I wonder which of the countries that we have right now is the most genocidal of all the states that there are? There's a few contenders, and of course it's normal for states to be genocidal. A non-genocidal state would be quite an achievement! But there's always a ranking.

Can you feel it yet? It's nearly that time. I get so excited during the run-up. Halvening is coming 🎵 Halvening is coming 🎵 Halvening is coming 🎵 There's only the real thing.

Website for custom-product auto-fills the order on the checkout page with a 5% off code. Meanwhile, in the header, it says "Use code SAVE10 for 10% off" Can't use two codes at once, so delete the auto-5% and add the header-suggested 10%. Their "Buy 100 get 100 free" option was pretty obvious, but the second option that appeared after adding the order to just change that to 200-free wasn't. Needed to notice the button appeared and click it for some reason. That one had a price on it, but the price was crossed out on a "sale" free I guess? 🤔 Strange way to do pricing. Get like 60% cheaper per unit for noticing things and knowing how to use websites. Maybe it's designed to make me feel clever like I got a good deal.

Building new channels Building my new Lightning node (Under Tor with Umbrel this time) took *way* longer than I had hoped. Blockchain download was long, and hard-drive failures were oft. In the end I had to replace hard-drives two times and the entire mini-PC once coz it just wouldn't stop overheating. But it is finally done, just at exactly the same time as the hard-drive of my old node failed. I have managed to move the wallet data to the new node, with only a few weeks downtime, and other than apparently one of my peers is offline now I think that's worked. In the two years or so of the old node running it helped with a total of about 3 transactions. So the plan is still to shut this node down and build a new one unassimilated with the old IP addresses/IDs. I'd like to be more useful to the network with the new node than one and a half transactions a year. I don't really care about making any sats profit from it, just wanna contribute to the liquidity flow and keep the channels balanced. But I have no idea how to open channels which might do that, or about any search systems that could find them. Anyone got any advice?

Looking at satellite.earth and this seems ludicrously easy to self-host. I'm posting this from a self-hosted one I just built in the last 15 minutes. It's lovely, it's got the microblogging stuff on one column and reddit style communities on the other column and some kind of pay-by-lightning-for-media-hosting. And the Nostr thing where it's all just the same account as if I logged in with Snort or Iris is still really cool. #nostr #satelliteEarth #satelliteWeb #selfhost

People who want an algorithm to pick the best social media posts for them but who drive to a supermarket rather than let an employee choose their bananas.

Is World War Three bullish 🐮 or bearish 🐻 ?

The UK used to be able achieve things, like even world-domination. And now they can't even build a railway line.

Oh. Iris is just an amazing amount better than Snort was. Nost starts to look viable. Not embedding a Peertube isn't perhaps unexpected: How does it deal with a youtube embed? that is already obviously better.

Snort started getting weird about asking for a PIN I didn't want to give, and it was easier to look and see if there are simply better clients not asking such annoying questions so I asked the chat-bots. Perplexity AI tells me that iris dot to might be good. This does seem pretty nice as it goes. Do you know I made a bitcoin cartoon in VR? If this embeds from PeerTube then Iris is my new client now and I love Nostr portability quite a lot more:

Dalliance Network

Starship Schrödinger's Destiny V0.3 - Payment

Yatra tries to collect some data from an alien planet, and ends up in a car-chase arguing about the meaning of money. There is also a 360/VR cut of...

There's a lot hanging on this: I make maybe one post a month to Nostr so it's all up for grabs. Does anyone see it? I think it will fail to embed, and also that almost nobody will actually follow the link either.

Happy MayDay to all the Americans out there. Don't let international consensus stop you celebrating four months late, you do you! Up the workers!

Haven't logged in since they blocked my twitter-to-rss robots ages ago, but fully deleted my Twitter accounts today. Not gonna be giving 'em biometrics or attaching my bank acounts or helping them train the AI thanks. They can't even be trusted with shitposts any more.

Bloomberg.com

X Plans to Collect Biometric Data, Job and School History

X, the social network that used to be known as Twitter, updated its privacy policy to include a new kind of user data it plans to collect: biometric.

Well I say deleted. "Deactivate" is the only option they present really. 😕 🤷

Episode 11 of my "Observers" cartoon in which the aliens discover a planet where the people squabble while their planet is on fire.

I was out at a friend's place this weekend. They've got a tiny bit of land. Growing their own food, planting an orchard, solar panels to go mostly off-grid. They're selling some power back to the grid at times, but seemed dismissive as though it wasn't really enough cash to be worth doing. And I also suspect it's more accounting-trick than actual-power-distribution that means they can turn off a gas boiler or anything. When I wondered about running a bitcoin miner instead, they looked fairly offended. These green folks can have a visceral reaction to Bitcoin's energy consumption. Didn't get into it. But really, if you hate Bitcoin's computing power being run from oil-burning generators: best thing you can do is take the free wasted solar energy you already have and out-bid the oil-burners in the hashing market. The oil-burners will have to stop burning the oil if they can't sell profitably, and if everyone else was mining with their excess solar they wouldn't stand a chance with their expensive oil. And if you want Bitcoin's price to go down, so it can't justify so much hash-rate, best thing to do is get some of the coins and sell them to make the price go down. I dunno the actual amount of stranded-power they have so dunno what the economics would be really. Looks like you'd need about 3000 watts to run the machine, and if the power is stranded and so otherwise-wasted or free, then it will be profitable to run it whenever the power is there. Roughly two grand or so for the hardware to get about 10 dollars a day in current prices. You'd pay for the miner in about about ten months then be earning 10 dollars a day after that. Or more. Or less. Depending what the price does. Also you'd have to reduce that by all the time you have to turn it off coz it's dark or you need the power for the washing machine and lights and kettle or whatever. It may only be viable in summer. But every satoshi you earn and sell lowers the price, and reduces the proportion of Bitcoin which is mined by carbon-burning.

Things looking bad for Binance-coin. It went up 3x in about 2 weeks back in Feb 2021. A move that looks entirely likely to reverse shortly, dropping it 75%. No support between 210 dollars and 45 dollars really. Don't have an account anywhere I can short it though I don't think.

When Channel Four first launched the show "Big Brother" I thought, that name is going to corrupt the meaning of the Orwellian phrase. Little did I expect the more lasting consequences. Copy-cat shows piped up, and since the stars were so talentless they were incredibly cheap to make. When it became so cheap and engaging to make Reality TV that no other types of TV could be justified, we passed the Reality TV event horizon. They saturated the culture with mass-drivel. Soon, the only people who could be elected president or prime minister or even MPs were the kind of vapid uninteresting nobodies that reality TV feeds upon. First Trump, then Johnson, and then all the others. Not only did they saturate our airwaves, now the reality TV stars also filled the corridors of power. The end was inevitable after that. The mega-scale problems facing our civilization would have been difficult even with our best minds unleashing our utmost effort. Instead we had reality TV stars arguing about conspiracies directing effort at walls and garden-bridges and vanity projects. It is too late for our world now. I broadcast this message to the galaxy only in the hope that any who find it can avoid this terrible memetic hazard for their own culture. Burn this planet, and never let the phrase "Reality TV" be uttered in all your galactic empire. It is the kind of mind-virus that can collapse civilizations.