It's a pretty good heuristic for judging which side is evil in a conflict. Which side prioritizes preventing communication rather than enabling it? This is why I consider my own government system evil (the UK). There are a lot of things you can argue about, but this started actualizing in the 2000s: criminalizing or semi-criminalizing speech (see e.g. "non crime hate incidents"). That was the point at which I decided the UK's governing system had become evil (and after that, rapidly despaired of any reversal, because the population did not in general reject it as such). View quoted note →

This kid's energy reminds me of Kasparov at a similar age. Not necessarily playstyle, just the self confidence. It's one thing to get the advantage in the opening, but to literally crush players of Caruana and Nakamura's stature after having done so, that's something else. View quoted note →

Apparently Bitrefill were hacked in a pretty sophisticated way. Honestly it's kind of an advertisement for them, paradoxically: they're one of the few long running sellers of goods and services for bitcoin that at least offer the right model: you pay a lightning invoice, anonymously, you get the thing. you might need an email or something, but that's OK. absolutely minimized risk of funds theft along the way (only exposed *very* briefly), absolutely minimized risk of leak of personal info to hackers (since you give them so little; almost nothing in fact; notice in particular that LN does a very good job of hiding the sender's origin from the receiver; not 100% perfect but exceptionally good with non custodial wallets, heck even custodial, perhaps, depending on details, though I absolutely do not recommend custodial LN, for different reasons).

an interesting point about this: there's a reason bitcoin devs tried quite strenuously, and eventually succeeded several years ago, in removing all openssl dependency from the bitcoin project. it's the nature of some of the truly awful protocols (ASN1 , X509 and etc etc) that openssl had to, or chose to support. so yes a very natural and correct reaction is "holy shit what happens when people find similar bugs in the consensus layer of bitcoin" but it's also true that it's a very controlled and very stress-tested surface area that removed stuff that was problematic. It's also true that even 1 small bug could be catastrophic. I guess we'll see! View quoted note →

I think we need a new word for the specific kind of mental anguish I experience when I scroll through twitter and find that every long post (the ones I always gravitated to, because it usually correlated with someone having something to say) is in the "that's not X - it's Y" prose style that is so transparently LLM speak. It really is painful at this point and it's completely endemic. I know we have "slop" but I never really liked that, it's not the content (sometimes, the content is interesting), it's the style and emotional timbre. I put up with it when an LLM is giving me some useful info in my interaction with it, but please for the love of god, write your prose yourself, even if all the info is coming from that source.