Fixpoint

From #trilema: 2019-12-27, 2019-12-28, 2019-12-29.

Diana_coman updated some WoT ratings, most notably of asciilifeform.

MP pushed trinque to expand on a point and not redeploy the suppression machine now. He found an article that someone had been looking for, discussing the toddler's notion of a static world and surprise at encountering dynamic equilibrium, but then couldn't recall where the reference had been needed. He noted some shortcomings in a TMSR-OS article by dorion; diana_coman was already on the case.

Mocky returned 1 BTC that MP had lent him in late 2018 toward the cause of escaping stupidity. MP was pleased, but pushed him to get up to speed on the blogging and prospective reporting game that had been stepping up across the board in his absence.

Trinque not having replied yet, MP expanded his own point on the suppression machine: going through life, one is constantly uncovering new personal deficiencies. Each time, one faces a difficult choice: to face and overcome it, painful because it requires killing a part of one's youth; to accept insufficiency; or to pretend it doesn't exist or doesn't matter and eventually end up an overgrown teenage loser (possibly hanging out in #asciilifeform to commiserate). He went on to note that the existence of evil⁽ⁱ⁾ is essential for life to be interesting, but that this doesn't make it any less evil.

Meanwhile, Wikipedia deprecated itself from hanbot's web browser, to amusement all around, and BingoBoingo observed vast police reporting discrepancies on a cocaine bust based on differing local market conditions.

Trinque followed up with willingness to adapt; to that end he was working on an OS article series, and kind-of requested a castle deed. As a teaser, he noted his finding on the weight of the GRUB2 bootloader denominated in units of BusyBox. He tried to get a point through to jfw and dorion that their Gales project didn't exist as a thing worth naming, by reason of building on far larger components, yet he still thought the work was valuable. Dorion characterized it as a stepping stone.

MP was surprised by spyked's feedbot sending him a deluge, but realized this was "user error". He humorously noted the superlative passivity of trinque's deed request, but resolved to grant it.

BingoBoingo was awaiting deedbot processing to proceed with the mike_c case; MP said they'd pick it back up after New Year's.

MP praised the absence of unnecessary scripting language dependencies in the base Gales system, noted by bvt in his installation report. On the question of how practical the system would be for wrangling packages with large dependency graphs, he figured the preferable approach would be to work on trimming down those packages toward sanity and reject traditional notions of "installing". Trinque was keen that this not result in everything ending up installed everywhere; there was brief discussion of the nature or desired shape of V trees.

Experience had soured trinque on the relative usefulness of Lisp, or at least the popular free implementations. He discussed with whaack, pointing out the subtleties of different complexity proxies.

Diana_coman had tried to run trinque's deedbot paste uploader code⁽ⁱⁱ⁾ and urged him to publish the server part too; he agreed. She had found the SBCL/ASDF "ecosystem" to be a mess rivaling Python.

1. Or problems. [^]
2. My own "bash one-liner" for pasting from standard input (it happens to be written in Python, because I tend to have that handy and trust it a bit more than curl):

   import urllib2, urllib, sys; print urllib2.urlopen(urllib2.Request('http://paste.deedbot.org', data=urllib.urlencode([('pastebox', sys.stdin.read())]))).geturl() [^]