I had a great time at DWeb camp last week as always. I sat on an "Open Social Web" panel as the Nostr representative and I think what I had to say about Nostr was generally well-received alongside Bluesky and Mastodon. People were mostly drawn to the loose governance and the scrappy "good enough" approach to protocol design. But, like last year, it still feels like the energy folks have for "social media" as we typically think of it has been completely sucked out of the room. Few people are interested in putting more energy into some public virtue-signaling town square. I think Nostr has an advantage over Mastodon in Bluesky in this area because it really does have the most non-microblogging experiments going on, and the protocol is the friendliest to encrypted private spaces.

The iOS 26 release date is less than a month away, and Apple is making big changes this year with the introduction of the Liquid Glass design system. I'm available for last-minute contract work to help you get your app ready. Whether you just want to make sure nothing breaks, or are looking to refresh your entire UI alongside Apple, I can help you make a smooth transition!

In the future all food will be made with a microwave, and if you can't deal with that then you need to get out of the kitchen.

In the Future All Food Will Be Cooked in a Microwave, and if You Can’t Deal With That Then You Need to Get Out of the Kitchen – Random Thoughts

I really feel like I'm missing something about Cashu. @calle calls it digital cash, but you are reliant on a bank (mint) to cash out. They say it works offline, but it doesn't really because it doesn't prevent double-spending offline. This makes it a glorified IOU tracker, right? Privacy-preserving IOU tracker is cool, and a network of banks that used them would be even cooler, but calling it offline digital cash seems totally disingenuous to me. Tell me why I'm wrong? View quoted note →

Yesterday I finally took the plunge and downloaded Blender and started learning how to use it. I have been #3dprinting for a while but mostly I just print designs others have created, or made a few very simple designs using TinkerCad. But I finally found a project small enough to feel manageable and the time to do it. We have a sliding barn-style door in our kitchen that our two toddlers insist on slamming shut, often while the other one is in the doorway. I decided to design a simple clamp to fit on the top to keep it from closing. Here is the evolution of the design. The first was the wrong size and just fell off, the second added a little hat to keep it from sliding off but quickly broken, so the third beefed up the thickness and infill to make it stronger. And here's a video showing how it fits on: I'm already working on a second design to toddler-proof a couple of our cabinet drawers that the regular spring locks wouldn't fit on. This may be a slippery slope.

I have been finding AI really useful for coding, but this is a good reminder that AI benchmarks are not representative of reality, and developers cannot be trusted to accurately estimate their work, even after completing it 🙃

Bluesky Social

METR (@metr.org)

We ran a randomized controlled trial to see how much AI coding tools speed up experienced open-source developers. The results surprised us: Develo...

Starting a thread to coordinate a test of my social-key-backup tool with @lizsweig and @Hazey

@hzrd149 is there any way for me to report impersonators from Nostrudel?

I'm still looking for a few more folks to help me out with this! View quoted note →

I'm looking for a few people to help me test my social key backup tool for Nostr! Hoping to get at least 4 folks. I'm not going to actually back up my real key to you, I just want to run through the process with others and make sure it works for other people. You'll need python installed and some familiarity with the command line. If you'd be willing to help me out with this tomorrow please reply to this or send me a DM! And I'm considering creating a Nostr group for comms, lmk if there is a group chat tool you like.

I just completed a successful recovery of an nsec using my shamir's key sharing CLI. It's so satisfying as a programmer when you finally get your encryption and decryption code working together. The script is very basic, I'll probably rewrite it in Rust, but it proves out the core concept and gave me a lot of ideas about how to make this actually accessible to normal people and what other features and services would be nice to bundle with it. I'm still trying to come up with an umbrella term for this family of things (social key backup, social key migration, threshold-based consensus, etc.). The best I've come up with so far is "social keys" but I'm not sure if that makes sense. Does it makes sense to you?

Also I submitted my first git PRs via Nostr yesterday, it was pretty easy with ngit and https://gitworkshop.dev!

I set up nak bunker on my home server in docker yesterday, so I finally have a Nostr signer running on my own hardware. If anyone is interested in the compose file it's short enough that I'm just going to paste it here: services: nak: build: . command: bunker --persist --sec your-nsec-here wss://nos.lol volumes: - docker/nak:/home/nakuser/.config restart: unless-stopped I haven't taken the time yet to figure out how to use ncryptsec or something to keep my nsec encrypted at rest, if someone figures out how to do that in docker lmk. View quoted note →

Testing publishing from my new remote signer.