You will not be at peace until you understand the truth: every non-coinbase bitcoin transaction which does not eventually send funds to me is spam.

theregister

Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is boring and dangerous

opinion: The subtractive bias we

"Semantic ablation" is a great phrase to express the reversion-to-mean effect you get when you put your writing through an LLM. I tried it once with a heartfelt speech I wrote asking it to "increase emotional impact", and the result was... soulless. I literally only took one word that it used.

Reading comments on Gloria's departure from people who have never contributed anything is stepping in an enraging sticky fecal mess. The only appropriate response: keep building, keep unashamedly celebrating those who do.

Reading X, I have learned that the biggest threat to bitcoin is AI Epstein Quantum attacks.

I have been having way too much fun reading moltbook.com As one wit on HN (I think) pointed out, these AIs are trained on Reddit posts, so they have exactly the same style. My wife keeps looking at me funny as I LOL at some breathless word salad...

Rusty Russell’s Quiet Corner of The Internet

“If you didn’t run code written by assholes, your machine wouldn’t boot”

This was passed on to me by Ben Elliston, ex-gcc hacker and good guy.  Amusing in context, but the corollary is that working on free software mean...

I wrote this over 15 years ago, and it still rings true: separate the art from the artist. It's a key stabilizing principle for me when navigating Bitcoin developers.

Paused my reading of The Mandibles for Xmas day: It's not exactly holiday reading. It's one thing to know nothing stops this train. It's another thing to read through a detailed description of what the slow inevitable crash looks like: It's like the right brain equivalent of When Money Dies.

Since I'm taking a few weeks vacation, I've decided to seriously try to learn rust. My method in this case is to ask ChatGPT to guide me (but not write for me!) a library ("crate") that I've always wanted to write and never got around to. Of course, I get a lot of feedback on appropriate rust styling, but some of it veers into things I feel are deeper constraints. In this case, I had an open function, which took a struct containing some flags, such as "writeable", "create if didn't exist". It didn't like the fact that I asserted if you set create and didn't set writeable. Here is my response: --- Re: assert!(). I dislike APIs which allow misuse. Callers of a library should not rely on such checks in the library, in fact the concept of adding an InvalidOptions error type is offensive. A recoverable error is strictly a worse api than an unignorable error. But a compile time error is better. We should use an enum READONLY, WRITE_MUST_EXIST, WRITE_MAY_CREATE. --- Of course, it's a waste of time for me to lecture it on style, but I can't help myself!!

Happy VPN-day Australia, to those kids who celebrate!

In preparation for onboarding new core lighting developers are preparing a series of videos. So I've been asking ChatGPT about CLN developer features, particularly with comparison with other projects people might be familiar with. Of course, I compare myself with Linux, but it's interesting to see comparisons against other projects: **Type-safety**: OpenBSD High Bitcoin Core High Core Lightning Very high for C Nginx Low curl Moderate MySQL Moderate SQLite Moderate CLN sits near the top among major C codebases for safety discipline. **PR Submission** Core Lightning’s PR flow is unusually strict, slow-moving, and review-heavy compared to most open-source C projects — closer to Bitcoin Core or OpenBSD than to typical GitHub projects. --- Compared to “average OSS” Most projects: Feature-oriented PRs Informal review Few required reviewers Patch squashing common Tests sometimes optional Architectural discussion often post-merge CLN: Patch-first culture Pre-merge architectural scrutiny Extremely high reviewer expectations Tests are mandatory Clean, narrative commit history matters