cazalla: ben_vulpes, btw, puta shop is closed sundays, so i'm gonna try to sync up blockchain on another machine. i stuck the memory in the other slots in this machine and memtest86 didn't detect any errors over night so might be the motherboard instead
cazalla: i guess i could've done a better job of illustrating that these variants are mostly copy/pasta jobs
ben_vulpes: "earlier versions of the popular to edit so as to make your own ransomware." << parser failure
assbot: UK traffic diverted through Ukraine - Dyn Research | The New Home Of Renesys ... ( http://bit.ly/1GR2w2H )
mircea_popescu: sounds more like a gay spat than anything, two people who figured "they" were the embassy or something.
mircea_popescu: BingoBoingo from what i hear, the entire polish embassy thing is bs. for one thing, they really didn't do much / nobody even knew existed. for the other, no police reports, or what exactly happened there ?
Adlai: callsigns aren't a good example, being assigned for uniqueness (and sometimes other properties such as perceived cleverness or snake-oil information hiding
mircea_popescu: Adlai people associate shorthand names with keys. sorta like nicknames/callsigns work in the army/airforce.
assbot: Logged on 17-02-2015 03:18:52; Adlai: let's take a step back. the wot should be about who trusts whom, and trust is verified on the basis of signatures. i see no reason why node identity should be based on anything other than signing keys.
gribble: The operation succeeded.
assbot: Logged on 14-03-2015 02:11:04; mike_c: gaming. for them, idk.
Adlai: http://log.bitcoin-assets.com//?date=14-03-2015#1052459 << ik: for them = gaming. also http://www.btcalpha.com/mpex/stocks/[sf]-{nsa,mg,qntr,mpif}/ all http 500
mircea_popescu: mostly because the sort of sluts i hang out with don't even have panties, but anyway.
mircea_popescu: egg-vest. i guess i may be the only one still wearing three piece suits,
mircea_popescu: this is like... the frist time i saw something intelligent on tardstalk in... years ?!
ben_vulpes: i imagine the forbidden city is a bit more well trafficked.
mircea_popescu: i guess this is a point. istanbul is a major airtraffic hub. the us... not.
ben_vulpes: the local airport is nominally 'international', but only to select destinations and not many into s.a., much less efficiently over to the south atl.
ben_vulpes: i live in the sticks.
ben_vulpes: mircea_popescu, asciilifeform: miser, pauper, it's all the same
BingoBoingo: danielpbarron: Well, if you manage to install OpenBSD it's basically closer to a normal OpenBSD environment than the pogo is.
assbot: Sources tell me the the NGC is working with Antiguan authorities and the Feds to shut down and to extradite an individual to Nevada soon.
chetty: travel can be fun if you relax and go with the flow, my first trip to Argentina was @29 hours
BingoBoingo: <cazalla> i'll fuck around with the pogo and hopefully learn a thing or two, that but that aside, what are odds shitty ram is cause of my problems.. memtest86 cites errors and i actually did have a couple blackouts a month back << Rather high
BingoBoingo: <cazalla> but i even tried 0.10 out of pure frustration and it wouldn't work either.. i actually think it might be related to ram in this pc, memtest86 reports bunch of errors << Bad Ram can keep a lot of things from working
asciilifeform: not incl. the gringo-tax thing
ben_vulpes: the strategic banana is a red herring.
ben_vulpes: they own linux.
assbot: The SECOND Official Ultra-Ever Dry Video - Superhydrophobic coating - Repels almost any liquid! - YouTube ... ( http://bit.ly/1x4PgEy )
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: internet breaks >> http://www.xach.com/naggum/articles/3141310154691952@naggum.no.html << you beheaded the link
asciilifeform: ben_vulpes: i must confess that i didn't grok the analogy with the strategic banana, retreat from the fortress, etc.
mircea_popescu: "A key growth hack we developed was the ability to show different headlines for social and search so we didnt impact our search traffic."
mircea_popescu: but gotta appreciate the "shared hosting for idiots thinking themselves corporate" thing. myths never die! INFINITE BANDWIDTH!!1
mircea_popescu: you could have bought that and driven it to a ytmnd for all the good they do anyone.
mircea_popescu: meanwhile, the thing's just been buying those spammy "related stories from across the net" slots. which... whatever. TRAFIC!
mircea_popescu: "The amazing thing about the platform is that it is a flat fee. This means that although our traffic has grown 350% year on year our costs have not changed. The depth of their out of the box features plus ecosystem of plugins ensured that we didt have to worry about commodity features such as SEO, site maps and editorial workflows as someone else had built and open sourced an approach."
mircea_popescu: this is perhaps one of the most idiotic bits of salescopy i've seen in recent memory : https://vip.wordpress.com/2014/03/11/10-growth-hacks-that-helped-metro-co-uk-achieve-27-million-monthly-visitors/
mircea_popescu: "We also migrated to the hosted platform as a service provided by Automattic on vip.wordpress.com. This enabled all of our costs and resources to be focused on growth as they didnt have to worry about caching, servers or anything that didnt improve experience for our readers or editorial users. "
mircea_popescu: funkenstein_ follow the bit to get into assbot's.
gribble: Currently authenticated from hostmask funkenstein!518d5cd7@gateway/web/freenode/ip.81.141.92.215. Trust relationship from user funkenstein to user funkenstein: Level 1: 0, Level 2: 0 via 0 connections. Graph: http://b-otc.com/stg?source=funkenstein&dest=funkenstein | WoT data: http://b-otc.com/vrd?nick=funkenstein | Rated since: never
assbot: Logged on 14-03-2015 04:11:17; mircea_popescu: you should prolly get in the wot.
mircea_popescu: you prolly want to get in the wot.
scoopbot: New post on Trilema by Mircea Popescu: http://trilema.com/2015/look-what-the-spam-dragged-in/
mircea_popescu: read the logs, it's all you need.
kakobrekla: welcome to the show.
funkenstein_: can i just say this is the first time i've been on television?
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform ^ chgeck it out, the internet breaks a little more.
mircea_popescu: the kicker, of course, being "She seems to think that professional careers require flawless writing ability, which I don't feel is the case."
mircea_popescu: leaving aside the "reddit principally exists as source of pre-spun spam text, because the cult of bayesianism really does work", jesus christ check out that life history.
mircea_popescu: so i get a piece of spam, http://trilema.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/spam.png and i'm curious, where did the script get that sentence ?
mircea_popescu: you're confusing me. weren't these servers ?
ben_vulpes: what's the mpex phrase?
assbot: Wolf Richter: The US Oil Bust Just Got Worse | naked capitalism ... ( http://bit.ly/1NUUnw3 )
ben_vulpes: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/03/wolf-richter-us-oil-bust-just-got-worse.html << pretty amazing how linear the 'fraking boom' looks in retrospect
mircea_popescu: "Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor implied. If you could repeat previously discredited memes or steer the conversation into irrelevant, off topic discussions, it would be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . .
mircea_popescu: http://qntra.net/2015/03/blythe-masters-to-head-wall-street-invasion/#comment-13670 << i lawled.
ben_vulpes: dude what the shit
ben_vulpes: lady v returns from travels tomorrow noon pst, so i'll likely be unavailable though the pm.
ben_vulpes: anyone who has other ideas re: muntzing cazalla's system please chime in
cazalla: i should be able to let you know whether it is or not by this time tmw
ben_vulpes: cazalla: you'll not be on the hook for b/w.
mircea_popescu: cazalla if memory corrupts then yes, on anything.
mircea_popescu: cazalla that may have corrupted a db then
cazalla: i'll fuck around with the pogo and hopefully learn a thing or two, that but that aside, what are odds shitty ram is cause of my problems.. memtest86 cites errors and i actually did have a couple blackouts a month back
mircea_popescu: this is what i meant : while the thing's not necessarily useful, at least it's trying.
cazalla: over the past few days i've tried a fresh install with 0.8.3, 0.8.6 and 0.10.0 and all have problems, and yes fresh as in fresh as i wiped hdd each time
mircea_popescu: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=831003.0 << look, a scamcoin that's not totally retarded from the get-go.
cazalla: ben_vulpes, confident nothing in there, but even if there was, i have nothing more than bitcents on machine connected to internet
ben_vulpes: OMIT any potentially sensitive data there.
ben_vulpes: and you're certain you know the contents of that logline?
ben_vulpes: twould be real funny if there were privkeys in that log statement.
ben_vulpes: jesus fuck the qa.
ben_vulpes: nailgun for the shitgnomes.
ben_vulpes: this is the obvious solution, yes.
mircea_popescu: just assign costs to cpu/bw usage, and price to information obtained, and there you go
mircea_popescu: ben_vulpes ideally it'd have a performance based model, where it sorts the connections according to a "value", periodically kicking the bottom one and taking a new one in
cazalla: i actually have older chain here on external hdd so im copying that over, it isn't a full one either though, i believe it is from other day when trying 0.8.6 so will try soon
ben_vulpes: not the hardcoded list, but the list of candidates constructed at/during runtime from which a node may consider downloading blocks.
mircea_popescu: dude, we went over this. the list is strictly made out of wot nodes. nothing else.
ben_vulpes: and to tag this with the 'block download' thread: nodes that misbehave like this must be booted from the dl candidate list.
ben_vulpes: although is that the hash of the existing block or the incoming block and are they even the same?
ben_vulpes: << considering running 'getblockhash 233764' and seeing if it returns the same hash
ben_vulpes: good god they're all like 35
mircea_popescu: http://40.media.tumblr.com/4462e776fa649fb2001fd50392084f46/tumblr_my1gxe6Ubl1s0yaxoo1_1280.jpg << check out the maids outfit that bride picked!
ben_vulpes: mircea_popescu: the movie...
ben_vulpes: as a side note, it's lovely to see pastebin die the good death.
assbot: Visual Culture Test - The Naked Woman pe Trilema - Un blog de Mircea Popescu. ... ( http://bit.ly/1xmlC8m )
mircea_popescu: http://trilema.com/2012/visual-culture-test-the-naked-woman/#comment-90764 << ahaha check it out how one patrick mcfarland made a btc in 2012
ben_vulpes: anyways cazalla your mission should you choose to accept it is to run down some useful debug information from a 0.8.6 that refuses to sync. i suggest booting your bitcoind with the -debug flag.
ben_vulpes: well you have places to hunt now don't you? and a foundation to whom to report shitgnomery in the wild?
scoopbot: New post on Trilema by Mircea Popescu: http://trilema.com/2015/the-portrait-of-young-lenin-as-an-artist-in-his-youth/
ben_vulpes: and then THEN you need to point the thing at a known-good node and see if you get the same results.
mircea_popescu: well considering all the bezzle poured in, it should be d.cbse
ben_vulpes: who's the fractional reserve this time?
ben_vulpes: new noobs, gorgeous weather, summer runup must be impending.
ben_vulpes: <bagehot> [04:12] Another argument I've heard is that thing like 'money' and the 'economy' exist as they are because of some constraints that are present in the natural world and so those constraints, eh, cause certain behaviors << it's called thermodynamics
mircea_popescu: lol the guy is trying, give him six months.
gribble: The operation succeeded.
gribble: The operation succeeded.
ben_vulpes: ;;later tell bagehot lmk if you want a hand with setting up networks off of the mainchain
mircea_popescu: (same idea re: "state preserving old buildings" put forth in http://trilema.com/2009/el-ingenioso-hidalgo-don-quijote-de-la-mancha-si-conul-andrei-pippidi/ drove teh romanaian nuts. but the point stands : why the fuck would the public treasury spend money to maintain some family houses of meanwhile dead families ? once the snail's no longer in the shell, the shell has no further meaning or import.)
ben_vulpes: <bagehot> [02:58] the keys used to keep bitcoins a store of value are. << wat
mircea_popescu: and so for them erring that way is sensible. but in actual fact... good god, the world is better off.
mircea_popescu: im sure if someone burned down reddit loads of future intellectuals will be all "o noes, the treasures lost". because they don't exactly know.
mircea_popescu: which is why i don't particularly share the worries of most intellectuals abnout the various books burned during history.
mircea_popescu: that's the important thing about colonialism : it is a plain statement of the fundamental worthlessness of the locals. what it says is that their culture is not worth reading.
mircea_popescu: that's the point of colonialism : much like b-a, you may only join it nude.
mircea_popescu: colonialism is about coopting the locals on its own terms only.
ben_vulpes: decimation, mircea_popescu: ksr, "We could be intruding on alien life." << isn't colonialism about coopting local structure if not eradicating them entirely?
ben_vulpes: <asciilifeform> presently the only package of -source- i've succeeded in building into a kernel that can be used on pogo - was netbsd. << it's over. eat a strategic banana, let them have the abandoned fortresses, move to the hills and build batteries of cheapish ground and air control devices to hold no mans land, lick wounds, regroup.
ben_vulpes: lineage, then.
ben_vulpes: and gypsies (so family legend goes) who assimilated into the local joomunity.
mircea_popescu: i dun think genes are what you think they are.
ben_vulpes: like gypsies, but according to the people in question, 'smarter'
cazalla: but i even tried 0.10 out of pure frustration and it wouldn't work either.. i actually think it might be related to ram in this pc, memtest86 reports bunch of errors
ben_vulpes: the glib retort is "we're not immigrants, we're jooz!"
mircea_popescu: ben_vulpes no dude, iut's not a real thing. the idea was that somehow there's a cutoff : up to moment t, imigrants are a ok. at t+1 they're now cattle. well, how do you choose t ?
ben_vulpes: attempt to mutate the state and you tempt him
cazalla: ya, i know, but i was using 0.8.3 and i have at times in the past thought fuck it, i'll just download the blockchain after a format
ben_vulpes: state is von neumann peeking through the curtain
ben_vulpes: oh, well. then what?
ben_vulpes: umpteen fucking centuries of having the bottom 90% snipped off of your ethnic group is much more pertinent
assbot: Logged on 13-03-2015 13:15:53; gabriel_laddel: the political position of "they're cattle, we're not" is totally A OK.
ben_vulpes: <mircea_popescu> http://log.bitcoin-assets.com/?date=13-03-2015#1051719 << that it may be << oh come now the israel thing is totally orthogonal to the 'everyone else is cattle' attitude
ben_vulpes: <mod6> ben_vulpes: here's v0091 of the patching script: http://thebitcoin.foundation/ml/btc-dev/2015-March/000066.html << once we have a source tree in the wild and some sort of provenance chain for it we can start talking about dvcs over email
ben_vulpes: wouldn't it be handy to have a thing that could watch the output of n different 'bitcoin's running in real time?
ben_vulpes: your 0.8.6 all of a sudden refuses to sync further?
ben_vulpes: cazalla: what's the full story here?
mircea_popescu: nah, chain's still ok on the older clients.
assbot: Logged on 13-03-2015 12:53:40; cazalla: and i am stuck using fucking electrum since then because for some reason, since bitcoin-qt 0.10.0 came out, my old 0.8.3, 0.8.6 throws errors and i can't fully sync and even lame attempt to try 0.10.0 falls flat.. i think maybe memory is fucked though unrelated, memtest86 throws a bunch of errors
ben_vulpes: <mircea_popescu> said.... everyone ever ? << nah. babes in haus is totally the way to go.
ben_vulpes: but on the other hand "you're a parent now - you must sacrifice your whole life for the new life"
ben_vulpes: <mircea_popescu> what's wrong is the idea that dependents can push one around in one's own castle. << myup.
gribble: The operation succeeded.
bagehot: Where is the 40 character output?
mircea_popescu: use the whole thing
bagehot: For the <full_gpg_keyid> I'm using the fifth column I get from the command gpg --list-keys --with-colon, 60E5BD872B2A6031. I'm getting back 'assbot: That does not seem to be a valid fingerprint.'
bagehot: But, how do I prevent getting muted by assbot? I figured I registered a public key with gribble to register with the wot and then it was a matter of ;;eauth and messaging !up to assbot
bagehot: I dig the link to the BRK letters at http://wiki.bitcoin-assets.com/finance. His letters are really a sharp resource on finance.
mircea_popescu: there's no relation between assbot and gribble really.
assbot: The huge language issue pe Trilema - Un blog de Mircea Popescu. ... ( http://bit.ly/1Cf5BIA )
Birdman: Right, but the risk is on my end really if I send the money. Also, I am trying to do a larger volume where my irl contact is uncomfortable doing
mircea_popescu: if you can use a bank, talk to sturles, he's been doing the offices of noob introducer since 2010.
Birdman: It'd have to be a cash in the mail thing most likely
Birdman: Hello -assets. I am looking to dump my dollars for coins and have almost no trust ratings in the WoT. Willing to use an escrow or however it can be the least risky for both parties if anyone is interested
assbot: What the WoT is for, how it works and how to use it. pe Trilema - Un blog de Mircea Popescu. ... ( http://bit.ly/1FkBoal )
mircea_popescu: http://trilema.com/2014/what-the-wot-is-for-how-it-works-and-how-to-use-it/ and http://trilema.com/2012/gpg-contracts/ for more theoretical considerations.
bagehot: aside on the wot, is this the resource to read for wot? http://cascadianhacker.com/blog/2014/04/11_bitcoin-assets-new-wot-and-voice-model.html
bagehot: I suspect so, although, it'd depend on the natural constraint thats being put forth
mircea_popescu: or thereabouts.
mircea_popescu: just like gravity causes fishes to swim and birds to fly, just so money and the economy cause black people to be poor and jews to have long noses
mircea_popescu: the latter.
bagehot: Its definately the case that some social systems cause behaviors in practically all people, although I suspect once in a while people manage to commander the board for a bit.
bagehot: Another argument I've heard is that thing like 'money' and the 'economy' exist as they are because of some constraints that are present in the natural world and so those constraints, eh, cause certain behaviors
mircea_popescu: you should prolly get in the wot.
mircea_popescu: but vice-versa : money and the economy decide what people are.
mircea_popescu: one interesting idea that came out here is that the people do not decide what either money or the economy are.
bagehot: And also how those people define the terms.
decimation: bagehot: do you think the supply of money must expand as an economy 'grows'?
mircea_popescu: maybe look into http://trilema.com/2013/why-i-nixed-p2p-colored-coins-and-all-that-jazz/ and go from there.
bagehot: Well, so to give a concrete example, but not to make a normative statement about the relative merits for some purpose of one kind of unit of account over another, I think it'd be fun to try switching the party that initiates the asset-liability relationship.
bagehot: Heh, nah, I've got no interest in patching bitcoin for the sake of itself beyond tinkering with the code to learn about.
bagehot: Well all the better then. In the longer run I want to try inventing some units of account with different transactional properties and expansionary mechanisms.
mircea_popescu: but, the discussion is in the logs, you can traverse it by searching. prolly a good start as any :
mircea_popescu: actually, this is exactly backards from reality. bitcoin is an utter mess, it works mostly by accident, most of the bits are horribly broken and dysfunctional.
bagehot: Eh, the delay was to make sure I communicated accurately what I am here to learn.
bagehot: Where I can go to get the gory details on how the interesting parts of the bitcoin source code are implemented and why those interesting bits actually work cryptographically and in a game-theory sense. I think its pretty incredible that a bunch of people can credibly store tokens of considerable value on a decentralized, digital network.
assbot: The Heretic's Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money: Peer-to-Peer Review: The State of Academic Bitcoin Research 2014 ... ( http://bit.ly/1G15duW )
cazalla: bagehot, i can't speak to whether it's any use or not, but i have seen this floating around before http://suitpossum.blogspot.com.au/2014/12/academic-bitcoin-research.html
decimation: bagehot: if you wanna know how bitcoin works, unfortunately the only comprehensive reference is the code itself
bagehot: On a related note, can anyone suggest a site collecting major papers on the technical and analytical details of bitcoins?
bagehot: at least from what I understand of the technical implementation.
bagehot: the keys used to keep bitcoins a store of value are.
asciilifeform: http://www.mouser.com/Passive-Components/Capacitors/Niobium-Oxide-Capacitors/_/N-5g8eZscv7?Keyword=153997756&FS=True&Ntk=P_MarCom << and here they are.
bagehot: decimation: What is there to say about the BoE? I'm here to learn checkout scarcity-through-obscurity currencies.
asciilifeform: http://www.mouser.com/Passive-Components/Niobium-Oxide-Capacitors/_/N-5g8e?Keyword=128206846&FS=True&Ntk=P_MarCom << and they aren't entirely gone
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: NbO caps >> 'They also do not exhibit any piezo effect and have no voltage dependence, thus making them a good fit in coupling circuits.' << guess what.
decimation: bagehot: here to tell us of the bank of england?
asciilifeform: not size, no. size is effect of taking the higher cut.
bagehot: Thanks for the !up, mircea_popescu
asciilifeform: ^ that's actually the main appeal i think
assbot: Logged on 20-08-2014 05:33:36; mircea_popescu: now grant one more thing : there's going to be no space until long after the ocean floor is alma mater.
mircea_popescu: it can have either
mircea_popescu: " said Peter Smith, the Phoenix principal investigator at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
mircea_popescu: "Perchlorate is not a common word in the English language; all of us had to go and look it up," << pls resign now.
mircea_popescu: but anyway : it'd seem on cursory inspiection that the components market is actually not very healthy.
mircea_popescu: so apparently there's exactly one producer of niobium oxide capacitors, and you can't put an order in.
decimation: your jug of bleach is sodium perchlorate, this is calcium perchlorate, but the idea is similar - concentrated bleach
assbot: Toxic Mars: Astronauts Must Deal with Perchlorate on the Red Planet ... ( http://bit.ly/1MzllaL )
mircea_popescu: re: electronic bits. funny what's left once a major empire collapses. japan used to own the electronics trade. and they still do, except... it's mostly moved away from the stuff they make.
asciilifeform: and folks have a devil of a time chasing down specifically these, and not identically-marked cn turds
asciilifeform: to this day the only genuinely reliable electrolytic capacitors are, afaik, from jp
decimation: the japanese are famous for highly specialized component manufacturing
gribble: The operation succeeded.
decimation: asciilifeform: supposedly panasonic has a good reputation in the passives market
cazalla: on one hand i get it, ya don't want random drunks coming in carrying on while you're having a conversation, but they are easily muted
cazalla: which is what i was gonna do last night ya know, bit of a chit chat, bit of a yarn but nope, gotta wait in some other room to be screened
cazalla: asciilifeform, even if Ts wasn't proprietary, it'd be pointless to download as you can't just connect and chat with them
asciilifeform: but that isn't what they're doing
cazalla: surprised they're using it tbh, mumble is far more popular in recent years
mike_c: gaming. for them, idk.
asciilifeform: the proprietary chat client thing is hilarious
mike_c: they aren't pretending to be bigshots, it's just a bunch of TA's derping around
asciilifeform: will the lulz never end?
asciilifeform: 'PS [nsa police] is the only police and security organization in Maryland equipped with vehicle-mounted thermal imaging devices.' -- nsa newsletter circa 1999, pp. 10. ( http://cryptome.org/2015/03/nsa-newsletters-1999.pdf )
asciilifeform: https://youtu.be/xeb3ZLb-wJ4 << linguistic/historical interest only. didn't know there was an engl. transl. of this. even a pretty bad one.
PeterL: http://log.bitcoin-assets.com//?date=13-03-2015#1051552 << J. Smith vision is 'Earth will be transformed into a sea of glass populated by those who deserve the glory of god', no rocket needed
cazalla: even the aussie guy from drink or die fought off his extradition for 4-5 years
asciilifeform: usg must be assumed to lie unless there is actual reason to suspect it may have told the truth
cazalla: if i had to guess, he was likely told they'd take it easy on him and public defender told him to go with it
asciilifeform: http://www.hangthebankers.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/NROL-39-rocket-with-logo-650x427.jpg
trinque: asciilifeform: heh, always makes me laugh to consider what the mouth is resting on
trinque: *especially* when the target is involved in some kind of techno-nerd shit. take him down! he thinks he's better than us!
trinque: maybe it's a calculated targeting of such and so, but I think the mindless bloodlust of american culture also plays a part
cazalla: i'm sure they'll want to make an example though
asciilifeform: trinque: it was never about the dope per se
trinque: how the fuck is anything to do with drugs "life in prison"
BingoBoingo: davout: Floppies though are purely passive. You need to bring a drive to the disk. SD incorporates the drive.
davout: asciilifeform: wasn't that the exact same for floppies?
asciilifeform: it is a 'polite suggestion' for the system, only.
asciilifeform: (the lever found on many such cards is not electrically connected to the internal flash!)
asciilifeform: 2) -and this is the important one- -- imho these need to eventually run from rom. actual rom. or at least eeprom with the write-enable leg snipped & grounded.
asciilifeform: 1) initialize a new disk without having to use a computer and involving the rotten pc ecosystem in any way