Ben Eng

Guy poses a question: what would you take your $9B in Bitcoin exit to?
The answer cannot be to fiat currency, of course. The answer must be in productive capital, such as investing into building a company that expect to grow and succeed in the long term. Maybe an AI startup opportunity?

2025-10-18 18:58:17 UTC

What should my first Bitcoin hardware wallet be? I'm ready to purchase one to learn how to self-custody.

2025-09-21 20:05:27 UTC

- reply

* I am likely wrong about economists mislabeling velocity --- they are using it correctly as a transaction rate, as I specified.

2025-09-21 19:43:59 UTC

As a long-time listener of @TomBilyeu and @nprofile…v947, I have a gentle criticism of how the fiat money and debt crisis is being explained. The explanation must be wrong, although the sentiment is directionally correct. As a side-topic, my realization has also allowed me to gain an appreciation for @EricRWeinstein's application of gauge theory to economics, which maybe would also align to how Jim Simons successfully applied math and science expertise to investing.
Tom and Guy both have explained how the money supply necessarily must inflate to enable debts to be paid, because the interest cannot be covered without creating money. That is, if the total money supply is $100, and you lend it all to Alice at 10% interest, Alice cannot pay back the loan with interest without printing an additional $10. On the surface, this seems correct, but it cannot be.
In Guy's episode "Chat_144" [open.spotify.com/episode/1HFORy…], the topic of using Bitcoin for collateralized loans is discussed. BTC is the perfect money, its supply being mathematically impossible to inflate. If the debt yields interest, the prior explanation making inflation necessary completely contradicts how interest-bearing loans of BTC could work.
The contradiction is resolved by fixing the prior explanation. Money supply inflation is NOT necessary to pay back the loan with interest, because of velocity. The borrower spends the $100 on goods to build his business. That money flows out to others. The borrower's business earns money back through sales by his growing business. That $100 of total money supply has exchanged hands a great many hands in numerous transactions throughout the economy. Presumably Alice's business has earned revenue and profits, and it is from this inflow of money, which can grow on the ledger to many times larger than the money supply, that $110 can be paid back to the lender.
However, the $100 money supply does limit the liquidity available to transactions being settled. The $110 repayment cannot happen in a single translation. There needs to be enough velocity to allow that money to circulate through the many hands, so that Alice can repay portions at a time until the full amount owed is repaid.
We can see from these dynamics that the economy has mass (money supply), velocity (rate of transactions), momentum (amount of money * transaction rate, which economists mislabel as 'velocity' of money). We also have conservation laws, such as the obvious money spent must equal money received per transaction; the total money supply remains constant absent the creation of new money. This is exactly the physics of this model of the universe. From this insight, we can easily take the leap that this universe can be modeled as a gauge theory.

2025-09-11 04:05:25 UTC

What do people want to be built on Nostr that doesn't exist yet?

2025-08-28 19:54:08 UTC

Canada bans cash payments over $10,000. This seems like Bitcoin's time to shine.
https://blossom.primal.net/5c4135ec5a10a5a2d2ac05e60372054ae50d3034777215fd89dd21b0f6ad9b35.png

2025-08-24 15:50:28 UTC

- reply

Banning from Telegram makes sense after its CEO Pavel Durov was arrested and detained by France on August 24, 2024. You can be sure that the terms of his release included compromising Telegram's privacy and content moderation (censorship) policies to comply with Europe's authoritarian control (digital services act).

2025-08-05 02:58:42 UTC

- reply

The problem being solved is digital identity for authentication to access online services.

2025-08-04 22:21:43 UTC

If everything becomes unlocked by a block chain secured by cryptographic keys, people and everything we use must evolve to embrace cryptographic keys as digital identity.
Every time the topic of digital identity is raised, there is backlash. The reaction is ill founded. Resistance should be to digital identities that are issued, controlled, and revokable by centralized authorities (government, corporations); with authorization for services being programmable by authoritarians (i.e., social credit).
We need to embrace decentralized digital identity, which is what Bitcoin uses, where the end user arbitrarily issues their own keys, and then maintains custody and control over their keys, never relinquishing secrecy to anyone else. That is Self-Sovereign Identity.

2025-08-04 17:21:40 UTC

Today's lesson in Applied Cosmology: dimensions and degrees of freedom
In physics, Minkowski spacetime has 4 dimensions (3 spatial dimensions and 1 time dimension), expressed as X⁴. In curved spacetime, the number of degrees of freedom for X⁴ is the number of parameters to specify this model: fourteen (14).
🌐4 coordinates for identifying a point in spacetime (x, y, z, t)
📏3 rulers in the space dimensions to measure distance
⏱️1 clock in the time dimension to measure duration
📐3 protractors (x-y, y-z, z-x) to measure the angle of each space dimension with respect to the other space dimensions
📐3 protractors (x-t, y-t, z-t) to measure the angle of each space dimension with respect to the time dimension
In the same way, we wish to identify configuration dimensions with respect to separation of concerns. The number of separate concerns is the number of dimensions. Within each dimension, each concern has many parameters.
The number of dimensions is modest (fewer than a dozen?), while the total number of degrees of freedom (parameters) is large (hundreds?).
For example, the horizontal scaling dimension is parameterized for the platform and infrastructure by the number of worker nodes in a cluster. Within an application component (e.g., deployment or statefulset), horizontal scaling is parameterized by the replicaset scale.
The vertical scaling dimension is parameterized for the platform and infrastructure by the compute shape (cpu architecture, cpu, memory, boot volume) of each worker node. Within an application component, vertical scaling is parameterized by the cpu, memory, and storage requests and limits of each container within the pod template.
Other dimensions of interest are:
👉high availability
👉disaster recovery
👉workload complexity
👉workload scale
👉workload isolation
👉security isolation
(and many more)

2025-08-03 20:14:40 UTC

- reply

Where will you be posting your keynote? Does Nostr support video?

2025-07-10 04:34:18 UTC

When BTC becomes the unit of account, medium of exchange, and store of value as the global reserve currency, its valuation should be equivalent to the total global wealth being convertible all at once to BTC.
USD$454.4T / 21M BTC = USD$21,638,095.24 per BTC
Is it coincidental that the square root of the total global wealth roughly equals the number of Bitcoin?

2025-06-13 02:58:07 UTC

The increase in emissions and atmospheric particulates coming out of Iran recently is concerning.

2025-05-30 23:00:22 UTC

- reply

That is a beautiful fat cap.

2025-05-17 15:30:58 UTC

https://breez.technology/sdk/
@breez
Clicking on Build gives this error:
https://blossom.primal.net/a640ed64c290b91854cd93103a83841436666b45f6f77dd64e48b77783eda52e.png

2025-05-16 23:53:32 UTC

Thanks for nothing, Bitkit.
https://blossom.primal.net/369187ecb39529a1a7de7944f188d9fbe6200b2e92fcbba886d403687ba4e1ff.png

2025-05-05 14:49:53 UTC

When we say "the economy", it sounds disconnected from our lives. I always refocus its meaning to "standard of living", which in this context means the productive activities that sustain our lives. Freezing the activities that sustain our lives focuses on the essential concern.

2025-05-05 14:49:36 UTC

We must recognize that history serves a purpose. Its purpose is not to log a series of events. It is to provide an explanation that teaches us lessons toward strategically guiding our future with ideological and moral clarity. Clarity comes from romanticizing good and evil, separating heroes from villains. Without essentializing in this way, history is noise with no signal.
Signal is discerned from recognizing essential characteristics and filtering out the noise. Thus, history must be mythologized to be useful toward its purpose. The history of America's founding was drowned by noise (slavery, colonialism), and its essential lessons (secession, rights, liberty, protection against government tyranny) were muddied. So too has the Renaissance. The noise now overwhelms the signal, as the mythology is lost to the noise-makers.

2025-04-30 16:45:55 UTC

- reply

GDP is an aggregation of productive economic activity and parasitic government waste. If GDP contraction takes place due to reduction in the latter, so much the better.

2025-04-19 00:11:42 UTC

- reply

Sorry, I removed my lightning address from my Nostr profile, so don't try to zap me. The reason being I was using Wallet of Satoshi which just worked. When that got taken away, I never found another free lightning wallet that worked as easily. I mean, do I need to pay for Primal to make zaps work? This illustrates exactly the point of my original post. It's not obvious to a noob how to easily get equipped to make Bigcoin and Lightning work according to best practices.

2025-04-18 15:44:29 UTC

I feel like the Bitcoin ecosystem is missing a go-to library of procedures and practices. That is, a collection of how-tos. For example, how to setup a wallet to self-custody keys. How to buy Bitcoin using fiat. How to protect against losing your keys. How to protect against losing Bitcoin on death. How to setup a wallet to enable Lightning transactions. How to setup a digital service to take Lightning payments.

2025-04-01 12:59:09 UTC

- reply

I was surprised how simple the recipe is for mayo. Now I need to learn to make ranch from scratch.

2025-03-30 20:53:56 UTC

One of the greatest movements in the 1990s was patterns (design patterns, architectural patterns, stereotypes, archetypes). Pioneers like the Gang of Four (Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides), Martin Fowler, and Douglas Schmidt wrote books and wikis to capture patterns.
The truth of a pattern was obvious. The explicit and precise specification in human language enables immediate affirmation, because the reader recognizes it as being not novel. The reader has seen it many times before, so the pattern communicates no new knowledge. This is a key characteristic. It is important to say a true thing that is obvious to everyone when expressed explicitly, especially when it has never been said explicitly before.
The utility is that a pattern formalizes a term of art. It establishes a word or phrase as referring to a specification that details its meaning. Knowing the name of the pattern, the listener can immediately reify a mental model, and know that everyone hearing the same name will share that mental model. That is powerful.
Through patterns, coders effectively changed natural language within the domain of software development to be "English as code". When communicating with English in other contexts, there is a high degree of imprecision. We have to account for ambiguity with more or less generous interpretations. However, with patterns we can be more confident in what we say and what we hear from others who speak in those terms.
I feel like in our journey toward Humanity as Code to enable AI functions that can subsume human toil, we should be specifying patterns as formally as possible across all domains. Perhaps AI models can be doing exactly this on our behalf by distilling our writings into pattern specifications, which can then be verified and cleaned up. This would form a reliable repository of truth, which can then be used for training.

2025-03-30 20:53:33 UTC

«Money is backed by purchasing power. That in turn is backed by productive capital.»
I gained that insight today, so I share it with you. I feel like my superpower is distilling masses of cross-disciplinary information as a generalist into compact precise expressions that capture the essence. (Fewer words, more punch.) I feel like this skill is important toward being able to compactify knowledge into a tweet or a meme. I've said for decades: use simple messages.
Now, as to the substance of the insight, I feel like the goldbugs got it wrong. Money backed by gold's intrinsic value can only be assured to hold up to the gold's utility value. My insight is obvious once said aloud, so I claim no brilliance to have said it. I am a little resentful that Austrians didn't say it ubiquitously before me, so that public discourse would not be filled with idiocy like "Bitcoin is backed by nothing" or even "fiat money is backed by nothing". Both statements can now be seen as untrue.
A resource view (a non-monetary view) helps to understand the value of things, so that we are not confused by the obfuscation of value in monetary terms. Which seems strange if one purpose of money is as a unit of account for a common way to assess value across all domains. Where money fails in that purpose is in assessing itself.

2025-03-28 01:33:49 UTC

- reply

These people are going to feel it in the rekt 'em.

2025-03-25 03:25:42 UTC

- reply

On other platforms, bots and intelligence agencies generate most of the mindless engagement, noise in the form of substance-free reactions or talking points in support of narrative control.

2025-03-21 19:06:16 UTC

The biggest tragedy of modern corporations is that division of labor (benefiting from comparative advantage among individual workers and job roles) leads to fragmentation of responsibilities such that catastrophic inefficiencies arise. These manifest in the form of "above my pay grade" (vertical) and "not my job" (horizontal) deference. The shedding of responsibility and narrowing of scope per worker leads to few (if any) responsibilities taken on to bring everything together.
To mitigate the fragmentation of responsibility, the modern corporation generally thinks of the roles for "bringing everything together" in the following ways:
1. Team Managers - supervises people, time/effort, cost, performance
2. Project Managers - oversees plans, schedules, deliverables, coordination
3. Product Managers - gathers requirements, analyzes the problem domain, understands the market, shapes the product vision, specifies the commercial terms, coordinates how to go to market
4. Architect - precisely specifies the problem domain and designs the solution approach, enables the work breakdown for planning
The biggest problem with this view is the incoherence of the following principles that most people who build products are well-versed in.
A. Architecture is everyone's responsibility.
B. Security is everyone's responsibility.
C. Performance is everyone's responsibility.
D. Quality is everyone's responsibility.
These things being everyone's responsibility actually become either no one's responsibility or someone's responsibility. That someone will have neither the power to oversee nor the capacity to deliver, because indeed these are shared (team) responsibilities for which a designated leader can only serve as a champion and cheerleader and/or an annoying nag.
A professionally managed organization, especially at large industrial scale, solves these problems with a matrix. While people management is hierarchical (Team Managers), work is managed through "dotted line" reporting structures that cross functions. A RACI matrix specifies this precisely. Every job role/responsibility and its relationships to all others is defined in terms of Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed. This form of professionalism is what breeds the "above my pay grade" and "not my job" mentality.
Professional management is what kills "CEO mentality", which is the founder mode entrepreneurial spirit instilled throughout an entrepreneurially managed organization.
The problem is how do you scale founder mode beyond the founders? How do you scale CEO mentality beyond the CEO? How do you assign responsibility without breeding irresponsibility elsewhere?

2025-03-17 18:47:29 UTC

- reply

Without having seen or listened to the content, the title almost suggests this is a gag book with empty pages.

2025-03-17 18:45:42 UTC

- reply

Links or patties?

2025-03-03 18:45:30 UTC

Bitcoin priced in fiat is more volatile than Zelenskyy's butthurt.

2025-02-25 13:18:02 UTC

Web of Trust is not. It should be a Web of Authenticity and a Web of Integrity. It is NOT a Web of Authorization.

2025-01-16 22:31:17 UTC

Fiat slogan: fux the money, fux the world.

2024-12-29 23:03:01 UTC

- reply

Or does a Cashapp lnbc address never expire, even though I get a new unique address every time I click to see it in the app? That is what is incredibly confusing. Meanwhile, everyone in Nostr has LN addresses that look email-like.

2024-12-29 21:19:35 UTC

I think I must be a total LN dumbass. When Satoshi Wallet was working, everything was flawlessly easy. It gave me an email-like address, and zaps to it just worked. When it was shut down, I started using Cashapp, it shows a bc1q address and a lnbc address for receiving BTC. However, I just realized the lnbc address changes with every transaction for privacy, and maybe it even expires after some time. Cashapp doesn't give me an email-like address for LN. Or does it? This is so confusing.

2024-12-25 18:46:43 UTC

- reply

Most charity is a scam to fund the administrative staff to control the organization that operates the charity. The purported beneficiaries are decoys.

2024-12-25 16:17:07 UTC

Is Primal superior to Amethyst on Android? I should give it a try.

2024-12-22 20:41:18 UTC

Worth contemplating: what 'checks and balances' exist in our system of government to counter abusing classification of data to hide wrongdoing?

2024-12-16 16:16:20 UTC

- reply

Having heard about Primal on Bitcoin Audible, it sounds interesting. But then exploring primal.net I can't see any information about how to on-board.

2024-12-03 02:27:15 UTC

«One day you discovered you'd learned a cartoon version of Lincoln in school. Not the man who favored an amendment to the Constitution forever preventing the federal government from abolishing slavery» https://mailchi.mp/tomwoods/20243-9250479?e=8be05b6441
Our culture and societal cohesion relies on a shared understanding of history as a collection of false but believable myths. Myths are formed from idealized stories retold to essentialize some moral principle or some virtuous characteristics that inspire us. Of course, the noble goal of freeing the slaves motivated our nation to transform itself. This is one element that binds us proudly in fraternity, because we are a part of a great improvement in society. We are built on myths to fuel our virtues, such as courage and valor. We look back to the precursors to our society, such as the 300 Spartans who stood bravely against the vast Persian army of Xerces. Their battle cry Molṑn Labé defied the enemy to come take their cannons and semiautomatic rifles, as it does today for us.

2024-12-01 02:59:05 UTC

Did the value of all NFTs crash to zero yet? And everyone moved on without anyone noticing?

2024-11-24 22:51:55 UTC

If there was ever any doubt that Jack was in favor or tolerant of establishment censorship and narrative control using Twitter, we now see that Bluesky is in full-on censorship mode to suppress such opinions as "trans-women are men" and to suspend accounts who engage in such speech.

2024-11-22 14:49:59 UTC

@nprofile…t7a0 I just heard your rant about Pear Drive. A quick search failed to find any trace of the project and its source repository. Is it not open source?
https://open.spotify.com/episode/3sYh4nnRSodyFj5L5306Jz?si=JYZQiJZhSnmxRB2abwF8cQ&t=4253

2024-11-10 15:30:36 UTC

Are there independent journalists on Nostr publishing current events and breaking news? To me that is the next gap to fill for Nostr to actually replace Twitter as the primary social media site, next to having a friends network that includes one's favorite people to follow.

2024-11-10 14:13:59 UTC

- reply

Compare: https://www.jetpen.com/blog/2021/05/09/future-distributed-applications/

2024-11-10 14:11:56 UTC

@nprofile…6425 Maybe good idea to purchase a cheap GoPro-like device that you can covertly record the activity at the hotel room entry, while you are not present. Then, you never need to rely solely on hotel security cams.

2024-11-10 13:49:34 UTC

- reply

Correction: link to the full article
https://newsletter.squishy.computer/p/natures-many-attempts-to-evolve-a

2024-11-10 13:45:27 UTC

I would like to see Gordon Brander's article reframed in terms of Consistency Availability Partitioning tolerance (CAP theorem = Brewer's theorem).
Article: https://www.myhub.ai/items/natures-many-attempts-to-evolve-a-nostr
Guy's Read: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5qNxe5YsvaDpKvojJGfusZ?si=OS44QukFTT265Mbhn-TMrg&t=1846

2024-10-09 02:42:02 UTC

Censorship resistance is necessarily traded off with privacy? You cannot have both? This is the first I've heard of this.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/2Sc0UuIhoD8YefMHor6C13?si=QwM9S-IRSuKjYLwecHtdlw&t=1360&pi=1mR5ieKxRFmmw

2024-09-07 17:54:52 UTC

The more times that I revisit my formulation of rights, the more confident I am in it. I truly believe I have added an essential component to this understanding, which was missing previously. That element is 'mutual recognition', a specialization of 'reciprocity'. The latter concept is also helpful in understanding the proper response to violation of rights.
https://www.jetpen.com/blog/2023/01/23/revisiting-the-definition-of-rights/

2024-09-07 14:12:48 UTC

- reply

NAK?

2024-09-02 20:17:08 UTC

I use Signal to chat with some acquaintances. I don't really believe it is secure in terms of privacy. It may implement some form of encryption. It may offer some form of authentication and data integrity. These measures may be an improvement over other messaging technologies.
However, I don't remember ever generating a private key to use in Signal. I don't have custody of a private key that I control and keep safe and private. Therefore, I can only assume, not my keys, not my privacy.

2024-09-02 19:33:07 UTC

We have come to understand, chiefly through the teachings of government education, that 'science' means the expert opinions espoused by an authority with more clout than you.
I wonder if the style of how science is taught plays a role. Every science course spends a lot of time on the history and the scientists credited with discoveries. This puts the focus on persons more so than the method and the substance of each discovery. Putting aside shoulders and giants that are disregarded by venerating specific individuals, this style of teaching conditions the mind to believe what is told by people anointed with special mystique. In this way, we train a society of non-player characters.
To train scientific minds, we must not tell them to believe what they are told. It is not even enough to demonstrate and have students reproduce well-known experiments. When we teach Newton, we need to finish with an apology that although he got it mostly right, his understanding was incomplete, and thus ultimately not entirely correct. Same for Einstein. Same for Bohr. Same for Schrodinger. Same for everyone and everything we know today. Everything we think we know in science today is in fact incorrect at the extreme limits of our understanding. Observations disagree with our best theories, and our best scientists cannot yet explain them. The emphasis of our training must be to teach scientists to not be married to our incomplete and incorrect knowledge passed on to us by our predecessors and the current crop of experts. Science is about seeking the truth, not about being told the truth.
One of the most valuable ideas I didn't fully appreciate until only a few years ago listening to Sean Carroll's "Biggest Ideas in the Universe" series of videos was the distinction between an "effective theory" and a "fundamental theory". Almost everything we know is an effective theory. This means the theory is only useful within some narrow range of conditions. To teach the theory without that caveat is to lie by omission. Almost everything science students are taught suffers from lying by omission. That's why I often quip that everything we know today is wrong or everything we know today is a lie.
I'd like to take the formal definition of "effective theory" and dress it down to business casual.
I am reminded of second and third year in engineering Skule™, where most students learn for the first time the real-world relationship between theory and practice. First year is occupied entirely by maths-and-sciences 101. Most students have not ever built anything of their own design (without someone telling them how) at that point in their life.
Even during first year, students start to see a difference in mentality between professors from math and science faculties as compared to engineering faculties. It was my first exposure to the routine application of "first order approximation", whenever any calculation became difficult. Engineering profs literally did this at every turn, and the 'good enough' quality of this spun my head. It was quick and dirty, and yet presented with the same mathematical formalism and rigor. Most importantly it was effective. Engineering is all about applying theory, but knowing when and how to apply rules of thumb for practical work.
Eye opening was digital circuits. One would imagine that logic gates that only compute based on 1 (5v) and 0 (ground) are pretty well-behaved. A student naively building circuits will quickly realize that this so-called digital world is a mess of analog madness. WTF are capacitance, resistance, and inductance doing in this binary world? What do you mean I have to put a capacitor across the ground and 5v pin? Madness!
Holy shit did the theory ever lie by omission. Reality is 'complicated'.

2024-08-26 01:54:23 UTC

Seeing a sudden surge of interest in Nostr as Twitter users are posting their npubs. Is the Telegram CEO arrest opening eyes to the vulnerability of centralized platforms?

2024-08-11 19:44:27 UTC

- reply

What is the current bubble? I think it was the zirp-induced real estate bubble, where people locked into low interest rate mortgages saw their property values skyrocket as covid refugees fled New York and California. Now with higher interest rates, homeowners cannot afford to sell their homes or move elsewhere, so we see stagnation due to paralysis, as inventory remains near zero while demand cannot be satisfied.

2024-06-11 14:57:30 UTC

@npub1h8n…rpev the point of disagreement with Rand on the topic of faith actually pertain to a concept called Benevolent Universe Premise. Rational optimism is BUP: the belief without needing proof that the universe is available to be understood by our reasoning minds; and beneficial to us to the extent that we are able to control it according to such understanding.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/68Lu0Al64awfUNpXbpHu0p?si=E3Rk5O46Tx-RtjAr8I7X9A

2024-06-09 22:36:36 UTC

- reply

"far right" is only used as an epithet by those among the far wrong.

2024-05-26 13:47:29 UTC

I google-searched "holesail peer to peer" and it found nothing relevant. Using brave search found it as the first result along with holepunch-related pages. Looks like Google is down-ranking or censoring this.

2024-05-15 22:23:35 UTC

- reply

Windows Task Manager shows two pear-runtime.exe processes doing nothing. After killing them and retrying, a window opened and the user interface appeared. Seems to be working fine now.

2024-05-15 22:03:49 UTC

When I do `pear run pear://keet` on windows, it just sits there forever making no progress.
Is it supposed to do something???
https://docs.pears.com/guides/getting-started

2024-05-05 21:20:49 UTC

I feel like I wrote the summary for this episode on personal AI in 2022, before @npub1h8n…rpev published this episode.
https://www.jetpen.com/blog/2022/06/10/revisiting-personal-assistant/
https://open.spotify.com/episode/2E8aBjyILy0pgPF9dPRyME?si=KHEKje2BScSjVDiXDXOwYQ

2024-04-28 15:55:39 UTC

Bitcoiners want Bitcoin to become the new de facto money. They do NOT want the government to treat Bitcoin as money. Otherwise, financial regulations like KYC/AML and money transmitter licensing will be enforced, which no Bitcoiner should build technology to comply with.
Florida appellate court rules that Bitcoin is money. https://www.klgates.com/Trouble-in-Paradise-Florida-Court-Rules-that-Selling-Bitcoin-is-Money-Transmission-02-13-2019

2024-04-24 21:23:50 UTC

- reply

Asked GPT-4 to fact check. It was pedantic. Essentially confirmed.
https://files.sovbit.host/media/0b1e11c0406b6f929dd3c9c21e5a2930527d327912ef6dff13a64ad2d3c6aeea/a81bc752809c3b6778c44f7314bb4b356adb612f2aabbace7bfe4c5ecc9a5ed7.webp

2024-04-24 21:17:52 UTC

@npub1kzu…rf4g the term you are looking for is "embedding" in AI Unchained for inserting a block of content into a context window so that you can submit a prompt to operate on that content.

2024-04-08 15:09:15 UTC

My internal communication just now.
«Following up on the topic of autonomous operations, AO roughly refers to a service running mostly without human intervention. [MyProduct] can push this envelope further by setting a more ambitious goal. By standardizing the patterns for SOPs and interfaces (workflows, observability), and by formalizing them toward machine precision, we can enable the next generation. It becomes trainable for an LLM. First, gen AI can assist SRE to answer questions. Then, it can do the SRE's job almost completely, once given sufficient agency. That should be our end-point to set a vision that can excite.»

2024-03-20 00:14:13 UTC

Everyone on Nostr are excited about Blossom Drive. It's a minimalist in every way. Entirely different than what I envisioned as the basis for decentralized storage. Perhaps this basic building block is what we need at the base layer. Torrents above it?

2024-03-02 19:22:01 UTC

Because of the friction of integrating digital services to fiat payment systems, including PCI-DSS and KYC/AML, the ease of integrating to Lightning might be what pushes Bitcoin into the mainstream. Unleashed.chat is the first service that only accepts Bitcoin/Lightning because of this ease of integration.

2024-02-26 16:41:56 UTC

Bookmarking this ep on executive function using the prefrontal cortex for how to evolve toward AGI.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/0c8DWcNAFHioywGxC9rjwN?si=XXGiAMTNQj2UJhW8kIGjSQ

2024-02-26 02:46:38 UTC

Centralized control through government tyranny, cronyism, and corporate monopolization are the underlying dynamics that must be mitigated through decentralization, but we are falling behind. Foundational technologies are lacking.
First we need identity. Id must be self-sovereign, so that the individual controls their own private keys, sharing them with no one, holding custody securely with unbreakable secrecy. Everything else is built on SSI as a foundation, because we need ownership, privacy, authenticity, integrity, and access control---all dependent on identity.
Next, we need dis-intermediated communication. Individuals need to be able to exchange messages reliably without being tied irreplaceably to a third party. This includes being able to identify, find, and address each other according to their identity.
Over top of p2p comms, we need censorship-resistant apps that are capable of interacting with one's social network. This includes commerce, so Bitcoin for store of value and for payments is a foundational element of the architecture.
For apps and the services that individuals can offer for commerce to be censorship-proof, we need for hosting of logic on compute to be distributed, and we need the data that is processed to be distributed.
Here is the point where the analysis necessarily veers away from the simple explanation that I've tried to stick to, so I'll stop this thread here, and I'll start exploring the details in separate threads as my wandering mind spontaneously gets to them, as I did in this thread.

2024-02-10 18:09:26 UTC

The danger of quantum computing growing capable of factoring large numbers is not only that public key cryptography that enables private communications, data privacy, data integrity, and Bitcoin transaction verification. It is that replacing the cryptographic algorithm in Bitcoin would require a hard fork. Once Bitcoin becomes the dominant money, such an event would provide an opportunity to change the rules encoded into the protocol. The enemy class would seek to inject authoritarian controls (KYC, AML, lawful intercept) into the protocol at that opportunity.
This thought arose while listening to this podcast.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/0IIp1LOwQg1pNpiNxTDrUp?si=ws9HStHLQPavQ2T77U08Cw

2024-02-03 19:07:15 UTC

Listening to this read. @npub1h8n…rpev, does Bitcoin mining rely on real time availability of Internet access? Or can a block be verified offline and then synced to the block chain periodically (i.e., once per day)?
https://open.spotify.com/episode/2W7MuTETn73GMjJOkCEUES?si=uklow9IhS9qffDS887_ruQ

2023-11-26 20:54:12 UTC

"We" is a big club. And you ain't in it.

2023-11-24 01:41:04 UTC

- reply

If the app gets deleted, do the keys get lost along with the Bitcoin? I don't see a way of exporting a recovery phrase from the app.

2023-10-28 19:02:10 UTC

Across covid public health, climate change, and monetary policy, they believe that fear-mongering, lying, and suppressing inquiry and dissent are valid for manipulating collective action. That's why we don't recognize their authority.

2023-09-03 17:03:45 UTC

The public now understands that governmental and non-governmental organizations and institutions should be considered lying institutions and hate groups. We also understand better that society must become trustless and permissionless

2023-09-02 16:58:38 UTC

@npub1h8n…rpev appreciating Bitcoin Audible for teaching so much. I wonder if maybe on the Bitcoin security topic, you could explore the threat analysis of the attack vectors that authoritarians will use against "fix the money, fix the world". You've touched on it before in episodes (ie., ordinals) where you remind us that provable ownership a digital token does not protect you from physical force against your person and your property. Therefore, what Bitcoin actually can fix is inflation (fiat counterfeiting, theft of purchasing power), but it cannot fix the state stealing income and wealth.

2023-09-01 00:33:51 UTC

- reply

Wikipedia censorship comes in the form of competing edits, where ideologically opposed individuals engage in narrative combat. How would such disagreement be resolved? My rough thought on this topic is to enable content to be composable by users based on competing sources using whatever client-side filtering and whitelisting desired by the user. (Same as the Primal content moderation model for Nostr.)

2023-08-28 17:12:31 UTC

- reply

Re: surveillance, it is reputation (social credit) scoring that is then used either by corporate entities or state actors to ruin targeted individuals (i.e., retaliation for political dissent), which is the danger. For example, Canada's freezing of access to funds in bank accounts is the ruinous tactic that would be enabled with ease by CBDC.

2023-08-22 19:01:36 UTC

- reply

I don't know about other clients, as I only use Amethyst. Twitter by default shows "for you" feed based on its recommendation algorithm, which mixes in content from outside following list. Amethyst defaults to showing only content that you are following. It's hard to reach outside one's followers this way, especially when one has very few, like me.

2023-08-12 18:33:12 UTC

One of the greatest things about Nostr is that spam bots use zaps to spam you. You receive real money to get spammed. Zap-spam me harder, I say.

2023-08-12 15:03:00 UTC

- reply

As our demographics change due to birth rates having fallen below replacement levels (2.1) for decades, we will require a tripling of productivity for young workers to provide for the needs of the aging population. Automation with AI assisted tooling will be essential. I expect AI personal assistants to become prolific. This begins with taking small AI models that can be self-hosted by anyone affordably and being able to fine-tuning on private and proprietary data. Corporate policies, procedures, designs, and other internal documents are the place to start, so that enterprises can encode their expertise into AI assistants to aid their staff to bring about this 3X productivity improvement over the next decade. Then, beyond the generic enterprise baseline improvement, we can look to personalize AI into life-coaching and memory aids for the aging population.
https://www.jetpen.com/blog/2022/06/10/revisiting-personal-assistant/

2023-07-18 13:07:45 UTC

- reply

When a founder or major executive sells their shares, we consider this "capital consumption". Is a transfer of ownership really "consumption"? Maybe the productivity of that capital is diminished, if the key contributor is less invested in the company or separates entirely. Any better insights you can give on the concept of capital consumption?

2023-06-11 19:27:47 UTC

- reply

So much prerequisite knowledge on each of these five technologies is needed to form an opinion, who can even give an informed response to this poll?
#nevent1q…d855

2023-06-06 21:52:26 UTC

- reply

These are much more wearable.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bensin/2023/03/29/rokid-max-review-a-wearable-215-inch-screen/?sh=2181f84c2b23