China has been deploying humanoid robots to its border with Vietnam [1]. This is just the beginning; expect this trend to proliferate to other countries over time and for the robots to become much more capable. This raises a lot of obvious concerns but one that jumps out to me is the removal of the general public from its own security. Security is being outsourced away from the group who ostensibly wants to be secured and at the sole discretion of a class of people codified into law as “above everyone else” (ie. the State). This is happening within the broader context of general automation where factories are being automated top to bottom in more and more industries. The general public has less influence in society at an unprecedented scale. In AI circles there’s always been the concept of the “alignment problem” where researchers are worried about advanced AI being aligned with humans but until we can figure out alignment between groups of us there’s no real “extra” threat posed by advanced AI for the vast majority of people. 1.

South China Morning Post

UBTech humanoid robots to patrol China-Vietnam border crossings

The initiative features the industrial-grade Walker S2, billed as the world’s first humanoid robot capable of replacing its own battery.

One of the most important and influential papers of the last decade was “Attention is all you need” and people are out here giving all their attention to Meta and TikTok. 🙄😂

Writing open source privacy software (legally protected by first amendment; see Bernstein v USA) and posting effectively politically incorrect jokes (also legally protected by the first amendment) resulted in jail time. At no point did they have control over anyone else’s funds. This case shows a clearly corrupted justice system. This happened to all of us in this community and we would do well to take lessons from Phil Zimmerman [1]. It will not get better on its own. The least you can do is talk to your friends and family about the need for privacy and free speech and show how both are under attack. If capable, build better systems. We all have a role to play. #FreeSamourai 1.

Phil Zimmermann - Wikipedia

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Wall St entered the game when Bitcoin was at $42k. If they’re getting rinsed there’s a chance we’ll retest those levels. Not my base case. Not financial advice. And as always GFY. View quoted note →

After Bitcoin and Nostr the whole concept of “accounts” feels so archaic.

Don’t let media of any kind (news, social, etc) distract you. They thrive on your attention and in the end you’ll have many hours/days/weeks of frustration and resentment to show for it. What has become possible with AI these days is nothing short of insane and now is the time to build. That nagging problem you’ve had with that product or service the last few years? Replace it. In the last two weeks I’ve stopped listening to any podcasts, browsing hacker news, and anything similar and in that time I’ve built two separate production grade systems to solve real problems I had both at work and personal life. One of them replaces software I used with family for years and the other was something entirely new that saves me a lot of headaches at work. Minimal dependencies and none on third party platforms. And although I’ve been writing software for two decades I built these without writing a single line of the code. Full test suite, manually reviewed, etc but the point is that we’re at a point where almost anyone can do it. Most of that was written while I was doing other things like eating lunch, in a meeting, or cooking. Don’t wait for someone else to build your app for you.

Learning out loud here: I love Nostr and the community here. Relatively high signal, customizable (even to a fault 😂), extendable, etc. Because I wanted Nostr to grow and compete with the activity on platforms like X for a while I had a goal of having some kind of interaction on Nostr every day whether it was a post, comment, repost, or a handful of zaps. On reflection I’d prefer a relatively inactive but thoughtful and thought provoking feed. I don’t need the dopamine rush of a firehose feed. I don’t usually want to contribute to a firehose. There’s a great cohort of builders, artists, cryptographers, shit-posters that you can filter for and have a great experience and in that narrow view it’s already won the social media wars in my eyes. I may hop on Nostr 20 times a day or go a week without opening a client but it won’t be because of any vanity metrics. Touching grass is real. Distractions are real. Lifespans are real.

Freedom tech just hits different. You can build your own payment system in whatever way works for you and without asking. Imagine building something like this on the legacy fiat rails… View quoted note →

Hollow words. Even if they pinky promise not to target developers they can always change their mind. They can also be replaced by the next administration who could reverse course. Notice how they used the word decentralized? That’s a sliding scale for one thing and in any case they don’t mention privacy which is the one thing most needed at this point in time. View quoted note →

Be prepared. The world is becoming overly hostile to bitcoin. “Then they fight you” is definitively here. ETH and the other shitcoins are not a threat to TradFi so they’ll embrace it in short order. It’s a captured network already. Vitalik et al will slip in some backdoors and some AML protections because they can. Few people on that network will mind and TradFi will love it because it appeases the regulators. Bitcoin? It will become prohibitively expensive (in terms of risk) to use in a sovereign way and all the normies will flock to the easily manipulated ETFs. Nations might still move forward in selling international trade with it but along the way they’ll squeeze every sat they can from the plebs. Saylor has done a great job pulling coins off the market in a sly way pretending to be in it for the “thermodynamically sound money” but in the end he’s going to hand over all of that stash to the government.

European countries and the EU have accelerated their crackdowns on the internet this last year. View quoted note →

Been doing a lot of “save in bitcoin and focus on your craft” lately but hoping to go back to “focus on bitcoin and save your craft for later” soon enough.

@OpnState warned us that FATF was working on this months ago on the @Stephan Livera podcast. It’s happening. We can also fully expect our beloved tools like Electrum to come under attack any day now. Keep building, anon. The politicians only know how to do the wrong thing. Don’t expect them to help. View quoted note →