I use Signal to chat with some acquaintances. I don't really believe it is secure in terms of privacy. It may implement some form of encryption. It may offer some form of authentication and data integrity. These measures may be an improvement over other messaging technologies.
However, I don't remember ever generating a private key to use in Signal. I don't have custody of a private key that I control and keep safe and private. Therefore, I can only assume, not my keys, not my privacy.
We have come to understand, chiefly through the teachings of government education, that 'science' means the expert opinions espoused by an authority with more clout than you.
I wonder if the style of how science is taught plays a role. Every science course spends a lot of time on the history and the scientists credited with discoveries. This puts the focus on persons more so than the method and the substance of each discovery. Putting aside shoulders and giants that are disregarded by venerating specific individuals, this style of teaching conditions the mind to believe what is told by people anointed with special mystique. In this way, we train a society of non-player characters.
To train scientific minds, we must not tell them to believe what they are told. It is not even enough to demonstrate and have students reproduce well-known experiments. When we teach Newton, we need to finish with an apology that although he got it mostly right, his understanding was incomplete, and thus ultimately not entirely correct. Same for Einstein. Same for Bohr. Same for Schrodinger. Same for everyone and everything we know today. Everything we think we know in science today is in fact incorrect at the extreme limits of our understanding. Observations disagree with our best theories, and our best scientists cannot yet explain them. The emphasis of our training must be to teach scientists to not be married to our incomplete and incorrect knowledge passed on to us by our predecessors and the current crop of experts. Science is about seeking the truth, not about being told the truth.
One of the most valuable ideas I didn't fully appreciate until only a few years ago listening to Sean Carroll's "Biggest Ideas in the Universe" series of videos was the distinction between an "effective theory" and a "fundamental theory". Almost everything we know is an effective theory. This means the theory is only useful within some narrow range of conditions. To teach the theory without that caveat is to lie by omission. Almost everything science students are taught suffers from lying by omission. That's why I often quip that everything we know today is wrong or everything we know today is a lie.
I'd like to take the formal definition of "effective theory" and dress it down to business casual.
I am reminded of second and third year in engineering Skule™, where most students learn for the first time the real-world relationship between theory and practice. First year is occupied entirely by maths-and-sciences 101. Most students have not ever built anything of their own design (without someone telling them how) at that point in their life.
Even during first year, students start to see a difference in mentality between professors from math and science faculties as compared to engineering faculties. It was my first exposure to the routine application of "first order approximation", whenever any calculation became difficult. Engineering profs literally did this at every turn, and the 'good enough' quality of this spun my head. It was quick and dirty, and yet presented with the same mathematical formalism and rigor. Most importantly it was effective. Engineering is all about applying theory, but knowing when and how to apply rules of thumb for practical work.
Eye opening was digital circuits. One would imagine that logic gates that only compute based on 1 (5v) and 0 (ground) are pretty well-behaved. A student naively building circuits will quickly realize that this so-called digital world is a mess of analog madness. WTF are capacitance, resistance, and inductance doing in this binary world? What do you mean I have to put a capacitor across the ground and 5v pin? Madness!
Holy shit did the theory ever lie by omission. Reality is 'complicated'.
This is an interesting perspective: "Is illegal Bitcoin a good thing?" Legitimization of Bitcoin allows tentacles of regulatory capture and state involvement to infiltrate the ecosystem. When BTC is illegal, state influence is excluded, and BTC participant are properly incentivized to build resilience and protect the network.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/1knFLL9TPuLtGVdSRtDEF7?si=xPM_jnwIRUqZ4du4cWIdqQ&t=3839&pi=-VAnffLERDa94Seeing a sudden surge of interest in Nostr as Twitter users are posting their npubs. Is the Telegram CEO arrest opening eyes to the vulnerability of centralized platforms?
@Guy Swann the point of disagreement with Rand on the topic of faith actually pertain to a concept called Benevolent Universe Premise. Rational optimism is BUP: the belief without needing proof that the universe is available to be understood by our reasoning minds; and beneficial to us to the extent that we are able to control it according to such understanding.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/68Lu0Al64awfUNpXbpHu0p?si=E3Rk5O46Tx-RtjAr8I7X9A
I google-searched "holesail peer to peer" and it found nothing relevant. Using brave search found it as the first result along with holepunch-related pages. Looks like Google is down-ranking or censoring this.
Does keet have a directory of rooms for users to find interesting rooms to join?
When I do `pear run pear://keet` on windows, it just sits there forever making no progress.
Is it supposed to do something???
https://docs.pears.com/guides/getting-startedBitcoiners want Bitcoin to become the new de facto money. They do NOT want the government to treat Bitcoin as money. Otherwise, financial regulations like KYC/AML and money transmitter licensing will be enforced, which no Bitcoiner should build technology to comply with.
Florida appellate court rules that Bitcoin is money.
Trouble in Paradise: Florida Court Rules that Selling Bitcoin is Money Transmission
Summary and analysis of a Florida circuit court
@TheGuySwann the term you are looking for is "embedding" in AI Unchained for inserting a block of content into a context window so that you can submit a prompt to operate on that content.
My internal communication just now.
«Following up on the topic of autonomous operations, AO roughly refers to a service running mostly without human intervention. [MyProduct] can push this envelope further by setting a more ambitious goal. By standardizing the patterns for SOPs and interfaces (workflows, observability), and by formalizing them toward machine precision, we can enable the next generation. It becomes trainable for an LLM. First, gen AI can assist SRE to answer questions. Then, it can do the SRE's job almost completely, once given sufficient agency. That should be our end-point to set a vision that can excite.»
Everyone on Nostr are excited about Blossom Drive. It's a minimalist in every way. Entirely different than what I envisioned as the basis for decentralized storage. Perhaps this basic building block is what we need at the base layer. Torrents above it?
Because of the friction of integrating digital services to fiat payment systems, including PCI-DSS and KYC/AML, the ease of integrating to Lightning might be what pushes Bitcoin into the mainstream. Unleashed.chat is the first service that only accepts Bitcoin/Lightning because of this ease of integration.
I asked Unleashed.chat about what topics I talk about. That is not me. Do I have a doppelganger?
Bookmarking this ep on executive function using the prefrontal cortex for how to evolve toward AGI.
Spotify
How to Optimize Cognitive Function & Brain Health | Dr. Mark D'Esposito
Huberman Lab · Episode
Centralized control through government tyranny, cronyism, and corporate monopolization are the underlying dynamics that must be mitigated through decentralization, but we are falling behind. Foundational technologies are lacking.
First we need identity. Id must be self-sovereign, so that the individual controls their own private keys, sharing them with no one, holding custody securely with unbreakable secrecy. Everything else is built on SSI as a foundation, because we need ownership, privacy, authenticity, integrity, and access control---all dependent on identity.
Next, we need dis-intermediated communication. Individuals need to be able to exchange messages reliably without being tied irreplaceably to a third party. This includes being able to identify, find, and address each other according to their identity.
Over top of p2p comms, we need censorship-resistant apps that are capable of interacting with one's social network. This includes commerce, so Bitcoin for store of value and for payments is a foundational element of the architecture.
For apps and the services that individuals can offer for commerce to be censorship-proof, we need for hosting of logic on compute to be distributed, and we need the data that is processed to be distributed.
Here is the point where the analysis necessarily veers away from the simple explanation that I've tried to stick to, so I'll stop this thread here, and I'll start exploring the details in separate threads as my wandering mind spontaneously gets to them, as I did in this thread.
The danger of quantum computing growing capable of factoring large numbers is not only that public key cryptography that enables private communications, data privacy, data integrity, and Bitcoin transaction verification. It is that replacing the cryptographic algorithm in Bitcoin would require a hard fork. Once Bitcoin becomes the dominant money, such an event would provide an opportunity to change the rules encoded into the protocol. The enemy class would seek to inject authoritarian controls (KYC, AML, lawful intercept) into the protocol at that opportunity.
This thought arose while listening to this podcast.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/0IIp1LOwQg1pNpiNxTDrUp?si=ws9HStHLQPavQ2T77U08CwListening to this read.
@Guy Swann, does Bitcoin mining rely on real time availability of Internet access? Or can a block be verified offline and then synced to the block chain periodically (i.e., once per day)?
https://open.spotify.com/episode/2W7MuTETn73GMjJOkCEUES?si=uklow9IhS9qffDS887_ruQ
