From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Wed Dec 20 2000 - 19:47:45 MST
"Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience@pobox.com> writes:
> Ha! Handforged each one and zero, did you? We only we had ones. And we
> didn't handforge them, because we had to make our own iron atoms from
> hydrogen. Some days we didn't even have hydrogen and we had to use
> primordial ylem. We sent packets by carrier pigeon until all the pigeons
> died of the plague, and then we had to invent fire before we could use
> smoke signals. And a Babbage Machine, oh, we never even dreamed of a
> Babbage Machine. We had to use slide rules chipped out of flint and
> Granpa died before his was finished booting up. Our whole village only
> had one bit of RAM. It weighed thirty pounds and we had to share it with
> the neighbors.
Back in my day, we didn't even have the full set of Peano's axioms. We
didn't have 'zero', so we had to do without natural numbers and
addition. We had to make do with scraps from empty sets.
If you tell that to the youth today they just don't believe you.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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