RetroUpriser: Well the offer stands should you change your mind
assbot: Highway seizure in Iowa fuels debate about asset-forfeiture laws - The Washington Post
BingoBoingo: A doomed by the bong case heats up http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/highway-seizure-in-iowa-fuels-debate-about-asset-forfeiture-laws/2014/11/10/10f725fc-5ec3-11e4-8b9e-2ccdac31a031_story.html
asciilifeform: (if there remains alive even one who has not read it)
gribble: Harrison Bergeron - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron>; Harrison Bergeron - Tnellen.com: <http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html>; Full text of "Harrison Bergeron (& Activity)" - Internet Archive: <https://archive.org/stream/HarrisonBergeron/Harrison%20Bergeron_djvu.txt>
decimation: yeah sorry for the shorthand. You can view the whole series here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIzOma9Pyv8&list=PLA6274B0CEF58CEB0 (or download with youtube-dl)
mircea_popescu: "By their nature as vigilantes, acting outside or above the law, most superheroes have a troubling undercurrent of aristocratic, undemocratic, authoritarian values."
assbot: Logged on 26-03-2014 03:30:35; asciilifeform: nitpick with pediwikia - the 'batman' in the epic is not wearing a 'batman' costume. he's a bloke who smashes heads with a baseball bat.
BingoBoingo: From the lulzmines: "Batman is a rich white psychopath who beats up poor people for fun. He is not now and never has been a hero."
asciilifeform: (for folks reading this who have no idea - there was not a film called 'stierlitz', but it is the cover name of the hero in iconic ru multiparter '17 moments of spring.')
asciilifeform: the closest translation would probably be 'blown'
asciilifeform: as in, through a hole in the street
decimation: asciilifeform: in Stierlitz, the poor English translation for the word that refers to when a spy is killed 'doing his duty' seems to be 'failed'
asciilifeform: decimation: 2way traffic is a forced wartime thing. when you have no one in diplomatic cover behind the lines.
mircea_popescu: and to think the derps are going o nbout "blockchain technology". as if.
mircea_popescu: <asciilifeform> it's not even a 'technology' in the sense semiconductor is - but more as arithmetic is. << quite agreed,
asciilifeform: after the war, it was almost unheard of to have 2way traffic at all
decimation: the original idea was to mark a strip of paper with the morse characters, but very soon after the telegraph was introduced it was realized that operators could send by ear much more quickly
asciilifeform: the ru version was a very simple stapler-shaped gizmo that punched holes in old 35mm film
decimation: later, when the germans started to encrypt the 'headers', they were able to sort out each crypto link by the intercept operator's ability to recognize his opponent's hand
asciilifeform: hand >> incidentally, this was part of the reason why shortly after the war, most intelligence orgs moved to mechanical (punched tape) operation
decimation: the uk operators at the "Y" stations became familiar with the 'hand' of each german operator
decimation: asciilifeform: when I visited Bletchley park, they told a story about this. Apparently the germans initially sent the 'headers' in enigma traffic in plaintext before the message
asciilifeform: 'hand' here is in the sense of 'handwriting'
asciilifeform: namely - if you're operating using some other, incompatible abstraction - the result will be demonstrable nonsense.
asciilifeform: it's not even a 'technology' in the sense semiconductor is - but more as arithmetic is.
asciilifeform: no one will even think to mention 'wot-based' gizmo in the future, just as when you buy a pc now - the crate does not bother to say 'semiconductor-based'
mircea_popescu: "hard to keep people from observing water is wet once their wanderings take them to an ocean"
gribble: Quote by Robert A. Heinlein: “When railroading time comes you can ...: <https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/557199-when-railroading-time-comes-you-can-railroad-but-not-before>; Q&N: The Door into Summer (Heinlein) - Hjkeen.net: <http://www.hjkeen.net/halqn/dor2sumr.htm>; Railroad Time - Home Page - TimeZone: (1 more message)
asciilifeform: interestingly, mr mold invented almost precisely the same scheme, afaik independently, neither of us lifted from the other
asciilifeform: decided that it would be a particularly apt name for the ideal 'crucifix' against the vampires in question.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: incidentally, i lifted 'kyristor' name not from the obvious place, but from a zoological exploration of a peculiarly malignant femiderp re: 'kyriarchy'
mircea_popescu: but the unbreached fortress is exactly as fortified as any other unbreached fortress : infinitely so.
asciilifeform: well, the pieces are here.
mircea_popescu: "god help us if people are in charge of their own lives, anything b ut that" ?
asciilifeform: they're certainly interested - in something quite else.
mircea_popescu: mircea_popescu The idea being that any current social media website is a defective implementation of the WoT, what I intend to do is prove this point. Because the sort of idiots involved wont figure it on their own, and the assholes a la zuck and conde nast have about as much interest in the matter as your random bank cares about getting off shitty buggy ms software.
asciilifeform: which is, that to the victim's nose it distantly resembles the real thing - but has an ulterior motive baked in.
asciilifeform: in fact, 'reddit' gizmos can be seen as a specially broken case of wot - having the same relationship to wot as baited rat poison has to food
asciilifeform: (an individual could be a 'node' on any number of orthogonal wots, such as film tastes, mathematics, etc)
asciilifeform: ^ my ancient failed attempt at 'wot.' was to be used with another (never happened) apparatus, 'sollipse,' for running a 'multiverse' of wots.
mircea_popescu: "see the films that people you trust liked"
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform which is why the "unspecified" website i asked for someone to make a month ago and punkman volunteered is EXACTLY a wot-driven film database.
undata: given a BTC transaction which represents an "item" in the catalog, there could as well be transactions which refer to that one and rate it
asciilifeform: this, as often is, - is one of the 'insufficient wot in extant system' cases.
mircea_popescu: while the exercise is instructive, i don't really believe it's the girls' fault exactly.
asciilifeform: undata: you need 'wot' baked in or you get idiots gaming the ratio system, the way they did on 1990s bbs.
mircea_popescu: but the problem is not merely storage. retrieval is up there too. consider the simple task "let us watc ha movie". the girls now have to find one. i've distributed more lashes for failure to find good films than for all other reasons combined, in 2014.
asciilifeform: (it was all crud long-overdue for the recycling vats from the moment of printing, naturally)
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: reminds me of a tale from the pet. she was once given a bag of 'books' by a 'friend' who vaguely recalled that she 'likes reading books.'
undata: it seems that kind of incentive structure could be tweaked to reward preserving the obscure
mircea_popescu: in fact, the way digital stuff is handled, it reminds me of how books would be handled in the house a functionally illiterate peasant from the 1900s.
undata: the sites I'm thinking of solve this by making upload credits capital you spend on download, effectively
asciilifeform: though it's out there.
mircea_popescu: rather than "we have every book ever made"
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: another example. want w4r3z copy of 'winblows' ? easy as fart. want the leaked microshit source? (why!?!? but that's another question) - harder.
mircea_popescu: imagine if libraries of the paper variety were organised on the principle that "well if you want something to read we prolly have a coupla books"
mircea_popescu: suppose i wanted to do something of the substance of actual reason, knowledge, science. da fuck do i do ? pray ?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: none of the major 'libraries' have '% ratios' though
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform i'll tell you something about obscure. perhaps the best franchise in the history of western pornography is kink.com. best in purely aesthetic terms. now, their various brands, things such as i dunno, publichumiliation exist on the piratebay in the sense of maybe a dozen items out of what, 500 ? 1k total ?
asciilifeform: and the language barrier mostly (not always!) keeps enemy at bay
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform how's the russian thing work ? mostly as undata's idea, right ? loosely affiliated, % enforcing warez sites
asciilifeform: undata: 'obscure' here is almost by definition - that which is not found on 'pirate bay' and the like
mircea_popescu: and the body out of hair
undata: asciilifeform: what about torrent sites with seed ratio requirements? They seem to have done well as archives, even of the obscure.
asciilifeform: warez censor is not the only mouse in the warehouse. there's moth and dust, father time.
mircea_popescu: how about this canonical formulation of it : most of what i know i know alone, because the "internet" is made out of knowledge in the sense the earth is made out of grass.
asciilifeform: it's a serious problem, and folks who don't routinely discuss 20+ year old, moderately-obscure documents don't even know the beginning of it.
mircea_popescu: problem goes deeper : if "who can add is finite" then you have a point of failure baked in quite nastily.
asciilifeform: ('eternity' was one of the more braindamaged ones, so perhaps that wasn't it)
asciilifeform: and a few others
asciilifeform: in fact, many folks arrived at 'proof of work' and something akin to our current concept of 'blockchain' by attempting to answer the 'who gets to add bits' question.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform in short, your complaint is legitimate but the solution unobvious.
asciilifeform: there was one called 'eternity'
BingoBoingo: Fuck, whoever made this scan isn't very good at the whole scanning books business
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: i assume you studied some of the known bitcoin predecessors.
mircea_popescu: well, the problem ehre is this : immutable datastore comes with the problem of, who may add to it.
asciilifeform: the spittoon is all in one strand, yes
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform incidentally, there is a lot of overlap between the problem of packing bits and the problems of blockchain and crypto isn;'t there.
asciilifeform: as in, the one you and i read.
mircea_popescu: the ideal would be to have a permanent file storage that works by incrementally adding chickens to the task
undata: seems like seeding a trackerless torrent with your thing and a signature of the thing solves this
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: and may or may not be the actual scan or a questionable ocr turd
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: the top link is to a torrent which may or may not be alive
mircea_popescu: dat tokenization. anyway, iirc it was on the same place last tiem
mircea_popescu: so what's the problem ?
mircea_popescu: the thing linked above ?
mircea_popescu: the entire us carrier approach to war is expensive and unwieldy.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform im not so sure there's that much validity to that demonstration.
asciilifeform: expensive proposition if they have short life expectancy.
undata: asciilifeform: spend magnet links into the blockchain?
undata: thestringpuller: not a clue
thestringpuller: there is to:
undata: thestringpuller: wrong string.
asciilifeform: 'they called him rheostat. for the knob he twisted to turn up the current when they ended up in his chair.'
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform at least it didn't get all the way to snotislav or something
BingoBoingo: Micrea is the cleanshaven alternate universe version
mircea_popescu: i like it when hirelings go "hello micrea". on a first name basis with people you don't even know the first name of ? way to fail multiple times per line!
asciilifeform: (an intelligence case officer is a kind of psychiatrist, in the same sense that a sniper is a type of surgeon)
mircea_popescu: what's the worst that can happen. and nobody reads anyway, and who's going to figure anything out
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform most folk get this idea that "they're in control of their own life" and that "they won't have to do anything they don't want to do" and so...
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: if you happen to have a w4r3z link to 'running rings of spies' by 'paladin press', it has some (authenticated and not) case studies.
asciilifeform: (most folks, apparently, feel less 'edgy' re: the idea of muppeting for a small-time intelligence agency, than ru or us)
gribble: The operation succeeded.
mircea_popescu: i haven't a clue if they mostly do or don't.
mircea_popescu: if the car worked on an ideal carnot cycle it'd be pretty much fireworks show
asciilifeform: except that if mr. o were so 'open' to volunteers, he'd be grunting in the oubliette with mr. nyc deathray
mircea_popescu: think cc server - rooted box. i'm the rooted box. say something to me!
mircea_popescu: let's model it properly. you're the kgb special assets chain of command, and i'm orlov.
asciilifeform: unless i dramatically fail to grok how this works, a public blog is very much not the correct tool in the box for this.
asciilifeform: or the like.
asciilifeform: picture the letter: 'dear mr.o, where can i park my mystery crate that certainly does not contain a rocket launcher.'
gernika: Orlov reminds me of detective who has you in the interrogation room. He somehow befriends himself to you and makes you think he wants to help you. He lays out your options. Cooperate and you get life. Otherwise death.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform again, how do you FIND these guys ?
asciilifeform: so perhaps mircea_popescu was thinking of another.
asciilifeform: rather than 'influence agents'
asciilifeform: the piece concerned folks who were given the job of preparing hidey-holes and providing materiel, however
asciilifeform: s never met any Soviet citizens, leads a lonely, introspective life, far from other people, and is by profession a forester, fisherman, lighthouse-keeper, security guard or railwayman. In many cases such an agent will be a physical invalid...'
asciilifeform: 'A portrait of an ideal agent for spetsnaz emerges something like this: a man of between fifty-five and sixty-five years of age who has never served in the army, never had access to secret documents, does not carry or own a weapon, knows nothing about hand-to-hand fighting, does not possess any secret equipment and doesn't support the Comunists, does not read the newspapers, was never in the Soviet Union and ha
asciilifeform: (the piece in question)
scoopbot: New post on Trilema by Mircea Popescu: http://trilema.com/2014/the-thorny-problem-of-violence-or-the-miracle-of-the-talking-ass/
asciilifeform: in the classic book, you had a fella going up to the junkyard keeper, offering him a bag of benjies 'for almost nothing'
asciilifeform: what's the logic here?
mircea_popescu: how the fuck do you expect to reach him ?
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform remember that rather accurate depiction of "typical agent" ?
mircea_popescu: what does any other derp paying for "online marketing" ?
asciilifeform: let's posit paid muppetry. what is the client getting for his money?
gernika: I could see him as the "social media" branch of a wider effort that includes RT.
mircea_popescu: either he's an officer, which is weird, but weird is not new in the game ; or else he's just yet another aspiring-talking head, except not working for X company but Y, or else i'm wrong.
mircea_popescu: gernika the kgb does not recruit nobodies for this role.
asciilifeform: iirc that's the one where 'we need a new fleanode'
assbot: The problem of enforcement pe Trilema - Un blog de Mircea Popescu.
RagnarDanneskjol: this is the one i was thinking of http://trilema.com/2014/the-problem-of-enforcement/ - also worth rereading
asciilifeform: 'whore, on account of the equipment' heh.
mircea_popescu: so then, again...why would you get paid ?
asciilifeform: mostly on account of i can't be bothered to give a shit.
RagnarDanneskjol: oh -the title looked familiar
RagnarDanneskjol: oh yes very interesting indeed - I read it before - always get more the second time around. thank
assbot: The thorny problem of violence, or the miracle of the talking ass. pe Trilema - Un blog de Mircea Popescu.
mircea_popescu: RagnarDanneskjol http://trilema.com/2014/the-thorny-problem-of-violence-or-the-miracle-of-the-talking-ass/ << the 8th note you will prolly find of interest.
scoopbot: New post on The Whet by han@thewhet: http://thewhet.net/2014/thinking-you-can-infer-the-meaning-of-new-words-still-eviling-strong/
TheShrander: i'm trying get some more people here, so they can understand and not waste money in fucking startups... we will see :D
cazalla: dignork: a, lol, i see what you mean, it's a typo in original css, full text then: http://dpaste.com/0D7MGFD <<< thanks, it's a bit of an improvement for mobile
TheShrander: i'm gonna hold a speech about the WoT in Italy next month. mircea_popescu we have already talk weeks ago, i'm wyrdmantis, remember?
gernika: undata Pretty sure the same thing happened to me about 3 years ago.
undata: gernika: when I was 16 I worked for a software company which persuaded staff (myself excluded of course) to alter their stock options unfavorably given that they subsequently sold out to HP
mircea_popescu: !up TheShrander
gernika: It's hard to go for more than a year here without the company you're working for being sold.
punkman: just the comments that followed
assbot: Logged on 27-09-2014 02:45:16; asciilifeform: decimation: the cure for this depression is to understand that a machine can be built to be -understood-.
asciilifeform: mathematicized, 'proofy' programming is one part grantsmanship, two parts organized pseudoscience, one part enemy disinfo.
mircea_popescu: generally, that's the formative experience of failure. when one's daughters are given away as objects to they in the other system, because even as objects there they are still worth more than were they to stay in their parents' own system, much like infinitely nothing of something is still more than absolutely all of nothing whatsoever.
mircea_popescu: ben_vulpes yeah, but the idea is for it to be done for free.
ben_vulpes: at the risk of point out the obvious if you can afford the bundling and transportation, you could have them in odessa
mircea_popescu: so orlovs' prediction is that in the near future i will be able to order oligarch underage daughter prostitute to my hotel room in odessa ?
mircea_popescu: "Some of the action is bound to be quite shocking; for instance, while the elites and the oligarchs themselves are rather well defended, at least initially, their children, ensconced in various elite schools, academies and universities, comprise a soft target, setting the stage for school take-overs, mass kidnappings and shootings of a very different sort from the ones seen to date. "
ben_vulpes: gpg --verify should spit out the author
mod6: mircea_popescu: eh yeah, just making sure i guess, those wern't posted to the mailing list.
asciilifeform: mod6: except the 1st
assbot: ISPs Removing Their Customers' Email Encryption | Electronic Frontier Foundation
mod6: asciilifeform: are you the author of these patches? : rm_rf_upnp.tar.gz https-snipsnip.tar.gz turdmeister-alert-snip.tar.gz goodbye-win32.tar.gz ?
mircea_popescu: they're just lazy and stupid.
undata: so the answer in Iran's case is "because an adjacent sovereign is not fit enough to destroy them?"
mircea_popescu: the first central government
mircea_popescu: the apportioning of penance among the universally guilty humans, the temproal role of the church,
mircea_popescu: it's like accusing someone of us "rape". do they have a penis ? well....
mircea_popescu: listen, until you start doing your own photosinthesis, you can be accused of being "parasitic"
undata: I'm not convinced I'm asking the right question.
undata: maybe that's just the nature of it
undata: mircea_popescu: one that eventually wears out the thing underneath, leading to collapse
mircea_popescu: manking lives off the soil.
mircea_popescu: otherwise endlessly spinning the "simulated loads" of bezzle is a great way to keep a great engine away from the road.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform i don't disagree the brain works. im just saying, it's not working till it does work.
asciilifeform: doesn't do any work << usually folks ask 'if x works' with the understanding that x may be on a shelf, in a crate, has not been used in anger yet
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform there's a much larger issue there. iran is mostly ethnially persian. the leadership, ethnically arab. on their own, the arabs are usually poor. therefore they depend on govt dole.
asciilifeform: iran authoritarian << poor country, and, afaik, run by populistic idiots generously helped by foreign wreckers from half the globe
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: test bed << if the proper kind, with simulated loads - aye
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: i can't say that i agree. they're cheap as dust. but very far, typically, from the 'levers of power'
mircea_popescu: everything else is forever abundant. and so... they may well wish to live
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform the only thing ever in deficit in the world is the working brain and the erect penis.
asciilifeform: stuxnet << as i described in my article 'don't blame the mice' - imho, iran doesn't really want to live. how we know this? if they wanted to live, there would have been a public impalement of whoever said 'everyone runs winblows, it's ok for us to'
mircea_popescu: guy pretty much has it, in the working parts.
mircea_popescu: " There tends to be a clean break with the old, collapsing society, which is motivated by money and prestige within society at large, because these entrepreneurial groups are motivated by honor and prestige within the in-group only." << what is the wot if not exactl;y that ?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: in his words, approx., 'violent entrepreneurs are special and distinct in that they will work whether or not you pay them, whether they're paid simply determines whether they work with you or on you'
mircea_popescu: undata violence is not merely physical violence. tim swanson got bludgeoned into the dirt, what is that if not violence ?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: mr o is fixated on the 'elephant's trunk' because that was the organ he saw in action personally while visiting ru in '90s
mircea_popescu: i dunno what he meant by it, but what he actually said does allow an interpretation that actually works, so. benefit of the doubt.
mircea_popescu: " And as the unraveling progresses, the violent entrepreneurs develop agendas of their own, which, inevitably, involve having the cooperation flow the other way: instead of cooperating with those formerly in charge, they demand that those formerly in charge start cooperating with them. And it is here that the scene turns bloody."
mircea_popescu: in a sense, "entrepreneurs of violence" is just a particular facet of sovereignity. orlov was in a room with a sovereign elephant and what he came out with was the trunk.
mircea_popescu: i have servers, too, and as the ddos rises so do the servers. simple equation there.
mircea_popescu: he's not particularly powerful, at least not in any way the pete's derpy commenter would recognise. but that's an unrelated matter.
mircea_popescu: anyway, i'd say i'm the poster child for orlov's "violent entrepreneurs". it's not that i make an enterprise of violence, is that i clearly and pointedly reserve the right to use violence without limit.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: if they weren't worthless they'd be invovled NOW << tricky bit here. 'involved now' almost always means 'share the fate of the new york death ray plot' or 'citadel corp.' or a thousand other stoolie-run shams.
mircea_popescu: well if the one you're thinking of is, then the one you;re thinking of might be, yes.
undata: mircea_popescu: the one I'm thinking of is better termed a distributor
mircea_popescu: if they weren't worthless they'd be invovled NOW. since they aren't now, they won't later.
undata: heavily armed, unfortunately christian, but otherwise seemingly fault tolerant
undata: mircea_popescu: here in Oregon there are plenty of farming operations that I wouldn't be surprised if later they take on a more political nature
assbot: The Obamacare Gestapo 012 - Pastebin.com
mircea_popescu: what did you think the flag was
mircea_popescu: that's what the flag is.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform americans aren't a nation. no such for them.
mircea_popescu: then flush it down the drain for all it matters, you just want to meet the people involved.
mircea_popescu: buy a pound of cocaine, uncut, on the premise that it muyst be exactly one pound and exactly uncut.
mircea_popescu: and i dont mean no dime peddling doofus either.
undata: many in Texas (not on the fringe) are secessionist
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform yeah, they will. VERY distinguishable. recall the previous fall : who dared go around in a militsya uniform ?
undata: asciilifeform: there we go; I was going to suggest "state govts"
asciilifeform: undata: in many (most?) places in usa, they won't be readily distinguishable from existing policemen.
mircea_popescu: no, not gangs. gangs are roughly what the police is. hardly entrepreneurial/
mircea_popescu: they already have emerged.
undata: asciilifeform: It is likely a failure of my imagination that I cannot guess what sort of violence-entrepreneurs might emerge in the US.
mircea_popescu: $wp_rewrite->set_permalink_structure($permalink_structure); is the call you care about
ben_vulpes: something (perhaps js?) strips the '/', '%'
mircea_popescu: anyway, there's a $prefix defined in wp-admin/options-permalink.php but "you really should not fuck with that"
assbot: ClubOrlov: Twilight of the Oligarchs
mircea_popescu: ben_vulpes and so it doesn't use just the name ?