asciilifeform: and then you say 'british admiralty's logarithmic human calculators were merely emulating this here computer, on account of lacking one'
asciilifeform: sometimes, the simulation turns out to be a superior 'reality' and you throw the old 'reality' out.
asciilifeform: the same way electronic calculator 'emulates' a stable of slaves counting with beads.
asciilifeform: but instead an entity which simulates the behaviour of one where possible (in much the same way a tcp/ip telephone attempts to behave like a traditional electric telephone.)
asciilifeform: decimation: if the order predicate is non-inferrable, it is given.
decimation: how do you re-use the quicksort for floats?
asciilifeform: decimation: handle them where?
mircea_popescu: however, that's not the point. suppose i want my machine to always use bubblesort. everywhere
asciilifeform: on a proper computer, e.g., 'quicksort' or 'newton-raphson method' are distinct entities. and there are no 'programs' as such, only a graph of circuit linkages.
decimation: mircea_popescu: the kernel kinda works that way
asciilifeform: i don't mean a specially-instrumented crippled proggy running for the occasion
asciilifeform: this is how we got these things that we call 'computer' even though i can't flip a switch that stops all cpus and shows me all the places 'quicksort' is mentioned on the machine and which ones got invoked in the last 7 days.
mircea_popescu: that may explain how we ended up with the current usg.
asciilifeform: then, for one reason or another (monkey overruns man's city; or, more commonly, man begins to turn monkey-like in his haste and sloth and adopts monkey's approach to design) and the fair-weather airplane becomes the only kind extant.
asciilifeform: sometimes this situation evolves in interesting directions. e.g., monkeys steal a small subset of man's tech, and build a cargo-cultish airplane - but one which sorta flies when the weather is just so.
mircea_popescu: if it's voluntary, if the prickly is passive, then the other party is active, and to the active goes the agency.
mircea_popescu: maybe wrongly, but the term to me suggested involuntary and incontinence. which is what the entire observation was based on, after all :
asciilifeform: naggum wrote that the worst thing that could possibly happen to common lisp is if it became 'mainstream' and popular.
asciilifeform: not everyone is itching to be part of some gigantic 'everyone' who will 'do things their way'
asciilifeform: it comes mainly from not wishing to dissolve in the sea.
decimation: moriarty earlier said that such an attitude is 'simplistic' - after all, how can these people (economists, programmers, students) have so many papers and have said nothing?
mircea_popescu: amusingly enough, for the capacities of the basic rational agent, they'd seem to have a point, too!
mircea_popescu: proponents of such tailored "knowledge" will understandably fight tooth and nail with some classes of rational approach, such as the people who use the counterexample effectually (aka, trolls)
mircea_popescu: decimation it's worse than that! consider : you could pick arbitrary assumptions and arbitrary data sets so as to theoretically and practically justify a particular theory sufficiently so that it gives the desired results for a FINITE time interval, calculated to exceed the probable testing period.
decimation: re: model being horeshit: "Because, we know that with theoretical cherry picking someone can come up with a set of assumptions that produces a result that may logically follow from those assumptions, but if the assumptions really don't have much traction in the real world, that result really doesn't have much to say about what we are actually looking at. " << from my econtalk link above
ben_vulpes: whoa abcl runs on the jvm
asciilifeform: they are 'prickly' in the sense that their only contact with a world outside their own is redditards knocking on the door to 'teach how the world is'
mircea_popescu: but what would be the equivalent to "lisp people being prickly" in context ?
asciilifeform: the most unbearable itch, to monkey, is the mental hole in his picture of the world, the annoying hatefact that rubs his nose in the entire model being horseshit.
mircea_popescu: important to remember that his declarative statements are powerless to influence reality, and as much as he'd like to live in a world where there's no incentive for me to stay honest,
mircea_popescu: "The site is owned by the most annoying, donkey riding arsehole involved with bitcoin." "Unlike all the others, owned by nice people that ran off with your coins." "I wish that arsehole would run off with all the coins if it meant never hearing from him again."
asciilifeform: walls tall enough that the monkeys don't even know, normally, that there is a something behind them, or walls at all.
asciilifeform: if surrounded by monkeys, and for one reason or another can't call an exterminator - what to do.
mircea_popescu: and if you conform by doing the "since they call me a thief anyway might as well", you are actually giving away that much power.
mircea_popescu: this is what i meant, obliquely. if you allow the "community" of screaming monkeys to decide whether you are antisocial type 1 or 2, you're giving them too much power.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: 'antisocial' in this case is same kind of 'antisocial' as, e.g., mathematicians who won't ask to learn from redditors how to do topology 'correctly according to the kommyoonity!'
ben_vulpes: programmers are the herdiest of creatures
mircea_popescu: if your highschool peers can make you antisocial by claiming you're antisocial then there's no incentive for them to abstain is there.
mircea_popescu: "But part of it definitely stems from the incessant stream of ignorant criticisms leveled at the Lisp community by outsiders" asciilifeform it occurs to me that if the outsiders can do that then the whole ecosystem empowers outsiders to an outrageous, unwarranted and quite dangerous degree.
mircea_popescu: "one of the great strengths of the APL ecosystem so far are the user community. Lispy people are a preposterously pricklish and unhelpful bunch in comparison."
mircea_popescu: well i guess if they have silent (non js, non url-forwarding etc) browsers it could be from anywhere
mircea_popescu: they're not redirects. in fact, linked traffic has always been 10% or less, as far as trilema is concerned.
decimation: huh. do the redirects come from particular domains?
mircea_popescu: seriously, 20% of my search traffic came looking for... "true" ? what the fucking hell of a cosmic joke is this.
moriarty: afk folks, enjoy the weekend
decimation: from military service, and free land to farmers. By the end of 1767, German settlers from central Germany had established more than 100 colonies along the Volga River, near Saratov, Russia."
decimation: "The Germans from Russia are descendents of Germans who settled in Russia in the years about 1763 to 1862. Their story begins with Tsarina Catherine II (Catherine the Great) who was empress of Russia, but a German princess by birth. In July 1763 she issued a manifesto to attract people from Western Europe to settle in Russia. The manifesto promised new settlers freedom of religion, freedom from taxes for a 5-30 year period, freedom
mircea_popescu: they've alsways been.
mircea_popescu: it's what makes the joke good
decimation: I see it in the cards
mircea_popescu: "let's save the environment by shipping natural gas across the atlantic because we're too bigmouthed to fit a cock"
bounce: so, us gas aid for ukraine then?
decimation: this is true, but the us is itching to start exporting natural gas by ship
mircea_popescu: and germany doesn't want to be in the fallout
mircea_popescu: moriarty no, because the us is getting screwed in its imaginary economic war.
decimation: last I read in the newspapers, Germany is pretty much on Russia's side
moriarty: EU is the one who has to suffer
moriarty: decimation, but for the cost of its own GDP
decimation: moriarty: it looks to me russia has the whip hand
mircea_popescu: russia is fine. the us is too high to notice how fucked it's getting.
mircea_popescu: pain is not the basis of this discussion.
mircea_popescu: aggression is when it comes to bomb canada and expects the us to mind its own fucking business.
moriarty: mircea_popescu, the passport outlines where china thinks its borders are
mircea_popescu: well yeah, it being the south CHINA sea
moriarty: mircea_popescu, have you seen the latest china passport?
bounce: the us not only has the most advanced toys anywhere, it relies on them being so. china wouldn't have to. big difference.
bounce: sure. but you'll note that when the us started to use all those beltway bandit toys they broke in droves and could be pwned by IEDs
assbot: Operation Black Buck - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
decimation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Black_Buck << it took 11 refueling planes for one bomber to bomb stanley field in the falklands
mircea_popescu: or we could read secret dispatches, check out how the various actors behave around it, who knows, even go to a military expo.
moriarty: for now, their leadership is even more pussyfooted than obama
moriarty: until the day it actually uses it, we can argue to no end
bounce: if china cared enough it could zerg rush just about anyone. plus their gear is getting better -- best stolen from anywhere.
mircea_popescu: in the most humble display of abjection imaginable.
mircea_popescu: you can tell this by the very good predictor that when china told the us to get fucked, the us secretary of state promised to carefully avoid misunderstandings in the future
mircea_popescu: the us is negligible by comparison.
moriarty: and as of this moment, they are being led by a pussyfoot for a president
bounce: there's russia still
decimation: reading the history of the falklands war demonstrates how threadbare the uk military really is
mircea_popescu: what were the ods ?
mircea_popescu: where the hell did you bet that
assbot: HMS Invincible (R05) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
decimation: yeah they still have a handful of nuke subs
mircea_popescu: while england's own "fleet", w/e it is lol... do they still have it btw ?
decimation: russia would love to shower scotland with bezzlars so he could use them as a wedge to split the eu
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: ^ precisely why this outcome wasn't on the menu.
mircea_popescu: plus, russia'd have loved to sponsor them
decimation: and welfare states work much better when the population is smaller
mircea_popescu: so they can borrow anew
decimation: I suspect a big voting bloc were welfare recipients who feared the sudden lack of welfare bezzlars
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: unless i'm misinformed, scotland runs deep in the red.
mircea_popescu: but why would anyone want in the uk ?!
decimation: They should have allowed infants to vote
mircea_popescu: i still dunno wtf they did to make such a wide margin happen.
asciilifeform: independence << that is only a permitted outcome when the 'orcs' vote.
decimation: independence would have been the more amusing outcome, for sure
decimation: which is why victory is so terrible for the triumphant empire
asciilifeform: decimation: 'valve' << except for the problem that the defeated are left alive, to stink loudly and plan a comeback
mircea_popescu: the ones it keeps you didn't want. much like africa forever, much like renaissance europe ec.
decimation: this is one of the 'safety valves' of mass-democracy (like in scotland)
mircea_popescu: quite. and intellectually dead places go beddy-bye whether they agree they're intellectually dead or not.
mircea_popescu: just nobody wanted to sit there and discuss that.
mircea_popescu: for all anyone cares, the ideas of midwest people re cattle and rain are right.
mircea_popescu: it's not even a matter of whether social justice and pc and the rest of the crap is right or wrong
decimation: or the german farmer circa 1850
mircea_popescu: well, now the whole us is flyover country.
decimation: this is an illusion to some extant, because new york/coastal cities suck the intelligent youth from flyover country
mircea_popescu: the american caesar, if he exists, will caesarize in chile or w/e.
decimation: heh. he did spend most of his life adventuring among the gauls
mircea_popescu: in the sense that a boring place can not have interesting people.
decimation: in the sense that the dying country will split rather than come under stronger central rule?
mircea_popescu: whether that young lion is mp or not.
mircea_popescu: left to stand on its own, buffett's "immense potential" will die under the paws of some young lion
moriarty: didn't the 1800s also work because EU projected its dominance globally through colonialism?
decimation: and the mass suicide of europe
mircea_popescu: once that died, the country died.
mircea_popescu: decimation the 1800s worked because at the time europe was mismanaging human resources, and so you could actually get free value by just taking its rejects. then early 1900s worked because the whole country obeyed its betters, so carnegie, rockefeller et co could create a monopoly on the world.
decimation: when I was younger, I wanted to explore the infinite potential
moriarty: most people i know who like coding actually mistake their liking for solving puzzles, for liking coding
decimation: asciilifeform: yeah reading your blog has removed the romance of programming for me
moriarty: asciilifeform, yeah i think nobody likes coding for the sake of coding
moriarty: awh :) daybyter wanted to say something on the main
decimation: I think it has been mooted here that the reason why the early (1800's) us worked for awhile is because of the memories of law&order beaten into the parents & grandparents of those living here
mircea_popescu: the current libtards are really just trying to do a sort of "being cinderella" except a little deeper than disney
decimation: mircea_popescu: you mean educatin' the local youths?
asciilifeform: usually the question presumes certain customary rituals
mircea_popescu: decimation really it started during the renaissance, as an attempt to bite the fruit of life fully.
decimation: yeah in 'modern' times the common solution was to send the kids off to 'elite' boarding schools and so forth
Apocalyptic: the only incentive is to get reelected yes
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: the man is, approximately, usa and colonies.
moriarty: asciilifeform, there is some truth to that article
mircea_popescu: decimation when do you think the middle ages are ?!
assbot: Carl Friedrich Gauss - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
decimation: "Gauss's intellectual abilities attracted the attention of the Duke of Brunswick,[2] who sent him to the Collegium Carolinum (now Braunschweig University of Technology), which he attended from 1792 to 1795, and to the University of Göttingen from 1795 to 1798. "
mircea_popescu: do you mean like 5 people in the renaiisant italy or what.
asciilifeform: decimation: ^ the only organized approach known to work
mircea_popescu: o hey, trilema is not on the "dark enlightenment" map w/e that is. i guess im cool like that!
decimation: in the middle ages, the local barons would think of themselves as personally responsible to nurture the talent of the local intelligent young boys
mircea_popescu: there's so many various different examples of it...
mircea_popescu: <asciilifeform> 'lesswrong' would be a harmless heathen pit if not for the inescapable fact that it is a tarpit for a good number of otherwise intelligent folks << this is a major problem in search for a solution.
decimation: I suspect few recognize the irony of turning away from traditional worship of Jahweh to worship some hobo
asciilifeform: there's ~1000+ of these, i won't link to them all, not everyone is a zoologist of crackpots
asciilifeform: 'lesswrong' would be a harmless heathen pit if not for the inescapable fact that it is a tarpit for a good number of otherwise intelligent folks
decimation: yeah I guess there's this fantasy that he can personally steer research toward non-angry-ai-god ai
asciilifeform: by alliance with usg, on one front, and subterfuge / 'kool aid dosing' subversion of likely participants - on other front.
xmj: as to the rest, no idea
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: well, he'd like to have a say in whether anyone gets to research.
mircea_popescu: kinda like the position of the girl being propositioned. if hte guy is good enough, not her place to have an opinion, not really.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: if you were to listen to mr. y, mis-programmed 'agi' is likely to, e.g., disassemble the known universe into constituent atoms to build a gigantic live mendeleev table. because it likes to sort things. or the like...
xmj: http://www.propertarianism.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/darkenlightenment1.png << there we go.
xmj: hrm, still not the right one
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: they have an elaborate narrative where 'intelligence' can take on the role of uncontrolled fissile chain reaction (of the kind that was thought to be possible pre-1945)
mircea_popescu: o, that's bad because it could mp them out of existence ?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: 'artificial general intelligence' in their parlance.
xmj: there's lots of good memes
asciilifeform used to read nearly all of these ^ people - today, none.
assbot: Mapping The Dark Enlightenment
asciilifeform: the sheer density of epicycles the lw types lay on and on, to keep various dogma ('equality', etc) going - is something to behold.
xmj: moriarty: (not themap but interesting_ http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/01/12/1178414/-Racism-has-a-new-name-HBD
xmj: moriarty: you cannot receive development, you don't deserve development, you develop and then you've earned it.
mircea_popescu: "ETA: How concerned should we be that DARPA is going full steam ahead for strong AI? Perhaps not very much, given the failure of at least two of their projects along these lines"
asciilifeform: in that sense - yes. but with the usg-like mask of 'we will neuter you for your own good'
xmj: moriarty: "why didn't they?"
xmj: moriarty: now comes your neoreactionary and inquires "if western europeans built such beautiful institutions such as states that actually hold together over centuries, industries, absolute nuclear family that favors outbreeding, and an army that could literally dominate the entire world..."
mircea_popescu: well, i didn't mean b-a-hood in the "it's sensible and it works" sense, i mearly meant it in the "rule the wrold" sense.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: except that they subscribe to every dogma of present-day usg (incl. 'climate science', 'equality', 'democracy') and so maintain various pretenses.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform so basically they aspire to b-a-hood ?
asciilifeform: jurov: 'friendly' means something very particular to these folks. it means, developed under the dictatorial control of mr. y and his clique of fellators, in accordance with various 'rules' stated in his (often contradictory) blatherings.
mircea_popescu: possibly one of the more stupid things to come out of academia.
moriarty: xmj, some have posited that the reason why Africa received much less development is because of the way our map projections undermine the true size of Africa
moriarty: xmj, oh, the cause models
asciilifeform actually FOIA'd all the available lenat material and still has thick binder of mildly interesting goodies
mircea_popescu: what's left is the multi-millenial selected scum of humanity.
mircea_popescu: moriarty there's nothing to fathom. africa is the craddle of civilisation. better people leave, so they left.
jurov: they banned you cauz of this? huehuehue
jurov: Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky This is a road that does not lead to Friendly AI, only to AGI. I doubt this has anything to do with Lenat's motives - but I'm glad the source code isn't published and I don't think you'd be doing a service to the human species by trying to reimplement it.
moriarty: in our attempt to fathom why africa has such a different development trail, we have come up with some interesting cause models, from the bias introduced by the Mercator projection, to the irrelevancy of subdividing world population based on continental shelves
mircea_popescu: and resistance will be washed away on the simple grounds that well... fiat world is going to africa anyway.
moriarty: but i guess once a system is put in place, resistance would act against any attempts to better the status quo
asciilifeform: chinese system did then - and afaik, still does - select, with mind-boggling efficiency, for the uncreative 'human computer' type.
assbot: Logged on 19-07-2014 03:41:36; asciilifeform: even ancient china, apparently, had 'cram schools.' (see miyazaki, 'china's examination hell' - neat little monograph on the subject)
mircea_popescu: the chinese got there, but with thinking. their thinkers can't reproduce w/o the state. it proved ruinous but it is not yet abandoned.
mircea_popescu: recall your argument re the statist agriculture endgame ?
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform not the same, yes. alive, also yes.
mircea_popescu: proceeds to act as if the static image he perceived, more or less blurry, is made out of diamond.
mircea_popescu: the average idiot tasked with "making policy" and "framework" for absolutely no reason doesn't get this,
mircea_popescu: bounce: apropos earlier point, you need the idiots though. how else are you going to know you're not? << this is such nonsense. why would you care ?
moriarty: mircea_popescu, it doesn't help that the metrics of a good academic is the number of publications, one that seems to be robust in the face of peer review, but take a peek behind the curtain only to unveil the editorial committee having ties to the same university, sigh
asciilifeform: animal with glands cut out - not the same.
mircea_popescu: i suspect the azns may have some extant
moriarty: mircea_popescu, yeah i don't care too much for academia, when i've realised the amount of crap coming from most institutions
mircea_popescu: <moriarty> asciilifeform, to be fair it was somewhat of an adjustment coming from the open world of academia and studenthood into proprietary work << that'd explain why you so drastically overestimate the "conversation" going on between empty barrels rolling downhill.
asciilifeform: moriarty: in point of fact, given correct hardware design ('dataflow' machine) neither compilers nor 'parallelism' as conventionally understood - are necessary concepts at all.
asciilifeform plugs in 'read all books in the world for free' machine to recharge.
moriarty: asciilifeform, sure, and then you get the philosophical stances behind strong vs weak typing, how many passes would you like your compilation to occur, how about parallelism for that matter, etc
mircea_popescu: wil redirect anyone trying to do so in the future.
assbot: The irc world is a big but very flat place. pe Trilema - Un blog de Mircea Popescu.
mircea_popescu: http://trilema.com/2014/the-irc-world-is-a-big-but-very-flat-place/ << if anyone feels like arguing the ethics/moral question, i'm all ears.
asciilifeform: moriarty: all of these devices are quite the same from the standpoint of, e.g., 1970s hardware architect (in whose time there were actually multiple cpu paradigms in use)
bounce: so make a new fancy box that does lisp from the ground up.
moriarty: the very basics of comparative languages as one of the electives or course modules in CS will inform anyone that the history of language development was in response to advances in hardware, but at the same time, paradigms from ages before still come into play today at various points in the hardware spectrum, if no longer on your desktop, then at least on your mobile devices which are
asciilifeform: (re: smbx) must say that some things absolutely must be experienced to be understood. i went to considerable lengths to actually obtain the machine before i dared to write about it at any great length.
moriarty: whenever someone makes a comment like last programming language, it's a giveaway sign they have no formal education in CS
moriarty: that's the fallacy of homeschooling
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu, others : http://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2012/09/12/not-all-programmers-alike/#comment-3728 << smbx for the impatient.
moriarty: you can get some sort of clue based on the amount of money in the system, and the flow rate
moriarty: we know we shouldn't do it, but we do it anyway :) and if you can partition the market into the emotional plays, and the bot plays, you can then expect to tailor your response accordingly
moriarty: without any training, the basic market participant buys at the high and sells at the low, despite being cognisant of the mantra to the contrary
moriarty: you may act individually, but your response to feedback from the market constraints that individuality, and as a whole, the market acts very mechanistically, well, if you can pin it down of course
moriarty: same it is with anything else, even in the markets
moriarty: they may amble along seemingly individualistic paths but the feedback arising from interaction with other criss-crossing of paths result in a very predictable wave
moriarty: think crowd behaviour as they exit a museum
moriarty: if you have a good perception of what will be the populist stance, then you can make a trading move to optimise your profits in response
moriarty: it's all about grasping the mindset of the mainstream, and then harvesting that to your advantage
bounce: hmno. you're mistaking your peers keeping you down with the humility needed to climb up by yourself
asciilifeform: too often 'lose the smug arrogance' is when pig says to man 'you think you're too good to eat shit with us, you bugger'
bounce: lose the smug arrogance and you know what to look for to improve yourself