Sometimes I choose to fly via Brasil just so I can get Pão de Queijo. So good.

How far could it be, Dubai to Bogota? REALLY FAR...

This is what it feels like living in New Zealand...

The Spinoff

Trying to enjoy the NZ summer while the world burns

The sausage of our Kiwi summer has come with a cheesy filling of existential dread.

There's something interesting about this new project to build a trans Africa rail network with funding from the middle east and china. I was of course first proposed by the horribly racist Cecil Rhodes in his colonial ambitions as the Cape to Cairo railway a 150 years ago. I like the narrative of former colonies planning and building their own infrastructure. On part I thought was interesting is the Dakar - Port Sudan railway is being funded as a way to provide more affordable way to do the hajj pilgrimage. Making affordable a recreation of what was the most expensive road trip in the history of humanity, when the richest man in history, Mansa Musa. Although it seems like Mansa took a route along the north coast of Africa, not straight across southern Sahara desert as the new railway plans to go. Obviously the real impact will be economic as it'll mean the land locked countries of the south Sahara will get access to fast, cheap, and reliable transportation, especially for freight. The lack of reliable road and rail infrastructure is a lot of what has held Africa's development back. I've watched videos of travellers who go via car or motorcycle down the west coast of Africa or try and drive across the Congo to go from west to east Africa, and it's bad. Many countries are barely connected at all. The infrastructure that exists was mostly built by European colonial powers to extract natural resources without any concern for regional connections or economic development.

Cape to Cairo Railway - Wikipedia

Mansa Musa - Wikipedia

What does art taste like?

It’s interesting, my video feeds on TikTok, instagram, and YouTube shorts have so little resemblance of each other. Totally different kinds of videos, not just topics or creators, but totally different genres. Nothing alike. It’s weird because I know all the videos I see on one are uploaded to the other two. I am not trying to get the algorithms to diverge. I interact in mostly the same way to the same videos on all three but get a really different experience. Given that they are mostly clones of each other this is surprising. Is that the case for anyone else? When I open divine.video I mostly get testing and debug videos. So no comparison yet.

I’m in Dubai for this creators summit and they brought us out in to the desert for an evening activity, which turns out included a neon horse.

Happy New Year

Quotes about the internet from the Stuck on the Platform: Reclaiming the internet book by Geert Lovink

Institute of Network Cultures | Stuck on the Platform: Reclaiming the Internet

There’s a debate raging over in the Bluesky world about whether or not infrastructure providers on ATprotocol should be neutral carriers or if people running things like PDS servers should be able to choose who they host. It’s an interesting read and worth thinking about. From a Nostr perspective it’s like arguing for a custodial system then being upset at the power dynamics that exist because of that. I’m curious what folks think. I think the poster kicked a hornets nest, not understanding how communities of users react to being told what they should or shouldn’t do with their own servers. Thoughts?

Gist

why-i-left-atproto.md

GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

This is a really interesting solution to the Nostr login system from @bigmarh View article →

Instagram reels has decided instead of showing me reels in languages I understand they’re going very poorly AI dub everything in to English. It’s so painful that it gets me to stop my endless scrolling.

So New Zealand got it's first Ikea today. It's national news.... last year we got a Costco which caused mobs of people and was national news for over a week. I know it's silly and consumerist of me, but it sure does make life easier. https://news.google.com/search?q=ikea%20nz&hl=en-NZ&gl=NZ&ceid=NZ%3Aen

No shade to the microblogging twitter like apps but we’re seeing a wave of new apps that take Nostr in to being the universal social app protocol. We’re learning what Nostr native means. View quoted note →

New version of the diVine released to TestFlight. This one focused on lists. I think we should do more with lists in Nostr.

Anthropic released a new model, Opus 4.5 and i'm playing with it. I had it generate some docs for a server i'm working on setting up, and it created a docx file which was nicely formatted instead of a markdown file.

Nostr’s core are the developers who build all the apps and servers and other tech we need to make it work. Eventually I hope the tech eventually fades in to the background as users come for the community they can find. We can do better as a developer community. One of the projects I’m working on through And Other Stuff is making Nostr a better place for developers. The first step is to listen and learn, to do that we’re working with the open source support group superbloom. Please fill this out if you’re helping build nostr and share.

Nostr Community Survey

If someone speaks fluent Japanese, Chinese, and Thai we would love to translate this in to those languages in order to reach more devs.