Well, I’m going on live Indian financial news in 40 minutes. Scheduled this a few days ago. Now it’ll be during the opening volley of a war which I’ll be asked about. 🤷‍♀️

Today I traded in my old Hyundai for $500 and drove away with a Toyota with a working air condition feeling like:

Am I the only one in the world that doesn’t love the movie Akira? With its violence and gore and dark psychological aspects, it helped pave the way for mainstream adult animation. And it had amazing visuals for the time, with iconic aspects that were replicated elsewhere. So like, it’s objectively important in the history of the medium. No doubt about that. But in terms of watching it, I don’t find it subjectively engaging, nor do I find myself recommending it like “you gotta watch Akira”.

I know it’s popular to be all-in on moral panic these days, but I think Bitcoin is in a good technical place right now. I’m bullish. I think Core devs are doing good work. And I’m glad that people can run Knots or otherwise fork if they don’t like Core. That’s part of what makes Bitcoin robust, and gives useful market/adoption signals. Mining pool centralization isn’t great, but there are plenty of optional tools to use more if it interferes more with the network, and economic signals (eg the possibility of high fees for censored transactions) exist for precisely that context, to help it get unstuck if it gets stuck. I think current functionality is great, but I also think CTV+CSFS is a sensible upgrade on top of that if folks end up coalescing around it. Sometimes the sun is out. ☀️

The past couple decades of macro debates, summarized.

Currently checking out my copy of The Bushido of Bitcoin by @Alekandar Svetski. I got to see it in draft form, but it’s nice to see it out in print. A treatise on virtue, basically. The forward by Ross Stevens is absolute fire; that part wasn’t available when I checked out an earlier version.

The combo of 1) people getting sucked into digital echo chambers and 2) people believing hallucinating AI answers without checking, is going to take a lot to change. We are in an environment where if things *look* official enough, we’ll usually just instantly believe them. Since nobody has the time or inclination to check everything. Like, someone can just tweet a picture of me at a conference, and put a quote next to it, and tons of people will take it at face value. People won’t stop and ask “is this actually a quote of hers from this conference?” It could be years ago, out of context, or not said by me at all, but one would never know since it seemed legit enough. The current counter to this is basically to assume most things are potentially wrong in part or in full, unless further verified. But the risk there is people get detached and don’t bother researching things. One thing you can do is go through your follow list and remove people/entities who don’t have a high signal ratio. In other words, keep people you agree or disagree with that are locked in and high signal, but remove those who parrot things they don’t understand or spread misinformation on a regular basis. In an environment of endless quantity, it is more important than ever to elevate quality.

Sometimes when I find myself not finishing a book but am still curious to at least know the ending, I ask AI to summarize it for me. But today I wanted to remember something from a book I fully read many years ago, and asked AI to summarize it for me, and noticed that it was totally wrong at multiple points. Dramatically so. I pointed out that it was wrong and it’s like “my bad, here’s the right answer.” So I asked how it could confidently make mistakes like that. Like what specifically happened in this case? And it talked about how it extrapolates from stories and thus if something avoids the usual tropes, it could get it wrong. It said if I ask for citations it could help it prove its accuracy (which I didn’t think to do for fiction, I mean the entire objective answer is in one book, there’s not like multiple conflicting answers here). So I was like “okay what happened to (this character) at the end? With citations.” It gave me a wrong answer with misleading citations. So I pointed that out. And it was basically like “oh wow, you’re right, I know that is disappointing to happen twice.” And some more boilerplate. So I asked “I mean, I should just disregard all your prior summaries, right?” And it more or less was like “Yeah. But we can revisit them if you want.” By the end I felt like JK Simmons in Burn After Reading.

One of the biggest unlocks I’ve had over the past year is just taking almost all meetings while walking outside.

In five years of going to bitcoin conferences, I’ve literally never had a truly bad experience with someone. People who fly out to be at places are almost always reasonable. To put this in context, I’ve had thousands of brief meetups over the years and nothing truly bad happened even once. The worst outcome was I had someone be slightly awkwardly clingy a few times, but nothing worse. So this is a 99.9% social uptime situation, and even the 0.1% is still okay. I am kind of at the top end of the gray zone of security. Super-celebs have security teams and don’t walk around on the conference floor. I do personally walk around the place by myself (which yes is a friction as I get dozens of interactions and photo requests and such), and when offered security by the conference to get out, I turn it down since I find it very hectic but manageable and worth it. People who are negative (and usually anon) online tend to either not go to these events or don’t show their face if they are there. That seems on brand. No skin in the game. This is a positive space, and I think we’re going to win.

Here’s one of my random Nostr Lyn stories. I have a friend who lives in Vegas, and we previously agreed that if I come out here, I would try In-N-Out Burger. This chain is not available on the east coast but of course I always hear of it. Never had it before. And I’m about as introverted as one can be at these events; I start to get overwhelmed by the sheer bandwidth. So I skipped the high-end events that were happening last night, and went to In-N-Out Burger. Away from the conference. Just peace and conversation with a friend. One of my favorite moments this week!