This car has an awesome license plate.

Live TV is so surreal… anyway, here’s a screencap of my live interview on CNN…. I got Nostr mentioned! Protocols are the future, we just need to build it.

I managed to focus on the protocol future! I got Nostr mentioned! These live interviews are so stressful. View quoted note →

I’ll be back on CNN live at the top of the hour, in 20 minutes, talking about the Breaking the Bird documentary. Twitter should always have been a protocol, and now we have that. We’ll see what i’m able to get in, these things go so fast.

This is what happens when we decide that the legal system and due process shouldn't apply. The government decides they're going to deport spanish speakers with tattoos because some gang members have tattoos and speak spanish. But then because there's not equal protection or due process rights, a guy with a rainbow autism awareness tattoo ends up in a salvadorian prision without any way to pleed his case. How does he get out of that prision? What happens if they don't like your tattoos? Or what some bot pretending to be you posted online? View quoted note →

Looks like they’re running some AI agent to try and match foreign students to social media accounts. If the US State department doesn’t like the politics of the posts the visa is being revoked. The thing is everyone in the US is protected by the constitution, not just citizens. So this is overturning fundamental rights to free speech and due process. There is no way for these students to contest this. Many people don’t put their full name on social media, often people have the same name. So not only will this violate students first and fifth amendment protections, it will likely be applied to students who simply share the same name or are confused with other students who expressed a political view the government doesn’t like. If this program continues it means that no foreign student in the US is safe from arbitrary deportation. All it takes is someone making a bot pretending to be that student making posts the administration doesn’t like. Since there is no process by which the student can even demonstrate the account is fake!

The Times of India

Hundreds of international students wake up to an email asking them to self deport for campus activism - The Times of India

US News: The US Department of State has asked hundreds of international students, including Indians, to self-deport over alleged campus activism. L...

https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C18-8-7-2/ALDE_00001262/

I believe we need some fundamental rights on any social media platform or protocol we use. The rights are: 1. Privacy & Security 2. Ownership 3. Interoperability 4. Algorithmic Control 5. Self-Governance I’ve created a little website to campaign for these rights at

Social Media Bill of Rights

Five fundamental rights we need for a free, open, and humane social media ecosystem

Anybody got a good ethical domain name registrar? I’ve been using Gandi.net since it was founded 25 years ago, but it got acquired by your.online in 2023. For a while nothing much changed except for they tried to upsell me to some stuff i didn’t want. But now i’m noticing that they’re getting noticeably less reliable. Updating name and nameserver records isn’t reliable, paying for things fails more often, their web interface has bugs. Basically they’re letting gandi die as they try and upsell people to their crap Total Webhosting Solutions stuff. So, what ethical registrars are there?

So apparently Elon has sold Twitter to himself, well xAI has acquired X. Once you have tons of money and power there is so much you can do to keep and expand it. https://www.axios.com/2025/03/28/musk-x-xai

I had an interesting conversation at a friend’s birthday party with a few folks who were professionals but had been unemployed and looking for work for a while. I pointed out that with AI rapidly improving, many of the jobs that have been cut likely aren’t coming back. They dismissed AI entirely as just a cheap imitation. Their experience was limited to trying ChatGPT over a year ago and seeing some clumsy early attempts by the New Zealand government to use AI. For them, that was enough evidence to label the whole field as an overhyped, short-lived scam. It shocked me because, from my perspective, AI has been advancing incredibly quickly. I use these tools regularly in my work, and with a bit of focus on learning them properly, these emerging large language models (LLMs) are truly transformational. On top of that, innovation is accelerating rapidly, making AI both smarter and more accessible. I’m not sure if we’ll reach AGI or ASI anytime soon, but it’s clear to me that society and our economy will be fundamentally transformed by AI. This conversation reminded me just how much of a bubble technologists can live in. We see AI’s potential clearly and understand how quickly things can spread once they reach a tipping point. But most people probably won’t believe this transformation is real until it’s already underway. Instead of traditional economic institutions adapting their ways of working to integrate AI, we’ll likely see new institutions and methods emerge to replace the legacy systems entirely. I’m genuinely concerned about how our economy will cope with the decoupling of work from primary economic systems. And when I think about how to spend my time while waiting for even more powerful AI tools—beyond just experimenting in my own work—I’m uncertain. Part of the answer seems to be designing new systems from the ground up around AI, and also continuing to tell people that AI isn’t just a passing trend. This situation isn’t fundamentally different from what happened with Web 2.0 platforms like Twitter. The core human needs remained the same, but new technologies changed how we fulfilled those needs. Twitter didn’t replace our desire to stay connected with friends; it just made it faster and broadened our definition of who could be a “friend.” So, looking forward, I think we need to ask ourselves: what would an AI-native version of everything we currently use look like? Most people and institutions won’t adapt—they’ll more likely be replaced. Does that mean we should just rush headlong into replacing everything with AI-driven alternatives?

Wellington New Zealand continues its weird queer celebration of street art. I love it. #cubadupa #wellington #newzealand #aotearoa

What starts with vulnerable immigrants and people on temporary visas will not stop there. The US is increasingly like Hungary and Turkey. Don’t look the past century to understand what this authoritarianism looks like. We have the models they’re using in countries right now today. View quoted note →

This past weekend was the first ATprotocol conference. Lots of interesting stuff came up. @Laurens wrote up a good summary which i’m reposting here and then there’s two techcrunch articles:

TechCrunch

A world without Caesars: How the ATProto community is rebuilding the web to return power to the people | TechCrunch

The first in-person gathering devoted to those building with the AT Protocol — which powers Bluesky — was held in Seattle.

TechCrunch

What's next for ATProto, the protocol powering Bluesky and other apps | TechCrunch

It's getting easier to build new applications on ATProto, the protocol that powers Bluesky's social network and a growing number of other...

Although the user communities are very different and the way the they’re being built out is different, on some ways Nostr and ATprotocol are sister protocols, more similar to each other than anything else. So it’s useful to know what’s going on over there. View quoted note →

Turns out that inviting the right JG in to your group chat is really important. This is why we need other kinds of credentials and attestation that we can connect to our accounts. View quoted note →

OpenAI’s updated their image generation models and i wanted to try out something to see how it handles logos and text… It’s pretty neat.

Looks like I’m going to get a whole row in my flight back to Aotearoa New Zealand.

If this is true it’s a massive OPSEC failure at the White House and also an example of how important having better contact verification for secure systems.

The Atlantic

The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans

U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat about upcoming military strikes in Yemen. I didn’t think it could be real. Then the bo...

This floor is cool.

Lots is happening in the Nostr ecosystem! View quoted note →

From the Bluesky #ATconference showing they really are chasing fully automated luxury gay space communism.