I was kind of hoping for a more positive 2025…

“This product is a civilian robot. We kindly request that all users refrain from making any dangerous modifications or using the robot in a hazardous manner.”

Unitree A1 Highly Integrated, Pushing Limits - Unitree Robotics

机器狗A1灵巧，创造无限可能,宇树Unitree是一家专注于消费级、行业级高性能四足机器人、灵巧机械臂自主研发�...

Pie baking didn’t go so well. #cooking #food #pie

I love a good single origin V60 pour over. #coffee

Posters at protests are now created with the hope that they’ll go viral as a meme and amplify the ideas and movement. The recent Hīkoi protest defending the founding treaty of Aotearoa New Zealand was a great example of this transformation. Few posters were mass produced, instead there were tons of different ones each with their own message. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/te-manu-korihi/537394/signs-of-the-hikoi-more-than-just-words-on-cardboard

There’s a Banksy exhibit in town and I went to go see it today.

Bluesky’s ATprotocol ecosystem gets its first micro investment fund. It’s much smaller than the resources and investment we’ve got going in to Nostr but they’re doing better about getting press coverage.

TechCrunch

Meet Skyseed, a VC fund and incubator backing the Bluesky and AT Protocol ecosystem | TechCrunch

In November, Peter Wang sought ideas for a new fund to support the AT Protocol ecosystem. Four weeks later, he launched Skyseed.

Apple allows external purchases for content in apps in the US AppStore using their External Purchase Link Entitlement which they setup to allow for compliance for EU rules.

An App Store First: Delta Adds Patreon Link for Purchase and Perks - MacStories

The folks behind Bridgy Fed the gateway project between social media protocols have spun up a new organization so they can focus on their work on bridging social media protocols. Adding Nostr support is in their roadmap, but I wonder what we can do to help them go from planning to support Nostr to having it run in production. Having @Alex Gleason as the only person building / maintaining gateway tools is a kind of centralization and single point of failure, not that there’s anything wrong with his work, he’s just one person. Anyway, check out ANew.Social and their manifesto about bridging open social protocols:

augment

Bridges & The Last Network Effect

We're in an exciting moment for the open social web. As Elon makes one bad decision after another on X, we've seen waves of users leave the platfor...

https://www.anew.social/hello-social-web/

I helped put together a paper on the future of open middleware in the era of social media protocols.

Shaping the Future of Social Media with Middleware | The Foundation for American Innovation

The Foundation for American Innovation.

This is a first for me, a Nostr app which has migrated off of Nostr to a newer protocol, willow.

GitHub

GitHub - Cynsar-Foundation/second.exchange: This is the social media platform owned by users and governed by users

This is the social media platform owned by users and governed by users - Cynsar-Foundation/second.exchange

Willow is one of the most interesting emerging protocols, this is the first time i’ve seen a willow app in the wild.

The fall of the Assad Regime in Syria seemed to come out of nowhere. After 13 years of civil war, most of which had been a stalemate for years, one group of rebels takes over Aleppo, Homs, and finally Damascus in two weeks.

Fall of the Assad regime - Wikipedia

So who are the rebels? Tahrir al Sham

Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham - Wikipedia

They’re a faction that is opposed to Al-Queda and ISIS with some support from Qatar and Turkey. It seems like it’s mostly a remixing of Islamic groups which had led the civil war for a long time, but when Iran, Russia, Hezbollah, Israel, and The US got distracted elsewhere they were able to use some support from Turkey to finally overthrow Assad and capture Damascus. My guess is once they took Aleppo and discovered Assad wasn’t able to bring in help in a counter offensive then faith in the regime amongst its soldiers collapsed. I’m personally really concerned about what will happen to the Rojava, the autonomous Kurdish region (

Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria - Wikipedia

). At the start of the civil war Kurds who are aligned with the Turkish PKK took over and liberated their own land, then got support from the US to defeat ISIS. The region has been effectively an independent country for the last 12 years. Ideologically the PKK used to be a Marxist group but they shifted to Social Ecology, a branch of left Anarchism founded by Murray Bookchin a couple decades ago. They do not believe in a centralized government and have run their region with a network of independent democratic local governments, associations, businesses, and militias. The US government maintains military bases and cooperation with Rojava. While many people in Rojava are religious the movement is multiethnic and non-Islamist in its political ideology. I find it kind of crazy that such an interesting radical political and economic project can emerge in what is clearly one of the most difficult and conflict ridden places. Despite the US and Turkish governments being close allies and the US providing military support to the Kurds in Rojava, the Turkish government hates the Kurdish sovereignty movement. Turkey wants to prevent the emergence of any independent Kurdish country, even one without a state as such like exists in Rojava. Will Turkey turn on and invade Rojava now that they have something like allies in power in Damascus? It doesn’t seem to make like Tahrir al Sham is an agent of Turkey, there are militias directly under the control of Turkey occupying land which is nominally Syrian, plus regular Turkish troops, but more like Tahrir al Sham is just getting support where it can. So we shall see. One last thing I find interesting is the positive statements put out by governments around the world about the fall of the Assad regime to an organization that those same governments have declared a terrorist group. Does a terrorist grouping become a military when it gains control of a nation state?

A friend asked about secure, encrypted, and private alternatives to google docs… the only thing i could think of was cryptpad which we both felt was so slow and clunky that most people would probably revert back to using google docs… I thought since folks here on Nostr care about such things, maybe something new has come up in the last few years which is better than cryptpad…

Is there anywhere written up what’s involved in creating a feed display of content outputted from a DVM? I’m lazy and 2 minutes of googling didn’t show me. ;-D

Use Tor because it makes you and everyone else safer. View quoted note →

New version of @nos is out. Mostly a bug fix update, but go in to testflight / appstore to update as apple doesn’t push an upgrade automatically all the time. View quoted note →

If Trump really does impose broad and high tariffs then it’ll cause domestic inflation. What will it due the USD visa vi other currencies? Will it cause inflation elsewhere?

Is satlantis open source? I’m curious how they do the username/password to nsec bunker and if it would be possible to adapt to other communities not just bitcoin digital nomads. There’s some Maori in Aotearoa New Zealand who are interested in having something similar but for Maori orgs and places here. Is there a library / server setup fro username / password access to nsecbunkers like the way satlantis does it?

GitHub

Satlantis

Satlantis has 5 repositories available. Follow their code on GitHub.

We’ve got good list tools in Nostr but aren’t making lists accessible and useful as much as they’ve done over in Bluesky land.

The Ultimate Directory of tools and applications for Bluesky

The Ultimate Directory of tools and applications for Bluesky

A curated collection of all things relating to the Bluesky social media platform.

And since we’re talking about how Bluesky works, View quoted note → I might as well share this technical deep dive.

Building Bluesky: a Distributed Social Network (Real-World Engineering Challenges)

Bluesky is built by around 10 engineers, and has amassed 5 million users since publicly launching in February this year. A deep dive into novel des...