"What do I think is fun? Does it really coincide with beer ads?" "Fear and status are, in a sense, drugs, and if you had a choice between smoking cannabis every day or being on fear and status every day, I’d definitely recommend the cannabis."

Free-Man's Perspective

Hustled Through Life

Most people, sad to say, are too rushed, frightened, and confused to think about what they really want out of life. They are hustled through school...

A lot of people when they talk about solving societal problems jump straight to suggestions about fixing education. That almost never works. Even when the correlation is there, the causality is usually the other way around (rich societies have more money to spend /waste for education, they are rich first). There are many reasons why it does not work, but one view is useful. Information is abundant. The teacher in school does not need to read a book to us, we can read ourselves, or let AI describe that. The way to learn is to engage with a topic. In other words pay attention. The teachers know this and repeat it to students. "Pay attention!" We don't pay attention to boring, uninteresting stuff. We need to be engaged with it first. Is it a date to remember or a fundamental law that we need to understand in order to finish our project that we're engaged in. It used to be that information was scarce. With printing press, information started to be free. That was accelerated with internet. What became more important is how to apply the information. Now with AI, this is also demonetized. Now it's only about our attention. The teachers in school direct our attention. But they often have to drive it to some centrally planned content(*). Which is boring, often useless at least during childhood when it's presented and thus forgotten before we actually need it. The only superpower remains - where do we put our attention? Can we actually control it or is it controlled by apps, advertisers and propaganda? "If they lose our attention, they lose their power" (by @jack ) It is crucial step in The Merge, but I'm not spoiling anything more. (*) Also known as mandatory curriculum. It's quality is similar any other "service" provided by the state. Remember your experience at the DMV, or trying to call the tax office. Yes, same quality.

I think this concert / festival season is the last one where we can experience music more or less untouched by AI. Of course not everyone will use AI to make music, but our perception will change because music as whole will change. Same happened to visual art, even if we look at old masters that definitely have not used AI, we have all seen AI remixes, we relate what we see as based on context of AI visual art. I'm not saying it is good or bad, but it's obvious that music will change a lot. Go and enjoy the old one!

Few people know - oxytocin's effects are context-dependent. They can promote in-group favoritism while increasing out-group hostility.

Just learned about @Samiz. What's the real range of BLE? How close do the users have to be? (I have only one Android device with me, so I can't try). Should we make a reticulum based version? Or add reticulum support?

A look at free banking in the 19th century and how it relates to today. We can build it with Cashu. And it might have some nice properties. Admittedly a bit too long, but I think this perspective is interesting and is not much known. If it's too long for you to read, there's also a text to speech audio version that supports value4value, links at the beginning of the article.

Cashu: Bitcoin freebanking – Juraj Bednar

Writing an article on free banking in USA in 19th century is interesting. I wanted to illustrate it on a story of a businessman coming from New York to San Francisco with his banknotes. He travelled by sea. Oh wait, the Panama canal was not built yet, I did not want him to go all the way around south America, that would have taken 4-6 weeks. So train on land, right? Nope, transcontinental railroad not built yet. Towards the end of the free banking era, he could have taken a ship to Colon, Panama, then train through Panama railway to Panama city and then another boat. Before the Panama railway, people would go on a mule and quite often die, the jungle of Panama was not very safe. I am very grateful for air travel and the Panama canal. And the free banking is coming back with Cashu, stay tuned for the article.

Know some normies that don't yet know about Nostr? Perfect, don't tell them.

There's this completely unfounded cypherpunk nostalgia (*) among some bitcoiners. (*) Nostalgia: we had a glorious past full of ideals and now the present is corrupt, we have relaxed on the ideals, we wish we went back to the good old times I think it's completely unfounded. We could not even imagine in our wildest dreams that we would arrive at the current moment. We had crampy slow mixmasters, command line encryption that no one used and fiat in envelopes and later centralized electronic gold custodians. You say that there are some services that require KYC, got corrupt by VCs and compliant, not really punk. That is true, but also these corrupted services did not exist at all in the before times you are so nostalgic about. Do we have more options or less? Definitely more. We are participating in an open decentralized project that emerged into sixth largest reserve currency in the world. And we are only beginning. Pissed about grandmas with ETFs? Even if you remove them, we are more than 1000x of what anyone expected. We thought we are going to be fringe like the 0.001% PGP users. We don't need everyone to be cypherpunk. Let others do what they want, we're already winning our game. Their game? Not playing, sorry, too boring.

Contemporary life. Fiat art.