Have you been on Facebook lately? I know, I know. I try not to go there, but I get reeled in by RL contacts from time-to-time. Anyway, that place is an AI slopfest, the worst kind of engagement farming. I default presume nothing I see on there is true. I don't know why people still use it.

Sitting on Spectr, watching the vibe on the timeline in one column and the zany happenings over at nostr.wine in another. The Chill Protocol, even in times of drama.

X/Twitter is such a trash site nowadays. Dumb rhetorical questions to invoke user engagement is not content.

Skip the salad dressing. Use hot sauce instead. Melinda's has a number of them that are zero-calorie and of moderate/low heat for the light-weights out there. People will think you're a freak when you do this in public, but it's worth the gains.

My ultimate hope as we enter a mainstream period of AI skepticism is that people will see this as impetus to create on their own. Arts and letters. Photography. Whatever. Just make something. Reactionary skepticism isn't enough on its own.

Spectr (https://spectr.clave.casa) is a nice client. Love the deck, speedy, responsive, and is actually good about fetching events.

Trivia tonight. Our absolute worst performance. Turned comical. A good time had by all.

Wait, so is the line here that BTC is dropping price because one dude made a (relatively) minor transaction?

The Anthropic/OpenAI IPOs will be the greatest pump and dumps of all time.

I have two active lists of following, and this is getting annoying.

I've lost 96 pounds since late July. Au naturale, no drugs. I'm swirling a sub-200 weight for the first time in a couple of decades. I stepped on a scale at the end of July and blinked. It'd been a few years. Sure, my pants were getting bigger, but 298? No. Decided right then and there. Wasn't going to happen. Diet and exercise. Cardio combined with resistance, with the objective of gaining muscle. Intermittent fasting and calorie counting, followed by a shortening on the fasting, always calorie counting. Everything calories, if not with an app then mentally. The gains were easy at first. The weight melted off, because I am one stubborn Gaul, and none are as fierce as the Belgae, or so Caesar says. Plus, I was fat. I had nowhere to go but down. Anyway, I stalled out at around -70 pounds. That's okay. Stalls happen. But this one stuck around a while. I didn't know how to get 'er out of neutral. Then I stopped drinking alcohol, and the weight loss picked back up with a vengeance. I'm a social drinker, and a social guy. Only recently did I read about the metabolic effects of Mr. Booze. I ran through the chemistry today, dusting off ancient knowledge from undergrad I'd intentionally kept buried. I despise chemistry as a field of personal study, and I resent having to do this. Turns out, though, alcohol isn't just something to calorie count like I was doing previously; it's a substance that works against fat-burning metabolically. I intensely dislike knowing this. You may now dislike me for knowing this, too. I've gone 45 days without a beer, but feel no real impetus to have one now. Sometimes, ignorance is preferable.

Guy I don't know trots in here and starts complaining about Nostr so I check out his protocol. Realize it's kinda like BlueSky with centralized servers where you can export your data, laugh, close tab. He's right about you coiners and how you limit the adoption of the protocol, though. That much, he's right about.

The Vatican has provided some pretty slick infographs for "Magnifica Humanitas." I have some quibbles with some of the contents of the encyclical (namely, the intentional misreading of the Tower of Babel story at the beginning in order to score cheap metaphor points; unity is an original blessing, and "diversity" the punishment for humanity's transgression), but the overall message is a good one.

First sunburn of the year, let's go. Get it over with and get outside.

Played bags* today, and I'm happy to report that I am still terrible. *In the midwest, we call it bags and not "cornhole," because we aren't disgusting freaks.

Best there ever was. Best there ever will be. Ad multos annos, Bob!

True.

A beautiful visualization of the grift in real-time.

Is AI Profitable Yet?

Friday vibes. Happy (I rarely become enamored by "new" bands I discover. I studied popular American forms extensively as a kid, especially folk, blues, rock, and country -- and there's nothing new under the sun. But these girls bring it, along with their big throat singer, combining forms to make something truly unique and worth listening to, the way select American bands (Turnpike Troubadours, Old 97's, Wilco) still combine forms to produce something uniquely their own. So, Alatau on, my Siberian friends.)

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.