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cypherpunks01

4,040 karma · joined July 13, 2010

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cypherpunks01··on ElevenLabs Music v2.5
Are people asking for this to exist? There isn't a big enough pool of talented humans willing to work for low pay, widely available cheap recording gear and free musical educational material, that music needs to be made even cheaper and soullessly?

I'm not against some AI uses, I use LLMs myself where it makes sense, but music is one of the things that we were told AI would free up all our time to do!!

cypherpunks01··on Harvard study predicts most suicide attempts a week in advance
"Using smartphone surveys" is a pretty concise clarifier in the original title
cypherpunks01··on Harvard study predicts most suicide attempts a week in advance
Oh it is a scientific prediction for sure.

I am just saying that if a layperson were told, "I have invented a machine that can accurately predict when someone is going to do Z!", but then, while researching the technology behind how such a prediction is possible, turns out the machine simply has been repeatedly asking the person how likely it is they will be doing Z, how much they think about Z, etc, then the layperson may feel a bit misled by the initial claim. I feel that way towards the editor that wrote this article title.

cypherpunks01··on Harvard study predicts most suicide attempts a week in advance
Unqualified use of the word "predicts" is a little bit of a stretch in this editorialized title.

The study doesn't predict suicide attempts out of some type of biometric or otherwise observable data or surveillance information, it's predicting it from a self-survey. The actual journal article title tells the story much better:

"Using smartphone surveys to predict next-week suicide attempts"

https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fabn0001117

cypherpunks01··on Hackers have withdrawn ~4k BTC (~$320M) from the Liquid Federation wallet
Seems that an Elements rangeproof cache bug may've gotten exploited. Fix for suspicious issue was committed just last week and attackers could've monitored the public commits and exploited the bug before fix was ever pushed?

Sort of self-fulfilling prophecy if true, that's a leading theory anyhow.

fix: range proof cache bind to asset and scriptpubkey

https://github.com/ElementsProject/elements/commit/c26d719c2...

cypherpunks01··on Iranian missile blitz takes down AWS data centers in Bahrain and Dubai
US gov is not going to reimburse a private company for war damage caused by a sovereign country.

Property insurance generally has war exclusions, insurance co will deny claims. Unless there is some affordable magic 100% war damage coverage policy sold in the middle east, which is doubtful, no insurer would be able to successfully underwrite anything like that.

The company eats the losses and the recovery efforts it wants to persue.

cypherpunks01··on Google Workspace CLI
Me: huh, 0.4.4 version, this project must have been around for a little while.

checks https://github.com/googleworkspace/cli/tags

v0.1.1 2 days ago

v0.2.2 yesterday

v0.3.3 18 hours ago

v0.4.2 9 hours ago

v0.5.0 8 minutes ago

Interesting times we live in..

cypherpunks01··on Show HN: qbo-cli - Quickbooks CLI for AI Agents
Super cool! CLI makes a lot of sense for this, interested to try it out.

The MCP server released by QBO is a mess, keep needing to have Claude hack it to fix inconsistencies in parameters, limit results that completely fill up context, etc.

cypherpunks01··on NewPipe: YouTube client without vertical videos and algorithmic feed
Top comment right now says "newpipe breaks every few weeks or so", but revanced builds in my experience last for at least a year before a new build is required. Personally I'd prefer more upfront steps and get a stable result, rather than something that works quickly but breaks often.
cypherpunks01··on Voxtral Transcribe 2
Yeah, I think the multilingual improvements in V3 caused some kind of regression for English - I've noticed large blocks occasionally dropped as well, so reverted to v2 for my usage. Specifically nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2 vs nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3
cypherpunks01··on Show HN: NanoClaw – “Clawdbot” in 500 lines of TS with Apple container isolation
Hate to ask the obvious question but.. how does Claude check for milk?
cypherpunks01··on Postal Arbitrage
Yes, Jmail.world and the entire Jmail suite is mind-blowingly impressive, apparently Walz and @lukeigel co-created it.
cypherpunks01··on New information extracted from Snowden PDFs through metadata version analysis
Anyone tried this?
cypherpunks01··on I wasted years of my life in crypto
Lightning Network already uses millisatoshis. Of course they can't be settled in sub-satoshi amounts on the main chain, until there's enough interest in a fork to do so.

The fixed supply describes the total sum of units that have been issued, and that are intended to be issued in the future - it doesn't relate to the divisibility of those units.

cypherpunks01··on The realities of being a pop star
> "A couple of weeks ago Yung Lean came for dinner at my house .. He is probably one of the wisest people I know."

Two sentences I would've not predicted in close proximity to one another! Hah, love it. Guess he's been through a lot over the years.

cypherpunks01··on Pozsar's Bretton Woods III: The Framework
The flow has definitely started reversing, and yep you're right there will be problems. Worldwide central bank holdings of gold just recently surpassed holdings of US Treasuries for the first time in 30 years. And I believe that's using only reported amounts of gold, when all experts agree that China has acquired far more gold in recent years than what's reported.
cypherpunks01··on Tether is now the 17th largest holder of US debt
Correct, this is the answer. Wasn't really known until this year.

https://fortune.com/crypto/2024/11/25/commerce-nominee-howar...

cypherpunks01··on Rivian's TM-B electric bike
Most visibly interesting part to me is the frame design without a rear triangle (no seatstay) like a motorcycle or dirtbike.

Materials must be real strong to withstand all the torque forces without a rear triangle, right? Any other e-bikes like this?

cypherpunks01··on Erowid - Documenting the Complex Relationship Between Humans and Psychoactives
I think generally yes, phenethylamines are the primary compounds known to work in the same dose range as LSD. Unfortunately they are much cheaper to produce, and the majority of the 25C- and 25I-NBOMe fatalities occur after people believed they were taking LSD. I have read similarly, that tab size of a dose might be an indicator, but I don't think it's a fully reliable method. Check out the old 2013 Erowid "Spotlight on NBOMes" article [1]-

> Silk Road prices for pure 25I-, 25C-, and 25B-NBOMe powder currently range from $90 to $200 per gram. The most problematic listings are vendors selling blotter that begs to be resold as acid: 1/4-inch perforated squares in 100-hit sheets bearing designs such as Albert Hofmann's bike ride and The Beatles Yellow Submarine, among other acid-blotter designs from the past. One vendor states "each tab is acid size, no big blotters here". Another offers hits supposedly containing 1 mg of 25I- and 25B-NBOMe each! Dosages range from 500 micrograms to 2 mg per 1/4-inch hit, with advertised doses averaging around 1 mg. On Silk Road, LSD blotter is 5-10 times more expensive than NBOMe blotter.

I think unfortunately toxic and potentially fatal doses can fit on a 1/4 inch hit or in a single liquid drop. There needs to be a lot more active chemical though, whereas you get a slight metallic taste with LSD, the article says NBOME is extremely bitter due to the higher concentration, which is sometimes covered up with mint or other flavor (never heard of this with LSD).

There's an interesting 2019 article "Multimodal imaging of hallucinogens 25C- and 25I-NBOMe on blotter papers" [2] that analyzed a random seized NBOME sample from Germany. It has lower concentration per cm² than what Erowid cited, but I don't think it's a technical limit unfortunately that prevents scary doses from fitting on a standard blotter.

[1] https://erowid.org/chemicals/nbome/nbome_article1.shtml

[2] https://analyticalsciencejournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/do...

cypherpunks01··on Radio Garten
Anyone got a few international favorites? Alright, I'll start

Oroko Radio / Accra, Ghana / https://radio.garden/listen/oro-radio/pmCVm8Ts

FIP Radio / Paris, France / https://radio.garden/listen/fip/YNeGA5ua

cypherpunks01··on Email immutability matters more in a world with AI
Your own emails are immutable, if you trust nobody's modified your copy.

But proving to others that an email hasn't been modified is a more difficult task. As I understand it, you'd need to retain DKIM keys for the signing server, to check that historical DKIM signatures verify correctly and the old message was not forged or altered.

Are DKIM signing keys issued in some kind of Certificate Transparency log, where you can verify whether a particular DKIM key existed for a particular domain in the past, in order to do this in general?

cypherpunks01··on Can LIGO Detect Daylight Savings Time?
Can anyone explain in simple terms what is going on here? Author states he's going to "discuss possible causes for this behavior and implications" but I don't really see where it's discussed.

Why would human activity impact the probability of LIGO event detection? Is this because LIGO operators are doing certain things to the detector during their work hours, or some other property of the environment around the 2 LIGO detectors?

cypherpunks01··on Raspberry Pi 500+
Are sd cards still corrupting all the time in rpi servers even with high-quality SLC sd cards, or just with cheap consumer sd cards?
cypherpunks01··on The treasury is expanding the Patriot Act to attack Bitcoin self custody
Yes, TLS encryption has similar potential risks, quantum and other elliptic curve vulnerabilities.

Quantum resistant algorithms are under heavy discussion in bitcoin dev mailing list, and have been for awhile. I think the signature sizes for leading algorithms are still too large to be practical within existing block size limits, but of course lots of things would probably have to change in a quantum emergency. Bitcoin devs tend to be extremely conservative with making new changes (in part because it attracts a lot of contrarians) so it's going to take a long time for people to agree on the right architecture for a quantum resistant scheme in bitcoin, but it will happen, BIPs are in the works like BIP-360 which outlines some potential structure for it.

cypherpunks01··on The treasury is expanding the Patriot Act to attack Bitcoin self custody
Yes, and for even higher security, use a bitcoin-only airgapped hardware wallet like Coinkite's Coldcard or Foundation's Passport Core.
cypherpunks01··on The treasury is expanding the Patriot Act to attack Bitcoin self custody
Strictly speaking, loading an address with many UTXOs has no effect on security of the receiving address at all (beyond increasing its public profile).

The security concerns start happening after an address spends a UTXO. Before a P2WPKH (segwit) address is used, only the public key hash is known. In order to spend from it, the full public key needs to be revealed. That's why it's recommended to use single-use addresses, because a quantum computing attack or elliptic curve vulnerability could be used against an address where the attacker knows the public key, but would not work against an address where the pubkey has not yet been revealed.

So, the main security change happens after you spend from an address the first time. Subsequently, there are theoretical vulnerabilities that could occur after an address is spent from many times, but really only if the signer is malicious like dark skippy, or faulty and doesn't properly follow RFC 6979 deterministic signatures, leaking some signature entropy which could be used to crack the private key. The latter has happened with some bad custom wallet implementations, but these attacks are even further in the realm of theoretical, not super realistic, require faulty software/firmware to be implanted into signing devices.

cypherpunks01··on Toothpaste made with keratin may protect and repair damaged teeth: study
Hah, I didn't assume that either, it was only until after I read the first sentence of the article, "Toothpaste made from your own hair.."
cypherpunks01··on Court records reveal Sig Sauer knew of pistol risks for years
> "In a company of our size, would anyone ever believe that there was a real issue going on, and we wouldn’t address it?"

*awkward silence*

cypherpunks01··on I tried every todo app and ended up with a .txt file
Totally agree, Todoist rocks. Recurring tasks are necessary for any kind of regular maintenance tasks, and Todoist supports all natural language scheduling "every month on the 15th" or "every 8 weeks starting Thursday". Textfile certainly isn't going to do this for you. Article author writes:

> Todoist: Great until I realized I was gaming the points system instead of doing actual work. Turns out completing “drink water” 8 times a day doesn’t make you productive.

Why didn't he turn off the points system if it was distracting, instead of migrating to the next shiny new TODO workflow? Not sure I understand, but I guess that might've left nothing to blog about.

cypherpunks01··on Lithium compound can reverse Alzheimer’s in mice: study
Yes, it's already thought that there's an association between naturally occurring lithium in drinking water and decreased suicide rates:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-journal-...

I would think naturally occurring lithium in some people's water would give pretty good control conditions to do a wide study of this effect on Alzheimers as well?

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