jimmydoreornot

As for nostr layer privacy, the giftwrap is written by an anonymous key, but sent to a person's public key. So you know they received something, but you don't know who from.

IP layer privacy is left to a lower layer. VPN or Tor or whatever. Trying to re-implement onion or garlic routing in nostr is IMHO not a great idea. Why tie such functionality together in the same layer?

Right. And that is why Stella Assange and Matt Taibbi are on there... because they are bitcoin maxis. /s

I half agree, and half disagree. I agree that users need some kind of management tools to deal with public key crypto, shouldn't be copying private keys into apps, and there needs to be recovery from lost keys. It is a hard problem and nostr has a long ways to go.

I disagree that you need a "reliable way to know other peoples public keys." I think this puts the cart before the horse. And doing it that way, public certification authorities who say "I certify this key belongs to this person" can't be trusted anyways, so it doesn't really work (and as people do trust them for practical reasons, but shouldn't, they have enabled widespread TLS MitM by governments). It is rarely the case that you know someone and then you discover someone claiming to be them and you need them to prove their identity (which is BTW totally possible in nostr already). What usually happens is you learn the key first, and over time learn who that person is and develop intuition and trust about them through experiences that occurred via that key.

But that doesn't reflect on the platform. It's just the next random thing uploaded.

In case you think nostr is saturated with "outlandish Christian conspiracies about the end of the world/angels/etc", I've been on nostr more than a year and have encountered exactly zero of them.

I hard disagree. And you cannot stop us. #resist

It is true anybody (or bot) can spin up new identites so the count of pubkeys doesn't say much.

It is also true that there is spam. But it is avoidable. Spam lives in the general feed and in replies. You can configure clients to ignore the general feed, only show posts of people you follow (and maybe of people they follow). If you want to meet new people, then use relays that filter spam. You have choices of how to solve this; nostr is about putting the decisions in your hands.

I have not seen any client that creates a new ID. I've always imported my key and used my same ID from day one.

But you are 100% that the community is heavily slanted towards bitcoin enthusiasts.

1. I concur. But it's no big deal. 2. Nothing prevents this, but it would be specified as a sister protocol. I haven't seen it specified, but I know that relays are doing it. 3. Websockets allows pub-sub. Clients stay connected to relays and instantly get the next message when it arrives. Polling means either lots of polling or having delays. 4. I can't even comment on this one. 5. Optional chaining is possible and has been proposed.

I also started a nostr-like protocol back in November 2022 based on my gripes with it. Then I came to my senses... nobody is going to use my variant. Perfection is the enemy of the good.

The odds of correct operation are higher with Rust, and for some people that matters a lot to them.

There are plenty of good reasons not to use rust. If your use case doesn't care about security, fine use whatever. Or if time-to-market is critical, use go or whatever. Or if your organization can't handle the risk that when you leave they can't find another good rust developer, then don't use it.

I was a security researcher since 1992. I don't mean to sound arrogant, but why continue to use languages that lead to security holes when we now have a language that it strongly resistant to most of those failings? Rust isn't just type safe or memory safe - eliminating foot-guns was a guiding principle throughout. People hate the borrow checker, but that concept of ownership eliminated broad classes of concurrency bugs. Rust was a godsend for computer security.

Yes I need to seriously try low-carb.

BTW, I have (controlled) hypertension, (controlled) high cholesterol, high triglycerides, low HDLs, and a large beer belly gut (just like my dad, but unlike my brother)... but I have hba1c on the low end and high insulin sensitivity. Doctors used to insist I was on the path to diabetes (25 years ago), but now they are mystified. I chalk it up in part to fasting and drinking a lot of coffee, and my revulsion towards sweet tasting food (I love fat, starch and salt... but not sweet).

So I have a lot of doubt about insulin-related explanations given my well controlled blood sugar. But I still think hyper low-carb might work.

As an aside, long-distance running works to a limited extent. I drop weight without trying and my hunger does not increase. Other forms of burning calories, however (e.g. bicycling), have not had the same effect.

I never have a craving for something sweet. Not since I was like 5 years old. I will eat sweets from time to time, but usually only when pressured socially to do so. Sweets seem repulsive to me, make my tonsils cringe. I haven't binged on sweets ever since that halloween stomach ache in 1976.

Glad that a protein shake works for you.

I suspect something like that is going on. It is pretty clear to me that there is a strong genetic component. We know the hunger system is very complicated. It's the reason we still don't have a weight loss pill. If you decrease hunger along one channel, the other channels ramp up to compensate.

But there also may be other components that we can do something about. For example, perhaps the bacteria in my gut are causing half of my hunger, insisting that I eat bread (because they want it, not I). And if I starve them out on a zero carb diet, I can break free of the excess hunger.

Hope springs eternal.

I have done fasting, I have done alternate day fasting. I have done fast-5. Yes, I can get there if I want to.

My point is that "there" is a miserable place, and so I don't stay "there".

I'll try it.

I don't think this willpower explanation quite fits the facts.

I can delay gratification. I can quit coffee cold turkey no problem. I skip breakfast to increase my fasting period. I don't need TV or Internet, I'd rather work on my lifestyle property. I almost never take pain pills, I see myself as stoic, I can do long duration exercise.

I can count calories and force my weight down from 100kg to 74kg by sheer willpower and focus on the issue.

And yet I can't effectively keep the weight off. Because the hunger is 24x7, and my ability to focus on the issue isn't 24x7... I have other things to do in life.

This.

It is the annoying, aggravating, all consuming hunger that is the cause, not a misunderstanding about how many calories are in what foods.

I would have thought by now science would have a drug to modulate abnormal levels of hunger, but we still don't have one. And we don't know what causes them.

While correct and useful advice for some people, this advice is useless for many (I suspect most) overweight and obese people.

I'm on the border of overweight/obese. I can lose weight if I focus on losing weight. I've dropped from 100kg to 74kg and back. I've gone back down to 91kg and back. How? Eating less, of course. By counting calories. But here is the problem. Anything below 95kg and my body and mind is hyper annoying, constantly interrupting my thoughts (amygdala?) insisting that I go eat something. It is impossible to program computers when my brain keeps interrupting me. I simply cannot focus on anything other than eating. It's like a very slow motion breath hold... eventually you will come up for air. I find life so miserable at those weights that I eventually learned to accept my fate and I'll die early I'm sure, but at least life will feel tolerable until then.

Why do some people's bodies/minds insist so insistently that they eat more when they clearly are already overweight? That's the question I would love to have answered. People often postulate the answer lies in the kinds of foods you eat, but I've proven that hypothesis wrong (for myself) many times. Avoiding sugars and fried foods and eating oatmeal, fish soup, salads, fruit and veg with lean proteins... does not make any weight difference for me, nor does it make low body weights any more tolerable. Sounds great, I'm sure it's healthy, but I've proven on myself multiple times that this technique does not work. Only counting calories works for weight loss (actually distance running works for me too), and it always leaves me famished and miserable.

Going on a zero-carb diet might work. I've seen success stories. I haven't seriously tried it. When I've tried in the past I was craving bread so massively that I caved in.

I concur that the term "shaping public opinion" is more accurate in many cases, but not in others. There are enough stories where the author clearly understood something about the story and attempted to convey something else to the reader for political/cultural effect. For example, not reporting on the race of a black perpetrator but always reporting on the race of a black victim.

There is a less activist way of presenting the news that doesn't attempt to "shape public opinion". I'm old enough to remember Walter Cronkite. I've read (some of) Manufacturing Consent. Today's media in America (almost all of it, NYT being no exception) heavily shapes public opinion, turning news reporting into a political battleground.

I've always felt voting was a bad idea. It drives candidates to waste inordinate amounts of time and money on campaigning. For many posts, the ancient Athenians selected people at random (sortition) usually from a pool of willing candidates. A large enough random selection would be represenative. This would work well for the US House of Representatives.

Your comment implies that you don't want representatives, you want other people to vote for whatever it is you want. All I can say to that is: ask God for the serenity to accept those things you cannot change.

Knobs to turn on and off the water spouts. Spouts were of varying diameter, so you had to try different holes to find one that fit. The little balls grab the spout so you can turn it.

You can't let any old peasant mess with the water supply.