asciilifeform: http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2021-01-18#1029678 << maybe i'm thick, but a) why 'generate programs' when you have macros?? b) if somehow absolutely ~must~ : wainot do it with macroexpand/macroexpand-1 ?
snsabot: Logged on 2021-01-18 21:57:59 verisimilitude: Back to programming, it's poor how Common Lisp, despite being image-based, doesn't have strong facilities for generating wholesale programs, in the sense of a program which would output a template to file, as a human would. Sure, I could fiddle with the *PRINT- values, but this is comparatively weak. It's so weak, I've found an alternative solution which avoids needing to do this.
asciilifeform: $ticker btc usd
btcinfobot: Current BTC price in USD: $37315.47
asciilifeform: !w poll
watchglass: Polling 15 nodes...
watchglass: 185.85.38.54:8333 : Could not connect!
watchglass: 205.134.172.4:8333 : (172-4.core.ai.net) Alive: (0.083s) V=70001 (/therealbitcoin.org:0.7.0.1/) Jumpers=0x1 (TRB-Compat.) Blocks=666742
watchglass: 205.134.172.26:8333 : Alive: (0.082s) V=99999 (/therealbitcoin.org:0.9.99.99/) Jumpers=0x1 (TRB-Compat.) Blocks=666529
watchglass: 205.134.172.6:8333 : (172-6.core.ai.net) Alive: (0.082s) V=99999 (/therealbitcoin.org:0.9.99.99/) Jumpers=0x1 (TRB-Compat.) Blocks=666742
watchglass: 71.114.46.209:8333 : (pool-71-114-46-209.washdc.fios.verizon.net) Alive: (0.160s) V=99999 (/therealbitcoin.org:0.9.99.99/) Jumpers=0x1 (TRB-Compat.) Blocks=666742 (Operator: asciilifeform)
watchglass: 54.39.156.171:8333 : (ns562940.ip-54-39-156.net) Alive: (0.113s) V=99999 (/therealbitcoin.org:0.9.99.99/) Jumpers=0x1 (TRB-Compat.) Blocks=666742
watchglass: 205.134.172.28:8333 : Alive: (0.154s) V=99999 (/therealbitcoin.org:0.9.99.99/) Jumpers=0x1 (TRB-Compat.) Return Addr=0.0.0.0:8333 Blocks=666740 (Operator: whaack)
watchglass: 208.94.240.42:8333 : Alive: (0.147s) V=99999 (/therealbitcoin.org:0.9.99.99/) Jumpers=0x1 (TRB-Compat.) Blocks=666742
watchglass: 192.151.158.26:8333 : Alive: (0.208s) V=70001 (/therealbitcoin.org:0.7.0.1/) Jumpers=0x1 (TRB-Compat.) Blocks=666742
watchglass: 143.202.160.10:8333 : Alive: (0.253s) V=70001 (/therealbitcoin.org:0.7.0.1/) Jumpers=0x1 (TRB-Compat.) Blocks=666742
watchglass: 84.16.46.130:8333 : (182518.pk.3pp.slovanet.sk) Alive: (0.300s) V=99999 (/therealbitcoin.org:0.9.99.99/) Jumpers=0x1 (TRB-Compat.) Blocks=446571
watchglass: 185.163.46.29:8333 : Violated BTC Protocol: Bad header length!
adlai has often considered image-based development [e.g., while pondering ways to reduce trading engine downtime... 'turn it off and back on again'] as purely temporary pill, of the "have you tried killing everyone and recruiting a new cult" variety.
adlai: that one line might actually respond to everything that was spoken in here since my previous conversation, although I must remark that I never viewed Mircea as some sorta upstanding role model, nor really as anything other than a generous ?illionaire who was teaching by example rather than by sermon;
asciilifeform: adlai: ~100% sermon
adlai: thus, to complete his "sermon by example", he actually had to eventually do something indisputably scummy, otherwise "gpg contracts" would eventually be nothing more than the title of a blog post that nobody even read.
asciilifeform: adlai: i dunget it; why 'had to' ?
adlai: why he chose to take the "scammer by example" as far as he did, is ... an interesting question! ask him, lol.
adlai: why 'had to' ? << for the same reason that heaven-and-hell-based moralities are ineffective without uncertainty about what happens after death
asciilifeform: adlai: imho much simpler. see also hitler's 1945 'nero decree'.
adlai: to avoid bloviating about places where I've never been, nor even studied, I will not comment on the brief mention of eastern european geopolitics, other than to remark that it's probably a different breed of clusterfuck than is found in the leftovers of the commonwealth.
adlai has been quite tempted to visit those places with the "rando leftover of IDF" hat clearly visible, for enough time to _earn_ citizenship (rather than buy it), although that may be a worse idea than showing up uninvited to a TMSR konference.
adlai: in simple terms: life is too long to live happily ever after on a private island surrounded by a harem and its disciplined spawn.
adlai: verisimilitude: you may find that your prose is slightly less unpalatable if you replace the purely racial stereotypes with socioeconomic ones, although the fanbase for my website is quite scant, so my advice is worth what you paid [sic] for it.
adlai: e.g., you complain about "ebonics", yet eventually claim to write "Archaic English"; perhaps you should be complaining about the pidginification of the glocal era ushered in by the anthropocene?
adlai loosely cuts the start of "anthropocene" not at any year favored by climate wankers counting rings in 20th century tree trunks, but instead at the centuries when wholesale planting of private forests, for purposes such as hosting wildlife and serving as raw materials for ship building, became commonplace.
adlai: so, roughly the same as "CE", give or take a millenium.
verisimilitude: I'd rather mostly avoid the topic than make what I write on it ``less unpalatable''.
adlai: honestly, I think that's a better approach; it's a problematic topic, anyway. nitpicking people's word choice has never gone well in my conversations, and it probably doesn't go too well in those of anyone who isn't getting paid for that exact service, either.
adlai recalled what else he wanted to comment upon!
verisimilitude: I referred to the stereotyping and whatnot.
verisimilitude: As for language, what I do may seem unreasonable or inconsistent, but as a human being I needn't be reasonable nor consistent; I don't find it particularly egregious compared to the modern idiocy, anyway.
verisimilitude: I've long held the position that reason is only one of the many ways humans may make decisions. Reason is a tool, and I can always use a different tool when it suits me better.
adlai: and yes, I am mostly talking to myself when I write here, in public, that it is educational to compare the fadeout of MP's hosted wallet service [it had a free beta, remember?], with trinque's
snsabot: Logged on 2021-01-18 13:42:17 trinque: my own opinion of all this was expressed in how I operated deedbot.
adlai: although I should publicly declare, since such does occasionally make a difference: fucker overpaid my last withdrawal! although, not at ultimate personal detriment, so who cares.
adlai: the difference between reasoned tools and the unreasoned one is that you can't go back to using a reflex after you have decided to forsake it for the benefit of a reasoned response.
asciilifeform: adlai: mp did not formally close his thing; rather, went to 'punish offenders'
adlai: e.g., I have exactly once in my civilian life faced a gun barrel pointed at my face, and it was a bit chilling to recall that once I was sober and thought about other times.
adlai: asciilifeform: thus the word choice of "fadeout" instead of closure and other such not-quite-synonims.
verisimilitude: I've only bothered with identifying three good categories of decision-making: reason, instinct, and random chance.
verisimilitude: Anyway, the reason I speak and write oddly, adlai, is because I decided only addressing the modern rot in my native language wasn't good enough. I did what I do in other things, by considering ideals, and wandered towards the extremes.
adlai fails to see how 'random chance' falls under good decision algorithms, although it is admittedly a component of certain ones.
verisimilitude: It's good when one doesn't care; I've written about it here.
adlai: I'll repeat what I've written before: your ritual adherence to grammatic form is admirable; if anything, it reminds me of my best teachers, rather than internet randos who happened to have been good at filling my mind with verbiage (and those were busy, busy, busy, loooooooong before I first wandered into #b-a)
adlai: the implication that I understand from 'random chance' is unbiased choice. you may have intended to refer to algorithms incorporating randomized choices, although that's slightly more specific than, to pick an extreme - russian roulette.
adlai: yes, russian roulette is one such algorithm; so, s/specific/general a category of algorithm/
asciilifeform: adlai: you may find it interesting that the 'roulette' was orig. played w/ a nagant -- where the cylinder in fact spins freely. i.e. is ~biased~ rng.
asciilifeform: player who knows how to spin correctly -- will never lose
adlai: you may find it amusing that one of the quickest "nope"s out of a conversation with a professor that I ever attained on-campus was after asking, "why does statistical thermodynamics presume unbiased selection of edges"
adlai: the answer was along the lines of "I need to go eat lunch, and who the fuck are you again?"
adlai: at least it wasn't "write me an email about that idea", that is the worst.
asciilifeform: adlai: see also.
snsabot: (trilema) 2014-03-19 asciilifeform: and, finally, his moment arrived! von Kármán surrendered his orange ticket, took a deep breath, and said, "God, explain turbulence." Theodore von Kármán spent the rest of eternity burning in Hell.'
adlai has a stoner version of this joke, composed after reading that one, although it is a syntax error to tell it without a lit joint
snsabot: Logged on 2021-01-19 11:37:51 snsabot: (trilema) 2014-03-19 asciilifeform: and, finally, his moment arrived! von Kármán surrendered his orange ticket, took a deep breath, and said, "God, explain turbulence." Theodore von Kármán spent the rest of eternity burning in Hell.'
adlai: it hinges upon the demonstration of turbulence using the joint, so I guess you could use a cigarette, or a pipe, or even a drink if you're creative enough.
adlai: and how do you know if you're telling it to a junkie? "no es microfono"
verisimilitude: The intent was unbiased choice, but that's a nice addition to this, because the primary point is that the tosser doesn't care anyway.
verisimilitude: People who decide to live by coin flips are advised to cycle the coins on a regular, or random, schedule.
adlai: or read the FG source document, even if they never plug in one of the devices.
verisimilitude: http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2021-01-19#1029679 This involved writing a different manner of meta-program which would stand alone after generation, asciilifeform, but I've decided on a better solution for this.
snsabot: Logged on 2021-01-19 10:56:06 asciilifeform: http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2021-01-18#1029678 << maybe i'm thick, but a) why 'generate programs' when you have macros?? b) if somehow absolutely ~must~ : wainot do it with macroexpand/macroexpand-1 ?
asciilifeform: verisimilitude: outta curiosity, what's moar compact than shitting output of macroexpand to file ?
verisimilitude: I'll explain.
verisimilitude: Having written and gradually refined my Meta-Machine Code targetings, I'm naturally considering a Meta-Meta-Machine Code. However, it's nicer to write several of the core algorithms so generically that I could copy them wholesale, rather than generate them, and I may be able to do this successfully enough for my tastes.
asciilifeform: meanwhile, in misc. crackpotteries on www.
asciilifeform: verisimilitude: this link in particular reminded me of your experiments.
shinohai: http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2021-01-19#1029751 <<< After looking into who this was, I'd say they have a promising career in the Biden administration.
snsabot: Logged on 2021-01-19 11:59:06 asciilifeform: meanwhile, in misc. crackpotteries on www.
verisimilitude: I'm curious as to why, asciilifeform.
asciilifeform: verisimilitude: generally 'fits in head' machine archs.
verisimilitude: I'm familiar with that webring, but don't believe I've seen MyNOR before.
verisimilitude: Alright.
asciilifeform interested in 'single instruction cpu' largely from this pov
snsabot: (trilema) 2016-04-07 asciilifeform: i dug out the 1-bit cpu because i have a weakness for exotic archs that might be amenable to optical or otherwise 'this handful of switching elements' incarnation.
verisimilitude: I dislike those designs, because the true instructions are but collections of the ``single'' instruction.
asciilifeform: verisimilitude: horizontal microcode doesn't trigger yer allergy, tho? wainot?
asciilifeform: in vertical microcode, you can at least see what a given macroinstruction does, by reading the micro. but not so in horizontal, where opcode has 0 meaning unless you know the internals of cpu inside and out
verisimilitude: That's not intended for the lowest-level programmer. I'm to understand this MyNOR is similar.
verisimilitude: I dislike when the single instruction is exposed to the programmer.
asciilifeform: verisimilitude: from that pov, i dislike when something other than human-readable coad is exposed to the programmer. but e.g. single-instr. cpu is interesting from entirely diff. pov.
snsabot: Logged on 2020-08-22 14:59:36 asciilifeform: 'holy grail' ultimate pill here would obviously be 'desktop fab'. but afaik currently is not even in realm of 'science fiction', but rather lsd fantasy, sadly.
verisimilitude: The high-level instruction set is an obvious destination of this train of thought, yes.
asciilifeform: http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2021-01-19#1029753 << lol! elaborate?
snsabot: Logged on 2021-01-19 12:09:52 shinohai: http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2021-01-19#1029751 <<< After looking into who this was, I'd say they have a promising career in the Biden administration.
verisimilitude: I agree; I'd never considered it from that perspective, as I don't do anything with hardware, sans using it.
shinohai: asciilifeform: https://archive.is/piVOe
asciilifeform: shinohai: waiwat -- how's the linked person connected w/ earlier lnk?
shinohai: Both appear to labor under the delusion they are female.
asciilifeform: shinohai: aa
verisimilitude: Say, I've had a persistent Emacs problem I could use help with.
verisimilitude: I use this function for when I need a spare buffer for notes:
verisimilitude: (defun switch-to-temporary-buffer ()
verisimilitude: "Generate a temporary buffer and switch to it."
verisimilitude: (interactive)
shinohai: Well the first step is admitting you have a problem. We here at vicorp are happy to help.
verisimilitude: (switch-to-buffer (generate-new-buffer "temporary")))
verisimilitude: The issue is when Emacs crashes, and it will; these temporary buffers aren't saved at all, because they've no associated files.
verisimilitude: I've tried to see what message-mode does, but locally setting buffer-offer-save has no effect.
verisimilitude: Vi vi vi is the editor of the beast, shinohai.
shinohai: xD
verisimilitude: That doesn't look good in the logs, so I'll reformat it.
verisimilitude: (defun switch-to-temporary-buffer () "Generate a temporary buffer and switch to it." (interactive) (switch-to-buffer (generate-new-buffer "temporary")))
verisimilitude: Mine Emacs recently crashed, and it was a bother to lose these buffers, even though I recall their contents.
verisimilitude: Oh, I'll also share my nice binding.
verisimilitude: (define-key ctl-x-map (kbd "C-M-b") 'switch-to-temporary-buffer)
shinohai: I thought `auto-save-mode` actually wokred in emacs on temp buffers, but don't use it much.
shinohai: (Though it isn't enabled by default)
verisimilitude: Well now I feel stupid.
verisimilitude: I'd thought I'd already tried that, perhaps.
verisimilitude: I'm appreciative, shinohai.
shinohai: Happy I remembered *something* about emacs lol
verisimilitude: I'll share the new.
verisimilitude: (defun switch-to-temporary-buffer () "Generate a temporary buffer and switch to it." (interactive) (switch-to-buffer (generate-new-buffer "temporary")) (auto-save-mode))
verisimilitude: How would the equivalent in Vimscript look, shinohai?
shinohai: no idea verisimilitude ... I tend not to rice out my vim setup. Only plugins I even have are nerdtree and slimv (for slime support) .... pretty boring.
verisimilitude: To call this ``ricing'' is so odd to me. I don't do it much either. Care for a joke of mine about this, shinohai?
shinohai: Shoot.
verisimilitude: I rice so little one could confuse me with China's Great Leap Forward.
shinohai: lolocopter.
jurov: vi use scratch files
jurov: nofile buffers are supported in vim, but it is more oriented to files than maintaining memory state
jurov: for lisp i use vlime which has read-only repl. so for anything more complicated i have to put it down in some file and i like it, it keeps one away from maintaining some hairy memory image
asciilifeform never before heard of a 'read-only repl'. sounds rather like the infamous write-only memory imho.
jurov: it means you don't write in expressions there, but evaluate them from the other files
thimbronion: I've also been using vlime - mostly because I'm a vim addict. Only complaint about the read-only repl is that some times it doesn't automatically stay focused on the latest output.
adlai upst^H^H^H^Hdnstreams to peripherals, and their evils
snsabot: Logged on 2021-01-03 14:47:27 asciilifeform: and incidentally most folx indeed 'can't see'. they then wonder where the chronic headaches come from.
adlai hears 'deathrays' on a weekly, if not daily, basis; although most likely culprits, other than the easy target of "pass the lsd", are power adapters in various devices
adlai: incidentally, that is why I loathe electronics.
adlai: however, my easy approach is simply to deny that the headaches exist, and most importantly, to minimise use of a device identified unambiguously as emitting.
adlai: once that's out of the way: my prime interest in the forseeable decade of junkyard wars is dealing with garbage displays, i.e. the kind of flatscreen TVs that asciilifeform would sell on ebay for "I don't care if nobody bids, just take this thing away from the torture chamber, it's starting to stink."
adlai is aware that more than his conscious lifetime of engineer-years have gone into cost-cutting the retinal tomfoolery of "over 9k dpi", that does not mean that the garbage must be fed to a dumpster fire.
adlai: and yes, this is entirely "ricing out my monitor[s]", so that I don't have to buy overpriced crapple.
adlai: [pointing a camera at the running display is a laughable waste of electricity, although does justify the unpaid labor, in certain cases.]
adlai: and on to yer favorite, "adlai babbling about things he doesn't fully understand": aiui, even in cooled solid-state quantum wankage, these devices rot at rates proportional, at some exponent, to power consumption of each individual cell; yet ...
snsabot: Logged on 2021-01-19 12:11:29 snsabot: (trilema) 2016-04-07 asciilifeform: i dug out the 1-bit cpu because i have a weakness for exotic archs that might be amenable to optical or otherwise 'this handful of switching elements' incarnation.
adlai: yet, if you've got a few dozen thousand of these doing the work of one higher-arity automaton's grid element, doesn't your debugging process still end up quite similar: one failed hardware element requires you to recompile a metric crapload of adjacent routage?
adlai: 'arity' might be the wrong word, ofc. I'm going off my "reads and talks" experience here.
adlai is imagining a "sierpinski 3-cube" of small-even-integer-arity photonics, so that we discuss a slightly more practical example than "light-year of SISC"
adlai: small-even, rather than smallest-integer, to enable crossings.
adlai: as you approach the Landauer limit, your world changes from "giant gobs of nanoparticle" to "quasiparticles on the surface of the fractal"
adlai: coolant left as an exercise for the professionals.
adlai: crossings are admittedly a nightmare for garbage flow analysis, although they are what enables "buy computronium by the kg" instead of "buy ComputronInside by the fractal-dimension-squigglemetre"
adlai: most likely, both in the quantum wankage [and close to the Landauer limit], and in the "battlestation worth its weight in FPGA die" world.
asciilifeform: http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2021-01-19#1029814 << inductor whine.
snsabot: Logged on 2021-01-19 18:47:02 adlai: hears 'deathrays' on a weekly, if not daily, basis; although most likely culprits, other than the easy target of "pass the lsd", are power adapters in various devices
asciilifeform: often enuff you can buy an equiv. power brick w/out the whine.
adlai oughtta, someday real soon, figure out how to triangulate inductor whine from a single constant-radial-speed cervical "no" gesture
asciilifeform: adlai: get 1 of those audio-heterodyne headphone things used to search for the whistle of gas leak
adlai: alternatively, donate garbage and braincase to truck, and wish better luck to the next generation.
asciilifeform: http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2021-01-19#1029817 << i dun actually sit on a scrapyard, lol
snsabot: Logged on 2021-01-19 18:49:37 adlai: once that's out of the way: my prime interest in the forseeable decade of junkyard wars is dealing with garbage displays, i.e. the kind of flatscreen TVs that asciilifeform would sell on ebay for "I don't care if nobody bids, just take this thing away from the torture chamber, it's starting to stink."
adlai: that could be useful, although I doubt any walk-in junk shop sells them.
adlai does not live in Waltonstan, after all.
asciilifeform: http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2021-01-19#1029819 << i gotta bite : why on satan's green earth wouldja buy a crapple display ?!
snsabot: Logged on 2021-01-19 18:51:46 adlai: and yes, this is entirely "ricing out my monitor[s]", so that I don't have to buy overpriced crapple.
adlai is using the term generically!
adlai: "state-of-the-art beautiful hardware, priced by the brand"
asciilifeform speaking of displaywank -- aboutta uncrate a ev3285
adlai: as opposed to "garbage with serial number filed off, purchased from lemon yard, plastic casings packaged separately"
adlai is seriously considering, in case this was not crystal clear by now, 5th and 6th decades of life on this green earth as electronics junkyard proprietor.
asciilifeform: adlai: it'sa living
adlai: those are high numbers for as young an idiot as I to be banking on; however, it seems like a more honest career than "let's pretend all the pixels are square"
adlai: cartesian, rectangular, etc.
adlai has a short-term usecase for "any large display that falls off someone else's garbage truck" of displaying market data, a field sufficiently nonlinear and ... whatsthatword, that rectangular pixels are not required.
adlai: the word probably is 'cartesian', i.e., opposite of curvilinear.
adlai should probably avoid excessive neologising, despite the temptation.
asciilifeform: adlai: displays w/ market data ? are you aboutta take up manually-cranked buy-cheap-sell-dear ?
asciilifeform: ( didntcha have a commonlisp bot for this ? )
adlai: yes; whether that Faustian Bargain eats my soul completely should be resolved beyond reasonable doubt before the 4th decade is out.
snsabot: Logged on 2020-12-28 11:47:43 asciilifeform: chrematism, i'm firmly convinced, is the exact sort of sin the ancients saw it as : is intensely tempting w/ all kindsa sweets, and will easily destroy yer soul -- but only if yer ~successful~ in it.
adlai is currently in the "wasting picasso that fell off garbage truck" phase of building the program
adlai: and no, it is not a goose that pisses golden guano; it is more like a stupid child that trades baseball cards for pogs in the hope of being able to buy a digimon bootleg tape.
adlai has, however, allocated a few more years of "phree man-months" to this
asciilifeform: adlai: 1 of asciilifeform's consultingisms is actually for an outfit that makes such instruments as you described, for manually-cranked traders.
BingoBoingo: whaack: Pretty sure I saw waves you would like here, not sure full year's weather cooperates with the water sports
adlai: mmhm, and the various "mom and pop shop" CL programmer consultancies are all over the place. you may have even worked at one of those!
adlai does wonder whether 'instruments' refers to hardware; 'financial instruments' (lol!); or bloatware for replacing exchange website bloatware.
asciilifeform: adlai: i mention because, funny thing, found self having to study at length what exactly traders do, how/why etc
asciilifeform: adlai: softs
adlai: I guess there is an "option four", i.e. "do not replace the bloated exchange website; enhance!"
asciilifeform: ( they tend to get sold in complex w/ irons, is my current understanding, because to trader cost of whatever comp is rather like cost of candy wrapper )
adlai: that's also the impression I get, from what traders expound.
adlai: even the ones who have negative real net worth, i.e. are trading someone else's wealth, while their own is mortgaged, are slinging amounts that either earn them a new workstation per whenevertheywant, or run them bankrupt soon enough that nobody cares.
adlai does not recommend that kind of risk appetite, although that is what most do.
snsabot: Logged on 2021-01-19 19:24:13 asciilifeform: adlai: 1 of asciilifeform's consultingisms is actually for an outfit that makes such instruments as you described, for manually-cranked traders.
adlai: always good to know there's still competition; it betrays the existence of a target market, outside of the proverbial 'lsd fantasy'
asciilifeform: adlai: it's simply one of 'over 9000' industrial niches where SoftwareSucks(tm)
adlai goes back to 'paralegal'-ing the quest through search engine spew about "sleeker and cheaper than CRT"
adlai: 'paralegal' for patent clerk, ofc!
asciilifeform: adlai: what were you looking for , again? cheap highres display to tile wall with ?
adlai: exact opposite.
adlai: "how to best use that one specific piece of hardware"
asciilifeform: aa, already have it then ?
adlai: bog-standard television, with more input ports than options for computer that drives them.
adlai thus has to actually start understanding what goes down the various VGA/RGB/HDMI/etc
adlai: and, what pixels actually exist in that specific hardware item; although, that is the least interesting question.
asciilifeform: these tend to suffer from oddball pixel geometries (not simply 'not square' -- but e.g. triangular) and problems w/ bw (i.e. stuck at 30hz) -- but this may not matter if yer displaying numbers
adlai is repeatedly, throughout this thread, reminded of some standup comedian's joke about "visit meth head, find him sitting on floor, staring at unplugged television"
adlai: ehh, not quite displaying numbers, although easiest "let's use this metric pixelage" is to just pipe a terminal at it, for some reasonably suboptimal resolution.
adlai envisions displaying shape of crapflow
adlai: where 'crapflow' ~= what ends up projected downto idjit "candlestick charts"
adlai: and, of course, the orderbooks.
adlai has been swimming in this liquishit for too many years, and seriously, does not want to talk about it. it is depressing.
asciilifeform: adlai: a la shitstamp's ?
adlai: nope; less-cartesian view of higher-dimensional clusterfuck that gets twodimensionalised into those.
asciilifeform: adlai: what'll the corresponding input device look like ? e.g. two 'whack-a-mole' buttons labeled 'buy' and 'sell' ?
adlai: tbh, although the nerdorkgeek in me wants to say "kbd lol", the answer will probably be some varyant of rat, ball, or even - god forbid! joystick.
adlai: ball mouse without ball is probably good enough: two axes, few buttons.
asciilifeform pictures flight sim yoke, adapted for trading, where the latter is modelled as flying ufo between algorithmically shat landscape
adlai does not envision anything useful for speed-clickers... asciilifeform has the correct idea.
adlai: isn't telepathy efficient !
asciilifeform: adlai: you can in fact model it as 'collision avoidance' problem. catch is, the 'mountains' are in a fog.
adlai: good noose is that target market is small enough that it should not matter if competitor builds ~identical widget for selling in overpriced genius bar crapple shops.
asciilifeform: ( 'collision' in this case is going broke , or in general case to go below some critical value of net )
adlai: no mountains, no fog; river, salmon, grizzlies.
adlai: sourceforge subdomains ain't gonna cure my depression
adlai clix
adlai: ...1.1.6-win32.zip much better than expected; tyvm, asciilifeform :)
asciilifeform: adlai: i haven't actually tried the remake. did play the orig. msdos one tho, in early '90s
adlai: 'myabandonware' site tldrs as: ``Perestroika (a.k.a. Toppler) is a fun game by a small Russian developer called Locis, who promptly disappeared after this "one hit wonder.",,
asciilifeform: that one sucked imho
asciilifeform: adlai: your 'salmon in river' thing reminded me of the inner game in 'tower' where you end up in the sea and devouring (canned!) fish that swim there
adlai: that metaphor originated from angst at pervasive 'bull vs bear' idiocy
asciilifeform pictures if meteorology field consisted of 'warmists' and 'coldists'
adlai: lmao, 1-star review "this game contains a virus"; dipshit, it's called "having fun with a computer instead of using it to design another computer"
adlai files angry joke under "only people who read all of Asimov's History of the Future will get this" and goes back to humorless anger
adlai: " ... to catch a fish in a bubble with your torpedo and ... " << wait, you're telling me the fish are collateral damage of perfectly conventional weaponry!?
adlai: madness, plasfemi
adlai: maybe sourceforge links occasionally can dispel existential angst!
adlai queues dusting off dosbox at some point to actually play this
adlai: it's "computronium, sold by the kg, priced by the pound", with a dash of "we estimate pounds using a compass; problem?"
adlai: nice example of how 'paralegal algorithm' can result in wasted time: I found plenty of articles comparing projector technologies because of an overloaded acronym. isn't hitech marvellous!
adlai has always considered projectors more useful for blinding, than projection, although that is sadly another example of microscope hammers.