#alethepedia | 2020-12-31

http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/alethepedia/2020-12-18#1001735 << consider to what state the original PGP 'wot' has devolved; those signatures, these days, essentially tell you that a chain of folks with driver's license / passport photos, untrained in recognizing forged documents, have glanced at the documents of the next folks down the chain.

12:26

Logged on 2020-12-18 15:12:49 thimbronion: Along those lines wrt ratings why not just skip the number and text and just leave contact info for future inquery?

12:28

whereas the text signed after the small integers in the TMSR WoT has most often served as a 'tl;dr' of a few years of publicly verifiable activity.

12:28

http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/alethepedia/2020-12-18#1001739 << "... and if you sign, don't be surprised!!"?

12:28

Logged on 2020-12-18 17:25:21 asciilifeform: thimbronion: not even speaking of him specifically. but imho the psychology of 'mustn't sign anything, must not commit to a statement unless absolutely unavoidable' is destructive and in fact symptomatic of 'dark triad'

12:30

incidentally, I have encountered the same "If you think, do not speak; if speak, do not write; etc" 'folk wisdom' in old jewish sayings, although the exact wording that I encountered there seemed to originate as advice for stenographers, rather than a warning to authors.

12:32

for the record, this is sufficiently correct as to be not worth discussing further; however,

12:32

Logged on 2020-12-15 17:25:23 asciilifeform: could be -- substance abuse; could be -- the sucking soul vacuum which afflicts some folx upon cessation of a substance abuse; i've nfi in this case.

12:32

that was never meant as mockery.

12:32

Logged on 2020-12-15 17:23:32 thimbronion: asciilifeform: just referring to adlai's constant mockery of my having an "alethiometer."

12:33

adlai: afaik many written traditions have some variant of 'nail that sticks up, will be hammered down' and similar exhortations to live as vegetable

↖

12:35

I find my own frequent inability to communicate at an appropriate level of humor - or lack thereof, when necessary - rather distressing, and honestly, if I speak nonsense, do not hesitate to use your IRC operator permissions to kick me;

12:35

Logged on 2020-12-15 17:10:23 thimbronion: adlai Perhaps I'm a moron - likely I am - but I certainly feel like one whenver I try to figure out precisely wtf you're saying.

12:36

if I had anything worth clarifying, I'll probably return after a few days/weeks to explain.

12:37

and no, I do not consider humor to be inappropriate in plain-text communications; although perhaps that's a failing of my own past education.

12:38

adlai: you had good start -- this was almost a thread re wot mechanics, reluctance to sign, etc. but then spontaneously instead about how no one appreciates humour ?

12:39

bonsai-ification of troublesome, or otherwise merely unexpected, ideas could be more common in traditions that strongly emphasize arguments from authority;

12:39

Logged on 2020-12-31 12:33:26 asciilifeform: adlai: afaik many written traditions have some variant of 'nail that sticks up, will be hammered down' and similar exhortations to live as vegetable

12:40

e.g., in Jewish written traditions, contradicting what a wise dead feller wrote, is supposed to be treated by live readers as ~equivalent to finding a contradiction in a mathematical proof.

12:41

i.e., not necessarily an indication that either the wise dead feller, or the modern writer, are to be cast out of the library, all texts burned, etc; yet, a 'coarse error of authorship', never to be committed by any sane author.

12:42

adlai: i seem to recall there being at least 1 schism there, of the kind which pivoted on whether a particular philosopher (maimonides) is truly 'canon'

12:43

asciilifeform: if anything, the mention of humor was in response to thimbronion's "all the hate".

12:44

the various veins of theology schism all the time, and unlike real veins, seem to have much trouble ever reunifying.

12:45

adlai: that, imho, is the litmus of whether a subj is fundamentally a subfield of mathematics, or of daemonology. in the former, no multicentury schisms, afaik.

12:45

to take an extreme example: theology and philosophy may have been considered equivalent, in Maimonides's day; maybe even in Descartes's; yet today, are almost irrevocably split apart.

12:46

adlai: theology simply had the serial number filed off, the barrel -- shortened, the stock -- sawn off, and is happily alive & well today as 'economics' and surrounding claptrap

12:47

even Descartes would probably have done a double-take if someone got his attention with daemonological wankery, yet ultimately turned it into free tutoring in algebra, and vice-versa! although Descartes may have preferred the philosophical wankery.

12:50

!s alethiometer

12:50

lekythion

0 results

12:52

at the risk of outing myself permanently, in asciilifeform's eyes, as a crackpot daemonologist: the "alethiometer" is a plausible device, first described in science fiction, that uses hard randomness to enable divine intervention, as limited by the operator's imaginitiveness.

12:53

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adlai spells it 'thio', instead of 'theo', to distance the wording from 'theos', despite the plausible equivalence of the roots

12:53

adlai: there was a pretty great story (sadly i fughet the author) where it turns out that a. turing turned out to have put to use this device.

12:53

(trilema) 2015-09-08 ascii_field: that if hugh everett were alive today, he might build a machine that tests rng output for being the privkey to a fat btc balance, and shoots him in the head if it fails

12:54

( is set in a slightly diverged 'parallel world' where he lives to laff about it later. and # of other divergences from our own, unsurprisingly )

12:57

the fictional "golden compass" is arguably no more useful than e.g. Tarot deck, I Ching rituals, etc; however, each such ritual functions within the constraints of its language, so a Tarot deck will quite obviously anchor your mind in a world of pre-rennaisance technology, and I am far from qualified to say anything whatsoever about the I Ching.

12:59

adlai: the ancients imho understood the fundamental importance of having a working rng.

12:59

asciilifeform: that's an amusing story, considering how, iirc, Turing's team reached a point where they realized the daily Enigma ciphers would not be crackable without interception of the item from an enemy unit.

12:59

( and the risks of 'being predictable' )

13:01

adlai: how's this connect ? (turing iirc died in '54)

13:02

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adlai catches up on the fragmented logs before continuing

13:15

nonsense; I am glad that it actually got published, rather than failing ~your own~ filters, and it might simply be suffering from insufficient urgency when compared to the sorry state of bitcoin.

13:15

Logged on 2020-12-23 13:32:01 asciilifeform: my ontology didn't make it even past stage 1

13:17

and, if I may volunteer an answer to a question addressed at someone else, I consider the trb project, ~without~ a discretized signature mechanism, to be almost a complete waste of time; compare how much time and verbiage is spilt over "what does this mean" as opposed to "does the tripod stand without antlers"

13:17

Logged on 2020-12-23 13:29:42 trinque: hm, if you had a standard ontology of signings, what'd you build atop that?

13:19

adlai: i disagree that unvectorized vsigs were 'waste of time'. they succeeded in the fundamental 1st step to civilization -- separation of shit and drinking water. i.e. there are no 'mysterious anon contributions' in trb vtree.

13:19

( aside from, obv., the genesis! )

13:21

ddting the maggots, the 'community', is a non-negotiable 1st step in terraforming an opensore into something that fits-in-head and can be relied on for serious work. everything else, can only come after.

13:24

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adlai can't find the precise log link for the old argument; and honestly, does not consider it worth referencing; however, there does still seem to be a vacuum that needs filling, and everybody else either too busy, or avoiding the subsequent tar-and-feathering as "imbecile who implemented yet another git replacement"

13:25

... and although it is good that the vpatch format exists, it is far from what I dream about existing in, maybe, two decades.

13:25

so, like, go patch v.

13:25

or better yet write about it first

13:25

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adlai is glad that there is no impatient "kill stupid child" MP around, right this instant.

13:26

nothing more needs to be written about the existing item.

13:26

point being if you want something out of trb get to work.

13:28

not that I think you owe me any work.

13:28

I for example can't stand any existing linux, so I'm fixing it.

13:28

I'd like to avoid "second-system effect", wherein I set goals that are overly ambitious, since I will be building upon rather strong bedrock.

13:29

sure, you know my well-advertised opinion of hubris by now

13:29

couldn't agree more.

13:31

my inclination is to aim for a system that strictly includes the proposed discretization, although this might be overly ambitious.

13:32

upstack, I'm still trying to find a use-case for computable signature meanings.

13:32

(the easiest decision is to implement precisely that, instead of a strict superset)

13:32

rather than say, some human text at the top expressing the signers thoughts.

13:32

how is the zero, one, infinity problem avoided there

13:33

not that it wouldn't be interesting to implement and find out. probably the best way to find out.

13:34

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trinque rereads asciilifeform's piece

13:34

well, they are utter and complete vestigial bones, if trb is supposed to be literally ~only~ a 'zero-kelvin', cast readonly executable in cement, machine, rather than a process; and if the versiontron is only used for trb; yet, I think both of those conditionals are wrong.

13:35

adlai: yer latest link is b0rked

13:35

specifically, 'trb' is the process of turning 'prb'-circa-2014 into a zero-kelvin machine, that could well be called by the name 'trb' once it actually is worth declaring as zero (or at least, low-integer) kelvin

13:36

yup, verb describing a social process

13:36

and such a versiontron should be usable for performing a similar reductive, or even forensic, process, on any giant shitball of gnarly spaghetticode.

13:36

adlai: you may recall, trb started as modest proposal to simply determine wtf even ~is~ the protocol.

13:37

fwiw, this is a slightly different purpose from that of most, if not all, existing 'version control systems', where they are all about writing fresh shitballs instead of investigating existing ones with the aim of reducing complexity.

13:38

adlai: vtronics worx entirely equally well for ~avoiding the introduction of complexity~ as for reducing after the fact

13:39

ah, yes, trinque's caches are filled again on this subj

13:39

now (again) obvious why one ought to be able to say "saw and was shit/good" rather than just authored

13:40

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trinque is hauling an even bigger prb into v slower than he would like.

13:40

as for trinque's question re:value of collapsing plaintext opinions into integers: I suspect integers are an overkill, and quite possibly anything beyond a small group (e.g. the example in the original text), is overkill.

13:40

trinque: gnat?

13:40

asciilifeform: whole running linux

13:40

a

13:41

adlai: it seems like 100% of yer selectified linx are duds!? what are you using for a www browser ?

13:42

adlai: I've grown to think the whole "dick is a 4 and becky is a 2" thing is retarded.

13:42

ideally, trinque could sign a "here's the state of gentoo repositories" genesis, and a bunch of "here are my patches to $mp_wp etc" patches, and the PHP expert who steps up to nitpick one line out of the patch to mp_wp, could publish a 'strike' (bowling metaphor!) against a specific part within the one large patch.

13:43

there's only the ordering of *things*; nothing has an absolute value by itself

13:43

asciilifeform: some sorta serial-number-filed-off version of google chrome

13:43

adlai: fuck gentoo; I already did that

13:43

gentoo's full of the "everything to everybody" that births a complexity hell of configuration space

13:44

anybody wants it; it's called cuntoo and works fine

13:44

so far, no one did, including myself

13:45

trinque: fwiw asciilifeform is still using 'coprolithic' gentoo on 100% of irons. (incl. what is given to isp subscribers)

13:45

simply because needed 100%-backwards-compat. and tuning-free escape from 'hell of config space' asap. and this was how.

13:46

sure, frozen gentoo works; I do not have religious notions about these things.

13:46

I have an item baking that takes this notion of freezing further, such that particular tasks have particular filesystems that go with them

13:46

both previous links are supposed to be to the Vectored Signatures post, and anchored to a highlighting of the text "decompose it into orthogonal dimensions ? Let's say, of four 2-bit components", and I am almost - but not quite! - up to my receding hairline with doing anything other than, surprise surprise,

13:46

reading and writing plain text, no links, no code, no nothing.

13:47

adlai: take a look at the log, seems like you forgot link notation..

13:47

lmao, yep.

13:48

*

adlai has probably exceeded gasmask's diaphragm keystroke mtbf

13:48

heck I thought you were being almost normal for a chnage

13:48

*change

13:48

it is a precise metaphor from the world of death within four hours.

13:48

"look at this, adlai's talking about things"

13:48

lol

13:49

what a weird guy

13:52

anyhow, the use-case for computable sig intents that came to mind was mapping how much of a program is left to read, how much left to rewrite, etc.

13:53

trinque: iirc fella was let outta the nuthouse only quite recently. but imho he really oughta practice in sticking to a thread

13:53

I'll raise again that I think there's a use-case for folks being able to declare a particular codepath condemned without necessarily blowing it away in that same patch

13:53

say I want to go piss red ink all over the trb threading code; it'd be nice for these annotations to live in the code

13:54

perhaps this is as simple as adding them as comments though

13:54

asciilifeform: yes, he wouldn't frustrate me if there were *nothing* of value there

13:54