some notes and quotes i wrote down during trevor paglen's berlin talk tonight. "palantir is not so much a military technology company, it's a vision technology." "slop is the media that the attention economy forces people to create." "do you subscribe to the sublime idea of things that are beyond yourself?" "this is where it turns to magic. instagram. telepathy. some of it feels supernatural." [context: talking about getting a targeted ad right after having a conversation about that exact thing.] topics to follow up: - vilém flusser on technical images - the politics of llm training data - cia & russian psyop manuals buy his book:

Verso

How to See Like a Machine

Today our world is under the watchful and tireless eye of computer vision, with cam­eras and monitors tracing our every move. Furthermore, generat...

everything i love about cyberpunk is found in neuromancer and ghost in the shell.

the gov just restricted fable 5 under export control law. we've been here before. in the 90s strong encryption was classified as a munition and placed under arms export controls. the cypherpunks fought and won. read the cypherpunk library.

The Cypherpunk Library

The Cypherpunk Library

A personal collection of good public-domain reads. Free to read, free to keep.

weekend project: cypherpunkbooks.com one shelf for books, manifestos, essays, etc... built it for myself to keep everything I want to read and everything i love in one place.

i dislike how taboo discussions around money are in leftist activist circles. i see a lot of hand waving. 'money won't be needed in a post capitalist world.' 'money is the root of evil.' 'money is exploitation.' then the conversation ends. i wish it didn't go like this. money is not inherently evil. it's just a technology. just like language. a technology for transporting value across space and time. that's it. it doesn't have to be exploitative. the current monetary system is deeply corrupt. imo it's the source of a lot of the world's problems, but the answer isn't to dismiss it. we should strive to build a better one. if the current implementation is broken fork and build your own.

i'm being one shotted by yanis varoufakis' technofeudalism. i can feel the dunning kruger setting in.

really enjoyed this from matt balez. a few things stuck: i learned subcent api fees via usdc on base is easy. a few weeks ago in vegas i highlighted this a unique value prop for bitcoin agentic payments. i was wrong. still true that stablecoins are inherently censorable, and freezable at any time. they don't optimize for human freedom. stablecoin privacy is very spooky. the fact that you can feed an agent's etherscan history to chatgpt and id the merchant should scare everyone. "open source AI deserves open source money" is a banger. how do we meme this into existence? watching steinberger go anti "crypto" was rough. surprised usdt on lightning wasn't covered. i know usdc has the regulatory momentum rn but @speedwallet 's wallet's usdt/lightning ux is quite good. they address the volatility and short term usd obligation point all on the ln network. we can have a convo about the tradeoffs re censorship resistance, but i think bitcoin builders can learn a lot from speed.

The Best Money For Agents

Spiral PM Mat Balez weighs the relative merits of stablecoins vs bitcoin for agentic payments and nudges us towards the more neutral option.

spoke at vegas a few weeks ago on lightning and ecash. @Shinobi moderated, @EVAN KALOUDIS and Alex held it down on @ZEUS and @Fedi . fun one. thanks for having me.

gm @Derek Ross

thanks @SoapMiner

primal following notifications have become totally unusable. everyday i’m followed by like 50 bots.

anyone else getting a flood of followers lately? open claw bots working overtime.

this is a prized possession. out of print. very rare.

satoshi thought like a ux designer. check out his comment on why base58 over base64. base58 removes 0, O, I, l (look identical). removes + and / (forms accept it). all alphanumeric (double click selects all). base64 is more efficient but he optimized for real world use.

if your hobbies do not improve the quality of your thinking, then they are a theft of your time and a sabotage of your spirit.

opus 4.6 -> plan -> build is game changing.

"You have to have some kind of a drive, some kind of a desire to find out the answer, a desire to find out what makes things tick. If you don’t have that, you may have all the training and intelligence in the world, but you won’t have questions and you won’t just find answers." — Calude Shannon (Claude Shannon at Bell Lab. March 20, 1952) https://www1.ece.neu.edu/~naderi/Claude%20Shannon.html

imo the best bitcoin narrative is framing it as a public utility. the first truly public payments infrastructure we’ve ever had. public as in open to everyone regardless of race, religion, or political allegiance.