Show Idle (>14 d.) Chans


← 2016-05-18 | 2016-05-20 →
00:55 deedbot [ยป Contravex: A blog by Pete Dushenski] A lolz a day keeps the doctor away : CRA edition - http://www.contravex.com/2016/05/18/a-lolz-a-day-keeps-the-doctor-away-cra-edition/
~ 3 hours 44 minutes ~
04:40 deedbot [Qntra] Monsanto Embargoes Argentina From Getting Dicamba Resistant Soybeans - http://qntra.net/2016/05/monsanto-embargoes-argentina-from-getting-dicamba-resistant-soybeans/
04:40 BingoBoingo ^ Qntra Farm Report is back! Eat Moar Monsanto!
04:55 BingoBoingo In other safe spaces https://archive.is/peuFf
~ 2 hours 3 minutes ~
06:58 Framedragger http://btcbase.org/log/2016-05-19#1468376 << yeah.. because fuck URLs amirite.. i'd think the nadim (of cryptocat) rebased commit history on purpose.. what's funny/sad is that many many stupid people did use cryptocat during those periods of encraption in cryptocat.. too bad for them
07:04 Framedragger http://btcbase.org/log/2016-05-19#1468376 << yeah.. because fuck URLs amirite.. i'd think the nadim guy (of cryptocat) rebased commit history on purpose.. what's funny/sad is that many many stupid people did use cryptocat during those periods of encraption in cryptocat.. too bad for them
07:05 Framedragger ;;later tell Vexual missed your PM, msg me once you're online!
07:05 gribble The operation succeeded.
07:09 shinohai Because being here isn't complete until you have met Vexual.
07:09 BingoBoingo $b 2
07:10 shinohai Nice fph archive there BingoBoingo ... I'd love to see a 450 lb sloth attempting to pedal a bike.
07:11 BingoBoingo the politicaly correct term is "couch bison"
07:11 shinohai >.<
07:21 shinohai http://www.zdnet.com//article/new-android-malware-poses-as-app-joins-device-to-botnet/ <<< kek. waste more time on useless games and apps ppl
07:30 shinohai HehnI actually saw a BitBet tweet this morning, is finally working?
07:30 danielpbarron it's been tweeting for a week or two
07:42 shinohai I guess it got lost in the other noise in mah feed
~ 23 minutes ~
08:05 mircea_popescu Framedragger much like many many stupiud people use tor.
08:05 mircea_popescu stupid people are no one's concern.
08:06 mircea_popescu in other lewls, http://trilema.com/2015/facebook-sends-traffic11eleven/#comment-117282
08:06 mircea_popescu "Are you a business man/woman or an ARTISTS,POLITICIANS,PASTOR,ENGINEER,DOCTOR, STUDENTS, GRADUATED and you want to become Rich Powerful and famous, in life or,Are you frustrated in life. What type of wealth do you want? Today is your luckiest day, 'I want to join great Illuminati occult in Nigeria' we are here for those of you that want to join Illuminati Brotherhood in Nigeria and across Africa."
08:07 mircea_popescu apparently that great dream of that (other) great ustardian dreamer (pres. bahamas) is taking shape : the great illumination of africa!
08:09 shinohai ^ dafuq did I just read
08:09 * shinohai needs more tea this morning.
08:10 mircea_popescu what type of tea do you want ?
08:15 shinohai That black loose-leaf from Iran or China is what I'm making
08:17 mircea_popescu today is your luck day!
08:18 * Framedragger suspects mircea_popescu is baiting him about tor because he remembers those comments on trilema where framedragger said "evidence or gtfo mircea" ;)
08:18 Framedragger owell
08:18 mircea_popescu wait, you STILL haven't seen enough evidence ?!
08:19 Framedragger maybe i have. look, i know those folks personally, by which i mean, not only over the internets. however, malice/incompetence are the same in terms of effects
08:19 Framedragger so, i'm not gonna argue..
08:19 mircea_popescu aite then.
08:19 BingoBoingo Remember kids, asystole is the most stable cardia rhythm possible.
08:20 mircea_popescu it's a sad day in any man's life, when he's squeezed into admitting that personal connection be damned, incompetence and malice aren't usefully distinguishable.
08:20 mircea_popescu with any luck, it happens young. like for instance through the age-old process of, orcs come through rampaging village, rape everyone, surviving kid is faced with the cold, sad truth that "if those assholes were any good, they'd be still alive".
08:21 shinohai tor convo again? (-_\) #facepalm
08:21 mircea_popescu neah.
08:21 shinohai tor is only gtood for making lulzy Qntra articles!
08:23 mircea_popescu turning into quite teh qntra funkmeister over there, huh shinohai ?
08:23 shinohai I grudgingly admit that mircea_popescu was right as always, that I would enjoy it if I got off my ass and did it.
08:23 mircea_popescu >D
08:25 mircea_popescu for the record : all the various german terms, funkmeister, funkspielen, etc, are derived off how you say radioing in german, ie, funk (hence telefunken). the reason it's called "spark" is because they needed a name back when sparkgap was the way. and so...
08:25 mircea_popescu meanwhile asciilifeform still hasn't explained why he hates early radio so damn much.
08:26 shinohai Radio was like the first thing I was interested in as a child.
08:26 shinohai I still have an sdr and god-awful yagi hooked up to this day
08:27 mircea_popescu the way the world's going, you might end up using that skillset for reals.
08:28 shinohai Will bve downloading trb blockchain with packet radio xD
08:28 mircea_popescu in truth, if we end up that stretched there's prolly going to be some adjustments made. like - daily blocks.
08:29 mircea_popescu 1mb/day should be within reach for radio.
08:33 shinohai Sadly, in the land-of-the-not-so-free 'tis illegal to send encrypted comms with HAM license. :/
08:33 mircea_popescu by the time this is actually needed, all that'll be about as interesting as soviet rubles.
08:36 shinohai I haven't looked into D-STAR much, but it is proprietary chip, which opens possibility that it is already pwnd at that level, you cannot decrypt message without it.
08:36 mircea_popescu actually come to think of it, someone should write code to turn standard base64 (like comes out of pgp armor etc) into text. have a nice markov-based state machine with a large-ish dictionary and a syntax/grammar checker.
08:36 mircea_popescu crypto goes in, poetry goes out. no fucking law against poetry, is there.
08:37 shinohai :D
08:38 mircea_popescu the blank verse funkenclub.
08:40 * mircea_popescu can't wait for mod6 's t now :D
08:40 mircea_popescu its announced presence has rearranged my head, it's really the correct solution for the long sought for job market thing.
08:41 shinohai He is pretty close to having an awesum tbot finished, twas working good last night.
08:41 mircea_popescu epic.
08:41 mircea_popescu you know thinking about it... each irc channel is like whatever, a guy walking down the street. maybe carrying a bag of groceries or a skateboard or w/e.
08:41 mircea_popescu then #trilema, it's like mechaworld. 95% computer by mass.
08:43 mircea_popescu and in other news, http://65.media.tumblr.com/c068547109830b95fb0f57bbe9657a8c/tumblr_o6xqe2V4B51vn1bdyo1_1280.jpg
08:43 shinohai cucked.png
08:45 mircea_popescu nah, dun look like it, chick's all coy and shit.
08:55 mircea_popescu nice qntra btw. and yes monsanto is fucked - the projections were for weed resistance to appear in centuries. it showed up within a coupla short decades. this puts the practical utility of their "genetic research" in serious doubt. in fact they've closed down most "general" projects, focusing on a coupla more promising line, after which it's ~the end.
08:56 mircea_popescu incidentally i have nfi how that worked so well for the weeds. pretty impressive.
08:56 mircea_popescu BingoBoingo "genes Monsanto claims title travels" << claims title to ?
08:57 mircea_popescu toxic either because it is a grass < toxic, either - being a grass and all.
08:58 BingoBoingo ty, fxd
08:59 BingoBoingo Well the thing is the weeds were always resistant
08:59 shinohai I read "toxic Ether"
08:59 mircea_popescu BingoBoingo i suppose that must be the explanation, "carried resistance". ie, they had it, genetically, but not normally expressed. until environment changed and so genetic expression changed to fit.
09:01 mircea_popescu shows teh sort of "scientific research" that happens in the us based labs for the lulzy sham it is. "oh, we treated a crop of grass with this vial and the grass died. ERGO IT WORKS!!! we studied genetics under lamarck et all, don't understand much of anything. what do you mean, cultivate the survivors and see, what do you mean need a chain of witness blocks going down many generations ?!?!?!"
09:01 BingoBoingo Well, and some of them like fucking horseweed seemed to have never really cared much about glyphosate. Then there's Japanese knotweed which glyphosate will kill, but only if sprayed during the first new moon after the autumn equinox.
09:02 BingoBoingo Anyways what I found especially lulzy was putting glyphosate and dicamba in the same bottle and calling it innovation.
09:03 BingoBoingo Dicamba's bundled into a bunch of other commercial off the shelf consumer herbicide products already.
09:03 mircea_popescu but yes, for any republican bioscientists in the making : the scientific way to study something like plant resistance to X is to : 1. create the first generation test environment. this means a witness, and a number of exposures (maybe dosed variously, with other substances too, etc). 2. create next generation environment. this means, your experiment now subdivides into as many experiments equal to 1 as there were tests perfor
09:03 mircea_popescu med. 3. keep doing this, depending on life form, MANY times. at least a dozen for plants, for instance, they express fast. mammals, 100s.
09:03 mircea_popescu this is why it's fucking hard & expensive to do genetic research ffs.
09:04 * BingoBoingo still wonders why Monsanto hasn't been digging for Diquat decomposing bacteria to make a wunderwaffen
09:04 mircea_popescu BingoBoingo yeah, monsanto is very much apple'd. the original idea seemed promising, in the 90s. sometime years ago, dunno exactly when cuz they've been keeping it secret and i never cared that much, they found out it's a doomed entreprise. ever since then... MON's been pretty much a stock scam.
09:05 mircea_popescu except you know, with much better pr than the usual pinksheet.
09:05 mircea_popescu BingoBoingo bacteria are a whole other game.
09:05 BingoBoingo Right, kinda the pharma model where having a pipeline of things to pattent matters more than anything else.
09:05 mircea_popescu quite so, yeah.
09:05 mircea_popescu they are exactly like the pharma.
09:06 mircea_popescu anyway, looking at their stock the news was first heard by sophisticated investors q3 2015, ie recently.
09:06 mircea_popescu then the chumps bought back in.
09:07 mircea_popescu oh look at that, it's in play, also. bwahahaha.
09:07 mircea_popescu nice move covering it today for srs.
09:07 BingoBoingo Still, the point remains Argentina's only strategy is to void the monsanto glyphosate resistance patents locally
09:07 BingoBoingo And yes, in play today.
09:08 mircea_popescu BingoBoingo i guess we retrospectively discovered what a major point of discussion in the recent bahamas-macri meeting was. and the local socialist fucktards thought they ran off and hid in the countryside because of them. lelz. "reddit we diddit!!1"
09:09 BingoBoingo Seriously.
09:09 mircea_popescu BingoBoingo maybe even worth updating the article for all these tie-ins ?
09:10 mircea_popescu or maybe save for a later re-piece, if it sells or something. eitherway.
09:10 BingoBoingo I will in a couple hours, gotta get a string trimmer and re-piece. Or you know you could do the tie ins from Argentina bsns perspective.
09:11 mircea_popescu if i had any sort of local confirmation or somesuch actual meat. but i've not been investing in connecting to the local agros who the shit cares, and obv el presidente'd rather die than give up this one, and i'm noit about to start torturing elected presidents just yet.
09:11 mircea_popescu so pure speculation at this point, not worthy.
09:11 BingoBoingo Anyways it looks like reddit doesn't get much traffic anymore compare https://voat.co/v/Conspiracy/comments/1050659 to https://www.reddit.com/r/farming/comments/4k1jyv/monsanto_embargoes_argentina_from_getting_dicamba/
09:12 mircea_popescu who could have predicteded.
09:12 BingoBoingo You know, I bet the local farm supply store would have had a better ball gag than all those porno stores...
09:12 BingoBoingo brb
09:12 mircea_popescu i did find what i wanted in the end, though.
09:13 mircea_popescu spoeaking of which, found a SPLENDID leather collar with metal spikes in local pet shop. top notch stuff, 12 bux.
09:13 mircea_popescu possibly the most 12 dollars has bought this year anywhere in the world.
09:16 mircea_popescu incidentally speaking of https://voat.co/p/partnerprogram anyone knows the voat people ? i think it's conceivable mpex might list them...
~ 1 hours 24 minutes ~
10:40 asciilifeform l0gz dead
10:40 mircea_popescu aha.
10:41 mircea_popescu apparently phf gotta handcrank them, and when he sleeps...
10:52 deedbot [Trilema] Vacation - http://trilema.com/2016/vacation/
10:53 asciilifeform spiffy l0g
10:53 mircea_popescu hm ?
10:53 * asciilifeform has ~'fivenines'-reliable own l0g
10:54 asciilifeform the thing nailing monsanto has a name, 'epigenetics'
10:54 asciilifeform one of the interesting things is that monsanto used to be an actual 'golden age of usa' chemical co. e.g., produced first commercial LED.
10:55 asciilifeform BUT was restructured as a chumpatron some time quite recently (90s?)
10:55 mircea_popescu in another view, what's nailing monsanto is called "so you thought you were smart, eh ?". heck, plants've been here a while. odds are whatever random unwashed derp in our colonies comes up with, they've seen before.
10:55 asciilifeform well everybody is eventually nailed by 'so you thought you were...'
10:55 mircea_popescu aha
10:56 asciilifeform but yeah, when substance s is something that kills plant p but not plant p', and therefore may have been secreted by some past p', odds are 'it's happened before'
10:57 mircea_popescu quite.
10:58 mircea_popescu the very deeply ignorant approach is rather notable, to my eyes. derps seriously think that's how genetics works, much like a baby perceiving his environment as a photographic still rather than a dynamic equilibrium and so faceplanting self once an hour
10:59 asciilifeform the more interesting part is that the actual workerbees doing the gruntwerk do ~not~ think this
10:59 asciilifeform and haven't since at the latest - the '80s
10:59 mircea_popescu surely. management problem.
10:59 asciilifeform aha.
10:59 mircea_popescu much like - lol and behold - soviet empire!
11:00 asciilifeform usa was really first to mass-produce entirely defective workerbees, and afaik they are limited to software
11:01 mircea_popescu nah. i disagree. usa was first to pretend like underage male fuckwards are "worker bees", which only can be meaningfully attempted for ~a certain kind~ of software. what we reference here as the web.
11:01 mircea_popescu the truth of demographics is that underage males are mostly defective by mass. this is unfixable.
11:02 mircea_popescu the soviets had ~the same percentage, but simply killed them./
11:02 asciilifeform yeah but in modern usa 30y is still 'underage'
11:02 asciilifeform somehow.
11:02 mircea_popescu this is also not creation. it is the result of expanding complexity.
11:02 asciilifeform these folks got developmentally frozen.
11:03 asciilifeform complexity of what ?
11:03 mircea_popescu as the maximal leverage avaialble to the individual increases, the % of things crawling out of cunts (which, recall, run perl) that may ever individuate decreases.
11:04 mircea_popescu as the bar to the individuation is fixed ~the mean of the leverage, so obviously as that increases the sigma-ness associated increases also (by about the square root ?)
11:04 asciilifeform where is this 'leverage increases' ?
11:04 mircea_popescu let's take a retrofitted historical walk.
11:05 asciilifeform if anything, leverage pertaining to computer maxed out in '90s
11:06 mircea_popescu so, year is 160 ad, we're in rome. maximally, a man can replace the work of about fifty or so men, give or take. the mean of this is say 25. about 10% of the population can reach this, and lo and behold - about 10% of the empire's population is citizens!
11:06 mircea_popescu the year is now 660, and we're in londinum. a man can replace the work of maybe two, give or take. the mean is one-something, and "everyone" is someone.
11:07 mircea_popescu by 1160, which catches us in paris, we're up to a leverage of maybe as high as twenty, and so "most men" is good enough an approximation. about 60-70% really.
11:07 mircea_popescu then in 1660... one's either a noble or not worth the mention, and this reduces to a few percent again.
11:07 asciilifeform yeah but what part of any of this happened any in past 20y.
11:08 mircea_popescu the amount of work you CAN replace has been monotonously increasing since about then, mind.
11:08 mircea_popescu you wish to think in terms of your chosen art, which is meaningless. it's not always the same art that provides the additional leverage.
11:08 mircea_popescu however they may ebb or wane individually, of interest to man is the sum total.
11:13 Framedragger > There's just no life in this idea as originally thought out, a browser thing.
11:13 Framedragger mircea_popescu: yeah ok i'm afraid i've to agree
11:14 mircea_popescu Framedragger doesn't mean much more than, "the correct path is to take a decent crypto lib, a distributed-hashtable-storage thing from one of the p2p torrent tools, and make a real social media app"
11:19 Framedragger mircea_popescu: yeah... thinking...
11:19 Framedragger asciilifeform: do you have an opinion on IPFS (distributed storage protocol, of sorts)? spoiler: reference implementation is in golang
11:19 Framedragger wonder if ipfs is worth leveraging here
11:22 asciilifeform Framedragger: i think you just answered yer own question
11:22 mircea_popescu was this the merkle data thing ?
11:22 asciilifeform golang --> straight to furnace.
11:22 mircea_popescu asciilifeform dude i'm going to make the REFERENCE IMPLEMENTATION of your next girlfriend in golang and what'll you do then.
11:23 mircea_popescu you can implement shit in whatever the hell you want. the reference implementation for cramer-shoup is in malbolge.
11:23 asciilifeform <mircea_popescu> you wish to think in terms of your chosen art, which is meaningless. it's not always the same art that provides the additional leverage. <<< pretty much everything other than the infernal machines has been going to hell, visibly to naked eye. so which art would it be that mircea_popescu was thinking of ?
11:23 asciilifeform metallurgy ?
11:23 asciilifeform mircea_popescu: on the contrary, there isn't a reference implementation.
11:23 Framedragger yeah generalized merkle DAG
11:24 mircea_popescu asciilifeform right. which is my point - if you don't like golang pretend there isn't one. you can't invalidate design by "bad implementation" wtf.
11:24 asciilifeform until very recently i used to think quite like mircea_popescu above, 'sure, i'll read even if implemented in js'
11:24 asciilifeform but this was a mistake.
11:24 asciilifeform turns out it is 100% a waste of time to study certain things.
11:24 mircea_popescu turns out also that this has to be a personal conclusion.
11:24 asciilifeform sure does.
11:24 mircea_popescu so then.
11:25 mircea_popescu back to the arts : no, not really. finance, believe it or not. and other things. few of which are "palpable" in the sense that farm derp could put hand on
11:25 asciilifeform realize that 'golang' is not simply a language, but a set of libraries that is used by pretty much 100% of the extant soft implemented therein
11:25 asciilifeform and so i am not interested in a crypto lib that calls out to google crapolade.
11:26 asciilifeform mircea_popescu: chumpatronics quite clearly moved forward! yes
11:26 asciilifeform but what else ?
11:26 asciilifeform (it is the one science that will never stop!11111)
11:26 mircea_popescu finance is a different story from chumpatronics, why teh haet.
11:27 asciilifeform finance as 'improved since 1980' is precisely chumpatronics.
11:27 mircea_popescu notrly. finance is basically "engineering for large systems with complex parts"
11:27 * asciilifeform brb, phood
11:27 mircea_popescu sort of like how qm is thermodynamics for grown ups
11:31 mircea_popescu anyway, Framedragger golang is not liked here because we don't own it, and we don't like usg.google more than we like usg.anything, and because it seems quite well engineered to work as a baited hook for the usg chump works.
11:31 mircea_popescu that aside, the IDEA of ipfs, as far as can be distinguished, is not necessarily bad.
11:32 mircea_popescu it's not very much clear there's anything much there besides the usual marketing crapolade. i dunno how familiar you are with this phenomena, but let me dig a fine example out of the log.
11:37 mircea_popescu http://btcbase.org/log/2015-04-02#1084144
11:39 mircea_popescu plenty of other good ones ( asciilifeform you recall reporting on that group pushing 20 year old schweizer as "wai of footure" at some conference ? ), but the more important point is, that this is a fine field for innovation as it stands. it's very far from "settled science", where the logical move is to simply import the universally accepted library and move on.
11:40 mircea_popescu this is where one writes code as a young man that then makes them famous for rest of life, the c and whatnot of our time. you see what i mean ?
11:42 mircea_popescu for instance, i'm deliberately keeping my ongoing "war on the web" as far as attacking forums goes on a very low roar. not that i couldn't scale it up and end ~any web-based forum, owing to the incredible incompetence of the scammers involved. but then, millions of derps would in a voice go "ok so these are bad, what should we do ?"
11:42 mircea_popescu can't quite answer "get fucked" to something like that, not unless you're prepared to follow through and holocaust them all.
11:43 mircea_popescu but should one be able to answer "use this thing"... well then. different matter altogether.
11:46 Framedragger yeah i see what you mean. also nice to keep idiots in single basket
11:46 Framedragger re. golang, i understand the sentiment yeah
11:47 Framedragger sounds like amusing examples too, will check later ($dayjob)
11:47 asciilifeform http://btcbase.org/log/2016-05-19#1468579 << lulzily, shortly after i wrote this i actually met the man.
11:47 a111 Logged on 2016-05-19 15:37 mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2015-04-02#1084144
11:48 asciilifeform (i was sent to sit on a committee of sorts, with him in it)
11:48 Framedragger hahaha
11:48 Framedragger on "Identity-based encryptionย " ?
11:48 asciilifeform nope.
11:48 mircea_popescu and, how's he in life ?
11:49 asciilifeform mircea_popescu: in life he was ~same as all the other greyhairs in the room
11:49 asciilifeform and quite like ~all the other usg academics i spent most of my working life working with.
11:49 asciilifeform tragic figure.
11:51 asciilifeform http://btcbase.org/log/2016-05-19#1468573 << i'ma bite this bait. tell me, what constructive thing have improvements in finance in past 30y enabled ?
11:51 a111 Logged on 2016-05-19 15:27 mircea_popescu: notrly. finance is basically "engineering for large systems with complex parts"
11:51 asciilifeform bigger yachts for pinksheet sc4mz0rz?
11:51 asciilifeform what did n-way leveraged whateverthefucks improve ?
11:51 asciilifeform bigger yield of uranium ? purer aluminum ? longer cocks ? what.
11:52 asciilifeform less frequent marketpanics ? (quite certainly not)
11:52 asciilifeform all i see is complexity cancer, on which the usual scamvultures feast.
11:53 mircea_popescu asciilifeform i count bitcoin, you know.
11:53 mircea_popescu i also count sepa.
11:53 asciilifeform bitcoin is really an electrically-enabled return to 200 bc
11:53 mircea_popescu i also count all SORTS of things, including 3% corp tax in romania, for instance. wasn't there in 86
11:53 asciilifeform low tax is now a technical advance?!!
11:54 asciilifeform are we playing civ1?
11:54 mircea_popescu what's your definition of technical advance ?
11:54 mircea_popescu well yes.
11:55 mircea_popescu (to be specific : the idea that "small corps are the driver of economy, and should get massive tax breaks" is entirely past 30 years.)
11:55 asciilifeform dunno, lenin's NEP had it.
11:55 asciilifeform and i can't fathom it being the first.
11:56 mircea_popescu but as per our discussion of monsanto, if your idea of "innovation" in humanities is alligned with "absolute first", you can't even PERCEIVE humanities, let alone meaningfully interact with em.
11:56 mircea_popescu context matters, who the fuck cares what lenin's nep did.
11:56 asciilifeform not being timeless god on mt olympus, i generally don't do 'absolute firsts'
11:57 mircea_popescu right ? so you're part of the 55th civilisation to discover cellphones. do you care about the other 54 ?
11:58 asciilifeform but the reason i dun see the 'let's 3% tax' as a technical advance, is that it was not a deliberate act, but a concession to collapse of inca empire. it was done ~to~ the folks who did it, like an earthquake.
11:58 asciilifeform ergo not a technical advance, any more than eruption of mt vesuvius was.
11:58 mircea_popescu in this sense chloroform was done to the discoverer, not the other way around.
11:58 asciilifeform '90s post-sov govs did not have the actual option of mega-tax.
11:59 asciilifeform mircea_popescu: lsd, famously
11:59 mircea_popescu yes, of course, life taking place in nature, its discoveries are DONE to it
11:59 asciilifeform teflon.
11:59 asciilifeform etc
11:59 asciilifeform but these transitioned TO technical advances once cemented in place
11:59 asciilifeform and repeated volitionally
11:59 asciilifeform it is not yet clear to me that 'let's 3% tax' has made it to this stage
12:00 mircea_popescu well, they've been sticking to it for a decade+ by now.
12:00 asciilifeform here in the land of 50% tax.
12:00 mircea_popescu ah but you see, this is thevery thing we're discussing. ~I~ benefit from it, and it empowers me. that'd be what i'd care about.
12:01 asciilifeform yeah but it is also possible that mircea_popescu benefits from scratching his toes just-so when he wakes up. this is not a technical advance as generally understood, because the recipe is useless to anybody else.
12:01 mircea_popescu i don't give the first inkliong of a shit as to whether it could "rightfully" be called technical, inovation, or pornography. that's a concern for kids debating superman-vs-spiderman encounters.
12:01 mircea_popescu what i strictly care about is, doth it or doth it not make it easier for me to send fifty men out of their houses, behead their offspring and claim their women.
12:01 mircea_popescu and that - well that, it does.
12:02 asciilifeform well is it, to use mircea_popescutronic analysis, a matter 'for the forum' or 'for the gynaecaeum' ?
12:02 mircea_popescu the particular is not a public matter. but the thing we were discussing, ie, leverage, and its impact of citizenship, and the way this drags out citizenship out of the commoner's reach, is.
12:02 mircea_popescu it ended up illustrated with minutia, but it is not the illustrative minutia.
12:03 asciilifeform iirc the thread was about 'leverage increased, ergo we are awash in surplus people'
12:03 asciilifeform this was a testable hypothesis re: observables.
12:03 asciilifeform or so i thought.
12:03 mircea_popescu how testable ?
12:03 asciilifeform does it reduce to mircea_popescu asserting 'my magic got stronger in ineffable wayz and stfu' ?
12:04 mircea_popescu well no, not necessarily. but on the other end of the same chasm, it may not be a case of "either this leverage is universally accessible or stfu"
12:04 mircea_popescu the very point being that it's not universally accessible.
12:04 asciilifeform i can readily believe that mircea_popescu's magic got stronger, sure. but did he singlehandedly surplus all of the obsolete meatbags ? or did somebody else's magic also get stronger, and if so how..?
12:05 asciilifeform bulldozer is not universally accessible, as it is costly, but its DESCRIPTION is.
12:05 mircea_popescu just as long as you admit to an increase of maximal-possible-mojo per capita, and to a decrease in marginal utility per capita, you're basically admitting the premises.
12:05 asciilifeform that is what distinguishes reactor from hoodoo
12:05 mircea_popescu ah, but no, i do not accept this requirement that the DESCRIPTION be universally accessible either.
12:06 asciilifeform then we have 'my hoodoo got stronger, stfu' ?
12:06 mircea_popescu because, as per the discussion of "ideas" : in my hand it's an idea, in derp'\s hand is nothing, for derp may not have ideas.
12:06 mircea_popescu not necessarily.
12:06 mircea_popescu there's a space between these two.
12:09 asciilifeform well sure, somewhere in that space live, e.g., galois theory, other fine arts
12:12 mircea_popescu heh.
12:13 mircea_popescu tell you what, something as finely technical as, the lorenz contraction, still is not "universally accessible". in fact, it is outside of the purview of ~all us schoolchildren.
12:13 mircea_popescu and there exists a lobby there proposing that for this reason, it is not really, properly technology.
12:13 mircea_popescu are you of the same notion ?
12:13 asciilifeform laugh all you like, i had it in sch00l
12:13 asciilifeform american, no less
12:13 mircea_popescu so did i.
12:13 asciilifeform ~american~ school
12:13 mircea_popescu but this was just about 30 years ago, has it not.
12:13 asciilifeform 15.
12:14 mircea_popescu dollars to donuts, if you arrest everyone who ever said "quantum computing" on an webpage, and keep them locked up in solitary until such a time they can explain what it means, scientifically,
12:14 mircea_popescu you'll be lucky if you ever release 1% of a rather large inmate population.
12:14 asciilifeform now this, for sure.
12:14 asciilifeform or for that matter 'electrical cures' of 1890.
12:15 mircea_popescu so then. accessibility is no sort of criteria for technology.
12:15 asciilifeform nobody cancelled quackery.
12:15 asciilifeform so it seems like we have:
12:15 asciilifeform 1) live in sovok
12:16 asciilifeform 2) collapse!11111
12:16 asciilifeform 3) ?????
12:16 asciilifeform 4) Pr00000f1t!1111
12:16 asciilifeform ^ mega-technology ^
12:16 asciilifeform fish in the scania was also technology ?
12:16 mircea_popescu and what's wrong with that ? are you derriding the pulley system on the grounds of how trite the rope is ?
12:16 mircea_popescu definitely was.
12:17 mircea_popescu inasmuch as it allowed the swedes to pretend to being a nation for absolutely no other discerinble reason,
12:17 asciilifeform having golden meteor fall in your back yard is not a technology.
12:17 mircea_popescu fish in the scania is the equivalent of lace in luxembourg.
12:17 asciilifeform it is called windfall.
12:17 mircea_popescu and why the fuck not ?
12:17 mircea_popescu everything's called windfall by some people.
12:17 asciilifeform there is prolly a madman to whom every animal with 4 legs is dog.
12:17 asciilifeform does not follow, from this, that it is useless to give different names to species.
12:18 mircea_popescu but once yo uspeak of madman you're either granting my point or else going full "no true scotsman"
12:18 mircea_popescu yes, there's madmen and there's people, and technology need not be describable to madmen to be technology.
12:19 asciilifeform point here is that technology is an informational thing. two folks, with same materials, will come to different fates, because one knows that magnetic field induces electric current in moving conductor, and the other - does not
12:19 asciilifeform recall the thread about the indian firing a rifle ?
12:20 asciilifeform he does not 'have the tech'
12:20 mircea_popescu it is not clear technology is an "informational" thing. seems apt to say technology is a productive thing.
12:20 asciilifeform all he has is a thing he found on a dead englishman.
12:20 asciilifeform when he ~makes own rifle~ - he has the tech.
12:20 mircea_popescu asciilifeform but in a discussion of indian tribes, the smaller trbie with guns that wipes the larger tribe with tomahawks HAS, in fact, deployed the technology.
12:20 mircea_popescu us army grunts notably don't know how the fuck their shit works.
12:21 mircea_popescu and for that matter, when you have sex you get a child, which is yours, even if you have nfi how cunt works. nor does she.
12:21 mircea_popescu "functional literacy", it's a thing.
12:21 asciilifeform naturally, it is not his role in life. but their hardware is so flimsy that if cut off from the mothership for a month, they will die.
12:21 mircea_popescu "role in life" is not a thing.
12:22 asciilifeform the making of prussian-style soldiers, folks with very narrow role in life and bonsaikittened brain, is also a technology.
12:22 mircea_popescu not for the folks. for the makers.
12:22 asciilifeform (think of how jp adopted it in 1900s)
12:22 mircea_popescu that's the point. technology is technology only in context.
12:22 mircea_popescu in and of itself, it's "natural phenomena" or "magic" or what have you.
12:22 asciilifeform technology is something you can pick up informationally.
12:23 mircea_popescu no. it picks you up, in that some can and some can't ; some do and some do not.
12:23 asciilifeform this formulation is simply a change of coordinate system
12:23 asciilifeform but entirely true, sure
12:24 mircea_popescu fine then, let it be so. to me the difference is that i perceive the "you" to be universalizing in your statement.
12:24 mircea_popescu and the important point here is that no agent may be universal ; and no universal may have agency. which is why god can't act.
12:24 * asciilifeform universalizes to alert readerz, not to woodland fauna
12:25 asciilifeform so no, it does not follow that redditus can build reactor
12:25 mircea_popescu so then reactor is a technology ?
12:25 asciilifeform nevertheless, meiji jp 'dutch studies' scholar builds steamship. etc
12:25 asciilifeform aha, is technology.
12:25 mircea_popescu on the basis of what ?
12:26 asciilifeform on the basis that englishmen of 1880 could have built it if it were explained to them.
12:26 mircea_popescu let's do a thought experiment. suppose i invite you to spend a week at my north pole hunting lodge, where, contrary to what you might expect, we spend our time hunting large floating worms of delicious carnation. with me so far ?
12:26 asciilifeform aha!
12:26 * asciilifeform licks lips
12:26 mircea_popescu now then, after a moment of this, you wish to know how the fuck is it possible that these animals live here ?!
12:26 mircea_popescu and i explain to you that i discovered a way to create them by farting.
12:27 mircea_popescu you think i'm joking, but presently i demonstrate : i put a finger on my nose, and frown, and fart, and soon enough there it is, another one.
12:27 mircea_popescu so you try... but nothing happens.
12:27 mircea_popescu and then i call a girl over, and she tries it, and there it is! a pretty one too.
12:27 asciilifeform there is a less comical example of this, historically - damascus steel.
12:27 mircea_popescu so you're a little miffed, and suspect us of collusion. so then we capture a random inuit woman, and i spend some time with her,
12:28 mircea_popescu and lo and behold! she does it too!
12:28 mircea_popescu but you still can't, and marry her, and learn inuit, and still can't, and what now ?
12:28 mircea_popescu technology ?
12:28 asciilifeform and yeah, i go home and it dun work 'cause my farts haven't enough molybdenum in'em.
12:28 mircea_popescu asciilifeform there is a much much better example in your own experience. recall the matchsticks ?
12:28 asciilifeform and i won't find out what molybdenum is for another 2000 yrs.
12:28 asciilifeform aha.
12:28 mod6 heheh
12:28 mircea_popescu lol.
12:29 asciilifeform a stage magic trick is a technology, yes
12:29 mircea_popescu this "is_technology" function is never as usefully decidable as schoolteachers like to pretend.
12:29 asciilifeform or does mircea_popescu propose that i could not possibly perform the match trick even if told all.
12:29 mircea_popescu ie, when decidable, not useful ; when useful, not decidable.
12:29 mircea_popescu asciilifeform what is "all" ?
12:29 asciilifeform all that the inuit gurl was told.
12:29 mircea_popescu ie, exact words ?
12:30 asciilifeform as in, sitting right there.
12:30 asciilifeform no side channels.
12:30 mircea_popescu oh, you were there for the event, throughout.
12:30 asciilifeform i meant, sitting when she is being taught for 1st time
12:30 mircea_popescu and eating the same food, so one'd expect molybdenum to equalize. but...
12:30 asciilifeform and spoken to by mircea_popescu for first time.
12:30 asciilifeform so no dictionary tricks.
12:30 mircea_popescu sure, she's rando, we just ran into.
12:30 mircea_popescu heck, you pick her.
12:31 asciilifeform then unless the trick requires cunt muscles i can duplicate it.
12:31 mircea_popescu and how do you know this ? other than, it happening to be your religion.
12:31 mircea_popescu what proof can you offer ?
12:31 asciilifeform 'ain't no magic on this here planet' is a religious proposition, yes.
12:31 mircea_popescu quite so.
12:32 asciilifeform quite possibly tomorrow we https://xkcd.com/298 .
12:33 mircea_popescu lol
12:33 asciilifeform but until then technology is a communicable thing.
12:33 mircea_popescu haha no. until then technology MAY be communicable.
12:34 mircea_popescu do me a favour and don't go all religious freak on me, absence of proof / proof of absence stew etc.
12:34 asciilifeform and yeah in some jungle there is witch doctor whose wonderful spirit-summoning tech is not communicable to the filthy white man.
12:34 mircea_popescu and who promised you such barrier as "a jungle far away" ?
12:34 asciilifeform nobody.
12:35 mircea_popescu point in fact, most of what you do is not communicable to "filthy white man". though from what you're saying i take it next you go renting you'll rouse them from their beds to teach lisp ?
12:35 asciilifeform but if mircea_popescu is a gifted telepath, clairvoyant, and spirit-summoner and proposes to use 'technology' to describe his abilities, imho this is abuse of terminology.
12:35 asciilifeform however genuine his talent.
12:35 mircea_popescu and why is that ?
12:35 asciilifeform because wordz have meaningz?
12:36 asciilifeform that is is useful to distinguish the 2 ?
12:36 mircea_popescu i use "technology" to describe my numeric head-mathing, though most gurlz can't do it.
12:36 asciilifeform iirc mircea_popescu routinely taught it to the gurlz
12:36 mircea_popescu it is, to a degree and after a fashion, a talent.
12:36 mircea_popescu asciilifeform yes, but not to all :) to selected gurlz.
12:36 asciilifeform and yes, circus weight lifter has strength and he cannot teach the strength
12:37 mircea_popescu anyway - words have meaning ONLY IN CONTEXT.
12:37 asciilifeform erdos cannot teach me to be erdos but can write down the theorems.
12:37 asciilifeform for which he was famous.
12:37 mircea_popescu asciilifeform and how do you distinguish the theorems for which he WILL BE famous from the ones for which he will not be ?
12:37 mircea_popescu see, it's easy enough in retrsopect, to confound historical accident and meaning.
12:37 asciilifeform recall, gauss is still open, even.
12:38 mircea_popescu but try it prospectively, like a math teacher on a grad program. pick which kids do good work and which waste their lives.
12:38 asciilifeform ^ this is surprisingly easy
12:38 mircea_popescu it's a technology, right ? by ytour notions of tech, math is the supertech. so then ?
12:38 asciilifeform and generally not-done for wholly political reasons.
12:38 mircea_popescu it's not surprisingly easy to do it usefully. it's very easy to do it when no one's doing it and there's a lot of low hanging fruit,
12:38 mircea_popescu then you can say like the butcher that moved into village and introduced hygiene, "i am a better surgeon than the guys in paris"
12:39 mircea_popescu but if it's actually useful to do, it can't fucking be done worth a shit.
12:39 mircea_popescu recall the example of the esteemed mr shockley, for instance.
12:39 asciilifeform if mircea_popescu is going into 'mathematical creativity has never been and likely will never be technologized' he is preaching to choir.
12:39 mircea_popescu or what, you think he was anti-talented ?
12:40 asciilifeform but on the other hand it is not wholly impossible to write something meaningful and useful re mathematical creativity.
12:40 asciilifeform i assume mircea_popescu read, e.g., polya
12:40 mircea_popescu asciilifeform well the problem with this choir is that it's made of apparent 16 yo girls who spend the night doing all manner of kinky stuff
12:40 asciilifeform or hell, hadamard
12:40 mircea_popescu and the day choir.
12:40 asciilifeform lel
12:42 asciilifeform thus far thread seems to compress to a very discouraging http://btcbase.org/log/2016-05-19#1468598 ; mircea_popescu: 'me an' the other wizards got vastly moar powerful!1111' asciilifeform: 'waiwut how' mircea_popescu: 'yer puny brain will never apprehend the smallest part of it'
12:42 a111 Logged on 2016-05-19 15:51 asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2016-05-19#1468573 << i'ma bite this bait. tell me, what constructive thing have improvements in finance in past 30y enabled ?
12:43 mircea_popescu in fact, a useful heuristic to distinguish magic and technology, is that as the stakes increase, magic gets harder and technology easier to do.
12:43 mircea_popescu and by this measure, a good chunk of what you regard one is really the other and back again.
12:45 mircea_popescu to take a simple illustration : make this matchstick exactly 1 mn thick within 0.1% tolerance throughout it's length and i'll pay you a dollar is hard. make this rod of molybdenum 1 mm thick within 0.0000001% tolerance and i'll pay you a billion is easy.
12:45 asciilifeform to technologize is to break apart magic and make it repeatable - e.g., damascus steel was magic (gotta be in the right time, right place, use iron from here-and-here, and whisper the incantations yer grandfather taught you for good measure, and be of pure aryan blood, and ....) but then somebody builds mass spectrometer and today you can buy a damascus knife from helsinki
12:45 mircea_popescu meanwhile, "shit an atom of gold and i'll pay you a dollar" is easy. "shit a brick of gold and i'll pay you a billion" is very fucking hard. etc.
12:45 mircea_popescu asciilifeform there's not much to go on when one believes there's more substance than marketing to that "damascus" claim.
12:46 asciilifeform well the damascene pattern is there. but no, i did not personally buy these swords and go back in time to 14th c and fight with them for 20y
12:46 asciilifeform if mircea_popescu does, plox report back, i will read.
12:48 mircea_popescu well, they look the same, should be good enough for our technological needs :D
12:50 mircea_popescu anwyay, there's not so much difference between what we're saying. "make it repeatable" as you say is part of parcel of "economy of scale" as i say.
12:51 asciilifeform not simply scale.
12:51 asciilifeform it has to be communicable via dead words.
12:51 mircea_popescu but that's not what you said :)
12:51 asciilifeform in that sense, much of what we think of as technology, has not in fact yet been technologized.
12:51 asciilifeform (recall the 'fogbank' incident ?)
12:51 mircea_popescu repeatable is one thing ; but your idea of communicable is murky at best.
12:51 mircea_popescu which incident is this ?
12:51 asciilifeform $s fogbank
12:51 asciilifeform hm
12:51 mircea_popescu gotta get the logsearch already.
12:52 trinque phf: have an API?
12:52 asciilifeform http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/201814/fogbank
12:53 mircea_popescu trinque were you also going to give him deedbot log access ?
12:53 mircea_popescu asciilifeform ah that's an actual thing ?
12:53 mircea_popescu i always thought it to be a sort of snipe pee.
12:53 asciilifeform mircea_popescu: good evidence that it was indeed a product
12:53 asciilifeform a sort of styrofoam
12:54 mircea_popescu aite.
12:54 asciilifeform with particular neutron cross-section
12:54 mircea_popescu so what's lost here ? very thin foams are well understood
12:54 trinque mircea_popescu: yeah we can work that out too
12:55 mircea_popescu cool.
12:55 asciilifeform mircea_popescu: story is, the particulars of making just-that (and it had to be just-that, on account of the detonation process) foam, were never fully written down
12:55 mircea_popescu heh.
12:55 asciilifeform as it turned out to have a hidden dependence on an impurity which was present in the feedstock at the time
12:56 mircea_popescu ah and they can't make it now ?
12:56 asciilifeform but ~no longer~ present in 2000s when they resumed production
12:56 mircea_popescu this smacks of so much disinfo... but anyway.
12:56 asciilifeform they spent, supposedly, a few 100 mil, massive failures
12:56 mircea_popescu so this was a technology yes
12:56 mircea_popescu :)))
12:56 mircea_popescu understood and reproducible. at least generally speaking.
12:57 asciilifeform and eventually had to reverse-engineer old samples and found the missing 'gotta have trace elements x, y, z'
12:57 asciilifeform anyway i was not there, and cannot say how much the entire story was simply a cover for embezzling half a bil usd
12:57 mircea_popescu but the implications for your position are pretty lulzy, wouldn't you say ?
12:57 asciilifeform but it reads like an elementary 'damascus steel'
12:57 mircea_popescu was it really magic ?
12:58 mircea_popescu (think about it - dead words failed to convey it. in spite of everyone's best effort)
12:59 asciilifeform i was specifically citing example of failed technologizing
12:59 asciilifeform (whether real, or fictional in whole or part, i obviously do not know)
12:59 mircea_popescu what is this "Failed technologizing" mean ?
12:59 asciilifeform when you ~think~ you have reduced the item to a recipe of dead words
12:59 asciilifeform but in fact the would-be maker still needs the right unobtainium
12:59 mircea_popescu but this is universally the case.
13:00 mircea_popescu name one item that is not in this situation.
13:00 asciilifeform long division?
13:00 mircea_popescu ok but i said item.
13:00 asciilifeform axe.
13:00 mircea_popescu tell me ?
13:01 asciilifeform long handle, heavy head with sharp edge.
13:01 asciilifeform can go, make.
13:01 asciilifeform even if yer an eskimo.
13:01 mircea_popescu this sounds like a flanged mace ?
13:02 asciilifeform axe is communicable, hence ~everybody who wasn't genetically damaged, had'em.
13:03 mircea_popescu but you communicated axe and i ended up with a flanged mace. http://www.therionarms.com/reenact/therionarms_c1306b.jpg << is this your axe ?
13:03 asciilifeform i said 'edge' not 'edges' neh ?
13:03 asciilifeform where'd ya get so many.
13:04 mircea_popescu wasn't clear that part is intentionally meaningful. fine, consider same item with a single such spoke
13:04 asciilifeform at any rate, 'resistance of medium', this is not a place where a primitive axe-maker is likely to wander into
13:04 asciilifeform hard enough to give a stone 1 edge.
13:04 mircea_popescu (note how you keep trying to brace yourself against unstated convention, "of course you would understand this is not the item because that'd breach symmetry and we have a convention re symmetry")
13:04 mircea_popescu aha! quite exactly.
13:04 mircea_popescu not even the fucking axe is "fully technologized"
13:04 mircea_popescu because everything everyone ever does has some medium involved.
13:05 asciilifeform well yes, if i were in the position of the hero of that one asimov story where he is trying to communicate what humans look like over radio, but he has no idea even which way their displays scan, or what the hell they use to decode signal in the first place,
13:05 asciilifeform i would have a bit of a tougher cookie on my hands
13:06 asciilifeform (communicate to intergalactic whateverthefucks)
13:06 mircea_popescu even your "primitive man won't stray" argument is broken, as you stop midway. a) the point of his following your recipe is that he got off lazy butt ; if he doesn't, he doesn't AT ALL. why would he get off lazy butt JUST AS FAR as you imagine he would and no further ?
13:06 mircea_popescu the same sort of thought process is involved (for him) when he decides to make the axe at all and when he decides to make singlespoked flanged mace.
13:07 asciilifeform this would happen if he lived in some heavenly vacuum where the purpose of the axe is entirely unclear
13:07 asciilifeform but on the other hand if he knows that it is to cut heads with.
13:07 asciilifeform (heads, trees, ...)
13:07 mircea_popescu but if the "purpose" of the axe (as you imagine it) is unspoken part of the design,
13:07 mircea_popescu then the design is for a magic item
13:07 mircea_popescu no "dead words" form.
13:07 asciilifeform granted it #includes <heads.h>
13:07 mircea_popescu quite very live words.
13:07 asciilifeform and sometimes <trees.h>
13:07 asciilifeform etc
13:08 mircea_popescu soon enough you're going to re-discover post-structuralism at this rate, and end up understanding what i meant by context above.
13:08 asciilifeform neh i get it
13:08 mircea_popescu *thumbsup*
13:08 asciilifeform but this is still quite apart from 'my anal telepathy muscles are ineffable and stfu finance made progress'
13:08 mircea_popescu yeah, apart because of how familiar you are with either.
13:08 mircea_popescu this speaks not of it.
13:09 asciilifeform waiwut
13:11 mircea_popescu how familiar you are with making axes vs making aerogels does not establish if making axes or making aerogels is "magic", it just establishes how familiar you are with them.
13:11 asciilifeform noshit.jpg
13:11 asciilifeform but i dare say i have a handle on 'technology' vs 'magic'
13:11 mircea_popescu sure, like aquinas' beauty.
13:12 asciilifeform can be taught - technology. 'must be aryan, and live on mt. parnassus' - magic.
13:12 asciilifeform and recall how it is my profession to cut things ?
13:12 asciilifeform specifically to cut off the parnassus.
13:12 asciilifeform because they are annoying.
13:12 mircea_popescu lmao.
13:12 mircea_popescu you know what the literary model for this is ?
13:12 asciilifeform hm?
13:13 mircea_popescu the grinch.
13:13 asciilifeform possibly.
13:13 mircea_popescu nttawwt.
13:13 asciilifeform relatedly:
13:14 asciilifeform 'In the one-page Errata in the December 1979 issue, I explained that the turkey in the oven is a plastic "channel filler" which captures x-ray energy and explodes with enormous force, purely as the result of getting very hot very fast (ten million degrees in half a microsecond). In the original H-bomb article, I had described the conditions inside the radiation channel in terms of "a gas of photons." For my revised explanation in the
13:14 asciilifeform Errata, which I dubbed "exploding styrofoam," the corresponding phrase would be "a gas of electrons." The implosion of the secondary is driven by matter pressure, not radiation pressure. Incidentally, Dow Chemical complained that Styrofoam is a trademark, like Xerox, and that nuclear weapons do not contain Styrofoam. Point conceded; the foam is generic. ... I like the idea of a nuisance material, plastic foam, as the real secret of
13:14 asciilifeform the H-bomb. It symbolizes the banality of evil which is the essence of the whole H-bomb business. Workaday people doing workaday jobs building doomsday machines based on 1950's technology, while civilization marches bravely into the new millennium, oblivious to the death sentence imposed by a secret technology involving plastic foam. It calls to mind the most famous line from The Graduate, "One word: plastics."'
13:14 asciilifeform ( http://www.fas.org/sgp/eprint/morland.html )
13:14 mircea_popescu meh.
13:15 mircea_popescu anyway, sounds like some sort of boron carbide.
13:15 mircea_popescu not in any sense plastic.
13:15 mircea_popescu and since it's gas-based, prolly heated by means of the gas being a neutron poison. xenon.
13:15 asciilifeform same mornald as in intro of my old article ( http://www.loper-os.org/?p=1323 ) incidentally.
13:15 asciilifeform *morland
13:16 mircea_popescu i wonder if the logs will end up classified now also.
13:16 asciilifeform Officially !111111
13:16 asciilifeform i shit thee not, this is the actual law in usa since '50s
13:17 mircea_popescu heh.
13:17 * mircea_popescu looks through his periodic table, that great tool of war.
13:18 asciilifeform which is why anyone with usg 'ts' reading the logz is technically in a state of sin, and subject to disrobing, unless specifically blessed by u.s. DOE 'q clearance' pope.
13:18 mircea_popescu yeah, boron not aluminum.
13:19 asciilifeform (phun phakt, there are 2 wholly separate pyramids of 'clearance' in usa; DOE (atomic) and DOD (pentagon)
13:19 asciilifeform )
13:19 asciilifeform non-transferrable!111111
13:20 mircea_popescu there, the official free world reconstruction of "fogbank" : B4C foam with a xe-135 filling.
13:20 mircea_popescu do the calcs on it beging anywhere close to a critical core if bored one day. "electron gas" exactly.
13:20 asciilifeform aha.
13:20 mircea_popescu "plastic" my fucking left foot.
13:20 asciilifeform at any rate ru folks were never hung up on no stinkin' foamz.
13:21 mircea_popescu yeah, they used sheepskins.
13:21 asciilifeform among sane folk it is small piece of the cost.
13:30 mircea_popescu in that drawing, "modern security features added to render useless in the wrong hands" prolly means 1kb rsa with exponent 35, amirite
13:30 asciilifeform we had the thread!
13:30 asciilifeform $s permissive action link
13:30 mircea_popescu aok
13:30 asciilifeform ah damn
13:31 asciilifeform anyway it was the thing where the detonator timings are derived from passphrase that gets piped in through jack on the bomb chassis
13:31 mircea_popescu the notion that you can make a) a physical object that b) does something and yet c) is safe in hands of adversary is so fucking lulzy.
13:31 asciilifeform essentially symmetrically-ciphered firmware
13:31 asciilifeform but famous largely for how most american nukez ~lacked it~
13:31 mircea_popescu asciilifeform problem is i take off that chip and fuzz it.
13:32 asciilifeform mircea_popescu: fuzz what? it will happily pop, but with wrong timings
13:32 asciilifeform --> fizzl
13:32 asciilifeform e
13:32 mircea_popescu it's a black box circuit, i measure all its outputs for known inputs.
13:32 asciilifeform but idea being, you don't know the desired outputs.
13:33 mircea_popescu right.
13:33 asciilifeform because they are part of the valuable mojo that went into crafting the thing
13:33 mircea_popescu the other idea being that their chip is shit.
13:33 asciilifeform and aren't actually present in the stolen box.
13:33 mircea_popescu and i'll recover them through any of the numerous cryptanalysis tricks available.
13:33 asciilifeform again, they ~aren't in there~
13:33 mircea_popescu who aren't ?
13:33 asciilifeform the params
13:34 mircea_popescu aren't in where ?
13:34 asciilifeform the bomb.
13:34 mircea_popescu sure. so ?
13:35 asciilifeform iirc the way it worked was that the actual timing constants needed for yield Y, e.g., 'pop squib s1, then after t1 ns, squib s2... then after tN, run neutron gen tube for tN' ns, ...'
13:35 asciilifeform weren't in the box
13:35 asciilifeform you had to key'em in.
13:35 asciilifeform before dropping the bomb.
13:35 mircea_popescu sure. so you have a chip, that takes say 4 inputs, and generates say 3 outputs.
13:35 mircea_popescu i put this chip on a breadboard, and feed all possible input combinations to it, note down all that comes out.
13:36 asciilifeform and ...?
13:36 deedbot [Qntra] Bayer Bidding For Monsanto - http://qntra.net/2016/05/bayer-bidding-for-monsanto/
13:37 asciilifeform idea is that to get the desired answers, you have to properly reverse-engineer, and grasp, the bomb geometry.
13:37 asciilifeform which is a good chunk of the work of building the thing to begin with.
13:37 mircea_popescu and then have a physics team to sort outputs in order of likelihood and a cs team to rebuild the chip from scratch.
13:37 asciilifeform originally there wasn't even a chip, just analogue knobs.
13:37 asciilifeform it wasn't a security-by-obscurity thing
13:37 mircea_popescu right, and im well persuaded the current item is just a glorified enigma machine
13:38 mircea_popescu ie, decent physicist takes one look at list of possible outputs and picks the right one.
13:38 asciilifeform 'decent physicist' who took the entire thing apart, measured the actual geometries of everything, incl. thickness of gold plating on the pu pit, etc
13:38 asciilifeform massive headache
13:38 asciilifeform and if you can do this, you probably already own nuke
13:39 mircea_popescu well if i can steal one, also.
13:39 mircea_popescu tey said "wrong hands", they didn't fucking say "reddit's hands"
13:39 asciilifeform whole thing was intended as ~anti-theft~ measure, against 'indian who found the rifle on dead english'
13:39 mircea_popescu i guess the ustards imagines itself in the glorified position where all non-orcs are friendly.
13:39 mircea_popescu come to think of it, tyhe usg aspires to be tmsr in more ways than one, huh.
13:40 asciilifeform this is the explicit doctrine of 'anti-proliferation' from the get-go
13:40 asciilifeform ever since they made peace with the su bomb
13:40 mircea_popescu heh.
13:41 asciilifeform incidentally, iirc the 'enter constants before launch' thing was originally 'dial-a-yield'
13:41 asciilifeform rather than security measure
13:41 asciilifeform it was so that 'hey i have a tank column here and berlin is 50km away, i need moar neutrons and less thermal'
13:42 mircea_popescu come to think of it, the idea of using acetonitrile is very bizarre. much better polar solvents exist ; unless the remarkably high dielectric constant of the substance is useful.
13:42 mircea_popescu i guess it must be.
13:42 asciilifeform likely it was used simply in manufacture
13:42 asciilifeform rather than in shipped product
13:42 mircea_popescu yes. but why use this headache when much better solvents available
13:42 mircea_popescu unless, again, the dielectric is a major part of what "better" means.
13:42 asciilifeform (aggressive solvent, a place where i used to wurk had massive tanks hooked to dna synthesizer, to clean the pipez)
13:43 BingoBoingo Or better solvent ruins it.
13:43 mircea_popescu BingoBoingo can always dilute.
13:43 BingoBoingo What if dilution agents ruin it?
13:43 mircea_popescu i guess.
13:43 asciilifeform you prolly need the polar aprotic aspect
13:43 asciilifeform for the foam-making
13:43 BingoBoingo Or need that solvent to get the exact right contaminants fixed?
13:45 mircea_popescu acetone just as aprotic. or thf.
13:46 asciilifeform PeterL still around ?
13:46 mircea_popescu note how they stand : thf, massively used, because relatively safe - million tons produced a year or such. yet, dielectric < 10
13:46 asciilifeform perhaps he knew why.
13:46 mircea_popescu acetone, barely 20, also rather volatile if not as toxic.
13:47 mircea_popescu of course, dmso would be even dielectrical-er, but hm.
13:47 mircea_popescu o look at that... twice the boiling point. aww!
13:47 mircea_popescu so the boron carbide with xenon filling aerogel production process involves electromagnetics and evaporation. SCIENCE!
13:49 asciilifeform whatever it was, the re-discoverers billed 200+m usd.
13:51 mircea_popescu or maybe dmso was really too toxic (that thing is a riot) and thf acvtually dissolves borones and so ...
13:51 mircea_popescu anyway.
13:51 asciilifeform or they couldn't find monkeys willing to dmso
13:51 asciilifeform (see l0gz re asciilifeform and dmso!)
13:51 mircea_popescu lol
13:51 mircea_popescu does it really taste like garlic ?
13:51 asciilifeform where is the moterfuckign $s
13:52 asciilifeform mircea_popescu: 'taste'
13:52 asciilifeform go try yourself.
13:52 mircea_popescu whtwere you doing with it again, spectrometry ?
13:52 mircea_popescu lol ty, i'll pass.
13:52 asciilifeform we were doing 'high throughput screening' of compounds from massive library of random crud
13:52 asciilifeform (in vitro)
13:53 asciilifeform there was robot, which i was reversing and writing soft for, but meanwhile actual work was done by gurlz
13:54 asciilifeform in porous gloves.
13:54 mircea_popescu o,o
13:54 asciilifeform aha, story is in the l0gz
13:55 asciilifeform >> http://btcbase.org/log/2013-11-13#378362 <<
13:55 a111 Logged on 2013-11-13 14:20 asciilifeform: we had a beautifully-educational incident with DMSO
13:56 mircea_popescu ah!
13:57 mircea_popescu dude the noise in the logs d'antan
~ 54 minutes ~
14:51 asciilifeform in other nyooz, re 'ic fab in kitchen',
14:51 asciilifeform http://monster6502.com/?ct=t(2016_WDC_Digital_65xx_Voice_Newsletter_2016)
14:51 asciilifeform 'disintegrated circuit'
14:53 asciilifeform 3218 transistors...
~ 20 minutes ~
15:13 asciilifeform in otherlulz,
15:13 asciilifeform http://seclists.org/oss-sec/2016/q2/371
15:13 asciilifeform 'I find it very disturbing that there seems to be very little response from popular OS distributions to this issue. Most do not appear to have issued any package updates to close the shell exploit. Perhaps the opinion is that major new versions will be introduced as part of major distribution releases and it is ok for users to exposed to problems for two or three years.'
15:19 mircea_popescu heh.
15:19 mircea_popescu laaarge train of "unblessed" vulns etc.
15:21 mircea_popescu the sad truth underneath this all is, that the "computer [security] industry" has slowly became dependent on usg-sponsored burnings to the degree that unless weimer and co actually write all the stuff and put it out, they can't do it on their own, in any sort of timeframe.
15:22 mircea_popescu there's now and again cases when actual forces hostile to usg do the whole thing, but when genuine independent research occurs... well. this.
15:29 asciilifeform tends to get phuctored.
15:39 asciilifeform in other slightly time-delayed lulz,
15:39 asciilifeform http://www.vox.com/2016/4/18/11434098/alt-right-explained
15:40 asciilifeform ^ mr mold gets the hanno boeck treatment
15:50 mircea_popescu aww.
15:51 mircea_popescu why do all these people put so much effort into creating some sort of label/brand/title for themselves anyway
15:51 mircea_popescu dude wtf am i reading.
15:53 mircea_popescu he read unspecified "central texts" and references some william buckley. who the fuck is william buckley ? turns out, a tv show host.
15:54 mircea_popescu $up PeterL
15:54 deedbot PeterL voiced for 30 minutes.
15:54 asciilifeform buckley was iirc the closest thing to organized sanity in his period/usa.
15:55 asciilifeform or hm nm
15:55 asciilifeform that was j birch
15:55 mircea_popescu look. a tv host can not be anything.
15:55 asciilifeform $up PeterL
15:55 deedbot PeterL voiced for 30 minutes.
15:55 PeterL http://btcbase.org/log/2016-05-19#1468999 << not sure why you think acetonitrile is bizarre, I use it lots
15:55 a111 Logged on 2016-05-19 17:42 mircea_popescu: come to think of it, the idea of using acetonitrile is very bizarre. much better polar solvents exist ; unless the remarkably high dielectric constant of the substance is useful.
15:55 asciilifeform mircea_popescu: aha, i mixed him up with birch
15:55 mircea_popescu PeterL they use lots of it, and constantly bitch about how expensive it is to handle.
15:56 asciilifeform it is expensive because osha
15:56 asciilifeform not because expensive.
15:56 mircea_popescu whatever be the case. PeterL presumably has a very legitimate need for it, being in the business of organics. these schmucks making advanced clays however... not so much.
15:56 mircea_popescu either that or i don' tunderstand something.
15:56 PeterL and solubility is not exactly linear with polarity
15:57 mircea_popescu this is true
15:57 PeterL depends on other factors as well
16:00 PeterL http://btcbase.org/log/2016-05-17#1467867 << yes, nursing mothers commonly leak milk. There are adsorbent pads you can put under her bra to adsorb it.
16:00 a111 Logged on 2016-05-17 21:54 asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2016-05-14#1466468 << important question that perhaps only mircea_popescu could answer: is there a 'background lactation' ?
16:00 asciilifeform PeterL: discussion was about NON-NURSING women
16:00 asciilifeform and whether ~these~ leak milk.
16:01 asciilifeform thing is a variation on sweat gland, after all.
16:01 PeterL my sister-in-law started leaking after spending a day at the maternity ward when my daughter was born, she had weaned her kid about a year before that
16:02 mircea_popescu this is pretty well known, sure. actually screaming on a reasonable frequency will get recent mommies all lactating in a social setting.
16:03 asciilifeform mircea_popescu: 'vox' article linked because it is a handy illustration of how usg 't-cells' attack whatever foreign object. mr mold is getting same treatment, for nth year in a row now, as phuctor for past yr. i.e. sprayed in coating of 'pre-discredited, move along' claptrap
16:09 hanbot <BingoBoingo> ^ Qntra Farm Report is back! Eat Moar Monsanto! << is there anti-monsanto graffiti in the us, btw? common theme here. also, "go home obama", from a few months ago.
16:09 BingoBoingo Not yet.
16:09 asciilifeform i will point out that we have 'go home obama' here.
16:09 asciilifeform or at least, had.
16:13 asciilifeform at any rate, with people being idiots, i fully expect 'bring back $1 burgerz, motherfuckers' graffiti after monsanto dies
16:13 asciilifeform and it will be done, by using moar ground up rat meat
16:13 asciilifeform pr0gr3555555.
16:14 BingoBoingo Nah, Bayer pretty much has to buy Monsanto
16:14 asciilifeform has to why ?
16:14 BingoBoingo For the branding
16:14 asciilifeform obummer will push button in his desk and angela merckel's shock collar will go off ?
16:14 asciilifeform if they don't
16:14 BingoBoingo Pretty much
16:15 * hanbot had to double-take whether there was "unilever" printed over a local "pizzalomo" ad on a building the other day
16:16 hanbot it wasn't, but prolly coming.
16:18 asciilifeform iirc mircea_popescu explained that ar is surrendering to usg
16:18 phf trinque: what kind api?
~ 45 minutes ~
17:04 mircea_popescu surrendering ? nah, ar is the future of usg.
17:04 trinque phf: to implement a $s
17:05 trinque just whatever's passed to the search page as data
17:06 trinque sexps are fine
17:07 mircea_popescu asciilifeform i dun see how he needs any further spray for any purpose, the substance's self-discrediting enough.
17:07 mircea_popescu i suppose we don't agree on that score.
17:12 trinque anybody built sbcl on musl?
17:12 * trinque senses he will need his shitwaders for this
17:18 shinohai Went fishing with mircea_popescu , cayght a beauty: http://btcinfo.sdf.org/uploads/TRITON.jpg
17:28 BingoBoingo Congrats shinohai
17:29 shinohai >.>
17:30 shinohai testing a file upload script since I'm ditching imgur for good.
17:30 BingoBoingo Y not move to slimgr?
17:31 shinohai I tried earlier today, was 404 for me :/
17:32 mircea_popescu ouch
17:33 shinohai "Whose a pain in the ass now bitch?"
~ 1 hours 34 minutes ~
19:07 mircea_popescu ;;later tell copypaste btw the party's here --> #trilema
19:07 gribble The operation succeeded.
~ 1 hours 6 minutes ~
20:14 shinohai https://medium.com/the-coinbase-blog/what-happened-at-the-satoshi-roundtable-6c11a10d8cdf#.o9at5lmmf <<< ok guise classic failed so we're gonna try to scrounge up another set of devs "in the next month or two"
20:14 asciilifeform these won't run out any time soon
20:14 asciilifeform mit is wide.
20:15 asciilifeform 'And if no perfect solution exists they seem ok with inaction, even if that puts bitcoin at risk.' << gold.
20:15 asciilifeform 'Even though core says they are ok with a hard fork to 2MB (they have it on their own roadmap, just very far in the future), they refuse to prioritize it. They prefer to withhold something that could help the network now...' << these folks never give up
20:17 asciilifeform [various derpage re july halving] << can somebody explain why this halving is supposed to be a mega-apocalypse vs the LAST HALVING ??
20:17 shinohai Because Brian Armstrong is an autistic retard.
20:23 mircea_popescu herp.
20:23 mircea_popescu asciilifeform many little things, all coincidental.
20:24 asciilifeform in mircea_popescu's picture, is it simply that the termites have gnawed long enough at the support columns ?
20:24 mircea_popescu basically, tmsr has been extremely effectual at murdering usg assets and crippling usg influence in bitcoin, this doth not sit well with them ;
20:25 mircea_popescu they had plans, none of which worked, their cost basis keeps exploding, which is not nice,
20:25 mircea_popescu the chinese are in a similar position mutatis mutandis etc.
20:25 mircea_popescu asciilifeform not so much that, moreover simple desperation.
20:26 mircea_popescu recall, the usg & friends, as well as any and all other wanna-be, pretended or otherwise power centers have been regularly humiliated.
20:27 mircea_popescu the options keep narrowing until it's either rage or quit. because obviously the correct and naturally-imposed solution of submit and humbly suck mp's cock is for some incomprehensible reason not on their plate.
20:27 mircea_popescu so the logical expectation is that they'll rage before they quit.
20:27 asciilifeform i did pr3d1ct!111111
20:28 mircea_popescu i guess so.
20:28 asciilifeform unheard-of marvels will be seen, e.g., minerz paid in megatonnes of fresh printolade, thread, & broken glass, not to mine
20:28 asciilifeform possibly the intel cluster will be brought up;
20:28 asciilifeform and other tiltatrons
20:28 mircea_popescu eh, that's not ready.
20:29 asciilifeform (7y is a plenty long time to set up nsa mine, neh ?)
20:29 mircea_popescu they started late, and suck at everything.
20:29 shinohai Coinbase is rebranding their exchange as well -added ETH like all the other hippies lately.
20:29 mircea_popescu shinohai eth is the backup plan, turns out. lulzy shit.
20:29 asciilifeform uncooperative cn minerz will have 'accidental' fires, etc.
20:29 mircea_popescu anyway, asciilifeform, morale at the ant farm is exceptionally low.
20:30 shinohai I'd ask BA for a quote for Qntra, but he blocked me on twatter
20:30 asciilifeform mircea_popescu: the ants perhaps desire a stalingrad.
20:30 mircea_popescu they had gavin and all it took was a trilema post to turn him from st peter to a sort of dan quayle. it's not the sort of thing the grunts like to face.
20:30 asciilifeform 'last conclusive push!1111'
20:31 mircea_popescu too used with the "we control the vertical, and the horizontal" usual fare.
20:34 asciilifeform i can picture black 'sectera' phone ringing on hitler's desk, 'ft meade, we need moar time, secp256k1 is still standing' 'lose the other division, or LOSE YERSELF!1211111'
20:35 asciilifeform 'nein nein nein nein nein!111'
20:45 asciilifeform http://btcbase.org/log/2016-05-20#1469135 << explain this. i dun see how the cost of generating additional gavins is any higher now than in 2012
20:45 a111 Logged on 2016-05-20 00:25 mircea_popescu: they had plans, none of which worked, their cost basis keeps exploding, which is not nice,
20:47 asciilifeform reddit vermin are an ~inexhaustible resource
20:52 asciilifeform and i don't see this 'quit and submit' thing ever being a thing
20:52 asciilifeform it is like expecting hitler to surrender
20:52 asciilifeform he knows that the noose is waiting
20:52 asciilifeform so it will be 1945 all over again, offers of 'separate peace' from himmlers, bormanns, etc. left and right
20:53 asciilifeform none of them adding up to ~anything
20:54 asciilifeform (and who in his right mind would strike any kind of agreement with a gavin or a preet!)
20:54 shinohai Preeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet!
20:54 asciilifeform wants a craaaaaaaaacker
21:02 mod6 haha
21:02 mod6 think i should get off her first
21:02 mod6 think she wants some water
21:02 mod6 to put out the blow torch
21:02 mircea_popescu asciilifeform how the fuck are you going to generate "Aditional gavins" roflmao.
21:02 mircea_popescu had one, "fired", fizzled.
21:03 mircea_popescu ironically i fucking warned the idiots when they fired the hearn toothpick. but, too dumb to figure it out.
21:03 asciilifeform sooo they annoint another
21:03 mircea_popescu how ?
21:03 asciilifeform say, whatever dipshit wrote the earlier linked thing
21:03 mircea_popescu that guy was there then.
21:03 mircea_popescu they TRIED to anoint one, to great lulz. dr whateverthefuck.
21:04 asciilifeform so they take buterin. when he's spent, whoever the next one is.
21:04 mircea_popescu eh get out. not how this works.
21:04 asciilifeform they'll go up the cost ladder
21:04 asciilifeform pay, e.g., dan boneh, perhaps, to convincingly play a satoshi
21:04 mircea_popescu yaya.
21:05 asciilifeform literate folx are every bit as whore as the imbeciles, merely cost moar
21:05 mircea_popescu look, you're theoretically arguing about things in such a vague distant approach it's not worth the skinning.
21:05 asciilifeform hey it isn't as if i worked in hitler's bunker, my approach is necessarily indirect
21:05 asciilifeform but imho it is possible to say something useful re what will be tried.
21:06 mircea_popescu and if not necessarily useful, in any case entertaining.
21:06 asciilifeform aha!
21:06 asciilifeform i'd be curious, though, to meet a usg fauxtoshi who is willing to endure 5 minutes of my questions re trb src.
21:06 asciilifeform in public.
21:06 mircea_popescu heh.
21:07 mircea_popescu coming right next after the official usg libertard ideologue steps in here to prove to me how wrong i am about things and matters.
21:08 asciilifeform i've wondered often who precisely they paid, and how much, to set up even a basic 'first 6mo of trb'-level framework for them of understanding how the shitsoup even worx
21:10 mircea_popescu you want the job ? :D
21:11 asciilifeform well i already did the job. right here, for phreeeeee.... it isn't as if hitler doesn't read the l0gz
21:16 asciilifeform but, hilariously,
21:17 asciilifeform $rupturefarms was one of the places where usg bought 'algorithmic vulns'
21:17 asciilifeform for all i know, the folks in the next room were doing bitcoin.
21:17 asciilifeform (though chances are - not; it was not quite so classy)
~ 53 minutes ~
22:11 mircea_popescu it's gonna be funny as we age, and all sorts of infantile derps are the #78589 satoshi
~ 29 minutes ~
22:40 mircea_popescu https://ransomwaretracker.abuse.ch/ << apparently this emergent social behaviour is so big it warrants fansites and whatnot
~ 15 minutes ~
22:56 mircea_popescu $google the war on the web
22:56 * deedbot hands you a broomstick.
22:58 mircea_popescu https://www.sott.net/article/318360-Russia-holding-the-line-to-prevent-total-global-war << re the missile shield thing
23:00 mircea_popescu truth be told, the scenario is rather plausible. the us has nowhere to turn.
23:00 asciilifeform http://btcbase.org/log/2016-05-20#1469206 >>> related >>> http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/teslacrypt-shuts-down-and-releases-master-decryption-key
23:00 a111 Logged on 2016-05-20 02:40 mircea_popescu: https://ransomwaretracker.abuse.ch/ << apparently this emergent social behaviour is so big it warrants fansites and whatnot
23:00 mircea_popescu easier to explain to the peons why they can't have chocolate this week if there's an "all out total war" going
23:01 mircea_popescu asciilifeform aha
23:03 * mircea_popescu is kinda amused at all the "oh noes, nuclear war destroys planet as we know it". go for it boys, really.
23:06 asciilifeform mircea_popescu: sop since '49
23:08 mircea_popescu asciilifeform i vaguely suspect delivery actually worked better in 49 than it does today.
23:08 asciilifeform the subs work.
23:09 mircea_popescu i'd be surprised if they can usefully launch anything by this point.
23:09 asciilifeform i can't speak for usa, but ru regularly test-fires.
23:10 asciilifeform (and even have commercial spinoff for low orbit commercial payload on same)
23:10 mircea_popescu yaya. the mechanics of the thing are against them. you have a very visible (really, in the right spectrum it blots out the sun), slow moving large object. doing what.
23:11 asciilifeform launching from 200m under water ?
23:11 asciilifeform what sun.
23:11 mircea_popescu what, this is a submarine icbm ? travels underwater ?
23:12 asciilifeform vertically.
23:12 mircea_popescu aha. and once it's in air you can see it.
23:12 asciilifeform you have 2 min. to shoot.
23:13 asciilifeform hence the usg obsession with chemical lasers, etc.
23:13 mircea_popescu actually... it takes about half hour to cover its range.
23:13 asciilifeform depends from where.
23:14 mircea_popescu "to cover its range" is not origin dependent.
23:14 asciilifeform but unless you are shooting from ronny raygun's orbiting deathray, you have 2min.
23:14 mircea_popescu if memory serves, it goes for 10k kms at a top speed of maybe 20k km/h
23:16 mircea_popescu and whole shebang is made of fucking epoxy, if you can imagine that. all the structural integrity and shielding of chewing gum.
23:16 asciilifeform american.
23:16 asciilifeform ru - titanium.
23:16 asciilifeform but it is not designed to be shot, no.
23:17 mircea_popescu point remains, the item is in the air for half an hour, during which it is a larger source than anything in the sky in about a third of the spectrum. it weighs a hundred fucking tons, and is about as maneuvrable as a dead whale.
23:17 mircea_popescu how hard do you think it is to put a missile in its path ?
23:17 asciilifeform hard enough that bush's idiots couldn't do it unless the thing beaconed.
23:18 mircea_popescu i'm not particularly interested in defending the us from imaginary attacks
23:18 mircea_popescu it's quite certain who the rogue state is today.
23:18 mircea_popescu and for that matter - a nuke IS a fucking beacon. thermally even!
23:18 asciilifeform when pops
23:18 asciilifeform prior - only neutron.
23:19 mircea_popescu nah. it moves fast in air, large profile, it heats significantly.
23:19 mircea_popescu has none of the mitigation of "invisible" aircraft
23:19 asciilifeform in that sense yeah
23:19 asciilifeform but dummy barrel has same thermals as genuine nuke.
23:19 asciilifeform and costs 100x less.
23:20 mircea_popescu yeah, well, that's where the pain starts : it'd be a wonder if the whole nato fleet can launch a coupla dozen simultaneous.
23:20 asciilifeform at one point it was sop to use separating bus in the cone but supposedly now 'banned under treaty'
23:20 asciilifeform (i fuhget which)
23:21 mircea_popescu anyway. this whole thing... children threatening with holding their breath.
23:23 mircea_popescu fun factoid : the (only!) uk sub actually has a... mile long aerial in tow.
23:23 mircea_popescu visible from fucking sat.
23:26 asciilifeform uk is a joke, as described in l0gz
23:26 asciilifeform (in the uk-sub-leak thing)
23:27 mircea_popescu the us is moving towards it, not away.
23:29 mircea_popescu it's worth a lulz tho. they have to catch bbc or else it may be the case they should fire.
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