decimation: but before that it was used to describe Massachusetts men who spoke with a particular accent and had a particular affinity with the anglo colonizers
mircea_popescu: decimation this is exactly the usage.
mircea_popescu: dead about the time shockley was splitting up.
decimation: moldbug repurposed (re-re-repurposed?) the word "brahmin" to mean something like 'modern liberal elite'
mircea_popescu: apparently "brahmin" has a lengthy usage to describe the cult of the dead cow of massachussetts ?
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform "In the United States polite letters was a cult of the Brahmins of Boston, with William Dean Howells at the helm of the Atlantic." << Release Date: August 20, 2006 [EBook #3190]
decimation: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=1299 < "One clever soul suggested applying this doctrine to yet a fourth profession, creating a kind of “programmer priest.” Perhaps one day there will indeed be someone you can trust to pronounce – truthfully and competently – that a crypto-system is strong, that a protocol has not been diddled, that your computer serves only a single master."
decimation: "The ritual traces its origins to professor H. E. T. Haultain of the University of Toronto, who believed and persuaded other members of the Engineering Institute of Canada that there needed to be a ceremony and standard of ethics developed for graduating engineers. The need was patently obvious in the light of the Quebec Bridge disasters."
assbot: Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ... ( http://bit.ly/190fPzt )
decimation: from the slatestarcodex guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ritual_of_the_Calling_of_an_Engineer
BingoBoingo: mircea_popescu still vividly remembers this event when he was maybe 13 or so. this kid "got really psised off" and was going to hit me. every time he launched his fist, he also closed his eyes. every time i'd dodge and he'd mash his fist into the nearby wall. his hits got softer an softer, but he never figured out why exactly he's not making contact. << Airstrip One must first be cast into the ocean
BingoBoingo: School administrator was puzzled by the combatants being "A" students without long disciplinary records didn't see fit to issue discipline to either party as the aggressor learned he wasn't fit to aggress.
BingoBoingo: going to fight me. When he finally starts throwing punches can't keep his eyes open long enough to hit anything or avoid going to the ground and getting stomped
BingoBoingo: mircea_popescu still vividly remembers this event when he was maybe 13 or so. this kid "got really psised off" and was going to hit me. every time he launched his fist, he also closed his eyes. every time i'd dodge and he'd mash his fist into the nearby wall. his hits got softer an softer, but he never figured out why exactly he's not making contact. << Silimar event in middle school. Bigger kid pesters me for days about how he's
BingoBoingo: thestringpuller: Illustrates an important difference. "Anyone can do" and "Few can do well"
BingoBoingo: mircea_popescu: the best chemistry lab, were it to be maintained as a collection of bottles going "stuff" "Good stuff!" "REagenT" etc 18:23:12 mircea_popescu: would not really work. << This is why other big cause of home explosion is meth "labs"
BingoBoingo: decimation: Well failures of the natural gas system tend to be more... catastrophic... I remember as a child the day half of my hometown was evacuated because ditch diggers broke an incoming pipe at the edge of town.
mircea_popescu: bitcoinquestions in general a machine is secure if its secure. linux is not a magic pill. as danielpbarron suggests, not connecting it to the internet helps a lot, but also makes it more difficult.
BingoBoingo: The things live burried in yard
BingoBoingo: decimation: in the us gas heat is common, but typical large us house has a 'forced air' system that moves heated air around the house << Natural gas backup generators for homes are not unheard of here, occasionally going up to home's normal electricity consumption.
ben_vulpes: it's not really clear to me how close they actually are to terra.
decimation: it strikes me that if the wind suddenly shifts they could easily bash their heads into a rock
decimation: ben_vulpes: yeah I guess that's what I thought was happening when he gets close to the ground, but there's probably not enough of a 'cushion' to do the turns they are doing
BingoBoingo: asciilifeform not so foolish as to think about 'homogeneous enforcement environments', knows that there are, e.g., vast deserts in usa where folks set off trucks full of dynamite for amusement, etc. << Sometimes law enforcement attention comes to these folks too.
ben_vulpes: GE entails actually riding on a compressed cushion between the foil and the ground, not the lift off the foil alone.
ben_vulpes: that's not ground effect if i understand the mechanism in question correctly.
BingoBoingo: ben_vulpes: fwiw there aren't many orcs in the rural bits of ussa, and one can shoot trespassers on sign in those provinces too << Different kind, even tolkien had different kinds of orcs
decimation: ben_vulpes: yeah we ground-bound folk don't appreciate the air movements around objects
bitcoinquestions: If I generate a key on a MAC OS that I use for other purposes is it at all secure? Or should I not even bother generating keys if I'm not on a linux distro?
decimation: re: parasail < I've heard of incidents where pilots of parasails fly too close to moving trains. They get caught in the vortex and then crash
ben_vulpes: just...limited subset of the control space.
ben_vulpes: don't get me wrong, they're fly as hell.
ben_vulpes: sorta like the "chair with prop hanging from parasail" design.
mircea_popescu: actual planes, how do you call them
ben_vulpes: <mircea_popescu> so take up bobsleigh. better for your health. << or bicycles, more actual physical connection of your meat with the dynamic systems in question. airplanes and helicopters worth looking into as well
gabriel_laddel: t) rather than just a false positive. Again, I've never written C, and perhaps the ast is so complicated that it's actually impossible to get any useful information out of it, but my current experience suggests that having this ability is a good idea. Building something like `slime-who-calls' suddenly becomes simple.
gabriel_laddel: Why might one want to see the C ast? Let's say that we've got a codebase like the linux kernel, or opengl drivers. You know that somewhere you've got some stuff that talks to the hardware, but grep returns false positives. You instead pull the ast into memory, query across it for the bits your looking for. False positives now indicate something about the language (i.e., that I don't understand it as well as I though
gabriel_laddel: As for PGP, I'm assuming that I'm going to have to spend a decent amount of time with the codebase and reading the spec. Perhaps not.
mircea_popescu: the browser is not unlikely what'd have happened if the beduins had discovered dna alteration and there was no interstellar void.
gabriel_laddel: trinque: in any case, I hate everything about the browser.
gabriel_laddel: trinque: well, there is that too.
trinque: gabriel_laddel: the outputted JS is more comprehensible?
trinque: I've tried the clojure/clojurescript combo and was thrilled to be using the same language on both ends
gabriel_laddel: "As for what language I'll be using on any given project, it will be determined entirely by what is correct for the project."
mircea_popescu: right, i see what you're doing there.
gabriel_laddel: asciilifeform: I'm assuming, at least for now, that I'm going to have to /look/ at the current PGP sources (thus the C sexprast ). This has no bearing on what will be released other than - I will do what makes sense given the situation.
asciilifeform: in that all the turdaliciousness remains in place
gabriel_laddel: asciilifeform: Yes. Show me all structures that look like this. Pattern match against structures, rewrite them as so.
mircea_popescu: let the wolves have it.
asciilifeform: for the purpose of taking a flamethrower to it and replacing with something sane - grep + eyes has always sufficed
mircea_popescu: then after a decade i come by and go... "why did she write this!"
asciilifeform: gabriel_laddel, et al: try to remember why all of these things need redoing in the first place
asciilifeform: 'clean' as in, i whip out a stick and point to a line, and you can tell my why it's there.
gabriel_laddel: As for what language I'll be using on any given project, it will be determined entirely by what is correct for the project. If I hack something out in CL, but switch it over to C, I'll do that. If it makes sense to release a protopye that is hacked together C+CL+CFFI I'll do that. In any case, both of these come after getting the #b-a distro finished.
gabriel_laddel: My current plan for dealing with these projects: The haskell package Language.C.AST parses C99 entirely, taking into account all GCC extensions. I'm going to pay someone to add a sexpr backend to it so I can work it into my CL toolchain.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform cl can't do these ? :D
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform because the guy says so lol. why else ?
asciilifeform has no idea why any of the discussed projects would require cffi
mircea_popescu: so total noob here, but. the way cffi works is you compile your c stuff as dynamic objects and then put the headers in your lisp program ? or what ?
mircea_popescu: ie, the illegal residents of ww2 ?
mircea_popescu: do they mix ?
gabriel_laddel: asciilifeform: you had a alternate name for gossipd based on russian theater that had some relation to the nazis. I couldn't find the wiki article again, care to point me to it?
gribble: The operation succeeded.
gabriel_laddel: asciilifeform: I'v M-x rembered (or something) the previous thread on the matter for when I return to it.
asciilifeform wishes to point out that a 'sane pgp' will not be pgp-compatible. because much of the insanity lies in the standard itself.
mircea_popescu: i wanna read the design documents for this.
gabriel_laddel: mircea_popescu: as for now, I just want to have a clear idea of what the interface is, what the problems are etc.
mircea_popescu: i think we're in the mental institution. they're outside. cheaper this way, more of them.
asciilifeform: 'yes we reached the moon, who said we weren't talking about that one [points to moon painted on ceiling of mental institution]'
asciilifeform: now the next phase of moon-chair-stacking, that nix may or may not have yet entered, is to decide that the turd they have created and are doomed to dine on is in fact a sausage, and to lash out angrily at folks pointing out the actual facts
mircea_popescu: in any case : the space of things physics has to represent is in point of fact narrower than the space of things computer programs have to represent.
gabriel_laddel: " As far as I can tell, were one to extrapolate from the given information to a set of concrete requirements we see that NixOS plans to rewrite the build scripts for every version of every project on unix. Again, this is insane. The correct thing to do in this situation is to realize the utter impossibility of the task that has been set forth and re-evaluate one's approach.[1]" << [1] links to the quote previously d
asciilifeform: the 'nixos' thing is about the same kind, and degree, of contribution to culture as the soviet dogs with extra heads sewn on. with the difference that the latter still have the former beat in the purpose they're really fit for - chimeras to scare small children with
mircea_popescu: thestringpuller notrly.
mircea_popescu: when put together with the nix discussion on github it gives me spots on the spline.
mircea_popescu: anyway : the quote you took carries a certain meaning in its original context (physics - esp "natural" is a term of art in physics) and is an entirely different thing in the new context (coding). i fully agree with the quote as it is on the source blog
mircea_popescu: neither, no.
mircea_popescu: all the various foregoing rants are not directed at you personally as if you were somehow in ther wrong on some score.
gabriel_laddel: That said, I've had the experience several times of reading trilema or the logs, not immediately grokking it, returning a day later to have it all 'click'. I'm thinking that might happen here.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform but feelings were the criteria.
asciilifeform: programmer enters the syntax tree directly.
asciilifeform: lisp notation of basic arithmetic << one of the most common n00b failures-to-grok. (+ 1 2 3 4 5) not only puts less mileage on keyboard than 1+2+3+4+5, but nukes the abomination of having arbitrary orders of evaluation
mircea_popescu: the right structure is that structure which expresses the sum total of all the concepts in can express in the smallest total count of expression units. note that both fields being infinite, this is a difficult comparison to evaluate.
gabriel_laddel: the only reasonable basis for discussing such things is how much power they afford you
mircea_popescu: mebbe i should dig that article where i murder some guy over leaving out the outside paran or something.
mircea_popescu: which most idiots aren't aware of in the first place.
gabriel_laddel: becuase of the "various subsidiary problems that fall away"
mircea_popescu: (ps. the lisp notation of basic arithmetic would win "least likely to succeed" "ass-ugliest award" from a vast majority of all the people who understand basic arithmetic. it "doesn't feel right" for almost anyone. 3+4 does.
mircea_popescu: which is why a flimsy repackaging of "popular advice" that doesn't even work on the fucking plane is horribru. not only it doesn't work in practice, but the mind that tends to make such confusions is probably in a very poor state to think about anything.
gabriel_laddel: hoever it was, and I'm fairly sure I grok ASCII's plan and will be handling some intro documentation for it + figuring out how the PGP code needs to interface with it exactly.
gabriel_laddel: as for my id, I'm currently fixing <irritant to livelihood>. First chance I get I'm sitting down and sorting out the whole GPG thing. As it stands I was not particularly happy with the documentation it supplied and wasn't sure which parts I'd have to rewrite. My previous key got destroyed in a failed backup becuase I didn't spend enough time on it the first time around. Also, I don't think gossipd is happening via w
mircea_popescu: but you, in your own description (well, in their description which you seem to underscore) of "how to meta-structure" in fact revert to what is the equivalent of pattern matching.
mircea_popescu: after all... when you hit the language with regexp just right you know.
mircea_popescu: but in any case : what do you figure is the difference bewteen "When you strike the natural structure, a sort of resonance occurs" and "perl is a fine way to do nixos" ?
gabriel_laddel: mircea_popescu: yes. you've written about the game of 'balance' wrt fucking. when playing this game you /know/ somehow that you're doing it correctly, via various signals.
mircea_popescu: the entire basis for that quote is the reverbalisation of the concept that "when true love comes around you'll know". empirically, most people do not.
mircea_popescu: the fact of it being a pile a kludge is an excellent indication of it not being the best way, but rather heuristic in nature.
mircea_popescu: listen here : the fact that it feels right is no indication of it being the best way.
gabriel_laddel: the /feeling/ didn't do anything. It is merely a signal.
gabriel_laddel: well, when someone is tweaking the design of something and it produces extremely complex and counter-intuitive behavior I point them to that quote.
mircea_popescu: what the fuck already, if the planet crossed through a bogon ray one evening in 1988 and made everyone's brain essentially batrachian in nature i could never know.
mircea_popescu: these kids are so fucking stupid i can't believe i've just read "when you meet the right someone it'll feel special" in code-words.
mircea_popescu: What you hope to find is the natural structure of what you're describing a structure that affords a really beautiful, simple description. When you strike the natural structure, a sort of resonance occurs, in which various subsidiary problems you may have had with your description just melt away, and the description practically writes itself."
mircea_popescu: "Suppose you're trying to find the best way to structure your description of something. (Examples: choosing the structure for a computer program to perform some task; or choosing the structure for a theory of physics.)
mircea_popescu: motherfucker!
mircea_popescu still vividly remembers this event when he was maybe 13 or so. this kid "got really psised off" and was going to hit me. every time he launched his fist, he also closed his eyes. every time i'd dodge and he'd mash his fist into the nearby wall. his hits got softer an softer, but he never figured out why exactly he's not making contact.
gabriel_laddel: as for the fight in our realm, I'd like to buy 10ks of AMD opterons K8 chips and reverse engineer them. Give designs to China.
mircea_popescu: ever seen teenagers brawl in the schoolyard ?
gabriel_laddel: Seriously. Where is the tree of all hardware as nodes with drivers as sub nodes? Oh, it doesn't exist? right.
mircea_popescu: the sad reality is that the earlier "linux is a failure but doesn't have to stay that way" is slowly coming to the sobering reality that "it is a failure and systemfuck it."
mircea_popescu: "There are very few classics in the field of computing. We are at the very beginning of this journey and it hasn't even begun to get interesting yet. IMHO, the Cathedral vs. Bazaar isn't in anyway a dilemma or a classic. Linux was a failure 20 years ago, it is a failure today and any posturing otherwise is just that. "
asciilifeform: mitm for the userspace << funnily, one common purely-userland trick to play on pwned folks is to adjust LD_PRELOAD in their personal shell env
asciilifeform: the elf thing?
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform i didn;'t mean you, i'm stikk in shock over the quote above
asciilifeform: trying to explain that it is quit impossible to have a package management system above the language level that is not dumbed down by support for braindamaged languages.
mircea_popescu: let's just assume that it's ok to override the user imperatives. because.
mircea_popescu: like you know, plaintext emails and unauthed telnet. because "who would ever hijack an account!"
mircea_popescu: no but this is out and out "everythingwillbefineism" imported back into the software stack.
asciilifeform: likewise, another common form of braindamage is a lack of any fine-grained namespace control
asciilifeform: thing is, braindamaged languages (they know who they are) have no way of specifying -individual routines- as having dependencies
mircea_popescu: chetty well the movies kinda exist for this purpose.
mircea_popescu: this is essentially mitm for the userspace.
mircea_popescu: "For instance, for ELF executables, we set the RPATH in the executable such that it will find a statically determined set of library dependencies at runtime, rather than using a dynamic mechanism such as the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable to look up libraries" holy shit.
chetty: it's more like expecting tramps to ballet. spontaneously.//you mean they don't? I see in the movies all the time
asciilifeform: possibly the best package management system for commonlisp users is 'quicklisp'. essentially bulletproof.
mircea_popescu: in MPWorld this is implemented as a sort of api, and languages either talk to it or are stuck doing 100% of the work themselves.
mircea_popescu: "Examples: at what point is appropriate to leave package management up to a language's ecosystem? Is there ever a reason to? " << one hell of a problem.
gabriel_laddel: eventually learned the hard way.
asciilifeform: but there is no reason for any thinking person to become involved in any capacity.
asciilifeform: NixOS << if idiots want to keep trying to 'fly' to the moon by stacking chairs, let them.
asciilifeform: anyone read "[Date: 1601.] Conversation, as it was by the Social Fireside... << aye.
mircea_popescu: kids are expecting to do it and do it well but it's never taught. it's not like expecting virgins to fuck like pros on their first date. it's more like expecting tramps to ballet. spontaneously.
gabriel_laddel: yeah. also, they don't document anything, or so much as tell you that they're going to move the whole C toolchain.
mircea_popescu: anyway https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/4952#issuecomment-73422170 is where the fun starts.
fluffypony: mircea_popescu: they're part of the "pat-on-the-back" crowd that constantly need to be told what a good job they're doing else their paltry raison d'être will crumble
mircea_popescu: and somehow these natural and necessary modes of speech are "forbidden". /rant.
mircea_popescu: fuck (not heck. fuck!) it's probably even why people don't enjoy writing comments and specs. because they require "this is great" and "im so fucking proud of this" ands "i bet you wouldn't have come up with this in five lifetimes" to be either worth reading or worth writing
mircea_popescu: (much like people falling imagine everyone's looking when in fact nobod ycares, so the guy caught overstating his competency imagines the world ended when really - people just had a laugh).
mircea_popescu: there's nothing wrong with saying "i am great", in principle. competent people do not in the slightest mind the nude affirmation of your naked competency. the error on the topic is amusing, but not the end of the world
mircea_popescu: that the idiocy of puritanism imposing "modesty" upon the coder (on top of chastity - which by the way, there's nothing great about not "raping" women, being a nice guy, great sense of humor etc. that's a drone.) limit people's ability to do crucial things for their success and the world's hygiene.
gabriel_laddel: Thanks for the feedback. I'll keep that in mind.
mircea_popescu: the best chemistry lab, were it to be maintained as a collection of bottles going "stuff" "Good stuff!" "REagenT" etc
gabriel_laddel: The last message from me in that thread contains a brief discussion of the "why" of lisp, that is, what separates it from being 'just another language'. Figured I'd post it in here because your previous trilema post discussing reverse polish notation and Erik Naggum + many #b-a messages didn't communicate to me that lisp has 'clicked' yet for many people.
mircea_popescu: it's also necessarily going to remain there, and for great benefit.
mircea_popescu: "the human's inability to fully comprehend the parsing and syntactical schemes they're able to create" << this is actually a generally valid point, and about half of all problems of humanity come from this impedance mismatch.
mircea_popescu: btw, anyone read "[Date: 1601.] Conversation, as it was by the Social Fireside, in the Time of the Tudors." ?
mircea_popescu: jurov: when putin arrives everyone will be caught with pants down << everyone still there, at any rate.
decimation: me neither but it would be for folks in germany
mircea_popescu: by the way, let's help the haters out a little. http://trilema.com/2009/cocktail-flu/
mircea_popescu: the head mounted thing ?
mircea_popescu: only thing that ever scared me. but i'd quit the room in a hurry
asciilifeform: still sits in many a summer 'dacha', used to - would you believe - gather up mosquitoes.
asciilifeform: to a lesser extent also famous are other vintage home appliances, like 'buran' vacuum cleaner - http://kartmen.ru/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/20131126_162658.jpg
asciilifeform: ^ the thing is iconic in ru
mircea_popescu: hm i had some pics of them too im sure.
mircea_popescu: that's what it is. parents suspect children are about on the level of c programmers, and try to avoid any situations where reality emulates the c compiler.
asciilifeform: just as there are, afaik, no confirmed reports of 'glue sniffing' prior to the media chumpamatics re: same in usa
mircea_popescu: incidentally, the same that results in c++ bugs.
mircea_popescu: perhaps because parents are so acutely aware of the type of divorcement between meaning and action that trips up children.
asciilifeform: probably the crap was translated into even eskimo
decimation: in the us, the chumpatron is often kick-started by a government regulation that is sold as 'efficient' or 'safe'
asciilifeform: and the ban was an organized scam
asciilifeform: interestingly, this type of fridge chassis was formally banned in usa, despite giving a much tighter seal than the magnetic rubber used today
decimation: this is all a chumpatron on the 'let's break everyone's window so we can stimulate the window-repair economy' model
mircea_popescu: decimation i know, fallout's full of them :D
decimation: similar refrigerators were made in the us, and were similarly reliable, made before the 60's
mircea_popescu: yeah the handle's not right
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform http://article.yeeyan.org/view/214657/182505 << check out all the soviet porn
decimation: mircea_popescu: in the us, I'm pretty sure that the manufacturers (who have an oligopoly) cheapen shit up so that it 'breaks' and requires replacement at a rate they select
mircea_popescu: http://media.englishrussia.com/new_images//zilmuseum-50.jpg << exactly the one in middle
asciilifeform: i have a remote fitted to mine, and occasionally press the wrong button in half-awake trance
asciilifeform: and yes, it's every bit the toilet+kitchen combo it soulds like
mircea_popescu: decimation you know, i had an old zil fridge at some point in romania, and the thing had been running for ~25 years, and it never ever leaked.
mircea_popescu: heh there's that.
decimation: mircea_popescu: it's considered normal for the entire system to break every year or two, typically requiring a specially licensed repairman to come out and replace the freon lines
assbot: Logged on 08-02-2015 05:30:55; asciilifeform: and the junk is typically built to last about one decade.
asciilifeform: the house i live in is a massive roaring bonfire for money
asciilifeform: if one's principal equity is the house << depends which flavour of chumpitude one prefers
asciilifeform: the blower has a steel heat exchanger inside, which is either heated with gas fires or chilled with freon loop, as the season goes
asciilifeform: it is typically built as a system of wall ducts/grilles and massive blower in the cellar (in my case, attic)
bitcoinquestinos: What do you guys think is the best capital to acquire?
mircea_popescu: that's another thing. hire a plumber so he tells you what to do ?!
decimation: well, one of the reasons that things are this way is because the 'trades' have a pretty strong chokehold on what gets done
mircea_popescu: leaving alone the weirdness of keeping most of your capital in a nonproductive asset (hey, that's made to be through purely government interventionist means), not even pretend like you're managing it ?
mircea_popescu: rather strange, n'est pas.
decimation: mircea_popescu: the irony is that for many us citizens, their house is their biggest 'savings account', yet very few consider any other option than what the builder 'decided'
mircea_popescu: decimation but if one's principal equity is the house, a la us, then it makes sense.
mircea_popescu: kako lives in the house of teh future.
kakobrekla: decimation we have a heat pump for radiators and hot water for the house and for air i have a separate inverter unit with one external and two internal units.
gribble: Bitstamp | A market order to sell 666 bitcoins right now would net 148999.9978 USD and would take the last price down to 223.2300 USD, resulting in an average price of 223.7237 USD/BTC. | Data vintage: 0.0119 seconds
decimation: well, in the case of the us (as asciilifeform mentioned) natural gas is much cheaper to install and pretty cheap to run
mircea_popescu: decimation yeah heat pumps seem a lot better deal than any alternative, yet the least commonly used.
assbot: Ch E Page 301: Sustainable Energy - without the hot air | David MacKay ... ( http://bit.ly/1xMBmAj )
decimation: for the interested reader, some theory on heat pumps is here: http://www.withouthotair.com/cE/page_301.shtml
asciilifeform: and the junk is typically built to last about one decade.
decimation: only a few factories manufacturer the equipment, and they usually only sell to 'licensed installers'
decimation: hvac is a particular kind of chumpatron in the usa
decimation: typically the most efficient ones are 'mini-split' systems
asciilifeform: and they are to be found where in usa? warren buffett's house ?
decimation: the newer japanese units can achieve amazing coefficients of performance
asciilifeform: but the fact that heat pump can only extract so much at a given external temp
asciilifeform: it wasn't the resistive heater
decimation: asciilifeform: the heat pump was probably turning on bigass resistor for 'emergency heat'
asciilifeform: natural gas is considerably cheaper, in this part of the world, than equiv. via heatpump.
decimation: they claim to heat (without resistive elements) down to 5 F
asciilifeform had heat pump in old flat, about 1/3 the size of new house (gas furnace there), actually cost more to run the heat pump
decimation: I have a friend who swears by the new mitsubishi air source heat pumps
decimation: the problem is that air source heat pumps can only heat down to a certain ambient temperature
asciilifeform: humidity is the real hell.
asciilifeform: there, it happens in an enclosed space, above a drain.
asciilifeform: among other reasons
mircea_popescu: six months or a year down the road, we can continue this conversation in a better position.
decimation: part of the other reason 'forced air' heat is common in the us is because air conditioning is considered to be a requirement
mircea_popescu: bitcoinquestinos i could, but so far i'm not particulrly inclined. the logs are in the topic, peruse at your leisure.
mircea_popescu: (mostly for the co detector tho)
mircea_popescu: more expensive units come with their own batteries
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform no, but then again i never had a power outage. if they happened, ups would work fine.
decimation: this is very uncommon in the us, except for old homes
mircea_popescu: decimation you sort-of need it for the pump, but it's not so much.
mircea_popescu: my house in timisoara, the heating system held about a ton of water in the pipes and radiative elements. took about an hour to cool a coupla degrees.
decimation: yeah if all you need to do is heat boiler, then you don't need electricity
asciilifeform: bitcoinquestinos: about half the people here have www sites with human name, contact info, etc.
decimation: otherwise it's a worse solution
decimation: in the us gas heat is common, but typical large us house has a 'forced air' system that moves heated air around the house
mircea_popescu: decimation i have nfi what that is ? but no, either keep a pilot going, or w/e.
mircea_popescu: when it's decided gavin is of no further utility for bitcoin, it's decided here.
bitcoinquestinos: mircea_popescu: What do you mean? Is this a place where people find the best way to spend their bitcoins so they can hold tighter?
mircea_popescu: decimation eu mostly heats on gas, these micro units that mostly don't need power. either because battery or ingenious.
mircea_popescu: otherwise i dunno what household can be run on 5kw (bottlenecked at 1.5ish)