shinohai: http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2022-04-17#1096632 <<< bwahahaha, before I had discipline to `set -eu` and -o at start of all bash scripts I made many such hilarious encounters.
dulapbot: Logged on 2022-04-17 21:17:49 signpost: forgot to put -e in a shell script for cleaning up pentacle's last bootstrap attempt.
shinohai looking forward to pentacle .....
asciilifeform also
asciilifeform: $ticker btc usd
busybot: Current BTC price in USD: $39493.26
asciilifeform: cheapcoinz!11
shinohai: $uptime
busybot: The bot has been up for: 4 days 8 hours 38 minutes and 14 seconds
mats: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2022/04/china-zero-covid-shanghai-lockdown/629589
asciilifeform: mats: see also
dulapbot: Logged on 2022-04-14 14:50:07 asciilifeform: the 'shit test' continues.
asciilifeform: err, there
dulapbot: Logged on 2022-04-14 14:48:34 asciilifeform: meanwhile in alleged cn lulz.
mats: ah yes, the central govt loves shit tests that challenges the state’s policy objectives
asciilifeform skeptical re the 'empty fridge on balcony' meme, which smells strongly of 'colour revolution' fodder
mats: it’s the long tentacles of harvard grads manipulating the chinamen into tanking their own economic security with covid fake news
asciilifeform: mats: laff if you like, but is exactly what was happening, until recently, in ru
mats: the important difference is that ru/cn's vaccines are relatively worse than the ones made in the west
signpost: omicon should've blown through them by now in either case.
signpost: smells like bullshit to choke off exports.
signpost: *omicron
mats: that isn’t in their economic interest
signpost: damaging the united states economically is in their longterm interest.
signpost: this whole thing reads like ccp apologism.
signpost: mats: where is the economic interest in shutting down their economy to save the old and infirm?
signpost can see an entirely different model too, that this has more to do with chinese internal politics than external.
signpost: that would be entirely opaque to me.
asciilifeform: http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2022-04-18#1096663 << from where this certainty? (or that either in any useful sense worx, for that matter)
dulapbot: Logged on 2022-04-18 13:32:13 mats: the important difference is that ru/cn's vaccines are relatively worse than the ones made in the west
mats: the us and china are still heavily economically integrated and this won't change going into the future
mats: shrinking chinese exports to us would mean fewer net flows into the mainland, less corresponding wealth and a growing likelihood they'll get stuck in the middle income trap
mats: won't change going into the foreseeable future*
asciilifeform: not clear imho for what cn needs the green toilet paper, usa's main export
asciilifeform: ( in reverse direction, obvious as daylight, usa can't manufacture even ballpoint pen w/out chinese ball and ink, lol )
mats: usa still has fantastic quantities of natural resources
mats: like food and water, which can be had in exchange for toilet paper
asciilifeform: mats: is cn actually short on where to grow food ?
mats: on the mainland? yes
mats: iirc there's comparatively less arable land in country, and many more people besides
mats: political winds can change and upend the obvious economic interests, but its not there yet
asciilifeform: then seems like logical endgame -- import from ru
mats: buying from anywhere it happens to be cheapest is the logical global endgame
asciilifeform: especially then
mats: there's some sense in letting the old and infirm die, but its a difficult problem to manage when double digits of the working population can also get covid and then long covid
mats: getting rid of pensioners and savers might be helpful to the younger crowd but not if they end up, say, 10-30% less productive and have 7 fewer iq points on avg
signpost: my comment was that it doesn't appear shutting down economies helps any, not that were I to live it over again, I'd not get the vaccine.
mats: https://archive.ph/ZEpWA Bloomberg "Which Covid Vaccine Is Better? Moderna Edges Pfizer in Study of Five Covid Vaccines"
mats: https://archive.ph/8njuf "Sinovac’s Vaccine Found Inferior to Pfizer Shot in Chile Study"
signpost: given that I don't consider the chinese stupid, I have either intentional economic sabotage or internal politics as available hypotheses.
signpost back in a bit
mats: its not apparent that omicron is getting around in china, but i don't follow it closely
mats: record outbreaks in shanghai, but rest of country, unclear
signpost has a grandfather who had quad bypass, got omicron, was fine. seems like delta, etc, would've kicked his ass.
mats: geographic mobility of chinese nationals is pretty limited even precovid, folks have household registrations and need permits to visit and work in other places
mats: but enormous numbers of chinese don't have the vaccine
asciilifeform at this pt regards Official covidiocy stats ( whether washington's, pekin's, moscow's ) as moar or less same cocktail of fact & fiction as, well, other Official stats
phf: ковидобесие
verisimilitude: http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2022-04-18#1096689 This farce isn't obvious by now, mats?
dulapbot: Logged on 2022-04-18 14:26:07 mats: there's some sense in letting the old and infirm die, but its a difficult problem to manage when double digits of the working population can also get covid and then long covid
verisimilitude: http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2022-04-18#1096690 Oh no, I've never been lied to about risks before.
dulapbot: Logged on 2022-04-18 14:27:53 mats: getting rid of pensioners and savers might be helpful to the younger crowd but not if they end up, say, 10-30% less productive and have 7 fewer iq points on avg
dulapbot: Logged on 2021-08-08 17:34:07 verisimilitude: I vaguely remember my disappointment at realizing this so-called pandemic was fake, and not something which would kill hundreds of millions, perhaps leaving more room for me.
signpost: you were going to pick up subsistence farming just after the die-off, or what?
verisimilitude: No.
signpost: oic
verisimilitude: Oh, I be stupid and expect sinecure in the apocalypse, right?
verisimilitude: I've not read ``Atlas Shrugged'' yet.
signpost: my comment is that what kills hundreds of millions kills more.
signpost: but perhaps that's what's happy to ya.
verisimilitude: I can understand how a man with children wouldn't so easily want such. A man with children prefers stability, I figure.
verisimilitude: I'm probably confusing signpost with Peterl.
signpost will have kids before long.
verisimilitude: Well, I was close enough, then.
signpost: but nah, not interested in stability as such.
dulapbot: Logged on 2022-04-16 19:31:41 signpost: might well be that we adapt astonishingly rapidly when things break, and only when.
signpost: I was pointing out the suicidality of the urge.
dulapbot: Logged on 2022-03-20 19:36:19 asciilifeform: 'horror without end, or a horrible end'(tm)
verisimilitude: That's the nice part: I needn't plan for a scenario in which I die from such a mass effect.
signpost: funny thing is that was a factor in my reasoning into having children, too.
verisimilitude: How neat.
adlai has been pondering what are good targets for the next programming binge
verisimilitude: Elaborate.
adlai: fwiw, I have a REPL running on ~every computer I use, occasionally even on the smartphones;
adlai: 'programming binge' means several days where I prepare in advance to minimize distractions, possibly even to the point of planning them out, meal by meal, and then focus on one problem with the goal of having files of reusable by the end of it.
verisimilitude: It's easier to rewrite when doing that.
verisimilitude: It was fun to rewrite a long function, successfully improving it, and then realize six hours had passed.
adlai: one set of targets that has occurred to me frequently is improving my site. currently it's mostly bunch of stuff snarfed in by quicklisp, with some minimal customisations on top; and quite unsuited for anything beyond a static site.
adlai: by the way, I found the scrollback about the various options to CL:EVAL-WHEN kind of... horrifying.
verisimilitude: Oh, I'm doing something similar lately. I want to have some programs to generate my website for me now.
adlai: the different times in Common Lisp are incredibly well defined, and this is for a reason; and if you ever get them all mixed up, that is your own understanding being incomplete. there are good reasons for all three of them, and I have never encountered a case for any others.
verisimilitude: I disagree; I find it disgustingly ugly.
adlai: now, arguably, you could take what I just said literally and claim that there are between one and eight possible times, being the non-empty powerset of runtime, load-time, and compile-time.
verisimilitude: A better programming model would eliminate them.
verisimilitude: Let there be one time, or no times.
adlai: you're forgetting that Common Lisp was standardized for computers that existed then, and still exist now; it's not Arc, which Paul Graham wrote (writes?) with the stated goal of only seeming sane after half a century has elapsed.
verisimilitude: Well, I don't like programming ``languages'' in general.
adlai: consider how you wouldn't write the same sentences for children and adults, if you were composing a text about grammar.
verisimilitude: My Latin book slowly builds the complexity.
adlai: you might plausibly find some topics where you'd speak to everyone using identical words and grammatical forms, yet there's much to be said for adapting to both context and audience.
adlai: what I call 'the monolithic mood' is suitable for when you're considering only pure functions, and even then, if you use any modern lisp dialect, you still have the division between functions and macros.
dulapbot: Logged on 2022-04-18 23:28:05 verisimilitude: Let there be one time, or no times.
adlai: 'mood', in parallel to imperative, indicative, subjunctive etc moods, of languages; if 'monolithic' is not self-explanatory in that context, I guess I can talk that out, too.
verisimilitude: Well, now we reach Lisp not being good, per se, just better.
verisimilitude: Well, it's decent.
adlai: I wonder what exactly is meant by 'AI-complete' ; I suspect this is not delimitable as a specific complexity class, nor like pornography, only recognizable by another AI-complete system...
dulapbot: Logged on 2021-07-30 12:47:09 asciilifeform: it 'works' well enuff for fiction on ru warez sites, but this only because 'over 9000' readers and they send in corrections.
adlai: god damnit.
verisimilitude: Translation isn't AI-complete.
dulapbot: Logged on 2021-07-30 12:47:38 asciilifeform: ai-complete(tm)(r)(c).
adlai: verisimilitude: no offense intended, however, this specific question is a specifically for the guy who seems to have coined that neologism.
adlai: although I guess if you read the token "AI-complete" and it returns a high-confidence hit, instead of yet another shot into the great open space fair game for fresh neologisation, then please share your definition.
verisimilitude: No offense intended, but that man doesn't use this channel.
adlai frequently suffers from "TMSR myopia" ; thinking that all fresh ideas invented by the interlocutor
verisimilitude: The concept of AI-complete refers to something that seemingly requires a complete intelligence to properly work.
verisimilitude: Chess doesn't, and driving probably does.
adlai: I consider "complete intelligence" almost harmfully underdefined, and intentionally am locking onto the parallel to "NP-complete"
verisimilitude: For its worth, adlai, the ideas I share here do tend to be my creations.
verisimilitude: The concept of AI-complete refers to something that seemingly requires a complete human intelligence to properly work.
adlai: for example, in the context of document handling, there are obviously parts of the problem that can be called 'secretarial', or 'stenographic', or whatever euphemism sufficiently conveys the complement of 'AI-complete' in problem-space.
verisimilitude: The reason driving is likely AI-complete is because it involves real-world interaction.
adlai: and operating arms in assembly lines does not?
verisimilitude: Consider edge cases such as a truck driving road signs or stop lights to their destinations; no humans reasonably fail to accomodate these and other scenarios.
adlai: lol!
adlai: humans are frequently abysmal drivers, and commonly mediocre enough that it is child's play for a traffic cop to find fault with how they are driving.
verisimilitude: Humans can generally drive, whereas computers generally can't, however.
adlai: if there is anything fundamentally AI-complete about driving an automobile on a public way, that is not present in operating arms in an assembly line, it is probably the fact that factory floors are not kingdoms of uncertainty; whereas wildlife (both human and otherwise) frequently wanders onto the public roads.
verisimilitude: Yes.
adlai: I dunno that "humans" and "computers" are useful words in this specific conversation; seriously, I am asking for fundamental characteristics of 'AI-complete problem', and those words only kick aside the issue.
adlai: it's a question about the nature of the problems, assuming that they are being attacked by programs; not about the hardware running those programs.
adlai asked this specifically because the term sufficed to kill my curiosity earlier, and perhaps understanding it can improve the process of choosing the next target.
verisimilitude: AI interests me not.
adlai sighs
verisimilitude: IA interests me.
adlai: do you ever use semicolons? between your last two lines is an excellent place for one, instead of separate lines.
adlai: maybe you simply ran out of air :)
verisimilitude: I often use semicolons.
adlai frequently applies similar heuristic when playing piano; "if my neighbor who plays trumpet has to stop for air, then I should too"
verisimilitude: I didn't there, for emphasis.