I value order, efficiency, and reliability. I don't value simplicity or chaos quite so much. My effect on the nostr protocol has mainly been proposals to improve the reliability, efficiency, and orderliness of it, and the pushback has come mostly from people that like the freedom that the chaos gives them. Some examples * long ago I proposed that relays remember when an event arrived, and clients could query "all events that arrived after I last asked" to get a perfect next batch. * long ago I proposed gossip/outbox model which specifies where events are expected to be, while many still choose very different and innovative ways to choose and use relays. * I've been pushing for DHT usage to be more fully distributed and uncensorable, and to allow people to kickstart/bootstrap without knowing any relays or any nostr people. We get 99% functionality without it and so as you could imagine other devs don't really embrace the idea. I'm the guy who is never satisfied with 99%. * I've wanted a rigorous standard that doesn't change * I've wanted a binary protocol to juice up efficiency by avoiding JSON parsing I feel like the black sheep in this regard (hence my avatar) because I gather that most nostr developers (and users) more highly value chaotic liberty. Chaotic liberty is a great space to innovate in. But it is not a good space to build a solid user experience which requires a firm standard and compliance for interoperability. Hence I see hundreds of only somewhat compatible half-ass nostr applications that generally scare users off (which one? why are so many of them broken? and so different?). This is all fine. But it means I'm not seeing nostr as the protocol that becomes the social media framework that the Internet eventually adopts. I see it more and more as a playground. Which is critical and innovative and wonderful. I just don't see how it can also be a stable user experience that draws in lots of users and creates substantial network effect value. Mosaic is where I scratch my itch for order, efficiency, and reliability, and my attempt to create a solid user experience. I will be working on both Mosaic and nostr. Mosaic risks being too idealistic, the "betamax" of social media, but it is a risk I'm taking. Take joy knowing that I won't be bugging nostr devs as much about the chaos. Should I post this or edit it more? Fuck it. I saw a meme that said to just post it.

I think the battle for free speech is going to seriously heat up. So far in the West they are making a few famous examples out of people, deporting them, or famously cancelling them somehow. This has a chilling effect on everybody else who becomes afraid to speak openly. But the technology to cancel certain ideas could easily become far greater with AI and automation. The CCP in China puts a lot of effort into controlling what people say, and they are pretty successful at it. And that is prior to AI and automation AFAIK. So I am of the belief that we need to use this short time that we have to leapfrog them, to become seriously and deeply uncensorable, not just "censorship resistant". And to me that means things like (1) linking to previous events so you can at least detect if an event was censored, like scuttlebutt did, (2) avoiding placing trust in DNS and CAs, (3) avoiding any kind of centralization, even the "where should I look for your relay list" semi-centralization of NIP-65 (which I meant as a temporary stop-gap measure). And of course ensuring IP privacy techniques are usable. I think nostr would stand up against a lame censorship attack (taking out a single relay, then another, then another), but not against a sophisticated one.

The next US president will be from the America party. "I guaran-damn-tee it"

QUIC is pretty cool. You can start a client and then the server afterwards, and it still connects. A client can switch from WiFi over to 4G and still be connected.

as for Mosaic... Motivation comes from unrealized ideas. You have an idea. It doesn't exist. You are motivated to make it real. Procrastination comes from a series of attempt-fail cycles. After a certain amount of failure, your motivation is drained, and a deep-seated human brain heuristic kicks in which makes you not want to try again. This heuristic works well in the physical world, but is misapplied in the abstract programming world since in the abstract programming world trying again always means trying something different. Yet the heuristic is low-level and you need to use mental tricks to bypass it. Higher level wisdom that might tell you something like "don't build mosaic, it could fork the community" isn't actually effective at stopping you from doing something that you are motivated to do. Because higher level thinking evolved much later and doesn't affect your core motivations. So that motivation to make it real just nags at you until you do it. I supressed it for many months and it didn't go away. To those of you who found mosaic: please don't use it. It will change drastically over time. Nobody has reviewed it yet. I've not pointed at it and held it back from review, comments and feedback because I didn't want to waste people's time with incomplete stuff that was rapidly changing. Will it be a new protocol that starts over? Or is it an experiment to learn from? I don't know. I can't seem to figure out how to get these features into nostr, the nostr community seems happy with JSON, with websockets, with a single key using FROST remote signing, with finding relay lists on "popular" relays, with relays using URLs not keys, depending on CAs and DNS, outbox model being optional, AUTH command ordering issues, kind1 vs kind1111 issues, the notion of relays being front-and-center in user's minds is debatable (I think they can and should be mostly hidden magic), the fact that every relay is deeply different and there is almost no way to know what you are getting. The simplicity ethic I feel is taken too far. And the just one-way rule. NIP-11 out of band is a pain. Endless stream of breaking changes. Maybe these are irreconcilable differences. It is becoming harder for me to imagine that they are not.

Interesting video on money, quite a different take than I hear from bitcoiners: My summary of the video: There were never any barter economies. Money predates writing (the oldest writing cuniform on clay tablets were accounting records). Money is always tightly tied up with state power, primarily because states can enforce payment for debts owned which originated from people accidently harming other people.. the governmental power steps in and says "A owes B X amount of state-approved money to make this right." Thus, the value of a currency without intrinsic value is imparted to it by the power of the state that controls that money. Taxes just tie it even tighter to the governmental power. Every central power (state) has it's own money, with few exceptions (e.g. the Euro experiment, which is failing).

Conspiracy theories are so popular now, I just ran across a YouTube video that asks whether the Gilligan's Island shipwreck was by design. 🤦

Ask yourself this question: Who does the government work for? They work for the people of the nation, right? So when interviewed about a military op, should they tell the truth? No. Because that would be working for the whole damn world, including your enemies.