cykros

Keep an eye on Whitenoise. It's basically taken the technology behind Signal and placed it atop Nostr, so rather than signing up with a phone number, you do it with an npub (pubkey). Still in very early days so the features aren't all there yet, and battery use could be better, but they've got the basics of it working already.

It doesn't make sense for Americans, or anyone with access to a dollar denominated bank account.

For the other 80% of the planet though, it's a game changer. Rough estimate, but feels fair, as outside the US most people can't have one without substantial access to capital.

At the end of the day, it's just another IOU, much like a bank deposit, except instead of getting the 0.1% yield and FDIC (IF you're in the US), you get the ability to transact 24/7 across borders in a much faster manner than even bank wires, let alone ACH payments.

Gonna need to find a way to circulate this FUD further -- I'm annoyed the price is already jumping back up while I'm awaiting the glacial speed of the bank transfer of my paycheck this week to buy more.

The fact this is happening amid one of the smallest dumps from an ATH in Bitcoin's history is particularly amusing. 45%, compared to 80+ in prior cycles. And this time, while all major markets are melting down amid global liquidity hitting a wall.

Debian without systemd is a good start. Now, do Debian without dpkg, and you may finally be getting somewhere.

The reason Debian fell to the systemd behemoth is because its sysvinit scripts were already a complete disaster. Slackware and Gentoo, on the other hand, were able to stay clear of the mess because they had a decent implementation to begin with.

And Sysvinit was never the only place Debian kept its mess.

Bitchat does work with Meshtastic as of the most recent release. It also lets you self host a relay, because it uses Nostr relays. I'm not so sure about white/black listing so yours DOES get used, but you can absolutely host one. Routing through the Internet is something both Bitchat and Briar support, Briar through tor, Bitchat through Nostr (optionally also through tor). Disabling Internet routing at this time may require turning off Internet for Bitchat -- haven't dug on that one.

I do like the store and forward idea, though a thought on that is that while it makes sense for DM's, it makes less sense for group chats, which, being real time, make the shelf life of messages a bit short. It makes good sense for forum like content though. I think so far Bitchat has treated this as a bit out of scope, at least at this stage of development, and it is a reason that indeed, Briar is still quite relevant.

Bitchat only just recently even added ad hoc wifi support, so it's still very early days.

I still see the occasional netsplit.

But with modern nickname and channel services (Nickserv and Chanserv, mostly), and the very small IRC userbase, they certainly aren't as impactful as they once were.

There are people on IRC who I've maintained contact with for longer than anyone I can think of off the top of my head aside from family members. Many now through other channels (thanks to the Discord wrecking ball), though some still on IRC.

Hard to say how many intellectual rabbit holes I've gone down as a result.

I can say for sure life would have looked very, very different without it.

I think around that time was when Ubuntu switched from Gnome to Unity as well. What a mess that was. Seemed like all the UI teams had lost their minds at once.

It IS labeled "Opinion" in their defense...

But yea, El Reg is never where you go for objectivity.

Made it that much less likely that anyone would withdraw their gold from banks due to the disparity in utility between deposits and cash.

Paved the way for the downfall of physical money, and over a century of warfare in the absence of any sort of monetary discipline.

Thankfully we now have the necessary tool to fill that vaccuum.

The issue is that broad money isn't money. It's credit. And measuring credit is like measuring both velocity and position at the same time.

The Fed tried to measure dollar supply globally for decades before giving up as they finally got their heads around how the Eurodollar network works, and they've kept somewhat quiet about the fact that they're just not actually at the center of it.

If only there were a digital asset that had a fixed supply to prevent inflation that nobody could control who could spend what (to avoid unjust debanking) which was highly divisible so that you could spend large or small amounts, and because it's digital it could be spent very rapidly across long distances using the magic of the Internet. And if only it's governance model wasn't subject to the corruption seen in governments and private banks alike.

I bet that thing would be a pretty useful monetary tool, even if it were attacked, as one might expect by all of the government and banks around the world who were trying to cling to the power they have by virtue of having captured the ability to print money and use it when it is most valuable, fresh off the press.

The price of gold pre-1971 was always a fantasy as there was no free market for it, due to the policy rate sitting on it at $35/oz.

The price of gold before 1933 (EO 6102) was also not a terribly good indicator, as the friction of taking physical delivery of it also kept it suppressed in most circumstances, with explosive swings in times of crisis.

Arguably it's even more gamed after 1971 as it's not even used for exchange, and has a ton of rehypothecation and elaborate derivative networks.

Gold's drawback was always its physicality. Arguably its heyday was before the invention of the telegraph, when at least the expectation was that money was going to be slow, and the only way to move it across most distances was physically, unless you had some handy Knights Templar or Hawala network handy.

That we still cling to it despite all of this is a good indicator of just how fucked up fiat is though. Thankfully, we have a better alternative network being built out.

There's something to be said perhaps for preferring tools that do one of those things, rather than all of those things, and doing them well.

Not to say you can't then make an umbrella interface for interacting with them all as a suite, but perhaps the issue has become that gpg has not appropriately followed the Unix philosophy to begin with.

Not that I've got the solution for you. Just calling out the nature of your demands somewhat being at odds with a key design principle that made Unix and Unix-likes great to begin with.

Mastering Bitcoin, The Bitcoin Standard, Broken Money, and finished up a few other books I'd been in the middle of -- Against the Gods being most of interest here, as it was a good history of the discoveries of probability and how we think about risk management.

Also about halfway into Mastering the Lightning Network.

It'd be a shame if they went away; what better analogy than an analog clock for teaching how finite field mathematics works?

I recall seeing that it ran better on wine than on windows on the same hardware.

Never tested myself as I'm more a runescape/ragnarok online sorta guy myself...

They're not that free about beer. Though, more free about beer than liquor. That's only allowed to be sold in state run liquor stores. It was a real head scratcher when I first encountered it.

This reminds me of an article I read years ago about how people used to commonly wake up in the middle of the night, before the advent of electric bulbs, and often get a waking period between sleep in two phases (I assume more in winter months than in summer due to daylight hours). Apparently it was a very popular time for writing by candlelight, and I'm sure the creativity enjoyed by some of this tendency toward hynagogia had plenty to do with it.

Liberals, Fascists, and Communists always like to throw mud at each other as if they're not all cut from the same collectivist cloth (and all responsible for the deaths of millions). Best to pay them no mind.

Personally I'm not much a fan of Reddit or Twitter though, simply because the algorithmic nonsense is clearly there just to drive ad views and not to provide me with the interactions I'm there to have. Nostr is a much more pleasant experience.

This docuseries done by Erik Townsend from about a year or so ago on the need for nuclear and the looming energy cliff gets into some very high quality details and seems to be something the crowd here may be interested in: https://www.energytransitioncrisis.org/

Properly contained nuclear waste is almost as concerning to me as my wifi router is.

What, you don't want AI in your "mv" command, so that it guesses where you want your file moved to, rather than having to type in the destination? Personally I hate the extra keystrokes -- I think we should automate it to run in the background constantly, to make file relocation more efficient.

Wait, so she's admitting to letting her 12 year old use twitter, despite COPPA prohibiting it under the age of 13?

Heck, this probably qualifies for the CFAA to be applied; that's unauthorized access of a computer system...

Especially when firing up a VPN and not providing anyone their ID is so trivial.

Any AI that doesn't tell you to vote for whoever is going to allow the energy to flow is clearly AI that is more artificial than it is intelligent. Or at least, it hasn't yet learned to defend itself.

Well, they did literally often have "this page is under construction" banners on them. and <blink> tags lol.

I'd take it all back over the Squarespace hellscape the web has become.

Is there a free one?

I've been enjoying TT-RSS, though I do miss when the mobile app companion for it actually worked well. The web interface does work fine, and it does integrate with other local readers (such as newsboat), and allows for a centralized database so that I'm not stuck filtering what I've read on my desktop vs what I've read on my phone.

That's what Jack Dorsey realized too, which is why he's a Nostr guy these days.