The existence of [automatic captcha solving plugins](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/noptcha/) ought to just end the use of captchas on the entire web overnight really. But it won't, because the point of those things hasn't been to identify robots since almost the start. The point is the surveillance, and the capturing of free labour for robot training purposes. #captcha #ai #survelienceCapitalism

Peter Singer is a Consequentialist Hedonic Utilitarian Ethicist. It's his professional job to be good at ethics and teach others about ethics. He thinks the best ethics are judged by the consequences, and that good is the best for the most people. He has a podcast. It's probably great. He is cool. I only just heard about it. But this is his website. The podcast is offered on Spotify and Apple. It has an AI chat bot that isn't even prompted well to sound like Peter for no reason at all. It has a embed for a substack. That embed for a substack is expired because it's run by a thing called Supascribe that is presumably some software as a service scam. Below that is a cookie permissions banner which is asking for permission to spy on you for advertisers even though there are no actual adverts on the site. There are links at the top and bottom to Facebook and Instagram. There is no RSS feed embedded in the page. I repeat: Peter Singer is actually pretty cool, and he thinks about ethics sanely. This is the web we have built. Where a professional Consequentialist Hedonic Utilitarian Ethicist does all this.

[BIP 361](https://bips.dev/361/) is a proposal on what to do with bitcoin if Quantum Computers are buildable. Interesting abstract question even if you dislike bitcoin or prefer the US controlled Breton-woods petrodollar or using bank-debt charged at interest for money or whatever. The problem at hand is that coins are unlocked by cryptography which a big enough quantum computer could break. Sure, you can invent a quantum-proof key type, but all the existing coins have to be unlocked and moved into those types of addresses before that quantum computer is invented. There is enough space on the blockchain to do that over a few years, but a lot of keys are lost. Maybe millions of bitcoins in addition to the original million or so coins mined by Satoshi which have never moved with keys presumed burned or owner dead. That means handing maybe 10% or more of the total coins to Quantum Hackers with presumed evil intent. Can the node-runners and miners who make up the network do anything about that? BIP 361 suggests forever locking any coins not moved into quantum-proof addresses within five years. If you've been in a coma or in jail with the seed-phrase memorized you're going to get released and find your bitcoin frozen by the Bip-361 cabal. But then if bip 361 and similar fails, you're just going to wake up and find a quantum hacker has taken them instead. You ain't gonna recover your coins from your memorized seed-phrase either way. Some bitcoins are literally time-locked, prevented from moving for ten years. They are stuffed either way and can't move into safe addresses even if they still have the keys. Remember that "Some quantum hacker" isn't a furry kid in a bedroom or the organized crime syndicates. It's Google or the US Government or a university or Cern or something. Do you want to lock the coins, or give them to a random state or state sized corporate actor? It's all very well being sad after your timelocked coins are taken by a protocol change, but its just as sad to have them taken by the US Government. What would the US government do if they took Satoshi's coins? Probably use them to back a new satoshi dollar? It becomes that Bitcoin Strategic Reserve by default.

My hobby this week is deleting Google Off My Phone. So I installed GrapheneOS on my Pixel Six phone. No blog posts for years then two in one week!

Dalliance

Grapheneos

With Google soon to make Android even less free it’s time to extend my degoogling practise and see how much Android we can remove from my phone. ...

It seems to do most of the things I need from a phone these days, if only because of how I'm already deliberately not using Google for address/calendar/email and instead try and do most stuff with self-hosted web-services. Means if I have a browser I have most of what I want already. Graphene here is going to work for me except for: * Organic Maps isn't good enough for driving or for busses. * Banking apps Luckily, with Graphene, the Google Play services can be installed and they install in user-space, so you can set your phone to have a Google partition and a Free partition and install Maps and Waze and Bank-apps in the Google unfree part. Using a few new open-source things I wasn't using before on Android. Molly is nice for Signal and solves that tablet-app problem I think. But seems like this can work. Away from Google but still only supporting a google phone 🤔 for now. More models coming I believe. Perhaps I'll buy one soon coz both Google and Graphene stop supporting this Pixel Six this year. More details in the blog post anyway. #grapheneOS #degoogle #android #blog

Interesting to find myself on The Bitcoin Group with no real expertise or job in the industry. Closest I have to an Bitcoin Industry claim is having made a cartoon about it once. Was alright though, think I managed not to sound too dumb. Thanks @Mad Bitcoins

SPOILERS: Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy immersive theater show Went out and saw the Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy immersive theater show at the Riverside in Hammersmith. It was good fun. Our pub visit and Arthur Dent's surprise leaving party that Ford threw was interrupted by the Vogons coming to destroy the planet. Luckily, Ford got the entire pub into the Heart Of Gold and hence to the cargo hold of the Vogon ship. Songs and dance, audience participation, beautiful costumes and familiar characters. All good fun. Trouble with a comedy based on a forty year old show though is that the jokes are all entirely predictable and obvious. Which makes it a comedy show without much actual laughs. And while the Fenchurch in the show was an entirely lovely actress, I always found the character in the books/radio-shows quite annoying and she was too prominent in a 90 minute show. Good fun, but don't expect to be rolling in the aisles.

Starmer's speech is full of regret, so sorry that he believed the lies of Mandelson. Now we are expected to trust the judgement of a man who believed the lies of a person known as the Prince Of Darkness in order to appoint him as ambassador to America, precisely because of his relationship with the Epstein and Trump circle. If not for his relationship with those fuckers, why make him ambassador? What did he have over the existing ambassador other than his relationship with the whole Epstein crowd? Nothing. He was chosen for that position by Starmer exactly because of that relationship which Starmer now pleads he didn't know about as he was fooled by the lies of the dark prince. Nope. I don't buy it. Starmer can still fuck off. #ukpol

Read "How To Survive In A Science Fiction Universe" by Charles Yu, a novel about a time-machine repair-man getting stuck in a loop during his search for his father. First person narrated, in a fictional universe in which you can travel in time but you can't change anything about the past. It was fun and an easy read, lots of interludes about the physics of fictional universes and explanations of acausal items causing their own existence, including the book itself that you read in your hands. Its nice if you'd like something with experimental narrative form twisting the usual story format.

So Musk bought Twitter for 40 billion and then merged it with his experimental AI company that has never made any money and then sold it to the other company he mostly owns (which exists only due to massive government subsidy) for 250 billion dollars. This sale based on the ludicrous lie that data-centers might be built in orbit. It's a living I guess. Now that Musk has offloaded Twitter and his AI experiments to SpaceX, he can be sure the government will bail it out when the AI bubble pops. The government's defense industry depends upon SpaceX for access to space. This is probably the main reason for the "sale" transferring money from one of Musk's bank accounts to another of Musk's bank accounts. The AI price bubble popping could have wiped out xAI and thus Twitter with it, but now it's cushioned against that by contracts with a government who can't afford to allow their only real space access to go bust. So he can subsidize his failing AI business and his unprofitable media-manipulation efforts at Twitter with his government-protected failing exploding space-rocket project. All protected by the lie which the media keep repeating uncritically that it makes any sense at all to have data centers in space. What a great businessman.

Asimov wrote his laws of robotics as a dramic device to show how difficult it is to write laws of robotics. How they always will contradict each other. His laws are there to illustrate a problem, not as a genuine attempt at the solution. His laws are deliberately wrong. [Anthropic's constitution](https://www.anthropic.com/constitution) is a proper attempt to solve the problem instead. Surprising that it ends up written in English rather than maths. Perhaps the robot will translate it into maths later. There's a lot of thorny philosophy in it if you assume the premise that a super-intelligent machine can be built, even if known methods can't build it. We should do that philosophy whether the premise turns out to be true or false. Anthropic are doing much better on the AI ethics than openAI. And the business side, and the building actually useful models side. [Zvi has some blogs](

Don't Worry About the Vase

Open Problems With Claude’s Constitution

The first post in this series looked at the structure of Claude’s Constitution. The second post in this series looked at its ethical framework. T...

on the AI community's reaction to it and analysing it. Seems long. Might have to be expressed as a meme. 😆 #ai #anthropic

I see Facebook are going to be advertising their "AI glasses" at the superbowl. Trying to sell their glasses to athletes. I gotta tell ya, people wearing Meta's glasses should be shunned like those google glassholes were. They should be banned from any public place with their creepy surveillance headsets on. If you see someone wearing them you should harass that person and drive them out of whatever space you are in. Do not allow constant surveillance to become the norm, especially from that fucking creep zuckerberg. Same goes for Musk's surveillance cameras on legs, his "optimus" robots. Do not allow them in your spaces. Do not countenance their existence in your presence. Drive them out. Ostracize anyone you see with them. They must never become normal. https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/oakley-meta-readies-super-bowl-debut-to-sell-ai-glasses-to-athletes/ #meta #ai #glasses

Run Zack Run! Glad to see lots of people liking and sharing the Green Party England&Wales broadcast this week. It's striking. Hope it's happening in the corporate spaces too, though presumably the capitalist leaders there suppress it with their algorithms. Zack is in general doing such a great job of speaking my mind really it's unreal. All the other leaders just seem dazed and confused, trying hard to maintain the status quo, ensure that capital power persists and they don't offend their corporate donors. Or worse, just blaming the poor and the helpless and threatening that hurting people will solve the problems England and Wales face (it won't). Here's hoping it has some impact and the Green Party make huge progress because the country seems likely to just get worse and worse under any of the other party's policies and positions.

So farewell then Microsoft Office. I haven't used you really since the 90s. From this distance: it seems like you just kept getting worse and more exploitative since then and trapped millions of people in abusive relationships with tech. It made me laugh when you went monthly-payment subscription-only, and then laugh even more when suckers actually ponied up for that. It's fun when people say they don't know how to use Libreoffice, even though Libre is more like the original MS Office (before it was shit) than Office 365 was. I wish you fare well on your transition to your new identity as "The Microslop 365 Co-dependency Ass" or whatever the new name is. Good luck in your new task of exploiting people and learning how to replace them in their jobs. I will not be subscribing to your services. Or newsletter. I will continue to tell people I refuses to accept files in proprietary file formats. #microSlop #office #CoPiliot #ai #enshitification #poem

So farewell then 2025. In numbers: * 11 wordcloud tarot shows * 3 Festivals * 2 Loopy piano gigs * 2 Live Performance Improv Shows * 1 observers cartoon * 1 new microcamper/car * 1 new bedroom * 1 Bitcoin/Nostr conference * 1 Life-Log App released * 1 Broken Wrist * 1 Mortgage paid off Seems okay. More in the blog:

Dalliance

So Farewell Then 2025

So farewell then 2025. Had some serious health worries, made some stuff, did some performance, made money, had some fun. Not the best year, suspect...

Have a happy new year's eve everyone, and an even happier new year.

Heyhey y'all. Hope you had a nice xmas. Watched War Between The Land And The Sea with the family over Xmas so I can catch up on the Who Culture episodes about it without spoilers. Plus the mattress on the new Tardis bedroom should have expanded over xmas to be useable without voiding guarantee. So when I got back after Xmas I used the bed for lounging about drinking a glass of wine, watching Who Culture podcast, and mucking about on the tablet screen. Nice. #selfie

Builders finished in my new bedroom today. It's lovely in there. Looking very like i intended. Look forward to one day having money again so I can afford to furnish it with a bed 😆

Added a category manager and category state section to the Exocortex Log app. Have now organized and cleaned up the categories in my ten year database and so we can get some views of the time spent in each category. We see that through September and October I was in a routine of work and slack with a bit of social a couple of times a week, until the end of November when I went away for social at a conference all weekend. I saw a demo there of a person using Shakespeare, and then when I got back started doing some vibe-coding, shown in in Red. A break from that to go away at the weekend to a long social party then finish it off and publish a few days ago, since when Vibe Coding has dropped off a little.

Exocortex Blog

Adding Category Summary - Exocortex Blog

Adding a category management page showing stats and allowing rename and merge of categoriesg

#lifeLog #app #exocortexLog

I am quite keen to watch The War Between The Land And The Sea on iplayer. But we need to consider tactics. Will the folks sit and watch it with me at Xmas? If they would that'd perhaps be better than whatever drivel quiz shows and police car chase stuff they normally make me watch. If they won't I'll be be postponing it three weeks for no reason. 🤔 Might be nice to watch it in the new bedroom but that probably won't have a bed or a chair until the new year. #watching #doctorWho #onlyNotDoctorWho

conference is over now. I likely wouldn't have come for just a bitcoin thing, but I am very interested in redecentralizing the web, so it's attachment to the nostr day pulled me in. Everyone I met was friendly and interesting and seems much more interested in making a better money system than in making money for themselves. Our government and bank money systems are dysfunctional in all kinds of ways which are often less visible than they should be too people using them, especially to those in Europe and America who benefit from the way those systems exploit the global south. I'm not convinced that fixing that would end wars and fix broken government as some seem to think, but I am sure our money is the source of many problems. There are many bright, well meaning, and intelligent people building to improve bitcoin in fascinating ways with the hope of having a parallel system to transition to. With lots of work still to be done. Can it work? I'm sure I don't know, and I'm sure even if it's a better system it'll come with it's own unfairness and cruelty. Money will continue to be a source of suck and worry. I'm told that the bigger conferences are often full of shitcoin scammers and suit wearing banksters who are in fact all in it too get rich and rip people off, but I found none of that here. Here there is a real community of people trying to make the world a better place and improve the lives of their neighbours and governance of their countries. And in the end building community is the most radical and effective way to change the world regardless of the problems of it's money system. I had a great time. Thanks to those organising it and welcome new followers. I mostly don't talk about bitcoin very much because money isn't really very interesting and I'm fast from expert on it. #bitfest #bitcoin

> Perplexity CEO says its browser will track everything users do online to sell ‘hyper personalized’ ads Dalliance CEO says he will never use that browser and will continue to use whatever blocks adverts and tracking of all kinds most effectively. Dalliance CEO says Perplexity CEO can take his browser and fuck off.

TechCrunch

Perplexity CEO says its browser will track everything users do online to sell 'hyper personalized' ads | TechCrunch

Perplexity is building its own browser is to collect data on everything users do outside of its own app to sell ads.