Don’t get sloppy anon. During times like these where every project is actively under attack by agents of all kinds (AI or state) amid the chaos there’s opportunity for malicious updates to slip in too. In fact it’s almost certainly already happened on important projects. Be mindful anon.

“Lightning stable channels” or how to introduce untrustworthy third parties to your Bitcoin transactions. Don’t let a third party tell you what your channel balances should be, anon.

Bitcoin is money. Spend it! Then go and purchase no-KYC sats afterwards. If you have a lot of KYC sats then spend those first and if you approve of how your taxes are being spent then report it based on the requirements of your relevant politicians. View quoted note →

Less than one year away from block number 1M. Time to start planning the parties.

Movies today are insulting to everyone with an attention span. We need meaningful dialogue again. View quoted note →

Seems interesting:

GitHub

GitHub - shocknet/Lightning.Pub: The Nostr Native Lightning node, share your node with nostr accounts and connect easily to webapps.

The Nostr Native Lightning node, share your node with nostr accounts and connect easily to webapps. - shocknet/Lightning.Pub

@Egge are you still running zapper.fun? Homepage loads but after putting in an npub the page just shows a spinner. Looks like it can’t connect to the default relays based on the console logs. Hopefully it’s just me.

Blockspace is social media for heatpunks.

On the "Great Filter" debate (Fermi paradox, not spam in Bitcoin) There are endless debates about whether there's such a thing as a "great filter" and whether or not that explains why we don't see aliens. Some argue that the leap to multicellular life was such a filter and that it's exceedingly rare to do it. Others argue that the filter, if it exists, is ahead of us and that AI or bioweapons or nukes are examples of what can ultimately wipe us out. The idea there is that over time we accumulate more ways to destroy ourselves and it's just a waiting game. There's another alternative. If you take the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics seriously ("many worlds") then there's another possibility: there are many such filters and they quite possibly took us out in some branches. Consider that if such a filter happened and there's a branch where we survive and one where we don't then there's nobody around to have a subjective experience in the filtered scenario. We wouldn't be around to debate it. Only the branches where we survive do we get to have the debate and ask whether such things exist. So then it seems as though as long as there's at least one branch where humanity doesn't get filtered then that's the one we'll subjectively experience in the future and we'll never know if the great filter will come for us or not.

Focus on what you can directly control or influence and you’ll experience far less stress. Where reasonable make small improvements every day. Often just setting a small goal and accomplishing it gives you the motivation to reach for a bigger goal right away and you’ve made progress already. Setting a large goal initially can be an impediment to even getting started. And go outside!

No matter the fiat price, bitcoin is fuck you money.

I’ve had conversations about AGI with many people lately and everyone has their own bizarre definitions and why we haven’t reached it yet. Some people draw the line at systems that fit in one process, others mention things like having many different sensory inputs embedded in the same latent space, and so on. Every definition has been arbitrary and yet even by their own definitions we’ve reached AGI. The average person makes mistakes, hallucinates or lies, forgets things, gets confused, has creative insights, etc. There are people that are deaf/blind/dyslexic, etc. so missing some capability isn’t a valid line to draw. There’s benchmarks like Arc AGI that LLMs haven’t beaten yet but I know people that would do terribly on that as well. In my opinion we’ve reached it. Doesn’t mean we have Einstein in a box or that we have some god-like oracle but I think we’ve run out of meaningful lines to draw.

Silver isn’t looking so great all of a sudden 😯. Should’ve stayed humble and stacked sats

Cellular automata (CA) are underrated. Most people’s experience with them are simply Conway’s Game of Life or similar setups. The topic is much deeper than that though. Some 2D CA are in fact Turing complete [1] and can be used to perform any computation (albeit inefficiently). So what? Why not just use python or if you're really bored use a transformer model? Because in this context it's not about doing the computation but rather what we can learn about computation in general. The beautiful thing about CA is that they are naturally visual and we can see emergent patterns at a glance while they work. First consider that ALL scripts, models, charts, etc. on computers are discrete. Then understanding the simplest discrete systems (ie. CA) may give us an idea of the limitations of the more complex ones. In fact, even simple, deterministic systems can produce unpredictable behavior [2]. And sometimes even complex rules don’t lead to complex output. It also turns out that there's a natural connection between convolutional neural networks and CA [3] so this touches on important topics in AI. This is the focus of my current research and I'm hoping to publish more on that eventually (not under this nym of course). I recommend more people get creative with studying cellular automata. —— 1.

Rule 110 - Wikipedia

2.

Rule 30 - Wikipedia

3.

arXiv.org

Cellular automata as convolutional neural networks

Deep learning techniques have recently demonstrated broad success in predicting complex dynamical systems ranging from turbulence to human speech, ...

China has been deploying humanoid robots to its border with Vietnam [1]. This is just the beginning; expect this trend to proliferate to other countries over time and for the robots to become much more capable. This raises a lot of obvious concerns but one that jumps out to me is the removal of the general public from its own security. Security is being outsourced away from the group who ostensibly wants to be secured and at the sole discretion of a class of people codified into law as “above everyone else” (ie. the State). This is happening within the broader context of general automation where factories are being automated top to bottom in more and more industries. The general public has less influence in society at an unprecedented scale. In AI circles there’s always been the concept of the “alignment problem” where researchers are worried about advanced AI being aligned with humans but until we can figure out alignment between groups of us there’s no real “extra” threat posed by advanced AI for the vast majority of people. 1.

South China Morning Post

UBTech humanoid robots to patrol China-Vietnam border crossings

The initiative features the industrial-grade Walker S2, billed as the world’s first humanoid robot capable of replacing its own battery.

One of the most important and influential papers of the last decade was “Attention is all you need” and people are out here giving all their attention to Meta and TikTok. 🙄😂