Qntra (S.QNTR) October 2015 Statement
Qntra has realised no income and made no expenditure this period. Qntra is expected to realise no income and make no expenditure the following period.
As directed by its charter and on the basis of the report of the editor in chief, 8`590 S.QNTR shares issued this period. This brings the total shares issued to 322`828 (+2.73%).
After a year in the position of Chief Editor, cazalla has gone into temporary retirement. His stake in the golden share block has been repurchased, and BingoBoingo has been promoted to the CE position. This might be the first successfuli transition of power in a Bitcoin entity of any kind, which should be encouraging. Good luck to the new CE, and good luck to everyone else.
———It certainly is the first transparent one, which should tell you a few things. [↩]
« The war of the Roses
Filth »
Category: S.QNTR
Thursday, 05 November, Year 7 d.Tr.
Qntra (S.QNTR) November 2015 Statement
Qntra has realised no income and made no expenditure this period. Qntra is expected to realise no income and make no expenditure the following period.
As directed by its charter and on the basis of the report of the editor in chief, 14`052 S.QNTR shares issued this period. This brings the total shares issued to 336`880 (+4.35%).
A very good month for Qntra, perhaps the best one to date, as far as output quality or even quantity are concerned, as well as editorial variety and various other metrics. We shall continue to strive.
« BitBet (S.BBET) November 2015 Statement
B,TMSR~ and fundamental justice reform. »
Category: S.QNTR
Wednesday, 02 December, Year 7 d.Tr.
Qntra (S.QNTR) May 2015 Statement
Qntra has realised no income and made no expenditure this period. Qntra is expected to realise no income and make no expenditure the following period.
As directed by its charter and on the basis of the report of the editor in chief, 12`884 S.QNTR shares issued this period. This brings the total shares issued to 239`624 (+5.37%).
Judging by the graph reproduced below, Qntra has just broken through a three month roll of traffic decreases, so onwards and upwards, into the Summer!
« MPEx (S.MPOE) May 2015 Statement
MPIF (F.MPIF) May 2015 Statement »
Category: S.QNTR
Thursday, 04 June, Year 7 d.Tr.
Qntra (S.QNTR) March 2015 Statement
Qntra has realised no income and made no expenditure this period. Qntra is expected to realise no income and make no expenditure the following period.
As directed by its charter and on the basis of the report of the editor in chief, 25`162 S.QNTR shares issued this period.i This brings the total shares issued to 212`820 (+13.40%).
Qntra has also managed a notable premiere - being the first media organisation to have an accredited reporter at the Bitcoin conference. Something tells me that this, rather than anything else, is going to appear retrospectively as the reasonable criteria for judging fit and likeliness of survival in the murky waters of online journalism. Time will tell.
———It seems it's pretty much stabilized in the 25-30k monthly range. Which, ironically, is about what Trilema averages as well. [↩]
« The definitive sovereign
MPEx (S.MPOE) March 2015 Statement »
Category: S.QNTR
Thursday, 02 April, Year 7 d.Tr.
Qntra (S.QNTR) June 2015 Statement
Qntra has realised no income and made no expenditure this period. Qntra is expected to realise no income and make no expenditure the following period.i
As directed by its charter and on the basis of the report of the editor in chief, 19`024 S.QNTR shares issued this period. This brings the total shares issued to 258`648 (+7.93%).
———As discussed elsewhere, we superficially discussed maybe adding advertising. [↩]
« MPEx (S.MPOE) June 2015 Statement
MPIF (F.MPIF) June 2015 Statement »
Category: S.QNTR
Sunday, 05 July, Year 7 d.Tr.
Qntra (S.QNTR) July 2015 Statement
Qntra has realised no income and made no expenditure this period. Qntra is expected to realise no income and make no expenditure the following period.i
As directed by its charter and on the basis of the report of the editor in chief, 22`438 S.QNTR shares issued this period. This brings the total shares issued to 281`086 (+8.67%).
See you next month! And the next and the next and then Qntra will be one year old!
———Significant DDoS attacks this month, as you perhaps might have noticed. I guess Qntra must be doing something right.
In spite of whatever expenditure that meant in the budget of whatever party, pretty much every metric you can think of is up MoM, so I guess upwards and onwards as George says. [↩]
« So, what of the future ?
MiniGame (S.MG), July 2015 Statement »
Category: S.QNTR
Saturday, 01 August, Year 7 d.Tr.
Qntra (S.QNTR) January 2015 Statement
Qntra has realised no income and made no expenditure this period. Qntra is expected to realise no income and make no expenditure the following period.i
As directed by its charter and on the basis of the report of the editor in chief, 22`926 S.QNTR shares issued this period. This brings the total shares issued to 158`788.
Qntra seems to be doing quite well, and we're all excited about its perspectives. You might wish to consider it's perhaps the best time to try and get your own work approved for publishing. Talk to cazalla or Bingoboingo.
———It gave me a scare, but it was just Coelho haxxing. [↩]
« Third pass addressing the more common pseudo-arguments raised by the very stupid people that like the Gavin scamcoin proposal
Aseara fusei la una... »
Category: S.QNTR
Sunday, 01 February, Year 7 d.Tr.
Qntra (S.QNTR) February 2015 Statement
Qntra has realised no income and made no expenditure this period (to some alarm). Qntra is expected to realise no income and make no expenditure the following period.
As directed by its charter and on the basis of the report of the editor in chief, 28`870 S.QNTR shares issued this period. This brings the total shares issued to 187`658 (+18.18%).
As the editor in chief points out, February has been Qntra's best month to date :
As you can see, this is the sixth month. I for one am rather curious as to how Qntra's one year aniversary might look like.
« The Harry Potter challenge
MPEx (S.MPOE) February 2015 Statement »
Category: S.QNTR
Monday, 02 March, Year 7 d.Tr.
Qntra (S.QNTR) December 2014 Statement
Qntra has realised no income and made no expenditure this period. Qntra is expected to realise no income and make no expenditure the following period.
As directed by its charter and on the basis of the report of the editor in chief, 26`076 S.QNTR shares issued this period. This brings the total shares issued to 161`938.
Other than that, business as usual.
« MPIF (F.MPIF) December 2014 Statement
Introducing the Trilema jobs board »
Category: S.QNTR
Monday, 05 January, Year 7 d.Tr.
Qntra (S.QNTR) August 2015 Statement
Qntra has realised no income and made no expenditure this period. Qntra is expected to realise no income and make no expenditure the following period.i
As directed by its charter and on the basis of the report of the editor in chief, 16`644 S.QNTR shares issued this period. This brings the total shares issued to 297`730 (+5.92%).
That's about all - Qntra remains the old gray lady (with a rabbit hat) of the Bitcoin space.
———No DDoS this month, but a significant uptick in measured traffic, perhaps explained by further social media drama, which is practically the same thing. [↩]
« MiniGame (S.MG), August 2015 Statement
Micul Botanist »
Category: S.QNTR
Tuesday, 01 September, Year 7 d.Tr.
Qntra (S.QNTR) April 2015 Statement
Qntra has realised no income and made no expenditure this period. Qntra is expected to realise no income and make no expenditure the following period.
As directed by its charter and on the basis of the report of the editor in chief, 13`920 S.QNTR shares issued this period. This brings the total shares issued to 226`740 (+6.54%).
Altogether a slow month, hopefully something [actually notable] happens in May.
« BitBet (S.BBET) April 2015 Statement
The Fetlife Meatlist - Volume X »
Category: S.QNTR
Monday, 04 May, Year 7 d.Tr.
Prophylaxis
Motto : We're leaving together, but still it's farewell.
And maybe we'll come back to earth, who can tell?
I guess there is no one to blame... We're leaving ground (leaving ground)
Will things ever be the same again? It's the final condom...
Nature is fundamentally dishonesti, which always comes to bite it in the ass. Yet it never learns from the experience. Not ever. What experience ? It "perfects" the art of going through the motionsii, sure, which is how you end up with circuitous nonsense such as "the incredible complexity of life", but it also stays a blind anal childiii as if its life depended on it - which might have been the case, arguably, technically, at some point. Not for a long, loooong time now. But it won't yield, will it ? "Why change what works ? Especially when it doesn't!"
In our present case, the situation is that sexuate reproduction offers some very significant fitness advantages to any species deploying it, whereas intelligence also offers some very significant fitness advantages to any species deploying it. Are these incompatible ? Let's find out!
Turns out that yeah, they are. Even as little intelligence as the common waterbug enjoys is nevertheless sufficient to make it realise that sexuate reproduction is a burden, and in all the time and with all the effort such reproduction squanders it could instead have done something else. Anything else - like floating idly on a lake, as the waterbug doesn't have that many options - seems more appealing.
"But wait!" says ever-resourceful Nature, digging through her stupid box. "What if we, you know... hacked the reward pathways of the brain ? That'll make them do what we want them to do!"
Except it won't. Like every other ugly hack deployed by dumbassiv Nature, the "reward pathways" hack results first and foremost in some unintended stack smashing, because you see, other than the species in question there are many other species inhabiting the same general ecosystem, and those have to use their own protein constructions for their own purposes, and there's only so many ways to hitch carbon atoms together, and as a result those other species end up providing fuzzer services for this one, which means sooner or later you'll find a psychotropic agent, and lo and behold - "who needs reasons when you got heroin".v
But until that, you'll see the male waterbug dragging the female waterbug under the water and hold her there to asphyxiate until she submits, as she had the misfortune to develop this chitinous cunt plate to prevent forcible entry. Or else hold her above him, in front of a frog (which eats waterbugs), until she idem submits. Or gets eaten. Whatever. Reward pathways for the win, and there isn't a reward pathway for having a girlfriend.
All this because sexuate reproduction implies that the burden will necessarily not be shared equally, and so one party has an incentive to fuck the other over. Moreover, since the burden is going to have to be supported mostly by one party, that one party will change under the pressure, will adapt to the requirements of the burden. All the while the other party will necessarily change to take advantage of all the sweet, sweet empty space provided to it, free of charge, at the expense of half the population in the same niche. After all, bar service would be a lot slower and bartenders a lot shittier on average if bars had to accomodate the entire human population rather than just the lesser half of it.
Thus arise sexual dismorphisms, which is to say "because men hunt and women nest". "It's only natural", which means to say "since nature gored you already, we don't both need to go picking berries like retards. You stay in this sty and waddle while I go have some fun hunting. And when I'm back I'll go hunt your daughter an' stick it in her, too. Gotta conserve the species!"
The patently natural unfairness of all this has led the god-deluded into creating "institutions" so that you know, both male and female sit around picking berries in Farmville, instead of her sighing in stocks while he goes flying a hang glider, drunk and nakedvi, to survey the field for any unimpregnated wandering females to be taken back to the impregnation stocksvii. Make things more fair, which is to say more even, which is to say more bland and appealing to the stupid.
Except... it's actually cheaper, which is to say easier and more convenient, for the male to just go through the motions instead of doing the actual deed. And so no, you don't see a lot of Viking hang gliders around. You also see a lot of condoms, which serve the exact same purpose, practically speaking, only use up a lot less rubber.
It's also a lot cheaper, which is to say easier and more convenient, for the male to persuade the female that she doesn't even want anything from life, and so you see a lot of "empowered" and "career driven" independent women who you know, provide the outer shell for all the condom usage while pretending to like it - because that's the female coping mechanism, and has been since forever - she really didn't even want what she can't possibly get and she never wanted it all along!viii
It doesn't even stop there. Because why would it, really. To quote Mo of Robotzi fame, "Vali, uite cum facem, eu iti instalez un webcam, si tu numai te dezbraci, ochei ? Totu-i pe Internet, numa' pe Internet."
It doesn't stop there, either. It just keeps going, and going, and going, and then you wake up one day, look back and it's...
* mircea_popescu suddenly realised, sometimes last night, that the deep reason nothing works is simply that - all of it was made on a lark. Not for serious.
mircea_popescu Anyway : there's this entire pretend culture, and it goes very deep. Dunno how to properly illustrate it in its meta splendor. But I'm nothing oif not persistent, so lemme try. Case A : kid sees girl in bar. Waits for moment when no-one's looking around 3am, kloinks her in the head with bottle, drags her to the dark alley outside, shreds her clothes and her virginity. Case B : kid sees girl in bar, works up his courage until 3am, eventually approaches her and explains that he's into kinky stuff. Which works out, because she always fantasized about being raped, so they meet in dark alley and have some great sex. I posit that the entire fucking thing, "from the ground up", is B. all of it. "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if you could like... encrypt shit ?" "Why ?" "So you could be like... a secre agent!". Then they went about roleplaying their super-secret-agent kink for a while, and then forgot about it.ix Guitar hero for a different generation.
asciilifeform The 'pretend culture', at least in as far as it concerns public key crypto, was a very deliberate plank of the 'cypherpunk' folks - 'let's use crypto for every piece of shit, to defeat traffic analysis'.
trinque Sounds like the problem with letting most people define themselves on their own. You're going to get fake representations out of most, if it cuts it with the people looking at them. I was fumbling for that idea the other day re: internal representations of identity.
mircea_popescu Possibly the last time anyone did anything for serious with computers was in the 80s. Since then, everyone's just been trying to salvage utility out of the kids' roleplaying.
asciilifeform Industry exists.
mircea_popescu Does it.
asciilifeform I know, this sound like 'martians live among us'. Recall that pdp emulator fella ? Somebody's buying that. Folks with beards as long as my arm. On whom the remnants of 'the west' stand, like on elephants on turtles.
mircea_popescu Aha. Exactly. Those are hobbists not industrialists.x
asciilifeform Not hobbyists. Those use 'open source' emu. This one is intended for industrial plant, which still runs, yes, on pdp.
mircea_popescu As someone's hobby.
asciilifeform (As do a great many american .mil systems, of the kind which still work.)
mircea_popescu The "industry", such as it is, is fucking Google, holding hackathons, trying to feed themselves out of used condoms left behind in dark alleys.
asciilifeform No. The industry, in actuality, is grey beards maintaining code written in 1973, which keeps the water mains pressurized and the lights on.
He says the transformation is not complete. Maybe he's right or maybe he just can't cope with reality, I don't know and I don't think we yet have enough data to actually find out. In the meanwhile, the plain statement that no one has written any code as a professional activity in the past twenty years can be ridden for a lot of mileage, and simlarly the plain observation that no-one's done any work whatsoever in any field whatsoever, for just as long. Perhaps longer.
The whole shebang rests squarely on people trying to act like how they imagine the people doing the job they're pretending to be doing would act. Current Romania was legendary built atop a "Mircea, fa-te ca muncesti!"xi and current everywhere else seems to be constructed out of children pretending to be adults, when they obviously aren't, and pretending to be doing the things adults used to be doing, except they also obviously aren't. And then "impostor syndrome" is considered a disorder by these nuts, when those are actually the only sane people, caught under the muck of their congeners. Who, you know, "don't even really work here". They're just killing time until... you know, "they get discovered". Right ?
Aunt Dumb got herself painted into a corner yet again, the "hack" got hacked, and here we are. You will perhaps care to note that this generation of impostors is also the first generation that grew up with condoms as a component of mainstream pop culture. No longer is one a "pervert" for buying such, but moreover they get distributed freely in schools. It makes sense, in its own terms, but apparently it's also managed to entrench "playfulness" aka forever dumb and "generation Y" aka neoteny into the mainstream, perhaps to everyone's detriment.
I don't propose we get rid of condoms, if you're wondering, nor do I propose some sort of enlightened restraint in that ancient nonsense vein. Instead, I propose the god delusion is outright just as stupid, if not more stupid than the slothful hackishness of unadorned nature. So how about a prophylactic to end all prophylaxis, which is to say : a thin, semipermeable membrane drawn smack drab through the mij middle of the institutional delusions of the god people ? Take the sane parts - the contract, revised, the WoT, sound money as the foundation of all things. Throw aside the useful nonsense - the socialist Christianityxii, the Bayesian "politeness"xiii, generally the nonsense required to make things palatable to the multitudes. Fuck multitudes, it's not just that they can't have larger blocks - they can't have a future. Like, at all.
Something along those lines, anyway. Who knows...
———Which, incidentally, offers the best explanation that I am aware of for the otherwise baffling god delusion - "people generally" really dislike thinking about how things are run by scumbags. So instead of thinking about how "nature is fundamentally dishonest", they just meditate about how "god is great". Works, if it works. [↩]What do exams select for ? Exam-takers. [↩]Fun fact : googling for anal child yields a bunch of copacetic crud about kids health anal fissures etc. Googling for site:trilema.com anal child yields "Your search - site:trilema.com anal child - did not match any documents. Suggestions: Make sure all words are spelled correctly.". Because yeah, seriously, my spelling is likely the culprit. Finally, searching for site:trilema.com anal or site:trilema.com child both pop out trilema.com/2015/the-anal-child/ as the top result, unquestionably.
The explanation being, of course, that the multi-billion dollar advertising server cum searchsomething has managed to develop a "ranking algorithm" so very advanced it notices that Trilema has no content on the topic of anal+child of the type it would like to serve, and so then pretends there's nothing there. Because this is how AI works, seriously, it keeps lists of what it would like to see. AI is really exactly identical to your average US fucktarded puritan.
How fortunate this happenstance, for the stupidest people in the history of the world to live (coincidentally!) in the stupidest language in the history of the world, served by the stupidest AI in the history of the world. All glory to Thunder-ten-Tronckh, the best barony, and its Pangloss Google, the greatest philosopher of the Holy Roman Empire! [↩]She might be your mother, but she sure as fuck ain't mine. To me she's Aunt Dumb. And yes Aunt Dumb does have some kids with that Caliban of her husband, which may of course include you, if you say so. And I guess on some level that makes us perhaps related. What's that buy you ? [↩]Renton has a point by the way. If you define the point of existence in the sense of the "reward pathways" exam taking, then yes, the only acceptable certificate of achievement is the final OD. Well done, Aunt Dumb! [↩]Seriously, what do you suppose would happen if the oft-bemoanedly institutionalized airspace were to somehow revert to "its rightful owners", the independent males ? Somehow, like through alien intervention obviously, not like they got the brass tacks to go get it by themselves or anything. But maybe if some moistened bint came out of nowhere and handed it to them they'd play with it a little.
Anyway. Do you suppose we'd see naked and drunk hang gliders scouring the land for cunt prey ? [↩]What do you suppose the appeal of "hitchhiker porn" is, exactly ? And note that this was a genre much before online porn, and much before printed porn too! [↩]Notably, when I was about seven and some friends I had just made that spring (brother and sister) found out that I was going to the seaside with my parents (like we did for a coupla weeks every year) he got really angry and eventually threatened his own parents with suicide (to be enacted through jumping six feet from a tree), whereas she got wistful and after a while told me she didn't want to go anyway because there's huge bugs squirming through the sand at the seaside.
Years later she killed herself, so perhaps the episode was equally enlightening for the both of us. [↩]All this was in part spawned by a long going if little voiced thread in #b-a on the topic of "how can PGP folk be this fucking retarded". Sort-of like the colonial Europeans' expectation that someone firing a weapon necessarily speaks French, or Spanish, or English, or some sort of civilised language. Because otherwise... where did they get the human weapon! Goblins don't craft weapons. [↩]This is a very intricate argument to make, and in the flow of the conversation I misstated it as "financial" which readily earned me a well earned ready rebuff.
It's in fact cultural. Here's the structure to examine it : suppose the best MD in MD school got accidentally teleported through a particularly vigurous session of fill-the-hole played with the hottest cheerleader the campus ever saw straight into 1200 Sicily (which conveniently is not so different at all from 1960s Sicily, not really). And yes, seriously, this can happen : a good fuck can fold the spacetime manifold. But we digress.
Once there, after spending however long being depressed and hopefully finding the cheerleader's exact great-grandma, he proceeds to practice medicine as best the means available allow, but according to knowledge that'll be cutting edge in nine centuries' time. Because what else are you gonna do ? Gotta eat, gotta live, gotta build the time machine. Such it is.
Meanwhile everyone else continues to practice medicine as best the means available allow also, but according to what the knowledge of the time allows. And everyone else is going to be the professionals in the field of medicine in Sicily cca 1200, whereas our teleported professional is just going to be a quaint curio, undistinguishable and undistinguished from the weird old lady making pretty young things swallow live frogs whole, fresh out of the swamp, for her own perverse enjoyment of seeing the young sluts suffer. Hey, it cured Sue's pregnancy, it did! What spontaneous abortion, what coincidence, are you from like the future ?
He's going to be an amateur. Perhaps a very successful amateur, sure, but an amateur nevertheless. Just like cca 1800, the professionals were the guys giving women "peripueral fever" through direct mechanical infectation with putrescent cadaver tissue left under their fingertalons, whereas the guy making a point of washing was the amateur - and not even quaint, at that. Quite very insulting, and decidedly unprofessional.
So, yes. It's purely cultural, and those guys are amateurs. They do it for the love of it, after all, which pointedly means not professionally. Professionals do it for the hate of it. [↩]"Mircea, pretend like you're working", except in Romanian this "pretend" is constructed out of "to make", so it'd properly be something more in the vein of "Mircea, make like you're working". Said on live tv, within the first hours of live tv being a thing in Romania, just as the camera cut in to some douche. [↩]No, people are not all equal, and no duty is owed by anyone to any other bovine just for the asking. Don't love one another indiscriminately, don't be charitable blindly, that sort of thing. Not even novel ideas, at that. [↩]No, saying "cunt" is not sinful. Sin is not the metaphysical equivalent of spam, to be established through counting permutations of V1agr4 in strings of text. [↩]
« The 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9 Sunday event
Sunday, August 9th event : Auction! »
Category: Gandesc, deci gandesc
Tuesday, 04 August, Year 7 d.Tr.
Procedural Dungeon Generation for Eulora
For a long, long time now Eulora's been looking for artists. This has worked miserably so fari notwithstanding that there's an immense population of starving artists and a very thin sliver of opportunities they have to ever matter.
Come to think about it, BitBet's been similarly looking for bookies, with very similar results : if it's like a nobility title, with a sinecure attached, then perhaps some white zombie would maybe (if not too lazy that day) condescend to accept the blessing. But otherwise... work ? What work ? Adding value, being useful, doing something ? Away with these demonic heresies! The white race has decided it wants to end - and perhaps it's for the best if it did, really.
Not one to be discouraged by experience (but on the contrary), here we are expanding the ever-expanding field of stuff that needs done, to coding. Specifically :
A C++ module that generates maps procedurally is required for Eulora.
In this first iteration, the idea of a "map" reduces to "a folded corridor 3 x 3 units in square section".
Folding means that the corridor may curve however you please (provided it's continuous, contains no volumes smaller than 3x3 units and no inclines over 10%) and run into itself (not necessarily at right angles).
In this first iteration, the idea of "procedural" reduces to "of a specified unit length". Note that because the server has to be able to track the movement of clients, your code must output a mapfile in the same format as currently seen in the Eulora client (for that matter - you should be able to test your work product by replacing the ghost place map with your own).
Compensation is available for this, in two forms. Firstly, you get game items of a reasonable value ; secondly, you get equity. In this first iteration, the idea of "equity" reduces to "you'll be the first in line to work with on this line".
This will be used in game for two different future developments. One is that the plan for remarkable and above claims is to have them transform into dungeons upon completion, rather than just spurt a quantity of material in your inventory. These dungeons will have access control, taxation by owner, all sorts of features. The other is that there's plans for another "exploration" sort of line - archeology - which discovers ancient items of varying size, from a small collection of pots to perhaps the fucking pyramids.
Let me know if this is something you'd be interested in doing. This is the first opportunity in two years for anyone to join the Eulora dev team, so don't mess it up.
———Highlights include that one guy who wanted to be paid time wage (hey, Szabo said it's what made capitalism great, rite ?) because "it took him too much time to not actually have anything deliverable". This somehow makes sense, I should undertake the costs of his ineffectual existence because hey, he gotta live!
Highlights also include that other guy who, notwithstanding he's never worked for an "AAA" title, wants to ruin my game for me with his inept presumptuous bullshit. Because hey, the lost generation knows everything, through the simple process of having loaded up on some braindamaged priors that they're never EVER going to re-evaluate.
Highlights also include 100s of full color, beautiful A3 posters plastered all over Buenos Aires (un ciudad de Argentinanoesunpaispobre) worth about 15 million idjits and no less than 300 different "multimedia online games" artschools, which mysteriously resulted in ZERO prospects. Just like that other thing.
It's a wild ride out there in the lala-land of the unfortunately formally literate yet functionally illiterate. [↩]
« Here's who doesn't belong in Bitcoin : you.
Continut platit no more. »
Category: S.MG
Tuesday, 15 December, Year 7 d.Tr.
Prepare to be insanely, incredibly, very very jealous with envy!
Yeah, I did it.
I tell you, I was just going around minding my own business, when all of a sudden I couldn't move. Then all of a sudden I moved, especially vertically. The life and times...
This find (worth about 9 million copper coins) dislodges Grenadine Sippycup's 51k Dry Clumps of Grass find (worth about 2 million copper coins), the previous record holder.
This find also allows me to burn the remainder 10k or so of my stash of flotsam, which I bought from the merchant a coupla weeks ago after it spent a month there, unsought and unloved, after having been sold by me during the crazy first week, back when the only remarkable thing about a remarkable find was just how remarkably common and ordinary they were. Ask an elite vet that was around back then, it's an epic story.
Consequently I'll be selling Slag, Shiny Rock Shards and even Shiny Rock adlib. In my little shop. Of horrors.
PS. The title references a conversation. Of horse.
« The best auction. Ever.
Night Falls on Manhattan »
Category: Trolloludens
Tuesday, 21 July, Year 7 d.Tr.
[OPEN] Parasitic P2P Relay
The job's actually pretty straightforward :
Get a bunch of ESP8266, and set them up to work as relayers. You don't have to use TCP/IP necessarily, all you need to do is demonstrate an ability for individual units to talk to each other indirectly, through the mediation of other units.
Design and build a power plant working off the heat gradient provided by cars (you probably wish to include a capacitor). Because of the excellent energy consumption and wake-up specs of the ESP8266 you don't really need to extract that much energy.
Deploy these, by affixing them to other people's cars, without seeking permision. Get enough moving around so you can actually pass messages through this network. You don't have to demnonstrate any sort of significant bandwidth, 1kb/day transferred is ample for this exercise.
The reason we want this should be obvious, but if it isn't : it's a weapon, and in some contexts much more damaging than a nuclear warhead. That said, bear in mind that step 3 is probably illegal, if marginally so. In any case you will be dealing with an absolutely petrified and consequently quite irate USG apparatus, so don't expect much common sense.
Bitcoin available to defray at the very least the cost of materials.
« On how I ended up suing Phoenix NAP, LLC ; on how Ira R. Cadwell's mom Stephanie's going to lose her Chula Vista home ; on how Marcus Bohn is going to catch a lot of shit for that ; on assorted other drama.
Since Rebecca Hiles broke her WP, here's some comments to stuff on her site »
Category: Job Board
Wednesday, 15 April, Year 7 d.Tr.
[undata] Deed system for #bitcoin-assets, updated.
The spec :
1. Bot idles in chan. Upon receipt of command including pastebin link,
2. Bot reads first line. If equal to "-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----" bot adds key to its keyring, verifies that key fingerprint matches a trusted participant by calling w.b-a.link/trust/7C1FBEC924FBD66531A02AE3F95E4E395927DC9C/fingerprint/
2.1. Should the verification fail bot deletes entry from its keyring ;
2.2. Should the verification succeed bot signs the key and pushes it to public repositories.i
3. If first line equal to "-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----" bot separates all signed documents contained in pastebin into individual units. For each unit :
3.1. Bot extracts the sig fingerprint through a process homologuous to gpg -v -v ;
3.2. The json found on the webpage at w.b-a.link/trust/7C1FBEC924FBD66531 A02AE3F95E4E395927DC9C/fingerprint/json is loaded and parsed.
2.3. L1/L2 trust is computed on the basis of information from 2.2. If this results in L1 or L2 trust > 0, bot includes the whole message (from begin headers to end headers inclusive) into a special, \n separated blob. Otherwise, bot deletes keyid from its key ring.
4. Blob is hashed as a privkey for a Bitcoin address, obtaining that address.
5. A 0.0001 payment is made to that obtained address.
6. Once payment from 4 has received one confirmation, the bot uploads the blob on a website as a textfile, of the format blocknumber-bitcoinaddress.txt, where blocknumber = number of the block that included the tx and bitcoinaddress = the address that received the payment.
7. Bot announces the url of the textfile in channel.
For convenience, the sequence 3-7 should run once each hour, having all material obtained in the respective hour managed together.
Note that this spec has already been implemented twice in the past five months. It is not a very difficult thing to implement. It is however very important that the implementation lives forever, so therefore keeping it online no matter what is the hard part of the task.
Note that this spec was last updated on January 18th, 2014.
You can cut the job into yearlong slices if you prefer. You can also contact punkman to recover previous effort if so inclined.
UPDATE. After discussion in #bitcoin-assets, undata was placed in charge of this project.
———gpg --send-keys keyid [↩]
« What does desperation look like ?
On terrorism »
Category: Job Board
Saturday, 17 January, Year 7 d.Tr.
[OPEN] Callgraph for therealbitcoin, in SVG format.
Your delivery for this job is one single file, as a .svg (see Mike's excellent work on this score with regards to the Bitcoin Web of Trust for inspiration).
It must contain a complete callgraph of the Bitcoin core client, as published on the Bitcoin Foundation's btc-dev mailing list.
There is a 1 BTC reward for completion.
« MPIF (F.MPIF) June 2015 Statement
Eulora skills update »
Category: Job Board
Monday, 06 July, Year 7 d.Tr.
[jurov] Binary maintenance for Eulora
Eulora is the MMORPG in development from MiniGame. As detailed in the April 2014 statement,
[Eulora is seeking] dedicated package maintainers, who are willing to commit to supporting Eulora downstream on various platforms. I am looking for people that are willing to do this, as part of one year renewable contracts, that will be remuneratedi. To participate, you will need :
A WoT account. Since I will be paying on completion, your WoT account does not have to be trusted to any degree, it merely has to exist, and consequently this is a great way to acquire WoT standing.
Very good familiarity with your chosen platform. You must be able to take the large bundle of C code that's the client and make it run on your chosen platform. You must be able to deal with complaints from users of that platform that are specific to that platform.ii
Note that this isn't a "cool project" to jump into headlong. It requires commitment, and experience. You can ask any technical questions in #eulora, the lead dev as well as a bunch of very helpful people idle there. You can talk business to me directly in #bitcoin-assets. Each platform is to be supported through its own contract, let me know what you can do.
If you can support multiple platforms that's fineiii, if not that's also fine : this job will be split up to accomodate you.
UPDATE, June 1st 2015 : jurov is doing the Windows (and other) binaries for this.
———Bitcoin or S.MG shares available. [↩]I have no problem with your telling people "install the latest driver", but if that doesn't work you must know what the solution is. [↩]Say Windows all the way to XP or something, that's about a dozen different ones. [↩]
« [williamdunne] Scoopbot
[Artifexd] A better ircd [RFC] »
Category: Job Board
Monday, 05 January, Year 7 d.Tr.
[Artifexd] A better ircd [RFC]
This is a RFC stage spec. It means it is not yet mature, and you are more than welcome to help refining it. The preferred avenue is through making comments below.
1. At startup, programi reads from local configuration filesii :
A public/private keypairiii ; a "for" key fingerprintiv ; a local salt.
A list of IPs, each with an associated public key, a "for" field containing a key fingerprint, a pgp-signed document by the for key certifying the validity of the IPs public key with an expiration unixtimev in case the for field differs and a nickname.
A list of key fingerprints, with associated trust ratings as signed integer and a comment, signed by the "for" key.
2. Program connects to each of the IPs listed on port 1337, sends a Hello packet encrypted to that IPs public key containing its public key, its "for" fingerprint, a signed certificate for the IP fingerprint if necessary, a session salt derived from hashingvi some source of entropyvii with its local salt and a nonce. Each subsequent packet will increment that nonce by 1.
3. While functioning, program will accept connections on 1337 by listed IPs only.
4. While functioning, program will maintain a bundle of current public messages, composed of the "for" key fingerprint, a timestamp, a text field. Every second, for each IP in its list, program will add a a hash of the timestamp with the proper session salt for each session, encrypt the bundle to that session's destination IP and send it over.
5. While functioning, program will process bundles sent by open sessions, decrypting the sent bundle, verifying timestamp hash matches timestamp, and updating its own bundle to insert any missing messages. Any errors or unexpected conditions dropped to log.
6. While functioning, program will display current bundle of messages to user, something like :
FB0A C0EB 867C 3172 ADCF 5DD1 46FD 816F 1020 ED78 for 6160 E1CA C8A3 C529 66FD 7699 8A73 6F0E 2FB7 B452 1420477939 Hi there
The "fingerprint for fingerprint" part should be maskable by the user, through allocating any arbitrary nickname he wishes to any fingerprint or combination thereof.
7. While functioning, program will accept messages from the user, format them accordingly and insert them in its current bundle.
8. Private message functionality should be implemented as direct-link exceptions : messages received from an IP and originating from that same IP are to be treated as private messages to the user, not included in the public bundle and reported separately.
9. Program will not communicate the IPs of any of its correspondents to any of its correspondents. Program will not respond to any requests coming on port 1337 from IPs not in its list.
10. Program will compile the Web of Trust based on the signed lists received from its correspondents and display it to the user.
UPDATE, Jan 6th : As per discussion on b-a, Artifexd will be in charge of this project.
———You can write it in whatever you please as long as it compiles on linux. [↩]These must be text files. [↩]Steal gpg code - any version prior to the Snowden defection. [↩]Full fingerprints are always used, everywhere, throughout. [↩]There should be a special, fixed format for these. [↩]All references to hashing require sha-512, no exception. [↩]Such as urandom. [↩]
« [jurov] Binary maintenance for Eulora
MPEx (S.MPOE) December 2014 Statement »
Category: Job Board
Monday, 05 January, Year 7 d.Tr.
Online, it's the women that rape.
It's an inconvenient but incontrovertible facti that the "online threat"ii variety of pseudo-rapeiii is a form of typically feminine communication, employed generally by women.iv
Why do they do it ? Well, for a variety of perfectly sensible, long understood and well documented reasons. Such as :
A. Women shit test. The representation of the activity of sexual intercourse to another woman is perhaps the oldest topic of conversation among women. It allows the sexually experienced subjective woman to judge the sexual experience of the objective woman she's harassing. The reaction of woman to description of sexual intercourse (especially when presented as the nude act, purposefully and deliberately denue'd of the various clothes put on it by the fashions and mores of every generation like on a mutually shared Barbie doll) is mediated by her coy behaviour , and being mostly instinctual it is also mostly honest.
This, incidentally, is why women that fail to respond "adequately" to rape threats (which is to say, women that fail to respond like little girlsv, running away in horror at the naked story of fucking) become, at least as far as the discourse of their peer testing them is concerned, "whores". Women value each other (but not themselves - this is a fundamental tensionvi ) in terms of sexual experience.
B. Women build hierarchies. Always and everywhere, a group of women is a structured group, without exception to the degree the two might as well be synonymous.vii To quote myself,
mircea_popescu: "If you were planning to kill someone, would you helpfully tell him first ?"
Saturday, 07 February, Year 7 d.Tr.