Presenting a very old game, entitled: Man vs. Machine. Or, why Man is not a Particularly Good Source of Entropy.

All of my readers are invited to test the security of their GPG public keys using a new and very simple online tool: “Phuctor” (part of a long-term collaborative project with Mircea Popescu.) Phuctor is based on cutting-edge Ancient Greek technology. Engine now re-written, using GMP. Roughly 100-fold speed boost! The service is now essentially […]

This post is of interest only to those who study Bitcoin. If you have never heard of Bitcoin, read my previous post on the subject. Shitcoin is to be a distributed network for attaching “dirt” to particular bitcoins when certain conditions are met, in a manner which allows Bitcoin users to post bonds in order […]

Computing pioneer Alan Kay tells us that a computer is “an instrument whose music is ideas.” This seems like a beautiful metaphor, until you realize that we have somehow ended up in a world where the profession of musician is nearly unknown.  To continue with this analogy, let’s imagine that you were a child who […]

Computer users are forever being misled, successfully lied to, sold “old wine in new bottles,” bamboozled in a myriad ways large and small.  Why?  Simply because we are, to use the technical term, suckers.  Not always as individuals, but certainly collectively.  The defining attribute of the sucker is, of course, an inability to learn from […]

Technological standards may be usefully divided into five basic types: 4 – Standards arrived at by consensus. Examples: Common Lisp. 3 – Standards imposed by dictatorial fiat. Examples: Russian railroad gauge. 2 – Standards imposed through sudden, overwhelming, and indisputable technological supremacy over the previous state of the art. Examples: Arabic numerals.  Sildenafil. 1 – […]

The aim of Loper is to build a sane computing environment on top of the ubiquitous yet nauseatingly flawed X86-64 architecture.  I believe that it is possible to abstract away its most damning shortcomings, such as the lack of direct hardware support for capabilities, orthogonal persistence, type-checking, and garbage collection.  However, wouldn’t it be nice if we were not […]

Loper should not be considered truly dead until I myself am dead and buried. Currently available computing systems are brain-damaged in such wholesale, unmitigable ways that I am driven back to the project again and again, despite the oceanic size and nearly certain futility of the task. Working full time and being back in school […]

From Richard Feynman’s The Character of Physical Law: “It always bothers me that, according to the laws as we understand them today, it takes a computing machine an infinite number of logical operations to figure out what goes on in no matter how tiny a region of space, and no matter how tiny a region […]

This post is not about Loper. It concerns another idea I had recently. In order to distinguish such posts, the text will be displayed in an unpleasant color. As I often have odd ideas which I must write down, they will appear regularly. Many years ago, I read a short story by Asimov called “Button, […]