I'm having a lot of fun using and writing my new language bot. First time in ages that I find it fun to study languages, and I really think the bot is good at remembering my preferences. It's the first time I've ever implemented - or really though about - how to manage context. As well as the obvious stuff - like compaction - my bot also has some memory-like systems that are for language-learning specifically. For example, it keeps track of mistakes and successes in grammar topics; all labelled and categorized by the llm. This allows it to keep a compact summary of the mistakes I'm making in vocab and grammar and so on. And also a 'learner profile' where the llm keeps a summary of my preferences and basic life facts. For example it has learned that "Bitcoin" is one of my interests I'm not a language teacher, so I'm making sure that I design the system such that I don't have to make a decision that might be a bad decision; everything is llm-guided It's just for me and one friend, not planning to share View quoted note →

Giving up carbs (again). Plan to be very strict for six weeks, mostly just an experiment to see what longer term feels like I have sometimes cut back drastically for a week or two in the past, and felt good after a tough first few days. Then I gradually make exceptions and end up eating multiple croissants per day again!

Something I should have built a long time ago:

Maybe I shouldn't say this, but I'd trust myself to just select words myself from a print out of the BIP-39 word list And similarly, for dice rolls I would trust myself to do random rolls in my brain Yeah I know what some of you are thinking. While I'm not a professional cryptographer, I've been studying randomness and statistics in some form in my entire career, so I trust myself - if I need to select a new seed phrase really quickly - to do it with good enough entropy

We need to rethink "Bitcoin only" as a purity test. Multiple things recently have reminded me of this issue, not just the ColdCard hack. If you *genuinely* understand the tech, and the economics, and all that other stuff, you can come to the conclusion that Bitcoin will win. That you should put all your wealth in it, and you should help out with freedom tech if you can But things aren't so easy for people who don't really *understand* it all. They have to go on faith a lot. I've had just one long face-to-face conversation with a BIP-110 supporter. Very nice older man, but he knew essentially nothing about how Bitcoin worked. He had put all his life savings into Bitcoin, but he was very stressed and said he'd have to sell if BIP-110 didn't activate. My point there isn't to (yet again!) criticize a BIP-110 supporter. He kept using the word "conviction", and that his "conviction" was being tested. It's like a religious person talking about "faith" He was Bitcoin-only (on the face of it), but only because it was an article of faith for him and because he copied the opinions of people smarter than him. If we try to bully people to take "Bitcoin only" as an article of faith, then it becomes a meaningless slogan. And it can become harmful because it means that people can't ask the hard questions that challenge Bitcoin. And if people are Bitcoin-only as an article of faith, and not because they've actually learned about it, then I don't think that does anybody any good

If the code is open, bad actors will read it and exploit it If you want to motivate people to review and help you to improve the code, actively encourage them to use it and encourage them to depend on it in their products Make it truly open source (MIT, GPL, BSD). Be flattered, not angry, when people incorporate the code in their products. They are now motivated to help find and fix problems Don't arrogantly try to say that it's "your code", as if you are perfect I.e. don't be like ColdCard. Don't do a dumb rewrite, against the loud advice at the time, to switch all the code to a fake-open license which allows bad actors to read the code and doesn't incentivize good actors to do the same More examples are being (re-)surfaced of Coinkite/nvk being assholes. Their anti-open attitude appears to be deeply embedded in their DNA. I say this because they can't recover from this; the root cause of this isn't just "aww shucks, this one line was unfortunate". They were mismanaged by an egomaniac who hated openness ---- Just one example

A practical supply chain attack on the Coldcard

TLDR: The Coldcard does a factory reset when an existing PIN is changed to an empty PIN , contrary to Coldcard’s claims that a factory reset is i...

I guess I'm lucky that I had a slightly "icky" feeling about Coldcard. Their device looked really cool, and they had some good marketing, but that all felt kinda sus to me. So I don't think I really considered it

And, of course, in the 'Fork Talk' Telegram group, their main attack dog there is trying to find a way to blame Core for the Coldcard thing

I'd buy a device which simply did this: I enter 11 (or 23) BIP-39 words that I selected randomly myself, and then it computes the checksum and 12th (or 23rd) word and displays it to me Then I'd enter these 12 (or 24) words in a separate conventional hardware wallet The device could come with dice and a table of the words I'm suggesting this because this checksum is the only part of seed generation that isn't easily done manually

Are there tools to download the list of all the songs I've liked on Spotify or Youtube Music? I'm not asking for the actual audio itself, just to backup the lists of songs #AskNostr

The number theorists keep talking about Jacobins Are they anything like the Fabians that are attacking Bitcoin right now?

I'd be inclined to support this, if it was applied to everybody regardless of age What do you think?