wakoinc
Blake

Power corrupts. Unless it’s powering #Bitcoin.
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/argentina-government-imf-had-wanted-100-peso-devaluation-2023-08-17/

2023-08-09 17:52:04

https://twitter.com/romoolo/status/1689119185110990848

2023-07-26 16:24:59

WorldCoin: Where finding dead bodies or killing people unlocks all their wealth for instant transfers for bounty hunters. Modern treasure hunting!! What a time to be alive.

2023-07-22 18:24:04

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My main concern overall is really the white washing of what security you are actually getting, and what you are not as a user. When people can’t understand easily, they may think they have privacy and live in a sane world… when…
End to end used to mean best possible outcome (assuming the keys used were a sound curve) - and sadly today it’s entirely possible for ‘end to end’ to be something else entirely.
The extent of the scam used to (and often still is,) be SSL Certificate providers attaching ‘$500,000 encryption insurance’ as part of their sold certificates. A bogus un-claimable feature used for marketing and to trick untechnical users into thinking they were highly secure and safe to use their credit card online (this is largely pre the HTTPS push).
Cloudflare are certainly innovators - but in a very centralising way. Their business moat is tied to protecting and growing their centralised empire. Just like any other company, they can be coerced as a business to do a governments bidding.
I’d almost go as far as marking websites or services that use Cloudflare as not a green lock or add a yellow spy glass - but really, browsers are too broken now, best to instead focus on their replacement.

2023-07-22 09:35:44

Discussions online typically live elsewhere to their primary source today.
A few reasons why include who controls the primary source, how long it may be around, where/who hosts the primary content, and in what context is the discussion happening - perhaps different aspects/threads are of interest to different groups.
With Nostr the primary content isn’t tied to a primary host or controller/moderator. It’s a published referential event.
Discussions can occur directly in the same ecosystem. No need for bespoke external platforms comment sections like news articles, blogs, discord, forums, hacker news, etc. to host commentary themselves; the content and discussion can co-exist. That’s a truely unique and ultimately the winning model.
What will still need development is how to ingest or navigate or collate or filter or ingest the discussions - as it’s now lumped into a single pool of inter-referencing discussion.
One approach is to skin the discussion into views and effectively rebuild those external platform discussions directly on top of Nostr - tweaking views to suit. Other approaches will develop over time.

2023-07-21 21:05:51

Reminder: Cloudflare is a man in the middle, and decrypts all traffic and re-encrypts it using it’s own certificate.
Sometimes this is ok, for example Nostr events are effectively public, and relays can prevent DDOS. However it’s important to understand that the green certificate saying valid cert and encrypted in browsers does not mean private or 100% secure or true end-to-end without ease dropping.
Their ‘malware detection’ capability is more likely there for dual purpose surveillance. If you mature and roll out systems that mass spy on your population, flipping the switch from passive to active is easy.
If I was the government, I’d pay for a few (secret) contracts.

2023-07-21 19:41:47

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My issue is they make the devices and OS. And I’m not sure we should (read: please don’t) trust apps directly, to be honest, as they are a target vector.
External signing devices are great. What’s missing is a layer perhaps where the external signing device says, “hey, your last message to Dave was to pubkey X, it’s now Y” or similar - however I favour dumb signing devices.
A trusted OS would be ideal to perhaps have this security layer to keep/compare state and make it obvious/transparent - it’s just painful that we can’t trust the OS.

2023-07-21 14:55:18

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And just to clarify.. you’d need the pinned certificate key/fingerprint - it’s expiry is not enough to detect a change.

2023-07-21 14:53:42

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Not talking strictly HTTPS. Even so, when have you been directly notified by an app when they updated their pinned certificate? Or even having visibility to a currently pinned certificate and it’s expiry?
It’s not even the key exchange exchange security - that’s largely solved. It’s the swap out and zero-visibility attacks.
I’m largely targeting WhatsApp, Apple iMessages and FaceTime, and whatever large corp constant use a few buzz words that are literally meaningless.
I hope we can do better on Nostr, once key rotation is more mature. We need greater transparency around security related changes. I’m unsure how to include them outside of the app itself - which shouldn’t be trusted.

2023-07-21 14:38:26

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Nice*

2023-07-21 14:37:32

“End to End Encryption” is just marketing without having significant and deliberate tampering detection mechanism.
Examples include secretly swapping out a certificate/key for an identity to middlemen, private key leakage, changes in code to specific safety checks or tampering protection mechanisms, or changes in forward secrecy pre-generated keys, etc.
It would be nice if we had a way to better detect these types of changes and make it very obvious to the identity. As they happen and as part of updates. It would be nose to have a trusted host OS that could help validate.

2023-07-21 13:46:31

People seem to assume a single AGI. I’d expect multiple. And for them each to be their greatest enemy.. not humans.
That’s way off. What isn’t is ML used to manipulate humans - with greater control and less effort than current manipulators (media, propaganda, studies, social, etc).
To change culture you need to bring open people into a new established culture — or..
You need a journey of 10,000 smaller ‘truths’ that you lead people on a journey of acceptance to assimilate them. Some adopt sooner than others.
Governments and media - and more recently ’social groups/media’ - have learned this. It’s why history can be rewritten, maps changed, schools curriculum updated, people can believe they will die from something that is statically very rare, and this time will be different or better.. that ‘they’ (in power) learned a lesson or something; or worse, know what they are doing.
The risk of technology is always abuse. And the role of government is to remain in power at all costs.
Control culture and you control the near-term future.

2023-07-20 13:07:52

Australia has 65,000 police officers. Many are murderers.
Per 100,000 population, it wouldn’t be hard to argue (I have no hard data to share), that there are more murders per 100,000 in the active police force than the general population. What a successful institution - and one wonders why people fear and mistrust the police?
https://www.itv.com/news/2023-07-20/officer-who-tasered-95-year-old-allegedly-said-bugger-it-before-firing

2023-07-19 18:37:20

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The secondary reason is timing. And it aligns how funny things happen when the value of $1/1£/1€ in a currency drops below a certain threshold.
A $1 cheeseburger becomes $2. Then $3.50, followed by $5.50.
Instead of the population doing math in fractions of a whole unit - a dollar/euro/etc, suddenly they are doing math without decimals to interpret somethings cost/cheapness.
It’s a huge shock to the brain when this happens as the difference between $0.25 and $.50, and then $1 and $2 are the same %, yet perceived as different.
The USD, Euro, Pound, AUD, NZD, etc are all recently breakaway from decimals (cents) mattering. Cents have become rounding units and insignificant.

2023-07-19 18:29:41

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At the time I naively expected this global government spending to balance out - if all countries roughly spend the same GDP to pay for these Covid-made decisions.
What I didn’t appreciate then, that I do now, is that while some countries fair better post Covid than others relatively, but in a negligible way (ultimately there were no clear winners,) is just how much they would kick off true runaway inflation.
I find it hard to see how this isn’t a state that persists for the next years, perhaps beyond, and ultimately the final straw for ‘controlling’ fiat.

2023-07-19 18:19:42

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While some recent government spending was costs tied to Covid (the virus itself), the majority was tied to bad policy, lockdowns, propping up their broken economy (due to lockdowns), paying for vaccines, and funding military conflicts.
This is all taken out of the countries GDP - possible financial growth. It’s not paid for and it’s debt that that will last decades and inflation that hides who is paying for everything. Taxes aren’t funding this. They were already spent and allocated in budgets.
A decrease in your wealth is funding these bad decisions, mismanagement, and the consequences they had. The same story is happening (largely) globally.

2023-07-19 18:13:02

It’s important to understand that a small decrease in inflation _growth_ doesn’t mean a reduction in current or future prices compared to the previous value of money. It just means it’s not getting as bad as fast (alleged deceleration) - by that metric which is most certainly gamed and inaccurate.
Prices will never return to previous values. That’s how inflation works and run away inflation takes off.
https://twitter.com/ITVNewsPolitics/status/1681686884714414081?s=20

2023-07-19 14:56:57

The reason why large corporate fines don’t work, is because the legal cost to fight them is a fraction of a potential fine halving the amount or the delayed payment value for decades that decreases its real cost.
Simply put, larger and larger fines do not work to prevent or disincentivise behaviours that in the current system are punished by court settled damages and fines. The cost to fight damages legally is far far smaller than the likely savings by fighting. (E.g a $5B fine can become $2.5B with a 20 year delay on payment, with legal costs far below that).
Why does this matter, it’s means there is a practical cap on how large fines can effectively become and we’ve hit it. It means that legal costs are much much smaller than the cost to not fight large fines - effectively making the original fines worth far far less than intended - and hence the actual punishment far far less significant.
We will need another mechanism to replace or augment fines if we actually intend to have a mechanism to punish bad actors (corporations). Fines alone are broken. Limiting ability to sell product, criminal liability, forced company shutdowns/split-ups/receiverships, etc are all possible extensions. I don’t have an opinion on best approaches as yet.

2023-07-17 18:37:15

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Thanks. I’ll have a listen.
I’d wager our ‘aging population’ isn’t a root cause problem either, and instead a reflection of our inability to build efficient systems that scale. Intuitively, having more, greater experienced people, should result in accelerated innovation and efficiency - we are going the reverse.
We’ve failed to leverage efficiency at scale (outside of capitalism), while dawdling at managing population growth and increases consumption. Recycling is one such great fail - and it continues to be a joke - we don’t even design for it or have strategies.

2023-07-15 11:14:04

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Thanks for recommending. Solid discussion around the topic.

2023-07-14 20:09:40

Stock markets, budgets, funding, salaries, rental, house prices, fuel, travel, education, (even Bitcoin,) etc will all continue to be ‘all time highs’ - which isn’t a measure of growth or success; it’s a measure of less scarcity and greater dilution.
It’s simply a sneaky wealth transfer, away from individuals.

2023-07-14 19:18:02

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Matador: A Bitcoin-Powered (Lightning API) Passthrough Server

2023-07-14 19:17:19

https://github.com/Kodylow/matador

2023-07-13 20:11:01

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Perhaps.
What still surprises me is how passive the world was in general about quite literally accepting being coerced or forced to accept an untested rushed and questionable effectiveness injection. Even over a 24 month time frame, sanity went out the window and common sense aborted. And how little accountability we know we will ever see.
Not one person I know trusts their government or representatives. Yet… throw in abuse of a few emergency laws, and some financial gain with ‘get rich quick’ Pharma, and a media campaign pushing mass fear - and we’ll you get a flock of sheep, herded by 1:100,000th the number of sheep dogs. Insane efficiency in control to effort ratio. Insane.
The push for control (as opposed to liberty and freedom) is incredibly biased toward governments today. Technology made this worse. ‘Comfortable enough’ breeds apathy and prisoners who self-police - as opposed to ‘do what’s right for you’ (and not malicious).
Expecting an active push back at enough scale is a very far way off from happening again. Look at the Hong Kong riots… state will win long term. Teacher and union protests may squeeze out an extra 1% salary.. when the officials have budgeted for 3-4%. Any country with insane inflation or recent bankruptcy - no real people’s outcome.
People are just too ‘busy’ to expend energy outside of their comfortable enough existence. Global equality growth (poverty decline) is making this worse. Trends are not in favour of people’s led revolutions this century.

2023-07-13 11:14:20

What has truly stagnated is our ability to propose and collaborate on new and better systems - new political, governmental, financial, social, etc. the broken ones hold fast to protect themselves like a fortifying parasite, while the competition dies out or trails it’s ability to ‘catch up’ - it’s too slow.
Definitely progress on the fringes and in small pockets - yet it’s worth pondering for a while why the above happened and what’s next?
I link it to broken systems where incentives are wrong and bad entities have armour and too big to fail properties, the fact the system’s own protection mechanism largely sits on top of being too large + complex + intertwined for any alternative approach’s adoption strategy to be cost or time effective.
Coupled with a significant over bloated legal system that makes much of what could be innovated gray or illegal - an example being private communities and roadblocks to their experimentation and existence.
My pain point is the effort and time to exhaust these horribly conceived systems is now a frame of centuries - when it could (read: should) be decades. During the past few hundred years - it was only decades… and we’ve since built a nightmare that refuses to evolve.

2023-07-12 21:13:42

Have global bio-labs tightened access and security / contamination procedures - and ideally reporting of accidents or early reports of contamination leaks?
A sane modern journalistic system would be focusing on monitoring this non-stop until results - regardless of if Covid was a lab leak… we obviously need controls due to the very obvious risks of playing with fire.

2023-07-11 18:28:52

“Our main new result is to show how to securely combine the techniques used in FROST and SPRINT, allowing one to build a threshold Schnorr signing protocol that (i) is secure and robust without synchrony assumptions (like SPRINT), (ii) provides security even with an unlimited number of presignatures, and (assuming unused presignatures are available) signing requests can be processed concurrently with minimal latency (like FROST), (iii) achieves high throughput (like SPRINT), and (iv) achieves optimal resilience.”
https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/1019

2023-07-11 18:23:35

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Introducing the new Phoenix, a 3rd generation self-custodial Lightning wallet.
Splicing changes the game: single dynamic channel, no more 1% fee on inbound liquidity, better predictability and control, trustless swaps.

2023-07-11 18:17:01

https://acinq.co/blog/phoenix-splicing-update

2023-07-11 18:14:14

Government currencies are subprime.

2023-07-08 23:33:10

Fiat: The balloon 🎈 economy circa 1900/2000.

2023-07-08 23:30:51

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Zap who?

2023-07-08 10:33:49

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And pooled investments across pooled fiat exists today — the key difference is that they are funds and investment holdings — not a currency held by people on mass that preserves and grows wealth.
They important part is that the people’s individual wealth is held in a way it doesn’t lose value and it tired to real global growth - not inflated local currencies.

2023-07-08 10:29:11

They system was setup to (have high control over) extract wealth from its people, yet it’s sold as a way to stabilise an economy - yet it always seems to be out of control? And accelerating in frequency and volatility?
#Bitcoin will become more stable and reliable than global fiat averages - and that will be the final tipping point. And by stable I mean downward volatility and loss of value.
The reason why index funds work so well (lower risk to reward, especially in a relative sense to the market) is because you back the largest N with highest growth - now imagine that exists across global fiat currencies. The best growth regions will buy/invest more, while the slower/stagnating will sell - however gainers are larger than decliners in relative value.
https://www.itv.com/news/2023-07-07/hunt-downplays-tax-cuts-odds-conceding-calming-inflation-is-tougher-than-feared

2023-07-07 22:40:50

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KL8CIZej19o

2023-07-07 20:19:18

When a company tells you how and what to share on their centralised platform… don’t waste your time. #note1r7j…5dz0

2023-07-07 12:20:16

Same monkeys, different zoo. #note1zeq…ahjv

2023-07-05 22:47:02

The internet is already the metaverse.
The more we rely on it, the more reality and the metaverse become the same thing.
Some kind of visual projection (headset) is only a layer on top - it’s a new UI/UX for the the exact same metaverse.

2023-07-05 22:43:24

Use ML to create a scientific paper with supporting reference papers (new or existing) and data, with pretty images and graphs, that’s intended to support a pre-defined argument or position - without having ever performed any science or double blind tests.
The paper can be written in a very persuasive fashion to hide or smooth over any obvious counters or expected criticisms.

2023-07-05 22:37:50

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A counter point could be that we can just use machines / ML for good or to identify these types of attacks.
However there is an economic issue - what’s the monetary incentive to fund the automated identification, and secondly any automated identification will be biased and be statistical probability - no real difference to social feed algorithms.
I’m unsure if even you control your own ML modelling it will be suitable.. perhaps it could work for some time as portable compute and local personal ML models shrink.

2023-07-05 20:45:59

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If I look at my LinkedIn today, I’d wager 20% bots. Twitter none as I stopped using it - likely similar.
I think a single verification weak link is best case, and dozens is more reality. My Nostr network reach is 20,000 (2nd degree) and my 2nd degree following is 7,000. Each of those have their own 10,000s of possible weak links.
For small networks like Scuba Divers Egypt, sure, it can work. For larger social networks it would seem unlikely to work - especially when it can happen over months or even years - computers have infinite patients.
It the root issue is still that I can be impacted so significantly by mis-steps from my trusted network. And the ability to climb a network trust is actually very trivial if it has incentives.
Think of a Google maps business that gives a small gift and asks for 5 stars for a special discount or photos of your activity. It can all be gamed - and trust ranks breached by manipulation. NPS is also easily manipulated by businesses when they have KPIs and bonuses tied to them.

2023-07-05 20:45:58

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2023-07-05 20:45:57

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2023-07-05 20:36:11

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I’m not suggesting KYC or human verification.
I’m suggesting that we need to add a cost for machines to increase the expense of computer generated content - however humans would also have to incur that same cost - however at scale, humans post less and have an order of magnitude less expensive.
Or another solution. I don’t have a clear picture of exactly what will work best.

2023-07-05 20:32:50

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The expense will down trend for cost and power of machines and thus content. Human brains however are effectively stable and have physical limits that aren’t increasing.
I can imagine even with a 10% hit rate, perhaps using public records like birth certificates or similar, there will still be economical benefit for the bots/targeted ML. Whatever a human can do in the digital world, a simulation can do better, faster, and cheaper.
I’ve read and appreciate brugeman’s approach and research. Spam typically always has a call to action - however when you can instead hyper-target, again it’s death by 1,000 cuts.. most or all don’t have a link or product they are trying to sell you. It will be selling instead a way of thinking, a reality that is one they benefit from (they being whoever breaks even or makes money).
I have a Nostr relay too and my spam ML engine hasn’t been updated in training for 5 months now. It has 99.999% accuracy or abouts. Spam is different from targeted content.
Consider a Wikipedia page with two versions and one promotes euthanasia in the death section for suicides and the other condemns and highlights doctors are mass murders. Imagine Wikipedia shows you the version it wants you to side with. It’s very different problem from spam detection.

2023-07-05 20:18:52

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Well said. I think we’re always being influenced or manipulated in a way. The new adjustment is by just how much and just how hard it will be to identify using human cognition (or even research).
Brains are limited in power and time - biology is slow. We’re crossing that biological limit this decade.

2023-07-05 20:15:35

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Some good thoughts.
Perhaps a similar approach is staked Bitcoin (why similar? It adds a cost) that doesn’t move could be used. However there would then be a market selling UTXOs of hodlers. Even renting this would be 10-100x cheaper than buying that Bitcoin.
The issue with web of trust is that your weakest link is always the easiest route. Computers don’t care if it takes months to progress. And the next issue is even closed/small highly verified networks don’t cater for the wider audience social media we largely use today. What if it was your grandma who trusted the bad actor? Bye grandma?
The next issue is just like world coin using eye balls to ‘verify humans’, people will sell their human verification - or identities of the dead get to live again.

2023-07-05 19:40:12

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Another critical attack is the same as above, however once they have a significant portion of your content you see daily - they bait and switch.
This attack is malicious too, as now all those environmental people you follow and listen to, the profiles have flipped and are now either harassing you directly - or, pitching you content to swing your opinion, like nuclear is bad and coal can be clean.
It doesn’t have to be a hard cut over either. It can be over time and more sneaky.
Anyway.. online and social is about to become 1,000,000+ to 1 machines to humans - and since text content doesn’t help machines, the content the machines spit out will solely be to control you with alternative motives - run by other humans.

2023-07-05 19:34:05

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The information you now ingest can be targeted and malicious - yet hidden and subliminal. You have let your guard down and you are now suckling the teet of deception and malicious. A botnet 2.0 targeting individuals instead of network congestion.
You’ve been infiltrated. Your web of trust network has been corrupted. You are both a victim and pawn.
I’ve not only just described online advertising today, Reddit and Twitter, but the hyper-targeted content that’s coming. We currently have no clear defence - technical, social, biological or legal.
Governments seem to think laws against ‘misinformation’ prevent this. They do not. They will fail - if not only for the fact definitions of misinformation vary by content and individual, and government moderation or censorship is doomed to be rejected.
How do I know this is possible - because with patients (and a lack of morals), I could build this. If I can, someone else can.

2023-07-05 19:32:59

What if all your posts were ingested by a ML engine and it was asked to create 1,000 profiles, each with a history of posts, targeting topics you care about or your existing contacts do. They can post daily and rehash other content.
Then it was asked to connect with as many of your contacts as possible, using topics they are passionate about. Perhaps work, environment, politics, hobbies or activities. Perhaps recent news topics and events you care about - liked, reposted, reported, shared, wrote.
Now your network has been infiltrated with fake profiles that all appear to be like minded individuals, each leading their own lives and sharing information you that informs you. They could make up 10-30% of your daily content.

2023-07-05 17:46:53

Perhaps GPT-4 is largely marketing and hype. It’s nice and all - yet over sold. More over-sold is the ‘speed’ or rate of innovation.
Again, AI’s (I still call it ML) greatest threat to people in the near term is hyper-targeting and malicious actors who can now mass produce human-enough content cheaply - that for all intensive purposes passes enough of a turing test to appear human generated.
Our brains effort required to critically dissect and identify as ML/Bot created has crossed a significant barrier - for anything we read now, it takes say two times as long to evaluate it’s origin/intent/source. Previously it was a fraction - easy to identify compared to the content itself.
Death by 1,000 cuts is the new reality. Not entirely new, as mass media already does this; however they largely failed at digital (poor revenue). Now it’s possible to make money other ways through similar manipulation digitally - again, with hyper-targeting.
The only way I know of adding a cost to the targeted content is (burnt) proof of work. Seems wasteful - yet I don’t know another way to combat the catastrophic drop in price to generate ML. Humans would pay this cost too - yet humans don’t mass produce, so it ideally should mostly negatively impact mass generated content.
https://archive.fo/FlBgV

2023-07-03 21:48:46

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** should have added runaway inflation to their purpose. Ha. Good luck with that one.

2023-07-03 21:46:46

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And if you want just a single example, look at how useless central banks are at predicting and protecting (stabilising) against recessions/depressions - their sole stated goal.
Most of these systems of democracy exist to control what they obviously do not and can not. Why?
Simply put in Sapiens, by Yuval Noah:
There are two main classifications of chaos.
First Order Chaos doesn’t respond to prediction. The example he gave is the weather. If you predict the weather to some level of accuracy that prediction will hold because the weather doesn’t adjust based on the prediction itself.
Second Order Chaos is infinitely less predictable because it does respond to prediction. Examples include things like stocks and politics.

2023-07-03 21:35:44

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Why so negative about democracy?
It’s time to be honest that it isn’t the end game state, and simply it doesn’t really function as it’s sold. It’s a system, and over time all system have their weakness exploited. Democracy fails along side capitalism and at country or ‘union’ scale. Democracy won by forceful colonisation - and it is less directly controlling for its members than alternatives.
I have a hunch the right direction is decentralising large (and small) parts again. It’s a coordination and communication problem - not to dissimilar to decentralised computer science problems, game theory and peer coordination.
I don’t have the solution - however, more decentralised, fewer (simpler) laws, more accountability, more transparency, better leaders, less corruption, public service is actually public service - not public beatdown or public theft. A lot would be different. It needs to self-heal or better prevent democracies failures at scale.

2023-07-03 21:27:26

The illusion of democratic government is the illusion that they can control or impact what they can’t. For the most part, they are just along for a cyclical ride they have little real impact on. Voting is irrelevant in a self-correcting system.
They “tackle” symptoms and are unable to identify or understand root causes (or they know and it’s too costly, or longer term investment for their needs - solely to retain power), while blaming the last government, global events… basically anything.
Laws, regulations, and spending money (financing) broken initiatives isn’t effective. The cost to ROI isn’t understood (aka. over investment), the money is spent inefficiently (corruption and incompetence), and in the wrong places (symptoms, not root causes), and compounding side effects are never understood and are often counter productive.

2023-07-03 18:52:07

Nostr clients should likely support a https/wss only mode - largely for media requests, but app wide.
Some countries spying and other MIM attacks can be avoided.

2023-07-03 16:14:33

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With lemons?

2023-07-01 19:05:15

🤣 #note1lm7…k8jh

2023-06-30 12:27:45

When “enhanced ad privacy” actually means “making more money off you, by default opting you into ad targeting metrics (including sharing your browsing history with sites) built directly into the browser”. 😳
https://i.ibb.co/nnWxC37/image.png

2023-06-28 18:17:30

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But sure. It’s a wider cultural policing issue - however there are good cops and many interactions are reasonable enough day to day.
If I hire a murder, train them, give them a weapon, and tell them they are powerful - who is at fault? If I hire someone who commits crimes for my business, am I responsible?
Politicians, police unions, officers and any police leadership roles should all be accountable. No questions. They are arming poorly trained violent individuals.
The worst part is the cover up and the officers lying for each other - and the legal assumption that police under oath are honest. They are regularly not. Again, it’s skewed against the public.

2023-06-28 18:10:28

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These stories were in Paris and Sydney. No US at all. Plenty of recent Australian police brutality against youth and/or indigenous peoples in Australia too. Head stomping and despicable acts that are attempted to cover up - public video footage often the only reason police can’t hide and lie.
Definitely there are countries that have far fewer conscious-less and completely untrained officers. Many many countries even in the EU have significant police corruption.
Democracy has failed significantly to build strong police forces that are built for the community and respect the community. They are trained and exist today to use excessive force - that any mid-IQ individual would never deem as appropriate - yet they hype up their recruits, give them an ‘us vs them’, ‘we’re always right, their always trying to disobey’, ‘used against you, but not for you’ mentality. It’s sickening.
Domestic violence, meth and drug violence, horrific car accidents, murder and violent crime - sure are tough situations. Nursing home patients or your every day citizen are not trying to kill police or break laws or create a hard time.. they just want to get on with their day. Police are trained and indoctrinated in western democracies that citizens are all offensive and high threat. Not part of their community or just regular people.
Everyone breaks laws.. there are so many laws you can’t not break multiple a week. Most laws don’t matter or aren’t known - why, because there are too many and the majority of people aren’t trying to cause problems. The laws were created to handle rare edge cases - not the 99.99% reality. If you put an officer offside, they will always have countless offences to write up against you — to show you who is boss and they are powerful.. aka. pissing contest.

2023-06-28 12:07:39

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** unsure how ‘best’ autocorrected there. Ignore.

2023-06-28 11:52:47

Globally police have become trigger happy enforcers - who overreact and shoot bullets and “less than lethal” (read: deadly, but slightly less so) in circumstances without real elevated risk - like nursing home patients and in countries with tight public firearm control… they are not dying in bank robbery shoot outs (statistically).
The police institutions (and their training) need to be torn down and completely overhauled. Badge or no badge, murder is murder. Being a police officer is 10-100x (times) safer than many other professions. Police just get a pretty flag folded funeral - when plenty of other service roles deserve greater or equal recognition.
https://www.itv.com/news/2023-06-28/paris-angry-clashes-after-delivery-driver-17-killed-in-police-standoff
https://www.itv.com/news/meridian/2023-06-27/cps-to-decide-if-police-who-tasered-93-year-old-will-face-charges
https://www.sydneycriminallawyers.com.au/blog/how-dangerous-is-it-to-be-a-police-officer/

2023-06-28 10:46:00

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You can still add other prefixes for other pubkeys.
The domain should be _@ for the root domain use case, however it’s possible some clients accept an omitted _. I’d still include it as it’s the latest spec (at least that I’ve read).

2023-06-27 20:55:30

Things are often named what they want to be, yet fall short in reality. Similar to most companies values - if you are something by culture you often don’t need to remind people be act a certain way. #note1kh3…lc30

2023-06-26 10:41:12

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🤨

2023-06-25 16:37:44

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Me? I’ve been largely taking a break from tech and dev the past bit. I really don’t do social networks.. killed Facebook and Twitter a decade ago and now only have a zero follower private Twitter to get some content that’s yet to cross borders.
Some social keeps you connected. The rest rots the brain.

2023-06-25 16:16:55

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Risk is an exposure and management process. Supply chain attacks or zero days are possible and not of zero risk.
Active/dynamic systems (multiple lightning implementations and lightning channels) are generally at much greater risk than passive (btc cold wallet address). The overall risk may still be low - while the relative risk is quite different.
Side attacks are also very possible - like requesting a refund via a path hint with a high fee node the attacker controls. Unless you mitigate against something like this, naive implementations are vulnerable.
Same goes for Umbrel. LND may be safe, while an app update or new app could escape docker and do bad things.
It’s a matter of when, not if. Yet it’s all a risk management process at the core.

2023-06-25 14:23:25

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getPublicKey is part of the extension. spec.

2023-06-25 13:34:25

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Hot wallets can certainly advise people when a balance crosses above a threshold, how someone can provide better security of their funds.
The initial risk is low, without a large starting transfer.
Help guide people into suitable and appropriate standards based on their position and risk.

2023-06-24 18:42:54

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Perhaps other options exist.
Perhaps Russian citizens seize the opportunity to end Putin’s reign and support WMG - and then decide they want leadership other than WMG.
Russia has spent around 10-15X the expected cost/losses fighting Ukraine. WMG isn’t exactly overthrowing Putin and inheriting a functional military or government.
Democracy is largely a joke, however Fascism and Communism largely don’t respawn after a power swapping struggle.. this may be just a more sudden transformation.
Inheriting Russia as a new unelected power will mean a lot of negotiations and conceding with other powers to bounce back - or they have no way out of just becoming a North Korea that’s slowly crumbling. Russia needs investment, not a new dictator.

2023-06-24 16:07:07

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People look but don’t see. Hear but don’t listen. Trust without verifying 🙂
A subconscious automated mode that skips the thinking and examining conscious part of existence. To them, it’s easier to ignore what is and focus their consciousness on other more dopamine filled thoughts and activities.

2023-06-24 16:00:38

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Classic fog of war. Accurate near real-time intel is very hard.. even harder to commit to major action focused decisions.
And this is the age where everyone has phones and cameras.

2023-06-24 15:51:54

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Seems like fair commentary.
Things are often not what they appear - and minds often reject anything alternative to what’s been broadcast for so long as fact or truth.

2023-06-24 15:37:44

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Concentrated power is never a stable state. It’s always under attack, with paranoia a constant pressure for the top - or those who want the top.
It doesn’t help Putin effectively ran out of money (or is being seen to lead by greed) and/or basically wanted to underpay and send WMG in as cannon fodder. ‘If I’m [WMG] doing all the work, what’s in it for me’ logic is a strong opposing force.
I’d wager it’s actually been an fractionally published early strategy of the West and Ukraine’s military playbook - which is why greater and more immediate forced hasn’t been used or supplied to Ukraine.

2023-06-24 15:24:21

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Did you mean ‘governments’? 📎

2023-06-20 15:46:41

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sensitivecontentanalysis

2023-06-17 22:58:02

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About a week after we rescue @npub180c…h6w6 from his Brazilian jungle hideout.

2023-06-16 00:11:52

Yep. Steve is full of shit. https://nostr.build/i/b827f49663d05b80d9a6d14a731286424c3cf09d5c1c819dfbc0e212c351c571.jpg #note1jw4…m6h2

2023-06-15 21:27:34

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Proof of work QR code.

2023-06-15 21:10:24

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Personally I rely on Tim Cook and Elon exclusively.

2023-06-15 20:22:10

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For the above reasons proof of work and base cost in communicating is likely the best approach to offset this near limitless abuse capability of targeting individuals on mass.
I’d imagine Bitcoin is also part of the solution here too. We need to increase the cost of mass manipulation to above a reasonable threshold that’s possible today by state actors (typically being the largest players).

2023-06-15 20:18:55

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The future influences are impersonating targeted AI bots. Far superior to humans faking it and selling a fake life. AI will whisper into your ear with personalised messages.
That’s the real danger of AI. Not some bullshit take over all machines the FANGG founders float as reality. Even if it ends there, that’s many decades after the above has significant impact first. Arguably greater impact unless curl-tailed, due to its damage to human culture and social behaviour.
Imagine a world war that syphons 1-3% of an enemy GDP using these targeted AI bots, or maybe 5-10% if it targets business decision makers too. No rockets launched. No contagion let loose.
Targeting individuals on mass is the real danger. And it’s about to become cheap and extremely effective.

2023-06-15 20:07:30

“AI, Person X has the following interests, connections, and has visited the following websites recently. Write a highly targeted ad, masked as a blog post, that you intend for them to click and optimally buy from, maximising commission. The only goal is making money.”
Now do this 100s of times per day until we extract all their wealth.
Google and Bezos Playbook 2.0

2023-06-15 17:31:55

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“Yet they also learned from the 1918–1919 pandemic that it was exceedingly difficult to get an urban population to stay at home. People needed to work so they could eat; parents wanted their children to go to school; businesses dependent on customers, whether department stores or movie theater operators, did not want to close down. Hence, the most practical strategy was not unlike that arrived at for TB control: move quickly to isolate the acutely ill in hospital wards or at home, under the care of professional nurses or Red Cross-trained volunteers well schooled in infection control; and direct an intensive public education effort about personal hygiene to everyone else.”

2023-06-15 17:26:57

Interesting read about the 1918–1919 Influenza Pandemic.
“Mask wearing gained considerable popularity as an emblem of public spiritedness and discipline. Newspapers carried instructions on how to make and launder them”
“Still, gauze masks had their detractors within the public health community. One notable critic was the Detroit health commissioner, Dr. J.W. Inches, who declared “.. . these masks are worthless.” They were so porous that not only “.. . a mosquito could jump through them,” he remarked, but, “I have sprinkled granulated sugar through them,” telling proof that a microbe could get through the mask's defenses. Inches thought masks might have some utility for doctors and nurses treating flu victims, but for the ordinary citizen, the use of an ordinary paper napkin that could be destroyed after each use was far more advisable. (Dr. Inches was ahead of his time, anticipating the rise of disposable paper handkerchiefs in the 1920s.)”
Amazing how the world wide government effort to promote and educate how to handle a used mask (even how to take off a soiled mask safely) or how to launder a reusable mask was literally zero. Common sense would infer it’s the most risky part - touching likely contaminated materials.
We had clear evidence from July 2020 how air-conditioning location and positioning impacted spread (link below). Yet somehow we were told it was ‘droplet only’ and cloth masks worked? Only later was it admitted to be aerosol - meanwhile hospitals had been treating Covid as aerosol from day one…
“Virus transmission in this outbreak cannot be explained by droplet transmission alone. Larger respiratory droplets (>5 μm) remain in the air for only a short time and travel only short distances, generally <1 m (2,3). The distances between patient A1 and persons at other tables, especially those at table C, were all >1 m.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2862334/#
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0764_article

2023-06-15 15:30:22

Why #bitcoin? https://nostr.build/i/539057668d6bec012514bd72312a250c3f764dd5daacff485300b7a0076a8c75.jpg

2023-06-15 15:28:58

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Yep. Certainly clients can create their own custom experience and allow users to have options/choices on how to handle interactions. The published event content should be agnostic.
Like open url in an internal app web browser, open a different app. Or a podcast event with a mini-player, vs a dedicated (Nostr supported) podcast app. Same as select a preferred Lightning wallet.
The only real incentive to use custom is lead-gen or bring new people to your client app - but again, it’s a self-serving approach and not for the greater good.

2023-06-15 14:44:58

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I think bespoke client URLs/links in events are an anti-pattern. Clients die. References should be more durable with a 10-20+ year outlook.

2023-06-14 15:58:04

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* may be a way to start decoupling now we have a better financial system. #bitcoin

2023-06-14 15:56:31

The issue with businesses is that governments have too much control over them.. which leads to an erosion of fundamental human rights.
Alice can’t pay Bob, because Bob may be a terrorist, and company X complies with broad scoped, unfair, far exaggerated ‘legalities’ - unless it is in their business plan and they fight for it or accept future fines. It’s the same repeating playbook.
It stifles innovation, causes abuse of power and corrupts.
Distributed entities or DOWs or a country that doesn’t seek to play the broken power game. #note1z0r…mjj3

2023-06-14 07:18:29

Australia bank just sent this. Fiat is not your money.. it’s children being allowed to spend when the government benefits or banks say you can. https://nostr.build/i/349e244e17cf88427097d0df82d3d7a2a8b6c83da11a60c5a5488883a3067dfa.jpg

2023-06-13 18:09:31

Apple needs a high profile anti-trust case across multiple areas - including App Store and payments, Safari, etc.
They control too much.

2023-06-10 13:52:25

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Their existence never made sense to me. Huge marketing budget, no one recommending to use them, no one I know used them, etc. Either a hidden user base, funded by blind VC, or some other controlling funnel.

2023-06-09 16:28:07

Diversity in people and content drive Nostr’s victory. #note1kyh…g383

2023-06-05 18:34:15

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I think a simple “I don’t care about” with a few pre-made filters like trump, Bitcoin, NFTs, NYT, etc during on-boarding to enable client side filters like below is a reasonable approach.
Keeping in mind just because someone may post about a topic like Bitcoin 1 in 20 posts, does that mean you shouldn’t follow them for their unrelated content? Filtering topic based content is more valuable at the content than author level - unless the author is strongly tied to a topic - like a Bitcoin Price bot or something.
#note1mlh…zaev

2023-06-05 18:03:20

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It worked fine for Tweetbot. Definitely my preference is filtering client side - as the the relay query results are processed.
JB55 has put a lot of effort into making events fetch and render fast. Adding filtering, will have some additional computation. Obviously more filters will mean more non-linear computation. Just need to build it and test really - no point optimising without seeing how a minimal approach goes.
At some point I envision a smarter relay query NIP drafted and can support filters or rules. It’s perhaps a bit early, while what we have largely works ok.

2023-06-05 17:17:43

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I can’t say for sure, however I imagine twitter purposely made reporting accounts a 5-8 click painful process. I suspect that’s due to the noise it produced - even in a centralised and KYC environment. They didn’t know how to make the report data useful.
It obviously wasn’t part of their strategy to manage bots - as it almost seemed like an afterthought.

2023-06-05 17:10:59

The filtering/blocking approach used by Amethyst today has a few main faults - the primary one being lack of visibility of app wide filtering. People find out by accident, or at all - which is obviously a sign of a broken approach. I don’t quite see it as censorship, yet more as a poorly functioning content ‘value’ scoring system.
The inability to opt-in and customise your filters is really the lacking feature here. I’m actually surprised just how badly the WoT - trusting 5 nth degree following spam reports = shadow ban content - has performed. It shows that close/greater connected individuals (group clusters) regularly have different preferences and desires to self-curate what they see - instead of having it done on their behalf somehow (I.e. WoT signals). People also report or mute for many reasons - from bad content to “I just don’t care about this type of content”. Breaking News: Humans value different things.
Enabling users to self curate more easily and see how far that gets us is the best approach. We can even add filtering for NIP05 domains, or perhaps relays to avoid connecting to. Even content warning, profanity masking, nudity detection, etc. all done locally on devices without major performance impacts.
Damus POC I mocked up. Damus has active development in this area. https://nostr.build/i/e9870ad76d4cb0cabc21c87a15918366fa90400470c9c57bbc93a30364ca971b.jpg #note18z7…hnlh

2023-06-02 18:33:28

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Looks interesting.