"We can't go to war with the enemy, AK-47 hasn't been invented yet!!!"

And yet, for all the self-evident ridiculousness of that statement once written out (and therefore read, as a foreign object), it is the very substance of every serious Civ player's gameplay. Isn't it ? Isn't this what the whole game of Civ is, "wait on war for research x" ? Sid Meyer's Parasitosis Of The Delaying Gratification Mechanism, aka "we can't have kids until we build the nursery-palace-planet-galaxy".

If it gets to live in the warm, embracing, moist recesses of the brain where the brain's cunt is, if it survives attempts at examination, if it manages to avoid ever being written out and there laughed at on its desperate, simply desperate attempt at finding its way back in...

These days I am rather persuaded this and nothing else is what's at the root of most contemporaneous English speakers' notdoings.

whether asciilifeform has anything to do with it

His approach to life is substantially what turned the 16th century Spanish empire (period title-deed holder of all land west of the Azores, with proper paperwork sent mediately from Christ-the-king himself) into the sad remnant that couldn't defend Florida from Jackson's merry bands of drunks and loudmouths : fierce defensive during the good times followed by "inxeplicable" failure in crisis. He will sit on any opportunity, indefinitely, and think of ways to defend it from threats he imagines, rather than fruit it ; if he were alone on a deserted island with a pubescent girl who was, by virtue of how nature works, very much in love with him, he'd lecture her on hygiene (lest improper palm leaf wiping ruin his future girlfriend / wife's twat), he'd build watchtowers to keep an eye on any possible rapists/pirates (and dedicate significant portion of his waking hours to guarding a deserted island) and he'd sort out the professional life of her eventual fifth born, preemptively. Then one day some half-drunk bucaneer will stumble onto the beach, and upon despatching the idiot the very next minute discover a twenty-something virgin, half-crazy with... what ? What's she half crazy with ? Ten years' worth of daily compulatory impregnation with the seeds of insanity, something like that ?

Sure, he sticks with like-minded people, so it's not clear if maybe it was not-him. It wasn't not-him.

IMO what MP calls the poisonous offerings manifests itself as dead companies, not as shitty tools.

I think this is both true and eminently well put. Let me add that trading shitty tools for dead companies is no kind of improvement! If there was a hospital that had a perfect process but which sadly also came with the guaranteed death of the patient, it'd be called a morgue, not a hospital -- notwithstanding how little claim any particular hospital found in the world might have on calling itself a hospital in the first place.

In this regard, I would say that software is useful as a leverage to promote useful changes in the environment, not as an inert isolated object of beauty

This begs the question, yes obviously things are useful in the way they are useful, not in the way they aren't useful. I would agree that software is chiefly interesting as a tool to change the world rather than as an embodiment of aesthetic perfection ; but I'm not quite prepared to throw out the coda altogether.

It seems to me software could be an object of beauty ; it is self-obvious that the makers of such objects of beauty may, by the very defintions of the terms, expect no kind of payment whatsoever to be earned through their performance -- if anyone pays anything for a piece of art, it's because of reasons at best indirectly related to anything like the author's "work". Not because making art's not laborious, but specifically because it is not work ; it further seems to me that in the case of software any personal claim to such beauty is thoroughly spurious and eminently ludicrous, much like would be the case for any proverbial Joe (for good historical reasons we're well persuaded any such moron'd have to be "American") deeming the beauty of the dodecahedron somehow his own. It's a purely Platonic sort of beauty, so to speak.

To what real-world problem will it get applied, and what are requirements for that use-case?

This is actually a strong point ; I shall have to think about it.

@BingoBoingo: Yes, organizational apparatus is important, true. Definitely puts TMSR OS above other attempts. Re Gentoo - IMO it is somewhere in the middle between more classical distros and toolchains like buildroot.

The TRB Keccak regrind article can be found here specifically: http://www.mod6.net/2019/January/13/keccak_regrind_noUTF8.txt

That said, with a well defined scope, static linking should fly, perhaps even with only minor changes to Gentoo eclasses/GCC specfiles, but the cost of moving the remaining 10-30% of software to static linking may be not worth pursuing.

The thing about Linux distros is that all of the ones with longevity have some sorta organizational apparatus behind them. It's kinda why TMSR needs an OS. The closest any OS distro came to sitting at the table was OpenBSD taking Mircea's charity and they went retarded for Microsoft days later.

Every distro interesting for the cleanliness they propose int heir marketing is defuct for a lack of organizational sanity.

And Gentoo is not a distribution. It's a build tool chain.

AFAIK Mod6 already had a Keccak regrind posted, but his blog seems off the grid at the moment.

> I haven't seen any statically linking distributive being alive beyond the first year or two

Didn't Alpine Linux had a working statically-linked distro? Anyways, I'm guessing the problem, or one of the problems there is that distro maintainers actually aim to keep up with upstream, which is just nuts. Let's say moving to latest Linux might make sense, if only to get things moving on newer ARM boards; but latest Firefox, GCC (though the same argument could be made there for architectural support) etc. are just as good as garbage.

Other than that I agree, supporting static linking adds to the risk and the time for spending many months on wild goose chases is gone now. I'm very curious to hear Trinque's take on where this whole TMSR OS thing can go.