Panel talking about dark markets on nostr. Nostr can be quite anonymous and encrypted and connected to payment via bitcoin. Can it therefore do Silk Road? Allow anonymous markets? Nobody wants to publicly advocate for selling illegal drugs, but yeah, sure, people could do that. There's even protocol types for market places. Relay owners might get into legal issues if they are forwarding illegal market listings. But this is true in general, there are also illegal images and even illegal text. Nostr relays and Devs might find themselves in legal trouble anyway, due to the general legal crackdowns on internet requiring age proof and id on websites obstensively to protect kids. These are freedoms we all need to fight for. Perhaps brains will drain to more free jurisdictions? Devs move to where open development is legal? Not the panel at least. They want to say at home. #nostr #nostrshire #darkMarkets

Angor is a crowdfunding protocol for nostr and bitcoin. Dan here is building it. Kickstarter without middle men. Accountability is key. What stops the fund raiser just fleeing with the coin? Funds are programmed to be released in stages, time locked in a multisig. So if they aren't meeting milestones, investors can withdraw. If the founders are buying lambos instead of building, just cash out at that point. Permissionless and decentralised, no servers except nostr relays and bitcoin nodes. No third party's claiming 30 percent fees. The system is a nostr client scanning relays for investment object types. Allowing investment into the funding contracts and subscription to updates. #nostr #nostrshire #angor

Black Coffee from lnbits likes internet of things, but doesn't like the way it tends to work with centralised servers and spying companies running them. But what if your coffee pot and lights and smart plugs were nostr instead? Nobody can cut your machine off, it has it's own keys and encryption, you could even ruin your own relay to talk to it instead of using public relays. Remote control without having to expose the home network. You could even make it require zaps and so make a vending machine. Demonstration by sending lightning requests to the coffee pot on stage works better than the mikes that have been feeding back this afternoon 😆 #nostr #nostrshire #internetOfThings

Speaking of kids, here if a kid who is building a nostr gaming system. Not by vibe coding, by learning how to use unity. Gamestr.io is the marketplace he's building. Submitting a protocol improvement proposal for gaming types. His gaming market is first going to feature a Tetris clone that broadcasts scores as that new type. Talented kid named Sam. #nostr #gamestr #nostrshire

Wouter constant is talking about permissionlessness. Nostr is a protocol that doesn't need some central server to authenticate your requests. Which is good. But this means that, say, children can use it without parents permission. Online safety act and others are closing down the internet to protect them kids. So can nostr have accounts that do need permission? Can it be made kid safe? Of only to satisfy crazy governments under parent pressure. Weboftrustfoundation exists to try and build kidstr, some kind of nostr for children. Mostly just asking questions so far. How can it work? How can it avoid labelling vulnerable people to exploit? #nostr #permissionlessness #nostrshire

Panel asking what nostr doesnt fix? Relay centralisation could enable censorship, and the UI asking users to manage private keys is tricky. Could one app become a centralisation choke point? They say no. Agreed. Nostr has very good migration here, if one app goes bad it's easy to move. Privacy is not solved here, since almost all content is public anyway, by design. But since so users have public keys, it's a step towards enabling privacy. Agreed, and at least clients won't generally spy on every mouse click and scroll pause. No mention of the thing I think most important, that censorship resistance means poor moderation that means bullying, spam, and harassment. That's tricky to solve I think. The fediverse model seems more suitable for good moderation. #nostr #nostrshire

Marti Malmi talks about cloud flare being down but nostr staying up. Decentralised software isn't supposed to have these single points of failure, even though some clients failed due to dependency on it. Media files in particular aren't as decentralised as we might hope. Can we decentralise that better? Content addressed media available from many servers should be better. #nostrshire

Derrick Ross from Shakespeare reckons there open web is in trouble because you got to be a dev to build a website. He seems to think his app Shakespeare can make it easier to make a web app by using ai 😕 "Build me a Twitter like website" is the kind of instruction he thinks it will handle. A local app running on your own machine, though calling the big ai model apis. Including if you have the power at home to run deep seek or open models. I find myself suspecting it'd be hard for vibe coders who aren't devs to tell if they had vibe coded buggy insecure software or not. #vibeCoding #nostershire

Nostrshire panel talking about Adam Curry's podcast2.0 , more tags in your podcast rss for payments, in the hope it can fund producers. Did you know besos takes 75 percent of all Audible money? Actors and writers sharing scraps from Amazon's table. Hot news is that keysend tags are out of fashion and the bolt11 lnurl invoices are taking over. Podcast platforms can be bridged through nostr to enable cross platform comments and discovery but making users create key pairs is to complex the fountainfm guy reckons. Wants to hide and shatter l abstract away that complexity. #nostr #nostrshire #podcasting2.0

AJ at nostrshire ding a good job explaining why security matters and why we have to get off the surveilled and privately owned media #aj #nostr #nostershire

I'm at nostrshire, the first nostr conference in the UK. Ben arc kicks it off talking about the width of the ecosystem. #nostr #nostrshire

Went to see [Rob Manuel](

Bluesky Social

Bluesky

) doing his anon_opin show. The very first one. And my opinions are officially so great I won the very first prize. A jar of his queen themed Maam-olade. Mostly for provoking Doctor Who discussions and having head-shaving mistakes evident I suspect. It was a fun night in a tiny pub with mostly old grey gen-Xers agreeing with each other about trivial things and laughing. Excellent stuff. Nice to see you again Rob. Good times were had.

So everyone's wondering if there's a financial crisis coming from the popping of the dotcom bubble. Here's a little chart of those events, projected as though repeated from last week's stock market top. You'd be looking at 25 to 50 percent drop over a year or three, taking S&P index down to four to five thousand or so over 2026, since that's what they were. I think it's at least 30% likely to play out roughly like that, and am positioned such that I'm happy either way.

Facebook turns out to know internally what we all knew from the outside. Like 10% of their money comes from showing your grandma ads for scams. https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortune-deluge-fraudulent-ads-documents-show-2025-11-06/

I see Sir Kier Starmer thinks that it's "inappropriate" for a music festival to have a band that campaigns for peace and an end to genocide, but that it's perfectly appropriate and may "alleviate" a "grave threat” for a country to bomb nuclear sites in a another country! He thinks daubing some paint on airplanes as a protest is terrorism, but that using those planes in reconnaissance to support an ongoing genocide by Israel is a good and normal use of them. What a fucking weasel, absolute death worshiping fuck-knuckle. Goddamn Labour party loves them some illegal wars of aggression in the middle east. Can't get enough of it. Please fuck off Sir Starmer.

Seems to be some sort of conference for bankers and CEOs and politicians and suits and squares going on in Vegas this week.

😆 Missile Air Defense As a Service MAD AS you like. In some ways a government paying by a subscription for a missile defense service has been inevitable since Reagan started the mission to Privatize Literally Everything. The government will own nothing, and be happy. States must do only one thing: Pay money to rich people to get them to do the things. The idea of Reagan's Star Wars returning is pretty crazy in itself. That launching all those satellites would massively enrich the government's biggest donor is mostly just pretty typical corruption. But having the government pay to rent it out is just amazing. 🧑‍🍳 💋 Hey, if Russia and China outbid America during the hour they were launching the missiles, that's just the free market! Never really even know if it works without being attacked, but the rich owners get to extract the wealth from it all the same. Rentierism? In this economy? 🤣

Defence Industry Europe

SpaceX proposes subscription model for Trump’s Golden Dome missile defence system, reports Reuters

SpaceX is leading a proposal to contribute to President Donald Trump’s missile defence initiative, now called the “Golden Dome”.

I read "Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It" by Christof Koch. Interesting book which spends like 8 or 9 chapters detailing all the experiments which prove beyond much doubt that consciousness, and self awareness, is a thing done by a brain. It describes how perception is a construction of a description, has a chapter called "computational mind" And then spends the last two chapters describing why he thinks the mind can't be computed, because drugs have made him think experience is some kind of magic associated with highly interconnected causal structures. Apparently, he thinks, once things become interconnected enough they become able to cause things independently of the physics running those connections. Which is crazy, obviously. There's nothing causal in direct connections between neurons that isn't equally causal in modeled connections between virtual neurons. All his evidence in the book from neural MRI scans to the effects of psychedelic drugs and symptoms of strokes and disease point to the brain simulating a virtual reality which is the basis of perception. That simulated world in which we live is full of colour and shape and sounds and emotions and millions of mental constructs that are built to be correlated by the senses with the outside world, but are not equal to the world itself. We live in a dream constructed to correlate with reality. But then instead of taking the next step: That consciousness itself is a property of a simulated being inside that mental model of the universe, a property which the brain simulates and applies to the virtual self that's doing the experiencing inside that model, he jumps towards some magic implying pan-psychism or that sufficiently interconnected networks become causally self-complete for some reason nobody can fathom. Sure, colour and shape and emotions are all made up by the brain but experience can't be! For some reason. You see in truth dualism is false, in that there is no spirit realm in which ghosts animate the matter of the body somehow. Yet also, dualism is true, in that there is a simulated mental reality which we live in, computed by the brain in which all perception and experience are created, which is related-to but separate-from the unfolding complicated dance of energy that is the universe our bodies interact with. People take some DMT trip, and the model of the universe emulated by their brain collapses and breaks. Their virtual simulated self inside their mind has these experiences of being one with the universe or the experience of feeling dead yet conscious or whatever, and these hippies think that the broken down simulated experience is real and reflects how consciousness is more fundamental than the atoms that make up the neurons in their brain. Instead of realizing it shows them that their experienced universe is a simulacrum, they think they get a more direct experience of reality somehow. A consciousness more pure than any mere base atom. "Then I am myself the world" is a great title. Everything you ever experience is created and simulated in your brain like a dream, the whole universe is inside your head. Even the fact of experience itself. But that isn't the conclusion Koch reaches somehow, he just jumps from describing the evidence that this is so straight into ascribing super-causal magic consciousness to particular arrangements of atoms that integrated information theory suggest have high correlation, and thinks therefore conciousness is itself the entire universe. Ah well, fun book. I like arguing in my head with authors that are wrong. #reading #books #consciousness #thenIAmMyselfTheWorld

The Python library "YFinance" decided to force an upgrade. They did this by making the old version report a rate-limit error on every request. Confusing. Would have been better if they reported a "old version not supported" error or something instead. So that wasted some time. That upgrade had dependencies which have dependencies upon a newer version of Python, so needed a whole OS upgrade really. Which failed. Bricking the Rasp PI it was running on. Oh well, complete rebuild of the whole machine and software it runs from scratch then. That took all day yesterday. At the end I notice that the touch-screen doesn't touch. Needs drivers. The drivers haven't been upgraded in six years. They brick the machine again when trying to install them on Debian Trixie. Luckily, I kept good notes and could rebuild it all again much faster with no mistakes and knowing what to do and all the required custom software changes already made and saved. So now I spent a whole day on annoying upgrade work because a single Python library decided to break the old version, and my Rasp Pi has no touch-screen. Which isn't ideal for a machine mostly operating as a fancy light switch for all the LED strips in the house. This happens all the time in software. Millions of man hours wasted, so much hardware dumped because the drivers get abandoned. In other news: Microsoft abandons Windows 10 any day now. Good luck to everyone faced with doing that lap on the upgrade treadmill. I still have more work to do to bring up this RaspPi's software to where it was, but it'll have to wait, other things to do. At least it's back to sending me the nightly finance report and controlling the LED strips. If without a touch screen now.

CW: Doctor Who - Lucky Day --- Amazing. What a show. All the best episodes barely have The Doctor in them at all. 😆 Great to see Millie back. I love Ruby so much, she's brilliant, and to see her so happy and then traumatized and heartbroken is a wrench. What a bastard. Unbelievable levels of idiocy. Throw it away with Ruby just for clicks. 🥴 Great scary lizard dogs and also great fake lizard dogs. After putting the internet fans into Lux, RTD is putting the internet trolls as villains into Lucky Day. Don't really get why Conrad wouldn't eat the antidote though. If he knows he's lying, he ought to lie about that too. Only reason to not take the vaccine is if you believe the lies you're spouting. Best show of the run. So far.