Mike Dilger

Author of Gossip client: https://github.com/mikedilger/gossip
Dual National (USA / New Zealand)
My principles are Individualism, Equality, Liberty, Justice and Life

Public Key

npub1acg6thl5psv62405rljzkj8spesceyfz2c32udakc2ak0dmvfeyse9p35c

NIP-05 Address

[email protected]

NIP-57 Address

[email protected]

Profile Code

nprofile1qqswuyd9ml6qcxd92h6pleptfrcqucvvjy39vg4wx7mv9wm8kakyujgpzemhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumn0wd68ytnzv9hxgqgawaehxw309ahx7um5wgkhqatz9emk2mrvdaexgetj9ehx2aq7fedk5

Publishing to

relay.nostr.band

nostr-pub.wellorder.net

nostr-relay.nokotaro.com

Author Public Key

npub1acg6thl5psv62405rljzkj8spesceyfz2c32udakc2ak0dmvfeyse9p35c

Show more details

Last Notes

2025-01-20 04:36:50 GMT

My last post was supposed to have a subject but didn't. This is a test to see if the behavior repeats.

2025-01-14 21:46:54 GMT

“Here's a phrase that apparently the airlines simply made up: near miss. They say that if 2 planes almost collide, it's a near miss. Bullshit, my friend. It's a near hit! A collision is a near miss.
[WHAM! CRUNCH!]
"Look, they nearly missed!"
"Yes, but not quite.”
- George Carlin

2025-01-13 06:16:18 GMT

- reply

Yes, and there is no big problem with using saltwater: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1N2BwcAT-s

2025-01-12 07:39:45 GMT

- reply

Mayor Karen Bass who cut 18m from the LAFD seems actually quite upbeat about the situation. People will probably re-elect her because she's black and she has a positive attitude.
Did you know that over 300 fire hydrants have been stolen and sold for scrap since Jan 2023?

2025-01-12 07:19:58 GMT

"In a message to the American Red Cross, the Iranian Red Crescent has expressed its readiness to provide humanitarian assistance to US citizens affected by the California wildfires"

2025-01-12 02:44:18 GMT

- reply

I thought the idea was to make kind-1 for root posts only, so there would be a way to efficiently download only root posts, not everything in every thread that some reader may never drill down into. There is nothing in the NIP that explains that, but the commentary on the PR is full of that idea.

2025-01-12 02:40:18 GMT

- reply

I played a game on lichess. My heart was pounding, knowing it was a real human, and feeling like the Elo I start out with isn't right ... it starts you at 1500. Anyhow it paired me with someone at 1180 or so. And I won! Now my Elo is 1607. Now I'm even more nervous to play another game, I'm gonna embarrass myself in front of someone who knows how to play chess and will be suprised that a 1607 could play so badly.
I won because my opponent I think was nervous about my 1500 Elo being so much higher than his. I made 4 blunders and he only capitalized on one of them, I think he presumed they were traps or something. I was playing aggressively though which is my style.. letting pawns go in exchange for position. He only made one blunder, but I was able to use it to push through and checkmate him.
So the answer to your question "What's your elo?" is technically 1607. 😆

2025-01-11 00:58:43 GMT

- reply

I think the problem was I gave a bad commit hash, but the error message really does not match the actual situation at all. Anyhow, it wasn't a github problem and I got it fixed.

2025-01-11 00:21:25 GMT

- reply

We share code via code "repositories" we call "repo"s for short, so you got that one right.
Git is a version control tool that is used for pushing and pulling changes to code between repos. The repo has to be a "git" repo for it to work. There are other software repos like cvs, sccs, mercurial, bazaar, and more but the vast majority of developers today use 'git' because it is very good -- written by Linux Torvalds (Larry Wall, Junio Hamano, others) who started Linux.

2025-01-11 00:11:48 GMT

Is anybody else having github issues right now? I've got public repos suddenly asking for a username when you try to clone them... scripts like "cargo build" aren't working and say "spurious network error", but the error is github suddenly asking for a username. It isn't all repos, but happening for https://github.com/mikedilger/nostr-types

2025-01-10 22:23:24 GMT

- reply

My worry this whole time is that if I generate kind-1111 replies, half of my audience won't see them. If I reply with kind-1, half of my audience will see those replies as root posts. I have no way out. I'm not considering your post an attack, it is just the thing that woke me up to the situation again.
The only fix at this point is for everybody to implement NIP-22.

2025-01-10 22:04:43 GMT

NIP-22 has become non-optional. It solved a real problem and was a good idea, but also it was a breaking change. A non-optional breaking change. I made this point early on, calling the other devs mavericks and juggernauts.
Now we are in the situation where gossip either doesn't see anybody's replies, or it replies to their replies with kind-1 events which I am now told is a "sin". You see, I am not allowed to ignore this NIP-22. It is non-optional.
I'm not even against this being non-optional. What I am against is not running a migration campaign... not pushing everybody to upgrade to it. I warned this situation would happen and I was ignored. So now we have this mess.
I will now upgrade NIP-22, but somebody needs to go around to all the other clients and push them all to upgrade too.
@npub1use…k5ks @npub1l3c…6vs2 @npub180c…h6w6 @npub1gcx…nj5z @npub1jlr…ynqn @npub1ye5…knpr @npub1xts…kk5s

2025-01-10 07:48:13 GMT

I sent a note 12 hours ago blaming the LA people for all clumping together. But I'm not really that mean. I feel bad for them losing their houses. I guess I just wanna have a unique take, and I remember farmers losing their crops because they lost their water, and I was always feeling bad for them.
I'm pro-desalination, if it can be done without huge equipment manufacturing and chemical side effects.

2025-01-10 07:41:12 GMT

- reply

Pretty bad. 691 or something like that in rapid. But I haven't played people in a while, just bots and puzzles so it might be better now. My lichess puzzle rating is up to 1400, but that is definiately not comparable with an Elo rating. Honestly I'm low enough that I shouldn't be memorizing openings at all, I should be working on not hanging my pieces.

2025-01-09 23:57:52 GMT

I took a break from nostr over Christmas. First real break since I started working on nostr. About 10 days worth. What did I do? I programmed chess.
There is a ton of chess related software out there. We shouldn't need more. Chess.com has become very popular, but I prefer lichess.org. Huge databases of games and puzzles, lessons to practice and learn, and online game matchmaking, tracking of Elo (or glicko-2) scores, etc.
Even 20 years ago there was way too much chess related software. Ok... there can't be "too much". What I mean is that there was a lot. Scroll down this page to see some of it: https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/wiki/Download-and-usage
So why did I want to write more? I had 100 reasons:
1. I didn't know of any that easily let me see which squares were controlled by which pieces, as a learning tool. It is probably out there but I didn't know about it.
2. I didn't know of any that let me learn opening lines by playing them against the computer where the computer first plays fixed moves to get to the beginning of the line, then choose random branches (based on random leafs) to play the opposition side of a line, and subsequently starts over or switches to stockfish.
3. I like the chess.com graphics, but I don't want to pay for their services. So I want to use those graphics even though they can't be distributed. Honestly I could have just shoved them into my pychess folder somewhere, but whatever
4. I like programming.
Anyhow, I have this cool set of libraries now that doesn't quite do what I set out to do, but almost does. I can play stockfish, or stockfish can play itself, or I can play myself. Originally I wrote a 'state' library and a 'uci' library and plugged in my server to pychess, my server being the one helping me practice and learn opening lines. But something about how pychess uses UCI wasn't quite working and often it would get stuck. So then I whipped up a 'gui' in egui (was super easy) and added nice things like drag and drop, opponent moves slide into place naturally. I want to add the "click" when they land. It has many sets of graphics to choose from and various ways to highlight squares and show messages and alert and things. I"ve also got an 'lmdb' crate where I store positions and responses, and indicate in the response if it is my Preferred response that I am trying to learn, or a bad move, or whatever (so I can learn the preferred moves for my strategic play... which are not necessarily the stockfish "best" moves).
I'm way to old to ever be good at chess though. But I can be better.
I haven't done any tie-in to nostr yet but that would be quite easy, and running this on a website won't be a huge lift either. So maybe NIP-64 could get expanded and implemented.

2025-01-09 22:39:22 GMT

For those seeking rigorous privacy I've argued for using Qubes (or at least whonix) and Tor like Edward Snowden does. I use such a machine for certain activities. But it is not my main computer. My main workstation has too much stuff to run something like that... ZFS for instance.
In these cases VPNs have to suffice. But VPNs aren't entirely safe. You can be fingerprinted and tracked pretty easily still just by the multiple websites you go to fingerprinting your browser. And it is hard to know if you can trust a corporate VPN company.
Rather than install multiple browsers in multiple VMs and trying to tweak them all so they don't all have identical specs (something that can be used to associate them), you could instead consider something like https://vpn.simplifiedprivacy.com , a VPN system and Browser container system that work together to foil this kind fingerprinting, without the downsides of Qubes or the slowness or Tor. It fakes your display, isolates cookies, routes through backwater datacentres instead of those Cloudfare infested places. And of course you sign up anonymously with bitcoin. I think it is a good compromise for practical privacy. I haven't used it yet myself though but I'm going to take a look and I'd be interested in feedback from those who do. I believe it is just now in beta testing.
Cool idea.
I'm sure @npub14sl…t5d6 will correct me if I got any of that wrong.

2025-01-09 22:08:58 GMT

- reply

I love how people are so participatory: "I wanna reply! I wanna reply too!"

2025-01-08 22:35:20 GMT

- reply

Thanks.
In my latitude we also have a big effect from the way the winds are blowing. We get sudden changes from warm to cold when the wind changes from tropical to polar. As an island the land mass holds lessthermal energy than a continent does, so those changes aren't softened by much.

2025-01-08 21:54:19 GMT

- reply

Yes that may be expected for Florida. Not for Palmerston North.
I keep a season log where I take notes of what is happening during various weeks of the year. Form this week my notes read:
Weather:
* Daytime temps up to 23C are typical.
* Large gaps between rains
Soil:
* Exposed soil is very firm
Pasture/Grass:
* Long grass is dead straw, but still green beneath this year.
Topping is easier than in spring.
* Lawn flowers (clover, birdsfoot trefoil) still in bloom w/ bees.
* Dock has turned red
Trees:
* All deciduous trees fully in leaf
* Poplars barely have red leaves, but do have some
Fruits:
* Elderberry berries starting to turn black
But this year is different. Short gaps betwen rains. Soil has not firmed yet. No dead straw. Dock is still green. I will make a note for comparision in future years.

2025-01-08 21:18:48 GMT

L.A. is currently experiencing wildfires in the middle of WINTER.
Palmerston North has been cool with clouds and rain after rain after rain in the SUMMER.
wacky

2024-12-25 04:27:47 GMT

Somebody has seconded with all of my seconds!
Oh, hang on, no worries, here come a bunch more seconds.

2024-12-24 22:34:11 GMT

- reply

An angel! We are blessed! Merry Xmas Marie

2024-12-24 09:41:45 GMT

Well I'm going to sleep now, and if I hear raindeer hooves on the roof I'll just smile and roll over knowing that Santa's milk and cookies are all in place.
Merry Christmas and Seasons Greetings to those who aren't Christian.

2024-12-24 08:53:06 GMT

- reply

I'd like to and I may.
I'd be interested to know in what ways they practice communism still, even just at a high level.

2024-12-24 08:46:20 GMT

- reply

Well if you lived there for 3 years you have FAR more experience and data than I do. So I bow to your superior experience. This is why I titled the thing "i might be wrong".

2024-12-24 08:44:36 GMT

- reply

I hear that. One-party rule is China's biggest problem, and not likely to be fixed for a long time to come.

2024-12-24 08:42:46 GMT

Brief summary of the recent news about Slovakia (as far as I can gather). The news doesn't always tell it straight, so here is the simple story:
1. Ukraine (Zelenskyy) asked Slovakia (Fico) to back their entry into NATO. Slovakia said they won't do it, it's not a good idea.
2. (rumor, not reported) Ukraine offered Slovakia $500 million to back their entry into NATO. Slovakia still declined, said it would be WW3.
3. (because the carrot didn't work, they try the stick) Ukraine told Slovakia they will no longer allow gas to transit from Russia to Slovakia through Ukraine starting in 2025.
4. Fico travels to Moscow to ask Putin how they can continue to purchase and receive the cheap energy they need given the new constraint.
Zelenskyy makes it a moral issue: Ukraine is fighting for their lives, Slovakia is fighting over money (being unwilling to buy expensive gas from other suppliers).
Slovakia makes it a rational decision, both preventing WW3, and providing for their people.
(for some reason, Ukraine still allows Russian gas to transit Ukraine to Hungary, probably for the leverage over some future thing).

2024-12-24 02:37:13 GMT

- reply

It is good to learn that my choices make some sense to other people, that I am not senile yet.
There are already 2 issues I want to fix: Metadata not loading for people in lists, and relay sorting by a useful score (which is fixed on unstable). But I'm spending less time online over this Christimas week so it might not be patch-released until January.

2024-12-24 02:19:45 GMT

- reply

I have this instinct too, of having an extended family and working together. But my family was kinda whack, my mother a religious nutter and my father absent to avoid my mother. So it didn't work out for me.

2024-12-24 02:16:15 GMT

- reply

IF a protocol could provide it, it is a nice way to rest assured that somebody isn't censoring the most subversive of the events. On nostr you can't tell. Maybe you are only getting 50% of the events, the ones the government censors allowed.
But it should be done in a soft way so the protocol doesn't break, or become inflexible. Since events can be used in many ways in many places, and there is no global store of events, it is inevitable that you will miss events in nostr. You will miss the ephemeral "king of hearts" event on the relay where people play bridge. You will miss the event that someone sends to their bunker. So clearly such a thing could not be globally applied in nostr without causing serious problems.
But maybe it could be applied in a soft way to certain kinds of events, maybe even linking back to the last 3 events meant for public consumption, instead of just the last one.
In any case, not a core/critical part of the protocol and can be added at any time we want.

2024-12-24 00:34:46 GMT

- reply

I don't know what the L R and P stand for either! But I know that if I click this area I get the notifications. P must be PENDING since I have 13 of those. These are tasks that gossip does not do automatically, and it is letting you know that you might want to do them. R is for when a relay AUTHs you, to choose what to do about it (don't auth, fake auth, or real auth). L is ... I forget. I'm sure it is in the source code somewhere.

2024-12-23 22:51:51 GMT

- reply

I don't disagree with any of that.
While this revolution happened in China 50 years ago, in America it is happening now. The Chinese suffered and learnt, as did the Russians, neither of which is moving towards socialism today. American socialist-thinkers however don't have that first-hand experience to call on, and in a sense they have no natural immunity to these bad ideas. They need people like you to talk sense to them or else they can learn the hard way (and take everyone else down with them). What is the phrase... fuck around and find out?

2024-12-23 21:54:13 GMT

- reply

Also, we know where cultural Marxism came from in the USA. We can trace it back to University professors from the 70s or earlier, to Focault and Derrada, and we can trace it back to Marx and Engels. And last I checked, none of those people were Chinese.

2024-12-23 21:51:42 GMT

- reply

Ok wow, this is hilarious. James has lost it.
He thinks communism is a death cult attempting to conquer and destroy the world, and twists all data to support this theory.... when a normal reading of all the data says that communism was a bad idea, failed miserably, and only persists "in name" in nations where it is politically expedient to appease the low-intelligence communist-supporting crowds so they don't revolt (except perhaps Cuba which is crumbling as we speak).
There are so many inconvenient facts he is going to have to explain. Like (he even mentions this) why do communists in China universally weep that China as sold out to capitalism? If comunism is a terrible self-corrupting idea, why isn't China self-corrupted by it? How can it be growing faster than the USA for many decades now if it is communistic? Either communism works very well, or China isn't communist, you cannot rationally believe it is communist, communism is self-destructive, and also China is growing rapidly. That is a direct contridction.
Anyhow, I'll keep listening because I find it entertaining, but James is the one adjusting the world to fit his theory.

2024-12-23 21:22:41 GMT

- reply

Trump is the 'art of the deal' guy. He never says what he actually thinks, he says things to manipulate. He will butter them up or tear them a new one depending entirely upon how it affects negoations. But you knew that already.

2024-12-23 21:19:43 GMT

- reply

I think so too.

2024-12-23 21:19:29 GMT

- reply

They learned from their mistakes and corrected course, immediately after Mao. But you still haven't noticed? They started changing course in 1978 under Deng to ease towards a market economy, and have continued in that direction until today where China is now not much different from Western countries. There are state owned enterprises (same as most Western countries) and there are government regulators (same as most Western countries). China actually had to hold off some reforms in order to counter Trump's trade war. Xi is somewhat less reformist than Deng was, and I'm not promoting their particular system -- all governments suck. But to always harken back to the mostly environmentally-caused famine (made worse by communism negative affect on productivity) is pretty weak.

2024-12-23 20:56:11 GMT

- reply

I have Pluckrose and Lindsay's "Cynical Theories" book. Your post made me check the index for any reference to China. China is not in the index. And your note is the first I've heard that America's problem of cultural Marxism is coming out of China. My first instinct is to doubt that story, because China doesn't have this problem and they mock the "Baizuo"
What I think is more likely is that the US establishment has been drumming up anti-China sentiment in the US for decades in preparation for the eventual conflict of superpowers that the establishment has been predicting.
You didn't say it, but I hear from many people that China is communist. Well they do use that word. The CPC is the Communist Party of China (not CCP btw, that is an American "we name you, you don't name yourselves" assholeism). But China doesn't exhibit ANY of the characteristics of communism. No common owneship of production, distribution or exchange. No allocation based on need. They have and honor private property, they have money, "to get rich is glorious" and they have in their constitution that "the defining feature of socialism with Chinese characteristics IS the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party" which is to say that as long as the CCP is in charge, they get to call it socialism despite what it actually is... that the CCP being in charge is the DEFINING characteristic and whatever they do defines what socialism is. It isn't actually socialism.
They are an authoritarian dictatorship, no doubt, but that can be very good or very bad, just like monarchy, depending on what the leaders do.

2024-12-23 20:36:01 GMT

Trump says that China and the United States together can solve all of the problems of the world. I hope they arrange that. I expect that China will solve all the problems, the US will create a few more, and China will solve those too.

2024-12-23 08:34:56 GMT

- reply

I'm not going to argue this point because (1) I didn't understand the OP and I thought his post was accidentally missing context, so I thought my reply would be funny and not starting a debate and (2) you know what I mean.

2024-12-23 08:32:04 GMT

- reply

Ok, that information helps. Maybe the new UI person line widget doesn't trigger metadata fetches like the old one did.

2024-12-22 19:50:07 GMT

- reply

This is nostr. It is a censorship resistant social media ecosystem.

2024-12-22 19:32:42 GMT

- reply

You might need more discovery relays. Go to Relay > My Relays. How many are marked "D"? If not too many, then go to Relays > Known Network and configure some more. I use about 12 myself. Unfortunately I just realize there is no way to sort them by 'score' (rank or success rate are not very useful by themselves, sorry).

2024-12-22 19:25:52 GMT

- reply

I'm not sure. There is a flake file, and also this PR to change the flake file: https://github.com/mikedilger/gossip/pull/920
But I don't know how to use nixos or flake.

2024-12-22 03:19:25 GMT

I like narr. It is a good fork. Now I just need a list of interesting RSS feeds to follow. Any suggestions?
#nevent1q…4dk4

2024-12-22 00:11:03 GMT

- reply

If it is as you say, you can copy it as it is, then do that revert, then diff the two copies and reapply the differences (probably manually).

2024-12-21 19:10:33 GMT

- reply

Nostr And Rss Reader

2024-12-21 19:02:14 GMT

- reply

The build was on bookworm. 0.12.0 was built on bookworm too.
I rebuilt on Bullseye and uploaded to the github release, just for you:
83a56f2dfe62aaf019d30806c29651da9c79c61e109599d09eb648121518a051 gossip_0.13.0-1_amd64.bullseye.deb

2024-12-21 05:36:10 GMT

- reply

I'll write a grant proposal and put a few grad students on the problem.

2024-12-21 05:32:04 GMT

- reply

Damn I thought I came up with it. I probably saw this XKCD years ago and forgot.

2024-12-21 05:07:34 GMT

I found a problem with the Monty Hall problem.
It starts out with 3 doors on 3 stages. Behind 1 door I am told there is a brand new car. And behind the other two doors is a goat. But they won't tell me which door is which.
They tell me that I can choose any door and I will win whatever is behind that door.
I choose door number one.
Then Monty Hall says "Show him what was behind door number 2!" and door number 2 opens and there is a goat!
Then Monty Hall says "Now... do you want to stick with your choice, or switch doors?"
And I say "Yes, I want to switch. I want to switch to the goat that you have shown me behind door number 2."

2024-12-21 03:44:32 GMT

When the govt shuts down, please just leave it off. Anyone who turns it back on is a rotten egg.

2024-12-21 02:48:49 GMT

- reply

Its been two millennia, nothing stays fresh for that long.

2024-12-19 19:50:02 GMT

- reply

it is already turning into another super app

2024-12-19 19:27:16 GMT

We need a nostr client that is just about managing your relays (and maybe your keys, bunker, delegation, profile). The "nostr account manager" or NAM.
No content.
But very good at helping you understand all the relays out there, how they are different and what they offer, with lots of hand-holding so grandma could use it. Also assisting in moving content from relay to relay when you migrate.

2024-12-04 23:30:17 GMT

- reply

You are too lazy. 😮🙄😆

2024-12-03 21:32:46 GMT

- reply

"We need to onboard more people to nostr"
"We need to break everything and start over"

2024-11-29 02:14:00 GMT

- reply

Yep that was convenient how PGP did it, encrypting the symmetric key to each recipient in the header of the encrypted message. But ECC keys don't work like RSA keys and encryption has to be done with diffie-hellman key exchange to agree upon a shared secret which might then be used for XChaCha20Poly1305 or AES or whatever. And for some security reason you can't use that same shared secret twice (or so I am cautioned by the cyrpto libraries I'm reading the docs in).
@npub1mxr…0htc gave me a good lead.

2024-11-27 03:36:20 GMT

- reply

All of your outboxes and all of the inboxes of everyone tagged, which should include both A and B unless nostr changed and doesn't propogate p tags anymore.

2024-11-26 22:55:14 GMT

I've heard it said that if you stand up a new DHT it will be subject to Sybil attack until it gets very very large, and so the only reasonable DHT is Mainline DHT since it is already large enough to withstand this.
This is true for a Kademlia DHT. But with newer DHT research it is no longer true (for example, Whanau). And there has been about 20 years of research since Kademlia, and the Internet has changed too (NAT is even more of a problem now), plus I have a few other reservations like mutable data must be very small, disappears rather quickly, isn't fixed into the protocol yet (many nodes don't participate) and it also feels like an abuse of a DHT that was meant for bittorrent (just like inscriptions/ordinals/NFTs feels like an abuse of bitcoin).
I think it is worth researching DHT technology further, but of course mainline DHT might still be the right answer, I'm just not convinced given the concerns I've mentioned.
Nonetheless, pkarr is pretty fucking cool. The rest of pubky looks to me like an attempt to do something interesting with pkarr.
@npub1jvx…7yqz

2024-11-26 18:52:51 GMT

I support the right of Māori tino rangatiratanga (sovereignty). But if they do it, they are no longer New Zealanders and they should get none of my tax dollars. If they want independence, they cannot also be dependents.

2024-11-26 01:29:03 GMT

X sucks. Ya'all wanna stay here on nostr. Nobody needs the aggravation.
But maybe you are curious about what the current buzz is over there...
Here, I can take a peek and let you know:
* People are yelling at each other
* People are angry because somebody said a word they don't like
* Trump charges dropped
* I'm right you're wrong.
* Elon Musk memes about buying msnbc
* Europe planning for war, asking companies to move to wartime footing
* Europe planning to use metro stations as civil shelters
* France and UK planning to put soldiers in Ukraine if US pulls out
* Anti-war folk (Rogan, Brand, Dore, etc) think the war hawks are crazy
* You can't call (choose either Elon Musk or Sam Harris) an intellectual.
* Israel still bombing Beirut
* Hezbollah still firing rockets and missiles into Israel
* Another truce is being touted by the US and Israel
* Dilger thinks the truce is yet another fake but it ain't fooling them this time
* >> You're the stupid one! > No, you are!
* Romanians elected the "wrong" candidate who is not pro-EU and not pro-NATO
* Cyprus announces intent to join NATO
* Israel sanctions their own newspaper Haaretz for telling the truth
That wasn't even worth it.

2024-11-21 23:50:08 GMT

- reply

To me it is only a small annoyance that when I get a URL in a descriptor I have to check the last part to see if it already has an extension, and if not add one matching the original uploaded local filename. If I use BUT-01 GET /<sha256> I don't have to check anything I can just shove the extension after the hash, and maybe I should have done that instead. But I would change it to say that the URL in the descriptor is expected to have a relevent extension (then I have go to change chorus!)

2024-11-21 21:15:07 GMT

- reply

Imagine you have a unit vector that points in any direction. In 3-dimensional space, it represents some point on the unit-sphere. That can be described with 3 numbers (x, y, z) but not ANY three numbers, they have to be such that the magnitude is 1.
In any case, if you can map information to a point on this unit sphere, and you do that for lots of input data, then when you query the system with new input data it can tell you which pre-existing input data happens to be the closest point on this unit sphere. Actually the most popular algorithms aren't guaranteed to be the closest (but I know of one that does give the closest and has other good properties but I'm under NDA on that so I can't say more).
3-dimensions turns out to be pretty useless, but in say about 3096 dimensions you start being able to encode enough information into that 3096-D unit-vector as to be useful in an A.I. sense.
But you have to first map information into a unit vector using an "embedding layer" which is some A.I. magic that I don't know very much about at all.

2024-11-21 17:55:43 GMT

- reply

Ok I pushed another fix (it was putting a double-slash in the URL). I also merged in a fix to kind-1111 notes which will rebuild relationships.

2024-11-21 05:11:13 GMT

I've heard that Iran has hacked Israel's SSV blockchain (allegedly operated by Mossad and used to pay operatives) and obtained 8 TB of personal information about who their operatives are. Do any of your blockheads know anything about this blockchain and if this could possibly be?

2024-11-21 02:54:21 GMT

- reply

I personally believe that the government does have a role in preventing contagion, just like they have a role in preventing crime and preventing war and preventing the risk of people who drive too fast. One person putting excessive risk on another against that other's will.... that is a valid purpose of government. Of course the specifics would be a mess to work out... how fast is driving too fast? how bad of a disease does it have to be for the government to quarantine you? how big of a gun is too big? The fact that I posit these questions means I'm not a minimalist libertarian/anarchist. It means I don't believe that we have as a species worked out how to co-exist in peace without some form of dominance hierarchy (government officials have power over plebians) oppressing us all. If you have worked out a better solution I'm all ears because government sucks compared to free markets.. But a lack of government sucks more.
What happened wrong with COVID was that they all over-reacted to a minor disease (because they secretly knew it was from weapons research and that freaked them out) and decided to coerce people to take a risky rapidly developed medical product.

2024-11-21 02:26:51 GMT

- reply

I think that "US interests" want to spend all the allocated money while they can, because they clip that ticket and want to be paid as much as they can be paid. But there are other ways to embezzle and cheat the American taxpayer without also escalating a conflict against a nuclear power.
I don't think a Russian regime change makes any sense at all for the West. Putin is one of the doves. A regime change would escalate the war significantly. Okay, now that I typed that out, now I understand why they want a regime change. They want a bigger war.