MachuPikacchu
Machu Pikacchu

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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_30
3. https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.02942

2026-01-19 18:51:31 UTC

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The billionaire that created a social media platform that censored lots of people and cooperated with the feds? The one that created a hardware wallet that prevents any possibility of privacy?
I’m not anti-bitchat but also uninstalled it after the first week. Nothing wrong with experimenting. We need better tools.

2026-01-06 23:31:48 UTC

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Why California? If someone lives in Chicago for example why would California have any claim on it?
Regardless of the type of asset, bitcoin or otherwise, this law just makes no sense unless it only applies to California residents. And even then it still makes no sense.

2025-12-30 18:31:34 UTC

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Here’s one example: https://tribuneonlineng.com/china-rolls-out-humanoid-robots-at-busy-vietnam-border-crossing/
“Deployment is expected to begin this December” and since we’re at the end of December and I’m not a world renowned journalist I figured it’s acceptable to say they’ve been rolling them out.
Without physically going there ourselves we’ll just have to rely on the sparse reporting and vague timelines but in any case it’s a very real issue that is being publicized by the company and government involved and I’m not sure why you’re being so pedantic.

2025-12-30 16:20:39 UTC

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Why accuse me of lying?
It depends on which source you look at online; some are saying it’s already being rolled out and others say it’s in the process.
And in any case does it matter if it happens next week or happened last week? The contracts are signed and the robots are real and there’s clearly motivation to deploy these things. It’s not “years from now” from what the reports are saying. Whether those publishers are lying is a different story.

2025-12-21 20:51:21 UTC

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Going on stage and hugging a well known cracked out celebrity with a smile on your face shortly after your spouse is assassinated is textbook grief

2025-12-12 19:04:42 UTC

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Yes, fantastic idea!

2025-12-07 12:26:36 UTC

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. 🙄😂

2025-12-01 15:11:24 UTC

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In hindsight, in my humble opinion, javascript was a mistake. It opened a pandora’s box of complexity that’s made browser implementation difficult to secure and over time led to centralization.
Now only a handful of implementations exist and modern websites are painful to browse without an ad blocker and other extensions. Couple that with the big companies shoving privacy invading AI into the browsers as fast as possible and the war on ad-blocking and we’re accelerating into a situation where users have no control over the content they see.
However, just like Nostr is trying to fix social media (and other stuff) I think we’ll find a way to break the browser oligopoly.

2025-11-30 20:53:32 UTC

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The term vote implies the action carries one of two values but zaps give you also magnitude so it tells you more. That alone means “vote” is not the right word.
On top we can react with emojis each of which carries information distinct from “yes/no/abstain” so again I think “vote” is not the right idea.
All that said, haven’t thought about a better label. Just wanted to add that it’s more than just semantics 😅

2025-11-29 19:39:26 UTC

Writing open source privacy software (legally protected by first amendment; see Bernstein v USA) and posting effectively politically incorrect jokes (also legally protected by the first amendment) resulted in jail time.
At no point did they have control over anyone else’s funds. This case shows a clearly corrupted justice system. This happened to all of us in this community and we would do well to take lessons from Phil Zimmerman [1].
It will not get better on its own. The least you can do is talk to your friends and family about the need for privacy and free speech and show how both are under attack. If capable, build better systems. We all have a role to play. #FreeSamourai
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Zimmermann
#note1zc4…vc8r

2025-11-21 13:07:44 UTC

Wall St entered the game when Bitcoin was at $42k. If they’re getting rinsed there’s a chance we’ll retest those levels. Not my base case. Not financial advice. And as always GFY.
#note12yk…nwu8

2025-11-18 16:08:48 UTC

After Bitcoin and Nostr the whole concept of “accounts” feels so archaic.

2025-11-06 13:54:43 UTC

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This is why we need to focus more on using it as money (ie increase demand) than “store of value” because that’s just a dead end into ETFs.
Also, people’s expectations were way out of line this cycle. It’s the first time since Bitcoin has been around that central banks around the world have actively fought inflation. Liquidity has been draining off and on the past two years. The 4 year cycle thesis misled many.

2025-10-27 13:16:34 UTC

Don’t let media of any kind (news, social, etc) distract you. They thrive on your attention and in the end you’ll have many hours/days/weeks of frustration and resentment to show for it.
What has become possible with AI these days is nothing short of insane and now is the time to build. That nagging problem you’ve had with that product or service the last few years? Replace it.
In the last two weeks I’ve stopped listening to any podcasts, browsing hacker news, and anything similar and in that time I’ve built two separate production grade systems to solve real problems I had both at work and personal life.
One of them replaces software I used with family for years and the other was something entirely new that saves me a lot of headaches at work. Minimal dependencies and none on third party platforms.
And although I’ve been writing software for two decades I built these without writing a single line of the code. Full test suite, manually reviewed, etc but the point is that we’re at a point where almost anyone can do it. Most of that was written while I was doing other things like eating lunch, in a meeting, or cooking. Don’t wait for someone else to build your app for you.

2025-10-12 19:32:22 UTC

If there exists such a technology that would give you total dominance over a critical domain and you can’t guarantee you’ll have a monopoly on such tech then your best move is to work on preventing anyone else from getting that monopoly. That is the core principle behind decentralization.

2025-10-03 09:08:03 UTC

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I agree in spirit, but isn’t this also an argument for something akin to property taxes?
“Your UTXO hasn’t moved in 10 years but it’s being secured. You haven’t paid any fees this whole time.”
When you amortize the cost of your transaction over long enough it’s effectively the same argument, no?
In any case spam sucks and I’m not in favor of making it easier to do.

2025-09-30 17:07:03 UTC

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At first glance I thought it was an E30 👀

2025-09-18 17:55:53 UTC

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Even worse is that if they scare you but the threats are not believable then the voters learn to ignore them so they have to have some credibility. If the threats weren’t real before then the politician has to make them real. Nice little game they created huh?

2025-09-18 16:38:01 UTC

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Where are the sheps?

2025-09-17 21:39:28 UTC

We’ve joked about it for a long time now but it’s time to get serious.
Which one of us is going to fix the end of Game of Thrones using AI first?

2025-09-16 00:41:35 UTC

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50 tons is roughly $6B at a spot price of $3700.
According to Google about $56B worth of Bitcoin trading volume today.
Seems obvious which one should settle international trade long term given security and speed of settlement.

2025-09-12 10:20:15 UTC

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Not how I remember playing spin the bottle

2025-09-11 18:15:37 UTC

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Along those lines:
Chop up ginger and turmeric root and boil until you’re happy. Let it cool, strain, then put in your fridge.
When you want tea you can boil water and then add the ginger turmeric juice as needed. Add lemon and maybe some black pepper when you drink it if that’s your thing too.

2025-09-08 19:31:30 UTC

Learning out loud here:
I love Nostr and the community here. Relatively high signal, customizable (even to a fault 😂), extendable, etc.
Because I wanted Nostr to grow and compete with the activity on platforms like X for a while I had a goal of having some kind of interaction on Nostr every day whether it was a post, comment, repost, or a handful of zaps.
On reflection I’d prefer a relatively inactive but thoughtful and thought provoking feed. I don’t need the dopamine rush of a firehose feed. I don’t usually want to contribute to a firehose.
There’s a great cohort of builders, artists, cryptographers, shit-posters that you can filter for and have a great experience and in that narrow view it’s already won the social media wars in my eyes. I may hop on Nostr 20 times a day or go a week without opening a client but it won’t be because of any vanity metrics. Touching grass is real. Distractions are real. Lifespans are real.

2025-09-04 16:34:19 UTC

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I asked others this, but curious on your take as well. Given how much electricity China is bringing online and how dominant they are in producing ASICs and how much control they have over block template creation via Antpool and their proxy pools do you think China will run parallel systems (gold and BTC) for settling international trade eventually? This chart that Marty shared seems to indicate a big move coming.
https://image.nostr.build/633dc9547a1d58e0c8928139bd434b005f1c99202c6a079808d8c8cd5c615492.jpg

2025-09-04 16:21:32 UTC

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Curious if you’ve seen this chart and what you think about China trying out a gold backed currency. Do you think they’ll replace CNH with such a currency?
And given how dominant they are in producing ASICs and their enormous energy production push whether or not they’d have parallel systems (ie. gold and bitcoin) for settling international trade or if they’re more likely to go all in on gold.
https://image.nostr.build/633dc9547a1d58e0c8928139bd434b005f1c99202c6a079808d8c8cd5c615492.jpg

2025-09-02 15:56:38 UTC

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Better than Claude?

2025-09-02 14:38:09 UTC

Freedom tech just hits different. You can build your own payment system in whatever way works for you and without asking.
Imagine building something like this on the legacy fiat rails…
#note1qq6…zhwx

2025-09-01 15:53:37 UTC

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Is this whale potentially the ECB? Sounds crazy but they’ve been buying up Gold for years so they’re clearly stocking up on reserves and no reason to advertise buying bitcoin when they’re attacking it.
They’re openly considering a euro stablecoin on Eth so it could make sense to push down BTC sentiment while they’re accumulating shitcoins for their layer 2+ shitcoin.
If bitcoin runs up it hurts their messaging and shitcoin adoption narrative.

2025-08-31 13:12:36 UTC

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Life is short. Spend as much time in front of a screen while you can!

2025-08-26 18:34:56 UTC

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According to Richard Thomas, a wildlife biologist and notable Woodchuck (aka groundhog) aficionado, it can chuck about 700 lbs of wood!
Source: https://gf.nd.gov/wildlife-notes/how-much-wood-can-woodchuck-chuck

2025-08-25 15:40:40 UTC

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That ending 🥶 lmao

2025-08-24 14:38:58 UTC

Hollow words. Even if they pinky promise not to target developers they can always change their mind. They can also be replaced by the next administration who could reverse course.
Notice how they used the word decentralized? That’s a sliding scale for one thing and in any case they don’t mention privacy which is the one thing most needed at this point in time.
#note1qup…79t4

2025-08-21 20:05:35 UTC

Be prepared. The world is becoming overly hostile to bitcoin. “Then they fight you” is definitively here.
ETH and the other shitcoins are not a threat to TradFi so they’ll embrace it in short order. It’s a captured network already.
Vitalik et al will slip in some backdoors and some AML protections because they can. Few people on that network will mind and TradFi will love it because it appeases the regulators.
Bitcoin? It will become prohibitively expensive (in terms of risk) to use in a sovereign way and all the normies will flock to the easily manipulated ETFs. Nations might still move forward in selling international trade with it but along the way they’ll squeeze every sat they can from the plebs.
Saylor has done a great job pulling coins off the market in a sly way pretending to be in it for the “thermodynamically sound money” but in the end he’s going to hand over all of that stash to the government.

2025-08-21 19:45:52 UTC

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How would this look for bitcoin script? All transactions have to be multisig with the treasury or a set of friendly banks being a party? Don’t see how it’s possible otherwise.

2025-08-20 19:52:44 UTC

European countries and the EU have accelerated their crackdowns on the internet this last year.
#note1f7r…crrr

2025-08-20 19:49:56 UTC

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Europe feels like they’re panicking with Russia knocking on their door and the US waffling on defense support.
Do you think that’s what’s causing the recent attack on privacy, increased censorship, and stealing from bank accounts to fuel the economy while they’re ramping up defense spending?

2025-08-18 18:18:27 UTC

Been doing a lot of “save in bitcoin and focus on your craft” lately but hoping to go back to “focus on bitcoin and save your craft for later” soon enough.

2025-08-14 22:31:05 UTC

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Please tell us you started with: “first off fuck the Fed”

2025-08-13 19:10:32 UTC

@npub1v6z…uq49 warned us that FATF was working on this months ago on the @npub1r8l…x5dk podcast. It’s happening. We can also fully expect our beloved tools like Electrum to come under attack any day now.
Keep building, anon. The politicians only know how to do the wrong thing. Don’t expect them to help.
#note1044…72xf

2025-08-12 21:13:27 UTC

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Checks username 👀

2025-08-12 20:52:44 UTC

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What’s your go-to bourbon? I’m a big fan of the Weller line. Had a William Larue Weller once and it was my favorite but could never justify buying a bottle.

2025-08-12 19:44:21 UTC

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It really takes a lot of practice which is hard for us grown ups to find time for. You’ll get the ollie in no time though! Transitions are a great workout; I wish I had more time on them when I was actively skating but alas it wasn’t meant to be.
You’re probably better off without the flip tricks anyway because they’re not as forgiving to our “old guy” ankles when they don’t go well. I used to be really into gaps and stairs but can’t take the falls like I used to. Same with rails. I’ll still do ledges though.
Shove-its are a good first trick after ollies too if you’re interested.

2025-08-12 18:38:03 UTC

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Kickflips are fun, but watch out for heelflips. I’ve credit-carded myself one too many times with those and swore them off forever.

2025-08-12 18:07:52 UTC

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That’s fair and I’m not qualified to weigh in on it either but it looks promising.

2025-08-12 18:01:58 UTC

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How do you feel about LNhance? Do you think with that, CTV and Ark we’ll have a sufficient L2 to onboard the world without custodians?
I’m a fan of cashu for things like ehash or for passing offline payments like when connecting to a Tollgate. Also great for onboarding new people today who don’t have inbound liquidity for their own channels.

2025-08-12 16:27:33 UTC

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Is stem cell treatment any good yet? I’ve seen mixed reviews

2025-08-12 13:54:49 UTC

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Haven’t tried it since google went to war with their users lately but maybe this could work:
https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl

2025-08-11 15:37:01 UTC

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The phrase “linked to potential crimes” is doing some heavy lifting in that document. So invade privacy first and ask for the evidence of crimes later?

2025-08-10 18:51:16 UTC

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Can your laptop support local models? If so, some of the small models are great for simple coding tasks.

2025-08-08 15:51:50 UTC

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Even more bizarre: there are people that don’t have an inner voice in their head. Just “silence”.
Wonder what it’s like for them when they try singing in their head?

2025-08-08 14:08:30 UTC

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Chancellor? Isn’t he on the brink of a second bailout for the banks?

2025-08-07 17:55:58 UTC

Youtube has become unusable. I refuse to sign in to watch videos and now it’s refusing to show videos unless I sign in.
GFY google.

2025-08-07 15:05:13 UTC

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Brought to you by the same people who won’t let their clients buy Bitcoin. They’re borderline malicious at this point.

2025-08-06 14:57:02 UTC

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How is that not double jeopardy? Or is that just because it’s a partial verdict?

2025-08-05 19:25:54 UTC

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Not agreeing or disagreeing here but wanted to think out loud and get your thoughts.
Suppose we have a variable block size. What would it hinge on? Keeping transaction fees in a certain range? It feels like that could be gamed by pools who move their own funds back and forth to keep a baseline demand up and then we fill nodes faster than we currently do.
If we're worried about keeping a sufficient baseline hash rate when total block rewards are so low, the heatpunks would argue there will be a large group of heaters subsidizing the network.
Guess I'm trying to understand the mechanics of a market driven block size. I worry about premature optimization with bitcoin but it makes sense to hash out the details long before we may need them.

2025-08-05 16:05:05 UTC

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Still failed on my end. I’m determined to zap you! We’ll make it happen

2025-08-05 16:00:35 UTC

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For what it’s worth I received the zap

2025-08-05 15:57:55 UTC

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Tried 210 which also failed. Maybe I need to send a whole coin?

2025-08-05 15:56:37 UTC

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My first zap was actually 100 sats though 🤔

2025-08-05 15:54:04 UTC

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Tried zapping but it failed twice

2025-08-03 17:07:29 UTC

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As crazy as it sounds a high end MacBook has 128 GB of unified memory and you can run 70B models just fine for around $5k last I checked. They’re a little slow but they’ll work out of the box with Ollama.
Might be more cost effective than setting up a GPU cluster of several 5090s to get the memory capacity up. You may even be able to run Asahi Linux on there and get around macOS if you want although it’ll be painful I’m sure.

2025-08-02 15:53:56 UTC

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I McLove that movie 😂

2025-08-02 12:14:52 UTC

Venmo has the same article with 3 different titles
https://image.nostr.build/28ee66e213b102003541ef779c8f9042d1222989c0f51ae3754ff6c42a23b02f.jpg

2025-08-01 15:19:28 UTC

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If I had any fiat left I would buy right now. Maybe it’s finally time to sell my mailbox and some pine tree saplings from my backyard.

2025-08-01 14:13:45 UTC

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Sounds delicious. Gonna have to try that out!
Btw I tried zapping you but it failed

2025-08-01 11:28:37 UTC

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What’s the recipe for the shake? Milk, HODL butter, and maybe a banana?

2025-08-01 11:18:04 UTC

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Tether is doing similarly weird stuff with funding brain implants [1]. How do these things relate in any way to their core business?
1. https://tether.io/news/tether-takes-strategic-stake-in-leading-brain-computer-interface-company-blackrock-neurotech/

2025-07-31 08:20:31 UTC

Don’t let the AI break you, anon.
https://futurism.com/commitment-jail-chatgpt-psychosis

2025-07-26 13:31:55 UTC

Where’s the NIP for posting government issued ID and a signed permission slip?
#note14wn…m68p

2025-07-22 18:50:48 UTC

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Got “Master of Reality” and “Paranoid” (the album) in the queue 🤘🦇

2025-07-20 16:39:43 UTC

An Internet connected door cam with microphone can be legally used against you? Shocking! Who could’ve predicted that?
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/07/amazon-ring-cashes-techno-authoritarianism-and-mass-surveillance

2025-07-04 08:42:36 UTC

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Highly recommend this book if you want something to supplement your video course. It gives a solid overview and has plenty of exercises in there:
“Understanding cryptography: A Textbook for Students and Practitioners”
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-662-69007-9

2025-07-03 11:03:11 UTC

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That didn’t work for me. They denied me 3 times likely because I used a proton email. Never approved. Their support wasn’t helpful either.

2025-06-30 16:38:13 UTC

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What’s the light source on the left? Is it a skylight or did they install some kind of fancy candle?

2025-06-27 10:07:14 UTC

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It’s true Saylor brought the discussion mainstream, but he also coopted the narrative and is clearly pushing for it to be used a database rather than money.
He tells people not to spend it and to borrow against it. He advocates to stop making changes (because then bitcoin could serve more people as a currency). He preaches “trust; don’t verify” by laughing at self custody and mocking proof of reserves while touting an audit by other mega corps instead.
He tells everyone the work is already done and there’s nothing else to do but buy bitcoin in their brokerage or bank account and leave it there: literally the exact opposite of the lesson the whitepaper taught us.
Bitcoin has no value unless it’s being used by as many as possible. As decentralized as possible. A world where 10 governments, 20 banks, and a few hundred companies own the vast majority of bitcoin is a complete failure of the mission and yet if you follow his lead that’s the world you end up in.
I’ve had friends tell me they’re not spending their bitcoin. HODL they say. And yet they’re spending their fiat nonetheless. They’re still spending money but can’t bring themselves to use bitcoin for purchases because this influencer “super maxi” says not to.

2025-06-26 15:42:51 UTC

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What’s your go-to hot sauce? I used to be a Sriracha maxi (the original one not all the knock offs) but these days I’ve been on a Cholula kick.

2025-06-26 12:14:43 UTC

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“This is no doubt going to have, as an effect, the banning of open source AI that people can run freely on their own laptops.”
🎯
The big players will be much easier to control and share data with the regulators. And the mega corps don’t want the competition from self hosted models that don’t serve ads.

2025-06-25 21:37:44 UTC

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Congrats, Derek!

2025-06-25 17:40:24 UTC

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It was mostly tongue in cheek. I’m very active and eat a relatively healthy diet and have good blood pressure and resting heart rate.
I’m really just commenting on the fact that doctors are quick to prescribe medication.

2025-06-25 15:59:51 UTC

I’m long overdue for my once-every-other-decade physical. Just going to assume I’ve got all the chronic illnesses and need all the pills.

2025-06-25 00:39:18 UTC

The government playbook: approve and encourage bitcoin ETFs, tell people they’ll have their fingers chopped off and they’ll lose their keys, praise “bitcoin treasury companies”, let banks custody and lend/borrow against it for fiat, and make the taxes complicated for direct usage. You’ll unsurprisingly reduce adoption.
Throw in plenty of collaborative custody solutions so you can keep tabs on the ones who stay outside the system and suddenly bitcoin doesn’t seem so scary!

2025-06-24 00:22:58 UTC

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Personally I’d rather subscribe to a project of theirs. Even if the project is given away for free I’d be willing to regularly pay some amount. The more I use the app or service the more I’d pay.
I think that’s a more sustainable model for everyone too. The “funder” gets to signal specifically what they like and have something they can point to and know they played some small role in keeping it around; the developer still pays the bills and at any point they can pass the project on to someone else to maintain and there’s a more natural continuity in maintenance.

2025-06-20 19:10:17 UTC

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Good call. For posterity, I’m talking about hypothetically helping the towing company employees who forgot their keys 😅

2025-06-20 18:15:00 UTC

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Saw someone with a boot earlier. Wish I had seen this a few hours ago to practice it.

2025-06-20 14:12:41 UTC

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Ah it’s a problem with the error message. My wallet didn’t have enough to cover the lightning fees so it failed and told me to HFSP.
When I changed the invoice to 45 sats the payment worked.

2025-06-20 13:57:24 UTC

@npub1l2v…ajft
Thank you for the mcp-money server (https://github.com/pablof7z/mcp-money)! It works well for most things but when I tried paying a 50 sat lightning invoice it failed with this message
“Payment failed - insufficient balance. You have 50 sats but need 50000+ sats for this 50000 sat invoice.”
The invoice is only for 50 sats 😂 . Just want to let you know!

2025-06-15 23:28:40 UTC

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Nsec 😅

2025-06-15 22:49:32 UTC

Finally set up my wallet properly and can send zaps signed from my npub. The Nostr ecosystem has come a long way in the last few months.
Special thanks to @npub1xts…kk5s for Damus!

2025-06-15 01:26:07 UTC

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Highly recommend it

2025-06-14 18:27:36 UTC

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Nice to see your feet wear seatbelts too. Can’t be too safe!

2025-06-14 18:26:20 UTC

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That makes sense. It feels like separate events 🤔

2025-06-14 17:59:40 UTC

Why do we have a separate name for the sound of lightning (thunder)?
For most other things we just say the name of the action.

2025-06-14 13:34:10 UTC

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Watch out for the speed wobbles!

2025-06-13 13:10:57 UTC

Limewire and Kazaa was peak internet era.
Back then the viruses only targeted your computer. Now social media viruses target you.

2025-06-13 13:07:55 UTC

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Limewire strikes again!