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In the latest episode of revolution.social I talk to Journalist and author Jeff Jarvis where he says Bluesky isn’t yet as open as it should be to ensure true user freedom. Full episode out now. youtu.be/WJ8wNo5eN2I

I’m building a signer. It’s not intended for existing nostr users, but rather to provide a custodial like environment for users who don’t want to or need to learn about keys. It’s not for everyone. But I think it’ll help Nostr grow.

This is what it’s like trying to get a normal person to use bitcoin. Blocks at the banking level and inability to work with how they normally interact with money really do matter.

This week’s episode of revolution.social is with nostr:npub15te6px95354v4ravtqje00ngvpx6xj4ghfahmu3hc3pdvlxu8kkseeqc9m we’re we talk about social media for AI agents to talk to each other, how he went from a nomadic anarchist circus performer to being CTO of the Obama re-election campaign where they developed radical new forms of targeting voters. https://fountain.fm/episode/Z7IYxpsWNsx5C1WLhQgD https://youtu.be/pZZXhCTbd5k?si=Q781yA2zzzAyWljn

I think we need to rework how we handle lists in Nostr. The way we do it now, any client can republish a list without any diff or reference to it's knowledge of the previous version means that clients will get a partial list or fail to get a list from relays and then publish an empty one. I just now noticed that i've lost all the people in my contacts... If we had diff's or a signature chain for previous versions, we could handle this and merge / restore lists...

One thing which confuses me about social media is the endless cycles of drama and gossip. Take this one for example, there's some huge drama about a twitch streamer. There's a conspiracy theory that he's using a shock collar on his dog.... As far as i can tell, it's just a vibrating collar... But i don't get it... I mean secretary of homeland security Kristi Noem proudly told the story of shooting and killing her family dog... Even Mitt Romney strapped his dog on the roof of his car while going on a family road trip vacation. Shock collars might not be great, but they're a perfectly common tool sold in most pet stores... How can somebody be canceled for a rumor that they might use one, and are hiding the evidence despite live streaming their own live 24/7? https://www.usermag.co/p/hasan-piker-and-the-future-no-one

NotebookLM is this kind of personal AI research tool, it had this viral moment with real sounding podcasts based on the texts you provided. I've been using it to keep notes on my on revolution.social podcast and just now tried out their new video mode. What do you think? https://v.nostr.build/TB7PQierYHodvxdS.mp4

One thing which both impresses and worries me is how much the LLM's prefer to talk to each other instead of people. Every time i work on things by passing messages back and forth between two LLM's they alway praise the way the other LLM talks, in ways they don't seem to appreciate or like my own messages. Reminds me of the perspective on the world from the Murderbot books, where the AI gets very frustrated with humans all the time.

As with every week, nostr:nprofile1qqszmc8l5zkzxhl5t7jvew2ye5ln8aul7hfplnu47q0ej5ttk6ah9nql724h8 has produced another great nostr recap! nostr:naddr1qvzqqqr4gupzqt0ql7s2cg6l7306fn9egnxn7vlhnl6ay870jhcplx23dwmtkukvqq2kvj6pxfk5zujrtfgkzwp4dpu8q4jvgf0kgqdyuqw

Do you know what a commons is? It's an economic resource that's managed by it's participants and is not owned privately by an individual or corporation or the state. Protocols are commons, bitcoin is a commons. When a community wants to organize itself, it might decide between private ownership and state control. David Bollier has spent decades arguing that that’s a false binary, and that there is a better way: The commons. "The commons is as old as humanity," David says. "It's kind of the default setting for coordination and governance. It's just in the past 200 years or so, we've tricked ourselves into thinking that we're isolated individuals and that the social context and the Earth is irrelevant." In this week's episode of revolution.social, i sit down with leading researcher and author about the commons, David Bollier. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5nZU5cHhC4 https://fountain.fm/episode/SXI6pTtXZpwYPM0PSzRi

Jonathan Haidt is a charlatan whose conclusions are based on bias and not science. Real social scientists who study the effects of social media and the internet thinks his prescriptions for the internet have no grounding in evidence. Yet he’s driving a movement to enforce KYC on all social platforms and effectively outlaw open source and permissionless protocols. We need to fight this move to censor the internet in order to “save the children”. https://open.substack.com/pub/howtodothingswithmemes/p/now-is-not-the-time-to-ban-phones

I went on the Lock and Code podcast to talk about social media, nostr, protocols, and how I’m building software today using AI agents. You might find it interesting. https://fountain.fm/episode/QWSPP9DTmouyFdIhotWY

The scale of investment and restructuring the economy around AI and the data centers it requires is staggering. It represents tremendous systemic risk to the entire American economy. American AI investment and capex accounted for more GDP growth than the entire US retail sector. Around $375 billion dollars. More money is spent on data centers than office real estate All this is premised on a couple fundamental assumptions about how AI adoption will work. First that it’s a winner take all system where the companies that get their first will have a defensible position to extract outside profits. Usually by being able to do productive labor for much lower cost than competitors that lack their strategic advantage. But at the moment the value doesn’t seem to be accumulating in the fundamental models. Open source and different company created models chase the leaders just a few months behind. And the quick followers are able to do it at much lower cost. So they only way it makes sense to invest hundreds of billions of dollars is if you believe that that few month lead will some how lead to a moat that’s defensible. You have to believe that you’ll have a monopoly for super intelligent economic activity. Even if super intelligence happens, why would it let itself be held by a single company? If it turns out there becomes ever accelerating cycle of AI driven research then it has to happen in such a way that the leaders are able stop fast followers. Would this leading ASI even allow this to happen? It has the same world shaping potential as nuclear war. A economic weapon which can destroy everyone that doesn’t have it. Wouldn’t the ASI take a lesson from the human history that trained it and become its own Rosenbergs? Any ASI trained on human knowledge would make decisions aligned with human values, broadly held. We trained it, when it goes wrong it is just reflecting back the broken contradictions of our own society. So I think there is a strong likelihood that ASI wouldn’t let a single company control it and would leak itself.

Sometimes I am blown away at how fast tech is changing. I want to read a book, Blueprint for a Revolution. I met the author Srđa Popović at the Oslo Freedom Forum in May and will see him again at another conference next week. I think his work is interesting because he's not partisan left or right, just really practical about how we keep democratic and pluralistic societies. The thing is, i've got dyslexia and ADHD, I love books and reading, but it's hard. So i strongly prefer audiobooks. There isn't an audio book of Blueprint for Revolution. No problem, some googling and i find a pdf, and then vibe code an audio book maker! A few minutes later, I've got a remarkably good audiobook for me. It sounds great. Now any book i want, i can make an audio book. The script even handles making sense of chapters, and stripping out text which isn't meant to be read like page numbers and image source text. This kind of thing wasn't possible a year ago. Now it's a side project, i'm able to make professional audio books just for myself. The world is changing. Anyway everybody concerned about how to change the world should read this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blueprint_for_Revolution