mircea_popescu: here's the difference : suppose a guy is a carpenter, and he goes to new york. there's no jobs there, so he goes to oregon and makes himself a cabin.
mircea_popescu: but in the sense of accident "i'd have been to busy to hear of bitcoin" or in the sense of stupidity ?
jurov: mircea_popescu: if they accepted me at ibm, maybe i won't be here, too
mircea_popescu: why is it that bitcoin attracts all the weirdos and assorted cruft refused everywhere
mircea_popescu: Neuropathy is unpredictable. One minute I am doing fine, the next my face aches, tinnitus (motor in my ear), then suddenly my abdomen, then feet, then can't swallow and have a "fear of imminent suffocation" anxiety attack, feeling that my stomach wants to exit my body, etc.."
mircea_popescu: pheral neuropathy auto-immune condition caused by an incurable STD which is also morphing into neuropathy every where not just peripheral and causes me chronic fatigue syndrome which causes frequent deliriousness+pain which makes it easier for me to write in a forum than to do the more intellectually sharp+focused work of actual programming... I only get opportunities to program depending on my body maybe every few day
mircea_popescu: "Yeah I am just messing with your minds and have no actual technical ability. But maybe someone does who is reading my points and maybe they will do something. I am hoping. You see I don't really care how we get the solution, as long as we get one. I am not the young productive programmer that I once was with two good eyes (not very productive since losing one eye and acquiring an apparently progressive, incurable peri
mircea_popescu: there's a reason footnotes survived three empires.
ozbot: Markopolos Letter to the SEC about Madoff | Doug Cornelius - JDSupra
ThickAsThieves: who knows, kids these days
asciilifeform: fingers have will of their own.
mircea_popescu: im bashing the crap corp
asciilifeform: perhaps if cray were alive, you could buy 'fpga' the size of a billboard...
asciilifeform: sad thing is, they sell 'chickens' now.
asciilifeform: some of the (officially released, not leaked) papers of the latter reveal that crap corp. was 'bailed out' as a 'national seekoority' matter
asciilifeform: who doesn't know the old, unofficial and very alliterative slogan of the (traditional) nsa - 'acres of crays'
the20year1: without him we wouldn't have the last starfighter
asciilifeform: invented (among a hundred other things) 'pipelining'
bounce: I say. In the spirit of expensive lulz, wish I had the spare change to buy up cray and move their headquarters to 4 2nd inf loop
mircea_popescu: the path to pain starts with but a single step!
decimation: http://www.computer.org/portal/web/awards/seymourbio ?Anyone can build a fast CPU. The trick is to build a fast system.?
mircea_popescu: i wanted the obituary to read "at least he had his bodyguard with him" but people thought it's too soon.
asciilifeform: i visited recently, to hear a talk, and noticed more girls in one classroom than there ever were in the whole bldg.
asciilifeform: the uni where i studied 'comp sci' has abolished many of the hardest items in the syllabus (or made them optional)
decimation: at least Mr. Cray had the good sense to die in a car accident
asciilifeform: (from the 'thinking machines' obituary)
asciilifeform: th threats. Some members of Thinking Machines' board suddenly seemed to realize that the person who had been running the company all those years had no business skills. The board discussed dumping Handler, but she managed to get her biggest enemies there kicked off.'
asciilifeform: n for a CM-5 sweatshirt and then rejected it. While the company was sinking, she focused her attention on putting out a cookbook with recipes from the company's now-infamous cafeteria. Increasingly paranoid, she had a video camera aimed at her personal parking spot and, by some accounts, made people take meetings with her in her parked car. She hired a bodyguard, telling her colleagues that she had received dea
asciilifeform: 'The first round of layoffs had started. Salaries were frozen. Requests for new laptop computers were being denied. Meanwhile, Handler had an enormous marble archway installed in the atrium of the Carter Ink Building. When a national supercomputer conference was held in Seattle, she decided to stay in San Francisco and commute to Seattle from the swank Stanford Court Hotel. She commissioned a $40,000 logo desig
benkay: "great!" i said to the desk operator responsible for scheduling things while I seethed internally.
mircea_popescu: benkay https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=525676.0 there's one jus' for you then :D
benkay: in other news, my user group got kicked from our corporate sponsor's shop next month for a "women in tech event"
decimation: from the article: Surprisingly, some of the largest and most heavily financed scientific fields, such as biomedical research, are among those with the least attractive career prospects, as a recent blue-ribbon advisory committee reported to the Director of the National Institutes of Health. "
asciilifeform: if you never learned the skill of inflicting pain on yourself, it might be hard to start though
mircea_popescu: i'm with the b's. both of em.
mircea_popescu: basically the chinese ran all the middle ages on a sort of govt-sponsored us university program
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform vaugely reminiscent of all the chinese administrative reorganisations
benkay: i wish i'd had an education in the classic sense.
asciilifeform: so in that light, phd students who crib buggy code from stackoverflow and pass it off as a thesis are unsurprising.
mircea_popescu: "we are adding the TRUE value to everything through teh social media"
asciilifeform: i'm certainly not the first to describe this, but u.s. education system 'bit-shifted'. i.e. 'college is the new high school', and thereby it follows that 'phd is the new college'
mircea_popescu: they're doing a lot of scholastics.
mircea_popescu: you know the refuge of dying empires
decimation: at some point the bills will come due. It's hard to see how the US is going to add much value to anything with only 300k EEs
mircea_popescu: decimation indefinitely extensible. "be able to also design the battery"
decimation: to be an American today is to put your head deep in the lion's mouth, on the understanding that he won't bite
decimation: well, as long as the asians keep shipping those parts
mircea_popescu: it no longer matters what the kid is lifting off net.
mircea_popescu: see, if the context is, "be able to power bulb with battery on request or spend the next month poledancing in mumbai"
asciilifeform: with the trend for centralization (everybody but a few weirdos runs 'arm' chips, compiles c/cpp) it 'works'
decimation: wrt embedded stuff "lifting off the net" never works well
asciilifeform: but won't. because 'i can lift it off the net'
asciilifeform: the american kids can't xxxx because, well, american schooling, 'diversity', etc. the eastern kids, they, in principle, could
asciilifeform: there's two separate diseases at work
mircea_popescu: "we are the premier engineer and science institution in teh werld"
asciilifeform: but it had the angle of pillorying american undergrads at posh unis
asciilifeform: and these people get Ph.D and 'graduate'
mircea_popescu: that's not even the worst part.
mircea_popescu: it can employ an infinity of them
decimation: Even in electrical and electronic engineering?an occupation that is right at the heart of high-tech innovation but that also has been heavily outsourced abroad?U.S. employment in 2013 declined to about 300,000, down 35,000 and over 10 percent, from 2012, and down from about 385,000 in 2002. Unemployment rates for electrical engineers rose to a surprisingly high 4.8 percent in 2013.
decimation: http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/03/the-myth-of-the-science-and-engineering-shortage/284359/
mircea_popescu: if you ask its citizenry, the us south still lives.
decimation: they are going to get stem degrees
mircea_popescu: and talk among each other about how "putin is living in a different world"
decimation: well, in the specific case of high-end test equipment, most buyers are not going to be easily swayed by bs
mircea_popescu: you familiar with the concept of invincible ignorance ?
decimation: well, in this specific case, I think it will be impossible to create a ring of patents that will stop the mongol hordes
asciilifeform: i doubt that anyone at fluke likes to think about 'the end'
decimation: yeah, but making lame patents isn't going to win in the end
asciilifeform: fluke, naturally, 'will not go quietly into the good night'
asciilifeform: and you can even get calibration certificates for them, for some extra cost
asciilifeform: but now, the chinese instruments are quite usable
decimation: Except, that's exactly what happened with the boston tea party
asciilifeform: there is really no qualitative difference between this and every other 'ip' enforcement action.
mircea_popescu: gotta support the team.
decimation: so, in the land of the free, the USG has granted a monopoly on yellow DMM's and then began enforcing the monopoly using taxpayer funds.
asciilifeform: and saying 'we're not the least bit sorry and shall do it again always'
asciilifeform: the next day, they 'apologized' by... supplying a crate of free fluke meters to the victim
decimation: did you ever wonder how many TSA agents could identify diddled electronics with their xray machines?
asciilifeform: decimation: did you see the recent incident with Fluke Corp. ?
decimation: Because actually inspecting things would violate the rights of the grey-market importers
decimation: " According to a press release from the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), until 2008, the CBP would snap pictures of the trademarks and other info on suspected counterfeit chips and send the images to semiconductor firms for verification. That stopped with when the Department of Homeland Security implemented a new security policy."
mircea_popescu: bounce i suspect the statements are homologuous.
bounce: "hairs of its own"... well, that sort-of works. my understanding was more along the lines of bad RNGs have higher risk of getting stuck in local minima, but anyway. nothing like having and obscure joke get dissected to death.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform freer people would make home candy in the pattern and distribute it to neighbourhood kids.
ozbot: The Rise and Fall of Thinking Machines, Bankruptcy Article | Inc.com
asciilifeform: 'Yes, our office was magnificent and yes, a gourmet chef and her entourage came in every day to cook our lunch. The meals were awesome.'
ozbot: Thinking Machines - The Daily WTF
decimation: just not against problems of the "I don't know what I want" variety
asciilifeform: this is a well-known fact. the 'ai winters' were merely the flip sides of 'ai summers', bacchanalia of graft of every variety
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform nn, "expert systems" and other prime snake oil has long been the substance used to maks government graft.
mircea_popescu: bounce the thing is, evolution algo looks for fine little hairs on things. bad rng adds hairs of its own. it's as if you'd be having two species fighting it out. often enough the one you're interested in gets overwhelmed
asciilifeform: re: the dope: simply owning the 'pill press' required to stamp the pictured items is quasi-illegal in usa
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform the guys are retards of prime order, which is why i quoted it.
asciilifeform: 'eat recycled food. it's good for the environment, and ok for you!'
decimation: I was speaking to a greybeard EE last night. He lamented that most compE kids coming out of school want to put a high-end media CPU on embedded projects so they can run java or something stupid
decimation: the microcontroller on board is basically free
asciilifeform: i experimented with this myself a few yrs ago, but life got in the way
asciilifeform: there was also a fellow who booted linux kernel on the controllers of dead hdds recently
asciilifeform: one was an 'arm' variant, the other, a big-endian mips with a couple of custom cores, if i recall
decimation: but now that you mention it, they would be a good place to find cheap flash chips
decimation: no, I mean the firmware
asciilifeform: decimation: most of them disassemble just fine
asciilifeform: most of them have cheap through-hole solder jobs and protrude almost 1mm
decimation: I wish there were an ssd available that let you examine its innards
asciilifeform: back in the day, i found that not one of three different pata<->cf cards would fit.
asciilifeform: libretto has the least slack space in the bay of any machine of that period that i've owned.
decimation: as is the case with most laptops
asciilifeform: if you have a libretto, the drive has to fit. exactly.
asciilifeform: decimation: i used a 'Transcend' TS64GPSD330. <$100 at the time.
decimation: I like your idea of underprovisioning the drive to leave room for bad flash cells
decimation: how did you adapt to the ancient ide connectors?
decimation: asciilifeform you mentioned in the past that you did not care for mechanical hard drives. Does this mean you put a flash drive in your Libretto?
asciilifeform: re: NNs: their present-day niche obscurity is well-deserved. try using it for any application with regular novel inputs, and notice how it 'forgets.'
asciilifeform: a shoddy rng ends up 'dwelling' in some portions of the state space
asciilifeform: nothing mystical about it. poor rng, for the application described above, is like watered gasoline
bounce: so god's grace is in the quality of your RNG?
asciilifeform: if you don't adequately 'massage' the state space, you get miserable evolution.
asciilifeform: we had a homework of evolving (genetic algo) - rather than, as usually done, 'training' a small NN
asciilifeform: incidentally, my first exposure to the problem of RNGs with inadequate entropy was by accident, at uni
asciilifeform: minksy & papert showed that single-layer NN cannot even learn 'XOR'. this touched off the first 'ai winter.'
chetty: benkay, it sure looks like an economic war is a brewing. It will crash the whole world economy if they keep it up
benkay: re chetty's zerohedge sanction link "Carney...said. 'I wouldn't, if I were you, invest in Russian equities right now, unless you're going short.'". << is this the great mechanisms of war ratcheting one step further? is the US seriously biting off an economic war with Russia?
mircea_popescu: Mircea Popescu @Mircea_Popescu RT @ArdenEliz The Future of Self-Satisfaction, Part I: Girth Is More Important Than ta Length (link)
mircea_popescu: Arden Elizabeth @ArdenEliz The Future of Self-Improvement, Part I: Grit Is More Important Than Talent (link)
ozbot: How Deep Learning Analytics Mimic the Mind
mircea_popescu: (for the rap fans among us : this is some friend of p. diddy's)
mircea_popescu: apparently they didn't have lambos in fiat yet.
mircea_popescu: Gilliams lives an extravagant lifestyle, much of which is depicted in videos filmed by videographers he hired to follow him around. The videos appear on TLG TV, which purports to be some sort of reality TV show starring him. A host of such videos still remain on YouTube, although some were deleted from Vimeo. One such video apparently depicted Gillaims posing with stacks of money on his lap.
mircea_popescu: " He also generated a document, which he supplied to a representative of the investors, in which he purported to show a series of $5 million trades, as well as over $100,000 in purported profits on trades during September and October 2010, [but] this document was false. Anyone can generate a professional looking document on their computer."
mircea_popescu: "Gilliams received $4 million from Morfopoulous and $1 million from another investor for investment in the STRIPS program. As evidence that the funds were so invested, Gilliams created a screenshot from Bloomberg Finance showing $1 million worth of U.S. Treasury STRIPS, which Gilliams represented was proof that he had purchased Treasury STRIPS. A screenshot? He must have been in the virtual office that day. A
Ghaleon: i have a feeling that carl jung's archetypal mode.. a consdesnded version will give the right person a keen edge going forward
Ghaleon: and get an answer thanks to the blockchain
Ghaleon: join the club brah
mircea_popescu: but im the elitist asshole to end all elitist assholes.
Ghaleon: mp, yes, the challenge is finding that person who can build the epic bridges and present the right face... without going insane for long enough
mircea_popescu: Ghaleon as you approach mastery you'll notice the leet asshole is an epic bridge builder type.
artifexd: Standard of success? No. Measurement? Sure. "Yes compile" is further along than "No compile"
mircea_popescu: the time to be kakobrekla'd is never! say aye!
kakobrekla: but 'did it compile' check is equal to 'did i make any typos' not 'is the code fucking shit'
Ghaleon: hence the typical irc, leet jerk attitude is bout to be extinct
Ghaleon: as programmers we must rise up now and be better bridges between humans and machines, money is the lifeblood of human energy, thus we must improve as ambassardors
mircea_popescu: otherwise you'd just carry a soldering iron everywhere.
mircea_popescu: that's trhe very point of having a language : abstracting the audience.
mircea_popescu: as opposed to "lisp is crap, they only run it on shit"
mircea_popescu: "javascript is really cool, it works on every shitty laptop out there"
kakobrekla: alert('whats wrong with the audience here?');
mircea_popescu: i never heard of a programmer that judged the languages on the basis of the machines involved.
asciilifeform: i still think it possible that there are competent people, but 'dark matter' because why should they talk.
mircea_popescu: most experts are over 50 and don't hang out in the right places, so
asciilifeform: naturally this only applies to cryptographic hashes, rather than checksums
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform these days, yes.
artifexd: relevant quote "the Bitcoin network is performing enough computation to generate SHA-1 collisions every 131 minutes!"
only: they will soon come up with bitcoin: http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/53673/how-does-the-authentication-in-the-new-uk-1-coin-work
mircea_popescu: probably some phtalate ester or other
nubbins`: fun fact, we dumped raw sewage into the atlantic until 2 years ago
mircea_popescu: the seabirds!
nubbins`: the seabirds
nubbins`: unfortunately i can't even sneak em into the trash
mircea_popescu: it'll sort them out.
mircea_popescu: you put it in the tumbler, stuff the tumbler with rags or packing peanuts or w/e to keep the cans flush to the side, then hook it to dry for a while.
mircea_popescu: wel lthen you're stuck.
nubbins`: either way, old inks break down
nubbins`: they're plastisol inks, PVC particles in emulsion
mircea_popescu: you can probably reemusify them if you have an old washing machine
nubbins`: brought em out to the dump today, and they wouldn't take them because it's commercial waste
nubbins`: which they in turn donated to us
mircea_popescu: unrelatedtly, this may be lulzy : http://financiallyregulated.com/2013/10/21/man-who-mocked-the-sec-in-his-blog-has-been-indicted/
gribble: John von Neumann - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann>; Von Neumann architecture - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture>; John von Neumann - CS Dept. NSF-Supported Education ...: <http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/VonNeumann.html>
artifexd: Change line 9 to vary the bias to your hearts content.
artifexd: If anyone wants it, here is the code for the Newman fair-izing test: http://dpaste.com/hold/1752001/
mircea_popescu: or the wall.
mircea_popescu: neumann was the later, and in that context yes it can.
mircea_popescu: in computational terms, the algo doesn't crash, it just never finishes.
mircea_popescu: artifexd if the bias is 100% you'll discard all sets.
artifexd: Unless the bias is 100%, in which case there is no entropy to tap so you can't get any entropy out.
artifexd: I recoded my test for that change and the results are an even distribution regardless of flip bias. Cool.
artifexd: I'm having trouble with http://trilema.com/2014/so-heres-a-problem-for-you/ If there was any bias in the coin, wouldn't that bias show up as a favoring towards heads in the end results?
mircea_popescu: In response to the argument that Title III provides no explicit provision for disclosures under the present facts, the court noted that "[Title III] does not prohibit all that it does not permit".
jborkl: That is very generous of them
kakobrekla: mebbe, ill see how bad the itch gets
kakobrekla: but i would need to register a sock, thats the issue
kakobrekla: at times like these, ban hurts.
kakobrekla: <mircea_popescu> i don't recall why the chan log only starts from april 2013, but prolly cause lazy < like a year of bullshit isnt enough
MisterE: where is the url bot?
MisterE: So I guess if you'e in a fund that invests in a Russian company you could get screwed f that the Russian holdings are sanctioned...
VanCleef: i would rather buy wechat for alot cheaper
ozbot: imgur: the simple image sharer
samson_: WTF has Crimea got to do with the US ?
VanCleef: Putin the next C.E.O of bitcoin
VanCleef: In an echo of the Cold War, MasterCard and Visa have stopped processing payments by some Russian banks after the United States issued sanctions over Russia's recent annexation of Crimea.
chetty: A workbook handed out to seventh grade students in Springfield, Ill., states that all Americans must register their firearms in order to have a Second Amendment right.
mircea_popescu: http://trilema.com/2014/so-heres-a-problem-for-you/ if anyone feels mathematically inclined
dnivi3: Interesting. Thanks for the insight. I gotta go!
mircea_popescu: and it'd even be better, because you wouldn't be locked into whatever braindamage they come up with
mircea_popescu: if they paid out that 35% you could reinvest it yourself.
dnivi3: I am not quite sure how the arrow in flight paradox relates to this.
mircea_popescu: what is this, logic 101 for people that haven't mastered the arrow in flight "paradox" ?
mircea_popescu: therefore my bottle of coca cola can never be empty.
dnivi3: They have a reinvestment plan for the future, to increase their hashrate. 35% of all profit goes to reinvestment for hash power.
dnivi3: Yes, indeed. However, it is not the case though if the mining operation is intending to reinvest (something which PETA intends to do).
VanCleef: thus being worth less as the network difficulty goes up?
VanCleef: so like each share locks you into a hashrate not a percentage of the companies total hashing power
ozbot: The problem with PMBs, ie “Perpetual Mining Bonds” pe Trilema - Un blog de Mircea Popescu.
VanCleef: therefore bad?
dnivi3: @micea_popescu: OK, what is that supposed to tell me? @VanCleef: there are some decent funds on Havelock, for example Peta Mine.
mircea_popescu: Morgan: Before money or anything else. Money cannot buy it
a man I do not trust could not get money from me on all the bonds in Christendom.
mircea_popescu: Morgan: No, sir. The first thing is character.
VanCleef: i wish there was something decent to invest in
dnivi3: Sure, but their business does not seem to thrive anyways so I'd rather pull out. What do you consider the chief consideration?
mircea_popescu: dividends aren't really the chief consideration in investments.
dnivi3: Seems like I jumped on the train a bit too early thinking that the price would rise (which it did for a little while). I am dumping my shares, can't justify the investment with regards to their shitty dividen.
mircea_popescu: i don't recall why the chan log only starts from april 2013, but prolly cause lazy
mircea_popescu: well no inasmuch as they