A while back I read an interview with the mathematician Conway where he said something that I regularly think of. To be a great mathematician, you have to be comfortable with something not being finished, not knowing when it'll be finished or whether it'll ever be finished (by you). You might work on a proof for years, not knowing whether you'll actually solve it. Whenever I have anxiety around some unfinished project at work, I think of this quote. I'm not a mathematician, but we can all learn to accept ambiguity and incompleteness. I'm fact, the mathematician Gödel, showed that every conceivable mathematical framework is incomplete, because it contains unprovable statements.

Quite a while back, I read about how the #Svelte devs used JSDoc type hints together with the #TypeScript compiler to add types to Svelte while keeping the actual code #JavaScript. I've decided to do the same with the #XMPP library Strophe.js

GitHub

GitHub - strophe/strophejs: Strophe.js is an XMPP library for JavaScript

Strophe.js is an XMPP library for JavaScript. Contribute to strophe/strophejs development by creating an account on GitHub.

Strophe now contains type declaration files generated from the JSDoc type hints (not yet released). My experience is a bit mixed. Writing JSDoc types is more verbose and feels a bit more clunky than writing TypeScript. But on the other hand, you avoid introducing a compilation step and the code itself doesn't have to change much. For relatively small libraries like Strophe it's worth considering.

Any #neovim or #vim fans here? Took me a while, but I've finally gotten comfortable with using the :terminal feature from Neovim. Being able to use vim keybindings to search terminal output and to copy it into a vim buffer is a game changer. Bonus, now I don't ever need to leave vim!

gm nostriches The German word for mermaid, "Meerjungfrau" literally means sea-virgin. Makes me think of a joke my dad used to tell. Two fishermen sit in a small boat when one makes a catch and pulls out a beautiful red-headed mermaid. He whistles to himself and takes a good look at her. Then he throws her overboard again. The other fishermen says "why?" He responds, "how?"

gm nostriches Do you know why coins have ridges on their edges, or in older cases text? It's to prevent coin clipping. A common form of debasement in the ancient world, where the edges of coins are shaved off and melted down to make new coins. The original coins were the hammered to flatten and spread them out, until they were their original width again. Pictured are two coins from my collection.

Had a chat with the neighbor this evening. He's married since 25 years and was telling me how he could never recreate what he has with his wife with someone else. I thought yeah, that's proof of work! You can't go back and redo the chain in a different way that matches the effort put into the current version.

Saw an AC/DC cover band in an old castle ruin today. ⚡

If Slayer wrote "Beat it". This is amazing. 🤯

Pretty good interview with Jaron Lanier from 5 years ago. Nothing particularly novel or mind-blowing (for tech-savvy folks) in his analysis, but he's fairly eloquent and answers well. What was especially interesting to listen to, were the part where he talks about alternative types of social media, in light of #Nostr (and other open platforms like #ActivityPub). Nostr might be a way to deconstruct the "manipulation machine".

Recently I've had to investigate the staking architecture of certain altcoins. It's interesting to compare their architectures and technical decisions with what I know of #Bitcoin. One thing I can say of the chains I've looked at, is that they're mainly larping as decentralized. Meaning that they're kinda decentralized, but if nation-state level pressure arose, they'd centralize and be compromised very quickly. One chain, Flow, has functions run by "admin" accounts with a TBD for "decentralization" of those functions. Another, Kava, has an upper limit of 100 for the number of validators necessary for establishing consensus. Bitcoin is in a completely different league.

"This is only temporary, unless it works" Applies not only to tech solutions, but also to government policies!

gm

There can be only one.

Just had to give my phone number and solve multiple captchas to join a Discord channel. I generally try to avoid giving my phone number to online services, but it gets more and more difficult. Years ago when I created my Reddit account, I didn't even have to give an email address. Only open source freedom tech like Nostr, XMPP and ActivityPub are still like that nowadays.

Taking a 5 hour train to Berlin tonight. I decided I'll pack light, leave my laptop at home and take a rest from work. As soon as I took my seat in the train I regretted my decision. I guess I'll be browsing Nostr for 5 hours then...

The year is 2025. Elon Musk has bought NVidia and made some changes to counteract freeloaders.

Twitter is really dropping the ball here by putting tweets and profiles behind a login wall. https://crisis.nl/nl-alert/nl-alert-detailpagina/?a=b18fcbbd-9be6-435a-981f-4461914760bf