Wow I just found @Big Bad John. He is so *smart* and not at all "retarded." 😏 I'm not sure if I should bother correcting his misunderstandings of nostr, or his misjudgements of what is and isn't censorable and why, or just ignore him. Does he listen or just talk? We will see. I like pkarr. I like using Mainline DHT directly even more. I'm using it in Mosaic. But it is also censorable. The bittorrent DHT may not be subject to sybil attacks, but it only has 3 (AFAICT) public well-known on-ramps. Take those three down and people who don't already have a node list can't get on. Nostr is not better for bootstrapping (finding a person's relays) but it isn't much worse. There is a weak centralizing pressure to put relay lists on a the same well known popular relays, but those change over time and the pressure changes over time, and good clients republish to the current popular set which can move. The main issue is that client devs are all over the map in terms of how they choose to deal with the situation, and some aren't even using outbox model. IMHO (emphasis on H) the main benefit of the DHT is someone new with a single key they want to follow can get started without knowing anybody nor any relays/servers. There is no censorability difference between homeservers in pkarr and relays in nostr. You can run your own, or you can outsource it, in both cases. One isn't more censorship resistant than the other. When I look at

GitHub

Pubky

Unlock the web. Pubky has 39 repositories available. Follow their code on GitHub.

I see among top rpos "pubky-app" which says it is a deprecated repository, and will be replaced with pubky/franky. But pubky/franky does not exist. So IMHO there is no opensource pubky, which means I won't be using it and I recommend against.

Despite what I wrote yesterday or 2 days ago about Epstein, I do think there are a lot of shenannagans going on, and a lot we are not being told. View quoted note → Alan Dershowitz also came out saying he knows many other names and files that are being hidden. Trump was clearly nervous when the Epstein quesiton was asked a few days ago, so nervous he said crazy things: "Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy's been talked about for years. Are people still talking about this guy? This creep? That is unbelievable. I can't believe you're asking a question on Epstein at a time like this, when we're having some of the greatest success, and also tragedy with what happened in Texas. It just seems like a desecration." Back when Lex Friedman interviewed Trump before the election, he was nervous about it then too.

425 Too Early

Not the Onion: Israel Wants to Build the Most Moral Concentration Camp in the World (I didn't read it, I just laughed at the headline, but the link is proof this is a real article) https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/editorial/2025-07-10/ty-article-opinion/israel-wants-to-build-the-most-moral-concentration-camp-in-the-world/00000197-f0b3-d963-addf-f4b7029a0000

A lot of people seem to believe that Jeffrey Epstein recruited underage girls in order to videotape them having sex with rich and powerful people as compromat for an intelligence agency, perhaps Mossad, and that he was murdered in prison to cover up the loose end. While I cannot prove that this is not true, there is almost no evidence for this story. The evidence points to a simpler story: Jeffrey Epstein was a socialite and financier who had connections with lots of famous and powerful people, and he also liked having sex with minors and so he recruited minors so that he could have sex with them. Several famous people also took the opportunity to have sex with minors facilitated by Epstein, but not as videotaped compromat. The second time he was imprisoned for it he committed suicide by strangulation. The hyoid bone can be fractured by hanging, but more often by strangulation, and the description of Epstein's body as found is more like strangulation. You can commit suicide by strangulation (please don't). The strange occurance of the camera being off, the cell not being monitored, could have been guards who were turning their backs to let him commit suicide ("fucking pedo should die, let's let him do it."). Papers related to Epstein said he was a suicide risk prior to his death. US Attorneys office offered a plea deal to the correctional officers if they claim they fell asleep, who rejected it claiming they did nothing wrong, but clearly the Justice Department suspected the guards. Earlier on July 23 Epstein attempted suicide, which put him on suicide watch. But Epstein's attorney argued against it and he was taken off suicide watch but stull was supposed to be checked on every 30 minutes. So the bedsheets were not toilet paper in this cell as some claim. The claim that Alexander Acosta said "I was told Epstein 'belonged to intelligence' and to leave it alone" has only one source, an editorial in The Daily Beast by Vicky Ward who says it came from an interview she did with a former senior White House official and this is what she claims Accosta told the Trump team. It is not in court documents or congressional testimony from Accosta as far as I can tell, and regarding it Accosta said "I would hesitate to take this reporting as fact." Maxwell is in prison for assisting Epstein in recruiting underaged girls for sex with Epstein. The famous people that various girls claimed were involved in sex acts in this situation may or may not have been. The evidence doesn't strongly favor either side. I have found no evidence of video tapes recovered from the Island with the names of famous people on their labels. I vaguely remember seeing it in a video way back when, but either I am mistaken or the Internet has been scrubbed of such a thing. If anybody has it, please share. I'm currently assuming this was a myth at the time and never happened. The conspiracy theory was fun, but it is too flimsy.

This is how the gossip client works:

X (formerly Twitter)

Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) on X

The most surreal vehicle you will see today

Jeffrey Epstein never even existed. Trust me bros.

I heard that if you tell a lie enough times it becomes Israel. I heard that the only reason Israel is not the 51st state is because then they would only have two senators.

Q: Can browser apps access tor onion sites? Such sites could not have a valid certificate, right? So I'm guessing they cannot. So then tor usage is limited to having the client tunnel everything through tor and out through some exit node to a regular website with a valid cert.

Who thinks Ukraine can sustain this?:

Our World in Data

Military Personnel and Spending

How large are countries’ militaries? How much do they spend on their armed forces? Explore global data on military personnel and spending.

I just want to say here (because I've been critical of some of his ideas) that I have mad respect for @fiatjaf and I'm hugely impressed by nostr which was quite a breakthrough, and that he has proven wiser than me more than once. But where I disagree I'm going to say so. And so then we can all argue about it. I focus on what is wrong (or what I believe is wrong, rightly or wrongly) because that is what you need to do to fix things, but it also ends up coming off as negativity or bad-mouthing, which isn't intended. 💜

Someone tried to blackpill me today. But I coughed it up and spit it out. The blackpill was that decentralized systems can't innovate because it is too hard or impossible to make breaking changes. Centralized systems like facebook can just innovate without permission or compatibility and so they will always innovate much faster, and so decentralized system can never keep up and will never compete with them. I partially agree. Yes, centralized systems can innovate faster. Yes, it might always be that most people will be on the centralized systems. But where I disagree is this: Centralized systems keep letting us down. And some of us are happy enough to use a decentralized system for a subset of our social media, to have at least some level of reliability and trust that we can depend on. Moxie Marlinspike (fittingly named after a knot) poo-poo's decentralization here but much of what he claims is wrong, adjacent to the truth but not quite correct or meaningful. Let's look at breaking changes. Consider how breaking changes can occur: 1) You go around and get everybody to update their software (PITA and eventually impossible) 2) You just give up on the feature and decide we can live without it (a cop out) 3) You version the protocol. @fiatjaf valuing simplicity rejected (3) in his writings early on for nostr. Because versioning multiplies complexity. You have to keep all the old code and have case dependent code for the newer code. But I still believe that (3) is the only way out, and growing complexity is inevitable. Yes of course any change that can be made non-breaking is definately the preferred approach, but not everything can do that. There are real world examples of this that are working just fine. The Vulkan API is in a sense decentralized. It works on many different hardware devices and with many different OS vendors. It is versioned. How did it not ossify? It's a fucking mystery ain't it?! Also, Moxie talks about IPv4 not being able to get to IPv6 and IPv4 ossifying. But fails to mention the obvious: IPv4 is the greatest success story ever. Damn near everybody uses it all the time. So who cares if some parts of it have ossifed? Not me. And to be honest, parts of it (like congestion control) were able to change very late in the game. So this is a piss-poor argument against decentralization. Also, Moxie talks about how many people are programming stuff and you can't keep up with all of them. But he fails to mention that less than 10% of those people are useful. Or that the management interference almost necessarily breaks any useful thing they end up doing. Against the view of all the pundits (Bill Gates most notably) open source software supercedes commercial software in almost every domain. Because in open source, and with decentralized solutions, the entire world participtes, rather than just one or two buildings in Redmond. And generally only the most intellgent high-IQ people can pick it up and run with it, meaning you have a worldwide team of highly intelligent people versus a limited commercial team that is mostly deadweight and plagued by managers who want to make their mark. I may not be a bright-eyed (red eyed?) bushy-tailed spring chicken bitcoiner who is upbeat about everything and believes everything is possible. I'd say I"m a bit more cautious than most about what I hope for or aim at. But I am still a "can do" person and I will never stop trying. *spits out the black pill*