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Ben Eng
ben@www.jetpen.com
npub1pv0p...mmng
Applied cosmology toward machine precise solutions to replace humans with autonomous systems in all domains.
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Ben Eng 1 year ago
If there was ever any doubt that Jack was in favor or tolerant of establishment censorship and narrative control using Twitter, we now see that Bluesky is in full-on censorship mode to suppress such opinions as "trans-women are men" and to suspend accounts who engage in such speech.
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Ben Eng 1 year ago
In today's climate of lawfare and the routine weaponization of “Show me the man and I'll show you the crime” (Beria's law), one should judge defendants accordingly. If someone is charged or convicted of crimes, ask who was the victim and what rights were violated? The state or a state agency or office has no legitimate standing to be a victim, because the state has no rights (only enumerated powers). The corollary to this is that unjust and immoral laws are also illegitimate. It is our duty to violate them. This includes laws that violate free speech, free expression, free association, privacy, and private property. This includes KYC, AML, surveillance, and lawful intercept.
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Ben Eng 1 year ago
Are there independent journalists on Nostr publishing current events and breaking news? To me that is the next gap to fill for Nostr to actually replace Twitter as the primary social media site, next to having a friends network that includes one's favorite people to follow.
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Ben Eng 1 year ago
@Guy Swann Maybe good idea to purchase a cheap GoPro-like device that you can covertly record the activity at the hotel room entry, while you are not present. Then, you never need to rely solely on hotel security cams.
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Ben Eng 1 year ago
"AI is going to replace your job" is equivalent to saying "power tools are going to replace your job".
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Ben Eng 1 year ago
On a Bitcoin standard, the volatility is always zero. One BTC is always valued at one BTC. That will never change.
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Ben Eng 1 year ago
The more times that I revisit my formulation of rights, the more confident I am in it. I truly believe I have added an essential component to this understanding, which was missing previously. That element is 'mutual recognition', a specialization of 'reciprocity'. The latter concept is also helpful in understanding the proper response to violation of rights.
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Ben Eng 1 year ago
I use Signal to chat with some acquaintances. I don't really believe it is secure in terms of privacy. It may implement some form of encryption. It may offer some form of authentication and data integrity. These measures may be an improvement over other messaging technologies. However, I don't remember ever generating a private key to use in Signal. I don't have custody of a private key that I control and keep safe and private. Therefore, I can only assume, not my keys, not my privacy.
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Ben Eng 1 year ago
We have come to understand, chiefly through the teachings of government education, that 'science' means the expert opinions espoused by an authority with more clout than you. I wonder if the style of how science is taught plays a role. Every science course spends a lot of time on the history and the scientists credited with discoveries. This puts the focus on persons more so than the method and the substance of each discovery. Putting aside shoulders and giants that are disregarded by venerating specific individuals, this style of teaching conditions the mind to believe what is told by people anointed with special mystique. In this way, we train a society of non-player characters. To train scientific minds, we must not tell them to believe what they are told. It is not even enough to demonstrate and have students reproduce well-known experiments. When we teach Newton, we need to finish with an apology that although he got it mostly right, his understanding was incomplete, and thus ultimately not entirely correct. Same for Einstein. Same for Bohr. Same for Schrodinger. Same for everyone and everything we know today. Everything we think we know in science today is in fact incorrect at the extreme limits of our understanding. Observations disagree with our best theories, and our best scientists cannot yet explain them. The emphasis of our training must be to teach scientists to not be married to our incomplete and incorrect knowledge passed on to us by our predecessors and the current crop of experts. Science is about seeking the truth, not about being told the truth. One of the most valuable ideas I didn't fully appreciate until only a few years ago listening to Sean Carroll's "Biggest Ideas in the Universe" series of videos was the distinction between an "effective theory" and a "fundamental theory". Almost everything we know is an effective theory. This means the theory is only useful within some narrow range of conditions. To teach the theory without that caveat is to lie by omission. Almost everything science students are taught suffers from lying by omission. That's why I often quip that everything we know today is wrong or everything we know today is a lie. I'd like to take the formal definition of "effective theory" and dress it down to business casual. I am reminded of second and third year in engineering Skule™, where most students learn for the first time the real-world relationship between theory and practice. First year is occupied entirely by maths-and-sciences 101. Most students have not ever built anything of their own design (without someone telling them how) at that point in their life. Even during first year, students start to see a difference in mentality between professors from math and science faculties as compared to engineering faculties. It was my first exposure to the routine application of "first order approximation", whenever any calculation became difficult. Engineering profs literally did this at every turn, and the 'good enough' quality of this spun my head. It was quick and dirty, and yet presented with the same mathematical formalism and rigor. Most importantly it was effective. Engineering is all about applying theory, but knowing when and how to apply rules of thumb for practical work. Eye opening was digital circuits. One would imagine that logic gates that only compute based on 1 (5v) and 0 (ground) are pretty well-behaved. A student naively building circuits will quickly realize that this so-called digital world is a mess of analog madness. WTF are capacitance, resistance, and inductance doing in this binary world? What do you mean I have to put a capacitor across the ground and 5v pin? Madness! Holy shit did the theory ever lie by omission. Reality is 'complicated'.
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Ben Eng 1 year ago
Seeing a sudden surge of interest in Nostr as Twitter users are posting their npubs. Is the Telegram CEO arrest opening eyes to the vulnerability of centralized platforms?
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Ben Eng 1 year ago
I google-searched "holesail peer to peer" and it found nothing relevant. Using brave search found it as the first result along with holepunch-related pages. Looks like Google is down-ranking or censoring this.
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Ben Eng 1 year ago
Does keet have a directory of rooms for users to find interesting rooms to join?