--- Day changed Mon Apr 28 2008
00:06 < fenn> my 3d mesh from straws idea isnt as cool as i thought. the mesh would flop around because it isnt necessarily rigid the way a geodesic dome is
00:07 < fenn> it would need internal bracing, not just a shell
00:08 < marainein> you need something more rigid
00:09 < fenn> than straws? could use steel tubing but the idea is it would be cheap and small and desk-top
00:09 < marainein> struts made from something wooden?
00:09 < kanzure> http://heybryan.org/exp.html I need a way to make this not suck
00:11 < marainein> what parts of it are you unsatisfied with?
00:13 < kanzure> all of it?
00:13 < kanzure> I am trying to describe too many things at once
00:13 < kanzure> self-replication, exponential growth, recursion, programming, manufacturing automation, reconfigurable fabrication environments, open source, scarcity/post-scarcity, 
00:13 < kanzure> etc.
00:14 < marainein> maybe you need to pick a core idea, and have links leading off it to peripheral subjects
00:14 < kanzure> what core?
00:14 < marainein> what's your goal?
00:14 < kanzure> ultimately? "to do as much as possible"
00:15 < kanzure> but in this case it's more multifaceted
00:15 < kanzure> 1) bruteforcing a self-replicating machine
00:15 < kanzure> 2) open source programmed knowledge database for automated fabrication
00:15 < kanzure> 3) scarcity/post-scarcity distinctions
00:15 < kanzure> 4) meta-repository aggregation processes
00:16 < kanzure> also the grounding problems, bootstrapping, etc.
00:16 < marainein> is the goal of this to a self-replicating machine somehow leading to a post-scarcity age?
00:17 < kanzure> yes, exponential growth means no scarcity basically ... since you can just make machines that exponentially mine the materials out of the sky (and if you think that the rest of the universe == scarcity, then we have some bigger problems haha)
00:18 < marainein> so maybe you should start the article with that, and explain how to get there
00:18 < marainein> and try and counter any obvious objections
00:19 < kanzure> but it's for more than just self-replication
00:19 < kanzure> it's going to be incredibly useful for all sorts of other projects since it's based off of git and revision control
00:19 < kanzure> and in fact, that's to be encouraged since that helps the self-replicating machine aspect
00:21 < marainein> that's part of the post-scarcity, idea, though
00:21 < marainein> isn't it?
00:21 < kanzure> nah, not necessarily
00:21 < kanzure> because this database would allow you to make various tools and systems that don't necessarily self-replicate
00:22 < kanzure> but the point is that if you have a lot of those subsystems like that in there, then you can have a giant crawler go in and find the links and fish out any self-replicating machine designs like that ;-)
00:22 < marainein> what does your hypothetical machine look like?
00:22 < kanzure> heh, only its basic design is known - it's based off of dependency loops, meaning it can make itself
00:22 < kanzure> so that's all we know
00:22 < kanzure> and this project is to *bruteforce* it from scratch
00:24 < marainein> how do you bruteforce something like that?
00:25 < kanzure> hm http://www.fightingfeynmans.com/
00:25 < kanzure> heh
00:25 < kanzure> well, you have the computer crawl through all of the relations and permutations and so on
00:25 < kanzure> but you can't derive it from first principles
00:26 < marainein> what makes you think that such a machine exists within some sane number of permutations?
00:26 < marainein> come to think of it, what exactly is a permutation in this context?
00:27 < marainein> (I don't think this a bad idea btw, I'm just having problems understanding how it would work)
00:27 < kanzure> permutation of the design space - it's a graph, the design I mean, so you can permutate through possible connections and configurations
00:27 < kanzure> re: whether or not such a machine exists: cells.
00:29 < marainein> what do the graph elements consist of?
00:30 < kanzure> packages, tools; these are the files in the manufacturing database that can be 'made' via tools (or your own bare hands, if you're up to it) in your 'fab lab' environment - it's like an instruction set architecture except for your factory.
00:31 < kanzure> I need to go. I'll think on this later.
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03:07 < fenn> more weird shit from texas: http://xahlee.org/Periodic_dosage_dir/t1/_p/lunbe/Jacqueline_Mercado.zip
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07:19 < fenn> reading xahlee.org.. gotta agree with a lot of his unix-bashing
07:19 < fenn> too much ad-hominem though
07:21 < marainein> if unix sucks, does that mean that some other os doesn't?
07:21 < fenn> no
07:22 < fenn> but some things are especially egregious failures, like xrdb or the regex incompatibilities
07:23 < fenn> his main point is that unix is just adding more and more layers of cruft and will never let anything go
07:24 < marainein> that's a reasonable point, but it's not just a unix problem...all major oses just seem to be getting bigger and bigger
07:25 < kanzure> Who's the "wheeee" OS guy?
07:25 < kanzure> He coded a kernel in his sleep. I forget his name. Gave piggy-back rides.
07:27 < fenn> i'm guessing something to do with firefox?
07:28 < kanzure> Nope.
07:29 < kanzure> Henry Meaken? Something like that. He redid an entire operating system architecture as well as a microprocessor architecture, for fun, because he saw some better ways to do it.
07:31 < kanzure> aha
07:31 < kanzure> Qua
07:31 < kanzure> http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffmassalin_pr.html
07:31 < kanzure> Henry Massalin.
07:31  * fenn tries not to take wired magazine too seriously
07:33 < fenn> ok, autistic computer genius, big deal :P
07:35 < fenn> "It feels good to be regarded highly, but why is everything so often a win/lose competition? I love talking with smart people."
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18:27 < kanzure> Non-suckage?
18:27 < kanzure> http://heybryan.org/exp.html
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19:29 < kanzure> biohack.sf.net was mentioned in a Manchester BarCamp. Awesome.
19:29 < kanzure> people in random barcamps are talking about my work :)
20:20 < kanzure> "The price of ignorance is subject to inflation."
21:56 < kanzure> "What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes ... attention."
22:58 < kanzure> orismology =~ ideonomy?
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23:48 < kanzure> http://heybryan.org/quotes.html
23:49 < kanzure> I have 20 MB of plaintext laws to chug through to find the (moderately) good quotes.
23:49 < kanzure> *logs, not laws.
23:49 < marainein> :P