I really feel like I'm missing something about Cashu. @calle calls it digital cash, but you are reliant on a bank (mint) to cash out. They say it works offline, but it doesn't really because it doesn't prevent double-spending offline. This makes it a glorified IOU tracker, right? Privacy-preserving IOU tracker is cool, and a network of banks that used them would be even cooler, but calling it offline digital cash seems totally disingenuous to me. Tell me why I'm wrong? View quoted note →

Yesterday I finally took the plunge and downloaded Blender and started learning how to use it. I have been #3dprinting for a while but mostly I just print designs others have created, or made a few very simple designs using TinkerCad. But I finally found a project small enough to feel manageable and the time to do it. We have a sliding barn-style door in our kitchen that our two toddlers insist on slamming shut, often while the other one is in the doorway. I decided to design a simple clamp to fit on the top to keep it from closing. Here is the evolution of the design. The first was the wrong size and just fell off, the second added a little hat to keep it from sliding off but quickly broken, so the third beefed up the thickness and infill to make it stronger. And here's a video showing how it fits on: I'm already working on a second design to toddler-proof a couple of our cabinet drawers that the regular spring locks wouldn't fit on. This may be a slippery slope.

I have been finding AI really useful for coding, but this is a good reminder that AI benchmarks are not representative of reality, and developers cannot be trusted to accurately estimate their work, even after completing it 🙃

Bluesky Social

METR (@metr.org)

We ran a randomized controlled trial to see how much AI coding tools speed up experienced open-source developers. The results surprised us: Develo...

Starting a thread to coordinate a test of my social-key-backup tool with @lizsweig and @Hazey

@hzrd149 is there any way for me to report impersonators from Nostrudel?

I'm still looking for a few more folks to help me out with this! View quoted note →

I'm looking for a few people to help me test my social key backup tool for Nostr! Hoping to get at least 4 folks. I'm not going to actually back up my real key to you, I just want to run through the process with others and make sure it works for other people. You'll need python installed and some familiarity with the command line. If you'd be willing to help me out with this tomorrow please reply to this or send me a DM! And I'm considering creating a Nostr group for comms, lmk if there is a group chat tool you like.

I just completed a successful recovery of an nsec using my shamir's key sharing CLI. It's so satisfying as a programmer when you finally get your encryption and decryption code working together. The script is very basic, I'll probably rewrite it in Rust, but it proves out the core concept and gave me a lot of ideas about how to make this actually accessible to normal people and what other features and services would be nice to bundle with it. I'm still trying to come up with an umbrella term for this family of things (social key backup, social key migration, threshold-based consensus, etc.). The best I've come up with so far is "social keys" but I'm not sure if that makes sense. Does it makes sense to you?

Also I submitted my first git PRs via Nostr yesterday, it was pretty easy with ngit and https://gitworkshop.dev!

I set up nak bunker on my home server in docker yesterday, so I finally have a Nostr signer running on my own hardware. If anyone is interested in the compose file it's short enough that I'm just going to paste it here: services: nak: build: . command: bunker --persist --sec your-nsec-here wss://nos.lol volumes: - docker/nak:/home/nakuser/.config restart: unless-stopped I haven't taken the time yet to figure out how to use ncryptsec or something to keep my nsec encrypted at rest, if someone figures out how to do that in docker lmk. View quoted note →

Testing publishing from my new remote signer.

So I've been fascinated by Shamir's secret key sharing algorithm for several years, and I'm pretty convinced that self sovereign identity, while cool, is not actually the best option for decentralized social networks. Especially the incarnation of self-sovereign identity that relies on you keeping a secret, and also that secret must be stored on a computer. Like instead fully custodial or non-custodial keys I would rather my friends and family being the ultimate authority on which key is mine. I would do this with my Bitcoin wallet and other keys but *especially* my Nostr key because Nostr is a social network, so the real value is in the social connections we have on here. So in the worst failure mode where all my friends and family betray me and steal my identity... my social network is already dead. There was a group of folks who built a tool for breaking your key into shards and backing it up your peers on Secure Scuttlebutt several years back (https://darkcrystal.pw/). I've always wanted a version of it for Nostr and now that I'm a free agent I'm going to give it a shot. If you're interested in helping or trying it out when it's ready let me know in a reply or DM.

DWeb Camp is in Canada this year. Will I see any of you there?

DWeb Vancouver

DWeb Camp Cascadia, Aug 8-10th, Salt Spring Island

DWeb Camp Cascadia takes place August 8th to 10th, 2025, at the Salt Spring Island Farmers' Institute in the Southern Gulf Islands, BC, Canada. Jo...

If you are checking socials because your internet things are broken, you are not alone. Google Cloud is basically down.

It's been about 1 month since I started my solopreneurship journey aiming to do six product experiments in six months. I launched

SpoilerFree.gg

SpoilerFree.gg - CS2 Tournaments Without Spoilers

Watch CS2 tournaments without knowing the results beforehand. The best spoiler-free experience for Counter-Strike 2 esports fans.

about 10 days ago and have been monitoring the metrics on it since then. So far I haven't met my target of a 5% conversion rate, so I'm moving onto the next thing! I wrote some rough notes about it on my weblog. If you have any advice, thoughts, or questions I'd love to discuss! https://mattlorentz.com/weblog/2025/05/27/spoiler-free-gg-retro.html

Last week I wrapped up my employment with @rabble and the gang at Verse Communications. Over the past 3 years I got to work on https://planetary.social, https:/nos.social, and more recently a communities-focused social app codenamed Plur. Working to build healthier social media with such a diverse team and community was such a transformative opportunity for me, and I'm sure I'll always look back on it as an inflection point. For now I'm taking some time to work on my own projects. Probably not Nostr-related for starters, but I’ll share more when there is more to share :)