#trilema | 2018-08-21

mornin'

10:43

good morning mod6, how goes?

10:44

in and out!

10:47

:D

10:47

I did watch that video, Mocky.

10:48

what did you think?

10:49

It was a pretty informative overview of the design of STL. Guy was pretty good, had some funny points. The government regulation part made me recoil a bit.

10:50

It wasn't a waste of an hour and a half.

10:51

lol i thought stl was product of some ro d00d , rather than usg committee ?

10:52

this guy is the him, ru dude

10:52

everyone's fucked in the head with the whole kanzure nonsense.

10:52

mircea_popescu: lure of miami?

10:52

not even that, more like "oh, the lords of the empire spake to us! all kneel!!!"

10:53

asciilifeform: he mentioned at some point later in the video that software had gotten to such a horrible point (totally correct on that; this is in 2002), that the goverment should step in and regulate all of these things.

10:53

( then q would be, which miami is kanzure et al lured by. i propose 'upper miami', analogous to chukcha's 'upper tundra', i.e. valhalla )

10:53

how the fuck they manage to take the submission they're due the lords of the republic and plaster it on the zinnobers of inca... well... it's explained in http://trilema.com/2014/the-death-of-taxes/#selection-185.965-185.1138

10:53

mod6: lol!!

10:54

(i expect everyone's familiar with the tale of Klein Zaches genannt Zinnober ?)

10:55

stepanov strikes me as guy trying to do the right thing for a library to be used by millions of programs, while also being resigned to the shityness of c++ and of average developer

10:55

haven't heard of klein tale

10:55

that later point being important.

10:55

Mocky: the 'helpers of average developer' are the central devils of the software hell.

10:55

the shittiness of the "average human" is a large driver of shit, in those who deign to consider it.

10:56

without them, the necessary, cleansing complexity collapse would have happened in 1990 when it was supposed to.

10:56

Mocky https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9200

10:57

german's greek to me

10:58

https://archive.is/TBjqJ << for the english folx

11:00

*

mircea_popescu never heard of haldane fellow, but check him out, website and everything

11:00

http://www.michaelhaldane.com/kleinzaches.htm << shall link it.

11:00

i agree re average developer. stepanov says i video that 1% should write library and 99% should just use. but that's bs. if 99% don't know algos or time complexity, then shouldn't be trusted with anything

11:09

Mocky: i.e. deskilling. see also e.g. http://btcbase.org/log/2018-06-27#1830482 .

11:09

Logged on 2018-06-27 23:41 asciilifeform: generally -- the industrialist saw the artisan as a headache, and killed him. nao we get to 'enjoy' the fruits of de-artisan'ed industry.

11:09

Mocky there's this naive 1990s humanism whereby "the average mankind" will "make an encyclopedia" and "usher in a renaissance" etc. there's this hallucinatory notion of a certain kind of hipster utopian mind, whereby "people need tools for their private projects".

11:10

that nobody has any such thing is simply not a bit of banal obviousness these overexcited morons ever stopped to consider.

11:10

yes, if out of 300mn cattle in the 50 contiguous states 287mn or so "hacked" shit together on their crapples then "99% just use".

11:12

in reality, 298mn just wanna click on catpics, http://trilema.com/2012/the-imbecilitarians/#selection-317.0-317.109 style, while daydreaming a little daydream. that's all. so yeah, 99% should just stfu.

11:12

the rest can rtfm

11:17

"cockchafer" heh

11:17

hm ?

11:19

from the story: https://archive.is/TBjqJ#selection-601.140-601.150

11:20

ah ah. they're these beetles, featured in http://btcbase.org/log/2017-09-02#1710209

11:20

Logged on 2017-09-02 21:35 asciilifeform: they luvvv their blackbody

11:21

the deskilling goes hand in hand with proliferation of library-ism and github-ism. library in reality is the natural outcome of experienced practitioner isolating code that has no business freely mixing with other code. for use primarily by same person. but today the 99% see library as opaque boxes meant to pile up and put a little shit pile of new code on top

11:24

Mocky: in the era before down's syndrome sufferers were set to programming computer , 'library' was simply book of useful recipes, to be studied and ~understood~ and put to use with care -- e.g. 'numerical recipes in fortran' , knuth's aop, etc

11:26

mix code was considered library? lol

11:26

Mocky used to be called "script kiddies", the sort that "1. found this snippet online ; 2. tried it ; 3. decided it works"

11:26

Mocky: reader was expected to... read.

11:27

and speaking of fortran, deskilling also goes hand in hand with the john backus vision of "algebra of programs" snap together lego coding

11:27

Mocky he has a point, "library" is oreilly-ism. before the free/open source struggle for power, it was rather a teaching tool.

11:27

not 'cut-and-paste'

11:27

the expectation was you understand the algorithms and reimplement them, much the way V is designed to work.

11:27

not that you ~call~ them directly from the book

11:27

i agree 'book of useful recipes' useful to and created by practitioners

11:27

which is why the current "library" model has inherited the problem of interfacing : they're literally trying to call code from a book and it has problems

11:29

back when someone last thought about this, "calling paradigm" wasn't even a problem, because you weren't supposed to fucking call it, you were supposed to READ it.

11:29

difference between shared library and personal library

11:29

but "we've all moved on" & "progressed past that" (thanks hilary!) and so now... they've got the problem of prototypes etc.

11:30

In other channels, apparently the skull bird on penis branch made a cumback

11:30

Mocky no, that's a different concern. you familiar with the "people with needles" theory ?

11:30

doesn't sound familiar

11:30

"the fewer people wielding needles they encounter, the more capable they are of living in, and building upon, their soap bubble world"

11:31

you're supposed to share libraries with thinking people so they can point out to you the obvious stupid. this is unrelated to the "you're not supposed to fucking call this as a function, you're supposed to read it as an algorithm, understant it, and implement it yourself"

11:32

the issue of http://btcbase.org/log-search?q=man+alone is very much related to the problem of http://btcbase.org/log-search?q=coffin+liners in that they stem from the same source -- nobody else there to anchor your thought process. you understand what dead reconing is and how it fails ?

11:33

"errors accumulate"

11:33

yeah, I see

11:34

not only 'errors accumulate', but in practice 'man alone' does not long drift, sooner or later drifts into one of the 9000+ intellectual mine fields and that's that, you get a new kanzure or graham or follower thereof etc

11:35

having somebody there who calls you a moron is unpleasant enough ; but not having them and by consequence not having any way to guess just how far off left field you slid... well... that's actually worse.

11:35

sorta like ghost ship eventually meets rocks.

11:36

i like how topics of conversation in #trilema are meta-stable, one can safely discuss whatever it is they were discussing without fear the convo will morph into completely unpredictable somethingelse within a dozen lines.

11:36

must make the work of esthlos that much easier.

11:36

ahahalol

11:37

whether you expose yourself to inteligent feedback is orthogonal to if you make some code into a library, no?

11:38

Mocky: 'library' as conceived of by the redditards is a fundamentally anti-intellectual activity.

11:38

'take this box and pry no further, use as voodoo spellbook'

11:39

Mocky this is the core of the discussion : if it's orthogonal then you're doing it wrong, and also using the wrong symbol. the fucking point of library is exactly exposure to intelligent feedback ; NOT "a substitute way of writing code allowing you to call from books"

11:40

basically, "library" was used historically (up until the http://trilema.com/2017/when-did-america-end/ moment, whenever that was -- thanks hilary!) as "a sort of primitive V tree, genesis and all".

11:41

THEN at said moment it switched into "here kids, i have this magical method to call books into programs now". these two aren't at all the same thing ; moreover, only one is useful to actual people.

11:41

the post-clinton america, intellectually as well as factually, is only useful to orcs&niggers anymore ; and pointedly not any longer useful to people.

11:43

mircea_popescu: even in 19th c , usa was 'land of magical recipes', as is the fate of all culturally-impoverished chukchistans

11:43

i'm making a rhetorical point, it doesn't survive so well minute analysis.

11:44

well ok then help me understand this: i have 'book of useful recipes' composed partial of code that I wrote *with* other intelligent people and partially of things that i just just wrote personally to simplify my own common tasks and found useful over a long period of time. is the latter portion 'man alone' ?

11:44

did anyone else ever read it ?

11:44

the latter portion i mean.

11:45

some is in production and was reviews by team members, others are more toolish and have not

11:45

well then yes.

11:45

tell me, you know who newton was, do you ?

11:45

yes

11:45

who was he ?

11:46

famous publisher of maffs and alchemy

11:46

right, that being the trap. "oh, he was physicist" "how do you know this ?"

11:46

in point of fact, newton was alchemist with strong religious notions WHO ALSO DID some math and published some physics observations. but AS A RESULT and FOR THE PURPOSE of his teological and alchemical studies.

11:47

cue in the magical http://btcbase.org/log/2018-08-16#1841981

11:47

Logged on 2018-08-16 15:41 mircea_popescu: "when you read a text and can distinguish the absurdities it contains from the actual sense, you may claim you have an anachronistic understanding of the matter ; but when you read the text and clearly see the ~necessity~ of the absurdities, their fundamentally-required-ness, and the circumstantialness of the sense, you may claim meaningful understanding of the item" as the witticism goes.

11:47

so then : he, like you, also had "partial of code that I wrote *with* other intelligent people and partially of things that i just just wrote personally to simplify my own common tasks and found useful over a long period of time"

11:48

in point of fact, infinitesimal calculus was exactly this, never published as such but merely used, "by the claw we know the lion" etc. you familiar with all that ?

11:49

not the last point

11:49

there was a problem circulated by the swiss circle of mathematicians, which he elegantly solved (anonymously). except they saw right through the anonymity, because doh, and begged him to select and publish the infinitesimal calculus method, lest someone else steals it.

11:50

very much tmsr problems, smack drab in the middle ages.

11:50

1600s, whatever, "renaissance" amirite. as fucking if, in england. aaanyways.

11:54

!#s pappus

11:54

1 result for "pappus", http://btcbase.org/log-search?q=pappus

11:54

no ?!

11:57

https://gordma.wordpress.com/2014/03/26/we-know-the-lion-by-his-claw/ << not terrible summary, anyway, even if terribly light on the maffs. but hey, "tanquam ex ungue leonem", lit hum etc.

11:57

anyway, the problems were 1. to determine the brachistochrone, and 2. to find a curve such that if any line drawn from a fixed point O cut it in P and Q then OP^n + OQ^n would be constant.

11:58

in '99 I and 2 others wrote a web framework in java for use in our company's products, no such published thing was extant. shortly after someone else published identical item named 'struts', not stolen merely obvious solution. I then watched the published 'struts' turn into ever bigger piles of shit year over year and suffered job interviewers probing my knowledge of 'struts' and i think that quite colored my

11:58

thinking on sharing code

11:59

hey, newton never published FOR REASONS rather than by neglect.

11:59

^

11:59

without a formal AND FORMALIZED republic it's fucking hard for people to handle the orc pressure

11:59

what do you know of the history of oxford ?

11:59

nothing

11:59

for instance, do you know why it has walls, and how they were ever used ?

12:00

fortress. so the people inside can fire cannon upon the peasants outside. because this fucking reason.

12:01

this being yet another aspect of the problems of man alone. absent a fortress where to do it, he's stuck solving some kinds of problems in some kinds of ways only.

12:01

which i suspect may actually be the principal destabilizing factor historically, driving the error generation process.

12:02

(contemporaneously, it's probably more a case of http://btcbase.org/log/2018-08-20#1843230 ie, abundance of "comfort")

12:02

Logged on 2018-08-20 21:06 asciilifeform: for a laugh, look some time for spectrum analyzer on lulazon. will find 9000 'homeopathic' boxes for 'finding the cia mind control rays'.

12:03

comforting fairy tales? to what does that refer?

12:04

mircea_popescu: sorta funny, from entomological pov, how 1 physically actual devil -- the half-century (and continuing) usg fondness for 'great seal'-style microwave bugs, where the power van yes - fries - the occupants of the bugged dwelling, 'cost of doing business' -- spawned entire pantheon of mythical contagions

12:04

the problem in the time of newton was a bunhc of morons wanting to "burn down the sorcery".

12:05

the problem in the time of darwin, however, was a bunch of morons trying to persuade him of their wisdom.

12:05

ie, monarchy got meanwhile overwhelmed by "democracy", so the moron mind was "in charge" so it dispensed largesse instead of trying to attack thought outright.

12:05

precisely how supposedly thinking people ended up writing papers on "global warming" and whatnot. grants amirite ? the COMFORT.

12:06

"why should i make a correct tool when could just use this thing available next day for 9.95 ?"

12:06

ok, yes

12:06

you fgamiliar with how darwin's workload went ?

12:07

20% to research, 80% to phrasing research results "in such a way as to not..."

12:07

the walls -- will be built. whether the king has the sense to hire masons to do it ; or the king is absent and darwin's stuck "holding the walls up with his back", http://trilema.com/2009/inchipuiti-va/ style... the walls will be built.

12:13

ftr, oxford sounds pretty badass

12:16

*

Mocky had pictured some savile row gents taking afternoon tea between lectures

12:18

heh. that's the 1800s gutting.

12:19

the 2000s gutting is in http://trilema.com/2018/wood-impregnated-in-oil-a-metaphor/ ; don't ask about the 1900s gutting, it's too painful to think about

12:19

(not for me as much as for these fine fellows, they still like their middle earth etc)

12:21

aaanyways, "responsible disclosure" or how did it go.

12:31

mircea_popescu: reminiscent of the much later fall of su, fortress walls intact but raped through backdoor and via 5thcolumn

12:32

afaik nobody even rammed at the oxford front wall, at all

12:33

imho strange that the intellectual capital of its time went long on defense against mob with pitchforks and so very short on intellectual 'fortifications'

12:44

indeed not.

~ 37 minutes ~

13:22

deedbot

http://qntra.net/2018/08/measles-burning-across-europe/ << Qntra - Measles Burning Across Europe

13:23

bahahahaha BingoBoingo , recall the 'mumps epidemic' in BingoBoingostan

13:27

lol

13:27

That hit a ton of people

13:29

'vaccine is work of the devil' has the obvious down side, neh.

13:31

Well, a lot of people struck with the mumps here were in their 30s which suggests stretching the vaccine out may be a fairly common thing here

13:35

the problem further compounded by the fact contemporary vaccine IS work of devil.

13:36

"why don't you eat these delicious foods ? they've got meat in them!" "yeah, 80%, the rest is digoxin, who wouldn't eat them!" "you mean you're one of those tinfoil weirdos with the homeopathy ?" "yeah, actually. http://btcbase.org/log/2018-08-20#1843215 " "

13:36

Logged on 2018-08-20 20:59 mircea_popescu: just normal toothpaste.

13:36

http://btcbase.org/log/2018-08-20#1843300 << little known fact: slime's architecture was originally implemented in a similar project for erlang called distel, by the same author luke gorrie. lukego also wrote an emacs clone in erlang and tcp/ip stack in cmucl.

13:36

Logged on 2018-08-20 23:36 asciilifeform: dour swedish 1980s industrial item, with a very brief ameri-renaissance in 2000s

13:37

o hai phf

13:37

*

phf waives

13:37

ahaha

13:38

i'm alive, i had a busy few weeks

13:38

*

mircea_popescu passes on the pregnancy wisecracks.

13:46

phf: i actually liked erlang, and even considered for battlefield, but ended up rejecting for the same reason as standard ml, http://btcbase.org/log/2018-05-19#1815589

13:46

Logged on 2018-05-19 18:36 asciilifeform: the closest runner-up contender was standard ml, but it demands a ~MB-sized runtime , and imposes gc , nobody is ever stuffing it into 32kB.

13:48

i.e. yes it successfully cures pointerism, overflowism, but at the cost of massive ball of ??? runtime, making your proggy effectively unauditable and quite certainly unmicrocontrollerable

13:51

even somehow abstracting over these -- proglang with gc is simply not acceptable in safety-critical/crypto proggy. it is at least in principle possible to write cl without cons; but afaik this is not practical in erlang

~ 15 minutes ~

14:06

asciilifeform, what's the problem with gc in this context?

14:06

Mocky: utterly destroys ability to put hard time and space cost bounds on anything whatsoever

14:07

!#s constant time

14:07

138 results for "constant time", http://btcbase.org/log-search?q=constant%20time

14:09

time i can see. space i don't see. max stack + max heap hard space bound, no?

14:11

Mocky: speaking of ~tight~ bounds, rather than upper/lower

14:11

as in, 'modular multiplication will use EXACTLY 16kB each time, and they will go in this-here range of addrs, which then will zero, and it will take N nanoseconds'

14:12

i see

14:13

a gc can be seen as an example of a data-dependent branch. which are ~not~ acceptable in crypto coad.

14:15

troo determinism means that i can write the exact sequence of instructions that will execute in the routine, and the exact addresses that will be referenced as operands, in the exact order.

14:16

there is no room in that for the possibility of 'maybe right here gc kicks in, and will take variable time depending on what you've been doing for past week'

14:17

gc time and space behaviour is a big fat side channel into pretty much any crypto .

14:18

so then do you have to contend also with e.g. linux process scheduler?

14:19

Mocky: process scheduler is annoying in re timing the instruction count used by a proggy . but doesn't leak anything if your proggy doesn't data-dependently address or branch.

14:19

( i.e. your proggy is cache-insensitive )

14:20

( see, for instance, http://www.loper-os.org/?p=2105 )

14:22

re upstack gotta see how small an erlang vm can really be made. to some extent that work is going to be done with the whole tmsr scripting language direction, where we have different vm's explored on a cutting table.

14:22

phf: aha, conceivably can put it on one of those tiny 'secd' scheme vm's

14:23

phf: unless i'm mistaken, it is pretty tightly married to gc / ability to cons, tho

14:24

i'd be quite happy to use a gc lang if i had iron that provides hard-O(1) cons

14:24

but i have no such thing.

14:25

( before anybody asks -- imho it is physically impossible to get this effect on pc iron, where not only caching but such things as sdram burst r/w exist )

14:26

this is for scripting though, the constraints are presumably not as tight. also gc is a kind of outer bound of a problem, can usually be special cased on a case by case. e.g. in erlang's case you can do region based allocation per process: cons as much as you want, collect everything when process dies.

14:26

for scripting, of the 'death is your gc' variety, and where proggy is not safety-critical ( no crypto , at least not directly ) the above dun apply, sure

14:28

all i particularly care for in re scripting is to obtain a replacement for perl/python/bash where the interpreter is simple (i.e. readable, fits-in-head, auditable, correct)

↖ ↖ ↖

14:28

(apparently erlang does that already. gc is a per-process, everything's collected when the process dies, but a very traditional gc can be enabled or disabled also per process. apparently you can also specify process's heap size on allocation, and do things when that heap fills up)

14:29

well any unix proggy is 'collected when process dies' lol

14:29

dun need any support from the writer

14:29

erlang process

14:29

aa 'green thread'

14:29

cons is malloc for lisp, or is more meant by that?

14:30

Mocky: approx yes

14:31

Mocky: it's an affectation, old time lispers used to refer to any kind of allocation as consing, but in c terms the implication there is malloc + whatever collection facility, not just a fire and forget malloc

14:32

ahh, ok

14:32

consing does a potentially very large amt of behind the scenes work, up to and including a full gc

~ 44 minutes ~

15:17

In other local developments: THe chickens are dying of hunger https://www.elobservador.com.uy/otros-10-mil-pollos-muertos-falta-alimentacion-n1266045

~ 17 minutes ~

15:34

this in .uy?

~ 15 minutes ~

15:49

hey hey hey, lbj

15:50

And mod6 It is indeed

15:51

BingoBoingo: eitherway, terrible news :/

15:52

It's a tale as old as time. Chicken company went bankrupt. Food gets low during a cold snap while the paperwork to get more food is en tramite. Chickens starve

15:53

hate to see that kinda waste

15:56

At least its only a five figure number of chickens. My initial thought was 10x that.

15:56

1000x that

15:56

The whole mil vs milliones deal

16:00

sure.

16:01

there was a huge loss of poultry a few years back: http://qntra.net/2015/05/us-poultry-and-egg-prices-headed-to-the-moon/

16:13

ben_vulpes

i say, this coordinated attack on the republic is underimpressive

~ 1 hours 53 minutes ~

18:06

http://btcbase.org/log/2018-08-21#1843514 << i agree it may make more sense for scripting than systems language.

18:06

Logged on 2018-08-21 18:26 phf: this is for scripting though, the constraints are presumably not as tight. also gc is a kind of outer bound of a problem, can usually be special cased on a case by case. e.g. in erlang's case you can do region based allocation per process: cons as much as you want, collect everything when process dies.

18:08

http://btcbase.org/log/2018-08-21#1843539 << wait, the chickens ?!

18:08

Logged on 2018-08-21 20:13 ben_vulpes: i say, this coordinated attack on the republic is underimpressive

18:17