A Week in TMSR: 3-9 December 2018



December 16th, 2018 by Diana Coman

On Monday, 3rd of December 2018:

Hanbot is recovering from an appendectomy.

Spyked publishes a regrind of the various TMSR bots as a single V-tree with two branches. His regrind brings together 4 previously separated V-trunks by Trinque, while aiming to preserve the history of the code. Commenting on this work, Mircea Popescu notes that a history-preserving regrind is certainly worth doing when the author is indeed qualified to do it properly as in this case; alternatively, the most basic sort of regrind (that is less demanding of the author's time and skill) simply collapses all existing work into one single genesis vpatch. Spyked's newly published regrind also serves now as a golden standard for any future regrinds with respect to testing - any new regrind should be tested by its author on ALL noted V implementations. In other V-related empirical results, Lobbes reports that a newer GNAT version fails to work with the existing VK.pl implementation of V. This does not come as a big surprise to anyone anymore.

Diana Coman announces her talk to students at Reading University, UK, scheduled to happen on the 10th of December.

With the help of the forum, Spyked realises that he purchased a boobytrap in the shape of a laptop or otherwise a rather expensive desk decoration/ paperweight. The item in question is called c101pa and it has the rather dubious honour of resisting so far ~all of Asciilifeform's significant attempts at disinfection.

Asciilifeform reveals that his day job is that of a genie caught in a lamp with rather unpredictable rubbing-schedule. As a result of having his lamp rubbed at odd times, his own TMSR schedule might go poof in a cloud of smoke at any time.

Esthlos is noted to have stopped any meaningful activity somewhere in November this year. His log summaries are missed, his fate is unknown, his reputation is - as always and for everyone - on the line.

On Tuesday, 4th of December 2018:

Mircea Popescu announces that he will delay making the reports for Qntra, S.MG and S.NSA due to Hanbot's appendectomy.

Mircea Popescu points out the expensive but inevitable bridge-maintaining work needed to gradually build sanity (as TMSR aims to do) from within an insane environment (as everyone currently finds themselves in). He notes that such bridges, if improperly managed, can potentially leak insanity to such degree as to kill off the attempts at sanity on the other end, as illustrated by a potential shattering of bot-code into incompatible and separate parts depending on the underlying type of database system used. Adding to the complexity of the issue is the fact that several choices (even fundamental ones such as the choice of a database system) may still have to be preserved for as long as none emerges as the clearly best option overall. As an example, Mircea Popescu notes that there is already a potential conflictual case of mysql vs postgres - each of them being best for some specific types of use but significantly worse than the other in other cases.

Mocky comes up for air from his search for a place of 9 to 5, Mon to Fri (or similar) servitude. He notes that the search is eating up his time, apparently delaying his reports on the previous Qatar trip and otherwise requiring vodka access as a prerequisite.

Asciilifeform turns 35 but doesn't believe that to be a prime.

Asciilifeform notices empirically that on the Internet it takes two questions to prove one is human after all: non-humans can xor correctly, but they fail to know - as yet - about the proper serial rate of a Fuckgoat.

Spyked takes over the delivery of republican RSS feeds from Trinque. The takeover means that Spyked's feedbot will announce from now on in #trilema all new posts on republican blogs. This very useful service had been previously provided - in an excellent way - by Trinque's deedbot for lack of any other better-placed bot to do it.

BingoBoingo reports on Qntra about Denmark's plans for criminal and expelled migrants.

On Wednesday, 5th of December 2018:

Mod6 briefly stops by to say hello.

Phf is alive in Moscow, Russia and is preparing to sign the lease of a flat there.

Lobbes and Spyked talk of a takeover of rss feeds in #eulora by feedbot from the existing lobbesbot.

Ben Vulpes completes various data entry tasks for Pizarro.

Bingo Boingo publishes on Qntra a brief summary of the adventures of Tumblr with AI and porn.

Trinque and Asciilifeform note that their respective irc bots (deedbot and pehbot) sometimes fail to reconnect. The reasons for this failure mode are yet unknown and nobody had yet the time to sink into investigating the issue.

A few people from some obscure "L0de Radio Show" join the forum brought in by danielpbarron. They talk of printer scam campaigns, keybase and what the majority seems to think of the latter. The result of this is rather predictable but it will take until next day to fully mature.

On Thursday, 6th of December 2018:

Anniez from L0de re-registers with a key that is at least not held by keybase.

BingoBoingo reports that there is now at least one new case of Leishmaniasis in Uruguay.

Mats reports a failed experiment on the ESP8266 microchip when using the rigol ds1054z instrument, due to insufficient sensitivity of the probe. He also outlines his future plans to return to Hong Kong in spring and attempt to acquire a permanent ID card and a Taiwan passport. The process involves additional steps such as applying for the right to abode but has apparently better chance of success than the experiment with ds1054z since Mats was born in Hong Kong and can reasonably expect therefore to be a good match to local probing.

Diana Coman signs chapters 4 and 5 of Asciilifeform's FFA series. She also publishes on her blog Chapter 11 of the SMG Comms series that makes the changes needed to allow arbitrary (as opposed to single, pre-defined) size of the public exponent for RSA encryption.

BingoBoingo publishes on Qntra two articles: on a confused ransomware guy and the adventures of Huawei's CFO in Canada.

Mircea Popescu publishes the delayed Qntra report for November 2018.

Danielpbarron publishes on his blog some talk he had with another dude on religious beliefs.

Lobbes deploys a fix to his auctionbot so that the messages at the end of an auction reflect correctly whether an item was sold to somebody or by that same somebody.

Some things mature quite quickly - Mircea Popescu negrates the main L0de guy.

Mircea Popescu publishes the delayed S.NSA report for November 2018.

On Friday, 7th of December 2018:

Asciilifeform leaks a few results of his chapter 14 of FFA but notes that he doesn't have any further ways to improve the speed performance of the code going forward. Essentially the performance to be reported in Chapter 14 is as good as it gets from FFA.

Bingo Boingo publishes on Qntra two articles on Leacher's Paradise (a torrent tracker) and France's street protests, respectively.

Feedbot fails to report the new posts from Qntra, prompting Diana Coman to enquire if feedbot doesn't track Qntra and Asciilifeform to note that feedbot is down. Spyked sorts out the issue when he comes online, noting that it was due to a failure of all of his connections to freenode. Spyked also plans to take over the feeds in #eulora from Lobbes.

Mircea Popescu publishes the delayed S.MG report for November 2018.

On Saturday, 8th of December 2018:

Nicoleci publishes on her blog a summary of the TMSR log of 18th November 2018.

Lobbes updates his bot's help page, mainly adding content and more detail to existing explanations of available commands.

Mircea Popescu publishes a guide on the exact ways to piss him off. The guide is essentially a structured model of his internal annoyance mechanism, providing also useful pointers to anyone interested in recognizing intermediate steps - milder levels of annoyance as they build up. Hanbot contributes in the comments noting the non-linear accumulative effect on the intensity of resulting rage of repeated failures of enrager to engage with the attempts at sanity on different levels.

On Sunday, 9th of December 2018:

Mats finds out the original meaning - "I'm your slave" - of many common greetings in Europe (e.g. "schiavo", "salve", "servus"), sparking a discussion with Mircea Popescu on what slavery is ("do what you're fucking told to do") and the fact that it exists mainly because a lot of people have a lot of trouble following with any efficiency the only existing alternative to it ("figure out something for you to do").

Lobbes provides to Spyked the list of rss feeds for #eulora.

Diana Coman provides Trinque with feedback on running his Cuntoo script: the script is successful in producing a bootable installation on the specified drive but fails at producing the expected genesis .vpatch of Cuntoo. Trinque helps her better understand the script, describes a way to speed up a subsequent run by copying already built packages to their place and suggests running the script again with a flag set to get additional information.

BingoBoingo publishes on Qntra an article on the hijacking of Linux.org. He also publishes on Pizarro's blog a weekly update of his business activity.

Mircea Popescu publishes on Trilema a post explaining how the stupidity ratchet works. The article is short, its embedded references are a den of rabbit holes.

Nicoleci publishes on her blog an account of several of her old acquintances turning out to be rather different than she thought they were. The difference seems to be that they thought and think they own her while she had no inkling that she was/is their property. As a result, their persistent attempts at "saving" her from her own choices - indeed from making any choices that are not "approved" - seem rather painful.

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8 Responses to “A Week in TMSR: 3-9 December 2018”

  1. Diana Coman says:

    Mircea Popescu points out that Asciilifeform actually can still improve his FFA times - it's really only that he doesn't have any improvements to the *algorithms* (though he can still tweak other bits and pieces): http://btcbase.org/log/2018-12-16#1881141

    And another correction: the "salve" salutation is the "other" type aka along the lines of "may you be ok" (http://btcbase.org/log/2018-12-16#1881143 )

  2. Nitpick: it isn't even necessarily the case that "cannot improve the algorithms." What thread was about, is that any future improvements will be ~linear~, rather than lowering O() complexity. (There is still, e.g., a platform ASMing to do, could yield anywhere from 10-20x linear speedup..)

  3. Diana Coman says:

    Oh hey, that's even better than I thought then! Since I did not yet get that far with FFA yet, I only skimmed the post and apparently left for myself plenty of space for pleasant surprises. One might say I'm finally getting the hang of this useful pessimism!

  4. spyked says:

    Thank you very much for writing this, Diana! I'm finding it a very useful guide for reviewing past conversations.

    > With the help of the forum, Spyked realises that he purchased a boobytrap in the shape of a laptop or otherwise a rather expensive desk decoration/paperweight.

    I'll add that the object in question has found its use as a portable public toilet that I'm carrying around with me on my travels. A sort of smartphone if you will, only for now I've replaced its "android" with a heathen Debian that at least allows me to run a Lisp interpreter, a browser for reading logs etc.

    > Trinque and Asciilifeform note that their respective irc bots (deedbot and pehbot) sometimes fail to reconnect.

    > Feedbot fails to report the new posts from Qntra, prompting Diana Coman to enquire if feedbot doesn't track Qntra and Asciilifeform to note that feedbot is down.

    The two problems above are related, since IIRC feedbot runs on top of the same ircbot as pehbot and deedbot. I've had a shot at debugging this in the past, but I've no clue as to the problem yet. In any case, given the ever degrading quality of Freenode services, I or someone else will have to find a fix for this sooner rather than later.

  5. Diana Coman says:

    Great to hear it's useful! And thanks for the addition re the three bots that are running the same core code.

  6. [...] Coman publishes on her blog a summary of TMSR logs from 3 to 9 December 2018. Mircea Popescu provides feedback and some corrections to it. The summary also prompts Mircea [...]

  7. [...] had a look through Diana’s #trilema log summaries, to compare and contrast with my own. They’re markedly different; I’m surprised at the [...]

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