"The Big Print" by @Lawrence Lepard is enriched with amusing anecdotes and expressive charts. Definitely a nice reading.

High time preference behavior over decades accumulated so much technical debt in the software systems of many banks that there is only one migration strategy left for society: Turn it off without a replacement and switch to Bitcoin.

Do we really need Don Quixote's schwarmerei (excessive enthusiasm) for chivalry in the Bitcoin social layer? The knights followed their own unholy business and if they did so with virtue in their circles doesn't make it just for society.

Nostr is to Bitcoin what git is to the Linux kernel. It started as a necessary tool to develop the latter and now it is a thing of its own.

Not only are Github etc. centralized platforms but they also violate the UNIX philosophy of doing one thing and do it well. These platforms suffer from feature creep and nowadays they have become issue tracker, continues integration/deployment (CI/CD) platform etc as well. Therefore it is refreshing that there are activities with ngit to combine and connect existing simple tools (git, nostr) to work together seamlessly.

"Perhaps it’s no surprise that Switzerland remained one of the freest countries throughout Covid because of this more localized governance model. There was much less room and tolerance for central government decree" from "Parallel: The Bitcoin Social Layer" by Brian De Mint. Unfortunately this was not true at the end of the Covid scam. The mandates were centrally planned and applied to all cantons and one could say that the federal system died with Covid. The states in the US have far more freedom in such concerns than the cantons in Switzerland nowadays.

@Zapstore is clearly an improvement over F-Droid and Obtainium by combining a user friendly search for app discovery with the installing of the app from source signed by the developers.

As euphemism has to be considered clownish as well (aka disguise ugly things in nice words) you consequently find some some explicit language in "Bitcoin: The Inverse of Clown World" by @Knut Svanholm ∞/21M and @Luke de Wolf

Inconsistency in the user interface on GNU/Linux is my daily visual reminder that there is a trade-off between privacy & security versus beauty & convenience.

The progression from "Auctoritas, non veritas facit legem" into "Veritas, non auctoritas facit legem" as mentioned in Cryptosovereignty by Erik Cason is quite a profound idea.

Unfortunately upgrading an existing Ubuntu installation to 24.04 has been rather a bumpy road and ended up for me several times in a rescue shell. The UI improvements on the other hand are quite nice.

Each shortcut introduced in your application to save some development time today has to be repaid manifold in the future during the maintenance phase.

After seven years of its introduction the Java Platform Module System (JPMS) is still not yet fully adopted in the Java ecosystem. Migrations take a long time and after the migration is before the next migration I guess.

Bitcoiners vs. Spammers? LuganoPlanB

"You Don't Change Bitcoin, Bitcoin Changes You". Therefore Bitcoin will not change to appease the old institutions. That does not make sense. #LuganoPlanB

Not all merchants are equally prepared to accept⚡ in Lugano as sometimes the terminsl is not ready (empty battery etc.), but at some places it seems to be almost daily routine.

Hardcoding the theme with libadwaita and GTK4 really sucks. Now the user interface really looks inconsistent.

Thunderbird as a snap on Ubuntu 24.04 is too restrictive as it prevents you from sharing the gpg private key with your applications. Good it is still possible to install thunderbird from a deb package.

After a long waiting time there is finally again a new bitcoin programming book available: "Building bitcoin in Rust" by Lukáš Hozda

But that is part of clown world as well! Only option :-(