I consider my Signal chats private. I consider my hotel traffic via Obscura to be... mostly private. I consider nothing I do on a publicly viewable chain to be private. We should know this by now. If privacy is the aim, I'd use XMR under the presumption that it is still not compromised. All this to say that I find current debates about zaps... amusing.

Mo Bitar brings the goods again.

Jesse Welles is a treasure.

The AI grift track: Unsustainable cost/business model as they continue to circulate capital between themselves, calling it "income" (ala Nvidia/OpenAI swapping funds back and forth) --> --> Hype. Lots of hype. We've been living this for two years or more now. AI is dangerous. AI will change the world. AI will revolutionize the way you eat your Cheerios --> --> High IPOs. OpenAI just announced theirs. This is where the big boys get paid. --> --> Scaling back on the hype, including the quiet shelving of "Data Center" madness. Notice how none of these are actually being completed and opened? Because compute is so expensive and the model is unsustainable, I fully expect OpenAI and Anthropic to shift to legacy corporate customers only, abandoning individual users. There is no way to make it cheap enough for you to use, especially as these models keep scaling up in terms of complexity --> --> The destruction of the little guys who cannot keep up with big boys, leaving only OpenAI/Anthropic and the smatterings of Big Tech with functional (diversified) business models --> --> You and I running open local models only. Not a bad thing, as they are getting better, and will do everything you probably need them to. And that's the grift. Nostrajoshmus has spoken.

I like zaps well enough. The problem was never including them as a feature. The mistake was leaning on them so heavily as a selling point of the protocol.

My complicated view of AI and art being what it is, I find it incredibly pretentious to take issue with this, unlike our smug article writer here. Nothing wrong with taking inspiration from outside sources. We all do it anyway, as art fuels art.

Literary Hub

Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk apparently used AI to write her latest novel.

Update: On Tuesday afternoon, Tokarczuk sent a statement to Lit Hub via her publisher, Riverhead, denying she used AI in her writing for anything o...

Real-talk for just a minute here, friends: I know not of a single "sovereign" individual in this universe. Not one has existed free from the constraints of some governing power. There's no such thing, and any notion otherwise is self-delusion. You are subject to a governing hierarchy, both on earth and in Heaven. Not even the King of the British Empire is sovereign. Never was.

Big, awful, oversized frames for glasses are back from the 1980's, and I just want to say: no, kids. No.

One of the better criticisms of the state of modern AI I've seen in a while.

32 years ago on this date. I was 13, about to turn 14.

I just updated Brave and I'm stunned. All windows returned to their proper desktop positions in MacOS. This one small thing is the best development I've experienced technologically speaking in years.

Nostr will never be awash in normies. There's simply too much coin talk here, and BTC is normie repellent. Any kind of crypto talk works better than bear mace. You don't have to like it, but that's reality. If we're talking marketing, we have to keep hammering away at the free and open nature of this network. Some people still care about that, and we need them. That's the sell, along with your own normie content. Nostr's best bet, since the bear mace ain't going away any time soon.

Really, AI is just like Web3, except with a lot more VC behind it. And like Web3, there will come a moment where we step back and say, "So this is it, huh? This... this kinda sucks."

We laugh and joke, but... yes. It's real-life content, eh. That's what brings 'em in. Bloviation about Bitcoin ain't exactly going to do it. View quoted note →

The Nowhere project is one of the coolest things I've seen in the Nostr space in a while. It's the power of this crazy little protocol unleashed.

nowhere · an entire website encoded in a URL

Nowhere encodes an entire website into a URL. The content lives in the link itself and is never stored on a server. Hosted nowhere, present everywh...

Had a nice wedding today. Good couple!