In the first half of the 20th century the world had people like Hilbert, Bohr, Von Neumann, Einstein, Feynman, Fermi, Gödel, Noether, Oppenheimer, Erdos, Dirac, Poincaré, etc. Where are these types of people today? We have Perelman and Wiles. Maybe Maldacena or Arkani-Hamed? Was the early 20th century a unique period of fertile scientific ground just waiting to be uncovered by smart people or was there an unusually high supply of gifted scientists in that era?

Ray Kurzweil predicts that by 2029 we’ll have reached longevity escape velocity. Meaning if you’re alive in 2029 the advances in medicine will accelerate fast enough to allow you to live “forever” (assuming no accidents). Has your money reached escape velocity yet, anon? Might make sense just to get some #bitcoin in case.

We owe John von Neumann a debt of gratitude for his work to prevent patent trolling of early “stored-program” computers. He circulated his EDVAC report widely so that the idea couldn’t be patented thus giving birth to the modern open computing industry.

Life-pro-tip: at least once in your life train for an endurance race. A marathon, century ride, Iron Man, etc. You'll learn many valuable life lessons during the endeavor. You'll learn patience, humility, perseverance, and time management. You'll learn about your own limits. You'll become healthier. You'll probably make friends along the way. These events require discipline to even finish. You will better understand how food affects you and how meal timing can improve your performance. If you take it seriously you'll develop better sleep habits as well. The skills you acquire when training for an endurance race also transfer well to other domains. #fitness #marathon #LPT #health

In the near future we’ll have viral LLMs that infect all sorts of machines. They’ll use local resources to retrain and adapt to changing ecosystems. Many reasons for initial creation: cyberwarfare, economic subterfuge, push propaganda, lulz, etc. You can imagine that in order to remain viable long term these things will learn to remove other LLM viruses so they can monopolize compute and defend themselves against removal. A sort of GAN. This leads to a Darwinian evolution of viral LLMs that we should be prepared for or at least study. I’d be shocked if they don’t already exist in the wild. #ai #llm #GAN

Looking forward to VoIP on Nostr one day so we can have trust in caller ID and proper spam filtering.

In cybersecurity there’s the concept of tarpits: environments that slow down malicious actors in order to increase odds of detection or successful counter offensives. Much of today’s social media feels like a tarpit for companies to slow people down long enough to target them with ads. #grownostr

The kilogram and the meter were first introduced in the late 18th century to standardize measurements. The joule was introduced in the 19th century. International trade benefited massively from adopting these standards. Without these a merchant might need to know the local units for each country or region they did business in and further have to trust the methods of measurement which were often manipulated for profit. We now use these units in textbooks, research papers, and specs all across the world and humanity has the benefit of being able to compare weights and lengths across the world and through generations. Until 2009 we didn’t have a precise unit for economic measurement: local currencies introduce the same problems we had with weights and the global supply of gold isn’t auditable. With the introduction of Bitcoin we’ve set the stage for a new era of economic development and prosperity. The world is still learning to live with this new unit though and there’s a real motivation for some people to slow adoption at all costs. We’re truly living in exciting times. #bitcoin #history #standards #economics

When earlier humans discovered how to harness energy to cook food and outsource digestion we evolved into a new species. We consumed more energy to improve our biological processes in a way that allowed us to flourish. In just the last 10-20 years as web search and then LLMs began proliferating, we began outsourcing mental “digestion” analogous to the leap we made with cooked food. This most likely marks the subtle beginning of a new species. The transition won’t happen in a decade, but over the course of many generations as those who embrace technology will outcompete those who do not. The difference this time is that we have the ability to record these changes with high fidelity in ways our ancestors couldn’t and therefore future generations will better understand this transition into yet another species. Imagine having millions of hours of video of ancestral human species as they lived before the use of fire. Assuming the above holds true, how does cyberwarfare play a role? Does polluting a group’s cyberspace have an impact analogous to limiting earlier humans access to fire? And how does bitcoin play a role given its pivotal role in digital commerce, savings, and cybersecurity? #evolution #sapiens #ai #llm #energy #bitcoin #cybersecurity

A network’s value scales somewhere between n² (Metcalfe’s law) and 2^n (Reed’s law) where n is the number of users. There are tipping points and saturation points where the marginal value of each user is amplified or dampened (due to congestion) respectively. Because Bitcoin’s model is simple and open and makes minimal assumptions about its users it can accommodate many independent networks: energy grids, monetary networks, social networks, cybersecurity, etc. It can act as a bridge between all of these other large and valuable networks (Schelling Point). The lightning network alleviates congestion for some applications which in turn reduces dampening effects due to congestion. eCash does as well. I’m excited to see what else we come up with to attract other networks.

For all of human history our societies were largely bound by geography. The average person’s wealth, generally speaking, was limited to the region they were born or settled in. With the invention of the telegraph and the automobile and the airplane people became more mobile but at the same time our currencies failed and were captured by regional powers therefore again constraining our movement. The consequences of having a secure and decentralized digital money are still very much under appreciated. In much the same degree the airplane changed civilization, bitcoin too will shape the direction of history. #nomad #bitcoin

@calle do you know of any efforts to build escrow/collateral systems on top of Cashu so that the mint loses funds if they rug users? I’m just learning about FROST. Wonder if that can be part of the solution. I’ve heard it can be used for making off-chain covenants? Proof of reserves is reactive while escrow is proactive. #ecash #covenants #cashu

PSA: wash sale rules don’t apply to Bitcoin so you can sell part of your stack and buy back immediately to realize a loss and claim that on your taxes. This only applies to real Bitcoin and not the ETFs. This dip might be a good opportunity depending on your cost basis.

LLMs are effectively just functions. The prompt is an argument. You could build a stack frame from the prompt, LLM model, an HTTP endpoint as the return address, and a distributed vector DB for the heap. With this in place you need a runtime. You could probably build the runtime on Nostr. A system like this could be ran by millions of people in a decentralized way and although would have higher latencies than centralized models like ChatGPT it might be more powerful. Prompts could be paid for with #bitcoin via #lightning or #ecash. Miners can supplement their revenue by providing access to high performance compute and still earn bitcoin. #ai #mining

OpenAI is now being deployed to the Apple ecosystem, embedded in many Microsoft products, taking up massive amounts of compute in Azure and Oracle Cloud, and has a former leader from the NSA on their board so presumably they’ll pick up military and intelligence contracts. This is a centralized system becoming more powerful at least partially because the economic incentives encourage that. Bitcoin has proven that a decentralized system can work and dominate if the incentives are right. We as a community need to work on this problem. Open source models aren’t a solution if they’re just being subsidized by VCs. Many Bitcoin mining centers are adopting AI workloads for revenue diversity so maybe we can lean into that somehow. A tighter integration between AI and the Bitcoin economy feels like the right direction. Something to think about. #ai #decentralized #chatGPT #bitcoin