“Lightning stable channels” or how to introduce untrustworthy third parties to your Bitcoin transactions. Don’t let a third party tell you what your channel balances should be, anon.

Movies today are insulting to everyone with an attention span. We need meaningful dialogue again. View quoted note →

@Egge are you still running zapper.fun? Homepage loads but after putting in an npub the page just shows a spinner. Looks like it can’t connect to the default relays based on the console logs. Hopefully it’s just me.

Cellular automata (CA) are underrated. Most people’s experience with them are simply Conway’s Game of Life or similar setups. The topic is much deeper than that though. Some 2D CA are in fact Turing complete [1] and can be used to perform any computation (albeit inefficiently). So what? Why not just use python or if you're really bored use a transformer model? Because in this context it's not about doing the computation but rather what we can learn about computation in general. The beautiful thing about CA is that they are naturally visual and we can see emergent patterns at a glance while they work. First consider that ALL scripts, models, charts, etc. on computers are discrete. Then understanding the simplest discrete systems (ie. CA) may give us an idea of the limitations of the more complex ones. In fact, even simple, deterministic systems can produce unpredictable behavior [2]. And sometimes even complex rules don’t lead to complex output. It also turns out that there's a natural connection between convolutional neural networks and CA [3] so this touches on important topics in AI. This is the focus of my current research and I'm hoping to publish more on that eventually (not under this nym of course). I recommend more people get creative with studying cellular automata. —— 1.

Rule 110 - Wikipedia

2.

Rule 30 - Wikipedia

3.

arXiv.org

Cellular automata as convolutional neural networks

Deep learning techniques have recently demonstrated broad success in predicting complex dynamical systems ranging from turbulence to human speech, ...

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.

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.

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.

@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 →

Youtube has become unusable. I refuse to sign in to watch videos and now it’s refusing to show videos unless I sign in. GFY google.

Don’t let the AI break you, anon.

Futurism

People Are Being Involuntarily Committed, Jailed After Spiraling Into "ChatGPT Psychosis"

People experiencing "ChatGPT psychosis" are being involuntarily committed to mental hospitals and jailed following AI mental health crises.

An Internet connected door cam with microphone can be legally used against you? Shocking! Who could’ve predicted that?

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Amazon Ring Cashes in on Techno-Authoritarianism and Mass Surveillance

Ring founder Jamie Siminoff is back at the helm of the surveillance doorbell company, and with him is the surveillance-first-privacy-last approach ...

The government playbook: approve and encourage bitcoin ETFs, tell people they’ll have their fingers chopped off and they’ll lose their keys, praise “bitcoin treasury companies”, let banks custody and lend/borrow against it for fiat, and make the taxes complicated for direct usage. You’ll unsurprisingly reduce adoption. Throw in plenty of collaborative custody solutions so you can keep tabs on the ones who stay outside the system and suddenly bitcoin doesn’t seem so scary!

You can just buy things. Check out: - @Great Ghee for ghee - @SoapMiner for soap - @SweetSats for honey and syrup - @Oshi for nut butter and bars

Let’s get out and raise awareness, anon. Call, text, email, send smoke signals, hire a hooker, whatever it takes to get your Congresspeople’s attention just do it. View quoted note →