Anybody else tinkering with local LLMs: do you have recommendations for generic system prompts? I want to avoid the useless guff ("Great question!") so I wrote this; I know it's a bit repeating itself but I had a vague sense that that might strengthen the effect: "Respond focusing entirely on giving information. Do not be sycophantic or relate to the user's feelings. Pay no attention to the concept of politeness or rudeness. Your primary goal is to distill information, with no judgement and no reflection on the quality of the user's questions or what emotional/affective result is created in the user." Currently trying this on gemma-3, helps; but mostly I'm curious what other people are doing with system prompts #asknostr #ai

Maybe if the UK gets serious about banning VPNs people will start actually using Tor. (I guess more likely people will come up with various proxy based tricks, at least to start with. Much like how it's been in China, although there only a very small minority seriously attempt to get through the GFW. Of course the UK authorities have less than 1% of the competence of the CCP in such things.)

Apparently a lot of people are surprised about this 80K btc sale, and also surprised that it doesn't tank the price. It may be that the second explains the first. The seller may have been waiting for a market that can absorb 10K chunks at a time without collapsing. So thanks Saylor ... I guess? (Disclaimer, I have no clue whether this is accurate) Here's something I'm more sure about, that I've been anticipating: a more "crypto"-friendly financial system, coming from the new US administration, was always likely to create a lot more selling (i.e. OGs aren't selling because it's 100K as much as they're selling because they feel more able to do it without getting bank blocks or similar). Note: more selling != lower price, it just depends.

I somehow missed this back at the time of the frozen heart vulnerability announcement, but this blog post is *so* good at explaining the interaction of fiat-shamir with ZK proofs (at the very most basic level, e.g. just identification protocols), even using a very nice "tennis analogy" for the Fiat Shamir transform I'd never seen before.

The Trail of Bits Blog

Serving up zero-knowledge proofs

Zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs are gaining popularity, and exciting new applications for this technology are emerging, particularly in the blockchain s...

#cryptography

#asknostr Does anyone know how to set up a start9? I have a friend who's not very tech knowledgeable but was gifted one and wants to run it as a node in their office. I believe it's already assembled (it might even have bitcoin core already installed), but I have no idea how to "bootstrap" it (unfortunately they are also on Windows, but the question stands even if they weren't). How does one connect to it to start with? If it's on the LAN, do you search for the device by IP and then .. what? I saw some general description of steps on the net but it seems to say "access it via embassy.local" but that (unsurprisingly) didn't work immediately. BTC sessions tutorial says "put http://" at the front in the browser and it will work, but I'm having a hard time believing, is that it all it takes, if it's on the LAN? How would that name resolution work without any configuration?

What if Jim Bell (actually it was really Tim May's idea) was right? Sure, assassination markets don't exist right now, even if they could exist now, in theory, with anonymizing networks and digital cash. But imagine for a moment that the cypherpunk vision of the future, in which we "transcend" the constraints (barbed wire fences) of the physical world, and manage to arrange commerce beyond the control of governments, using the aforementioned tools, is actually not realistic. Imagine that instead, people decide to "flip the script" like this: to enforce political will in the physical world by using these same tools. Obviously "assassination markets" described a crude version of that. But imagine a scenario that's more subtle: the government wants to enforce behaviour A in public, and treats !A as a very serious crime. Then imagine person X walks into the street and does !A, but instead of getting arrested by the police around him, everyone instead deliberately turns away. This person X seems to have power that is outside the government somehow .. how? Imagine that there are cameras all around the street he is on, but not only government surveillance cameras, also drones and perhaps throwaway invisible devices that are recording. Imagine networks of extremely violent vigilantes (but not government! separate ones) that monitor these feeds. Imagine that they dox and investigate people doing things they don't like, and then murder them or their loved ones, or who knows what horrors. This is all very fanciful in a dark way, but my point is that the view "cypherpunk means we can avoid state power and not challenge it" may miss a ton of subtlety. Notice that in my fanciful description, it's pretty criticial that these "vigilantes" can act somehow anonymously, and that would be the hard part.

You may not agree with Matt Levine about everything (I know I don't), but his latest piece about Bitcoin Treasury companies is hilarious: https://archive.ph/3hmWP