The Nordic System, a new novel by Mircea Popescu

Yeah, that's right, I'm writing a novel!

It's going to be a surrealist mishmash with strong sexual themes and "unbelievable characters" (if one's to take to heart the most common complaint the average reader tends to makei) that are going to be mostly women. Nordic women.

Here's a (provisional) list of chapters :

Kim Cheeii

The beach (by Calvin Klein)iii

Emma informs her parents.iv

The Always Nude clubs.

Elvira's introductionv

The woman that lives with a dog.vi

Emma's sleepover.vii

Elvira's wasp thing.

The Nordic Tree.viii

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Depending on how like writing I feel, how much rich Venchi ice-cream I can shove down my gullet, how much you people annoy me with unrelated matters and on other considerations, it can be done anytime between "in a couple of weeks" and "by Xmas", so don't postpone any weddings.

Except, of course, for your own, because this book is guaranteed to make you a) realise what you've been missing out on, while life was somewhere else and b) do nothing whatsoever about it. Because what the hell are you going to do ?!

PS. Hey nubbins, does this sound like something you'd want to print ? Maybe even publish.

———As proudly displayed by the comment sections of pretty much all surrealist short stories with strong sexual themes that I've published here to date. [↩]Tiny asian teacher is accosted by amazonian looking teens in Swedish highschool on her first day of work, forced to teach in the nude, becomes a sort of coolie maid-servant for the girls. [↩]Stuff about shells. [↩]All about how she's going to be naked at home from then on, and the sexual submission implications thereof. Imagine, a teenaged girl slave in the house of her own, middle class, normie parents. [↩]Elvira character to be a rewrite of the famous Extraordinarul act de supunere estivala al Elvirei. [↩]Subbie finds fulfillment in the dominant embrace of a strong willed... wtf is that dog called, big with dark short hair, ridiculous small ears and a bulldog face ? [↩]Wherein the effects of Emma's actions on her parents' marriage are explored. [↩]Mostly a setting of that ancient story. [↩]

« MPIF (F.MPIF) May 2015 Statement

The strange case of the unentropic entropy and other bedtime stories of primes and people. »

Category: Evenimente

Friday, 05 June, Year 7 d.Tr.

The news, in brief : "Hearn is a shitstain, MP is right, fuck reddit. Love, Satoshi"

Some hours ago, Satoshii posted to the original, meanwhile supplanted and therefore disused, mailing list. The post reads :

I have been following the recent block size debates through the mailing list. I had hoped the debate would resolve and that a fork proposal would achieve widespread consensus. However with the formal release of Bitcoin XT 0.11A, this looks unlikely to happen, and so I am forced to share my concerns about this very dangerous fork.

[Hearn is a shitstain] The developers of this pretender-Bitcoin claim to be following my original vision, but nothing could be further from the truth. When I designed Bitcoin, I designed it in such a way as to make future modifications to the consensus rules difficult without near unanimous agreement. Bitcoin was designed to be protected from the influence of charismatic leaders, even if their name is Gavin Andresen, Barack Obama, or Satoshi Nakamoto. Nearly everyone has to agree on a change, and they have to do it without being forced or pressured into it. By doing a fork in this way, these developers are violating the "original vision" they claim to honour.

[MP was right] They use my old writings to make claims about what Bitcoin was supposed to be. However I acknowledge that a lot has changed since that time, and new knowledge has been gained that contradicts some of my early opinions. For example I didn't anticipate pooled mining and its effects on the security of the network. Making Bitcoin a competitive monetary system while also preserving its security properties is not a trivial problem, and we should take more time to come up with a robust solution. I suspect we need a better incentive for users to run nodes instead of relying solely on altruism.

[Fuck reddit] If two developers can fork Bitcoin and succeed in redefining what "Bitcoin" is, in the face of widespread technical criticism and through the use of populist tactics, then I will have no choice but to declare Bitcoin a failed project. Bitcoin was meant to be both technically and socially robust. This present situation has been very disappointing to watch unfold.

Satoshi Nakamoto

As to the MP was rightii part, see for instance

09-09-2014 11:56:30 <mircea_popescu> this has been long said here, the #1 problem with the bitcoin protocol is that it has no specific payment for relays, and it allows separation of mining and relay.

And yes, if you're going to play the "first" game, please, bring forth the documentation. (Should you fail to find anything worthy of mention on the line above, you can always try and find an alternative source for that now-widespread technical criticism, which wasn't nearly all that widespread back in December, back when the shitstains were claiming "consensus" and the support of "economists". Good luck.)

As for redditard inquiries on the lines of "Can't see why SN would write about Gavin in this sort of terse/removed tone."... try and guess. Or try reading moreiii, it can't possibly hurt you. The only new thing in this world is the history you didn't know, after all.

Always remember : If you go on a Bitcoin fork, irrespective which scammer proposes it, you will lose your Bitcoins.

PS. What does desperation look like ?

———As to the discussion of authenticity, see btcdrak's analysis :

Here's a quick technical analysis of the email sent to the bitcoin-dev mailing list today at http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-August/010238.html

The email was sent from an anonymous email provider called vistomail.com which gives the appearance of being out of service. However you can see the logins at https://webmail.vistomail.com/

The vistomail servers are authorised to originate email by their IP address via the SPF DNS records . Satoshi used satoshi@vistomail.com when first announcing Bitcoin http://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2009-January/014994.html

From this you can safely conclude the email did originate from vistomail.com servers and was not spoofed. It does not prove the account was not hacked of course.

Partial headers from the email:

Received: from mail.vistomail.com (vistomail.com [190.97.163.93])

by smtp1.linuxfoundation.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2175813F

for <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org>;

Sat, 15 Aug 2015 19:00:05 +0000 (UTC)

Received: from DS04 ([190.97.163.93]) by vistomail.com with MailEnable ESMTP;

Sat, 15 Aug 2015 13:51:14 -0500

DNS RECORDS FOLLOW:

vistomail.com descriptive text "v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com ip4:190.97.163.93 ~all"

vistomail.com has address 190.97.163.93

vistomail.com mail is handled by 10 vistomail.com.

[↩]Yet again. Are you counting ? [↩]2013 : And Gavin moves on to the dark side. The Bitcoin project is officially hijacked ; 2014 : USGavin, the lolcow ; 2015 : Let's address some of the more common pseudo-arguments raised by the very stupid people that like the Gavin scamcoin proposal. And there's plenty more. [↩]

« The jerking around, a modern bedtime pattern.

That one with the eons. »

Category: Bitcoin

Monday, 17 August, Year 7 d.Tr.

The MP Suicide Self-Evaluation Scale

Suicide is an extremely contentious topic, principally because it's the ultimate locus of emotional thought.

The two principal approaches are the psychiatric, which consists of equating suicide with mental diseasei and which is currently fashionableii on one hand ; and the philosophical, which consists of equating suicide with freedomiii and which is both unfashionable and difficult to correctly understand on the other hand.

To try and remedy that difficulty, let us start from equally contentious, but more directly comprehensible stuff. Suppose you are a woman, finding yourself in one of the following four situations : a) you are guaranteed to find a mate on your own terms ; b) you are at liberty to either find a mate on your own terms or not find a mate at all ; c) you are required to find a mate, whether on your own terms or not ; d) you will mate with whosoever feels like mating with you.

Going through that list, it should be obvious that whether utopian or not (possible or not, desirable or not), the first option does not in fact describe a situation of freedom, because one can never be free to the inconsequentialiv, whereas the second describes a situation of absolute and perfect freedom. Whether you agree that the third contains sufficient matter of the appearance of freedom to be called anything such is entirely open to fashion. Currently you seem to think that McDonalds contains sufficient matter of the appearance of food so as to be called food-something, whereas the traditionalv freedom of womanhood does not contain sufficient matter of the appearance of freedom as to be called freedom anything. This is fine, fashions are there for a reason. Nevertheless, that there's a difference between third and fourth should be apparent, without that much of a mental stretch.

Totalitarianism (which includes all species of socialism, pointedly and specifically the one under which you currently live, its "Occupy Wallstreet" nonsense y comprisvi) is the rough equivalent of case d) above. It should be readily apparent why most people do not wish to live in that situation - it's exactly the same reason women don't. But exactly, no exaggeration involved. The situation where "suicide is always and everywhere a mental disease" neatly maps onto c) : you are free to pick something, just as long as you pick something. You somehow find it uncontroversial that a woman may make for herself the choice to not mate, which is, as an incontrovertible point of fact, biological suicide. You however manage to also find it uncontroversial that the woman in question may not cut her own throat, because... essentially because "you don't like blood". Which is fine, but it also isn't about her. And for that matter, I don't like pus yet somehow that doesn't mean everyone with an infected eczema has to move out of town.

This introduction - which proudly manages to not even mention Senecavii, fancy that! - should be sufficient to establish the general point - that suicide is in fact the appropriate behaviour at least some of the time. As far as the theory goes that's fine and dandy, but then again in theory there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is, and what shall we practically do ? Sure, it may be the case that sometimes suicide is the appropriate behaviour, yet how are we to know this time is that time ?

This is not a trivial problem, because, as Tommy Reagan aptly points out, "a man will say just about anything when his time is up". You are stuck trying to determine if the brain making the determination is functioning properly or not, this is not a very reliable process no matter how you design it. To compound the problem, the fact that (at least in the less civilized parts of the world) random people are going to assault you in a bid to prevent your exercise of this fundamental humanviii freedomix makes seeking a second opinion dubious at best.x

All is not lost, however, which is why we have this MP-SSES thing. So, answer you the following questionnaire and set your mind at ease.

I. Is your suicide impulse driven, or is it something that you've had on the back of your mind pretty much continuously for a long time ?

Impulse-driven suicide is almost certainly not going to be of the philosophical kind. What you are seeking is relief from specific stressors, not (likely) relief from existence outright. The two measures most likely to help sorted by likeliness of their helping are a) give up some belief/situation/position/job/etc and b) learn some new skills.

To be specific :

if your suicidal ideation mostly revolves around how the Cali libtards are "ruining the country", and it flares up whenever some blondy chick in an expensive car drives badly, you are almost certainly sexually frustrated, rather than in a position to "no means no" in the direction of generally. Fortunately this problem is a lot easier to approach.

if every single Valentine's day, Christmas and Thanksgiving makes you want to off yourself, you might be better served by giving up on "men are pigs", or getting a new mother, or other practical, simple measures like that rather than slashing your wrists the wrong way with a broken Tylenol bottle.

On the other hand, compulsive suicidal ideation is just a compulsion like any other. Like the obsession with checking if you've locked the door or with washing your hands, it probably has some sort of subconscious correlate, and it can perhaps be improved with medical care, but it's not terribly likely to ever fully resolve. There are some pills for this stuff too, but they don't work all that well and have a bunch of side effects. If at all possible, your best bet is to just learn to self-manage it.

As you can tell, this was a trick question. What you need to pass here is a good reason. Neither impulse nor compulsion are going to get you to pass.

II. Is your suicide mode specific and fixed, or you don't particularly care ?

This is well known to clinicians across cultures and centuries : a guy that tried to hang himself and failed is not probably going to try jumping next. A gal that tries pills and fails will try pills and fail fifty eight times, until her liver has enough of her and gives her brainwater. She's not going to trod a shotgun. People who drown don't simply drown because the river was closer to their house than the cliff, but because the drowning specifically has some sort of subconscious meaning or importance.

This is where therapy can actually help you : if you've answered "impulse" to the Ist question you don't really need a therapist, you just need a change in your life. Substantial, perhaps, a new job, a new entourage, stuff like that, the sort that happens multiple times in a lifetime anyway. If however you've answered "compulsion", and especially if your answer here is specific, then you almost certainly can benefit from seeing a therapist, and you have a perfectly good approach to make the sessions productive. What exactly is it that's so important about making sidewalk pizza that has you almost willing to give up your life to reenact it ? To understand this properly, think in terms of theatre, which is what it is : at some point in your life you've seen some show which was in your opinion so damned good, you're willing to kill yourself to see it again. Wouldn't you want to find out what the fuck that was ? I know I would, I've never seen a show that good in my life - and I've read Shakespeare even!xi

But if you've been thinking about this for a while and you don't actually care, you're essentially this guy.xii Nice knowing you / sorry for not knowing you, but yeah, you're the better sort of humanity. Pity it didn't work out, it's definitely our loss.

This whole scale is obviously only going to be useful to you if you're intelligent and honest. If you aren't, it's probably going to hurt youxiii. But then again, that's pretty much what Trilema is all about anyway, so I guess you should know better by now.

———A proposition that is formally correct, seeing how disease is, fundamentally, an inability of the living thing to safeguard its own life. [↩]For purely socio-economic reasons - suicide is always the more expensive avenue from the group point of view. See "the most valuable resource" for more on this topic. [↩]Also a correct proposition, and more substantial than the alternative, in that it considers more than merely the amoebic "will to life", a distinction which is fundamental to human identity and has been fundamental to human identity throughout recorded history. [↩]To go back from sex to death, everyone is guaranteed a death, and it will be exactly their own and adequate to them. Nevertheless, nobody readily understands the finite nature of their life as any sort of freedom. An argument can readily be constructed as to this point, ofcourse, and it may be constructed to be logically sound and perhaps even persuasive - expecially for Phil majors and other wankers inclined to this particular sort of wankery. Nevertheless, the banal observation that it will only be constructed after the matter is brought to attention - that it is, in other words, reactive and so properly said wankery - settles the question for our interest here. [↩]And by traditional we mean something stretching over degrees of magnitude more time than the entire history of our colonies in the New World. [↩]On this point, some very prime Ballas rib :

"Marching gets our message out." No it doesn't, it gets CNN's message out. "We don't watch CNN, we use the internet." Yet given the infinity of the internet you still surf the same 5 websites, looking for and finding exactly what you want, like a baby playing peekaboo in a mirror over and over and over and over and over and over and...

You are the 98%, you are totally without any access to the machinery of power and worse, much worse, you plug yourselves into the machinery of media and become a slave.

[↩]No, he was not "forced" to commit suicide, that's a little bit of pious fraud clearly indicative of why exactly it's a bad idea to trust "scientists" to drive social policy - they lie just as much as anyone else, are just as self-righteous as anyone else, but are in the unique position of being very well equipped to hide both these facts, at least from the casual observer (which is the 98%).

Seneca killed himself either because he determined to deny fate its due ("I die when I say, not when you say" - historically a major driver of the behaviour among actual men) or because he was really disgusted with the result of his educative efforts. Speaking of which, if you review the dialogues, it will be a hard argument to bring that Socrates was forced to commit suicide. It will at any rate be a lot easier for me to prevail arguing that he was so disgusted with the kids - Plato included - that he just didn't feel like seeing more of the mess. [↩]It's not so certain this is human. Plenty of animals will either not reproduce or actually destroy their litters in captivity. Somehow humans fail to make the inference that "this fox thinks our stinking offerings suck so bad it's willing to kill its own babies over it" and instead deduce something or the other about the feral nature of the poor animal in question. Because we're never ever going to possibly be in the wrong, we're just bringing democracy to all these creatures, n'est pas. [↩]It's not a right, because it's not given by anyone. It's a freedom. It exists there not to embiggen the self-importance of various entities (the "rights givers") but to diminish. To diminish everything generally, but any "rights givers" especially. Which is why it's "sinful", if you were curious.

And which also explains a part of the emotional thinking involved. If Joe quits playing Halo because "Halo sucks" what does that say about you, still there playing it ? Maybe it means nothing about you, and Joe's just being stupid. Then again... [↩]They do have suicide hotlines, of course, but generally those people tend to waste your time by refusing to help you do it. [↩]Another great indicator, especially for the suicidal ideation driven by wounded narcissism, is how prominently "what will happen after" figures in your thoughts. If your suicide is mostly the stage setting for lengthy funeral processions and ellaborate regrets of everyone, you've basically just skipped a normal stage in the development of the adolescent. Re-read Tom Sawyer, live it vicariously, move on. Sane people don't give a shit what happens after, which is precisely why they're doing it. [↩]Note that while he killed himself, he did it for the stupidest of all reasons - statistics.

People today seem particularly vulnerable to this sort of nonsense, and I lay most of the blame at the feet of plainly irresponsible "authorities" (once more - it's a bad idea to give scientists a say in social policy). The insane campaigns against tobacco in the past decades were based on a fundamental fallacy, the equivocation between what may happen and what does happen. Yes, it's true that tobacco has some deleterious health effects. Yes, it's true that if there's a million smokers less there's going to be fewer hospitals that need to be built and staffed. However, it's not true that if you personally smoke, you personally will die of it. You might, sure. That's not the same thing. It's also not true that if you personally don't smoke, you won't die of it, either. People have. Lung cancer happens with or without smoking.

The courts understand this much, which is why you can't sue for potential damages, you have to sue for actual damages. But people generally do not have the intellectual wherewithal to reproduce in their own heads the wisdom accumulated over sixteen to thirty centuries of legal practice, and so they end up sorely confused. In particular in the food blogger's case (wtf is food blogger srsly, get a job already), it makes exactly diddly squat a difference what the "statistics" of dating are. So out of every 100 mixed couples with one Oriental the woman is Oriental in 95 cases ? Big fucking whoop. Of every hundred women interviewed 99 do not see themselves as happy harem slaves in the future. Then the one that does fails and half a dozen of the ones that didn't discover they actually were wrong. Of every 100 Romanians interviewed by police in Europe, 106 or so are thieves and the remaining four rapists. What's that do, exactly ? Should I go hang myself over it now ?

It is after all a statistic, so it must be science (if only) so I must organize my life according to it, right ? That's the message of all the idiotic "campaigns" : you must organise your life according to statistics. And then people do, resulting in silliness of this sort, and then nobody is going to put the idiots who came up with the entire thing on trial for it, because hey, they only told you to quit smoking, they didn't also say "jump". Right ? Well... this is what's meant by irresponsibility, and, again, this is why you don't want scientists to have a voice in setting social policy. [↩]But that's okay, if you aren't you probably think intelligent, honest people are sociopaths or something. [↩]

« Statistics : still the hardest part of math.

Fetlife, the meat market »

Category: Gandesc, deci gandesc

Friday, 13 February, Year 7 d.Tr.

The Minuscule Crab of Doom and the Sympathetic Spool of Drool - an endlessly complex machine to shred your dreams to pixie dust!

I finally took Alf's advice to try some LSD mushroom sandwiches, and I confess I feel a little lightthreaded. I am also inspired to create a memorable event in Eulora, which will take place this coming Sunday (ie, tomorrow) starting at 8 pm (20:00) GMT.

The event will proceed as follows : I will take a seat in the company of the aforementioned Spool and the above named Crab, and any player desiring to touch Fate is to hand me one or more Tokens of Sacrifice, of whichever kind and in whatever amounts they wish. Upon verification of this duly payment, they get to make a wish.

The wish can be anything.

No, seriously. Anything.

The one only catch is that the Sympathetic Spool of Drool will perhaps reinterpret it, and allocate it a number. The other only catch is that the Minuscule Crab of Doom will hencewith and thereforth enunciate an anti-wish! of approximate equal value, and allocate it another number. Then I will pick a (future) block height, and whichever number appears first in the block hash (as read from left to right) will activate either wish or anti-wish, as it will happen.

Dread tightly in the presence of the twin aspects of Fate, for the distinction separating your dearest wish and your worst nightmare might be thinner than either one of you ever before realised!

And see you Sunday! Upwards infinity pm!

« No Such lAbs (S.NSA), October 2015 Statement

Come see the retard chamber! »

Category: S.MG

Saturday, 07 November, Year 7 d.Tr.

The meta problem.

This is a serious problem you could readily understand if you were smarter than you actually are by the following thought experiment : had I titled this article "The problems of stupid people" you, stupid as you are, wouldn't have read it.

Why not ?

I am curious as to what justification you profer for your own consumption, and if you are at all about being the smarter guy than you actually are rather than the stupid guy that you are in fact, you'll be curious too. No better way than this to find out how stupid you are, and why exactly than this.

So go grab a magic marker and write it down, on the very screen, right here : I wouldn't have read this article were it titled "The problems of stupid people" because ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___

Yes I'm serious, write on the motherfucking screen.

Done ?

Good. Let's pretend that you were not you, but some girl instead, and let's pretend this article isn't this article, but some math instead. And you wouldn't have liked it because "it is presented in a male perspective" rather than because "it's boring" which is to say you're stupid, because you already know you're not stupid.

How do you already know that ? Because some people, such as your mother, and your kindergarten teacher in preschool, and your kindergarten teacher in junior high, and your kindergarten teacher in high school and your kindergarten teacher in college (all three of 'em) plus a bunch of kindergartners online told you so. And how do they know ? They don't. So you know you're not stupid in the way stupid people know things, which is to say they heard them a lot, chiefly from people that aren't qualified to speak on the topic - the chief distinction of stupid people being a tendency to listen to "opinions" whether they are in any sense qualified or not. That's how advertising works, after all.

Now suppose you're not a girl anymore, and you're also not gay, which is how you know you haven't followed the thought experiment before : because knowing full well you're not gay, you clearly know you're not a girlie, and so that's that.

Welcome to being stupid. The meta-problem (of being stupid) is that you take as given items that then prevent an actual examination of reality. Has anyone ever "ruined" a movie for you by telling you how it ends ? Why do you imagine this makes a difference to you ? Suppose I were to tell you how fucking ends, does this ruin fucking for you too ? Why not ? Ah, because fucking you enjoy through a reflex pathway, which functions normally, whereas a movie you have to enjoy through your actual neocortex, which is stupid ? Cool.

And if you've read a summary you perceive no further incentive to read the book, and if you've read the cliffnotes you expect to get the credits, and if you've seen two news items and five tweets on a topic you perceive you have perceived "the consensus" on the topic (another way to say "summary", this "consensus", it's like the official cliffnotes for whatever book, the set the teacher himself uses) and are ready to opine on the matter (and even bring awareness among other stupid people that happen to be unaware of your resplendent stupidity) and so on and so forth.

This is your hell : you are stupid, and could be less stupid if only you put some work into it, except you can't do that because you already know you're not stupid. Just like fat people.

Anyway, all this I say by way of illustration, there's absolutely no reason you should be worried about any of it. You're not stupid nor are you fat. You're special.

« Where did your years go ?

You are poor lolz. »

Category: Gandesc, deci gandesc

Friday, 30 January, Year 7 d.Tr.

The lulz of today, or "you think it's only some kids that will exhaust their resources soon?"

Step 1 :

Step B :

The moral of the story being that you can not win battles in your own head with people who are in it for the lulz. It just doesn't work that way.

Oh, and here we go - half hour later, the lulz!

Which of course leads us to...

I guess deliberately building a shittier Internet can come back to bite you! Seriously, who knew! Nobody could have foreseen &c.

« Eulora Sunday Event - July the 19th

The best auction. Ever. »

Category: Meta psihoza

Sunday, 19 July, Year 7 d.Tr.

The lulz in "dating"

I wouldn't care, as I don't date, nor have I ever dated, nor do I really know anyone who does or would, nor do I care toi, except Diller's IAC keeps publishing all sorts of inanities to support the delusions of investors wrt its okcupid flagship (I suppose it could be worse -- they could decide shoebuy.com is really the flagship, for instance). I understand why he does it, of courseii, and I understand how, and I understand... heck, I even understand why him.iii But stupid annoys me, so here we go.

The entire proposition that okcupid has some sort of value stems from a supposed "matching engine".iv which somehow increases overall hapiness by suggesting people to each other.

This worldview, notwithstanding its complete divorce from reality, is flattering because it applies to narcissism. Everyone likes to think that they actually have an identity, and in the typical reversed logic of narcissism the fact that ok cupid "has" a putative "matching engine" is proof of the identity in question. And so the idiot becomes invested : it's not so much that a) he has an identity, and so thus therefore b) it might be the case okcupid could do him a service. Exactly the opposite : it's the case that a) he posits okcupid could do him a service, and thus therefore b) he must have an identity. Because if he didn't, why'd they bother, right ? (To get a dime each out of ten billion insecure idiots just like you, maybe ? Impossibru!)

On one hand, the notion that the accumulated detritus of uncounted masses of failed existences is somehow not merely valuable, but specifically valuable is beyond ridiculous.v On the other hand, the proposition that all this mange and cold sore crust is not merely meaningful but outright uniformly distributedvi beggars belief. Seriously, you're great as you are, all that's needed is someone who's the exact complement to reconstitute together the platonic sphere ? And you'll find them with a lot of tinkering of levers labelled 60% smoking and 39% pine shavings and 18.5% likes Woody Allen movies ? Darn, if only you had gotten that third decimal percentile right on "thinks blood diamonds are red colored" you could have the love of your life in your arms right now!

In plain terms, OkCupid is a strange sort of junkyard. If you need some shit to put in your house, you typically have the choice of the upscale junkyard (think Ikea), where you get whole pieces as new ; or else you can go to the common junkyard (think garage sale), where you get reusable pieces, on the general understanding that here's what works and here's what doesn't, and if you have any use for it it's yours for the cost of relocation. Instead of this, OkCupid is a large open air storage filled to the brim with broken pieces, and it purports to find the exact chunks that go with the broken pieces you already have! Think about that for a minute.vii

Back at reality ranch, dominant partners are (sometimes, rarely) looking for submissive partners that generally understand that they suck, and are eagerly looking for someone to tell them which parts have to come off and in what order. That's it. There hasn't yet been under the sun such miracle as that "equal power relationship", you get a master and a slave whether you're willing to admit this or not. Who the fuck cares if she smokes or doesn't smoke ? If you want a smoker she'll either smoke or learn to smoke, and if you want a non-smoker she'll either have been not smoking or quit. The notion that "I want someone that wants me for me" is predicated on "me" being a void class. Yes, I know the statement is enraging. Do you know why that is ?

And sure, I can see in the distance the self-sufficient smugness of "but MP, for as long as people believe it works, it will work for them!" Sure it will. Until the time comes to sit on a pineapple it will, and once that's here it'll be all "nobody could have predicted" and all sorts of various considerations made-up on the spot and so on and so forth. Sure.

As I said, I have no stake in the whole charade, enjoy it while it lastsviii, I guess.

———Here's a way to understand this thing : in some obscure Romanian movie whose name history has misplaced, there's a scene where a lower-middleclass mother of the 90s is trying to sell her twenty-something daughter on the idea of an "arranged" marriage. It's not arranged in the hard sense of Arab nights (here's a thought - the things they scare you with aren't actually true, they're just shaped that way because that's what scares you), it's soft arranged in the sense of, girl's life is manifestly going nowhere, there's this guy a little older who actually makes sense, the parents like, he's not poor, why not marry him and cook his meals and darn his socks and write his eulogy ?

The girly has however had a tiny bit too much exposure to the Diane Keaton nonsense... see, it didn't start with Horseface In The City. It's old, very, very old, like any tired old scam, like any worn through hobo trick to get a cockpuppet, and so back in the 90s, before it was "even invented" it still existed, with a different ugly stupid pretentious broad as the flag...ship.

So the girly's had a little too much bait, and the persuasion's really not going all that well, she knows she can't be as worthless as she obviously is, she knows she must be destined to the greatness that she obviously isn't, she feels it in her comic book, and therefore the damsel demures. In desperation the mother goes "wouldn't you like to eat here every week ?!" and they're in a McDonalds. Because you see, in Romania cca 1993, the absolute sum total symbol of greatness was exactly that : to be able to afford eating out once a week, and not in any dingy old place, either, but in one of these great and shiny new miracles of American engineering - the McDonalds. Yeah, that's right, that's where it was, back when "too big to fail" still meant something, back when the dollar still meant something.

This is exactly how I feel about the dating bullshit. Really, you eat at McDonalds ? Once a week ? Good for you, you're probably too rich for my blood. Let me sit right here with the tuica and the whores and go, enjoy your dating. No, thank you, don't worry about me, I'd rather drink paint than join you. [↩]Once you're at the party you'd better be drinking, and once you're in the bezzle you'd better be scamming. That's what it is, and as there hasn't yet been invented a way to scam that doesn't reduce to misrepresenting reality for the gullible, of course that's what he'd be doing. As a great Romanian actor pointed out in a great film whose name history has not misplaced, "The hand that doesn't tell a story doesn't get to go into any pockets". And so stories, of course, of course, by all means. [↩]What else is the man going to do, squigee on 44th and 5th ? Teach math ? From everyone according to his abilities. [↩]This is universally the claim, by the way. People are savy that 2001 came and went, so they're not actually making the nude argument that reality debunked, "hey we got eyeballs".

Instead, they're making the "hey we got eyeballs IN SECRET SAUCE" muchly improved, advanced and "rapidly moved forward" argument. This is what unites Google ("hey we got eyeballs in a secret advertising matching sauce") with Facebook ("hey we got eyeballs with various matching sauces that we don't wanna discuss) to OkCupid ("hey we got a secret matching saucengine!!). That's where the pretense of value is these days, the secret matching sauce, which is why stuff like Reddit (and Conde Nast generally) is going under, this is why Techcrunch (and AoL generally) is going under - they didn't have the sense to pretend to sauce, and absent that any gimmick conceivable (hey - defraud the general public under the pretense of "investment" that gets unilaterally reclassified later on while the SEC claps like a trained seal ?) is coming to naught.

That matching engine is why Bezos is the king of the hill while "Silk Road" couldn't move a bag of coke. Gotta have the engine! [↩]That's the actual proposition : that "life experience" is specifically valuable. Ie, that if Joe gets breast cancer this does not only result in a better Joe, but in a better Joe specifically to Joe - Moe's breast cancer (while equally valuable, of course) is specifically valuable in a Moe sort of way!

This is the great sleigh-of-head that allows the same twerps to build their identity out of hairdos that were copied after those seen in mass market publications and assorted consumer goods. Yes, they're mass produced, of course, but the Puta Madre tshirt on Joe is adding a Joe value of Puta Madress to Joe, that's not the same (but nevertheless is equal!!1) to the value the same very shirt would add to Moe.

Does your head hurt yet ? [↩]Think about it : if you take some bites out of a dozen cookies, what are the odds you'll end up with a dozen cookie remains that exactly fit in six pairs to reconstruct six whole cookies ?

It's pushing it for even one in six to exhibit this improbable property, and yet okcupid proposes this is the case of roughly speaking one billion out of one billion. And people believe this, too. [↩]Why are you keeping the broken pieces anyway ?

Oh, I'm sorry, I remember - because having an identity is hard, having a hairdo-and-tshirt-ity is all that's left on the table for you. Go right ahead, "find hapiness" and "your other half", it makes perfect sense now. [↩]Do you know how long the enjoyment of McDonalds as a status symbol lasts, incidentally ? Yea, that's right : until you stop being poor.

This one'll last until you stop being stupid. But my advice is to never stop : if you do, you might discover a lifetime of bad decisions has put you in a pretty lonely spot. Who could have predicted! [↩]

« Chez Cocus, or the Argentinian Chorus

The "Christian Europe" and other aberrant notions »

Category: Meta psihoza

Thursday, 15 October, Year 7 d.Tr.

The jerking around, a modern bedtime pattern.

Long ago, I wrote an article, in Romanian, describing for the needs of a Romanian audience what I perceived at the time to be a strictly Romanian problem. Let us go through that for an introduction in today's sad, misfortunate subject matter.

Money And Social Control (2009)

The wanna-be customer, the customer without a budget, the customer that wants just an idea, just a salty snack, the client who's perpetually in "economic crisis" terms is a rather frequent topic among Romanian contractors.

"Free" is something done by the desperate for survival. Those of you who clamor for respectability, who pretend to have obtained investment must get in the habit of writing checks for services rendered.

I have all sorts of contacts with people who supposedly run major businesses in .ro, we discuss all sorts of things, not of the nature of sports or women or hunting but of the nature of their job. Yet obviously, once you suggest they sign a contract they run off to "there's no money", "I'm only interested in some ideas", "I just want to find out", "The crisis hasn't skipped us" blabla coming from people who instead of actually hiring a service prefer the chewed gum and duct tape of "ideas", "helpful advice", "friendly expertise" and such nonsense.

Nimicul lui Krumel

Generally, the commentary offered and the criticisms arrayed against the nonsense lay on the lines of "respect"i, which is to say, of the contractor's respect for himself, for his compentency and profession (for it is, supposedly, a profession), of the customer for himself, for his own business and its futureii and only in the last place, the customer's respect for the contractor.

All these representations are supported with practical examples from the old economy, the economy of physical objects. The respect of a producer for himself and his product is readily visualised as "I'll burn it down before I sell it for that price". The respect of the customer for himself is at work in any upscale restaurant. You've yet to see some businessman invite some other businessman for lunch and then order "something to eat for free, whatever you got back there".iii The final bit, the customer's respect for the producer, is chiefly on display when people hire housemaids or governesses for the children. The first question is never how much, but above all what do the recommendations say. Because you're not about to save twenty dollars there.

I believe this approach is fundamentally inadequate, and the actual problem is merely perception. Let's take another set of examples.

"Daddy, when are you buying me a computer ?" ; "When do I get a wedding ?". Car money, house-for-the-children money, aunt Lena's operation money, tooth fillings money, all these expenses go into a particular rubric that might seem ridiculous when put to paper (because the Romanian mind has some very deeply rooted - and deeply fascinating - pudibonderies as to what may be set out on paper or regarded through the eye of reason), but isn't really.

Mostly through chance, a number of professions that are fundamental to any contemporaneous economy were aglutinated, in the somewhat endarkenediv minds of a wide majority, under the heading of "playthings", points of interest to adolescents, unserious, unreal and - in this sense - unrespectable matter.

When confronted with the professions in this category, the mental attitude is not public, nor does it arise from the power relations described by economy. Instead, it is familial, and derived from the power relations inside the clan.

This readily explains why the man seated will never tell the waitress "anything, as long as it's free", yet that same man will seek "some ideas", which he "just wants to find" etc. This is also why he imagines his "friendship" or "goodwill" is worth two shits : he thinks himself inside the clan.

Romanians have anyway pretty serious problems with the rational flow of money in society, some of which are universal, some of which moreover particular. As a fine example, your average Romanian fellow would readily prefer to earn 11 units, when everyone else earns 10, instead of an alternative where he earns 90, when everyone else earns 100, indifferent to the fact that 90 is still, significantly above 11. This, in the language, is called "the neighbour's goat problem".

These misunderstandings and erroneous representations lead to the bizarre situation in which money is moreover seen as a means to social control than as a meausre of the circulation of goods and services, or of the efficiency and utility of labour. A hundred lei is that hundred which Gigel ain't getting unless he's a good boy, rather than the value added by Cornel's work. As such, the fundamentally Romanian way to make money is to beg someone who has it, and not to produce value. Therefore, "running a business" is to shake as many carrots as possible under as many donkey noses as possible, not to construct partnerships and honor agreements.

This way of seeing, money as a whip rather than as an exchange substrate, of any property as an inheritance and not as an object with an utility, puts the poor "businessmen" in an absolutely desperate situation. They have not the experiences or knowledge that survival requires in modern economy, nor the habits and ethics of the intellectual work upon which their occupation rests, and which would in principle allow them to transcend their condition by instruction (or even mere reading), nor the ability to represent correctly the utility and role of consultants in the world of the pretentious but dumb.

The irony of the situation comes from the fact that the principal symbolic benefit of representing money in a clan structure comes from the very fact that it answers an ontological necessity : look how many people ask me for money, it must be that I'm, important, and, at the limit, it must be the case I exist. The wish of Becali or Mazare or whoever else of their ilk is exactly this : a procession as long as feasible of people holding their hat in their hands.v

Admire the beauty of the world. From the poorly understood and poorly implemented wish to validate their own existence, the "businessmen" mistreat the consultants, who were their only hope of survival, the only element that could conceivably allow the perpetuation of the "businessmen" in question. Doesn't it beat any fiction ?

What a difference the better part of a decade makes!

Meanwhile, incipient decay that had been ongoing but not yet visible (to me) in the West expanded, and my own understanding and experience base expanded, and now I can see that it's not Romania that caught up with the resplendent West. Nay - it's the West that caught up with stupid, muddy, marginal Romania.

Allow me to pick two examples, out of millions, because these two examples made the click in my head.

I. The fabulous case of OpenBSD.

OpenBSD has, for a while, played the foremost role of "consultant", exact equivalent of the poor kid in the quote above. Everyone hit them up constantly for... you know, "just an idea", just an algo, just a salty snack. For free.

And then, one day OpenBSD announced that either it gets enough money to keep the electricity on or it shuts down.

Nobody cared.

A month later, OpenBSD announced that hey, this is it, unless we get so and so in a week we're closing.

So I gave them the so and so.

This didn't result, as you'd expect, in "MP gave us the so and so, and now we're saved". Because why would it ? That event never happened - thanks to the tireless efforts of one certain barnaclevi now exposed and thousands others who fancy themselves "anonymous"vii - MP isn't a thing and OpenBSD was saved by... Microsoft. Right ?

One has to ask himself nevertheless - if Microsoft really wanted to pay half a million to OpenBSD, why did it wait to do it ? What's 2015 have that 2014 did not have ?viii Why all this jerking around, only to end up paying more, and on top of paying more, to end up playing the role of Pollychinelle in a medieval farce ?

Funny how just as soon as housewife starts getting looks her wifebeater clad redneck of a husband suddenly remembers he wanted to buy her earrings all along.ix

II. The endless case of PGP.

PGP is a tool that has been used as nothing but a toy for the past two decades! Why ?

It's not really "serious", is it ? According to whom ?

"Customers" would never accept it, right ? They'll accept any other piece of idiocy to date, and I won't bother to list, but they'd never accept PGP.

It's not actually needed, obviously. "The same" could be had cheaper, faster, easier, by more people, provided it's not actually the same. But that wasn't needed anyway (and customers'd never accepted it!).

We discover ridiculously infantile errors, worthy of a six week old prototype all the damned time - most recently, these days. Every time it's being put to some serious use, every time we attempt to employ it in production, another ridiculously infantile bit that's tacked on, for no real reason, rears its mouthbreathing head. Why do you suppose that is ?

Yes, I'm sure now that #b-a has picked it up it'll suddenly and retrospectively will have been very important all along, and "some researchers" will have retrospectively said (undocumentably) everything we say, and so on and so forth. Like we've seen it play out before.

In conclusion : The jerking around is not a Romanian thing. It's a poor-but-stupid-peoplex thing. As the US has become overrun with stupid and is now poorxi, the same crap comes back from wherever crap temporarily goes.

The jerking around is simply the return to pre-economic relations and means of social organisation, deployed by people who have meanwhile become too stupid to be able to have an economy and too poor to even need one in the first place.

It doesn't bode well.

———I've meanwhile learned a lot more about this "respeto" nonsense, and none of it is flattering to the primitive tribes in Argentina, last decade Romania and wherever else. [↩]Whatever of my great-grandparents that kept animals didn't sit down to eat before feeding said animals.

You might think what you will of the sort of savages that ran a society in which women refusing sex was tantamount to a declaration of mental handicap, and wives carried red lines on their backs at least 90% of the times they needed red lines on their back. You may think what you will of your great progress hence, not even a century ago, and of your great and blinding superiority over them.

I however will think very little of you for as long as your couch is in better shape than your tools. Yes, this implies you actually have tools, which don't necessarily have to be a wrench, but necessarily have to not be a smartphone. [↩]Or at least I would hope so, but given the pressure words like "businessman" are under, from the large wave of drool coming out of the ustardian kids these days - a wave large enough Hillary Clinton's surfing on it even! - who even knows anymore. Maybe US business expense accounts come with a complimentary airbnb reservation by now. [↩]"Intunericit" is strictly speaking incorrect usage in Romanian, but it was made famous by one of Ceasuescu's brothers who, under arrest during the Revolution and clearly perturbed, narrated a story and misspoke, saying "cind a inceput sa se intunericeasca" instead of "cind a inceput sa se intunece", roughly the equivalent of saying "when it started to endarkenate". Since he was stupid in the sense of just a step or two above diagnosable cognitive impairment, the expression survived him as the sure mark of the sort of intellect that might or might not inherit the kingdom of heaven, but certainly will get naught else. [↩]This is how you go asking, in Romanian. [↩]Barnacle is a term of art in the B,TMSRO~ universe. It denotes one of those USG minions who exist chiefly to prevent normal functioning of society in some particular point. The barnacle is today's soviet comissar, he's there to do what the thin layer of metal oxide does to keep inox tools unrusted. [↩]Mostly because contemplating the alternative is too scary, and obviously nobody has to do anything that's scary. Like...ever. [↩]Ah, that's right, in 2014 nobody could have foreseen Heartbleed getting shot straight in the head, and Mike Hearn getting beheaded to go with it and so forth ?

Ah, in 2014 nobody had any serious understanding of how and why Bitcoin can't be crushed financially ?

Awww, really.

Learn to read those reports, boys and girls, those schmucky kids that work for you still did summarize 2013 Trilema articles for you, they were right there on the desk, alongside the reports invalidating every other "no one could have foreseen" to date.

Read more, seriously. [↩]For the record, the test that establishes whether any given pair of tits is best employed as the beaten housewife of some inept redneck or something else is simply whether she sees through this crap or falls for it. There's pointedly no detriment to the world at large coming out of her being stupid. [↩]Hey, ever heard of Sergiu Brucan ? You'd have loved that guy.

He said Romanians are "a stupid people" once on live television, and for five or so years afterwards his middle name was fucking Goldstein. [↩]About as poor as Romania in the 90s, incidentally. I won't get into the details of intellectual poverty, for I don't want to upset my liver, but as far as economic poverty goes, let me point out that Romania also was doing the entire "we can't afford it so it's bad" song and dance the US Pravda's been churning out re Olympics recently.

In any case you're not adding 2k worth of value per capita top the world, which is where Romania was, back then. It got better. Maybe the US will too. Someday. Ask me sometime what Romania had to go through to reach that someday, marginal as it still is. [↩]

« Sunday, August 16th event : Another auction!

The news, in brief : "Hearn is a shitstain, MP is right, fuck reddit. Love, Satoshi" »

Category: Gandesc, deci gandesc

Saturday, 15 August, Year 7 d.Tr.

The importance of backups, from the other side.

Yesterday was a reasonably interesting day, as far as backups are concerned, because :

I. The Bad.

An agent buried in a distant land reported... well, a lengthy string of successive failures all adding up to a stash of about fifty to a hundred Bitcoins being perhaps lost. Because nobody could have predicted and the backups were in the safe but they keys to the safe were in the lost pile while at the same time the other backups seem to have either been poorly verified or not verified at all but in any case their substance wasn't usable for the intended purpose and so for all anyone knew once the safe's cut the contents might be equally useless and so on and so forth.

Sucky day so far, huh ?

II. The Ugly.

After screaming enough about the bad, I read the logs to find a mysterious line reading

anton_osika: antonosika has to sign a document stating the location of delivery. He however involuntarily lost his hands. So he can't sign documents anymore.

What the hell is that all about ? I have no idea, until someone conveniently digs up an old contract. It went like soi :

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

Hash: SHA512

Future Delivery Contract

For the Alleged Future Cryptocurrency "Ethereum"

This agreement entered today, the 27th of August 2014, between

The Long Party, antonosika, signature fingerprint of record 71A1EC4E1B6C7DD853FD856C86AC5789F93ED2E7

The Short Party, Mircea Popescu, undersigned as 6160E1CAC8A3C52966FD76998A736F0E2FB7B452

For the purpose that the Long Party shall deposit in Short Party's Bitcoin address 1JPvucRfu3ZzEvfBUQTJwsxMrZjeTqD6zR the sum of 3.00001000 BTC no later than August 31st, midnight GMT ;

And that the Short Party shall deliver to the Long Party in a manner to be agreed upon thence the sum of 15`000 ETH coins on September 15th, 2015, before midnight GMT, provided that the alleged future cryptocurrency Ethereum, scheduled to be released in the Winter of 2014 or fail that in 2015 is in fact released as specified on or before September 1st, 2015 ; and that the various direct buyers are delivered the ETH as promised ; and that ETH trades on a reputable exchange in total value of at least 100 BTC prior to the date of delivery ; or else deliver to the Long Party the sum of 0.0001 BTC.

The riders on the delivery clause above exist to protect the Short Party from the eventuality of having to deliver an inexisting asset, and will be interpreted constructively to that effect. In no case will this contract be deemed as a license for the Long Party to attempt to extract infinite value on the grounds that since the scammers pushing Ethereum have failed to actually make it available, its putative "value" approximates infinity.

This contract may also be extinguished by signed agreement among the parties prior to September 1st, 2015.

The Long Party will recognise assignments of this contract, but only if such assignments are integral, signed by the current holder and registered through confirmed notification in #bitcoin-assets on Freenode.

This contract is a matter of public record and serves as an invoice for Long Party's payment.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----

Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux)

iQIcBAEBCgAGBQJT/QR6AAoJEIpzbw4vt7RSY6gP/0uYeClhEaEp+qJ8Spvrc3AS

G85tlRXsO9FOIneZJ6OG1r+bixI0kwBYdoamthE7QJl+Fb18C683/XirIEH5uCjg

g4jgpatmxgixy21nnRfShbJpg/rtt6SzCfSxlI4jx+ZXzXiknC24fVXbT2WldtM7

R7IptzaWmlMQOl/dbRP2fALEb6z42JsUXPaHB0O9WKpjf8BQSuX/C/rB8f3/nlHH

Zaqii8jO+F7mDBLgWLKyC3zOGyAnol132+VMtX6oWGTaKGcxk6/PW1s6syhJvZIy

bwRJ1O0xFZA7W1bFV5UWxQaSPANVxvbePZcwgpNw/5y8ZS4XJAlgC3Tnb618BN83

AhSHbuTDsGO3fwF4eqGOn2jlXfGpfSN5zouBpOImelAPCPt+jJg1WVIdWDE8c7z3

DrBTOtoJ7kY1bGyawe0h29aT5WPxmCGx9Cyo+fBbVy3iQo+uvlLliHPvdQ/zO3aI

fo81jE4Lb72mI50Vw3npy04XgzZLjVbrDsa11K5ueLWwmf5biydupBEVN6l8Suc6

BYk76DQoADzfaMJ/RE4l6cVbzdBk92yfO3KaWUR613fQDYpxldvbSfJD3MZ+epDY

hI2pQ8041lNFIcq8jzfvKGL9IK001cJQy74o7VnJnZSmwDlzQCFWT9+dtXzYi34c

9TcTVF/i5YKpDQ2uE5bo

=84h1

-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

For some reason I thought this was never executed, but apparently the guy did send his 3 and change on the 26th (the contract itself was tendered after some discussion that same day, but I was so used with people idly discussing things because hey, it's the Internet, by which they mean the web, by which they mean AOL that I just didn't register someone was actually serious for once).

And so now it looks like I'm out another fifty to a hundred BTC. Not bad for a day's work, seeing how it is in fact mathematically provable that 99.9985% of the seven billion people alive will never have that much in their life.

But then...

III. The Deznodamintul.

As far as I is concerned, once the safe was opened the backups were fine. So that's that.

As far as II is concerned,

anton_osika: I got my hands cut off so I cannot make signatures; laptop stolen and broken backup. Got any tips for me?

So... that's also that ?

Backups, people. They are the very important, right up there with social engineering.

———Check it out btw, I found a way to wordpress proper contracts : wrap the header and signature part in pre and (optionally) font tags. Go me! [↩]

« Sneak Peak Screenshots and The Future Golden Goose

Ars gratia artis sau cum era, or The function and the functioning of art part deux »

Category: Zsilnic

Tuesday, 08 September, Year 7 d.Tr.

The huge language issue

When Trilema was started, it was designed and intended as a Romanian language personal blog. Things, obviously, never work as intended on the medium term, and so here we are : as I'm contemplating writing a Spanish translation of the Argentina for business article, I decide I want to fix the languages on this blog.

First step is to open a page, look at the source, and sure enough...

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en" >

That's all fine and dandy, until you stop to consider that, for instance,

Doesn't look that much like lang="en", does it. (I've changed it, by the way, and I'm having the remaining bits of Romanian entrenched in the various administrative tasks expunged as we speak).

More importantly : Wordpress doesn't really have a way to specify language on a per-page basis. Because it's made by and maintained by fucktards, which is to say ESLi speakers, and what do you mean there exist things in the world ?!?!

Even more importantly : you're supposed, according to "the standards", to mark by paragraph, sentence and even meta-relation. I kid you not, strange like

<para>Il faut utiliser <abbr title="Simple Object Access Protocol" xml:lang="en">SOAP</abbr></para>

The problem here is this : on one hand, not being the owner of the machines, I have very little incentive and even less inclination to make it easier for the machines to interact with my text.ii On the other hand, Trilema is meant to be read by humans, not by machines anyway. On the third hand... fuck.

So in conclusion : I am going to have the stray Romanian bits fixed. As I started writing this article I was imagining I will also put in an order for someone to figure out how to make it so correct language markings appear in the headers of all articles, probably by expanding the database with an extra field. But then, what to do about (the very numerous!) articles where languages are mixed ? Have someone else run through the entire databaseiii I suppose and find them and mark them. But then... Trilema often enough makes specific use of ambiguity, deliberately, to confuse this very matter. How would someone other than me be ever able to wholly solve this separation problem, and moreover why exactly is it that I wish to undo what I have done ?

At which point I took a step back and realised the foregoing. I don't in fact wish to undo what I've done to any degree, on the contrary.iv So I'll be simply striking the language bit off the header. And, for completeness, I will be also striking the "document bla bla" bullshit. It's not needed, and besides, whoever came up with the string isn't even in my WoT.

So there. No problem is truly insurmountable to the man wielding a flamethrower and willing to use it.

———English as a single language. [↩]Think about this for a second, will you. If you expend five minutes to "properly" add xml language markings on an essay you write, this has cost you five minutes. What does it benefit you ?

From the opposite camp, if you spend those five minutes to "properly" add xml language markings on the essay you wrote, this has benefited google, facebook, every other USG-VC captive ponzi operator plus every third world scammer trying to cash in on the USG ponzi cycle. Now they can more easily take your text and use it for their own purpose, whatever it may be, and make money. Money which they will use : the third worlder to pay for a plane ticket over, and the Ponzi circuit to pay taxes to the USG, so the USG can pay the TSA, so the TSA can hire some third worlder fresh off the boat to shove his fist in your wife's asshole whenever you visit her parents.

Does this sound like any sort of deal to you ? It doesn't to me, and I'm not even suffering from half of those constraints. Of course captive "standards bodies" would make standards to make text more accessible to machines. This isn't something you actually want, as a general principle, unless you actually own the machines. Which, by and large, they do.

Yes, I know, I know, you're innocent. You simply don't have any poltical bones to pick, because this can now happen somehow, magically : agency without agency. Just like that, by itself, of itself, all for you.

Whatever. Enjoy the next fisting trip. Is the daughter of age yet ? Actually... it doesn't really matter what age she is when they do her, does it now. It's only terrorism, child porn and money laundering when you do it. Well... good that you don't have any political bones to pick, then. Enjoy your flight, sir. [↩]Trilema consists, as of the time of right now, of 7`066 published articles (thus excluding this one). That comes to a lot of words, check this out :

mysql> SELECT SUM(LENGTH(content) - LENGTH(REPLACE(content, ' ', '') )+1) FROM posts

WHERE status LIKE "publish";

+----------------------------------------------------------------------+

| SUM(LENGTH(post_content) - LENGTH(REPLACE(post_content, ' ', '') )+1) |

+----------------------------------------------------------------------+

| 12272503 |

+----------------------------------------------------------------------+

1 row in set (8 min 41.84 sec)

It's kinda cool when you can make a computer work for minutes at a stretch. [↩]This is a very deep matter. Consider the following exchange :

mircea_popescu http://btcbase.org/log/?date=12-03-2015#1050204

Friday, 13 March, Year 7 d.Tr.

The horror that is Ubuntu

You might have heard that I recommend Ubuntu to people as a sort of equivalent to the patch for Windows smokers. It's sort-of linux-y, yet sort-of Windows-y enough to not trigger PWSD in random, non-techie people.

I had merely a vague impression of exactly how Windows-y it actually is, until last night. But the horror doesn't begin last night, the horror begins sometime earlier in the week, when :

Her : You know, this Ubuntu thing is just as progressively sluggish as Windows. But I mean... exactly.

Me : How did that happen ?

Her : I have no fucking idea.

Me : So look in top, what's hanging it ?

Her : What ?

Me : Click in system whatever, where the monitor is, look where it lists processes.

Her : The Task Manager thingee ? Hm... Oh! It says settings-something uninterruptible.

Me : So kill it.

Her : Hahaha is this the Ubuntu svchost ?

* Me quietly facepalms, head-desks and prepares to BBQ an OMFG with a side of WTF

Then last night :

Me : So did that fix it ?

Her : Yes. Killing Ubuntu svchost fixes the problem, and also makes the windows in Ubuntu look exactly like the windows in Windows once you've killed Windows svchost.i Of course it comes back when you turn it back on, so you have to kill it every time.

Me : You have to show me this thing.

So she did, and yes gnome-settings-daemon was utterly murdering the reasonably recent machine. Why ?

No, seriously, take your time.

Take your time and try to guess,

before you scroll all the way down

to where the explanation is.

Ready ?

Here we go :

I had to look into the open files. It has $Home/.thumbnails/normal opened, which made me curious. Wtf is in here ?

$Home/.thumbnails/ contains three directories : large, normal and small. They, together, contained over 300`000 files.

Imagine this.

Someone designed a system that does its own caching. You know, for kids. It can't use the OS caching, it's too good for that. It does its own. And then fails to garbage collect the cache. And then fails to notice when the cache that's never garbage collected runs out of any sort of bounds.

What happens if I copy a file ten billion times in that directory, does gnome-settings-daemon crash ? Does it check THAT bound, or do I now get to run random code atop its smoldering remains ?

This is how Windows people code. This is what System-D is all about : A Festivus For The Rest Of Us, in computing. For the rest of them. Of them. For the retards, for the vegetables that "are people too"ii, for the Power Rangers and the Secret Agents cracking the case in Excel.

This is why I want signed patches. This is why you want signed patches. Because we're not them. It sucks to be them. We want to kill them, not be them.

———I checked. It fucking does, yes. [↩]No they aren't. [↩]

« Corina Chiriac - Recital Mamaia'86

That spiffy selection thing. »

Category: Zsilnic

Saturday, 09 May, Year 7 d.Tr.

The Harry Potter challenge

Potter: Thisss hass been foretold.

Voldemort: Ssay what?

Potter: You do not know ; and in thisss tongue can not be expresssed. But it matterss little. Proceed.

Voldemort paused. His eyes closed. As his mind expanded throughout a spaceless space, rushing in all directions like a liberated spring, flowing endlessly through what, in other words might have been space and time but here - not, his chin drooped a little, and a little saliva dribbled on his chest.

And then there they were again. The walls. The ever damned walls. His mind crushed on nothing at all like a face pushed on a glass shower door, not painfully, not even notably. It was just as far as it went. No further. No actual walls. Nothing. The thousand times cursed barrier of that which you don't know. Insuperable. Eternal except for those timelines where it does not in fact exist at all.

Voldemort snapped awake.

Voldemort: You will tell.

Potter: If you inssissssst. You think you know Merlin. Thisss is not exssssactly sso. It isss, but for a reasssson isssn't. You sssee, Merlin isss moving back through time, not sssstraight like you and me. They call thisss a tachyon. He iss powerful, yess. But it isss not power asss you know, for he interactsss in reversssse.

Voldemort: What ?

Potter: You sssshould have picked a better venue to be insssstructed, boi. Parsssel hasss itsss sssad limitsss.

Voldemort: I sssee through your...

But Voldemort was broken off, sharply, by a voice in his mind. It spoke with a chilling, icy cling.

"You think I am speaking to you, but I am not. In truth, you are.

You see, Voldemort... you have taken a chance. Proceeding on what you knew, you bid your time and made your move.

You were wrong, and you have lost.

There is a prize for they who lose any contest in the manner that you have, and that prize is, a certain wall comes down, in your mind. This is what you now hear. It wouldn't normally be a voice at all, except through all your single minded fixation on a certain goal you have reduced your mind to function, sacrificed an awful lot... you, for all your accomplishments in a certain direction yet find yourself reduced to this - the sad state of a barbarous lout, running cluelessly on a field he doesn't own, having his own bicameral mind speak to him in voices. Ridiculous, wouldn't you say ?

And yet it's what you are. That which you think you would confront, you've misidentified. So it happens. That which you have polished into tools for the specific purpose you had for yourself picked - that was all you had. So it happens. Now is the time for the subtle difference between what-you-thought-was-there and what-was-actually-there to come into play, and so for all your directed effort to come to naught.

Make peace."

Valdemort snapped awake again. He threw a confused look around, clutched a strange charm and crushed it to the ground while mumbling something like "No, I was prepared!"

Everything had melted away before the charm was even crushed. Valdemort, safely seated in front of a strange, iridiscent crystal, sighed heavily.

There was a moment's tranquil quiet.

And then, a voice rang its chilling, icy cling.

"You see, Voldemort... you avoided taking a chance. Proceeding on what you knew, you bid your time and avoided committing yourself.

You were wrong, and so you have lost.

There is a prize for they who lose any contest in the manner that you have, and that prize is, a certain understanding that one must commit himself. You can not prevail except if you turn your mind to function, if you sacrifice everything and leave nothing left.

Make peace."

But Voldemort could no longer make peace. Extreme power comes with this disadvantage, that it allows the mind to breach such walls as should never be breached. The net result - no space left for the mind. No space at all.

It was at that precise moment that Valdemort went completely insane.

If you're curious wtf this is, I'll do the best I can to help.

mircea_popescu For the record, I just started writing a solution to that Harry Potter thing.

asciilifeform Solution?

mircea_popescu I never read the damned books, but the challenge is interesting. Should be done in an hour.

"That Harry Potter thing" is this, brought to our attention by jurov. The hour was in fact 21minutes.

« Hai c-am furat un negativ

Qntra (S.QNTR) February 2015 Statement »

Category: Cuvinte Sfiinte

Sunday, 01 March, Year 7 d.Tr.

The greatest failure in modern legal history, the story of Joshua Dratel

Quoth Brian Doherty :

As I've written before, Silk Road was undoubtedly a net positive for the health, safety, and liberty of most of its customers and sellers.

This is factually correct.

That it is factually correct while at the same time never having been a point raised by the defense should give you pause.

This was clearly a case where the only person actually helping the community was standing accused, in the midst of a roomfull of moral-panic stricken busybodies with nary a clue as to what exactly the Sun shining outside is, or how this celebrated "not truck but collection of tubes" thingee even works, too busy screaming "things happened that we don't understand all too well ?!?!?! BURN THE WITCH!!111" to form any shred of genuine intellectual curiosity, which just so happens to be the fountainhead of all actual inquiry, which in turns happens to be the inescapable requisite of any sort of legal process.

Why was this case not presented for what it was, then ? Why weren't the first words opening the defense case exactly and verbatim "what we have here is a strange situation where a collection of corrupt government lackeys are prosecuting a man for having dared to try to be useful, and made a marginally effectual showing of it" ? The only way to carry out this defense was to speak truth to power. Instead, and to his undying, hopefully bankruptcy-bringing shame, Joshua Dratel chose to rob his client blind. What's worse : he did this calculatedly - he imagined that nobody will ever figure it out, or at any rate nobody that isn't working for the same employer as himself. It's not merely that he's inept, it's that he selectively scams the most vulnerable, the most naive, the most desperately in need among his clients. Even considering the (deservedly) low standing of lawyers in the public eye - this is cutting new ground.

So, yes, everyone there present except for the derpy kid in the cage was certainly a government clerk, engaging in the SOPS. They all have their passable excuses, such as those goi. They are, after all, engaged by a rogue state to do its deeds, and while that in itself may be a hangable offense, they can't really be accused of defrauding their employer. Yet not the same can be said of the defense counsel. These people are also officers of the court, but at least in fictive theory the difference between them and prosecutors or judges would be that they pursue without let or hindrance the interest of their actual employer, the accused.

The most cursory examination of the defense in this case shows that fiction for the sad charade it actually is. At no point throughout the proceedings have Dratel & co followed anything even remotely related to their client's interests. In fact, at no point throughout the proceedings can it be shown that out of the choices available to them, the defense team chose anything but the most damaging course for their client. This was, without a doubt, the worst defense ever fielded in the history of common law, and the notion that Joshua L. Dratel, P.C., the "nationally recognized, full-service law firm" would even continue in business is my idea of comedy.

The only moral of this story being : the next time some naive normie tells you that tired old "whosoever represents himself has a fool for a client", remember that whatever sort of fool you as the client may be, none could ever surpass the sort of fool that'd hire a US lawyer.ii

———Only following orders of their employer, did not know about the concentration camps, standard fare. [↩]Yes, Joshua Dratel not having been yet disbarred over his appalling performance butchering his client means that the crime stands on the head of the entire profession. What Dratel did there is nothing short of the dentist who puts some old lady with a cavity under general anesthesia and then proceeds to give her a sex change operation while amputating both legs and part of the nose. It is a disgrace, it is in no sense anything else or anything short of a crime, and anyone harboring the guilty is tainted by that association.

Honestly, I don't think very much of a woman that wouldn't divorce after something like this. Infidelity, that's a minor concern by comparison. [↩]

« He who gets married....

Tiganii daca erau... »

Category: SUA care este

Saturday, 30 May, Year 7 d.Tr.

The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsbyi is a whole lot of prime cinematography workii wasted on a mediocre novel.iii

I get it, Jay Gatsby resonates with all you losers out there. That's fine, the "incorruptible dream" or whatever, the "real you" that'll wake up one day to be like Neo in damatrix. "Hope is an important theme", something in the vein of "hopefully God will upload kung-fu fightin' straight into your dumbass on a JIT basis". The sort of pseudo-hope that's a mere pretense, an adolescentine conceit intended to mask self-esteem the self perceives as indefensible - or in the simpler words of an old farmer, "the sort of bullshit that's not even worth turning." But whatever, I'm sure the great Red Greeniv Star in the East will shine its beacony light or something.

Meanwhile back on Earth the contemptible worm of a Mary Sue "hero" is unremarkable in all respects save one : that he manages, if ever so briefly, to make even that miserable heel of a husband appear convincingly pleasant. At no point is the master of the house even remotely in the zone of "people you'd tolerate at the table", except for that short stretch where he humiliates the starstruck humanist. This performance in failure and there only seems eerily representative of the failed generation, that sad collection of accidental births that actually imagine Fitzgerald could pass for a writer.

There's really nothing here, and in particular the failure of the... girls, for women they are not, must be noted. The exquisite decor of the set and the costumes serve approximately in the manner an ellaborate gold monture would serve a rabbit turd : its execrable quality is thus harshly displayed, magnified by the contrast.

The world periodically knows generations that, as far as anyone can remember, never actually happened. This film is a fine effort at capturing such a generation for the baffled amusement of their children, who always intuited that there's something wrong with the hole moving around where his mother or father should have went, but never really quite got to see it. Because you can't actually see a hole, that's the problem, the only way you know it's there is through the absence.

This film does an excellent job of chronicling the absence that the boomers were, in the only way such a thing can be done : by showing the edges of the missing parts. In that much, it is notable.

———2013, by Baz Luhrmann with Leonardo DiCaprio and that Freddy that got fingered (not really, but the difference is negligible - same product a decade later). [↩]Also set and costume design. If this film should be seen, it's mostly for Simon Duggan and Catherine Martin/Beverley Dunn/

Eva Starlite. DiCaprio is doing okay I guess, but otherwise the cast doesn't exist. Actors can't play in a vacuum, that's the first thing any tango instructor tells the woman : you gotta push back, bitch! The man can't dance with the air, let him lead, yes, but let him lead. Acting's no different. [↩]Here's a hint : the generation at the time, not being entirely fucking insane, thought nothing of the soap in question, and its tiresome author died poor and ignored, and correctly understanding his failure as both a writer and a human being for exactly what it was : his routund, resplendent failure, as a writer and as a human being.

Then a generation of narcisiac lusers got wind of it, and it tickled their fucktarded fancy. This is perfectly fine, but it makes about as much difference as the generation in question collectively does - which is to say zero. [↩]Ain't that clever! [↩]

« A lingering suspicion.

And there was another auction, and there was another record, and so on. »

Category: Trilematograf

Sunday, 25 October, Year 7 d.Tr.

The godfather

Motto: C'e la luna mezz'a mare, mamma mia me maretare!

I've seen this filmi a coupla decades ago. Everyone was enamoured with it, I thought it pretty stupid but didn't say anything. I've watched it again yesterday. Everyone is still enamoured with it, I still think it's pretty stupid. I'm saying something this time.

First off, the celebrated Puzzo novel makes absolutely no fucking sense. It's a pile of contradictory crap. Consider : this putative don, essentially a rewrite of Calogero Vizzini except transplanted "to America"ii, holds his mafioso activities in little regard and aims to integrate himself in actual high society (that's the significance of the gubernatorial aspirations for his sons etc). That's the playbookiii. Nevertheless, in a dispute between a young dicklet without any serious profession and an established man of affluence, the don favours the young dicklet. Why ? Makes no sense, no fucking hardcore ET don of the 1940s was EVER going to side with a young man fucking an old man's teenaged piece of ass. Ever. Evvvvvvvver.iv

This putative don, that's a man of honor, that then takes the side of a contemptible shitclod that cries like a woman in his presence (never, you hear me ? nevvvvvvvvvverrrrrr!) in a dispute with another actual man of honor nevertheless treats some Turkish darkiev as if he were his peer.

But wait, there's more! Who has all the judges and politicians in New York floating about in his pocket like so many nickles and dimes ? Oh, I dunno, the FUCKING FIVE NEW YORK FAMILIES, PERHAPS ?! Nope. Midwestern Don Derpiglione. Why ? Because Deux Ex Fucking Puzzina, that's why. Director said so, that's how it is. Sense ? What sense! So why are they the five New York Families then ? Perhaps they should be the Five New Jersey families ? You know, the Barzini family, the Appleseed family (run by Johnny), the Kid family (run by Billy), the Boone family (run by Daniel) and the Crockett family (run by David). The five mobster families of the American Sicily, an island off the coast of Kentucky Bay in Sacramento. Stop asking so many questions, stop expecting things to make sense, stop wanting anyone to have done any reading or comprehend anything. Puzzochukcha no reader. Puzzochukcha writer!

In short, the nonsense in this blenderized product is staggering, I don't recall ordering word salad and I can hardly even recognize these mangled, battered pieces of other stories in all the sauce. Mario Puzzo puts himself in the situation of a waiter who delivers your order of lobster in the shape of a pile of lobster eyes and eyestalks, somehow inexplicably still animated. That's not food, but a natural curiosity, and this is not literature, but a commercial Frankenstein - and somebody really saved on the electric current, too!

Second off, the actors can't act! I don't mean a little, I mean a fucking lot. Yes Brando has the cunning audacity to prop his entirely absent gift with distractions - but that whitewash worked a fuckload of a lot better when he was raping Maria Schneider's juicy behindvi than it does here with all the bizarro hand gestures and body positionings. Diane Keaton apparently thinks herself in some sort of Dallas, playing Pamela Ewing or some shit. Al Pacino is burried under so much inept bullshit he can't even be seen. (In fact everyone fucking dying is the best thing that could have happened under the circumstances, with a crew like that the only good thing to do is kill the lot).

Third off... no but seriously. There's no third off. Just a stupid story put up by a second rate crew. I've seen highschool productions of better value - at least those chicks were sluttish, and eager. It's something.

Something a damned sight more than The Derpfather.

———The Godfather 1972, by Francis Ford Coppola, with Marlon Brando, Al Pacino. [↩]Where ? The midwest, somewhere, right ? Because why ? Right. [↩]To understand each other : mafia existed in Sicily for very good historical reasons : it's a fucking island. As such, it's behind the mainland. Italy was a backwards shithole all through its post Odoacer history (it still is exactly that, today - a part of Europe like I'm part of the choir invisible), and so the poor island was still essentially feudal in 1848, at a point when capitalism was already centuries old. The reverberations of emergent capitalist work ethics and societal forms of organisation against the strong walls of feudal institutions and the narrow edges of the tiny island resulted in a particular institution, very much akin the Frontier cowboy. You needed men to uphold your rights in Sicily much the same way you needed men to uphold your rights in Californy or Arizony (or later the Ozarks). An' those men did the same things, essentially.

The Godfather'd have been much more honest, and thus an actual piece of literature, had it been plainly the story of Vail and the Empire ranch, fightin' that damn Injun varmint. Instead it gets to be the very contorted story of "Vail had he been Italian so Marlon Brando's bad English can be magicked away, and magically stuck in town because tumbleweeds aren't fashionable to the intended demo". I'd rather read the Celebrated Story of the 400 Jumping Short Stories Of Calaveras, myself, rather than this abomination stitched together by an overenthusiastic undertaker out of a day's worth of butcher's and fishmonger's offal. [↩]We're leaving aside the issue of whether a Sicilian would have even killed a horse. [↩]You have no idea. If even for a second you imagine a Sicilian of the period would classify in his own private Natural History the Turks above the frogs and the lizards you have absolutely no idea. You might as credibly propose that the old man was fond of giving himself a prostate massage every morning, with a stretcher dildo shaped like San' Francesco. [↩]Yes, that's exactly rape. The girl had no idea she was getting done in the ass. Nobody did. It was a spur of the moment thing, an idea that occured to Brando as he was handling a stick of butter. The girl didn't find an effectual way to say no in time, and so she got buttfucked, with the cameras rolling, for your private enjoyment. That's rape you're seeing there, and it doesn't really look all that bad, either, does it. [↩]

« What disruption actually means

The strange case of the WoodCollector and other stories. »

Category: Trilematograf

Friday, 23 January, Year 7 d.Tr.

The function and the functioning of art.

[In response to someone wondering if "Lisa Popescu" is my sister {because there's a lot of people taking a very keen interest in stalking me, as it happens - but not really doing a too good job of it}] I came across a young talent by her name Cristina Moise. From which point I'll just proceed to selectively quote from correspondence. To wit :

From: Me

To: Her

Salut,

M-ar interesa o compozitie, ceva mai complexa decit ce-am vazut in general pe tumblr.

Cele bune,

Mircea Popescui

This was made possible by the woman having had the intellectual maturity to include an actual means of contact. I am tempted to go back and add blinking red lights to that bolded string. Seriously people, stop being retarded already. If you can't be contacted you're on the Zoo not on the Internet.

And then she responded, within a reasonable timeframe, to ask for details. Well done, and so :

From: Me

To: Her

Pai nu stiu cam cit cunosti tu despre Bitcoin, da' e acu' mare scandal si ce m-ar interesa ar fi ceva de genul : redesenat un tablou clasic (doar in mare, ce priveste compozitia, altfel in mina ta si cu culorile tale), cu chipurile a diverse persoane substituite (facute dupa poze). Ceva gen Il Giudizio. Da-mi tu o idee, cit de mare l-ai face, cite persoane ai pune, cit ar dura, cit ar costa.

Cele bune,

Mircea Popescuii

To which she replied that she's heard a little about Karpeles - fancy that, the world's most famous frog-genius. So I pointed out that "ala saracu' n-are nici o treaba in chestie", which would come to "quel' poveraccio non c'entra di niente" in Italian, and wouldn't be translated in English on the grounds that English sucks. So then she wanted to know what is it about, and I told her.

From: Me

To: Her

Conceptul e in mare cam asa, ca fortele unite ale retarzilor sub obladuirea departamentului pentru retardat lumea al Statelor Unite s-or apucat sa inventeze ei inventii ca sa "imbunatateasca" Bitcoinu', si-or cam luat-o peste bot. Asa ca acu' stau si pling si neaga si se prefac ca nu s-o chiar intimplat. Si io fac ce face tot nobilu' dupa ce-o rupt miinile gloatei si i-o batut cu ele peste gura : comand tablouri comemorative. Cine stie, poate urmatoarea generatie de retarzi intelege din cuvinte direct unde i-s limitele - asta fiind pina la urma si scopul de-a fi al artei.

Cele bune,

Mircea Popescuiii

And then we reached an agreement and I've sent her over the dozen pics with explanations and we left it at

From: Her

To: Me

Buna Mircea,

Totul suna... delicios :)) Nu stiam ca voiai desenul asa de "out there". Imi place. oricum am vazut pe blog ca esti fan Oglaf deci totul incepe sa aiba sens.

mersi, Cristina Moiseiv

And so there we go. Supposedly this takes a week. I, for one, am quite curious what comes out of it.

———"Hi, I'd be interested in a work, somewhat more complex than I've seen on your tumblr." [↩]"I have no idea how much you know about Bitcoin, but there's a brouhahaha and what I want is something like, redraw a classical painting (broadly speaking, as regards to composition, otherwise in your hand and your own colors), with the faces of various persons substituted (drawn after photograph). Something like The Judgement. Suggest size, headcount, time, cost."

Admire my telegraphic style. Then copy it. Save the fucking worldenvironment by typing less and always exactly what you mean. [↩]"The idea is more or less that the united forces of the retards under the leadership of the US department for retardifying the globe sat down and invented inventions to improve Bitcoin, and then got fucked. So now they're sitting around crying in a circle and pretending like it didn't really happen. And I'm doing what every aristocrat does after breaking the arms off the mob and beating said mob with said broken arms over mouth : I commission commemorative paintings. Who knows, maybe the next generation of retards will comprehend by mere speech where its limits lay - this being in the end the very point and purpose of art." [↩]"Everything sounds... delicious. I had no idea you want it so wild. I like it. Anyway I saw on your blog you're an Oglaf fan so everything starts making sense." [↩]

« The three friends and the means of meaning

One hundred million Eulora coins. Or in other words, one Bitcoin. »

Category: Zsilnic

Friday, 28 August, Year 7 d.Tr.

The fun read.

OP Fun read.

MP Make any sense ?

OP Yeah. I'm not sure allowing contributors who've actually brought work for review to vent is quite in the same bucket as blanket cattlemer service, but sure. I guess one could argue the chump paying $12.95 for some chunk of nonsense "put in his work too", at least by proxy.

MP If they are venting why is this "board" required to intervene ?

OP It doesn't say the board will intervene.

MP "please contact the Linux Foundation's Technical Advisory Board at, or the individual members, and they will work to resolve the issue to the best of their ability."

OP Vague enough to mean nothing.

MP Vague enough to be an OCD undo of a thing that was donei. The thing that was done is a blanket statement that happens to be wrong. The correct statement is, "If you have problems we don't give a shit. Fuck you."

OP It could be. The problem with that statement is the idea that it'll turn away otherwise useful, efficient, otherwise desirable people, and that they'll be left with too few to do what they wish so either they'll fail, or they'll have to kill off the rest of the population. They vehemently want neither of these.

MP Yes, that is the problem : that they think this matters, and that they think they should careii. From there on, the whole spittoon follows.

OP Eh. I'd go for encouraging correct understanding of spheres of influence and inclusion in the unnatural context of the Internet over blanket fuck you-ing. 'Cause I mean... it's just another blanket. And yeah, you have WoT etc in there, but I wonder if it's a speck in a sea, where it oughta be the sea.

MP I think the sea should be "fuck you".

OP Who knows, words affect different idiots differently ;)

MP "We don't like you and we hope you die already".

OP Too strong for any purpose beyond destruction imo. But you know that. As long as you don't actually literally want them ALL to die already, but want them to do things for you....

MP No, not at all. The opposite, as currently practiced, is pure poison. It's like being submerged in a vat of social heroin. The constant stimulation utterly exhausts and soon destroys the brain. If people were correctly representing the world as fundamentally hostile, they would be capable of finding their way, and making friends and starting families and finding meaning. As it is, they're pretty much fucked, all by a fake pretense to "friendliness", hypocritical as much as it's insane.

OP Here's one: friendliness does exist. Why shouldn't they try? They're all going to die anyway, whether the world is fundamentally hostile or not. Maybe they find meaning out of spending their lives trying to be friendly and trying to observe it in others. Maybe some scant few succeed, just like some scant few succeed by fully embracing hostility.

MP This maybe has ruined your country. In the shortest span ever seen, to the most utter despair ever mentioned, this maybe has ruined your country.

OP Yeah well I have yet to appreciate the value, should it exist, of "country".

MP Myeah. Well, it was great once, but that was in fairness before you were born. At any rate : maybe heroin does a body good too. Who's to say. Kramer gets it just as well. "What do you want me to say? That the things haven't worked out the way that I planned? That I'm struggling, barely able to keep my head above water? That L.A. is a cold place even in the middle of the summer? That it's a lonely place even when your stuck in traffic at the Hollywood Freeway? That I'm no better than a screenwriter driving a cab, a starlet turning tricks, a producer in a house he can't afford? Is that what you want me to say?"

OP I don't really like this analogy. Being high is a physiological divorce from reality. How can we say, to the same measure, that someone's choice to "be friendly" or to "be hostile" enacts a similar divorce?

MP Point to point. Find a difference ? And no equivocation there. Strictly and only "being friendly".

OP Naturally you'll say it isn't, and i'll have no way to prove that it is. But: former's objective, latter's abstract.

MP There's nothing "objective" about either of them.

OP A body under the influence of heroin must be measurably abnormal. That's not objective?

MP That may be objective, but it's not germane.

OP Well I dunno why not.

MP Fact remains that the heroin addict and the "maybe" addict share an exactly homomorphical mental problem.

OP I thought the problem with the friendly blanket was that it's not how the world fundamentally works.

MP No, the problem with it isn't outside of the mind, it's inside of the mind. It's just recursive stupidity. Sort of slow burning autism, if you wish.iii

OP Then this'll have to be shown.

MP Ok, let's show it. Three people, of whom A is sane ; B is high ; C is maybe-sick. They all run into a scorpion. A kills it. B steps on it and gets killed. C steps on it and gets killed.

OP ...

MP Not the showing you had in mind ?

OP Nah. Problems: you changed blanket friendly people into "maybe addicts"; the maybe you reference was an idea I was postulating and wouldn't source from them. Moreover this abc is a rehash of the same premise: that maybe-sick is the same as high person. What is to be shown is that the problem is inside the mind rather than outside of it, in the maybe sick person (we can grant as is that this is the case for high people).

MP Can you construct a counter ? I like how you argue these days btw. Nicely matured.

OP Hehe yay! A counter to the idea that maybe-sick's problem is in the mind? Sure: it's outside their mind.

MP Like where ?

OP You said "if people were correctly representing the world as fundamentally hostile". I imagine this'd be the "where" of it; I'd have to say the world is fundamentally friendly. I don't actually think that's true, mind you, but I think it's equally...abstract.

MP What do you mean "equally abstract".

OP I mean that both statements (world is fundamentally hostile, world is fundamentally friendly) are equally unprovable.

MP To whom ?

OP To a thinking person. I think the best we could do is to construct a list of supports for both statements, and compare them. But how do we know our lists are complete? Could they even possibly be complete?

MP To a little girl they are unknowable, let alone provable. To an adult woman, or an adult man, they are the pinnacle of banal. The stacking of this deck being that I'm not arguing here for the benefit of tabula rasa, so that random pubescent derp may read and be better at picking up girls or w/e. I write for people who already know the world. Which is why the qualification for reading Trilema is above the PhD level.

OP You write for people who already know the world inasmuch as the world is knowable (and not even then; PhD level it may be, but perfect knowledge is unattainable nevertheless).

MP Anyway, this aside : that the world is fundamentally hostile directly flows from basic physics. The laws of thermodynamics are good enough basis to prove it.

OP The world we're talking about includes human thought, does it?

MP Depends what you mean by thought.

OP Hehe.

MP If you're willing to invent an unknowable, purely declarative thought outside of action, of the substance of "with all due respect", then no. If you see thought as the parsimonious explanation of action, then yes.

OP Alright, that seems a sufficient argument to me.

MP Ha! Discussion seems sufficient article to me!

———You know how this undoing thing works ? Pure ritual, distilled faith, the OCD guy is really just the religious believer taken to the extreme. In his case, the slow motion "you must wear this on your head lest god strike you down" sort of nonsense becomes a much more disruptive "I almost thought about nipples, I must immediately hop three times and touch my nose with my wrist or else THE WORLD FUCKING ENDS". [↩]Causes and purposes makes for excellent companion reading here. [↩]I carefully avoided "sluggish" in there. Could you tell ? [↩]

« Stuff I don't understand and other likable parts.

Argentina for business »

Category: Trilterviuri

Wednesday, 11 March, Year 7 d.Tr.

The four points of this morning, in color. Any questions ?

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Wednesday, 06 May, Year 7 d.Tr.

The failure modes of "democracy", from people who actually know what they're talking about.

That'd be me. First, by way of intro :

mircea_popescu Back to that "you have no rights" Fisher quote for a second : it splendidly illustrates the difference between democracy and republic, and why La Serenissima is not a democracy, and why no democracy can be anything but "a popular democracy", as in the popular democratic republic of .i

decimation "So, what that means is, this is actually terrifying. Democracy is radically indeterminate. The outcome can be manipulated. But that manipulation will not be apparent to people unless they have seen this technical result. Which means that you sort of--you can have shamans, people who know the rules, be in charge in ways that are tantamount to dictatorship. So, we should be very skeptical about claims that 'this is what the people want.'" via http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/02/michael_munger_1.html

decimation ^ The 'result' is simply that outcomes are not process-neutral, so manipulation of 'voting rules' manipulates outcomes. thus, dictatorship by process, ie USG.

asciilifeform Manipulation of 'voting rules' manipulates outcomes

Monday, 06 April, Year 7 d.Tr.

The Drafts Auction

Seeing how the attempt to seed the draft cycle failed, let's try to seed again.

To go on the block Sunday, November 1st, at 6pm GMT, the following :

3 Supplication of Berries Draft, q 100

3 Supplication of Leather Draft, q 100

3 Supplication of Mosses Draft, q 100

3 Supplication of Snails Draft, q 100

3 Supplication of Stones Draft, q 100

3 Supplication of Thorns Draft, q 100

The total base value for this being 180 coppers, the auction will start at a record breaking (the other way) 200 coppers. See you then!

« And there was another auction, and there was another record, and so on.

That unpleasant moment when "principles" you were supporting ~strictly~ because "of the principle of the thing" and pointedly not because of the convenient manner in which they worked upon a restricted set of circumstances decide to move on to another set of circumstances and work consistently but against your (inconsistent) preference. The only thing to do is look away. »

Category: S.MG

Monday, 26 October, Year 7 d.Tr.