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crtdaydreams: 1.4 million views
whaack: thimbronion: another monitor vendor: cococo.co.cr
mangol: "Amateur employee"
mangol: headline "Should employees jerk off at work?" << The Onion can no longer compete with reality, exhibit Z
mangol: http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2022-03-18#1085512 << signpost: would be interesting to read a review of CLIM if you can write one sometime
dulapbot: Logged on 2022-03-18 17:42:58 signpost: has written and fielded a product that used mcclim for UI, wasn't in love with it afterwords.
mangol perusing https://github.com/gabriel-laddel/masamune -- can't find anything there except a simple stitching together of some well known lispy software
mangol: signpost: asciilifeform: do you know if he has more stuff elsewhere?
asciilifeform: mangol: afaik that's all he had posted (or even mentioned baking)
mangol: asciilifeform: thanks. a web search doesn't find anything else either
mangol: imho the right way to start is to take maxima, then start CL-ifying Emacs into the same lisp image
mangol: masamune seems to have climacs which is not quite the same thing
mangol: i once looked thru all the CL Emacs projects i could find, and none of them could condescend to implement something GNU Emacs / ELisp compatible
mangol: which is why it's been a decade+ and we still don't hear anything from them
mangol: lispers just can't stop desiging new things (as naggum said, "this time it'll be done right"(TM) or something along those lines) and adapt something that works
asciilifeform: mangol: elisp is a horror tho, can't blame folx for wanting to be rid of it
dulapbot: (trilema) 2018-06-19 asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: elisp is a gnarly surviver of dark age 1970s lisps, suffers -- unfixably -- from problems long ago solved even in 'scheme' (e.g. 'funarg problem')
asciilifeform: naturally people cling to it for compatibility; but it's a microshit-quality item imho
mangol: the details suck, as does the VM, no argument there
mangol: but the basic language is almost like (the non-CLOS subset of) CL
asciilifeform: ( see also e.g. )
dulapbot: (trilema) 2016-03-20 asciilifeform: http://log.bitcoin-assets.com/?date=20-03-2016#1436666 << elisp , and emacs as a whole , suck donkey balls. it is in many ways a microscopic model of how linux sucks, a turd for which NO replacement is available, so it is kept on life support at all costs .
mangol: which means you can start with elisp code, and gradually massage it toward proper CL
thimbronion: ty whaack looks promising
asciilifeform: mangol: well as soon as you dispose of dynamic scope, will have to rewrite pretty much ~all~ legacy elispisms
mangol: nope, lexical-binding has been the norm since Emacs 24
mangol: virtually all new elisp uses it
asciilifeform: lol but do you use anyffin which postdates 24 ? e.g. asciilifeform doesn't
mangol: dynamic scope is a recipe for bugs, to be sure. kill it with fire (except for special (no pun intended) purposes)
mangol: pun: dynamic variable == "special variable" in CL spec parlance)
asciilifeform: recent elispism is a writhing horror where erry little script demands over9000 deps (which user is expected to allow to auto-download)
asciilifeform doesn't use any of it
mangol: imho MELPA is a godsend that keeps emacs relevant
asciilifeform: ugh mno, can't agree there
mangol: agree that some of it is sliding toward nodejs-style script kiddie dependency hell. but not all
mangol: and with increasing frequency of the artisanal developer tantrums verisimilitude linked for us, some kind of signing/trust system wouldn't hurt
mangol: current MELPA is totally laissez-faire once you get past the initial code review
mangol: also jwz on related matter: https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
mangol: CADT will happen to all emacs reimplementation projects that won't run (lightly edited) elisp originally written for GNU Emacs
mangol: many elisp heroes also grok wider lisp culture, and i expect they would be happy to help make their stuff compatible with CL if they can do so with moderate effort
mangol: AFAICT the main brake on emacs modernization is the inner circle at GNU, chief among them RMS
mangol: (again AFAICT) that's where the dodgy parts of elisp come from. and why they insist on adding incompatible versions of stuff that CL already has
mangol: back in the day, XEmacs already had better APIs than GNU Emacs. but GNU did (sometimes incompatible) reimplementations of much of that stuff
asciilifeform: mangol: seeing what 'modernity' largely consists of, asciilifeform finds it difficult to disagree with rms et al 'brake on modernization'
asciilifeform: at this pt 'modernizers', if given free hand, would rewrite the thing in nodejs or java or somesuch and declare actual emacs 'obsolete'
asciilifeform: (already happening at the edges where rms can't 'brake', hence the melpa liquishit)
mangol: i read that article of yours when it came our, good stuff :)
mangol: much of the code in MELPA is better than much of the stuff that ships with emacs IME
mangol: just from reading the .el files
mangol: and the MELPA inner circle are great to work with
asciilifeform: the 'over9000 deps' and 'user is expected to allow autodownload' kills it for me
asciilifeform: doesn't matter how supposedly 'good' some of it
mangol: well, package.el is a package manager in the style of APT, YUM, FreeBSD ports, etc.
asciilifeform: yea and asciilifeform's emacs does exactly fine w/out a package manager
mangol: with the difference that MELPA is usually set to pull from git mater
mangol: *master
asciilifeform: dun matter from where. asciilifeform ~reads~ the elisps when installing'em
mangol: that has scaled very well so far, but at some point someone will pull a nodejs-style tantrum
asciilifeform: arguably 'package managers' are good % of why the bloat of linux etc to start with.
asciilifeform: 'scaling' is not an unmitigated good, mangol
mangol: we may disagree on what constitutes bloat
mangol: AFAICT the bloat in open source comes from 1) corporations; and 2) GNOME-style "enterprise" development style
asciilifeform: well if previously something were small enuff to read & grasp, and 'modernized' variant aint, then to asciilifeform -- bloat, and verdict cannot be appealed.
mangol: that's basically the forth / suckless mindset. nobody else relies on reading all source by yourself
asciilifeform: it's the mindset of the days when computing was actually progressing meaningfully.
mangol: "Appreciating the value of a large language is evidently hard for many people, just like many people find themselves miserable in the big city and go to great lengths to create a small village for themselves in the city where everything is like it used to be where they came from."
asciilifeform: mangol: this one's even in my naggum article
mangol: :)
mangol: my whole coding mentality nowadays is basically "how to make things palatable when you can't ever hope to do everything by yourself / with friends"
asciilifeform: mangol: is interesting how 'cl is large language' did not age well, what with <1k entries in clhs index -- compare to just about any 'modern' item
mangol: yep :D
mangol: emacs vs vi editor wars also came mainly from emacs being huge IIRC
mangol: quaint now
asciilifeform: 'large' in reality aint about mass, but about cancerious proliferation (or lack thereof)
asciilifeform: *cancerous
mangol: has anyone figured out how to make a large mass of code without the cancer?
mangol: symbolics, inc. may have come closest
asciilifeform: well, the commonlisp folx. by closing the standard.
mangol: a comfortable OS for general use is at least 100x the size of CL
asciilifeform: dunno, asciilifeform found e.g. msdos entirely comfortable.
mangol: you'd probably love the Canon Cat from Jef Raskin
mangol: coded in Forth. legend says not a single bug was ever found in it
mangol: Raskin was one of the top iconoclasts in the history of the field
asciilifeform: mangol: i read his book on the subj. but never seen the box itself -- rarity
mangol: IIRC recent versions of MAME can emulate it, but i haven't tried
mangol: the Apple II was also supposedly bug-free
signpost: http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2022-03-20#1086009 << the problem with this philosophy is that the adapter between you and the world only gets fatter.
dulapbot: Logged on 2022-03-20 12:12:09 mangol: my whole coding mentality nowadays is basically "how to make things palatable when you can't ever hope to do everything by yourself / with friends"
dulapbot: (trilema) 2018-10-25 asciilifeform: when you add compatibility spackle, serious reader is not saved from reading the thing you spackled over -- on the contrary nao he has to read the ~original~ rubbish ~plus~ your spackle, however much it weighs.
signpost: and ftr, this does not mean that reality can be appealed if it leaves with no viable options.
mangol: i think it leaves no viable options
mangol: much of what we call computation is really about communication, and that has to be done over whatever protoclols/formats others are using
asciilifeform: mangol: there always is the option of not thinking 'amoebically' and rolling straight into 'unviable' with the aim of making it viable.
dulapbot: Logged on 2022-03-06 18:58:50 asciilifeform: http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2022-03-06#1082669 << 'people' who behave amoebically (i.e. follow gradient of 'tastier right there right now'). and see also.
mangol: the alternative to hill-climbing is doing something completely different. it's hard to get large numbers of people to do that
asciilifeform: so you do it with own 2 hands, if you have to.
mangol: to what end?
asciilifeform: granted 'modern man' has serious trouble w/ the concept. but it remains
asciilifeform: mangol: personal matter. pick what appeals, e.g. 'for odin'
signpost: why large numbers of people? are we going to vote on it?
mangol: i don't romanticize DIY, to me it's a burden as often as a delight
mangol: the ideal is that others already did all the work for me. i just have to have some way to trust they did a decent job
mangol: that has a technical aspect (e.g. web of trust) but it's more of a social/cultura matter, which is the problem i'm attacking
signpost: gonna give you the same resistance that kid talking about "all women want the same thing" as though it was the first time.
signpost: in good spirit, of course.
asciilifeform: mangol: lemme offer an example. in '15 asciilifeform wrote a versioning/publication system called 'v'. maybe dozen people, at most, use it currently. asciilifeform does not see this as a tragedy, it still worx, doesn't in any way rely on 'masses'
asciilifeform: or e.g. 'pest' worx just fine if there were only 2 stations.
mangol: signpost: i don't get what you're referring to
asciilifeform: granted, 'mass adoptions' stroke ego of author, and harmlessly -- so long as he resists temptation to debase the product so as to appeal to such 'mass'
asciilifeform: in actual practice, few resisted
signpost would also be perfectly happy on a machine that ran at 1980s specs, aside a few accelerated operations like RSA crypto.
signpost: hashing perhaps
mangol: asciilifeform: it's a value judgment. to me, large scale adoption > purity
signpost: mangol: yes, you're stating this as bare evident fact. why large scale adoption?
mangol: huh? i said it's a value judgment
signpost: are you unwilling to explain why you value it?
mangol: emotionally
mangol: i'm interested in things that "scale"
mangol: some people aren't
signpost: to my mind, most of the problem is in not being able to obtain computing hardware without planet-scale industrial processes.
mangol: sure, that's a huge liability in end times
signpost: that I have no idea how to "garage fab" doesn't make it not the solution, eh?
mangol: also mass adoption "strokes ego of author" but purity doesn't? :D
signpost: you are using terms which you don't want me to press you for definitions.
mangol: to most people, purity = wank, and they have a point
signpost: what's purity here? I would replace it with practicality.
signpost: except in the real sense of that word.
mangol: even i am squarely on the wank end of the purity scale, and i'm not much of a purist
asciilifeform: mangol: observe that at no pt asciilifeform referred to 'purity'. but to 'fits in head', which is not about an abstract 'beauty' in any sense, but about conserving a very finite natural resource (brain cycles) -- i.e. complexity cancer in effect makes everyone stupider
signpost: I'd argue that you consider democracy bedrock truth, rather than a particular political construction.
mangol: scheme is about ideal for me. average scheme code looks as pretty as the prettiest code in most other langs. but it still lets you take shortcuts where needed
signpost: yeah, "pure" or "ideal" seem like traps. suppose I move the goalpost on you, tell you that you're not really free, because you didn't fab the chip, or if not that, didn't mine the minerals, or rule the country, or.
mangol: yeah :D
signpost: if computers are thinking tools, why is this one before me thwarting much of my reasoning about what it's actually doing.
signpost: seems a pretty bad thinking tool.
mangol: signpost: i'm completely disillusioned with democracy, FWIW
asciilifeform: the interesting, per asciilifeform's lights, fact, is that complexity cancer makes it so that even if you've enuff dough to fab ic, you ~still~ are in the glue trap, cannot make a civilized machine
signpost: mangol: gotta press on things to bring them to the surface, is all
signpost considers himself quite the stuck pig on these subjects, ftr
mangol: signpost: at the end of the day, most of the stuff computers do is pretty boring. much of the lispm or smalltalk code is mundane
mangol: the forth mentality is that computers should simply do less
mangol: but "computers doing less" is approx. same as "you talk to fewer people"
mangol: as in, exchange information with fewer people
mangol: most people don't want that
signpost would far rather know the ~100 people on earth with whom he can refine his sanity than shotgun his farts to all of twitter
mangol: it's a continuum. you don't have to reside on one of those two poles
signpost: well, say what I can do otherwise, though. rather than what I don't have to.
mangol: i like having stuff like FFmpeg, i.e. if i find a video from somewhere, i know i can just play it
mangol: therefore, for my values it's better to gradualy polish a turd than to livein my own self-made bubble
signpost: hey, life itself agrees with you.
mangol: lol
mangol: ofc there are times, jobs, and people for whom security is paramount. nobody argues that you should have rock solid single-purpose stuff there
mangol: but most of life just isn't that serious
signpost: but doesn't seem to preclude having a device in my pocket that can fart pest packets to my friends over radio
signpost: isn't even security
signpost: it's a matter of excluding the imperial mind-rape
mangol: otherwise known as propaganda?
signpost: if taken as broadly as possible.
asciilifeform: http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2022-03-20#1086089 << fwiw asciilifeform enjoyed computer over9000 moar than currently long before hdd could even theoretically hold >3m of film
dulapbot: Logged on 2022-03-20 12:39:27 mangol: i like having stuff like FFmpeg, i.e. if i find a video from somewhere, i know i can just play it
mangol: brb
signpost will agree with mangol that should such a pocket of sanity exist, and grow, it'd be because the membrane around it is semipermeable. things of value flow in, like any organism.
signpost: doesn't mean they have to keep the same form. can be digested.
signpost gonna go work in the yard for a bit
mangol: asciilifeform: agree that too much layering is a burden on the mind. early computers didn't have that
mangol: a lot of the layering in MS/Apple/Linux is redundant. if we could have a system where only the communication protocols are redundant, and the core is refactored such that each concern is addressed only once, that'd be ideal
mangol: you can't eliminate the comms protocols if you wanna talk to lots of people, but the rest you can, with time
mangol: FFmpeg = over 9000 ways to play a video, etc.
mangol: i guess the summary is that we approach the same problem from the opposite ends. how to have a beautiful, comprehensible system. i want to polish turds, you want to start from first principles and build up
mangol: the thing that really drives me is, i'm constantly aware in the back of my mind that we have enough people to make a good, naggum-style big-city system
mangol: but these people can't work together to save their lives
mangol: if we could get all the Lisp and ML people working together on one system, it'd be a solved problem
mangol: only the lispers / only the ml'ers, would probably work out as well
mangol: even a subset of either camp would get you very far. one person who appreciates these langs i worth a lot
mangol: but instead we get The Lisp Curse, where everyone writes a teenage manifesto of how he'll make everything right, hacks feverishly for a few years, and makes something no one else will use
mangol: i tried to get Loko Scheme's author to talk to Mezzano's author so together they could spec a Driver Lisp language, so they could share device drivers
mangol: with a standard like that, over time, some of the richer lispers could even pay people to port Linux/BSD drivers to lisp part-time
mangol: but no, he has a beautiful and perfect idea for how to write drivers, and the other guy's OS would defile it in some unspecific way
mangol: same story every time
dulapbot: Logged on 2022-03-20 12:16:19 mangol: IIRC recent versions of MAME can emulate it, but i haven't tried
mangol: ^ if anyone here gets this working, would be very interesting to hear about your experiences
verisimilitude: http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2022-03-20#1086047 Similarly, only I use the MMC to my knowledge, but I never really built it for anyone else, only myself.
dulapbot: Logged on 2022-03-20 12:27:01 asciilifeform: mangol: lemme offer an example. in '15 asciilifeform wrote a versioning/publication system called 'v'. maybe dozen people, at most, use it currently. asciilifeform does not see this as a tragedy, it still worx, doesn't in any way rely on 'masses'
verisimilitude: http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2022-03-20#1086112 I was drawn to Lisp in-part so I could avoid ever working with others.
dulapbot: Logged on 2022-03-20 13:05:35 mangol: but these people can't work together to save their lives
mangol: verisimilitude: Common Lisp is a triumph of lispers who worked especially well with others. As is Emacs, as was Symbolics
mangol: Forth or APL is the upper limit of the lasting value that one computer genius can produce for humanity
verisimilitude: We'll see.
verisimilitude: Personally, my greater plans don't have room for Lisp; as McCarthy wrote, it's a local optimum.
mangol: 1e6 hackers have said approx. that
verisimilitude: I don't want ``languages'' in the future of programming, mangol.
mangol: AFAICT that guy started by asking, "why are electronics so much more reliable than software"
mangol: more specifically "why can any grunt make reliable electronics, yet a genius can't make reliable software"
mangol: the claim that visual programming can avoid degenerating into a "tower of babel" like text-based programming is interesting. i'm skeptical.
mangol: my approach to babel = turd polishing, once again. try to get existing langs working together, coordinating stuff that doesn't have to differ
verisimilitude: I'll compare this COSA to tabular programming.
mangol: enjoy! that site is one of the best if you're into computer crackpottery
verisimilitude: Everyone here is.
mangol: exactly. (full disclosure, i'm one of the resident crackpots in scheme)
jonsykkel: never understood why no programing langs have concept of a wire. for wireing shit together like u do with hardware
jonsykkel: with exeption of | in shell, whcih is the same idea but crippled cuz max 2 wires per "component"
mangol: jonsykkel: higher-order functions are approx. like wiring
mangol: and there's the graph-like visual prog langs, e.g. LabVIEW
mangol: those programs have connectors that look like literal wires
mangol: there's some handwavy quip that visual programming is doomed because you can fit only about 50 elements per screen
jonsykkel: i will gogle these terms
verisimilitude: ``Of particular interest is the construction functional form, which satisfies a want I'm left with by other languages: for a value to be used in multiple contexts without a name.''
mangol: that quip was memed so programmers with the hacker news mentality can now reactively (no pun intended) shut down any discussion of visual programming with "it'll never work"
jonsykkel: hehe
mangol: FWIW Jef Raskin (of Canon Cat) did a bunch of experiments with zoomable user interfaces (ZUI) with excellent results, was convinced those are the future
mangol: ofc the field then proceeded to ignore him
jonsykkel: is intresting stuf i ned to read. im guess u can more precisely tell computer exactly wat and how to do things with text files, maybe these files belong in lower abstraction lvls and visual type thign in higher lvls
jonsykkel: or smth
verisimilitude: All ``visual programming'' I've seen pales to mine envisioning.
jonsykkel: similar to how c progs or watever are wired together on shell
verisimilitude: I thought of a system which truly has no text whatsoever.
verisimilitude: All ``visual programming'' I've seen has text in boxen at some point.
jonsykkel: wat does it have insted
verisimilitude: ``I believe creating a programming language which allows for the creation of custom notation will have a similar effect to that interactive languages have had; both qualities must be a part of the system from its inception to properly work, and any attempt to do otherwise is always but a poor emulation.
verisimilitude: It disgusts me that equality, addition, multiplication, and select others are so privileged so as to be given slots in the character sets, whereas other notations aren't made so omnipresent and innate. The decimal digits are included in this disgust; such things shouldn't be embedded into foundations.''
mangol: i once tried explaining to #scheme that textual programming _is_ visual programming. namely, the subset of visual programming where you confine yourself to a rectangular grid of characters
verisimilitude: ``This also has a large effect on programming languages. The mathematicians can truly create notation that suits its context. The programmers cannot. I'm unable to include my crest in a text except as an image, yet humanity has a proud tradition of including such things in letters and whatnot. These machines are unable to offer anything grand enough to justify destroying these and other traditions.''
mangol: so we're already doing visual programming, but a really clumsy and underpowered version of it
verisimilitude: The basic idea, jonsykkel, is to have a graphical definition system, and the ability to compose other definitions. I realized it was a reduction system, at some point.
mangol: there's no way to avoid visual programming without using braille or something
verisimilitude: The MMC isn't visual programming.
verisimilitude: It's a tool.
verisimilitude: So, consider exponentiation, jonsykkel. My system would allow the graphical representation of that to be two boxen, one smaller at the upper-right of the other, with a definition that does what it should.
verisimilitude: The equivalent to PROGN would just be a box perimeter.
jonsykkel: sounds about right mangol
mangol: jonsykkel: nobody ever lost in popularity by underestimating the poverty of imagination of programmers
mangol: *underestimating the imagination
mangol: one of the most accomplished ML hackers said computing is the slowest-moving field of technology he's ever seen
mangol: something to the effect that every other tech field reinvents its fundamentals every 10-20 years
jonsykkel: i guess its moving, just in al kindsa random nonsense directions at the same time
mangol: yea, "a giant step in no direction at all"
mangol: the obvious way to start in visual programming is to make window dressing for lisp macros (i.e. each macro call is shown as a user-friendly GUI widget)
mangol: combine that with Raskin's ZUI idea to shut up that "50 elements" nonsense
mangol: ...which applies to labview-style graphs as well if you wanna go that route (no pun intended)
mangol: as far as "the working programmer" is concerned, the state of the art in visual programming is syntax coloring in MS Visual Studio
verisimilitude: Oh, also, my visual programming system would avoid Common Lisp's #N= and #N# circularity nonsense.
mangol: it's really hard to make anything more underwhelming than that
verisimilitude: Systems could be shown to the proper detail. An infinite recursion all on the screen is eventually halted by the system determining no more pixels would change.
mangol: verisimilitude: have you seen Simonyi's presentations about the stuff his startup Intentional Software was building?
mangol: Simonyi is the original author of Microsoft Office (or at least Word)
mangol: Intentional Software = basically some business-friendly version of window-dressing for Lisp macros
mangol: i don't know if they ever shipped something you can buy
mangol: they had the kind of math input you mention, for starters
jonsykkel: hehe, the state of the art christmas tree coloring is unbearable visual noise for most part also
verisimilitude: No, mangol.
mangol: jonsykkel: that's an apt metaphor for our field. current visual proramming is to potential of visual programming like a christmas three is to a theme park
mangol: *tree
mangol: we aren't even trying
dulapbot: Logged on 2022-03-20 15:13:29 mangol: Simonyi is the original author of Microsoft Office (or at least Word)
jonsykkel: i shud look into this stuf. making couple of those retarded fbd programs for plcs is the extent to which im familiar with visual programing
mangol: jonsykkel: visual programming is in its infancy, so it may even be beneficial to explore without knowing anything about the prior art
verisimilitude: A literal warcrime would be more impressive, asciilifeform.
mangol: asciilifeform: something like Office was a new thing at the time. it wasn't N'th iteration of the same old concept like we keep churning out endlessly
asciilifeform: mangol: wtf was new about it ?
mangol: properly speaking, Office was probably ripped off from Xerox PARC. was PARC committing warcrimes?
jonsykkel: cud be, avoiding the "trodden path" branch of tree seems to be only thing that makes sense in stagnant fields
mangol: yep - stagnant, or never properly started to begin with
asciilifeform: afaik the only 'innovation' in msword was the part where regularly crashed (and to this day) and loses days of work. well, and also macrovirii, transformed from hoax to reality by microshit
mangol: lol
verisimilitude: Don't forget the ``quick save'' that keeps changes; a murderer was caught that way, unfortunately.
mangol: speaking of quick save, computers still lose work when you neglect to save manually
mangol: pervasive checkpointing should be here any decade now
mangol: "An excellent read is Jochen Liedtke's A Persistent System in Real Use - Experiences of the First 13 Years (1993)"
mangol: laugh or weep as appropriate
mangol: "Raskin’s ZUI is good for organizing large amounts of information in a way that makes applications obsolete; but the current computing landscape is all about "apps""
verisimilitude: Businesses aren't inclined to build useful software.
whaack: thimbronion: they also deliver throughout the country
verisimilitude: It's interesting how PĀX (peace) is feminine and BELLVM (war) is neuter.
mangol: Free Software had the chance to dismantle the apps model of businesses but instead they too split into warring camps. perhaps they are neutered.
mangol: but with the recent influx of feminine energy into the movement, will finally achieve peace
verisimilitude: The champions of Free Software was never concerned about fighting such a model.
verisimilitude: The champions of Free Software were never concerned about fighting such a model.
dulapbot: Logged on 2022-03-20 15:26:26 mangol: http://tunes.org/wiki/orthogonal_20persistence.html
crtdaydreams: I would assume it's not healthy for constant R/W calls but that's ofc ``hardware problem''
crtdaydreams: (((SSD beware!!11!)))
asciilifeform: crtdaydreams: for that matter was done on pdp8 w/ core mem, lol.
crtdaydreams: asciilifeform: really? Long before my time...
asciilifeform followed the 'phantom' link, mind boggles re why the thing has an explicit compiler, rather than the sane way (as illustrated in e.g. 'losetheos')
asciilifeform: crtdaydreams: in what way is it significant that 'before your time' ? the folx who did it, and presumably you, all part of a literate culture, you can see how it worked w/out excavating a sealed tomb in a pyramid
crtdaydreams: asciilifeform: Didn't intend for that assumption to be made, simply I haven't encountered a pdp8 in the wild, nor had the opportunity to study it as of yet.
asciilifeform: if anyffin, far, far easier to study it nao than when it was new
crtdaydreams: ^^^ 100% agree
crtdaydreams: just hasn't been on the ever growing list of TODOs (til nao)
asciilifeform: even e.g. symbolics machine, the ~7k asciilifeform paid for his -- pocket change compared to what cost originally (perhaps just south of 1e6$ if converted to modern dough)
asciilifeform: not even speaking here of all the boxen there's a 100% working emulation for
crtdaydreams dearly would love to use a lispm, if just once. couldn't possibly express the need to own one
crtdaydreams: I tried to get a c64 emu going once. Obv. didn't go very far, this was wen back in school, was merely an excuse to procrastinate.
asciilifeform: wtf was so difficult about it, that ended in 'tried' ?
thimbronion: crtdaydreams: a fun project would be to build your own z80 comp. highly educational.
asciilifeform spent moar time in emulated c64 on 486 than on actual c64, it having been the 1st emulator that worked worth a shit on pc
crtdaydreams: thimbronion: IIRC z80 is 8080 clone?
asciilifeform: ( the patch is in mainline 'vice' to this day last i saw! )
crtdaydreams: asciilifeform: mp3s are gone :(
thimbronion: crtdaydreams: appears to be
verisimilitude: I really should play with the emulated Lisp Machine.
verisimilitude: I'm so anticipating having the pieces of my desired systems finished, so I may then play with the Lego bricks.
crtdaydreams: asciilifeform: neat project tho. far easier to just write an emu and push audio to e.g. alsa
crtdaydreams: s/write/use/
crtdaydreams: Could be a fun project to ~write~ one though. might learn a lot.
asciilifeform: crtdaydreams: odd, the files are still there. nfi wai barfs when loading, will have to dig in later
dulapbot: Logged on 2022-03-20 16:44:53 crtdaydreams: thimbronion: IIRC z80 is 8080 clone?
asciilifeform: z80 is still produced today, incidentally
crtdaydreams: hm. so you can fab one with a breadboard and a few transistors?
crtdaydreams: s/few/a few buckets/
thimbronion: pics aren't loading for some reason
dulapbot: Logged on 2022-03-20 16:58:26 asciilifeform: z80 is still produced today, incidentally
thimbronion: Will be nice when it's possible to blog via pest.
mangol: best
mangol: Collapse Forth is cool but Collapse Lisp would be even cooler
crtdaydreams: thimbronion: nice, would like to see more in the future
mangol: Collapse OS -- Why? "I expect our global supply chain to collapse before we reach 2030."
dulapbot: Logged on 2022-03-20 17:44:52 thimbronion: Will be nice when it's possible to blog via pest.
thimbronion: verisimilitude: not sure what you mean. I envision a built in local http server that loads pages fetched via lubyism
thimbronion: One could also take the DCC route
verisimilitude: HTTP over Pest makes no goddamn sense.
verisimilitude: Have I misunderstood something?
thimbronion: verisimilitude: not sure. thus far no questions for clarification.
mats: why do you think we need an os after collapse
mats: and is it really reasonable to think this collapse will be evenly distributed than disproportionately affect people without manufacturing
verisimilitude: It's rather like having gasoline to power the entertainment system in collapse, isn't it?
dulapbot: Logged on 2020-08-02 03:30:30 gregorynyssa: https://collapseos.org/
asciilifeform: the item itself aint unreasonable, is a forth + some asm/eeprom tooling
asciilifeform: tho must point out that most real-life uses of z80 and other period cpus did not make use of anyffin one'd recognize as 'an os', there simply wasn't cycles or memory to spare for one
asciilifeform wrote 'into desk' a number of z80 and 6502 designs, for e.g. otp machine; but since soured on iron biz and has 0 plans to sell
dulapbot: Logged on 2020-02-04 22:26:26 asciilifeform: shinohai: the funniest paradox, is that it is ~impossible to make a conventional '+ev' biz case for sane irons. (given that '100% openly published specs' is intrinsically part of 'sane'.) and so to bake it, yer stuck to work with insane folx. or w/ whatever coins you can muster on own power.
asciilifeform also does not suffer the illusion that such items would be readily buildable from junkyard iron, or in serious demand that'd justify anyone's effort
asciilifeform: fwiw even e.g. fg already no longer buildable as orig. designed, and that's without even 1 nuke popping yet
dulapbot: Logged on 2021-12-06 17:04:18 asciilifeform: '...and the XC9572XL CPLD, and both of them now have limited or no supply' << RIP folx who wanted to bake verbatim FG knockoffs, apparently
asciilifeform: an e.g. otp pirate hf radio text communicator would be in principle valuable (to ~some~, it aint much good for shooting and you can't eat it..) but again there aint, as far as asciilifeform knows, any biz model that'd support the baking of such a thing
asciilifeform: the hard part remains organizing a set of people who'd hypothetically get sumthing outta having such a thing. rather than the iron.
asciilifeform: as it is, afaik the (even hypothetically) relevant people don't trust anyffin electronic at all, and hard to blame'em given what's avail.
dulapbot: Logged on 2022-03-15 14:57:41 asciilifeform: it's entirely unsurprising tho, that difficult to sell ru (king or slave) on btc, or 'redneck', etc on btc, when his only experience with pc is arsebook running on win11
verisimilitude: Not only that, but there are so many scams in which a man can lose his money, but if he manages to gain too much, we saw what happened with Ethereum.
asciilifeform esp. disappointed with the 'ham radio' folx, who 'law abiding' to the point of pathology and in fact will be the 1st to rat you out if they 'hear' you, and not at all ashamed of the fact
dulapbot: (trilema) 2014-01-30 asciilifeform: would help to get the 'ham radio' / mesh network / btc-over-pigeon system now, rather than when it becomes the only possible means of running the network.
dulapbot: Logged on 2021-06-18 14:29:04 asciilifeform: verisimilitude: ham radio has various strange traditions of 'discuss only x,y,z', so perhaps not best model here
dulapbot: (trilema) 2014-05-02 asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: Shame encryption on Amateur radio frequencies is a crime << eventually, u.s. folks who want genuine net will need to commit this - or some other - crime.
verisimilitude: Some people sneer at me for using the Internet so much. What would I do without it? I'd read books, unlike they. They would suffer more than I without an Internet.
asciilifeform: verisimilitude: the 1st casualty of any kinda respectable collapse(tm) is the leisure to read the books (or net etc)
verisimilitude: Why would the US start doing things respectably then?
asciilifeform: verisimilitude: elaborate ?
verisimilitude: It was a joke.
asciilifeform: verisimilitude: joak needs to run on heads other than author's to work
verisimilitude: I disagree.
verisimilitude: Anyway, I don't know which is worse: collapse, or another fifty years of vile and demoralizing filth.
asciilifeform: 'horror without end, or a horrible end'(tm)
verisimilitude: An ancestor once told me he was glad to be dying soon, so he wouldn't see the horrors to come.
asciilifeform once remarked 'grandfather was lucky to die in '90'
asciilifeform: to return upstack -- there's precious little in the way of an audience for 'machines for collapse'. rich folx -- who could actually make the ball roll -- seem preoccupied with moving to bananistans (where will have to learn to like bananas to exclusion of all else; or, if luck fails, eaten to supplement diet of somebody who doesn't) ; those not rich -- generally preoccupied with moar mundane things, e.g. how to pay ren
asciilifeform: t and heating bill at same time
asciilifeform: the ~complete lack of a detectable interest in e.g. trb among 'mega-hodlers' already speaks volumes re their intelligence.
asciilifeform: ( go an' try to sell'em on 'bitcoin can and should continue to work without the telecom grid' if they aint even interested in 'bitcoin can and should continue to work' , lol )
asciilifeform: http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2022-03-20#1086275 << would e.g. ftp make moar sense ? or what's the implication ?
dulapbot: Logged on 2022-03-20 17:58:56 verisimilitude: HTTP over Pest makes no goddamn sense.
asciilifeform: or , lemme guess, only a yet-undefined magick protocol on a yet-unwritten ideal os, would 'make sense', lol
asciilifeform suspects that verisimilitude is dead set on emulating the legendary death of archimedes -- while forgetting that the latter in fact had built a # of working items outta avail. parts prior to losing his head
verisimilitude: A scheme for ``bare'' documents over Pest is more sensible is all.
verisimilitude: I'm going to try to build things worth a damn before I die, asciilifeform, and don't fault me for it.
asciilifeform: verisimilitude: how's it matter precisely how one drives the rx/tx of the 'bare' ? seems to asciilifeform that http'd work just as readily as irc currently worx for the local end of chat
verisimilitude: I'm loathe to mention it, but even Gopher over Pest would be better.
verisimilitude: It's very simple, unlike HTTP.
asciilifeform: ftp even simpler
verisimilitude: Oh, how nice, Gopher over Pest.
verisimilitude: A gopher is a pest.
verisimilitude: TFTP may be.
asciilifeform: doesn't strike asciilifeform as terribly important how the file movement is handled on local end
verisimilitude: On the local end, no.
asciilifeform: you want some means for browsing avail. material before req'ing a dload
asciilifeform: any of http, ftp, gopher, etc. would work (tho afaik difficult nao to find browser that'd eat gopher; some even lack support for ftp nao)
verisimilitude: Did I misunderstand something, or were it HTTP requests carried over Pest messages?
asciilifeform: nah, why wouldja do that
verisimilitude: Exactly my point.
verisimilitude: So, I misunderstood.
asciilifeform: the sane thing would be for it to play similar role to irc in current pestrons
asciilifeform: i.e. present strictly on local end
verisimilitude: I've no comment, now that I understand.
asciilifeform: ... strictly as glue for existing softs
verisimilitude: By the by, I don't discuss it much, because I know it doesn't interest those here much, but the MMC does exist and does work. I'm made at least a little work towards my goals.
asciilifeform: similarly, e.g. asciilifeform's peh machine also worx. problem is on other end.
verisimilitude: I've built software; I'm not delusional all day.
signpost returns covered in sawdust and stain to pile of logs, oh boy
asciilifeform: wb signpost
signpost: good evening asciilifeform
signpost: http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2022-03-20#1086107 << this is the confounding factor at all levels, that for political reasons, sane standardization of interfaces is thwarted.
dulapbot: Logged on 2022-03-20 13:02:35 mangol: a lot of the layering in MS/Apple/Linux is redundant. if we could have a system where only the communication protocols are redundant, and the core is refactored such that each concern is addressed only once, that'd be ideal
signpost: later in this thread it is illustrated why.
signpost: http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2022-03-20#1086113 << they're all solipsistic narcissists which require external motivation to collaborate, either great wealth or pain. hopefully both.
dulapbot: Logged on 2022-03-20 13:06:06 mangol: if we could get all the Lisp and ML people working together on one system, it'd be a solved problem
signpost: they don't get into computing because it is beautiful, but because it's a way to hide from the world while thinking oneself atop it.
dulapbot: Logged on 2022-03-20 13:05:35 mangol: but these people can't work together to save their lives
asciilifeform: signpost: the folx who went in 'because beautiful' aint doing so much better either. there's no way around fact that certain things require serious resources (and it even discourages attempts at items which don't. e.g. pest could've easily existed in 1990s; why didn't it?)
signpost: in a functioning society hopefully artistry reaches its peak in engineering.
signpost: but yes, definitely need the *whole society* to have what that's worth doing, such that mind-amplification is needed.
dulapbot: Logged on 2022-03-20 20:04:09 signpost: http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2022-03-20#1086113 << they're all solipsistic narcissists which require external motivation to collaborate, either great wealth or pain. hopefully both.
signpost: would you rather it weren't true, sweetheart?
signpost: it isn't so scary to be wrong; I do it all the time.
verisimilitude: I only mentioned it as mock offense.
signpost: given as received, lol
verisimilitude: Yes, the purpose was to get a laugh.
signpost believes in the time-honored tradition of men giving each other shit as much as possible.
verisimilitude: On that note, signpost, I don't believe great collaboration be needed.
asciilifeform: signpost: is how things worked, back when they worked
verisimilitude: One man who gets the computer working well enough can replace thousands.
signpost: on that we quite agree.
verisimilitude: I'm slowly foccussing on writing correct software; compare that to Linux, which is broken in millions of uninteresting ways, but has a lot of support.
asciilifeform: verisimilitude: consider interesting fate of k. zuse -- who built a working comp for the last reich, in his mother's kitchen. 0 uptake, eventually smashed by british bomb and that was it
verisimilitude: I'll just need to be more fortunate than he.
asciilifeform: a++ plan lol
verisimilitude: Also, while it's on my mind, I've had two offers to work for others fail, signpost. If I could get some Bitcoin, I'd make an address and get to work.
signpost: http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2022-03-20#1086137 << seems either can work if the total production rule space of possible inputs cannot cause the machine to crash.
dulapbot: Logged on 2022-03-20 14:39:01 mangol: the claim that visual programming can avoid degenerating into a "tower of babel" like text-based programming is interesting. i'm skeptical.
asciilifeform: verisimilitude: what kinda work are you willing to do ? worth putting in log imho
signpost will say if work comes up, nothing needed atm
verisimilitude: I've never linked to it before.
asciilifeform: the 2nd link worx. ty verisimilitude
verisimilitude: It's no issue.
verisimilitude: I wrote it long ago; notice it reads as if a normal person wrote it.
signpost: http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2022-03-20#1086138 << the challenge is that the populist mob moves the turds faster than you can modify your adapter.
dulapbot: Logged on 2022-03-20 14:39:53 mangol: my approach to babel = turd polishing, once again. try to get existing langs working together, coordinating stuff that doesn't have to differ
signpost has chosen to freeze a particular gentoo linux in vpatches, then to ratchet the thing down to the absolute minimum necessary to sit atop (and build) a linux kernel
signpost: has its own problems, but hardware drifts a little more slowly.
signpost still has g4 macs in service.
dulapbot: Logged on 2022-03-20 14:43:17 jonsykkel: never understood why no programing langs have concept of a wire. for wireing shit together like u do with hardware
asciilifeform: verilog incidentally very much has 'concept of wire'
asciilifeform: in fact even called... 'wire'.
signpost: http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2022-03-20#1086154 << very much want to see a proper hypertext system with transclusion and zui. holy graph of knowledge.
dulapbot: Logged on 2022-03-20 14:49:08 mangol: FWIW Jef Raskin (of Canon Cat) did a bunch of experiments with zoomable user interfaces (ZUI) with excellent results, was convinced those are the future
signpost: editable right there in the same program, of course.
signpost: http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2022-03-20#1086165 << we should be sharing ASTs with each other, not characters. why do I care how you want to represent the AST?
dulapbot: Logged on 2022-03-20 14:56:57 verisimilitude: It disgusts me that equality, addition, multiplication, and select others are so privileged so as to be given slots in the character sets, whereas other notations aren't made so omnipresent and innate. The decimal digits are included in this disgust; such things shouldn't be embedded into foundations.''
signpost: maybe I like mine to be interpretive dance. none of your business!
dulapbot: Logged on 2022-03-20 15:09:01 mangol: the obvious way to start in visual programming is to make window dressing for lisp macros (i.e. each macro call is shown as a user-friendly GUI widget)
signpost: there is no difference between this and writing UI for *any other data model*
signpost: oughta be a functional transform to and from AST
signpost: said otherwise, every UI state corresponds to one precise statement in a production rule space
signpost: *grammar
signpost worked for a while on precisely this proggy for a failed startup. you'd feed it an arbitrary EBNF, and it'd give you an interface against which to code a visual representation of statements in that grammar.
signpost: we even did some experiments with autogenerating the UI. ours was crappy, but could be done better.
signpost: wasn't the typical lego-block UI, looked more like a machine.
signpost: best one we did was a SQL query editor.
signpost: http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2022-03-20#1086213 << one addressing space for all knowledge and hierarchy of caches (puffs doob)
dulapbot: Logged on 2022-03-20 15:25:41 mangol: pervasive checkpointing should be here any decade now
signpost: this "files and directories" thing on disk is as skeuomorphic as microsoft bob
signpost: should just be a cache of the stuff stored in the signpost namespace, plus whatever other namespaces interest me.
verisimilitude: http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2022-03-20#1086402 The idea remains vague compared to tabular programming, as I mention, but an AST is insufficient. The AST for a C language program is still a C language program.
dulapbot: Logged on 2022-03-20 20:22:23 signpost: http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2022-03-20#1086165 << we should be sharing ASTs with each other, not characters. why do I care how you want to represent the AST?
signpost: verisimilitude: actually the editor I described was written as sql tables.
signpost: we made sql eat itself.
signpost: was fucking painful, but just because of the language involved. the abstract model was elegant.
verisimilitude: May I read about it anywhere?
signpost: I think the guy's still at it here
signpost: open sourced the thing
verisimilitude: I want a program to be a true work of art. I want to be able to hang printed representations of my programs on the walls.
signpost hasn't spoken to him in years, but was a fun walk for a while.
signpost: verisimilitude: hey, they do it with bridges and buildings.
signpost: computing's still making mud huts, but someday.
verisimilitude: The idea behind the high-level language was to truly allow the programmer to define his own notation.
verisimilitude: Imagine the original APL by Ken Iverson.
verisimilitude: Imagine everyone having the freedom Ken Iverson had.
verisimilitude: Even the decimal digits wouldn't have privileged symbols.
signpost: in the limit, one oughta feel they are thinking-with the item, mechanised daydreams. not there yet.
signpost: http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2022-03-20#1086278 << nope, entirely wrong reason to simplify computing.
dulapbot: Logged on 2022-03-20 18:46:20 mats: why do you think we need an os after collapse
signpost: you need a bigger gang than the gangs next to you, is what you need in collapse.
signpost: only reason to work to refine computing is if it helps avoid getting there.
signpost still thinks a global, distributed "gang" is possible with the correct tools.
verisimilitude: The USG already exists.
signpost doesn't preclude them from joining the wot, even.
signpost: http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2022-03-20#1086313 << it is this precariousness that makes it unlikely, though.
dulapbot: Logged on 2022-03-20 19:42:34 asciilifeform: to return upstack -- there's precious little in the way of an audience for 'machines for collapse'. rich folx -- who could actually make the ball roll -- seem preoccupied with moving to bananistans (where will have to learn to like bananas to exclusion of all else; or, if luck fails, eaten to supplement diet of somebody who doesn't) ; those not rich -- generally preoccupied with moar mundane things, e.g. how to pay ren
signpost more interested in there being demonstrated sanity at the point the other thing breaks. one doesn't have to help it break.
signpost: but any of us surviving "the churn" if it comes will make us different people than went in. who knows what happens then.
signpost: probably places which subsist at a lower level will end up ahead. maybe 0.1% of americans know how to kill an animal. how many of those know how to clean and eat it without making themselves ill?
signpost: http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2022-03-20#1086317 << verisimilitude this is where you lose the opportunity to make a worthwhile point by leaving the substance inside your head.
dulapbot: Logged on 2022-03-20 19:48:17 asciilifeform: http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2022-03-20#1086275 << would e.g. ftp make moar sense ? or what's the implication ?
signpost: could've said "what, we're going to do http chunk reassembly now? thought we didn't want fragmentation at the IP level, let alone way up here"
signpost: then the other guy says he meant a broader request/response mechanism, perhaps using yes, a browser as a stopgap UI.
signpost considers this a primary mechanism in a republic, the social constellation of balanced counterpressure.
signpost: see also: golden age roman literature
signpost: upstack, should just do a DHT on it, ask peers for $hash
signpost: this gives a hypertext system, wares, whatever.
signpost: index chunks for search also go in the DHT
signpost: that bit isn't as trivial, worth research and thought.
signpost burps, satisfying logs
asciilifeform: http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2022-03-20#1086448 << there's enuff meat in forest for maybe 0.001, lol
dulapbot: Logged on 2022-03-20 21:03:08 signpost: probably places which subsist at a lower level will end up ahead. maybe 0.1% of americans know how to kill an animal. how many of those know how to clean and eat it without making themselves ill?
asciilifeform: (optimistically, and if 'each other' also incl. in 'meat')
asciilifeform: http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2022-03-20#1086444 << imho e.g. this is moar immed.-term boojum than full-scale 'eat tree bark' tho
dulapbot: Logged on 2022-03-20 20:58:45 signpost: http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2022-03-20#1086313 << it is this precariousness that makes it unlikely, though.
dulapbot: Logged on 2022-03-04 15:43:25 asciilifeform: (3) country-wide lan in place of actual internet (north kr; ru during 'practice drills for ww3')
crtdaydreams: "Some people never go crazy, What truly horrible lives they must live."- Charles Bukowski
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