The user and the rotor.

Once upon a time there was a currency that wanted to find a userⁱ ; but he would have to be a sane user. The currency travelled all over the world to find one, but nowhere could he get what he wanted. There were users enough, but it was difficult to find out whether they were sane ones. There was always something about them that was not as it should be.

One evening there was a terrible attack on the currency ; there were bastard blocks and fuzzed blocks, and the non-standard transactions poured down in spammarific torrents. Suddenly a knocking was heard at the gates of the WoT, and someone in assbot’s L2 !up’d him.

It was a user standing out there at the edge of the channel. But, good gracious! what a sight he was. Having not completed his 6 months of reading, he hadn’t the faintest clue where to start and little sense of the expected etiquette. And yet he said that he was a real user.

Well, we’ll soon find that out, thought the older members. They pointed him to ‘!h‘, let him register his key, and then directed him towards ‘rotor‘ ; then they told him that if wanted to truly be a sane user, he would have to build rotor and, more than anything, appreciate it.

On this project the user had to finagle and fine-time all night. In the morning he was asked how he had slept.

“Oh, very badly!” said he. “I have scarcely closed my eyes all night. Heaven only knows what I was using before, but I was lying to myself something fierce until now, so deceived was I by USGavin and his buttbuddy Hearn. It was horrible ! But I got rotor to run !”

Now they knew that he was a sane user because he had seen the way right through the twenty layers of cruft and twenty shades of pallid blue smoke that Vesennes’ illegitimate band of power rangers have left in their wake.

Nobody but a sane user could be as sensitive as that.

So the WoT accepted him into the fold, for now they knew that he was a sane user ; and ‘bitcoin core’ was put in the museum, where it may still be seen, if no one has stolen it.

There, that is a true story.ⁱⁱ And so is this :

funkenstein_: I must say the rotor is a software release like no other I have seen, yes very deterministic. Perhaps in some way similar to simply passing around a massive virtual machine file (yes I’m fishing for a correction on this).
asciilifeform: If you recall, this was my original (~6 mo. ago) suggestion for how to do development on therealbitcoin.ⁱⁱⁱ But a number of folks (chiefly mircea_popescu) did not like it. For entirely logical reasons. Then again, 99% of the time spent by folks who aren’t me, thus far, appears to have been spent chasing various annoying little misconfigurations. But upside is that we aren’t passing around a massive binary turd.

mircea_popescu: Upside is massive but hard to quantify. Upside is that we HAVE FOUND THE HOLES IN GCC! Upside is that we know what to say about Linux, and why we’re saying it. Upside is that we have rotor, and that we know why nobody without a rotor has a chance. Upside of a sane approach is never “where it gets you”, but always “where it didn’t take you”. Just like the upside of picking sane girls to fuck isn’t “that hot blondie” but “I fucked over a thousand women in my life, most of whose names I don’t remember, and yet I never had a venereal disease”. That’s the upside.

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1. The personification of currency is no less ridiculous and not the slightest bit less objectionable than the personification of animals. Yes, lions, even Cecil, are dangerous. Just like currencies.↩
2. With apologies to Hans Christian Andersen.↩
3. Where therealbitcoin is the exact opposite of gavincoin and is therefore the only code run by the sane, including yours truly.↩