not even this.
trinque: ascii_field: re: earlier thread, seems like it calls for a lab attached to a (perhaps unrelated) other business
Chillum: I wish I had a satoshi for everything in the channel that was required reading
Chillum: people get rich enough that they don't need to delve into their stash then they die without telling anyone
assbot: Logged on 30-08-2014 20:46:17; asciilifeform: but, as every treatise on the subject invariably begins with, first try to understand what is to be hidden - and from whom
ascii_field: this is the universal explanation for buried treasure, incidentally
ascii_field: Chillum: familiar with the fact that jars of roman gold, silver are often found even now ?
Chillum: my point is the historically having gold has helped people in bad times
Chillum: I am not sure that happened during the Zimbabwe collapse
ascii_field: and not for airdrop, but for a little gruel and another day of not being shot and thrown to the dogs.
ascii_field: Chillum: it is quite plausible to a large group of people to pull gold out of the ground
Chillum: I don't know why you think it is absurd for a large number of people to be able to pull enough gold out of the ground to get an air drop
ascii_field: there was once an engineer who occupied himself with the design of a kind of bathyscaph, a sort of 'mecha' suit in which one could survive being beaten and bitten by bears.
ascii_field: Chillum: the entire exercise is what i call a 'bear suit'
Chillum: regardless of how they can afford those resources
Chillum: the fact is that anyone with enough resources to survive will be a target
Chillum: the idea behind broken bits of jewellery is that instead of coins that make you look rich it seems like you are selling petty amounts of scrap
ascii_field: or the absurdity you were asked to believe, that villagers could have 'food flown in' in exchange for collectively 'picking up gold flakes'
ascii_field: rather than ripped from your fresh corpse by whoever.
ascii_field: Chillum: consider the question of what kind of social structure has to be in place for the gold chain, etc. to remain yours to trade
Chillum: I read that the banks stopped serving accounts but still operated safe deposit boxes
mircea_popescu: oh, the weimar stuff ? yeah that was incredibly disciplined.
mircea_popescu: there is such a thing as group delusion. that's how the french ended up with the urinals.
Chillum: I read a journal from a woman in Germany when they had their hyperinflation. She was selling the links from her gold chain one at a time
Chillum: I know during the collapse in Zimbabwe people went to the rivers to collect gold dust and pooled it to have food flown in from out of country
assbot: Logged on 07-04-2015 00:10:01; mircea_popescu: just like having a car doesn't alow having gasoline. it's true that often people who have cars also independently have gasoline, but the two are fundamentally unrelated, and there is such a thing as the fool's breakdown, ie, car's outta gas on the side of hte road.
mircea_popescu: i am perhaps the only one here that has actually gone through a collapse, and if that's worth for anything - goods aren't helpful.
Chillum: I prefer to deal with other types of people
Chillum: the only drugs I am stocking are antibiotics
mircea_popescu: wouldn't just keeping a bunch of drug dealers (actual kind, not the derps) on your rolodex work better for the purpoise ?
Chillum: not prepared to live in the forest or anything
gabriel_laddel: ascii_field: I'll note that without comprehensive design documents others have to retrace your steps entirely and anyone who is a fan of your work is running on grey goo pipe dreams.
mircea_popescu: http://33.media.tumblr.com/350a2def4fc98d6a2ac1c3e2ddb2aa86/tumblr_nb9gz1n6B21rnlorio1_500.gif << have another one then alf. sorry about the one you had to return.
Chillum: so unless they are taken away or destroyed I will have something
ascii_field: the gurl's expression !!!
mircea_popescu: my question is, where did the guy find condoms that small.
mircea_popescu: in other news, here's a ben_vulpes scene. http://36.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_letr2hFxlq1qe3i9to1_1280.jpg
mircea_popescu: well... maybe. practice has a theory all of its own
ascii_field: mircea_popescu: largely because i am not mircea_popescu and not in control of the variables.
ascii_field: sure, could have tripped and fell to death in the bath.
ascii_field: and i could have easily built all of this by 25 y.o. if martians had landed and given me the means.
mircea_popescu: maybe the emacs.
mircea_popescu: yeah, for none of this is any of the current toolchain useful, from plant to emacs.
mircea_popescu: incidnetally - would you also have the selective inhibition design ?
mircea_popescu: but i have no doubt this is correct, chiefly because that';s how the brain works.
mircea_popescu: ie, you'd end up with half the space or more taken up by indexes
ascii_field: the current addressing schemes are retarded
mircea_popescu: if you do that the current addressing schemes would never work
ascii_field: mircea_popescu: what'd you have it do << a number of things, which resolve to 'the contents ending up where needed by dependency-graph without being asked every time'
ascii_field: memory as a device that just sits there, is a 20th c. idiocy.
ascii_field: nor am i especially interested in building yet another computer with passive memory.
ascii_field: (before anyone spits back the old paper re: the fact of c-gates implemented on xilinx fabric - go and see how many of them you can fit. and how much room left for interconnects.)
gabriel_laddel: ascii_field: o. I thought that you could if they have an entirely known design?
ascii_field: gabriel_laddel: not exactly. even if you could secure an infinite supply of the particular fpga, it turns out that they are not actually very general. in that you cannot efficiently implement muller c-gates in them.
mircea_popescu: which is what "not leaking" is, in mathematical terms.
mircea_popescu: and no, it's not an argument against abstraction period. it's an argument against using abstractive methods outside of their domain of definition
gabriel_laddel: ascii_field: iirc your argument was "it isn't worthwhile because if you succeed you'll not have enough of them to do anything interesting with"
mircea_popescu: the latter are computable.
ascii_field: interested readers can find the threads.
ascii_field: gabriel_laddel: to avoid rehashing ancient thread for a fifth time, stuck at the realization that reversing xilinx is futile.
gabriel_laddel: I can't remember your exact words, but I think you said in here once "my time would have been better spent putting together a demo than blogging"
ascii_field: and it cannot be done under the thumb of vc sc4mz0rz
ascii_field: you are doing another thing, spray-painted to resemble 'it'.
gabriel_laddel: ascii_field: we've already discussed this. I'm for doing it piecemeal because there are no other options.
ascii_field: it isn't hiding somewhere in the jungle
ascii_field: gabriel_laddel: the type of funding necessary cannot be 'found'
gabriel_laddel: ascii_field: Sometime in the next 48 hours I'm going to drop some information in here regarding the #b-a distro, and when finished with that move on to finding funding again.
ascii_field: (short version - it is too much like the proverbial 'mars voyage' - counter-economic leap.)
ascii_field: i will confess that it took me retardedly long time to understand that my hypothetical rebellion against the soup cannot be funded or organized for some very fundamental reasons
ascii_field: i've been fighting a largely losing battle for many years, attempting to convince folks to imagine - in their spare time - that a computer is not necessarily von neumann and the 50 yrs of shit soup
ascii_field: 'imprinting' not in the strict zoological sense, but in that of having encountered a concept during 'formative years' when a fella is figuring out wtf 'a computer is'
gabriel_laddel: mircea_popescu: nonsene. We know any programming language that doesn't allow the operator to manipulate its own ast programmatically is going to waste the operator's time.
ascii_field is a believer in sapir-whorf to the extent that he very much observed the braindamage caused by imprinting on certain programming concepts, in a great many people.
mircea_popescu: gabriel_laddel you're on very slippery ice sheet there. i'll save you the egg and point out that you can't form an apriori representation of why X model is no good.
gabriel_laddel: because some of the $random-african-gruntlangs don't have any means to describe the future or past.
mircea_popescu: but these might have been broken before
ascii_field: what i am speaking of is the effect i observed where folks learn to like fundamentally uninteresting concepts.
ascii_field: gabriel_laddel: there is also such a thing as the mental equivalent of stretched arse-rape sphincter
mircea_popescu: there's a guy who learns and his learning is wasted effort. there's a different guy who learns for sport.
mircea_popescu: but he never learned any of them in THAT sense.
gabriel_laddel: ascii_field: it is palpable. << Yep. Let's say, for example that you learn perl. Nothing you learn has any use outside of... writing perl. If you learn javascript, java, C++, scala etc. idem. The web and these related "technologies" are going away. All of the effort poured into learning them is wasted.
ascii_field: i'm not yet sold on the fact of that boy's existence being more fun than american jail.
mircea_popescu: then it suddenly becomes fascinating, like a puzzle of sorts.
ascii_field: this is why i often say that in buenos aires i would have to learn shoemaking or the like
mircea_popescu: ascii_field that gets extremely easier once you fuck his gf. you notice the subtle difference between the same object as he perceives it, and as it is.
ascii_field: the real reason i will not compete with the 16 y.o. is not stamina per se, but that i cannot trick my brain into actually caring
mircea_popescu: see, and this is a FINE example of what i mean by "leak like a sieve". your observation was in fact accounted for in my model. because i hadn't leaked it. because it doesn't leak there.
mircea_popescu: hence the earlier "solid wall"
ascii_field: and to this well-known maxim i will add mine, 'giving a fuck about the problem is worth 100 iq points'
mircea_popescu: perhaps the cpu also gets tired, but the rate of loss due to that has not yet been apparent, at least to me.
mircea_popescu: if you crash less often, you need less computer time to do the same work.
mircea_popescu: another approach to it is to point out that human brains leak like a fucking sieve.
ascii_field: the spiffiest tires will not turn 'trabant' into 'mazerati'
ascii_field: like the tires of a car
ascii_field: but this is a rather separate component of effective intelligence
ascii_field: 'knowing what parts to skip' is -the- wunderwaffen.
mircea_popescu: but im not going to because i see wtf that is freom a mile away, including the gender of the author and her parenting errors in her own kids.
mircea_popescu: and yes, probably the 22 me would have gotten through the fucking with phase in seven weeks and it'd take me 9 now if i tried it.
mircea_popescu: ben_vulpes much deeper than that. like "i readily see THE REAL REASON this is so, so i can skip eighteen paragraphs worth of confused "explicatory" nonsense
ben_vulpes: "this notion is strongly similar to these other notions i'm already familiar with, so i'll integrate it more quickly"?
mircea_popescu: depends ben_vulpes. the problem chiefly is that as the mental models get much better, learning speed collapses.
ben_vulpes: mircea_popescu: is there a difference between how smart/dumb one is and how quickly or slowly one learns?
mircea_popescu: im i the only guy too absorbed in self-love to notice this phenomenon ?
ascii_field: will never get the iq points back.
mircea_popescu: ever. no matter the field.
mike_c: i think you are unqualified in that field. the wrong job is pretty mind numbing, especially if you don't see the path away from it.
mircea_popescu: list of things actually killing the mind ? 0, so far.
mircea_popescu: list of things slavegirls think aforehand "kill the mind" ? 559876985975 items.
ascii_field: high-paying job that kills the mind is a suicide.
mike_c: but the safety net is still there. regardless of that, you could get a high paying job in software. just not one you want.
ascii_field: most of the pharma folks closed down r&d entirely.
ascii_field: the field died.
ascii_field: mircea_popescu: why do you suppose i'm not there
mircea_popescu: sheeet, they even took bugpowder in.
mircea_popescu: ascii_field btw, how about you get them personal friends in the wot and start a something.
mike_c: idk.. you are looking for a very specialized type of job. I don't think you'll get far complaining there aren't a lot of them.
mircea_popescu: for your peace of mind : the last time a mast broke off in a storm the year was 1715.
ascii_field: and if mast breaks off in the storm
ascii_field: i'm afraid that i cannot say more without breaking oath to the personal friends for whom i carry out this work.
ascii_field: and enable particular flavours of reverse engineering which are otherwise impossible
ascii_field: but invention of tools to speed up the process
mike_c: not whole, just most. like any other field.