In my adventures in transit to Riga I’m stopping over in a bunch of cities. Some people dread layovers but I try and make them long enough to go out and do things. I stopped off at the Moco Museum and had lunch in Barcelona.

I’ve got a long layover in Barcelona and I was looking for a taxi to go in to the city. The signs all say AMB instead of Taxi. Apparently AMB is an acronym for the city administration which regulates the taxis, amongst other things. But nobody knows this arriving at the airport who needs the taxis, because they aren’t locals who take the metro. The solution is there are a ton of scruffy guys with taxi jackets who’s job is to tell people who are lost that they should follow the AMB signs. The funny thing is in airports everywhere else the sketchy guys pitching taxis are scam artists. Since Barcelona is famous for pickpockets and scammers, you’d think the city wouldn’t try and make things even more confusing. I’m sure there is a story as to why they didn’t just put up a sign labeled Taxi. The paid guys are clearly a fix for broken UX.

I had an overnight layover in Lisbon and got to spend time exploring the city. I want to come back and see more. I’ve spent a ton of time in Brazil so being in Portugal is weird. It’s like decaf Brazil. The other odd thing is in Brazil everyone assumes that if you’re there then you’ll be able to speak Portuguese. I was given a note the very first day I arrived in Brazil telling me that if I was going to be there I should learn the language. I thought it was a bit of a high bar given my 12 hours in the country. My Portuguese is not great but I’m able to read and understand people and make myself understood if people have patience. In Lisbon nobody thinks seems interested in speaking Portuguese to me. The assumption is that I don’t *look like* a Portuguese speaker I guess. Or I’m only hanging out in touristy places and here they’ve given up on the idea of people speaking the local language. You can really feel how much Lisbon has become an international tourist / “digital nomad” destination.

your other pieces are better than this one. :) — This is a comment on: https://yakihonne.com/flash-news/

Nostriga here I come!

Check out the smart widgets that YakiHonne has launched. It’s a Nostr version of farcaster’s frames.

Yakihonne

Smart Widgets

Build and deploy smart widgets for enhanced user interaction. Create dynamic content experiences on the decentralized web.

It’s similar to open frames.

Open Frames

I’m excited to get this in to Nostr. It gives us a way of making interactive nano-apps.

I sat down and talked to someone in person recently who I’d only met online. After a very pleasant chat he said, you know what, you’re really nice, I always thought you were an asshole. Lots of people have different personalities when they switch context or language. It’s interesting to hear someone’s perceptions of me. So I’m wondering if people who have or haven’t met me in person think something similar? If we haven’t met then #nostriga is next week and we can meet in person.

The press, social media vibe, and energy has shifted from Trump to Harris, but the polling shows that if the election were held today, Trump would win the electoral college by a landslide and lose the popular vote. If this holds, it would mean that in 2000, 2016, and 2024 the Republicans won the election despite losing the popular vote. Only one time the Republicans win the election AND a majority of the votes this century, 2004. What amazes me is how this dynamic is just accepted. This is not a well functioning democracy. https://www.realclearpolling.com/elections/president/2024/battleground-states

The Cult of the Dead Cow has released a new protocol for secure private peer to peer social apps called Veilid… Here’s their defcon slides: https://veilid.com/Launch-Slides-Veilid.pdf Source code:

GitLab

Veilid · GitLab

GitLab.com

And website:

Veilid

Veilid

Veilid is an open-source, distributed application framework.

The DHT part and wrapping of content as it goes around the network are both interesting. It’s very slow and prototype level at the moment. And kind of made for the opposite use case of Nostr, in that it’s not possible to make public conversations on Veilid. Worth tracking to see what comes of it. Did you know, Beto O'Rourke used to be a member of CoD?

I just gave a friend an update on what Nostr is and showed a bunch of apps in the ecosystem. Showing how fast it is and how all of these apps use the same identity and data but are different in their focus. He has been around the space of social media protocols for years but he was blown away. We’ve really got something amazing. We need to do a better job of show and telling the story. It’s not about just zaps or censorship resistance or the way we’re doing web of trust moderation. We’ve built something which works really well. It fulfills the dream of the early days of the internet, web, and Web 2.0. An open interoperable internet, by and for the users. As an aside, yes bitcoin is part of it, but it’s so politicalized that some people dismiss nostr as that bitcoin social media protocol. We see people join nostr and through it discover bitcoin, that’s the path to wide adoption.

The US government makes people wait over 2 years in some places for an appointment to get a tourist visa. This is insane and nobody seems to care or talk about it.

Global Visa Wait Times

This custom algorithms viewer for Nostr using DVM’s is amazing! It needs docs and UX polish but it’s so damned promising.

Nostr decentralized search and other stuff

Chess.

So should my stay red or should I go back to purple for #nostriga. View quoted note →

I like this philosophy that @Jay Graber outlined in her design of Bluesky. I think it’s useful in thinking about our work on social media protocols.

Crypto is not a left right thing. If it becomes an exclusively one party thing then it gets dragged in to a partisan culture wars. This Wednesday August 14th there is going to be an online event / fundraiser by and for the crypto community for Harris.

Crypto4Harris Town Hall · Luma

Come meet the crypto industry leaders, policy professionals, and enthusiasts who are organizing on behalf of the Harris for President campaign. Lea...