every hour spent building extractive bullshit is an hour stolen from building productive tools. you can spend your time gamifying someone into riding a scooter more or you can build money that the state can't censor and communications it can't surveil.

some notes and quotes i wrote down during trevor paglen's berlin talk tonight. "palantir is not so much a military technology company, it's a vision technology." "slop is the media that the attention economy forces people to create." "do you subscribe to the sublime idea of things that are beyond yourself?" "this is where it turns to magic. instagram. telepathy. some of it feels supernatural." [context: talking about getting a targeted ad right after having a conversation about that exact thing.] topics to follow up: - vilém flusser on technical images - the politics of llm training data - cia & russian psyop manuals buy his book:

Verso

How to See Like a Machine

Today our world is under the watchful and tireless eye of computer vision, with cam­eras and monitors tracing our every move. Furthermore, generat...

everything i love about cyberpunk is found in neuromancer and ghost in the shell.

the gov just restricted fable 5 under export control law. we've been here before. in the 90s strong encryption was classified as a munition and placed under arms export controls. the cypherpunks fought and won. read the cypherpunk library.

The Cypherpunk Library

The Cypherpunk Library

A personal collection of good public-domain reads. Free to read, free to keep.

weekend project: cypherpunkbooks.com one shelf for books, manifestos, essays, etc... built it for myself to keep everything I want to read and everything i love in one place.

i dislike how taboo discussions around money are in leftist activist circles. i see a lot of hand waving. 'money won't be needed in a post capitalist world.' 'money is the root of evil.' 'money is exploitation.' then the conversation ends. i wish it didn't go like this. money is not inherently evil. it's just a technology. just like language. a technology for transporting value across space and time. that's it. it doesn't have to be exploitative. the current monetary system is deeply corrupt. imo it's the source of a lot of the world's problems, but the answer isn't to dismiss it. we should strive to build a better one. if the current implementation is broken fork and build your own.

i'm being one shotted by yanis varoufakis' technofeudalism. i can feel the dunning kruger setting in.

really enjoyed this from matt balez. a few things stuck: i learned subcent api fees via usdc on base is easy. a few weeks ago in vegas i highlighted this a unique value prop for bitcoin agentic payments. i was wrong. still true that stablecoins are inherently censorable, and freezable at any time. they don't optimize for human freedom. stablecoin privacy is very spooky. the fact that you can feed an agent's etherscan history to chatgpt and id the merchant should scare everyone. "open source AI deserves open source money" is a banger. how do we meme this into existence? watching steinberger go anti "crypto" was rough. surprised usdt on lightning wasn't covered. i know usdc has the regulatory momentum rn but @speedwallet 's wallet's usdt/lightning ux is quite good. they address the volatility and short term usd obligation point all on the ln network. we can have a convo about the tradeoffs re censorship resistance, but i think bitcoin builders can learn a lot from speed.

The Best Money For Agents

Spiral PM Mat Balez weighs the relative merits of stablecoins vs bitcoin for agentic payments and nudges us towards the more neutral option.

spoke at vegas a few weeks ago on lightning and ecash. @Shinobi moderated, @EVAN KALOUDIS and Alex held it down on @ZEUS and @Fedi . fun one. thanks for having me.

gm @Derek Ross

thanks @SoapMiner

the neon genesis eva ui revival is a very personally targeted trend.

opus 4.6 -> plan -> build is game changing.

"You have to have some kind of a drive, some kind of a desire to find out the answer, a desire to find out what makes things tick. If you don’t have that, you may have all the training and intelligence in the world, but you won’t have questions and you won’t just find answers." — Calude Shannon (Claude Shannon at Bell Lab. March 20, 1952) https://www1.ece.neu.edu/~naderi/Claude%20Shannon.html

openclaw identity.md should dynamically update based on what it learns. soul.md could remain the same.

do you think a man can vibecode better than god?

redesigned the mint rating and review ui for cashu.me now you can see what mints your friends trust and leave reviews. wanted it to feel like getting a recommendation from someone you know. web of trust does helps do the vetting for you. see a mint with all reviews, then you can toggle to only show web of trust. ratings recalculate in real time based only on reviews from people in your web of trust. if you don't really use nostr like that, then cashu.me comes with a built in web of trust based on based bitcoiners. this is now live in prod. give it a try and let me know what you think. please report and UI issues or bugs too.

This is the place @miljan.

Spent all evening showing throwing ecash at people. This way of tossing people bitcoin is special, people react to it really well. All credit due to the push UX of ecash.