AI is a bubble. AI right now is loud. “AI powered” this, “AI powered” that. AI is a buzz word, a marketing hype, a shiny sticker slapped onto products to sell. The ‘bubble’ is not the technology itself, it is the attention economy around it. Databases were once exciting, now boring. Search engines were once magical, now assumed. Cloud computing were once exotic, now is invisible until it breaks the internet. AI will stop being a bubble, when AI is invisible, when AI is taken for granted, when AI is boring. View article →

Alternatives are not always better, but it is always better to have alternatives. I’ve been putting together http://altweb.space, a small collection of alternatives. Not really aiming to “replace everything”, more like “here are other things out there, if you’re curious.”

Code & Codex started as a Substack newsletter. It went quiet for a while. I’m restarting it with a different publishing strategy. Substack is no longer the center, it’s just one distribution point. Dispatches are archived at jshamsul.com, mirrored on-chain via Paragraph, and relayed across Nostr. For Nostr specifically: essays are published here as long-form notes. I’m also reposting older dispatches so they live in the relay network. Just an experiment in permanence, redundancy, and open distribution.

Opening a browser tab and forgetting what you want to look up, is like entering a room and forgetting what is it you were supposed to look for. 👨‍🦳

Not sure why the text formatting is a bit off in this one.

Soon there’s going to be a cultural pushback against AI-generated code. Suddenly it’ll be “cool” again to write things the old way,.. not vibing, but the classic LSP-autocomplete way. Before that moment arrives, I’d like to propose a new label: “Bespoke, Handcrafted, Artisanal, Human-Made Software”™ 😎

CypherPunks are the Sufis of tech.

The elites, those in power, prefer a culture war, race vs. race, religion vs. religion,.. or even a gender war, men vs. women,.. Anything but a class war: the poor vs the rich. Political actors and social media platforms will amplify cultural division because they are emotionally powerful and easy to weaponise. Fear and hate keeps them in power. Identity-based conflicts create a fragmented working class, and unity among the poor is the elites’ biggest threat.

Start every game with GLHF, and end it with GGWP.

I might have jumped the gun on announcing Satslot a bit too early. The plan was to follow up with a few social media posts to build momentum. I was planning to create a press kit, and reach out to bloggers, and content creators in this niche. I wanted to spread the word across platforms, but something came up at work. That said, I’m picking things back up next week. There are still a few UI tweaks I’m refining. I am working on this feature that lets you download the entire Grid as a single collage image. Think of it as a kind of visual snapshot of Satslot’s evolution over time. In the meantime, I’m thrilled to see a few slots already claimed. You are the true early Satslot owners. Thank you for being part of the beginning. I don’t have a press kit ready yet, but here’s a blog post that goes deeper into what Satslot is all about:

jShamsul.com

Introducing Satslot

32 by 32 Grid Etched with Lightning ⚡️

View quoted note →

Announcing Satslot, 32 by 32 Grid, etched by Lightning.

Satslot

32 x 32 Grid Etch with Lightning.

Remember the Million Dollar Homepage? Back in 2005, Alex Tew built a website that consist of a million pixel arranged in a 1000×1000 pixel grid. Each 10×10 block of pixels is sold with $1 per pixel, minimum price was $100. I wanted to make something similar, but instead of 1 million dollar, I wanted 100 million Sats, the equivalent of 1 Bitcoin. That’s how Satslot was born. Inspired by Million Dollar Homepage, Satslot is a digital canvas consist of 32 by 32 square, each called a ‘slot’. Every slot can be acquired via Lightning payments, starting at 1,000 sats for the first 32 slots. The price increases with every batch of 32. Once you secure a slot, you can upload an image, name it, link to a website, and write a brief description, and you can update it anytime you want. To me, this is part art experiment and part tech experiment. I want to see what happens when the internet paints together, one slot at a time. It might turn into chaos, hopefully there’s beauty in that chaos. I’ll post more details soon.

Satslot

32 x 32 Grid Etch with Lightning.

Republishing some of my essays from my Substack Newsletter Code & Codex on Nostr, letting my words live in the open, not confined to a platform silo. View quoted note →

Trying out long-form post, just checking out highlighter View quoted note →

I wasn’t sure if I want to proceed with this at first, the project seems silly. Then I decided, what the heck, lets just try … View quoted note →

Let’s give a “welcome to Nostr” zap ⚡️ 👇 😁 View quoted note →

Doing my part to purple pill the folks over there.

You can't automate things you've never done before. Understanding precedes automation. Example: You can make Machines can classify billions of images, but you must first understand how to classify a single image. Automation scales what you already understand. Does this still hold true in the age of AI? WDYT?

Government shutting down social media during a major crisis is always counter-productive. Doing a social media blackout is the worst decision to make. Suddenly, the everyday social media users who are online only to get their memes, read artists gossips, buy product from their favourite influencers, get exposed to the crisis. Social media is a pressure valve, people use it for distraction, venting, and processing. When you remove it, the anger and frustration spills into the streets. The ruling government can try to take control of the narrative by flooding social media with counterpoints, or bringing up trivial issues to divert the people attention. But this needs to be done skilfully, as they will have to go against the algorithm. When social media algorithm prioritise outrage and sensationalism to gain virality, any content that tries to calm the narrative will struggle to gain traction. Worse still, when these algorithms that power your social media feeds are actively being manipulated, by certain people (perhaps a foreign government),.. who have access to manipulate it,.. who have a lot to gain from the destabilisation of the government that they are not in favour of. I can’t expect everyone to leave the comfort of the familiar social media that they are all currently on. I cannot tell everyone to just start sending Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays. But one advice that someone wiser once give me is this, when you see something starts to pop up online and everywhere, always ask yourself, “why am I seeing this now?”

You may not be able to change the world, but what you can do is not let the world change you. You may not be able to make the world better, but you can make someone’s world better. You can’t live forever, but your deeds will outlast you.