Chris Liss

Bill Gates is basically what people fear will happen if rogue AI runs amok and optimizes for some insane aim at the expense of everything else.
He’s the kind of sociopathic autist that had he been born 10 years later would have been on SSRIs and committed a mass shooting.
#note1wll…qt2p

2024-06-25 10:17:22

Don’t get it twisted — it’s great that Assange is finally free, but it’s *only* because the political liability of keeping him in prison finally exceeded the perceived harms from the vindictive sociopaths in government he exposed.

2024-06-25 08:46:27

- reply

that sounds great — using all these responses to convince her to let me post it when she’s done.

2024-06-24 22:02:18

- reply

thanks -- I’ve also thought about the “pinned” article or post and that would allow her to create the npub, keep it there and add whatever she wanted to the feed.
I will keep working on her. The guide is only 70 percent done because she’s thorough, but I think I can get her to do it when it’s finished

2024-06-24 21:42:58

Wife (not on nostr) is working on a restaurant/sight-seeing/tourism guide for Portugal because so many people come here and ask us for tips, the email we used to send out is now seven years old and it’s easier just to make a comprehensive one once, and then send it to everyone.
She’s really good at these, has good taste, knows food and wine (in the wine business), so I told her she should post it on Nostr somewhere.
She said she’s not interested, but I told her people who used it would probably zap her.
What do you think — could she make $20 (she very cheap, so $20 might move the needle for her) in zaps over the course of a year?
Also, where would content like this reside? Highlighter is good for essays, articles, but you’d want a guide to stay at the top of your timeline. Maybe we can create an npub just for the list, write it in Highlighter and just leave it up there, and update periodically.
Maybe there’s a niche on nostr for the people who are really in the know, posting local knowledge. What do you think?

2024-06-24 10:55:16

Okay, enough procrastinating my Monday run. I’m going out the door as soon as I type the period in this sentence.

2024-06-24 10:53:30

Who the fuck, besides the retarded German government, is selling BTW?
Maybe I’m delusional or there are unknown unknowns, but this is the most bullish setup in history.
So bizarre.

2024-06-24 10:45:28

That nostr posts are forever is more feature than bug IMO, but reading over some of my poorly worded ones is painful.
Fine line between hitting “post” too soon and getting stuck in too much woodcraft, not saying what’s on your mind.
For now mostly erring on the side of the former.

2024-06-24 10:02:07

The most common way someone drops a false belief adopted for emotional comfort is when the discomfort from believing a falsehood becomes even more painful.
Consequences > arguments.
I often wish it were otherwise, but it’s rarely so.

2024-06-24 09:45:49

And if money is energy, energy is money. We just needed a mechanism to convert energy directly into money.
So it’s not only eliminating third parties and permissions, the things people are most exercised about. It’s eliminating the loss of energy in the conversion process because you’re getting your money directly from the source.
Farm to table money, so to speak.
#note12wc…tyur

2024-06-24 09:33:36

Money is power, and power is energy, therefore money is energy.

2024-06-21 13:08:27

- reply

ha — feel free

2024-06-21 13:07:56

Re the covid pandemic: there’s an order of operations to things. You don’t launch the pandemic and mandate the shot and vax passes *before* persuading people to do CBDCs.
You don’t freeze the bank accounts of protesting Canadian truckers *before* the US has implemented that policy.
You don’t start censoring and deplatforming people *before* you can shut off their funds remotely with the click of a button.
Someone had to know this, but I think they got impatient and were worried if they didn’t have the excuse for inauditable mail-in ballots, Trump might win again and they’d be delayed another four years.
So they launched it and hoped for the best, but predictably didn’t achieve the total demoralization and control for which they had hoped, just this split-reality society where awake people live side-by-side with the zombified.
I think there’s an angle to this where you can cast Hillary Clinton as the unlikely savior of humanity because she was so widely reviled and even helped prop up Trump in the primaries because she knew the institutions would be against him. Basically, only she could have lost to that version of Trump, whereas a generic democrat probably would have won following the relatively popular Obama.
She might be the Gollum biting off Frodo’s finger and taking the ring down with her into the fires of Mordor.

2024-06-21 10:19:25

I think when we look back on this period of history, we’ll realize that Covid was launched prematurely, before the requisite censorship and CBDC measures were put in place. Maybe it was because Trump was president, but they had to launch it before they were ready.
As a result, while the psyop did serious damage to many people and accomplished many of their goals, it also missed too many people and woke too many others up.
Now, they’re scrambling for bird flu or terrorist attacks or WWIII, or whatever else they can cobble together, but it’s too late. They can’t extricate themselves from this failing psyop, and accountability is coming. They sense this, and are desperately gaslighting and pretending everything is still going to plan, but it is not.
And the sooner you realize they are failing, the bolder you will get. And the bolder you get, the more it absurd it will be to pretend Biden doesn’t have dementia, or the WHO is a serious organization interest in your health, or the FBI is a serious organization dedicated to fighting crime.
It’s already almost impossible. They are bluffing as hard as they can to deter people from walking away from them, from calling them out, but they don’t have the cards.
And that bitcoin, nostr and even the centralized and imperfect platform of Twitter exist makes it impossible for them ever to regain control.
Expect some bad things to happen in the short term — the desperate flailings of a dying animal can still hurt a lot of people. But the animal is already mortally wounded, and it’s just a matter of time before it’s dead.

2024-06-21 09:13:07

An olive is really just a miniature avocado.

2024-06-20 16:12:15

https://fountain.fm/episode/BiUbcPtpf3PVhGZeMonH

2024-06-20 15:51:46

- reply

I don’t think you should care about their opinions, either. But I was a transient here until I wasn’t.
But if the EU passes retarded laws that destroy my quality of life, I will surely leave for somewhere that won’t.
And I’m someone who craves firm roots. You just don’t want them in soil that’s become infested. And unfortunately, there is a lot of infestation going around.

2024-06-20 15:11:07

- reply

Right, so if you choose to stay in your current place in order to improve things, you are only in that place because you (or your ancestors) choose to bail on someplace else.
There is nothing final or fundamental about the place you are in presently. If you have roots, it will take more ill treatment for you to leave, but you are only even there at all because you or someone else already left somewhere else!
So the question isn’t stay or leave, it’s stay or leave under what conditions.
And ironically sometimes the conditions of the original place only improve when they realize they’re driving people out.

2024-06-20 15:00:38

- reply

But the people who have “since arrived” also left someplace behind.
Some excuses are good ones.

2024-06-20 14:38:27

- reply

Hopefully more room and a message that there will be nothing but room if they don’t change course.

2024-06-20 14:29:47

I like making money as much as the next guy, but revenue is just gross.

2024-06-19 10:25:12

They should design rides to malfunction every n times just to make them more thrilling.
#note16vn…5ale

2024-06-18 19:33:50

some people go after what they want, others settle for crumbs because they’re told it’s virtuous.
#note19rk…rku8

2024-06-18 13:03:20

Maybe the CBDCs are the very mechanism by which we get the bitcoin standard.
#note1hcv…rkwn

2024-06-18 11:35:57

I hate relying on the phone for things like tickets and boarding passes. Makes your battery a single point of failure. Much prefer paper over which I have more control.
I think the phone needs to be scaled back generally, and it was never a good idea to rely on it for so many functions.
Redundancy > efficiency.

2024-06-18 09:58:07

Should UBI everyone 100K, have it expire in 30 minutes, see how that goes.
#note1ny0…nys8

2024-06-18 09:11:59

- reply

Actually wrote something on that very topic a couple years ago — a lot of people just believe whatever they’re incentivized to believe, and the facts are not especially relevant to them:
https://www.chrisliss.com/p/the-information-gap?utm_source=publication-search

2024-06-18 00:22:34

It's hard to overstate the contempt I have for institutions like Stanford, Harvard and the New York Times.
These were the elite of the elite, they had everything going for them, and they capitulated to the lie so completely.
If they had any self-respect, everyone there would resign en masse to save the institutions, but not only will they not do that, they’re still clinging to demonstrable falsehoods and lying even harder in the face of them.
The extent of the disgrace beggars belief.
As I said, I’m still not quite over the denial of reality, and unfortunately it might get worse in the near term as the cognitive dissonance ramps up.

2024-06-17 23:34:09

if you know about someone's charity, it's usually PR
#note17ke…fqf7

2024-06-17 22:55:58

- reply

Pretty easy to see that all one’s boosted friends still got covid, for example.

2024-06-17 22:45:11

- reply

I think it's possible to have a decent sense of what’s false.

2024-06-17 18:10:54

One thing that bodes well for me is I’m not at all sedentary. I’m either running at the track, or lying on the couch with my laptop.

2024-06-16 16:57:49

real talk!
#note1ewt…6zkw

2024-06-16 11:34:35

real talk
#note13ks…ktcp

2024-06-14 20:20:41

Some things are too on the nose. Like why would OpenAI partner with the NSA, just as they’re getting their deal with Apple?
I mean I know why the NSA would want to be with those companies, and if OpenAI really is just the NSA anyway, fine, but why announce this?
And why announce it now when people are learning about Apple?
I saw this post by David Icke that was similar saying how it’s obvious they want you to vote for Trump because the other guys is a demented imbecile, and Trump is getting unjustly prosecuted for the most minor things in plain sight. Like why bother with the charade if it’s only going to help him?
I don’t know that Icke is right, but it’s almost too obvious at this point. Like, besides the most brainwashed NPCs, who is pulling the lever for a dementia patient?
Who is going to use NSA-ware, and Apple is going to lose big on overtly integrating NSA-ware (not that it’s not covertly there now.)
I don’t know. Maybe I’m in a bubble, and this shit isn’t obvious to everyone, but I actually think it IS obvious to all but the most credulous normies.

2024-06-13 18:45:07

- reply

Way better off being highest agency poor person. Won’t stay poor either.

2024-06-13 17:23:53

- reply

It’s less about rich and poor IMO, than high agency and low agency. Many poor people are surrounded by low-agency people and never really think there’s an alternative, but a high-agency person won’t stay poor for long.

2024-06-11 15:55:18

- reply

Could be 100% right. But zero interest in that discussion on my part.

2024-06-11 13:51:43

Seeing a lot of “trolley problem” analysis of the hostage rescue in Gaza, i.e., the argument that you can’t kill 50x to save x.
The trolley problem is fatally flawed as a basis for moral decision making though because it posits clear and exhaustive consequences to flipping the switch or not, i.e., saving four vs one.
In reality the consequences are (a) unknowable because the future always has surprises; and (b) never all in, because the future persists indefinitely.
So if you decide you can murder one person to save four, the discussion cannot end with a simple, +3 = good! The implication of giving yourself license to murder in order to save people in greater numbers also becomes a precedent, and pretty soon, you’ll have people demanding you take an mRNA shot no matter how untested it is for “public health!”
People will posit all manner of justifications for horrors to balance the “greater good” books, so to speak. Seeing morality through the trolley problem lens (which many do) is destructive.
So you can’t look at numbers and figure it out like it’s 7th grade algebra.
*That’s neither to justify nor condemn the operation itself. I have no interest in that or the war generally.*

2024-06-11 12:29:47

I suspect when we look back at this era we’ll marvel at the hubris we had at imagining we were close to AGI, or building tech that smarter than humans.
We don’t even understand our own brains or really how they work! We don’t understand consciousness.
How can we build something smarter than us when we don’t even know how smart we are? We are so stupid we don’t know how smart we are.
Yes, we can build something that can beat us at chess. We can also build something that’s taller than us too.

2024-06-10 15:10:22

Fuck that — better to just see if I can figure it out, probably make the problem worse and then give up. Manual is too confusing, and I don’t have the patience for a video.
#note18w4…fud4

2024-06-10 11:17:04

- reply

only someone on the far right would say that

2024-06-10 10:55:53

POWER
https://highlighter.com/chrisliss/Power-xsxypu
#naddr1qv…fckh
https://highlighter.com/chrisliss/Power-xsxypu

2024-06-10 10:18:58

- reply

*“You are wise and powerful. Will you not take the Ring?”*
*“No!” cried Gandalf, springing to his feet. “With that power I should have power too great and terrible. And over me the Ring would gain a power still greater and more deadly.”*
*His eyes flashed and his face was lit as by a fire within. “Do not tempt me! For I do not wish to become like the Dark Lord himself. Yet the way of the Ring to my heart is by pity, pity for weakness and the desire of strength to do good. Do not tempt me! I dare not take it, not even to keep it safe, unused. The wish to wield it would be too great for my strength. I shall have such need of it. Great perils lie before me.”*
Power corrupts, absolutely power corrupts absolutely.
Decentralization does not equal communism, in fact is its opposite.

2024-06-09 20:17:48

- reply

I’ve found on Twitter, the first post gets 10x the views of the middle posts when you make them into a thread. I’ve found on nostr, few people engage with the long form post kind (you allude to this in your article), and more engage with it in Kind 1.
But I’ve struggled with this general problem in my work for a while. I have a substack. I only send out long-form, more thought-out, edited posts to my email subs. I want to post more, and I have a ton of ideas, but I don’t want to fill up their email boxes with posts like the one I’m writing now. Where to put the intermediate ones if not Kind 1 on nostr/Twitter?

2024-06-09 19:58:28

- reply

Whatever it is, there are many cases of wanting to say something that requires more space than a tweet, but that you don’t want to be archived as one of your longer-form pieces, lest you dilute their quality.
But I agree there is something elegant about succinct Kind 1 posts of the type Gigi has in his thread.

2024-06-09 19:13:12

- reply

I get this, but there needs to be an intermediate “kind” then. Some posts take more than 140 characters, but don’t merit full long-form, article treatment.

2024-06-09 13:28:56

For whatever reason, this piece of fiction, written in January of 2021, is by far my most read Substack post:
#note1742…a9z8

2024-06-09 12:07:15

Friend of mine told me the astronauts who supposedly died on the Challenger shuttle in 1987 are apparently still alive. So I checked out this video — very interesting:
https://x.com/PollsNOpinions1/status/1797932650197581976/video/1
But the question is, if it were true, why in 1986 would they bother to stage such a thing, given the cost and the possibility of being found out?
But it occurred to me there is a plausible explanation: the last time we went to the moon was in 1972. Fourteen years later, I’m sure the public was wondering, why haven’t we been back or gone to Mars?
But once the Challenger exploded, they had a good reason not to try for a while, not to fund space exploration and allow the public more or less to forget about it.
In other words, if the original moon landings were fake, you needed some kind of disaster to help with the cover-up, or else people would expect more space missions.
I’m not saying the video is dispositive or that the astronauts are actually still alive. I find it plausible, though, and definitely think the alleged living astronauts merit a real sit-down interview to confirm or debunk, were there such a thing as journalism anymore.
I’m also not entirely convinced the moon landings were fake, but let’s just say doubts about it are creeping in, along with 90 percent of all the other shit I took for granted growing up.

2024-06-09 11:45:20

if you could predict the future perfectly and with certainty, it would be no different than remembering it, i.e., it would be the past. What makes the future the future is its unpredictability.
Hence any moral calculation based on the greatest good for the greatest number is necessary bankrupt. It entails tallying up future benefits and harms as though they were in the past.
This sleight of hand (pretending the future were the past for purposes of calculation) is at the heart of every scam imaginable from “two weeks to slow the spread” to “if we don’t stop using fuel, the earth will be under water.” It’s the future, and they don’t know.
What’s the alternative? Principles, rights, firm lines that must never be crossed. Everything else is a matter of argument, persuasion and up for debate.

2024-06-08 10:29:41

real talk
#note1v9g…4g3t

2024-06-08 00:43:57

- reply

if rare, yes

2024-06-07 18:17:21

- reply

Experience the anxiety as a physical sensation. Locate it in the body rather than abstracting it into thoughts. Anxious thoughts are the avoidance of that sensation.
Best way out is always through.

2024-06-07 15:57:36

- reply

It does? How would I add it?

2024-06-07 15:54:40

Was thinking about this.
Think (unfortunately) we’re gonna need nostr multi-sig or at a minimum passphrases.
Because it’s only a matter of time before one of these clients gets hacked with your nsec.
But if you kept one nsec, in a client and then used a passphrase or seed signer to post, would be a lot more secure.
Right now, there’s no major payoff in someone stealing my nsec, but five years from now when it’s the key to a lot of things I control, there probably will be, and even more so for people like Jack Dorsey or Michael Saylor, whose signed posts could move stock prices.
Otherwise, I agree with the post below, Just a matter of time.
#note1p7e…3utq

2024-06-07 09:48:04

Procrastinating going for my Friday run by shitposting on nostr. I always go, so it’s just a matter of time, but I ask myself, “Is posting on nostr work?”
In other words, when I write a substack that gets emailed to subscribers, I consider myself having done work. But why is that work and shitposting here not work? Is there any difference?
One difference is substacks are full length essays so they take more effort, more editing, more thinking through. Here it’s just off the cuff.
But not every observation needs to be stretched into essay length. Sometimes observations should be one sentence, just as sometimes books should be one essay.
Bottom line, I would prefer to think of this as work because I have a lot of observations, and forcing them into essay length and format is taxing. I’d rather just shitpost a lot of the time and feel useful doing it.
But that gets to the issue of “feeling useful”. What the fuck is that about?
Well, I think humans have a need to contribute. If you’re not contributing in *some* way, you are not living your life, like a cheetah or greyhound that sat around all day and didn’t run.
And while you can do dishes or pick up your kid at school, a person also needs to contribute at the edge of his abilities, i.e., you will not be deeply satisfied over the long haul doing basic work IMO if you are capable of more. Don’t get me wrong, basic work is important and much, much better than smoking weed on the couch all day, but you don’t want to be a cheetah who merely jogs.
Anyway, this is now almost essay length, though only of shitposting rigor, but my point is I want to lean into shitposting as an outlet of important, edge-of-my-abilities expression, so I can avoid the formality of crafting essays except on those less frequent occasions I am motivated to craft one.
And if I am able to flip that switch and decide it’s “work” rather than idle procrastination, I will be able to do so. And then there’s the question of who the fuck is really deciding which is which, and shouldn’t I leave that up to the Tao or God to show me the way rather than the paralyzing bureaucracy in my head that tells me whether I’m contributing as if it has any fucking clue?
But that’s the subject for another post.

2024-06-07 09:18:46

- reply

I mean FFS, can't we have the apocalypse as promised on schedule? And there’s never accountability — who’s gonna take the water and canned fish off my hands now!

2024-06-07 09:15:31

More succinct way of saying what I said in a novel in my last post.
#note1nsr…gwrd

2024-06-07 09:14:41

I was tempted to do this initially (before the sats offer) but decided not to. I mean that fake journalist and her ilk are a scourge, and doxxing is wrong, but she’s just some desperate loser looking for attention. Losing her Twitter would mean nothing, and the remedy of “telling the teacher” or “reporting to the authorities” seemed lame.
I blocked her, ignored her, she no longer exists to me. I’ve found that with truly sociopathic people, they want attention, and the worst, cruelest most vindictive thing you can do to them is act like they don’t exist.
Which is probably why they became the way they did because they were severely neglected as children and learned to do anything they could to get attention, recognition.
Feel bad for them, but the only way out in the very unlikely event they were to avail themselves of it would be to come to terms with the pain rather than be of service to evil in increasingly abject ways, so by ignoring them you are showing them the mirror into which they need, but probably won’t, look.
Probably deeper than necessary explanation re some sociopathic attention-seeker, but ignoring them is God’s work.
#note1zsd…c05m

2024-06-07 09:08:37

Saw a prediction on Twitter that there would be outages, catastrophes on 6/6/24 because 666.
Glad it didn’t happen, but always disappointing on one level too — there’s something so appealing about the simplicity of numerology — just add up the numbers, dude!

2024-06-07 09:03:49

woke up this morning, had the sense I needed to look something up, but forgot what it was

2024-06-07 00:45:07

Just listened to a podcast that makes The Mandibles sound like a best-case scenario:
https://rumble.com/v4ztgdt-coffee-and-a-mike-matt-bracken-modern-city-is-a-glass-dome.html
Don’t listen if you’re holding on by a thread already.

2024-06-06 22:53:15

- reply

https://x.com/EricSpracklen/status/1798724194991239655

2024-06-06 22:43:18

Told my wife Biden shit his pants at the D-Day ceremony in France, and she didn’t believe me.
So I sent her a clip. Will see what she says.

2024-06-05 09:03:59

Who will pave them with good intentions?
#note16q2…v8fw

2024-06-04 23:56:49

- reply

I struggle with whether they are smart and devious or actually drinking the Kool-Aid themselves. Surely some are true believers at least.

2024-06-04 23:55:38

It’s hard to know what’s *really* going on. I walk around here, and everyone is still doing their usual things — coffee shops and restaurants are full, the security guard at the college track where I run still says, “Bom dia, Creeshtofare” to me when I arrive.
I was in Marseilles this past weekend — reminded me of NY in the 1980s, graffiti everywhere, garbage blowing around in the street. But restaurants were full, people were out and about, super friendly.
There was no sign of hyperinflation, or impending collapse at all. My daughter saw a guy with no feet, a drug deal and a prostitute while walking with my wife, but pretty much par for the course in a grittier city.
Sometimes I think everything around us is fake — the coffee shops won’t be able to stay open, the restaurants can’t survive on meager fiat, the tyrants in the EU will stop them from getting meat and dairy.
And yet, none of that is relevant day to day. Some people are hurting, of course, but that’s always been the case. When I was growing up, there were legions of homeless.
It’s really strange to see one world online and another in person, and while some cracks are surely there, nothing has shifted in an obvious way yet in Lisbon.
Bottom line, I could see myself looking back on these years and thinking, “Wow, you were really paranoid, social media really got into your head” or alternatively, “wow, you really had it good back then when society was still functioning. You had no idea of the hardship that was coming,”
The range of outcomes is so wide, I really don’t know what to make of it.
Maybe it was always this way, and surely on one level it was, as you could always be killed or crippled in an accident, even in the best of times.

2024-06-04 23:07:10

I don’t like this suggestion — leads to groupthink. You just follow people because someone else was already following them, and then someone else does the same.
If there’s someone important enough for your follows, they will repost him eventually, and you’ll pick up on their posts organically.
Would almost be better if the client gave you 100 follows at random in your language of choice with varying follower counts, all of whom were reasonably active.
I bet that would lead to an interesting network
#note1dkc…s54q

2024-06-04 22:40:22

- reply

I agree they will almost certainly fail. But I think part of the reason they will fail is the centralized “keep people safe” ethos won’t fly here, in part because people like me will make sure to emphasize how pernicious and wrongheaded it is.

2024-06-04 22:34:27

- reply

I could see it. I think they might say something like — either will put you in prison, or you can have $50M to retire.

2024-06-04 19:52:32

Conspiracy Theory:
Economy gets worse, Biden falls way behind in the polls. It’s so bad, they can’t even plausibly cheat.
He’s also senile beyond salvage, and it’s obvious even to normies.
They have to get him off the ticket, but that cackling imbecile Kamala Harris is a problem — you can’t just push aside the first black, female VP.
So first Harris steps down, off the ticket, citing health or family or whatever. She gets incentivized big time behind the scenes.
Then they pick a new VP, no idea who, but someone palatable and compliant.
Polls are still bad into October, and suddenly, citing a (possibly real) health issue Biden is forced off the ticket.
They replace him with the VP and add a new VP.
Polls are even worse, but they are no longer reliable as people are just getting to know the new ticket and things can plausibly change quickly.
Cheating is back on the table.

2024-06-04 18:06:26

- reply

LOL, we’re definitely not the same. I don’t insult people with whom I’m having a discussion for no reason!

2024-06-04 08:29:40

- reply

you tell me -- do you want do-gooders monitoring people for “wrongspeech” online?
There’s always an important reason to censor — for “public health” or “national security” or “to keep you safe.”
It’s why people are here — to avoid centralized software that polices speech for “the greater good.”

2024-06-03 23:57:54

- reply

Same — the do-gooder, “keep us safe” ethos is poison.

2024-06-03 19:12:12

Made the mistake of checking out some of the Fauci testimony on Twitter. Congress is so inept, making stupid speeches instead of calmly getting him to testify to the truth or lie demonstrably under oath. Unwatchable.
Stick to people shit-posting on nostr. Even that “GM” bullshit is a better use of your attention span.

2024-06-03 16:43:11

Babies are great actors. Every movie they’re in, they are totally in character. It’s amazing — it’s like they were born for the role.

2024-06-03 09:26:44

- reply

High-quality food (farmer’s market organic produce, grass-fed beef, fresh seafood) worth it even if you’re not rich. Investment in health.
Fancy car only if you’re so rich the cost is de minimis for you.
Don’t need more than 3K square foot house at most, arguably 2K, unless you have a large family.
A house bigger than 2K is unpleasant to be alone in. Can’t only plan for max occupancy, but also min.
I would do private jet if I could afford it. I detest airport security, lines, delays, etc. Skipping the airport would be incredible.
Don’t need a private chef — learn to cook, it’s one of the joys of life.
Housekeeper is worth it a couple times per week, especially someone you like and trust.

2024-06-03 08:36:08

There is one exception, and that is things that censor disagreement. Those should be banished, and the people promoting them shunned.
It’s the Paradox of Tolerance.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/25998-the-so-called-paradox-of-freedom-is-the-argument-that-freedom
#note17n3…pkpj

2024-06-03 08:27:18

I like Nostur — easy to toggle between posts, articles, different people’s feeds. Works well on Mac desktop. Hate using the phone, much prefer to type on a keyboard.
Like Nostrudel too. Have Amethyst on my Android, seems good, but as I said, hate accessing social media via phone.
#note1tfg…fcx6

2024-05-29 15:06:59

Stop me if I've told this story before.
Was in the car in LA this past summer with my then 11-YO, waiting near the curb of a strip mall for wife to get here a sandwich and me coffee.
I was pretty snug against it to leave room for cars to go by, and they were, no problem.
Some woman in her 60s, drives by super slowly as if there isn’t at least three feet between my car and hers, says, “Are you so self-entitled, you can’t move your car?”
And before I can think, out of my mouth comes, “Are you so retarded, you can’t drive your car?”
Daughter got a good laugh out of that, told it to her mom who did not find it amusing.

2024-05-29 11:44:25

Lot of people were broken by the covid response.
Most obvious were the normies living in an epistemic bubble of unimaginable credulity (The mRNA shot saved millions of lives! Dr. Fauci is a hero!)
Less obvious but still broken are the people who are now terrified the all-powerful state will tyrannize and dominate them. I tend toward that latter camp, but now I realize that too was a coping mechanism.
The "state” is a bunch of mostly scared idiots incentivized to do stupid and destructive things. Some are diabolical, but most are scared, and some are even doing their best to helpful even now, at least in my opinion.
The sovereign individual has a lot of power now, maybe more than at any time in history.
Our biggest enemy is not the state but our own fears.

2024-05-28 23:09:05

“If we only brainwash harder, fewer people will wake up, and we’ll be less likely to go to prison where we belong,”
#note1d0z…7ykv

2024-05-28 21:17:40

- reply

I know, but this is off the scale.

2024-05-28 21:06:12

My wife has a very strange superhuman power.
When we watch TV shows, she’s basically a retard when it comes to recognizing actors and actresses from other shows. She’s always like “that’s the guy from x, y, z.” And it’s not.
(I’m actually good at that game, but not superhuman at it, just above average and light years ahead of her.)
But when it comes to recognizing a song, I’ve never seen anything like it. Two bars, sometimes one. Sometimes just the beat of a drum for one second.
She will name the song, start singing it. Virtually any song she knows. I’m not even doing it justice. She names it before I can even manage a thought about it.
We don’t know what this means, or what to do about it. I told her she missed her calling as *something*, but I don’t know what. She can sing pretty well, dance pretty well, but never really learned studied or practiced either. Never played an instrument.
It’s a form of genius, but totally untapped.

2024-05-28 19:30:13

- reply

one other suggestion would be a way to sign up for a “newsletter,” so to speak, with one’s npub such that every new post would get sent to them as a DM.
Not sure how many people would actually sign up, but you could have free and paid subscribers that way.
It would be like an email newsletter that substack has, only without the email.

2024-05-28 19:10:29

Even a commitment to pardoning is worthless because he can still not do it. *Considering* is worth less than nothing.
I will vote for RFK, Trump or no one, but my expectations are low regardless of who wins.
#note1qaj…rvmj

2024-05-28 13:56:52

Real man has 5 nakamotos, deliberately burns keys to boost price.
#note1jdv…ku5e

2024-05-28 12:07:33

Never outsource your information diet to a social media algorithm because it will only show you what you like or hate, what you react to. That’s a huge bias.
Even if you curate your nostr follows based on what you like, you’re only following people, and people will always surprise you with something you wouldn’t have chosen for yourself that opens your mind.
Same with Spotify’s algorithm instead of a human DJ too.
We all need a break from the tyranny of the known.

2024-05-27 16:35:17

- reply

Remember, the tinkering doesn’t change anything. The nodes (the market) have to adopt or reject the changes.
Do you want Saylor to be the arbiter of what bitcoin should be, or a free market of node runners who can accept or reject the proposals?
In the world, this is how innovation works: people tinker, come up with new ideas they bring to market, and the market decides whether or not they get adopted. Bitcoin itself is one of those ideas.
I actually think if it were to ossify, it would die. Not right away, but new technology (quantum computing, e.g.) might challenge it, and you’d have sent all the developers who might upgrade it home.

2024-05-27 16:26:48

The ideal political system emerges from people living their lives, pursuing their aims without ever thinking about politics.
As soon as you try to put a label on it, define it, identify with it, it’s gone.

2024-05-27 13:07:47

Problem for Saylor making sophistic arguments — node-approved development on the protocol = violating his property rights! — is all the people who follow and respect him do so because of his persuasive first-principles-based arguments the last few years.
So if he pivots to being a bullshitter, it’s not like some influencer with a bunch of low-IQ fans who are attached to a brand. He’s dealing with sharp, technically savvy, clear-thinking bitcoiners who will not easily be fooled.
He’s free to make his case, of course, but I’m really rooting for him to do a better job, so I don’t lose respect for what was probably my favorite person in the space.

2024-05-27 13:06:37

Problem for Saylor making sophistic arguments — node-approved development ton the protocol = violating his property rights! — is all the people who follow and respect him do so because of his persuasive first-principles-based arguments the last few years.
So if he pivots to being a bullshitter, it’s not like some influencer with a bunch of low-IQ fans who are attached to a brand. He’s dealing with sharp, technically savvy, clear-thinking bit coiners who will not easily be fooled.
He’s free to make his case, of course, but I’m really rooting for him to do a better job, so I don’t lose respect for what was probably my favorite person in the space.

2024-05-27 09:34:58

Listened to a good deal of @npub15dq…lm5m’s latest podcast with Peter McCormack. He wants to ossify the protocol for the most part because he thinks it’s already successful, and that the risk from tinkering outweighs the upside.
That’s fair, but there’s one point (maybe I missed it) that he seems to elide over, and that’s that the devs can’t do anything on their own if the nodes don’t go along with it, correct?
So he seems to position the devs as centralized tinkerers, messing with the free market, but the devs are more like people making new inventions, products, services, possibilities, and the market is the nodes who can adopt or reject them.
So Saylor, it seems, is arguing for cutting off the inventors because of the problems they might create, but that battle should be fought at the node level IMO, persuade people these inventions are harmful or pointless, and see what happens. Or fund other inventions that are better.
But cutting off the innovation at the root because of the possibility that people might adopt bad ones seems out of step with the spirit of the protocol.
I love Saylor, guy has huge balls, but he seemed to be bullshitting, reaching a bit with some of the analogies he was making.
Again, it’s possible I’m misunderstanding either what he was saying or how the protocol works, but that was my impression.

2024-05-26 01:15:43

- reply

You don’t think it would wear down if you were putting oyster shells and beef bones in it every day?

2024-05-26 01:14:55

- reply

I don’t what it would cost to make something like that.

2024-05-25 20:37:56

Had an idea for an invention:
Household appliance that crushes shellfish shells, meat bones, etc. into a powder that you could use either as a supplement, to put in pet food or just as part of compost for a garden.
Also, the reason the trash sometimes stinks and is disgusting is because meat and seafood scraps are mixed with other disposable items. It would largely solve that problem too. And people would cook more, especially fish if they didn’t have to deal with disposing of the bones/shells.
(Now, hopefully no one will use this to dispose of his spouse.)
I would buy one of these appliances, biggest challenge would be to make the noise tolerable.
Other invention I’m trying to get my friend who make furniture to build: elegant wooden Faraday cage box for cellphone charging with a built-in contact charger on its floor. You drop your phone in the box when you get in the door, pick it up, fully charged on the way out.

2024-05-25 15:35:20

It's funny I used to think -- even as recently as 10 years ago -- it was perfectly acceptable to be borderline blacked-out drunk at work or social functions.
Maybe in a society of people optimizing for embarrassment avoidance, heavy boozing is a convenient crutch.

2024-05-24 16:28:10

Wife parked the car today about 14 inches from the curb. As we were leaving, she asked, “Should I move it closer?” And before I could answer, she said, “It’s fine, I’ll leave it.”
But I could tell it bothered her. She fancies herself a champion parallel parker, certainly thinks she’s better than I am, and it had to hurt for me to witness such a poor performance.
So I said, “Yeah, it’s fine. But you realize it brings up your life’s average-distance-from-the-curb number above mine.”
She didn’t agree, but I assured her 14 inches would move the needle a lot, and no matter what would always negatively impact her life’s average.
Have a feeling the next few times I take the car, I’ll find it snug af against the curb.

2024-05-23 13:57:29

- reply

So basically flat, when adjusted for inflation?

2024-05-23 12:05:56

- reply

good point. Might be.