Epoch, The Self-Appointed "Worldwide Leader in Payment Processing", aka A Bunch of Dangerous Amateurs

Generally I send a few dollars to the authors of any game I ever like, even if I only like it a little bit.

That "generally" would be always, as far as I'm concerned. It's not always because well, few game developers have as of yet heard of Bitcoin. In fact it'd appear few game developers have heard the 90s ended already, it would seen. I see no other explanation for monstrosities like Epoch still existing.

Get a load of this :

Yeah, that's right : email addresses and passwords passed back and forth as GET calls. Well done Epoch, you're so totally the World Leader in Braindamage I couldn't begin to tell you.

Forget encryption, they couldn't even be bothered to make it a fucking POST. And now someone should give their CVV2 to these muppets ?

Sad.

« Why progress is a self limiting disease

Random weird shit »

Category: Meta psihoza

Thursday, 17 July, Year 6 d.Tr.

Do you work from your home in some tropical paradise ? Here's a breakfast idea.

I should say I prefer my salmon quite raw, or as one'd say in Romanian, crud.

« Pushing the soft tender flesh of a friend against the sharp rotating blades of the immutable machine.

Sometimes I miss Romania. »

Category: Zsilnic

Wednesday, 20 August, Year 6 d.Tr.

Discorsi da letto

Me: This is blanket gluttony!

Her: There is no such thing. Gluttony is not on the list.

Me: Of course it is. Like fornication.

Her: Fornication is not on the list either.

Me: Lust, whatever.

Her: Oh... blanket lust. How great blankets are... Oooohhh... Hey! Why's there a dark spot on the ceiling ?

Me: A what ?

Her: Over there, like a blur. Above the TV. O no, has the TV been struck down by God for being blanket gluttonous ?

Me: Do you know how inkjet printers work ?

Her: No. Maybe its punishment is to wear ugly braces and have no VCR in its cunt.i But it's right next to the window! Why shouldn't a TV have a little cozy...

Me: Lol. See the way it works, TVs need very high voltage to make the electrons smash against the glass. This very high voltage also creates a magnetic field, which ends up shooting various unrelated particles straight into the ceiling. It's mostly a carnival ride for specs of dust up there.

Her: Are there any cleaning applications for this ?!

Me: Not really cleaning, more like dirtying. That's how inkjet printers print.

Her: Hm.

Me: Actually, it's used for air purification too. Do you remember acid rain ?

Her: I remember it was a thing...

Me: Yes, here's what that thing was : coal contains some sulphur. Powerplants that burn coal release that sulphur, as sulphur dioxide, which is a very reactive gas, which actually does suck bits out of atmospheric water to recreate sulphuric acid which is then too heavy and falls down, which is a serious problem for some types of vegetation - trees mostly.ii This was a significant but localised problem, in the immediate downdraft of said power plants. Nevertheless the ecofreak party misrepresented it into some sort of global issue, which it was not, and started pounding schoolkids, who have no business with any of this, about the Amazon forests, which were at no point involved - no power plants there. Meanwhile the people that actually do things, as opposed to these fucktards interested in whatever Internet fame and other "social" goals found the perfect solution : add specially designed charged conductors inside the smokestacks. The very property that makes SO2 dangerous is that it's highly electrically charged - because that's what acids are, substances that can readily donate a proton - also makes it highly susceptible to the field treatment, and so this application completely neutralised the problem, and that's why it was a big ecofreakiii talking point in the 90s and hasn't been heard from since. Of course this'd have been moot anyway, because meanwhile they came up with this liquefaction of coal process that's much more effective anyway and also in passing resolves that problem, so all the ruckus did, outside of creating a generation of kids with a heartbleediv in their head (one that's now readily exploited with all the global warming/climate change/anthropo-hate club for free meals and airplane fare all over the world + a decent chunk of cash) is maybe saving a few trees over the 1990 - 2010 interval.

Her: Well, that's something.

Me: Yeah, it's something. You know what sort of something it is ? Like, imagine a woman. She's working, she's got kids, she's not poor but definitely money's still a limit of her world. The kids had breakfast around eight, it's now eleven, she's got a list of stuff to do and it's all crammed full. They're going to have lunch at the inlaws at one, it's going to be a major meal, but the kids are whining that they're hungry. Which sure, whatever, they're hungry. If they just fucking waited for two hours which positively won't kill them it'd be just perfect because gran'mama always loves it when the kids "have a healthy appetite" and then, irrational old woman that she is, likes the poor woman for a week or two, irrespective of her actual merits or dismerits. But no, the kids are hungry. And they want Chuck e Cheese because it's on TV all the damned time. Which is why I despise these people, and have, for as long as I can remember, aged fifteen or something : because I love that woman, and they're obnoxious shits getting in her way and making her day a lot worse than it needs to be for absolutely no fucking reason. Well, except that they heard it on TV.

Her: I see.

PS. Please note that I'm not nearly as awkward as that guy. This I suspect comes from habituation.

———They, like sane people, don't do the whole "TV perched on furniture" thing here. Instead, they do the whole "TV suspended from metalwork" thing. Like sane fucking people, did I mention that part ?

The armatures usually have adjustable holders to accomodate various receptor sizes, which sort-of look like braces, and usually a little holder underneath for perhaps a VCR. [↩]Ecosystems are ecosystems. All naturally occuring conditions favour some species and disfavour others, there's no such thing as a universally harmful development. If we nuke the place cockroaches will take over, if we simulate active volcanoes through acidic ash then volcanic flora will take over that place and so on and so forth. Nature is not so stupid as to depend on human agency, unreliable as that is. Instead, nature's already explored the totality of possibilities, and consequently there is no end. Not for it, at any rate. [↩]An ecofreak is, like any sort of religious zealot, one who expends a lot of verbal energy to staunchly put forth views that he doesn't either understand or upon examination actually hold. Fortunately for the ecofreak, like in the case of any other religious zealot, examination is not a skill within his repertoire. Obstructing examination however is. [↩]Heartbleed was a very painful, very loud and very far reaching warning shot that the Bitcoin community (the actual Bitcoin community) fired at the NSA, and generally the wanna-be republic. It consisted of publication of that group's most valuable secret, which was a hole that allowed it to expose the ssl protocol, giving it cleartext access to all traffic and all passwords going through https and ssh, as well as a decent shot at exposing the RAM of any networking computer.

I believe the time is ripe for it to become a proper noun, denoting exactly this : a major vulnerability deliberately planted by fraudulent aspirants to political power. Which is what the USG is, in its attempts to usurp the rightful dominions of La Serenissima, which is what "ecologists" are, in their misguided attempts to meddle in science and industry. [↩]

« The myth of the US social mobility.

Advertising sucks, an illustrated narrative »

Category: Trilterviuri

Sunday, 27 July, Year 6 d.Tr.

Democracy and finance don't mix - the math involved

This all started on irc, as all good things. I think it's perhaps worthwhile to model the thing however, so here goes.

I. We will assume that the point of language is to state questions ; the point of reality to offer the basis on which those questions may be stated ; the point of thinking to propose processes through which answers may be derived from the questions and particular perceptions of reality ; the point of the passage of time to modify reality so that the correct answers to questions become apparent and finally that the point of history is to record previous questions, answering processes, and actual answers. While you could perhaps construct your own set of assumptions, I posit it as axiomatic that either it is reducible to the aforestated assumptions or else insane - in neither case the differences posing any sort of interest to the rational agent whatsoever.

II. At any point, the questions that can be stated will be noted as Q1, Q2... Qn, where the n is not finite. The corresponding possible answers will be noted as A1Qi, A2Qi.... AmQi, where m is not finite and i is a value between 1 and n. It then follows from this notation that all answers A1Qi... AmQi to a specified question i are equally likely to be the correct answer.

III. At any point, a population can be described as P1, P2... Pk, where k may be finite but doesn't really have to be.

IV. Time itself can be modelled as a succession of moments, T1, T2... Tl, where l may be finite but also doesn't really have to be. In principle T1 may be chosen as any arbitrary, convenient moment, just as long as it includes all the history of all included Ps. Obviously at various Ts different sets of AjQi may be active, but because n and m are not finite this requires no difference of notation, we'll simply keep separate track of which answers are available and to which questions at which times.

V. On any arbitrarily chosen set of Qs, an arbitrarily chosen set of Ps will recognise a certain, definite subset of As for each Q, at an arbitrary point in time T. Each individual P will further contain a history of a number of previous Ts, with an associated list of Qs and their associated As, in some cases with an actual correct answer as revealed by reality over the passage of time.

VI. At any point of time, over a sufficiently large selection of P, the graph of historical known Qs, historical known As and historical known correct As versus count of Ps will arrange itself on a Zipf curve. Very few Ps will know very many old questions, very many old answers, and very many correct old answers. Very many Ps will know very few old questions, answers and correct answers.

VII. The probability of correctly identifying the correct answer among the As for a given Q correlates with the number of known previous Qs, with the number of known previous As and with the number of known previous correct As. If further restrictions are imposed on the counted Qs and As (such as, for instance, similarities to the current sets), that correlation amplifies.

VIII. It then follows that very few Ps are likely to identify the correct A in the A1Qi, A2Qi.... AmQi set, and very many Ps are likely to pick randomly among that set.

IX. It then follows that democracy (ie, counting Ps) and finance (ie, finding the right A in the set) don't mix, and in general that democracy is antithetical to any professional endeavour, to science, and to human welfare generally.

X. If Ps are selected so only very few Ps towards the power end of the powerlaw are included, paradoxical effects may be discovered, but these are by definition not common. Furthermore, there is no guarantee they scale (ie, continue to manifest past an arbitrary count of selected Ps), nor is there any guarantee that a selection of Ps exhibiting them can be in fact made for any arbitrary Q or set of Qs and their associated As, nor is there any guarantee that there can be a selection process declared that is computable in any general case.

This is it, pretty much. Have fun.

« The Wolf of Wall Street

No argument »

Category: Gandesc, deci gandesc

Wednesday, 29 January, Year 6 d.Tr.

Dear derps : you are being herded.

First point : The fact that USB drives contain microcontrollers is not news. The fact that microcontrollers - any microcontrollers - can be reflashed is also not news. The ridiculous Dragos Ruiu psychotic episode and its predictable co-opting for USG sponsored psyops is not really news.

Seriously, get over the nonsense. Not everything the USG propaganda machine aka "media" screams over is worth the mention. In point of fact, most nothing they push is worth the mention, that's why they're pushing it in the first place. It just so happens that the only practical way to silence signal on the Internet is through receptor exhaustion, and so they're working diligently to flood the communication channels with crap in the hopes that the legitimate content won't make it through anymore.

tl;dr : the USG is DDoSing you. Filter themi out.

Second point : CISCO, for a long time the most respected name in network hardware, lost all its market share last year as a result of having defrauded its customers at the behest of the USG. It is now in the desperate position of a large company with no market, and has been meanwhile reinvented by its actual owner - the USG - as a provider of... "secure" things.

tl;dr : Cisco caught stealing, is now being pushed by rogue state as data security expert. Don't buy their crap.

Conclusion : Your enemy is trying to get you to go on the "cloud", which is not what it seems, but the exact opposite thereof. Their efforts are transparent to the point of ridicule, but this does not mean they will necessarily be unsuccessful.

Bitcoin however does mean they will necessarily be unsuccessful on smart people, which has the following dreadful implication for your own survival : if you follow the piper and go into the holding pen, we will butcher you and your shepherd will not be able to protect you.

That is all, really. You don't necessarily have to be one of us, nobody really gives a shit. But if you go in the place where food goes, you will be food.

So now. Do you really wish to be food ? That's the only question that actually needs answering, superfluous derpage about "security" on curated venues owned by the producers of pseudosecurity theatricals are superfluous. Do you wish to be food or do you wish to not be food ?

Act accordingly, nature knows no mercy.

tl;dr : Put your nudies on the iPad, it worked just for all those other retardedii chicks.

———theguardian.com, wsj.com, washingtonpost.com, forbes.com, cnet.com, bloomberg.com, businessweek.com, you name it. The rule of thumb is pretty simple : if they're paying tax in the US, they're lying to you. Because the USG actually requires it, "legally", as per their definition of legal. It's that simple. Forget about the entire set - it's not only that they don't actually count in terms of readership, engagement, relevancy to public discourse etc etc as directly measured by their sheer inability to drive traffic on par with your average blog. It's that they don't even have anything actually interesting to say. And no, "social media" is neither a solution nor a replacement. "Social media" in its USG sponsored implementation is certainly media but in no sense social. Just definitively broken and in any case not long for this world.

The solution is the WoT, which at the most barebones implementation would consist of a list of blogs maintained by people you know and trust. That's it, and spread it out. Decentralize, but effectually, not just for the sake of the label. [↩]I won't soon forget the imbecile what's her name claiming that "hackers" went to the trouble of "faking" her 50 different pictures of fully clothed tongue displays.

Yeah, totally, that's what hackers do all day, re-enact the frightfully transgressive taboo smashing behaviour of putting the tongue out. Because these hackers are about as intellectually limited as your average starlet. Makes sense, so much sense. [↩]

« WarOfLife (S.WOL), September 2014 Statement

F.DERP September 2014 Statement »

Category: Gandesc, deci gandesc

Saturday, 04 October, Year 6 d.Tr.

Dating online, an inquest

It all started as all good things start these days : on irc.

ThickAsThieves I imagine dating in your 30s in 40s these days is pretty much all online websites now?

mircea_popescu Betas shower the websites, alphas let the girls suggest girls for the club.

This set me to wonder, how exactly does it work online ?

Conveniently enough, a certain website dedicated to BDSM-friendly dating has, among a bevy of other methods of communication, a feature allowing any user to see a list of all the users which have more or less recently pulled up his profile. Fortunately for our purposes it also has a security hole, allowing one to set this bit for roughly speaking the entire user database. And so, I've created, for 48`571 different, extant users the illusion that I have visited their profile. This has made a total of 189 people check back within 48 hours, signifying an engagement of about 0.4%.i

The whole story is available as csv if you're interested in doing your own processing, but otherwise here's some graphical summaries :

While the abundance of males is perhaps no surpriseii and the hordes of self-styled "dominants" perfectly in keeping with what you'd expect coming out of young men engaged in exploring their environment, did you have any idea homosexual meniii are really such a small minority ? On a BDSM site ? They friggin invented the thing for crying out loud. I guess BDSM has sold out huh.

Moving on, everyone declares an age. Everyone. So long quaint difficulties and obnoxious coyness of a century ago, it's all forgotten. The average age as declared by our sample works out to 36.09iv years. The average declared height is 178 cm (15 abstain), the average declared weight is 180.94 kgs (32 abstain). Apparently height is a much touchier subject than age, although being shorter is objectively worse than being taller, whereas being younger or older is not quite better or worse than the alternative. Yet these are both factors the subject has no real control over. What's truly shocking to me, however, is that weight - fully within the subject's control like no other variable, is the touchiest subject of all, and - what's more! - everyone is way, way, way out of bounds. 180 kgs is obesity, and this is the average of active people. Imagine all the lazy slobs too fat to even click on a profile pic!

O wait, trick's on me. Weight is given in lbs not kgs, and it's not really all that bad. Whew! :D

And now for the triplet breakdown. There are no less than 70 (seventy!) users that self-identify as straight-male-dominant. That's half the entire male population and almost a third of the entire sample. Their average age ? 39.4! They're actually older than the site average, perhaps hinting that traditional normative sexualityv is a thing of the past, slowly shuffling towards the grave with all the 50 and 60 yos that grew up in the same mental space as I did.

On the other end of the spectrum, the prized female types are rare : seven straight female submissive, seven bisexual female slavesvi. Better than nothing, but still : the average natural harem'd be built out of five dominant men to the obedient woman rather than vice-versa.

All in all a somewhat interesting passtime. Let me know if you come to any sort of interesting conclusions on your own.

———It is important to note that this counts as a vibrant and active online community, and that the "advertisement" so to speak was directed at their vanity. The average banner in the average community probably does worse, and remember we're discussing clickthrough here, not any sort of action. These considered, expecting one sale out of a million impressions of your banner may be overly optimistic. [↩]Quoth Greenspun :

When the Larry Summers story first broke, I wrote in my Weblog:

A lot more men than women choose to do seemingly irrational things such as become petty criminals, fly homebuilt helicopters, play video games, and keep tropical fish as pets (98 percent of the attendees at the American Cichlid Association convention that I last attended were male). Should we be surprised that it is mostly men who spend 10 years banging their heads against an equation-filled blackboard in hopes of landing a $35,000/year post-doc job?

Having been both a student and teacher at MIT, my personal explanation for men going into science is the following:

young men strive to achieve high status among their peer group

men tend to lack perspective and are unable to step back and ask the question "is this peer group worth impressing?"

[↩]While I disagree that there's such a thing as "homosexual women", in that what women do together may be fun but it's not sex any more than salad is food, nevertheless self-identified lesbians accounted for less than 10% of the gayness tag, and thus... well... we'll just ignore them. [↩]Seeing how we have > 200 respondents, the two digits are actually meaningful. [↩]Growing up I think I have never encountered any male that'd identify as anything else than straight dominant if their life were on the line. [↩]It's perhaps improbable to have a female slave that's not bisexual, strictly because from the male dominant viewpoint, tuna isn't optional in the diet of slavegirls. [↩]

« The complexity of life, a triad

Let's do Mark Cuban »

Category: Meta psihoza

Tuesday, 29 April, Year 6 d.Tr.

Danika

Danikai is the most ignorant, unaware, offensive piece of crap you could conceivably run across.

Marisa Tomei's character is this intellectually worthless, physically worthless female that gets fired from a 16k a year clerk job because she can't add, while living in a million-and-a-half suburban sort of house. Because this is how things work, in fantasy land. Hypergamy for everyone!

The culprit is, of course, her husband (I'm writing really short paragraphs so the sort of "journalism major" fucktarded 23 yo woman who's in the demo for such movies may follow along, thumb-on-monitor).

The culprit is her husband, who makes enough money to afford both the house and the woman, but doesn't have the common decency to enforce a morally acceptable, ethically respectable arrangement. Such as you know, Danika living in a basement cage, in a pony girl costume, while better women (bigger tits, functioning brains) have the run of the house.

This sort of appallingly offensive moral hazard then results in hourlong displays of nobody-on-a-stick acting as if she's somehow somebody, like you know, a person, who may open her mouth when people talk, and who may make calls and give her opinions and whatnot. It's really quite disgusting.

She has a problem with her 13 yo girl wanting to know what cunt means, she has a problem with the 13 yo wanting to know what cunt means lying about her English teacher having enforced the reading of the cunt-containing book, she has a problem with her highschooler son making out with an otherwise smoking hot foreign exchange student, she even has a fucking problem lending the guy the car. She has to ask her husband, and where is he going, and who's he going with and are the parents going to be there. It's a wonder the kid doesn't go "eh fuck this stupid shit, I'm taking the lawn mower, riding it all the way there like a baws". It's a wonder he doesn't go all Ken Park on her dumb ass, and here's another thing : if I were in a jury asked to convict the kid after he had impaled her on a rusted fuckstick and left her to die there, I would get that kid off the hook, jury nullificationii if necessary, but I'd get him off. Because Danika has no fucking business existing, and certainly has no business not being raped daily.iii

At which point I turned this stupidity off and went to do something else. Which ended it, you understand ? It's not like I turned off a representation of something that makes sense, or exists in reality. What I turned off was the whole of the story, Danika only exists as a work of fantasy, pumped out by interested dweebs in California to retarded twentysomethings majoring in journalism (Speaking of which, hey honey! How are you going to pay the college debt off 0.001 CPM ?)

Seriously, do something useful with your life. This ain't it. Learn to twerk or something, as stupid as it may be it's miles better than this picket fences post-soccer-mom bullshit.

———2006, by Ariel Vromen with Marisa Tomei. [↩]Look it up, it's an actual thing. The jury can perfectly well decide to annul the law in question. Whether the judge likes it or not (he won't), whether the prosecution agrees this is a thing or not (they won't, for that matter they don't even agree Obama has to wear a seatbelt if he doesn't want to), the jury can just come out and say "fuck this stupid law, it shouldn't be a thing, this person walks free". Which is kinda the point of the jury system in the first place, to create a guarantee against abuses of the state, as represented by, you've guessed it, judges, prosecutors and defense counsel. Yes, all three together, just like the good cop, the bad cop and their supervisor all work for the fucking police station, not for you. [↩]Yes, yes, rape is bad mkay.

At least it'd probably shut her up. Totally worth it, if you ask me. [↩]

« Ken Park

"Parody" is not there for you cancerous fags to try and hide your cancer behind it. »

Category: Trilematograf

Monday, 14 July, Year 6 d.Tr.

Cunt size discussion. This is guaranteed to be weird.

Cat How are you!

Chick Well I just woke up! But otherwise good.

Cat Gmorning!

Chick Fun post ;) Morning!

Cat You know mah cock does not actually fit in your cunt wholly ? :D

Chick Lol okay I believe you I belieeeeve you.

Cat But aren't you getting short vagina worriedi ?

Chick No.

Cat How come!

Chick I forgot about it after you said you were kidding the second time.

Cat Well, it is factually correct. There's about an inch leftover, you saw it. It fails to make any possibly conceivable difference, except for this : it puts the penis length thing in complete fucking perspective!

Chick How's that?

Cat Honey, I dunno how many times I got laid. Musta been thousands. This BEFORE I fucking noticed that a portion of my cock somewhere at the base is currently never getting to go in, and perhaps never has. Not that I'd know. Nor would it care. Meanwhile there's people out there rubbing their cock with rulers and lined paper derping about how they can't function socially because they don't have that extra bit ?

Chick But that has nothing to do with having sex and everything to do with comparing themselves to other... "men".

Cat But they may as well compare the length of their toenails! I don't stick my toenails in your snatch, either. Well... not most of the time.

Chick I was gonna say ;p

Cat In fact! HERE IT IS! My toenails are more of a penis than that last inch.

Chick Lol.

Cat I think it must be psychological. Like so : if there's some you can't fit, then they feel ok with the situation. But if you put the whole thing away it feels like they got swallowed whole and may fall in!

Chick Fall in?!

Cat Yes.

Chick What, like a cunt's a magic portal to the vaccuum of space?!

Cat Yes. Life and death etc.

Chick Are you saying plenty of males are actually afraid of cunts then?

Cat Yes. Not even a novel concept, Freud invented it.

Chick Yeah but I never took it literally...

Cat It is literal. Little girls are instinctively afraid of penises, for as long as they're sexually immature. They do outgrow it. Boys however... they never do. They don't have the mechanisms.

Chick Seems odd to me.

Cat It is odd, definitely.

Chick As a little girl I'm sure I was afraid of various silly things (I was even afraid of a bowl of macaroni and cheese once), but not penises. I remember being curious, but nothing like afraid.

Cat Didja have one shoved in your face ? When you were like 5 ?

Chick Lol no. I watched my dad pee tho'...

Cat Well, suppose a baby elephant shoved his trunklet in your nose to check you out. Cry and run screaming ?

Chick Wait, IN my nose?

Cat Well sorta derpy on your nose.

Chick That's a hard call.

Cat Obviously it wouldn't fit, HIS NOSE IS BIGGER THAN YOUR NOSE.

Chick Well yeah but one never knoes when you propose a nose hose.

Cat Haha. Check this out : we were about 10 yo and with a school visit at Zoo in next town over. They had baby elephant. Baby elephant kinda quietly and sadly checked kids out from a distance. Eventually decided to try this outii ? Maybe it's not so bad ? Shoved its trunklet into boy's face to sniff him. Boy bit the elephant's trunk! Right on teh tip!

Chick Oh no!

Cat Baby elephant cried and went to his spot.

Chick Why so mean?!

Cat Well I dunno, boy got scared I guess...

Chick Aww ;/

Cat It was a panic thing I imagine.

Chick This is too sad.

Cat It was VERY sad. And the little thing looked incredibly sad too.

Chick ;/

Cat I spent the rest of the week bugging my parents to buy me the elephant.

Chick Awww!

Cat "But where would he stay!" "In the basement!"

Chick Lol.

Cat "Elephants don't like it in the basement!" "Well they DONT LIKE IT AT THAT ZOO EITHER!". Then two hours of point to point comparisons of Zoo and basement. (They really were not that different).

Chick Awww.

Cat "But it will be too expensive. Would you not rather have a X for your bday ?" "No. Elephant is fine." "But we can't afford it!" "Let's go steal it then ? Nobody's guarding it I checked." "We can't go stealing elephants" "What sort of people are you!"

Chick Ahaha.

So anyway. Penis length actually carries no importance. Until you fall in, that is.

———See Oglaf's Good Behaviour slides 1 & 2. [↩]Here's an illustration :

[↩]

« A short compendium of stupid things you should never say

A sad story, illustrated »

Category: Zsilnic

Sunday, 30 March, Year 6 d.Tr.

Cryptographs, revived.

May 09 21:36:20 thestringpuller mircea_popescu: how does one get gpg certified on your blog?

I had no idea what the gentleman might mean, originally, but then it turned out he was talking about the little displayed after the name of select people in the comments section. There's actually a number of different such insignia awarded to the esteemed Trilema commenter crowdi, and this particular one reflects the achievement of having resolved correctly no less than five cryptographs.

What the hell are those, right ?

Well, as you can see, there's this dedicated section called "Criptograme", which contains a number of images that you're invited to translate into wordsii. There's 92 of them, published between August 22th, 2009 and August 27th, 2012. Then they took a break, because I'm not sure even why, perhaps I was too busy or too lazy to do them in English, I can't even recall.

Anyway! It was a fun game, time to revive it. So here you go :

Sha-1 hash : 97c38890058b1d4ca20e99ca14a9778e24af7b57iii

———The original article (in Romanian) introducing the things is Se dau insigne! There's a number of different ones. [↩]Romanian words, obviously, which probably makes them insanely difficult for you. [↩]This allows you to verify if your answer is correct without having to wait for me to confirm or deny, and also proves that there indeed is an answer, and that the answer is unique and fixed aforehand (ie, that I'm not drawing on a pool of possibles and rejecting them as people come up with them). All you have to do is run sha-1 on your favourite platform, of a string formed by adding your solution to "trilema". So if your proposed solution is "bitcoin", then you hash "trilemabitcoin".

Also, if you wish to prove you've resolved it without sharing the solution with the general public, simply make a comment such as salt+f0f0cf868277c9ff3873a7ebe68c3e2b49a7a14f. I will add the solution to the part before the + then hash the resulting string and check if the hash matches - if it does you're in. So for instance if the solution actually is "bitcoin", the hash of "saltbitcoin" will have to match f0f0cf868277c9ff3873a7ebe68c3e2b49a7a14f.

All these advances are the result of many years of practice in the Romanian space, isn't it neat ? [↩]

« What interests me in a project

The idea that Bitcoin is a sovereign... »

Category: Criptograme

Monday, 12 May, Year 6 d.Tr.

Consent is a myth. Let's see how it came to be.

It came to pass on a blue marble lit by a yellow star lost in endless space that some men decided that the pile of women a man accumulates is the proper measuring stick by which to judge his power.

The discussion as to why society is in all times and all places a structure of the decisions of men does not interest us herei, as it doesn't interest us here to consider why should anyone discuss some random marble of some arbitrary color - if you wish to be that abstruse go live with your alien brethren instead.

There exist alternatives, of course : the always popular (and hence more commonly seen) "he who dies with the most toys wins", the more romantic (and hence more normatively common) "he who sees the most things wins", the list goes on. Nevertheless, they picked what they picked, and if you wish to argue the point you're more than welcome to go talk to the dead.

It happens that the men in question weren't just some men, but the representative elite of the almighty French empire.

It is easy to misunderstand history, especially if history means millenia and one lives not a century ; it is easy to misunderstand power, especially if one's lost in the arid labyrinth of monolinguism. Let us try and summarily recuperate what "almighty French empire" actually means. So : out of all the provinces of the almighty Roman empireii, Gallia was certainly the brightest. It was had after a bloody, atrocious sort of war - harder, harsher and less humane than the conflict which resulted in the incorporation of any other province. The debaissement worked as it always does, and a few short centuries later Galia was not only richer than Italia, but actually fiscally stable - Rome would have collapsed in all of three days if it had to actually balance its budget.

Then the Roman empire failed, as all states eventually do, and Galia went to rejoin its German brother. Their creation, Francia, an immense conglomerate reaching past Carinthia failed eventually, and the Eastern and Western Franks split up. So begins the almighty French empire, the center of the world from pretty much that day until the rise of the "democratic" socialist state and the carnage they produced. Do not ever forget that La Belle Epoque ended in a horrible bloodbath because "progress", and because "democracy", and because socialism.

Nevertheless, in this interval spanning just about a millenium, the almighty French empire ruled the world. William, the first to invade Englandiii, as well as Napoleon, the first to invade Russia are both French, and are both French in the same manner : ambitious marginals, a Norman and a Corsican.

That the empire was occasionally mismanaged is indisputable. Such momentary lapses allowed the rare German victory in 1870 - an incredible feat, that, to the eyes of contemporaries, specifically because France was actually larger than Prussia, England and everyone else put together - or the moreover amusing episode of Jeanne D'arc. Nevertheless, France was throughout the center of the world, people in Serbia or Romania rebelled against their rulers inspired by the French exampleiv and the word for a passport today is passport specifically because trade, diplomacy and culture meant, for about half the history of Europev, French.vi

However, the empire was by and large well managed. That at the end of the XVIIIth century France beat everyone five an' a half times in rapid successionvii is not particularly surprising, but most importantly : it is not exactly the deed of Napoleon. He gets credited with it all as a matter of course by all those who don't really understand how things work past what their eyes immediately perceive, but there's more Mazarin and Richelieuviii in that result than there is Napoleon. His choice was primarily how to squander the inheritance carefully built up and preserved by his forefathersix, and his merit is the superb execution of that squander.x

So, that large paranthetical exhausted : some men had decided that the pile of women a man has is his score. This arrangement, whatever merits or dismerits it may have politically, is insanely inconvenient for women. Not only do they have to put up with the common indignity nature bestowed upon their assxi but now they have it compounded, because their personal choice in sexual partners has an impact far removed from anything they may personally know or would naturally care about. Specifically : whether any sixteen year old woman opens or doesn't open her legs for some random forty-something banker makes a world of difference to some other, fifty-something banker. The sixteen year old girl is in no position to well evaluate even the existence of the second banker, because really, how would she innately even know such a thing as bankers exists in the first place ? Besides, that a girl may evaluate a boy is an unlikely proposition enough, but once the boy's premier incentive to even proposition her has little to do with her as she is and everything with the metaconsiderations of some complicated psychosexual game he's playing with some other guy(s) all is lost for reason.xii

And so, the next generation came exactly to the only conclusion possible in this insane system : that the only winning move is not to play! You don't know what novel doom any choice may produce, and so just, keep your head low, your mouth clenched and slowly walk away.

Which is exactly to a t the Puritan strategy. It didn't come out of a void, and it didn't come out of reading the Bible. It came out of practical necessity - there's just no other good way to survive. And so, in spite of its patent insanity (seriously, who ever heard of a girl that didn't want to fuck ?!), the thing spread, because it was sorely needed to counteract... another, greater patent insanity. Isn't life in the city great ? (Yeah, this is the other side of that urban - rural dispute : you have to do stupid shit because others are doing stupider shit still.)

That patent insanity worked its poison, however, because the sexual impulse exists and will continue to exist no matter the "needs of society" and the "best interest of all those involved", resulting in some very angry women, and the entirely bizarre arrangement of the unconscious fuck. Because consent had such a heavy implication baked in - specifically that the man is thus therefore better than all the other men, something they then were willing to raise hell over - while at the same time copulation as an activity remained as stringently necessary as ever, the only proper mode of female behaviour became... being fucked while asleep. Because if she wasn't conscious it meant that she didn't consent, and if she didn't actually consent, well... that meant she could just fuck, rather than create a complex social contract involving many powerful actors outside of her control. Which is how idiocies like "Sleeping Beauty" even came to be, and which is why to this day people don't fuck like normal people do in this alleged art that makes its subject the silver screen.

As you might imagine, such nonsense is no way to live. The following generation was so angry with this otherwise stupid arrangement that they created the myth of consent. Supposedly there exists an exact opposite of the sleeping beauty, and that will thenceforth be the only mode of human sexuality, and anything else should be burned at the stake!

While constrictive enough, and while not seriously implemented by pretty much anyone sanexiii, this arrangment is still less stupid than the thing it rebels against. Yet it is by no means sane, which means the Grand Oscillator of Sexual Mores will make another pass or two before things settle down sensibly.

The only hope is that the nonsense of "consent", a logical impossibility as well as a ridiculous constructionxiv won't long survive the necessary revolutionxv. More pointedly, the hope is that the nonsense of "consent" won't find a nook or cranny somewhere unrelated to its original stem to entrench itself and cause mischief long after everyone involved forgot all about what the hell they were even involved in.

Hope. The love of myths.

———It flows from childbearing, if you must know : maternity is positive while paternity is declarative. Society being necessarily the outgrowth of family relations, society is necessarily predicated on the beings of women and the declarations of men. [↩]There was not until its time, nor hence, anything as great. Other empires were arguably larger (most egregiously, the British claim some ridiculous figure based on purely declarative nonsense, conveniently forgetting that most of the people involved in that statutory "empire" couldn't speak the language, or that a good fraction lived their entire life without ever as much as seeing an Englishman from any distance), but it is a pointless, hopeless sort of argument. The Roman empire was the largest, the longest lived and by a very thick margin the most important, successful and instructive attempt in the otherwise doomed quest to create states that matter in the world.

Before you even start with the Maurya & Han/Ming/Qing nonsense : nobody cares, seriously. So Iron Age India had some sort of centralised state, which went away like dust, so that centuries later the continuators of the Romans had to teach the stranded Indians how to work iron again. What nonsense is this ? The Qing dinasty doesn't survive past its vases, which is as much as can be said of the Etruscans. Let it be, there's no shame in being either the center of the world or superior people. It happens, tis a fact of life, learn to live with it. [↩]The other is also William, but a Dutchman. Interestingly enough, in both cases the foreign invasion completely (if openly and quite explicitly) restructured the country, to everyone's benefit. England, in this more neutral historical perspective, plays exceedingly well the part of the ideal whore : if strictly disciplined by a well chosen but foreign to her master she does deliver impressive results down the road. Essentially the curse of the island : useless on its own, ideal setting stage for foreign interest. A very feminine geographic feature, the island. [↩]What the US is trying to fake these days with its Nuland-sponsored "color revolutions" the French obtained naturally. The same spirit of difference stands between a historical novelist, who actually wrote well, and a contemporary American "best selling" author, who pretends to have at some point written something. [↩]A straight millenium bridges Cluny to the 1900 exhibition. [↩]By comparison English is merely a temporary convenience - it does not look likely it will matter three straight centuries. It certainly does not look like it has the substance to do so. [↩]You perhaps remember Wellington's victory. It came in the War of the Sixth Coalition, and according to the man himself it was the closest thing ever seen on a field of battle. [↩]Both ambitious ministers of autocratic, absolute and disinterested monarchs - let it never be forgotten that this and this only is the avenue to anything good in this world. [↩]Essentially, once it became obvious that the empire is going the way of empires, the choice was whether to slide into the darkness slowly and painfully, like the Byzantines (who, by the time the Turks finally relieved them of responsibility essentially consisted of four or five smallish villages scattered among the gigantic reinforced walls of a much more glorious past - the city of Constantinople was something like two thirds pasture when it finally fell) or to go out with a bang. Napoleon went "eh shit, let's at least throw a funeral party" and most of France shrugged its shoulders and followed him. [↩]Not in any sense similar to Hitler on this score. If you bother to read his speeches throughout the 30s, and then bother to pick up a newspaper or look at a map you will no doubt notice that all of Hitler's geopolitical complaints have in fact been resolved.

You may argue whether the war was necessary to resolve them, but if you do that you'd better also argue whether the Civil War was actually necessary to resolve the civil complaints Lincoln claimed it intends to solve. For all we know of alternative history the slave owners were going to release their slaves anyway, and in better conditions than the war left them - poor lumpenproletariat at the mercy of the Northern capitalist (an altogether probable outcome) and similarly the British leeches were going to release their grip on the world by their own volition (an altogether more improbable outcome).

Nevertheless, he did in fact put an end to the British Empire, and to the arrangement of the world that flowed from it. An expensive approach towards that goal, no doubt, and in many parts poorly executed and even worse thought through, but nevertheless : a century later England is begging Scotland not to abandon ship while Germany is - for the first time in the history of the continent, if you don't count the brief taste of power under Bismarck - at the wheel. [↩]To quote,

The first part of that statement happens to be true, women are in fact malleable by nature for very good reasons, which certainly aren't entirely cultural, and live the misfortune of not actually owning their own body as a matter of course - it belongs not just to itself, a problem shared with men, but also to their children, and in a greater sense to "society", because any shortage of men can be remedied by an alteration of sexual mores, but a shortage of females can not be remedied in any way shape or form : the maximum number of children born in any one year is exactly equal to the total count of ovulating females in that population.

[↩]Incidentally, these overtones are why women generally - specifically contrasted to femidiots, who are emphatically not women - are put off by the entire PUA thing. It'd be nice, you know, if one didn't have to go to work encased in ballistic armor, if one didn't have to probe all food items for shit, and if one could rely on the notion that if on the receiving end of a sexual proposition, that proposition stems from something direct rather than from some sort of meta-consideration. [↩]I know I've never actually asked any girl whether she wants to or not, except maybe once, the first time - and seriously, what do you do if your wife gets drunk, jack off ? [↩]Constructing the "opposite" of things is how you end up with the WonderBoy, that magical kid who eats shit and shits whole prunes. [↩]The word is used in its proper sense, like in "The long blade does twenty-four full revolutions each day." [↩]

« As far as amusement goes, the next best thing to reality is fantasy

Just in case you happen to think Silicon Valley is either new or novel... »

Category: Cocietate si Sultura

Tuesday, 30 December, Year 6 d.Tr.

Come see me clutching at straws

fluffypony Has anyone written a blog post on what exactly makes the Bitcoin Foundation such a stupid idea? I mean besides their uselessnes to date, I mean fundamentally why it would never have worked regardless of who was at the top.

mircea_popescu It would have worked fine with better people at the top.i So would have the forum. If bitcointalk weren't run by a random 20yo kid with nary a clue of this world and a random gang of the otherwise unemployable, it'd have not failed into the scam swamp of all time.

chetty Good people can make even bad ideas work.

mircea_popescu Yeah, the more general point being that no structural considerations can ever excuse personal ineptitude. Obama is a failure first and foremost because he, himself, personally, is an imbecile, not nearly up to the task he asked to be allowed to undertake. Every poor black person in jail is in jail because they, personally, are fucktards. The "system", family and all else come vehehehery distant seconds, and of little practical consequence. They're only discussed because we don't really give a shit about the prisoner himself. If we did give a shit, we'd discuss how fucktarded he is instead of how x is failing y and other statistical wankery.

chetty But but but, they are all victims.

mircea_popescu They're all fluffy magical unicorns, too. So what of it.

chetty Get with the program, you are supposed to feel sorry and guilty unless of course you too can find a nice victim group to be part of.

mircea_popescu What, gotta have my emotions available for use as part of the "productive future society" ? That's okay, I'm opting out. It'd be fucking ridiculous if I took my capital out of the bezzle, but allowed the emotional soliciting nonsense to continue. I guess that makes me a terrorist AND a sociopath dunnit.

chetty Well they kinda go together, newspeak the words are synonyms.

mircea_popescu You know, English as a discussion space is getting incredibly boring these days. You have "science" which mostly consists of the sterile nonsense of "creationists" and a few fringe groups (homeopaths, scientologists, whatever nuts), some very primitive "o look, I discovered fractals" repackaging of basic understanding ("i fucking love science!11") and a bunch of bureaucracy-serving faux debates (o, really, 97.x% of the "scientists" hoping for a govt grant agree the govt position has scientific value ? how very Ceausescu v2.0ii of them!). Then you have politics/current affairs, which are mostly a bunch of "who are we calling the bad things this week". Putin "doesn't understand how the world works" for having dared to humiliate our beloved leadership bimonthly for the past year, and the Israelis are whatever and on and on. And then you have some stale local interests topics, mostly molded in this mold, and some (bad) sports. That's it. I'm surprised people even bother learning the language for this crap. O wait... they don't, do they.

chetty Well do not dispair we have b-a.

mircea_popescu Talking to some random guy yest.

Him : It's gonna take awhile to digest this. You like writing eh.

Me : I have a lot to say :D

Him: Lol yeah, it's an unusual writing style. It's like a mix of technical, story telling and stretched analogies. I'm sure you get a lot of hardcore readers who follow along. From a technical standpoint, it's somewhat of a nightmare lol.

Basically, that's what b-a reduces to : using English as a language rather than as a lingo is so uncommon by now, it takes intelligent people some effort to accommodate.

punkman What's this technical standpoint anyway.

mircea_popescu I believe it'd be the proposition that words work unequivocally and logic may be applied to natural language constructs.

punkman "This isn't the textbook I was expecting!" ?

mircea_popescu It all dovetails neatly into BingoBoingo's recent stuff about sublanguages. And I guess my recent article, at that. The possibility of text meaning something to the reader is quite severely restricted by a whole list of novel issues, not directly familiar to the historian of this topic. By chance, I was just reading the latest on crooked timber. Here : crookedtimber.org/shit-and-curses-and-other-updates-on-the-steven-salaita-affair. There's a bunch of academics no less, discussing a topic of no particular interest with utter abandon : some Palestinian guy who's also a professor got offered a job and then de-offered the job, because Urbana admin didn't like him ranting about Israelis on Twitter. Now this is all about as irrelevant as you like, but if you read what these commenters say to each other it becomes rapidly obvious they fail before even remotely engaging. Goat sperm'd have a better shot impregnating toad eggs. So I suspect pop culture and the (very specifically English, btw, and Chinese!) tendency towards the lowest common denominator and cultural sterility result from this chasm : on one hand people expect to be belonging together, unwarrantedly.iii On the other hand, they share exactly nothing. Thus parallel discussion is not a funny occurence but the vast majority of all interractions, people happily arguing with self-constructed dopplegangers of each other respectively. Basically, a strawman is not merely a logical error, but the substance of all English language discourse today.

punkman Oh wow. I like this concept of parallel discussion.

mircea_popescu It started as this literary device I had thought I had invented like a decade ago.iv We even tried to work it into our book with Chet. But the more I read the more I realise that actually... it's not me inventing something novel, it's my brain trying to cope with nonsense. Back in the 70s when politicians started doing this, engaging in pseudo-debates on "issues" that had no coherent definition in their respective systems, people derrided the entire process as nonsensical. Enter the Internet, everyone is doing it. Everyone. Everwhere. Find the most obscure blog and you'll have two nobodies doing it to each other for sport. I suppose it must be cheaper than actual speech.

punkman Yeah you don't have to spend any processing cycles on what the other guy said, just do the most superficial pattern-matching to harvest some entropy for your Markov chain.

mircea_popescu Precisely. So you know, when the Markov chain-based invaders finally take over, they'll be welcomed by the populace.

punkman "Act like a dumbshit and they'll treat you like an equal!"

mircea_popescu I don't think action is possible anymore. You can't run with your eyes closed. You can't act in a world inhabited by these phantasms. I suspect for the average English-as-sole-language speaker action is actually impossible today.

chetty I am not sure its actually language relevant. People can fail to think in any language. Speaking more than one probably just gives you a better shot at noticing.

mircea_popescu Well, here's the thing : some languages act as a metamind for the speakers, the collected intellectual effort of antecessors having constructed the linguistic equivalent of engineer's scales and whatnot. So that through the mere workings of the language, one's point is refined. This used to work in English too, three centuries ago. "Put your idea in writing to see what it actually says". Some other languages however act as a confounder of thought, I am discovering, and a hindrance to expression, with contemporary English being a major example of this sad situation. A point expressed in today's English is actually LESS than what it was before it met expression. That's a sad state of affairs, and it creates a spiral of doom. As the language stops working positively, people stop caring, and so it'll just rot further.

chetty I dun think thats the languages fault, poor abused language.

punkman How's the Spanish language fare?

mircea_popescu I can't really distinguish Latin languages enough to have an opinion, other than that modern French is perhaps having a similar if unrelated problem. Maybe it's all the fallout of television, who's to know. "Here's what three generations of visual 'thinking' barbarians will do to language" sort of thing.

chetty

mircea_popescu Kinda interesting how teh black square is trying to do the same "I'm opting out of your fucktarded language space". Something tells me it won't work.

chetty Maybe more than blacks actually, how often do you need to look up stuff in urban dictionary?

mircea_popescu Well every time someone talks about me, interestingly enough.v

BingoBoingo Re your 70s observation, this is why I kind of follow sports. There is an entire infrastructure built around the mythos of each team and numerous parallel conversations, but at the end of the season there is a win-loss record and people are butthurt in proportion to how wrong the mythos they bought into was.

mircea_popescu That's a point. I guess wrestling actually IS the mother of all US sport.

BingoBoingo Not quite because of kayfabe and the heel/face dynamic.

mircea_popescu What is the whole "x random team owner is racist" thing ? Kayfabe neh ?

BingoBoingo That's not sports, that's politics. And private taxation styled after North Korea.

mircea_popescu There can not be such a difference. Differentiation presumes meaning. If you can't have meaning, you can't say "that's not sports, that's politics".

BingoBoingo Steve Ballmer and Magic Johnson fighting over who gets to take Sterling's team is a political discussion a la which contractor gets this bunch of tax money. David Price can't in the middle of the game take Mike Trout's bat and compell him to use a curtain rod instead.

mircea_popescu That's a point.

———Linux has worked splendidly and for a long time with Torvalds at the top. Canonical Ltd has been working horribly and for a much shorter time with Silber at the top.

Perhaps you can not directly distinguish between these two : they're both people, they both eat, they both wear clothes and speak in rooms with other people. This inability to distinguish merely translates your idiocy into yet another palpable example you'll readily ignore (like all the others), nothing more. It doesn't somehow make Silber's pointed uselessness passable, nor does it make Canonical a sort of Linux Foundation, even if "they both deal with software".

Learn to discriminate, it's what separates humans from chimps. [↩]Yes dears, that's the advantage of those with life experience over those without life experience : we've seen it already. Your fascinating show is our stale re-run. We've seen the "resistence through culture", too, which is your next stage. It'll come to you with all the trappings of novelty, of course, and like all the other people unaware of history before, you'll think you're discovering new ground and innovative moves over there. Have fun, I guess. I'm not spoiling the ending, btw : it's spoiled already. [↩]The funniest part of this unwarranted presumption of belonging is where various people misrepresent the United States as "a nation". If the US is a nation then so is Africa - what, you thought Biden's "error" is accidental ? It's not accidental, it's essential. To him Africa really is a nation, because why wouldn't it be ? If the US is a nation so is this bowl of cereal, any random continent and the Confederated Oceans of Saturn. Why not ? [↩]It's not exactly unknown in Romanian, these days. Here's a guy doing it better than me. [↩]Yes, I actually do this, research terms people use to describe me. This is of course to my benefit, I understand more of the world this way. I could of course just create a word (preferably an acronym) to describe those people who use terms I don't understand to describe me, and leave it at that. This of course would be to my detriment, as I wouldn't understand more of the world in this way. I'd understand less instead.

There's an old Romanian article dealing with the exact same topic, title roughly translates as "what's the use of square roots to me". The mob you see has no patria, the stupid-and-poor filth is the same - exactly the same - in the gutters of York, New York or Mumbay. Given this, it comes as no surprise that the anti-intellectualism of the ignorant is equally present wherever one finds the ignorant, which dovetails neatly into one of the main reasons there isn't nor can there be a US "nation" : the substance of those various populations could just as well be Mexican, or Korean. Mostly, they actually are.

In any case, in between the fundamentalist ignorance of those decried as "ignorant", the militant alternative flavour of ignorance of those doing the decrying and the plain indolent idiocy of those cautiously not getting themselves involved there are no actual people left that could make a nation out of the US. Mind that three rosebuds do not make a Spring, there's some minimal density of crystal lattice required before an amorphous mass can be described as crystaline macroscopically. Now how and out of what unseen straight timber will you make a majority of US citizens that effectually and efficiently marginalizes the rednecks, the libertards and the corporatists all at the same time and over the entire spectrum of public life ? 'Cause that'd be the US nation. Once you find it, let me know. [↩]

« No, you don't have something to say on the topic.

The FinFisher/FinSpy story, for posterity. »

Category: Trilterviuri

Saturday, 09 August, Year 6 d.Tr.

Colonia, Uruguay

So first off, the Uruguayans have pretty cool bills :

They're also rather proud of them, in spite of trading ~22 to the dollar.

The famous "time-holding nude chick giving some blond dude a chain splitting erection with spear" mural. The legend explains that the mural was made by the Municipal Arts&Crafts Shop in 1988. It looks it, especially if this were somewhere in say Ukraina.

So this is the port.

Ever seen aloe flower ?

Anyway, back to the river : very hard basalt rock in some places makes for some interesting shore.

One of the two foreground components of this picture are going to be repeated over the next few. What's your guess, orange tree or old car ?

Yep, right you were. Was it hard ?

The river gets mighty foggy in the morning.

Run of the mill collectivist indoctrination shit. Notice two things : one's the unsanctioned rendering of the teacher as a bird, which probably means exactly the same here as it did back home : whether it's a penguin or a parakeet, it's there to signify complete loss of contact with reality. A sucker, in other words. The other's this :

Notice the cocks ? The... collective cocks ? Well then.

I went and sought out the most destroyed sidewalk in all of Colonia for this shot. Victory is mine.

That looks almost exactly like some sort of Ford Model B. The A's were actually assembled in Buenos Aires, I guess it's possible the B's were too. The (illegible) marking towards the back identifies it as "Victory" but that doesn't seem to translate to anything.

I guess that means "Let desire win the war of possibility", is it ?

What's your guess, was this the prison or the treasury ?

They told him they were going to get new parts, they told him the bandage is to keep the rust out, but he knows he's not going anywhere ever again. He knows, and his headlights are sad :(

This is the place where they keep motorcycles and bicycles.

This is the place where they keep washing machines. Very organised sort of people.

Ever seen one so happy ?

« BitBet, June 2014 Statement

F.MPIF, June 2014 Statement »

Category: La pas prin lume

Thursday, 03 July, Year 6 d.Tr.

Collections of views and other impressions. Also from Buenos Aires.

This is the first honestly captioned ambulance service I ever saw. Imagine the ads : "Bob, how do you feel after the operation ?" "Same". Cut to SAME!!11 credits, some lame pun and... you're done.

This'd be the Twink Trick Tickler Brigade. Or something.

Be shoecat. Have no shoes.

Of course, the caption there on the wall says

Argentinian folk have serious problems handling time.

« Between the hammer and the anvil...

PSA : If you're trying to escape the gravity well, you'll meet this on your way. »

Category: La pas prin lume

Wednesday, 19 November, Year 6 d.Tr.

Cine cunoaste stie.

Asta e tot. Eventual ca bonus conspectari din urma.

« Hello everyone, I'm Facebook Martin and this is the racquetball trick.

The "sexodus". »

Category: Rautati si Mizerii

Friday, 12 December, Year 6 d.Tr.

China is the place to be!

I would like to thank Qin Zhihui - who through his irresponsible and uncitizen like, harmful to the legitimate interests of all the people and the People's Worker's Good And Best Supreme Future of Harmony and Eventual Party of China policy, like a thrice-cursed dog of evil spreading false and untrue rumours about how Xi Jinping likes to copulate with baby goats which he buys from foreign farmers for over one trillion yen each (they're special trained) on a local knock-off copy of Twitter called WeinerBoo or something, which were read by his 12 million strong following and reposted in many places and watercooler conversations all over the offices and rice fields of the Great Country - established for all time the lessons to be learned and warnings to be had about the dangers of uncitizen-like thrice cursed dog behaviour even online!

I would like to thank the various and innumerable People's Authorities from Chaoyang, Beijing, China, about eight thousand or so of them directly involved with the prosecution of this case, anonymous derpants, herpants and pissants, labouring in secrecy under the various brand names of People's, Worker's, Bset, Furute, Surpeme, Hannory, Reobek, Chenal and so on. Their sleepless vigilance, their careful depersonalisation, their pointless, mindless, zombie-like existence being integral to the safeguarding of the best interests of The Peopel, The Party and The Steta!

I would like to say that Qin Zhihui's discipline has been good for me, and that the authorities' hypocritical, deceitful and plain old mendacious statements as to how his arrest is completely unrelated to any sort of political play by one power actor to limit the growing power of better loved, smarter actors that just happen to be independent of the stupidity, ignorance and sloth which is always and everywhere the mark of "the people" and their more or less organised mobs have instructed and informed.

Furthermore, I would like to thank all those involved for the genius move of making a law that punishes success. It can only conceivably help a large block of otherwise stupid, ignorant and lazy people who would like to not be stupid, ignorant or lazy, but who can't for the life of them find any sort of tool of any kind that'd help in that endeavour. Reducing the entirety of mainland China to the intellectual equivalent of a swamp made of the dumped contents of one trillion septic tanks, throwing all the people in and carefully removing any shred of toilet paper, permanently removing all sources of running water and hiding the soap is bound to create a brilliant, resplendent future for all of China, and by extension, for all the World.

Ars Gratia Artis :

« What the WoT is for, how it works and how to use it.

The elitism memory hole effect »

Category: China care este

Sunday, 13 April, Year 6 d.Tr.

Check your privilege

It all started as all good things start these days : on irci :

mircea_popescu !t h am1

assbot [HAVELOCK:AM1] 1D: 0.11000000 / 0.26376753 / 0.43411640 (945 shares, 249.26031865 BTC), 7D: 0.11000000 / 0.32420524 / 0.50990000 (1337 shares, 433.46240978 BTC), 30D: 0.11000000 / 0.39303465 / 0.50990000 (2780 shares, 1092.63632173 BTC)

mircea_popescu !t h amq

assbot Have you got any tobacco?ii

mircea_popescu Guise halp whay is good investment tankeing ? Shorts fud campaign ?

mircea_popescu !up skinnkavajiii

-assbot- You voiced skinnkavaj for 30 minutes.

* assbot gives voice to skinnkavaj

mircea_popescu How's your portofolio these days ?

fluffypony "Have actually been discussing this very topic with a couple of my friends. Though CS has been around for quite sometime, it's becoming more and more apparent that Kumala doesn't seem to spend a whole lotta time even making sure his sites wallet's are working. Add to this the ridiculous fee's, 0 due-diligence, and serious lack of support we've all agreed that CS's time is limited at best barring some sort of major delta in Kumala's modus operandi of who gives a flying-."

fluffypony CS seems to be on the way out.

mircea_popescu Heh. Well this is the best ever indication the fuckwits are running out of whole bitcoins : the people who used to steal by the 100s are no longer interested to either continue hitting them for quarters or to sell to a hungry young scammer willing to bother. And so the ancient chumpatrons close down.

fluffypony Unfortunately the aforementioned user jumps to the wrong solution. "Decentralized exchanges are the next logical step in my opinion." Right after complaining about due dilligence.

mircea_popescu This is because the aforementioned user does not belong holding any bitcoin. He's not correctly privileged in the head.

pankkake !b 10

assbot Last 10 lines bashed and pending review. ( http://dpaste.com/3X7V79X.txt )

mircea_popescu This is why privilege is so very important : so that guys like him are kept packing others' groceries forever.

fluffypony He should check his privilege.

mircea_popescu Definitely. I think this is the new meaning of that previously meaningless expression : "check your privilege" is a polite indication that one's being so generally stupid it's not worth discussing the particulars. Roughly the equivalent of old MS-DOS "general failure please reboot".

fluffypony Lol

jurov Abort,Retry,Ignore,Fail?

fluffypony All of the above.

mircea_popescu ^

fluffypony Unprivileged comment detected. Please dump core and reboot life and / or universe.

So now you know.

———Check the day's logs, there's an abundance of gems in there, including an unrelated discussion of "tech" "IPO"s. [↩]Apparently this symbol wasn't randomly suspended because "suspicious activity" - in spite of matching exactly all the particulars of the NEOBEE case. Consequently it also wasn't arbitrarily re-listed with random letters added in the tail. Clearly, Havelock must be defunct, just like the brain of a random full time fuckwit/part time blogger unknown as Brad Edwards. [↩]This is that famous guy. Also known for "I love to buy stocks when everyone is selling them". A typical representative of forum-investors. [↩]

« The fallacy machine

La Florida and other places »

Category: Meta psihoza

Saturday, 31 May, Year 6 d.Tr.

Ce vi chi.

It's a Peruvian dish, with tiger's milk and raw fish (well not really raw, it's cooked chemically rather than thermically). Here you go, made with red salmon :

As for desert, challenge accepted :

And finally, as an unrelated bonus :

« How the other half lives, or Michael O. Church is a scummy fuckwit

How I was wrong : Cuckolding, or a story about sigmas »

Category: Zsilnic

Friday, 22 August, Year 6 d.Tr.

Ca tot... s-a tras tot s-a fumat tot s-a baut tot cum e peste tot ? La fel ca peste tot.

This would be the boy genius you all know and love as asciilifeform, proudly displaying the incunabula of his arcanum or, in other words, the hermetic tools of his regal art plus the fruits thereof.

On the analyzer to the left, phase transitions as sampled on the exit gate of the RNG arrayi working on battery powerii.

A larger view of the unit being sampled above. The Faraday shield has a cover which is removed in this picture.

This is yours truly explaining to Mike how the armatures of the shield have actually been carefully aligned against the board to make sampler access feasible in case the end user actually wants to measure the elements populating the board, because end user accessibility and verifiability isn't merely a boastful claim in this case, nor an afterthought slapped on haphazardly post hoc, but an integral part of the design process.

Either that or explaining to him how the solder marks anchoring the shield to the board work just fine as a tamper evident seal, especially if re-done by hand by the end user. It's particularly difficult to exactly copy random solder patterns.

In this picture you will find MPOE-PR, the Bitcoin Manticoreiii ; Fanny, l'Amazone Francaise and some other people.

One of said other people may or may not be scheming to take over the world.

This is a Take-Over-The-World commemorative coin I was regaled with in exchange for my donation to the cause. It weighs roughly one doom et demi.

That'd be it for me. And next year, in Jerusalina.

PS. The tot in the title is no cognate of the German word for dead, it simply means "everything" in Romanian. Funny how that works, huh ? Anyway, the entire thing is a verse in a rap piece, roughly equivalent to "Everything that was to be stuffed was stuffed, everything that was to be smoked was smoked, everything that was to be drunk was drunk, how is it like everywhere ? Just like everywhere."

———Which XORs together the outputs of two identical units. The assembly works as an analog circuit, and consequently has to be sampled. [↩]Which is how the unit actually does its cryptographic work, to trump attempts at differential power analysis. The batteries used here are not the same as will be used by the finished Cardano, but merely happen to have the same voltage and are readily available. [↩]An ancient horror perhaps only comparable to Chtulhu, it looks just like a bunny, but with a vicious streak a mile wide and poisonous byte. Known for taking the dead to their final resting place in PersianFolklore.org [↩]

« In which we teach basic reading comprehension to a certain Mr. Preston Byrne

An hero is he... »

Category: Activism

Monday, 21 April, Year 6 d.Tr.

Buenos Aires BDSM : La Casona del Sado, aka Faker House

The place is not necessarily easy to find for a tourist, because it implements a very dubious measure of security mostly consisting of "only tell details to people who ask pointedly and appear suspicious, to ensure that 10/10 copsi and 0/100 fresh morsels ever find the address". I had to be in front of the fucking door and pissed off in order to obtain the magical "apartment 1B"ii, they couldn't just tell me that on the first pass. If I ran my OpSec like this... but then again I guess I shouldn't be too harsh on mere mortals. After all, there is that Ulbricht episode.

A very gentille young man picks us up and escorts us to this very cramped apartment. A Spanish speaking old whoreiii greets us, pockets the 120 peso a head cover chargeiv, makes a note on her Windows Notepadv and takes us on a tour of the place. She's not dumb, but clearly limited by monocultural exposure ; she means well I'm sure but implements poorly. I feel her tendrils trying to read me, to little effect. Very proud of her 15 years' experience, which is fine, except here's the thing : I've had a certain slavevi for a decade now. A decade, you realise, and it's not that she's barely thirty, it's that I'm barely thirty. By the time I'll be sixty that'll mean forty fucking years, longer than any life sentence, longer than any commitment any human being you know ever made. It's not that I feign not being impressed to preserve social bargaining power. It's that plainly and for very good reasons I am actually not impressed.

Anyway, the apartment has high ceilings, which is the second among a short list of scant nice things about the place. In what looks like a coupla thousand square feet (divided into about a dozen rooms and hallways so you're never ever in that fearsome position where you can't touch a wall by lifting a hand, god forbid!) they've cramped a large number of diverse tools, there's a wheel, a coupla racks, a coupla cages, a horse or two. Everything looks reasonably well worn (which is not a criticism). There are very few armchairs, and all placed strategically blocking some critical corridor or other, so you can never relax. There is a room dedicated to sitting down, cheap plastic patio chairs and a couple of disjointed tables. As the tour ends, the matron tells us they only have two rules.

Rule #1 is no sex.

I am well meh'd at this point. I mean, it's perfectly true the place is an absolute cockfestvii so perhaps they perceive no need to fuck, as far as they're concerned. As far as I'm concerned however I'm always escorted, and you telling me I can't fuck what I bring from home in my own doggy bag is a little rich. My own mother had not the outlandish idea to come up with such "rules" in her own house, who does this Sofia chick think she is ? I would have said to her "I have the tits, I make the rules" but unfortunately she didn't speak enough English and it doesn't have the same edge in Spanish.

But then we moved on to rule #2. You won't believe this one. No nudity.

This woman pretends to be running a BDSM meet with no nudity. And she wants people to pay to participate. It's almost like being in Romania or something, I'm starting to suspect old people have a stupidity all of their own, that's countryless and perhaps timeless.

Don't get me wrong, the Argentines are really very bizarre about female nudity. At that other place, with ~200 people in attendance and cocksucking going on in every corner I had the only bare cunt under my hands. That's right, all.other.girls. very carefully wore something between the legs, god forbid some air gets in there and we all die a phosgene death or something. But even so, for crying out loud, this is supposed to be the place to be naked, lay off the stupidity already.

By now I absolutely need a drink, so I go to the kitchen of the place. A little black lab lives here. He's sage and placid, carefully getting out of the way this way and that way so people can navigate the narrows and sounds of the place. I ask the kitchen girl (she's dressed like a CVS/Pharmacy clerk, because this is "la casona del sado", not some CVS/Pharmacy in rural Ohio) if she speaks English. She does. I tell her I need a drink. I could have communicated the broad concept in Spanish too, but "I need a drink" is a thing past the broad concept. She gets it, because she offers beer with such hopelessness it's only fitting. No, I say. Do you have Reserva San Juanviii ? No, she says. Whiskey ?

Yes motherfucker, I come from a country that invented plum juice and I'm going to drink whiskey in sugarcane country because why the fuck not or something. Here's a hint : whiskey, like all cereal alcohols, is the shit of this world, one step above distilled wood. If you can't get fruit alcohol and are desperate for a drink you might indulge, but in that case you'll probably drink fucking vodka, at least it's clear. You don't need "aged" whiskey to show you all the greatness of barrel without any goodness of good alcohol, it's like putting a rotten corpse in a bellydance costume. It doesn't help it look any better, on the contrary.

So I end up with a bottle of whine wine which is passible. We go to the chair room, sit down, I smoke a cigarillo, go through about half the bottle during an hour of boredom waiting for maybe someone I know to show up and split. I've had more BDSM at the cinema in countries where I don't speak the language with girls I didn't know previously than I had at fucking Faker House. And, if the photographs on the walls are any testimony, so did everyone else.ix

There are no direct reasons to visit this place. I can think of some meta-reasons, like trolling the "community" of fucktards and idiots that are happy in their limited, infantile reconstruction of some adult thing they've unwarrantedly stole the name of. Not really my cup of tea.

———This thing was closed down by the police sometime during April, and they probably beat up on the muppets a little because everyone seems to have had the fear of God put into their bones somehow. Which is kinda weird, consider this ancient Romanian joke : Mom finds, while cleaning junior's room, some Sado-Masochism porn mags (this was pre-Internet). Cue the parents seated pensively in the kitchen. Eventually, Mom breaks the silence : "I say we don't beat him..." [↩]I don't recommend you actually visit this place, unless driven by some meta-interest, like wanting to privately laugh at idiots for a night. Should you be so inclined or otherwise driven to spend a night among the shadows of unsubstantiated pretense I've noted it here for your benefit. It's the bottom right button on a two row arrangement. The address itself is trivial to find, ask around. [↩]Very little has changed since 2008, except for the extra weight of half a decade. Here's the cached page just in case. [↩]I'm not sure what the cover covers and I didn't bother ask. At approximately eight dollars I couldn't begin to care. It is however 20% over the cover charge for the other place, which other place is a largeish hall and in my opinion a preferable outlet. [↩]Seriously now dear Argentine people... take a hint already. [↩]When I say slave I mean slave. I do not mean that we sit around, "discuss our feelings" for half an hour, then negotiate what she's going to let me do to her (because she's the master now, the slave?!) and then pick a codeword for her to break my fucking and then proceed to "sessionar" for half a fucking hour. What in the shitstained hells is "sessionar" anyway, holy shit, it became a verb now ? Fuck you, buncha fucking useless muppetheads. Stop faking it!

When I say slave I mean slave, I mean that when she fucked up I don't recall what minor point I ordered her to spend the night taking cold showers, and she did, four to the hour for hours, to the point of taking her body temperature to fifty or something. I mean that when I had her eat dogfood on all fours from a dog dish and she got one of her long hairs in there I made her eat it all anyway. So she vomited, and I made her lick her vomit off the floor. Not some of it, all of it. When I say slave I mean the woman will do anything I tell her to do whatsoever, with the only concern of how to do it faster and better. Because that is what a slave is, not fucking "safewords" and inane bitch.

And that's barely scratching the surface, the list is long indeed. But the list is really not the point, stop focusing on the list and trying to fake slavery through the forms of slavery. The point is that the woman is my property, without defense and without recourse, to be disposed of as I see fit. It's a lovely arrangement, it allows her to learn and grow a lot faster than you ever manage, specifically because she doesn't have to spend all that mental energy on lost causes like you do. She knows her independence is a lost cause, she embraces that rather than having to pretend like it isn't, and as any religion and any path to enlightenment out there will tell you, this is the avenue to happiness. The only avenue to happiness. [↩]I counted twenty guys and four women. Two of them were old, and I don't mean old as in, over 25. The other two were overweight, and I do not mean overweight as in, over 120 lbs. To use the dedicated PUA terminology, there was a 8-9 in there, in four parts. [↩]Excellent local brandy, if you come by do try it. [↩]This kid with a camera hung around his neck verified I grok Spanish and then informed me he's the photographer of the place and if we need anything just call. Which is nice, I suppose, until you went and took a look at the display photographs, they had maybe a hundred or so on three or four panes scattered all through. Thinking about it, this may be enough reason to go check the thing out, they're ridiculously bad. Even leaving aside that in.every.fucking.one the woman is hiding her face - and in the lamest of ways, too, holding up a balloon, the hair thing, the behind arm thing, the fucking 13 yo works! - they're badly framed, meaningless drivel. I don't think you could find a paysite that'd publish them even if you gave the set away free, which should say something, considering all the atrociously bad porn that gets published anyway. [↩]

« I love Rochester. So will you.

Bulwer-Lytton »

Category: La pas prin lume

Sunday, 14 September, Year 6 d.Tr.

Bitcoin was written by the retarded, part II

The first part of this amusement park ride was published here last year, as Bitcoind : not quite ready for prime time. Let us delve further into the depths of braindamage and despair.

I. Bitcoin wallets consist of a list of private keys, which are hashed into Bitcoin addresses (these practically would be the respective public keys). All Bitcoins in existence now or ever to be created in the future strictly exist as balances allocated to such addresses by the consensus-building instrument known as the blockchain.

II. All bitcoin wallets contain at least one "account", which is a set of Bitcoin addresses such that an account can contain any number of addresses, but any one given address may belong to only one account. These accounts are arbitrarily created, except all wallets have by default an account named "". That's "empty string".i Further except that they can not be named "*". Because.

III. All bitcoin accounts have an associated balance, representing the total Bitcoin balance they hold...

IV. Except this balance is not in fact calculated as the sum of Bitcoin balances held in the associated addresses...

V. And can be arbitrarily set to any value you wish...

VI. Provided the sum of balances held by all accounts in a wallet doesn't exceed the total Bitcoin held by all the addresses in that wallet,

VII. Except wallet account balances can be negative, in which case you can indeed exceed the total Bitcoin held by all the addresses in that wallet, and this happens quite commonly without any particular exertions on the part of the user.

VIII. Meanwhile Bitcoin wallet accounts in no way influence any Bitcoin payments, in that when ordered to make a payment Bitcoin software still selects coins from the whole wallet according to its own rules, completely ignoring which account it was supposed to pay from,

IX. Except it will arbitrarily fail for absolutely no reason if said account nominally had a balance associated that's less than the declared payment, notwithstanding that a) the account balance is meaningless anyway and b) the payment process doesn't even look at accounts when selecting the addresses it's paying from. So basically this just works as an arbitrary failure mode for no reason, just a random error message in there for the case you were bored. Which, inasmuch as you're using Bitcoin for any purpose whatsoever, you most definitely will never be.

X. Labels are a different implementation of the same concept (if you can call it that). They equally do not work, and to quote :

gavinandresen commented September 16, 2013

bitcoind accounts and Bitcoin-Qt labels are not designed to be consistent with each other. Use one or the other, not both at the same time.

Diapolo commented September 16, 2013

Well it's at least intersting to have accounts, with names I never set by using Bitcoin-Qt, no? I have no clue about the concept of labels, just asking :).

laanwj commented October 21, 2013

No, they don't need to match. For historical purposes labels and accounts use the same underlying information in the database but in different ways. I guess that should be changed some day, but doing that and keeping backwards compatibility (neither losing your labels nor accounts) will at least require a lot of testing.

How do you like it ?

Ooooobviously, we don't need any specification here, because the specification is the code.

Welcome to the world of the Powerfully Retarded Rangers.

———And obviously if you run php it'd be not the same as NULL or w/e. [↩]

« Let's clarify some things

A compendium of basic points about Bitcoin for the benefit of various confused noobs. »

Category: Bitcoin

Monday, 24 February, Year 6 d.Tr.