The Symbolics discussion

Motto: anyway, I think I'm going to reprint (and adnotate) the bolix discussion trinque linked, because I fear it's so concise and the language so tense that in a few more years nobody, including myself, will understand what the fuck was being said.

phf mcclim always reminds me of how rms was planning on competing with symbolics by reimplementing everything they had on top of gnu platform.ⁱ that was the goal. only a handful people who actually worked with a genera realize how "special" the result of rms's work was. mcclim's grey athena widget is from-cave attempt at "industry standard" echo of an echo

mircea_popescu why exactly did everyone in the golden lisp era feel such a burning need to compete with each other anyway ? i mean rms, i understand, stray dog mit took in, he'd bark at st peter if st peter came by. but the rest of 'em ?

asciilifeform gnu's confinement ( from poverty ) to 'commodity' (i.e. unix) hardware was a forced 'exile from eden' and the derp response is to postulate 'we're JUST AS GOOD, US TOO!1111' etc. the other idiocies follow from 'we can make roman aqueduct in empty field, and with 0 book-larnin', and it will be Just As Good'.

mircea_popescu yes, though i'm not particularily interested in stallman's moth-eaten brain. there were what, 5 different wanna-be symbolix corps ? commercial lisps ? etc. what sense did any engineer imagine this will make ? seems a lot of [the] retarded one-man-ism that gave the world 5k "airplane inventors" and just as many canvas-made planes that didn't work worth a shit.ⁱⁱ

asciilifeform most of the subj of thread is post-rms. iirc there were 3 mit licensees : symbolics, lmi, and ti. strangely, even though ti was a megacorp already at the time, their offering was the least memorable.

BingoBoingo No mystery. They were likely operating from an internal assumption of leadership and thus snore.

mircea_popescu the question of "why the fuck would anyone even bother with a mit '''license'''" we'll leave for some other time.ⁱⁱⁱ
asciilifeform describe the hypothetical 'not bothering'. thing was several thou. man-years of gnarly work, it was not repeatable in a garage. (work on multi$million handmade machines, also, not on commodity iron). in fact the piss ui from this thread, clim, franz lisp, whole shebang of barbarian yurts decorated with smashed roman mosaic, were results of later attempt to 'repeat in garage' regardless.

mircea_popescu mit never had a thousand man-years of work, in its entire history to date, counting all the departments.

asciilifeform ai lab strictly. it was the beginning and immediately the end of the 'interesting' mit.

mircea_popescu right. and if it were an actual man-year of work it'd be a wonder. ie, a dozen people "worked" in the us sense^iv for 18 months.

asciilifeform mno.

mircea_popescu blow me away.

asciilifeform i read the released cadr schematics. and the source. it was genuinely 1000+ man-year of genuine work. ever built wire-wrap anything ? picture ten tonnes of it. and quite reasonably minimal, even.

mircea_popescu this argument will not prevail, because again, mit never paid that many hours.

asciilifeform most of the hours were worked unpaid, by slaves.

mircea_popescu mit also never had this many useful slaves.

asciilifeform again it wasn't 'mit', it was 'mit's ai lab', wholly - at the time - unique assemblage. if mircea_popescu already postulated a conclusion in his head, and doesn't actually give half a fuck about facts^v, i will not bother with this thread. 1970s mit ai lab != modern mit just as 1850s usg ain't today's.

mircea_popescu and the problem of "slaves" and "work" is very interestingly repeating. so : if you count all the receptionists in the "work" you're getting an obviously diluted figure. if this were how work worked, i could build spaceship by hiring 1mn chickens/hair stylists in argentina. evidently, argentina isn't building any spaceships.

asciilifeform 0 receptionists.

mircea_popescu slaves, idem. if you count every nigger at mit, derping about "we're one, man" and "i should have money anyway" then yes you get the figures, but if you count THAT as slavery god help you.

asciilifeform it was this club where they let the brightest undergrads burn their lives for 0 pay to build interesting hw.
mircea_popescu asciilifeform this item did not physically exist. dozen people eighteen months. thatssit. where's the 500 undergrads ~actually~ working for decades ?^vi

asciilifeform decade. at the ai lab.

mircea_popescu have you seen the premises ? not physically possible to host 100 people working there, let alone 500 wtf.

asciilifeform most of the heavy lifting was done by a dozen or so people, however. (david moon, richard greenblatt, tom knight, buncha smaller ones )

mircea_popescu dozenpeopleeighteenmonths!!!

phf asciilifeform clim fwiw predates micro exodus. was, like common lisp, an attempt by the three vendors to make a unified gui foundation. you can still see scarring in genera where they started transitioning to clim apps from their flavors.^vii

mircea_popescu NOW -- the question is why did this fucktarded dozen decide the best thing to do is make 3-6-howevermany "Competing" entitites.

phf actually that's the same (i assume rhetorical) question rms was asking

asciilifeform iirc rms really hated noftsker, for some reason

mircea_popescu mno. his question was "why do these 12 people not see the glory of socialism and dedicate their lives to making every receptionist live in luxury she can't pay for".^viii why such rotten bullshit would get a flat no in return is directly obvious.

asciilifeform ( iirc it was because he went 'let us have our king from among our ~own~ number, why this imported viking lord ' ). this was pre-gnu rms, as far as is known -- apolitical.

phf hmm, i always thought his question was a lot more naively childish "why'd did all my friends i had fun with left to do these weird `grownup` things".

mircea_popescu of course childish. socialism. that's what it is. the notion that there can be an apolitical something is like the notion that there can be a transparent non menstruating woman etc.^ix

asciilifeform mircea_popescu rms naively believed (but afaik -- genuinely believed) that one can separate the cutlets from the flies. i.e. the experimenters from the receptionists.

mircea_popescu i expect rms did no such thing ; but that he correctly believed that if structured as ~radical~ socialism, socialism may be made to appear palatable to intelligent people^x ; at any rate more so than the commodified variant. hence all his imbecillities with "log scale for music payments by downloads" and whatnot other respectable sovietisms.

asciilifeform i have nfi, but must point out that this time was prior to him having written down any such thing.

mircea_popescu she's still a woman even at a time prior to having foaled.

asciilifeform and pre- him receiving the socialist prizes etc. pre-gnu. he was just another d00d in those times.

mircea_popescu i don't think there is any such thing [as just a dood]. i also do not think one can become a socialist. they're all born this way. it's braindamage, basically.

asciilifeform i don't buy this 'was always a trotskyist^xi, from baby' thing. not everyone is born in his particular mental dead end.

mircea_popescu all kids appear healthy, but the brains of a precious few are defective, and as aging exposes them to the challenge of correct diversification, it turns out they ~were all along~ schizophrenic. i currently find the notion persuasive. jane and jennifer are both interchangeable as 3 yos, but as they progress to age 23 it becomes apparent jeniffer just never had the tits in her and so... she's... you know, "modest". and has "morals". and all the rest of the bullshit. because if i make them strip, jane's DD look better than jen's A-.

asciilifeform mircea_popescu never met a 'modest'+tits ?

mircea_popescu asciilifeform shellshocked, yes.^xii (ie, little jane stuck too early with too much male attention she doesn't know how to handle (in no small part because her mom's a retarded jen and had not the sense to have sisters etc) will grow defensive. but it's to my eyes rather a different strand. quite evidently so : she's immodest in private.) anyway, to take the thing back to rms and friends : socialism is not a political choice, it's a psychological defense. it expresses itself in fundamentally defective individuals. 'tis what it is.

asciilifeform is this observation or postulation ?

mircea_popescu it's my current mental model. now, obviously other than the people who ~are made of~ shit, you can also have people covered in shit. these, however, can wash. even if they're not necessarily distinguishable on superficial examination -- put the firehose on them and you'll presently find out. which'd be ~why~ specific republican artefacts (above approximated as firehose) result in the "educational split"^xiii so to speak.

asciilifeform could just as easily say 'left-handedness expresses itself in fundamentally defective individuals'

mircea_popescu could, yes. but more appropriately i think you could say "cowardice expresses itself in fundamentally defective individuals, as well as in those who spend too much time in cowards' company".

asciilifeform distinguish, for my education, 'socialism', from how the spartans lived. (they -- also -- 'cowardice' ? )

mircea_popescu socialism is the proposal that the problems of individuals will be addressed by the group. the spartans made no allowance for the problems of individuals. they were interested in resolving the problems of the group, mostly in the shape of not getting wiped by the parthians. but anyway, thinking about it, it'd seem to me the only possible explanation of http://btcbase.org/log/2017-04-09#1641002^xiv is that the golden dozen lacked ~any conception whatsoever~ of the enmity of mit. like dodo birds, went happily to the necessary eventual slaughter because failed to perceive usg must be destroyed not ignored. in a field arbitrarily (and perhaps not exactly accidentally) limited in this manner^xv, they cultivated their own aesthetic notions of "competition" among themselves, instead of setting boston on fire.

asciilifeform you could redefine this, if you wanted , as 'problem of individual'

mircea_popescu yes, but you couldn't find petition introduced by hoplite because "life's too hard and i want an ipad". how the fuck they managed to think mit is anything but ~the only thing they must destroy~ is beyond me however. seriously, how the fuck does that work.

asciilifeform pretty sure that, e.g., d. moon, saw 'finally we take this tech private, make an honest corp' as breaking off from mit and whatever socialisms dwelled there

mircea_popescu possibly. why didn't it sell with the rest ?^xvi bitcoin-assets split sold with the rest. why didn't moon's corp ?

asciilifeform i'm speaking of symbolics co

mircea_popescu yes. why didn't everyone follow ? moon was eminently followable.

asciilifeform why there was >1 power in 16th c italy. why not everyone simply in florence, lol. knight (inventor of the machine, and designer/hand-builder of almost all of the early iron) was also 'followable', he ended up at lmi.

mircea_popescu so why the split ? why didn't moon follow knight, then. wtf is going on. [I have] serious trouble digesting this chunk of history.

asciilifeform symbolics co. was actually illustration of mircea_popescu's essay re the hanna barbara cartoon thing, what was the d00d's name. the one who said 'i could sell equally this, or canned fish'.^xvii

mircea_popescu !~google fred quimby
jhvh1: mircea_popescu Fred Quimby - Wikipedia: ; Fred Quimby - IMDb: ; Was Chuck Jones better for Tom & Jerry than Fred Quimby ...:

asciilifeform him!!

mircea_popescu so your proposition is that engineers are cursed by the gods in that they can't follow each other, gotta follow a different kinda guy and if they don't get lucky to find one will just symbolics all over the place ? why the fuck, what, brains dun work ?

asciilifeform not that noftsker, afaik, was a quimby. but lmi's greenblatt, it seems, was an 'anti-quimby'.

mircea_popescu amusingly, apparently everyone there knew this, too. "he's no captain, he's just a dude with a small penis who figures the world owns him reparations for it, so captaining will work by itself"

asciilifeform the reality, even if mircea_popescu doesn't subscribe to it, is that there may very well be more than two types of people alive, and not simply ubermenschen (exact clones of mircea_popescu , presumably ) and untermenschen ('socialists' or anyone who substantially differs psychologically from mircea_popescu ). may not even be (horror!) coded by penii

mircea_popescu but anyway, leaving this hot coal for a moment^xviii -- why the everloving fuck did it take them so long to lose virginity! yes, EVENTUALLY moon "finally we take this tech private". but how fucking unobvious can it be that mit is exactly the equivalent of hymen, there to insulate girl from control of her own cunt ? ~any 16 yo figures out her chief order of business is trashing the damned thing, why's it take moon 50 years ?

asciilifeform the lispm was a quite audacious and expensive project, and very difficult to justify commercially without at least a set of functioning machines and well-developed software.

mircea_popescu why do you have to "justify it commercially".

asciilifeform to get investment ?

mircea_popescu what next, i can't justify my saturday night guest list ~matrimonially~ ?

asciilifeform from where was the money to come ?

mircea_popescu i dun know why you think this is how things work, but allow me to reference a relevant bit of history : http://trilema.com/2012/hai-c-am-mai-gasit-una/ ; is it transparent or should i translate ?

asciilifeform either translate, or summarize ?

mircea_popescu golden age of bitcoin forum invesments, dude did horribly poorly ~on investor's money~. how did the investment come considering there wasn't anything there besides "we'll try to win on execution without a clue or a GED, against people with money and significant entrenchment" ? fuck, HOW is airbnb supposed to be worth 50 bux ? it consists of... nothing. groupon, its exact clone 5 years ago, meanwhile imploded. where did the billions come to make ~that~ particular iteration of nothing whatsoever into "biggest ipo ever!11" investment is entirely divorced from this "justifying commercially" business.

asciilifeform you are comparing bezzletrons, that run on pixie dust, to hw makers, who ran on 100% turkey dollar ? pixie dust dun buy megatonne of ic. not today, not then.

mircea_popescu this is not exactly correct, which is why i linked the article i linked. no bezzle went into that nonsense. still, it collected thousands of btc.^xix [Besides,] i thought symbolics was mostly hand made originally.

asciilifeform and mmm collected billion $ .

mircea_popescu asciilifeform see ? where did THE INVESTMENT!111 come from!

asciilifeform from bamboozling large crowd of derps with slightly more money than sense each ? yes, some folx are friends with chumpatronicist, or bank robber (stalin et al), who will give them a little dough out of whatever private reason of his own.

mircea_popescu market is not weighing machine to start with. it gets there, but it starts as something else. derping about "justifying commercially" is the EXACT equivalent of not talking to girl for nerd reasons.^xx

asciilifeform funnily enough lmi, after bankruptcy, was bought by one such. he took its remains to canada, and bamboozled their government for years, pretending to make 'french translator machine'.

mircea_popescu which reiterates the question : ~any 16 yo figures out her chief order of business is trashing the damend thing, why's it take moon 50 years ?

asciilifeform it ended with jail for the 'genius', and junkyard for the iron. all of it.

phf mircea_popescu i think people in question weren't even thinking in terms asciilifeform is using. they are all deep academia, without external guiding force they end up recreating windows interface 10 years too late.^xxi

mircea_popescu phf i saw this too, but what's irking me is WHY. let me retell the history of early computing. 1. a dozen mentally retarded girls were afraid of their own cunts^xxii ; 2. so much so as to need to be 50 before they'd finally deflower^xxiii ; 3. except they did it in such a manner as to replace the insulatory function of that^xxiv with various other ersatz-hymens created out of material collected in the environment^xxv ; 4 but because they were mentally retarded no possiblity of meaningful communication was open to them^xxvi and so 5. therefore they all ended up with random substitute hymens and that's the last time anyone heard of any of them.

asciilifeform phf i was offering to mircea_popescu that not everyone is born to walk around robbing banks to fund hardware manufacture, or 'burning boston' to extirpate 'socialism', some folks were born to theorems. but mircea_popescu won't have it -- either banks, and burning, or untermenschen, apparently.

mircea_popescu im not sure that's even discussed, here. what theorems are involved in handmaking symbolics gear ?

asciilifeform pretty sure that by the time there was a symbolics -- the handmaking was outsourced.

mircea_popescu [What theorems are involved in making] pre-symbolics gear. [?] anyway, in the above retelling, the 4->5 transition is the coup the grace. they couldn't "follow" each other ~because~, in this view, they were bereft of sufficient bandwith to in any sense communicate.^xxvii so they couldn't, like, end up with all the same one substitute cuntcap.

asciilifeform then, quite unlike now, new type of comp had to be made by hand from ttl chips -- few gates each; and connected with semi-reliable wrap wiring. it was quite impossible to offload this to 'brute labour', you had to intimately understand how the thing works in order to debug in any way.

phf pre-symbolics the "theorems" were "how do i computer" in general. those guys weren't playing around with custom fpga in their garage that they failed to sell. they were basically figuring out how to build a von neumann machine that can do things, which they did

mircea_popescu this part is fine. now, why did they fail to a) band together and b) control, deliberately, the product. they did a very strict anti-a and anti-b. why! the only reason mit even exists in this picture is because the dozen was "omfg, we DID figure it out, now quick, find someone TO PROTECT US FROM OUR HAVING FIGURED IT OUT!!1" holy shit who thinks like this and why do they.

asciilifeform my understanding was that greenblatt and noftsker had serious disagreement re how to actually do business. (noftsker favoured external capital, and founded the -- temporarily -- successful symbolics co; greenblatt -- the very soon dead lmi, and believed in 'lift by bootstraps', no external capital.) ti corp was not even part of this game, they did not hire -- afaik -- any of the original designers.

phf jealous wizards, i thought that was an archetype.

mircea_popescu for crying out loud. and the rest just happened to fall into s or lmi randomly as the wind blew ?

asciilifeform not knowing any of them in person, i cannot say why some went with one, and others -- other, and third -- with no one, and into the void. presumably agreed with n, or g, or neither. [but] 'i do not know' != 'randomly'.

mircea_popescu this equality doesn't hold. it's not a matter of "we don't know". we know what the environment constraints are, and we do not care what their internal processing is. if they fail to act rationally they did it randomly. but anyway, leaving this hot coal for a while also, consider THE FUCKING INDIGNITY. you're telling me the dozen was split up by a convenient application of... a socialist marote^xxviii ? same thing sunk lisp as the international ?!^xxix this fills no one with indignation but me ? it's on the level of "great monk died - syphilis". come da fuck on. have better problems!

asciilifeform if 'act rationally' somehow means 'pick a fuhrer! use haruspex if you gotta!' then none of them 'acted rationally', no.

mircea_popescu in the circumstance ? this isn't a given iyo ? the time for "debates" is when you're installed in power and are preparing to withdraw the power from the plebs. you create a trappings-of-power artefact through the magical working of dialectics, heap it upon them in exchange for the actual thing and move on. that's when you do "disputes". when you're the only twelve guys on monkey island you don't fucking disagree. because there's nothing to disagree ~about~. because there can't be. because monkeys. i dunno, seems like i'm repeating myself.

asciilifeform there is such a thing as an actual dispute.

mircea_popescu give me an example.

asciilifeform let's say for sake of argument that greenblatt was 'the true king.' he had no mechanism for somehow forcing the others to come along. so off he went, with subset of the possible participants. the rest -- with someone else.

mircea_popescu except for them being not fucking stupid. the mechanism is -- them not being fucking stupid.

asciilifeform even 40+ yrs later, and to quasi-serious student of the subject, imho it is not clear who -- if anyone -- was 'true king'.

mircea_popescu why is this important ?

asciilifeform what, exactly, were -- in mircea_popescu's view -- these people 'fucking stupid' for having not done ?

phf asciilifeform true king is a later invention, actual process is "choose king amongst yourself", and failure to do so is stupidity^xxx

mircea_popescu asciilifeform indulge me for a moment here. so, would you agree that a specific and specified problem (make a computer!) was actually resolved by a number of people ?

asciilifeform i don't actually see it as resolved, even today. attempted - yes. resolved - no.

mircea_popescu so you don't particularily want symbolix metal, it's just some random thing.

asciilifeform not random, no.

mircea_popescu then gimme something.

asciilifeform picture if we had no jet turbine.

mircea_popescu so then why do you deny ?

asciilifeform say it was tried in ww2, and then not again. bolix box would then be me262. fairly primitive, early attempt, but -- not continued.

mircea_popescu you'll have to pick a door (for the needs of this conversation only)

asciilifeform me262 had quite serious problems, from practical pov. the analogy is not a whim of asciilifeform's, it is quite exact -- what bolix et al did, was a 'stretch' of the tech of the time, quite near its breaking point the trouble is that this is how tech actually advances. early steamboats were expensive deathtraps (boiler explosions were still a quite familiar thing in mark twain's time, even)

mircea_popescu look, there's no crevice here to slither into. either you grant "they did" or else you admit they didn't do anything. pick one.

asciilifeform this dichotomy is a hallucination of mircea_popescu's , and i ain't buying.

mircea_popescu aite, then i guess it can't be explained what the people invovled were stupid for having not done.

asciilifeform they took a serious technological risk - and lost, like dirigible; rather than won, like steamboat.

mircea_popescu you will note however that ~all communication~ rests on hallucination in the sense here contemplated. and we're right back to 4->5.

phf there's only one computer asciilifeform acknowledges as "resolved", and that's the computer built by asciilifeform. i suspect similar dynamic was at the root of smbx/lmi.

asciilifeform a bolix-style machine that -- hypothetically - could have cost-competed with the 'i can't believe it's not butter' state of the art, would imho count as 'resolve'.

mircea_popescu phf im starting to understand the problem though. here it is : engineer will not consider inconvenient problems. NO MATTER WHAT. that is why he's an engineer : because paradigm made him a personal promise.^xxxi it's a sort of elective jewry.^xxxii

asciilifeform it is quite impossible to 'unconsider inconvenient problem' in a thread about bolix, which is in a way a parable re engineers going to the bottom of the sea

mircea_popescu you just did.

asciilifeform my contention is simply that they failed to ~resolve~ their problem , in the sense of achieving item#2 from my http://www.loper-os.org/?p=305 essay. because -- cost.

mircea_popescu but that is not the sense contemplated in context.

asciilifeform let's have expansion re the sense contempated by mircea_popescu then. possibly i'm thick.

mircea_popescu i'm not capable nor interested in specifying. fact remains - a dozen dudes either did something or didn't do something. if they did something we can discuss the history of the thing they did and what it says about them ; otherwise, we can not. and no, it's not an ~exact~ dozen, either.

asciilifeform they built something quite like a proper comp. but were unable to build it economically, or live long enough on 'credit card' to live to see the cheap-enough transistor. (they eventually resorted to 'credit card' and ended up simply making a titanic black hole for entire ~industry~ to fall into, when it finally imploded)

mircea_popescu alright, so then let's continue from there. at the time they did this, the world split. there were the people who built the "something quite like a proper comp", on one side. there were the people who did not so build, on the other side. you see this ?

asciilifeform aha...

mircea_popescu crossed this line -> stupid.

asciilifeform what means to cross this line ?

mircea_popescu Crossing this line means transforming a world which is ontologically constituted as "12 men on a monkey island" into an absurd counter-reality where we're invited to lay bets on either team A (two men and monkeys) or team B (three men and monkeys). It is not permissible, under any circumstances, howsoever manipulated, misrepresented, misstated, what have you, for any man to ever participate in any team that contains even a single monkey for as long as there's a different team with any men in it. The expression is "blood is thicker than water", and what it means is that you will not ever fucking cross the line to go be with the monkeys no matter what the fuck happens and what mommy says about how greatly the monkey fucked her.^xxxiii

asciilifeform the monkeys, as discussed in old thread, could easily win, if there is not enough for men to eat on the island. which imho is what happened. environment could not sustain the man.^xxxiv

mircea_popescu who starved ? other than rms.

asciilifeform nobody starved, but the lispm was abandoned, the way moon rocket was, as a 'neato but sorry, -ev' item. because yes the monkeys could win if not enough to eat, BUT you know this because there's 12 starved men. and when the necessary transistors were finally ~free, they went to tlb cache instead so that winblowz could run 5% faster.

mircea_popescu heh. notrly how this works. but yes i'm aware not being stupid results in a dreary lack of monkey island special olympics participation trophies.

asciilifeform who exactly, in mircea_popescu's model, are the monkeys ?

mircea_popescu everyone else.

asciilifeform ok...

mircea_popescu perelman says so!^xxxv

trinque dunno what's hard about the notion that look, you do not get computers until you have both the leadership category and engineering category maxed on your character, and that the folks that "tried" in the first round lost because of deficiency of character

asciilifeform trinque one possibility was 'too many chiefs, not enough indians' (tm). which is sorta opposite, as i understand, to your hypothesis.

mircea_popescu i didn't perceive this cheifdom in the chief characters. mebbe my antennae too blunt, but who ? how ?

asciilifeform self-perceived, this chiefdom. greenblatt thought he could lead. etc

mircea_popescu but he was more or less irrelevant. moon, knight etc. anyway, imo the principal point of the discussion is that knowledge, any knowledge, enacts a partition upon the world. this is the only difference - chucka and man are distinguished not by skin color, not by anything else but the overpowering fact that chuka doesn't know what to do with the rtg ; or with pushkin ; or with etcetera. disconsidering this fundamental in any manner opens the chasm of hell, in all its presentation from evil to insanity.

asciilifeform so far i follow the logic..

mircea_popescu asciilifeform there's really no more to it.

There it is, and there it goes. What can you do ?

———

1. This is factually correct, and barely begins to do justice to the personal history of he disaffectionately dubbed "the human mushroom". As far as my own read of the early history of killer micros stands, Stallman was exactly politruk : an overambitious underachiever who attempted ye olde "crack it two with the hammer to separate the things into something they can stuff in own pockets, and then mount them on their oxcart" wrt emacs, and whose apparent "success" in this colored the entire rest of his career. Ever wondered why "scientists" of the socialist state flavour, much like "politicians" of the same, and much like everything else in that soup specialize ? Ever wonder why the jewelry thief ended up a jewelry thief as opposed to a highway robber or grifter or whatever else "specialization" ? Because yes, it's exactly "the first line in which he had any success at all". [↩]
2. You are aware of the early history of flight, right, back when it was a "the people themselves" affair ? [↩]
3. It is not an idle question. Consider : I do not bother with random girly's self-notions, let alone her world-notions. Why would you ? Why would anyone ?

   Oh, oops, did I link http://trilema.com/2017/how-to-deal-with-little-girls/ ? I meant to link http://trilema.com/2014/how-to-deal-with-pseudoscience/ but the way I do it is that I type the first few words in and let trilema's url autocomplete do the rest for me, so it steered me wrong.

   Well... "wrong".

   THEY'RE THE SAME FUCKING THING. [↩]

4. No, 1500 or so hours a year do not make "a year", and especially not the sorts of hours they do. [↩]
5. Item lived 1963 to 2003 as "Project MAC". If we agree he didn't mean "CSAIL" by it, MAC was launched on a $2mn grant of DARPA's, and led by Robert Fano (And it was called a "project" to get that sweet sweet unpaid slave work, yes, were it called a "laboratory" it'd have worked differently ; and yes the whole "thousand eyes" expectations about the internet and human collaboration were based on linear extension of the experience of that early cvasi-internet but rather-republic, and so on).

   If you don't count a coupla PDP-6s and a PDP-10 in the costs, and if you gleefully ignore HOW government grants are used (check out Samuel Clemens sometime, he explains it for you) you may come to different conclusions ; but otherwise that grant did in fact pay for just about 18 months' worth of work. These are the facts. [↩]

6. The substance of this disagreement may not even have been evident to him at the time, but the broad point I am (unstatedly) making is that if he'll countenance linear extrapolations from those early, narrowly confined situations, I'm going to return the favour by doing linear extrapolations from today into the narrowly confined situation. Because might as well, neh ?

   In point of fact, the mythical "brightest undergrads burn their lives for 0 pay to build interesting hw" exist the same place "the internet unleashed a new era of intellectual productivity by reducing the barriers to collaboration" bla bla exists : Malleus, and there only. [↩]

7. I entirely agree with this view. Both clim and cl principally stand as misdirected attempts to construct a foundation of meaning outside of absent authority,... at which juncture, permit me to recount an anecdote. I said once that "I've no further patience for this crap (we were watching a film, maybe), the endless disputes of two subbies arguing to establish who should top for the evening". One particular slavegirl took the expression to heart, and launched a vast personal research project of reviewing different sources (mostly, online communities, like say reddit's relationship advice open mic column) under this light. She shares tidbits occasionally, but universally it is the same thing over and over again : "jesus christ, that is exactly their problem", repeated ad nauseam & infinitum qs in varying "flavourings".

   Because it's a thing, what! [↩]

8. Very much RMS's disagreements with other "insiders" can universally be interpreted as well as unerringly predicted on a strict structure of "they're not sufficiently Trotskyst". [↩]
9. Arabic fantasies. [↩]
10. For as long as it stays -- and dies! -- small, that is. [↩]
11. See, I didn't use the word, albeit it very much is the correct word, as illustrated by the footnotes ; that he followed my trees and selected the correct categories is a standing ovation to both his culture and his intelligence ; but memory being the fragmentary device that it is, I fear this feat may have been eaten by moths over time ; so we get this article instead. [↩]
12. Recall the story of that wedding ? Or that other one about the chick that I had to have a doctor scare out of anorexia which I seem to have momentarily misplaced. I expect there's more, really, because overwhelming attention is a problem, especially for young women. [↩]
13. Ie, some thrive, some don't. [↩]
14. "mircea_popescu NOW -- the question is why did this fucktarded dozen decide the best thing to do is make 3-6-howevermany "Competing" entitites." [↩]
15. Something more recently referred to as the problems of "man alone" [↩]
16. The meaning of "selling" here is persuasion. [↩]
17. The article he has in mind is Fred Quimby and ancient evils. [↩]
18. I do protest that's not an apt summary, and he never addresses it, so we'll let it slide as rhetorical flourish. [↩]
19. Which is not printed, but mined, at significant cost. [↩]
20. This is a much more important point than meets the eye.

    Understand well what it says : the same people, the same people that don't talk to girls because they've not yet decided if they're going to use one or two light bulbs in the eventual guest bathroom in the eventual house they'll inhabit with her and her eventual spawn also don't talk to "investors" because they've not yet decided something entirely similar. [↩]

21. This is again strictly accurate ; and if you are aware of how eg OpenGL managed to a) thoroughly thrash Directx and then b) utterly and for no reason give away their crown, as well as the knife on the enemy's throat you might start noticing the cucksimilarities. [↩]
22. The cunt is the creative portion of the female body ; males don't have cunts, but some of them do have heads, which similarily to cunts create new items. It would be naive to expect the difficulty of relation between the female and her own cunt is magically avoided by the male and his own head just because his headlips are horizontal whereas cuntlips are vertical. [↩]
23. Were you ever curious what these folk did in their 20s ? [↩]
24. The hymen [↩]
25. Such as a nonsensical notion of them needing MIT for any purpose ; and there being "need to justify" and so on, goange. [↩]
26. So they couldn't get together. Period and full stop, exactly like stupid women try avoiding the best part of a relationship with a male : the other cunts abundant about. [↩]
27. A problem shared with socialism, because no, there's no distinguishing one ideal system from another. Because this is how classification works -- things that run into the same problems are the same things, clamor ye all day about how "there's more than two kinds" : not as long as they end up in the same ditch they aren't! [↩]
28. In the direct, a puppet made to scare children ; in the figurative a boogaboo, the sort of notion that manipulates idiots. [↩]
29. Consider how ye olde "how much need the devil pay you for you to love him" question : how much does the dodgering, tittering dependopotamus at home have to pay you for you to not go out and hunt with your friends ? How much cake must your own fear bake to deter you from taking your rightful place among your peers ? How much of a cunt need you be to act like one ?! [↩]
30. Most timely intervention, in that it's always pleasant to notice others grasp the point involved. [↩]
31. Consider "he's a kind of a classical-russian-product and otherwise very seriously 'I have chosen my field specifically so I never encounter practical problems'", said in a different language by someone not in this conversation about someone not in this conversation. It's a problem, what!

    Incidentally, do you know what splitting is, as the psychiatry term of art ? And what the problems with it are ? And how they naturally extend to all extensions, howsoever cleverly formulated ? Good! [↩]

32. God made them some promises also, allegedly. [↩]
33. This line was completely reconstructed for this second edition. The original read
    

    well, on top of a world ontologically constituted as "12 men on monkey island" attempting to construct alternate world hallucinatorily constituted as "men and money teams compete for island special olympics".

    "who do you think will win, mr 13, the team with two guys and monkeys or the team with three guys and monkeys ?"
    mircea_popescu "i think the whole charade is a sickening display, personally."

    which is rather salad-y. [↩]

34. The point of who "wins" is entirely fucking uninteresting in context -- it's infinitely better to die with people than to feast on bananas, which is how Goebbels' kids died. (Not Joseph's -- Magda's!) [↩]
35. The dood literally said -- take your monkey trophies and give them to some monkey, I'm not one of you nor will become. [↩]