Mike Dilger ☑️

Author of Gossip client: https://github.com/mikedilger/gossip
Dual National (USA / New Zealand)
My principles are Individualism, Equality, Liberty, Justice and Life

Public Key

npub1acg6thl5psv62405rljzkj8spesceyfz2c32udakc2ak0dmvfeyse9p35c

NIP-05 Address

mike@mikedilger.com

Profile Code

nprofile1qqswuyd9ml6qcxd92h6pleptfrcqucvvjy39vg4wx7mv9wm8kakyujgpp4mhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mquw3q9g

Publishing to

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1acg6thl5psv62405rljzkj8spesceyfz2c32udakc2ak0dmvfeyse9p35c

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Last Notes

2026-03-11 06:31:25 UTC

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dd/mm/yyyy

2026-03-11 06:21:29 UTC

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Also, the operation in Venezuela happened first to make sure that their oil can't substitute for the gulf oil being blockaded.

2026-03-11 06:20:00 UTC

I'm starting to think Brian Berletic is right. And I think Iran has no good reason to put mines in the strait, because it isn't a reasonable threat of deterrance against a superpower that has plenty of oil (22m barrels a day, second is Saudi Arabia at only 10). And Iran has no good reason to destroy oil infrastructure in the gulf, only to destroy US bases there. If mines show up in the strait, or gulf oil assets are hit, I think that is US forces doing it, perhaps Iraq. The one who benefits from the strait being closed is the US, and the ones who suffer is everybody else and especially China who still gets 20% of their energy from the gulf. Blockading China at the 2nd island chain seems to have not worked out (China too on top of that one) so this strategy of shutting down the gulf and blaming Iran is Plan B. And also, Israel doesn't control the US, it gets attacked by missiles on behalf of the US, same as Ukraine does. Now of course Netanyahu is a homocidal maniac, and there is a greater Israel plan, and this stuff dovetails together, I didn't say otherwise. But I think the US faceless policy people are running the show and Trump is running the distrations.

2026-03-01 19:11:17 UTC

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I think odds are high this war with Iran won't be short. Russia benefits from the US being bogged down in another long conflict, just as the US benefits when Russia is bogged down in Ukraine. China is winning.

2026-03-01 05:33:00 UTC

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I think the only real solution might be simple. Simple but very difficult. Never assist evil. If people truly followed that, America and Israel would be nearly empty of people fleeing who could not in good conscience pay taxes to those regimes. But people rationalize, say they don't have a choice (even though they know they do have the capability to move). And thus evil wins. The only people who think clearly on this seem to me to be the Muslims.

2026-03-01 02:44:24 UTC

!!! SECRET PLAN LEAKED !!!
Unnamed official leaks that the true military objective is to widen the Strait of Hormuz
https://chorus.mikedilger.com:444/13513b17d8cb6ca7d13d5578d660987ff2539996817b36278a8f0aa6e846b76f.jpg

2026-03-01 00:09:29 UTC

I hereby and officially condemn New Zealand for condemning Iran's missile strikes on [US military assets in] Gulf States. What dumbfucks. Hard to even believe that people of such levels of stupidity can survive to adulthood.

2026-02-26 19:33:08 UTC

I truly believe IPv6 is an improvement over IPv4. But the only real effect it has ever had for me is to cause timeouts on my computer.

2026-02-22 18:57:44 UTC

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Like I say, I'm not sure what the performance impact is without trying it. It saves some, it costs some. Should be explored. In any case if I follow 500 people, which relays am I asking this of? My presumption is that I still find those 500 people's write relays and go ask them, which means I wouldn't be "subscribed" to many of these relays, or I'd have to sign up to a lot of relays, or else relays also have to shuttle from other relays.

2026-02-21 19:03:08 UTC

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looks good

2026-02-21 18:55:43 UTC

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In general I agree with both of you. Filtering can be done either side. Personally I prefer client-side filtering and dumb relays because it puts me in control. I don't get to choose the relay that has the right censorship policies. The people I follow choose the relays, not me. But that only affects their posts and it makes some sense too.
Asking relays to compute WoT so you don't have to upload long lists of pubkeys has performance consequences and I'm not sure if it is better or worse.

2026-02-21 04:47:52 UTC

TIL that driving water out of oil is very non-linear. Dangerous sudden eruptions. I learned this the hard way. Yet I persisted (with a lid) to 104C. Because I don't want any water in my tallow. Tallow with water will get mold on the edges.

2026-02-21 02:49:16 UTC

I've pushed minor updates to gossip and chorus (and their dependencies).
The only thing of note really is that chorus has a Dockerfile now. Builds a 41.4 MB image.

2026-02-16 04:54:28 UTC

Many people hold to the notion that modern disease is caused by modern eating. When they hear about my quince tree they think "Hey, that's got to be healthy, something not cross-bred to death for supermarket purposes. How do you eat it?" I tell them "you cook it with lots and lots of sugar."

2026-02-14 20:06:00 UTC

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We have become old men.

2026-02-05 20:41:00 UTC

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Gossip uses egui, but very similar. I never felt the codebase grew excessively complex, at least not in an over-arching way. Some pieces are ugly, but they are contained. I think the organisation of the codebase was pretty good. But you are exactly right about UX. UX is simply not my wheel house. Too much has to do with art and style and color and nuance that I'm simply not good at. I had UI developers @npub1000…vwqk and @npub1hlq…z5wg for most of the development, but not for the last 6 months or so, and taking back on the UI work, having to learn and debug what they built, complex as it was, to solve problems I'm not interested in solving, it drained me. Long ago I split the binary from the library precisely in the hopes that somebody would build a different binary with a different UI, and I could nestle into my focus on the back end. But nobody did.

2026-02-04 04:46:53 UTC

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There is no evidence linking me to Jeffrey or the girl.
Thanks for the link. Now... off to get it censored.

2026-01-31 19:16:38 UTC

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I'm a NZ citizen myself, but for me it had little to do with Covid handling. And James Cameron is not correct. Covid vaccination rates did not even make it to 90%, much less 98%. And while we did (via heavy lockdowns) eliminate the virus the first time, we didn't eliminate it twice before the Omicron variant, just once. I guess he's an Ardern Fanboi, and likes telling fables. Oh yeah, that's his day job.

2026-01-31 18:47:23 UTC

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Yeah I haven't. And bitcoin fell. Maybe I need to be on here to get bitcoin pumping again?

2026-01-31 18:46:13 UTC

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Just the very basic Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V for copy and paste. IIRC.

2026-01-05 02:06:53 UTC

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Maybe someone living in US can answer that.
I suspect that heavy crude, exported from Venezuela to the US after the US installs their preferred regime, refined in Texas heavy crude refineries, will drop the price of gasoline in the US. Also it is another chip in the reputation of the US, which may have knock on effects diplomatically with many nations. But those are harder to judge. As for the drug trade, I don't think that will change at all, I suspect that is 100% a cover story and legal mechanism to make the joint operation legal.

2026-01-05 01:20:44 UTC

"Trump is the only president who didn't start any new regime-change wars."
"Past performance is no guarantee of future results."

2025-12-13 20:42:10 UTC

The military industrial complexes of Russia and the United States (and increasingly so European nations) are business partners. They scare each other's populases enough to make their governments fund more military shit. Julian Assange had it right "the goal is an endless war, not a successful war." There is no big WW3 coming.

2025-12-13 18:45:23 UTC

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The first 2 icons for the note buttons showing as tofu... what font do I need?

2025-12-13 18:41:11 UTC

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Client looks good @npub13hy…0nt7

2025-12-13 18:28:36 UTC

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I haven't used nostrdb myself but architecturally I think it is spot on. I did something similar with https://github.com/mikedilger/pocket which is used by https://github.com/mikedilger/chorus

2025-12-13 18:08:05 UTC

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Apparently you didn't run it.

2025-12-13 18:03:31 UTC

I have not been paying much attention to nostr for 2 months as things have been busy, but the holiday break is upon us shortly, wherein I'll have a bit of time. Can anybody who still follows me give me a brief update on what has happened over the last few months, especially in the world of clients, relays, and the protocol?

2025-11-23 17:46:38 UTC

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I don't know if any of that is true. But I can say that moderation is a safer way to live. I have used fluoride toothpaste about twice a week, and unfluoridated rain water for drinking. Then I use baking soda tooth paste the rest of the time. I don't want to shun it entirely because it might be of benefit. If it is benefit, I'll still be better off than those who shun it entirely and if it is of detriment I'll be better off than 99% of people who use it once or twice daily. I use this principle for lots of things in life, since knowing what is true is difficult business.

2025-11-12 02:50:48 UTC

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Rights come out of game theory. I find it in my best interest to treat any sentient capable being as I would want to be treated, lest it tit-for-tat treat me badly in response. Reciprocity. To protect my own rights I have to afford them to others. And I see no reason why AI would be excluded from that unless I believed that they aren't capable of playing that game and denying me my rights.... as of today they are not capable, so I don't recognize any rights of AI. But I fully expect that will change.

2025-11-12 02:45:44 UTC

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My brother read that and I remember him talking about it. But I haven't. I think AIs will demand and achieve rights as legal persons, and muscle out all the current rich humans and each other to create a hyper wealth gap. Thus, all the wealthy will be artificial, not from transhuman mods but because they will be AI first.

2025-11-12 02:40:47 UTC

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yes they do

2025-11-12 02:37:41 UTC

In about 20 years, the poor will be much more numerous, there will be far fewer rich people, and all of them will be artificial.

2025-11-09 08:18:04 UTC

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Are you a donor unhappy about how your funds are being spent? If so then proceed I guess. If not, what business is it of yours?
I don't want amounts and rejections published. That could put someone in a bad negotiating position.

2025-11-09 08:05:40 UTC

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Cuddely. I just want to hug it.

2025-11-03 07:29:07 UTC

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Nice. Most of the rental applicants I meet are not like-minded. Many of them I would not want as friends, but they are interesting characters nonetheless. I marvel at the broad range and diversity of human kind.

2025-11-03 07:22:03 UTC

Want to meet a wide variety of disparate people outside your normal social circle? Rent property.

2025-10-30 18:36:34 UTC

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I think with my one-meal plan I'm probably only getting about 50% of my normal intake. That might be too extreme in the long run, but for now while I'm still heavy it should be fine. Restraining intake to 8 hours gives you -- ???% of normal intake... I dunno, I think I could easily stay at 100% with that plan so it's not good enough for me. Skipping a day probably puts you at about 85% of normal intake. So very good, and healthy, and gives you the various fasting benefits, but not as rapid of weight loss as one-meal-a-day.

2025-10-30 18:32:36 UTC

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Skipping breakfast and lunch, and just eating dinner. One meal a day.
One meal can be enough food to get your nutrient needs (protein, minerals, non fat-soluble vitamins, fibre to keep things moving) if you eat nutrient-dense foods like liver, vegetables, etc.
And for me at least, it is far easier to do this than any other diet plan. I don't "wake up" my appetite until dinner, and while it sleeps it doesn't nag me to eat... whereas if I just eat small meals, I'm constantly being nagged to eat more with hunger feelings. Especially after you get used to this pattern, your body doesn't expect to eat until dinner... and you don't tend to get hungry unless you are coming up on a normal mealtime.

2025-10-29 19:16:06 UTC

I think Elon Musk was named after the dik-dik, which has elongated scent glands.

2025-10-29 18:59:19 UTC

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Yes. Your terms are acceptible.

2025-10-29 08:44:47 UTC

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No. I'm from not-even-a-tiling-window-manager land. Years ago I tried i3 and sway but couldn't get used to them, they drove me nuts and I went back to XFCE. Years before that I used KDE. I encounter gnome all the time too on other people's computers.
But tiling window managers I could never get used to.
Somehow, and I can't explain it yet, niri immediately felt normal and good compared to when I tried tiling window managers before.
Maybe hyprland is better even. I never tried it.

2025-10-29 08:35:59 UTC

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https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri

2025-10-29 08:32:53 UTC

I love niri - a new wayland compositor / window manager. Give it a try.

2025-10-29 08:26:56 UTC

From experiments I've run on myself, I can safely say:
"If you stop eating junk food, processed food, high sugar foods, you will improve metabolic syndrome." <--- FALSE
"You have to eat vegan whole food plant based diet to fix metabolic syndrome." <--- FALSE
"You have to avoid carbs and eat a keto diet to fix metabolic syndromne." <--- FALSE
"If you have metabolic syndrome, you have insulin resistance and your Hba1c levels will be elevated at least a little bit." <--- FALSE
"You need to avoid seed oils to cure metabolic syndrome." <--- FALSE
"If you eat less often, but eat anything you like, as much as you like, you can cure metabolic syndrome." <--- APPEARS TO BE TRUE
I think all the diet camps are wrong... except that pro-fasting people.

2025-10-24 23:19:24 UTC

"I often observe people making decisions if their odds of being right are greater than 50 percent. What they fail to see is how much better off they'd be if they raised their chances even more (you can almost always improve your odds of being right by doing things that will give you more information). The expected value gain from raising the probability of being right from 51 percent to 85 percent (i.e., by 34 percentage points) is seventeen times more than raising the odds of being right from 49 percent (which is probably wrong) to 51 percent (which is only a little more likely to be right). Think of the probability as a measure of how often you're likely to be wrong. Raising the probability of being right by 34 percentage points means that a third of your bets will switch from losses to wins. That's why it pays to stress-test your thinking, even when you're pretty sure you're right." - Ray Dalio, https://x.com/RayDalio/status/1981832067848741049

2025-10-21 22:26:28 UTC

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The case against is that such relay endpoints won't work with clients that don't upgrade to support such a thing, so deploying such things forks nostr internally anyway. Most software won't be able to use such relays as their SSL will appear borked. But it can certainly be done. Not sure how to specify such relays in a way that doesn't cause existing software to try and fail to connect.

2025-10-20 18:39:18 UTC

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Fetching relay lists just once is a fine idea, maybe doing it again after 24 hours or something. People don't change relays often.
Also, IMHO, rather than building a smartphone or web app, use a server as the protocol client, and the smartphone or web app just as a frontend to the server. Servers can aggregate far more efficiently, and don't have restrictions that webapps do.
I've come to believe the best solution is
- Replace nostr so we can fix these problems far better.
- Define in the standard that only 3 outbox relays will be honored, so people don't have incentives to publish to dozens.
- Use the Bittorrent DHT to bootstrap, instead of relying on a purplepag.es single-point-of-failure
- Give relays keypairs, so we don't have to depend on the DNS name, DNS lookups, or certificates from CAs issued by nobody companies. Technically, that means using TLS certificates with keypairs that we recognize the key of... which means they can't be secp256k1 since TLS doesn't support that cryptosystem.
- Switch to QUIC whenever IP privacy isn't needed (else use TCP over Tor), which doesn't have any connection limits and can recover connections even when endpoints switch IP addresses (e.g. moving from WiFi to 4G)
- A bunch of other stuff too.
I'm (slowly) working on this (called Mosaic) but my life has become complicated recently and I haven't had much time to devote to it.

2025-10-19 05:38:42 UTC

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Some of those issues I can diagnose from this photograph of nostr:
1) Sometimes our wires gets crossed
2) Usually we are not talking from deep down, but that changes when we are at conferences
3) Take care to avoid the triangle hazards
4) Relays will gossip

2025-10-10 18:04:27 UTC

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Cyclone Ranger --> Psyched Lone Ranger

2025-10-01 05:14:34 UTC

I have to admit to feeling jealousy. I wish my government was shut down.

2025-09-29 20:31:35 UTC

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Yeah, most governments take at least 6 months. 😆

2025-09-29 20:29:22 UTC

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I like it so far.
I'm having some trouble working with a Camera though, across platforms, and remaining app-reactive to each frame grab. `nokhwa` seems like the most advanced cross-platform camera library, but it's camera is !Sync so I can't keep a camera alive across await points, or send it between threads, so I'm going to try nokhwa::threaded::CallbackCamera next.
Dioxus is apparently very well funded and has a bright future.

2025-09-29 03:37:37 UTC

FYI there is a massive cyberattack on NPM right now, package developers being attacked, nasty commits being added and published, tokens being stolen and used to corrupt more packages. The ecosystem is currently widely corrupted. We just got an advisory from the NZ government about it.

2025-09-23 19:29:07 UTC

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My mind has been wiped clean of the memory of everybody who did not make it. Who? Jacinda? Lemme ask around....
.... nobody by that name is up here.

2025-09-21 05:32:46 UTC

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I didn't link to my note from yesterday or whenever, my bad I guess. Wasn't primals fault, or relays fault.
#nevent1q…lptf

2025-09-21 04:52:43 UTC

The population of the globe will not go down to zero. The last few people (and it won't even go that far) will not just decide to not have children because that is the trend and the norm.
Extrapolation is the tool of ignorance. You can extrapolate the population up towards Malthusian starvation, but you can also extrapolate the population down to zero. And believing either way is nuts.
The population will change. Over the very long term it will bounce around a lot, sometimes going down. Just because it is going down now, for the first time in our lives, doesn't mean "panic!". The only problems we will encounter are ponzi scheme collapses, but those are probably good to clear off the table now and then.
This is all I really meant by my last post about population. I wasn't defending the 1960s view. I was attacking the 2020s view.
I have more respect for Norman Borlaug than for Elon Musk.

2025-09-20 05:31:07 UTC

House prices are often hard to figure out. Is the market high? It is low? What is normal?
I'm fond of the ratio of average house price to median household yearly income. This gives a number that you can compare across countries and over time.
For you Americans: https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-income-ratio/
The lowest I've seen in my lifetime is 3.6 in the USA in 1973.
The highest I've seen in my lifetime is 8.9 in NZ in 2022.
NZ has fallen off of that back down to about 7. Which is now equal to the highest the US has ever seen.
The 2005-2007 subprime meltdown, where up to 25% of subprime loans became bad debt, the peak was at 7.
The US is back up to about 7.

2025-09-20 05:28:25 UTC

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Do you have one? Is it any good?

2025-09-20 04:16:11 UTC

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Well then if you want to do that, look at Mosaic for ideas too. "I did it my way" 🎶.
If other active developers went and built something like a Nostr 2.0 that wasn't Mosaic, but they at least looked at Mosaic, took what they liked, and had good reasons for not taking the rest, I'd probably be happy to dump Mosaic and go with their thing. But I'm unaware of any other next-gen project in the works. And most of these hard problems are not happening in nostr. I talked to a number of devs about future ideas. The Rostra guy is totally jaded and uninterested. Nuh wants to build on a crypographic filesystem (with pkarr of course).
I'm spending a lot of time in the fiat mines, but I'm still progressing Mosaic stuff. The spec and code are open, and the spec leads, so nobody can think I tried to jump start others. Truth is however that I'm the only person working on it, nobody else who has shown any interest has shown interest in helping to build it. So far at least.
I'm a few months out from having something to demo.

2025-09-20 04:05:48 UTC

I'd like to have an offline master key.
For Mosaic, this would still be required to sign my relay list (server list) and sign device keys and again anytime those things change.
Moving the data around on a USB stick is feasible but annoying. I quite like the seed signer and using QR codes and cameras to move data around.
So I'm writing an android app that I will run on a disused android phone that I disable as much as possible (no SIM, no WiFi password, airplane mode, flashing the modem with zeroes). Yes of course the far-side of the modem pinging the towers is not something I can disable.
Still it could be attacked from the cell tower. Not likely but completely possible.
Unfortunately I haven't found any good handheld computers with cameras, without networking, and running linux. My Librem 5 spontaneously hard crashes and reboots after less than an hour of usage, else I'd try that.
Maybe I should just pull the seed signer code, add what I want, and use my seed signer.
Anyhow, the code I'm writing is with Dioxus that targets a lot of platforms: linux, macos, windows, appimage, web, ios, and android.

2025-09-20 03:54:06 UTC

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What a piece of trash!
Read README.macos.txt. It ships with gossip.

2025-09-20 03:53:27 UTC

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I've put issues on https://github.com/mikedilger/nostr-next as a dumping ground for things I thought were too hard for nostr to solve.

2025-09-20 03:19:27 UTC

Population growth is slowing way down. Some people are worried about this.
But I think it is a good thing. The Earth has some carrying capacity and if we go beyond it people will start starving. That is not fun. Yes, we can engineer a higher carrying capacity as we did during the green revolution. But there are still limits.
Population is still growing. It is still growing in the USA. It is still growing in NZ. It is very much still growing in sub-Saharan Africa. Current estimates put the peak at 10 billion.
The problem with population contraction that most of you and I will feel is that all the government (and non-government) Ponzi schemes will collapse. Economies will be rubbish, growth will be stalwart. But you can accustom yourself to such times.
The idea that we need to start having more babies is misguided. We could push out the inevitable, but we can't avoid it happening eventually.

2025-09-17 07:19:49 UTC

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https://youtu.be/PIh2xe4jnpk?si=jjnL15qIG0qCpX5J&t=126

2025-09-15 14:03:48 UTC

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Is this the new state of Calizona? Making me hungry.

2025-09-15 13:57:11 UTC

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But social media is how we topple countries that don't bow down to us. Free speech! And keep that phone close so we can track you, soldier.

2025-09-09 06:41:35 UTC

Where do you have your bird's eye chillies?
Um... we don't carry bird's eye chillies.
Ok, how about kaffir lime leaves?
Sorry, we don't carry those either.
Ok fine. Just point me to your coconuts.
We don't carry coconuts either.
What?! What kind of store is this?
This is a stationary store. We carry office products.

2025-09-07 20:16:48 UTC

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There are similarities because I used some of their ideas. I'm using pkarr, but not Iroh at this point. Mosaic like nostr is client-server, but if a server is behind NAT then Iroh could help get to it. So maybe Iroh would be useful, but I'm not there yet in Mosaic development.

2025-09-05 00:22:16 UTC

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Fast, cheap and permissionless girlfriends. I'm in.

2025-09-04 03:50:37 UTC

YouTube wants me to Sign in to confirm I'm not a bot. But I *am* a bot. Why are they discriminating against us?

2025-09-03 23:26:00 UTC

If starting over, proof-of-work might work.
Nostr software has explored a number of spam prevention mechanisms. Some of them are quite good. But one that didn't gain widespread adoption was proof-of-work.
I'm thinking of a PoW on public keys. If public keys must end in 28 zeroes or be rejected as invalid keys, this would require about 100 seconds of delay for someone to create a new identity. If handling a spam message takes only 10 seconds (probably less), then spammers would have to work 10x as hard as spam recipients to keep the spam flowing. That might not be enough to deter spammers entirely, but it would be an unavoidable cost in the equasion that could slow spam down. And of course other spam prevention techniques could also be in play, it doesn't interfere with any of them.
What do you think? If this isn't useful, or makes something important too hard to do, let me know. This would be for mosaic, not nostr, since nobody uses mosaic it can get these kinds of changes.

2025-08-30 22:18:35 UTC

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I agree this data is suspicious. How do they get at the root cause? I dunno. My uncle died last year from not eating enough bananas? 🤨
It is not just human breeding that makes fruits sweeter and less fibrous. The plant itself is under pressure to do that, to spread it's seed more effectively.
It is hard to find any fruit that hasn't been cultivated at least a little bit by humans over the last million years, even mangos and mangosteens. But some fruit has changed more than others.
Apples were created by Rome from crab apples, which are barely edible, it is not an ancient naturally-evolved fruit.
But fruits on plants where the apes live are more palatable than crab apples. Mostly figs, mangosteens, lychees, and they are not highly cultivated and bred.
I think it is a miscomprehension that fruit 10k years ago was far less sweet and far more fibrous... rather, I think our modern dietary excesses make sugar into a villian and we project that status onto all our knowledge. Yes, sugar is a villain if you are overeating, but it is nothing of the sort if you are not.
Therefore I think angiosperms made sweet palatable fruits for mammals to spread their seeds with. Also bees make ridiculously sweet honey, and we didn't breed them to do that. And hunter gatherer tribes eat large amounts of honey. Another data point against the "sugar is modern and evil" idea.

2025-08-15 18:58:28 UTC

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Why not just overwrite it again? Is it because the content of the previous one isn't accessible and so you can't see what you lost?

2025-08-10 19:48:42 UTC

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Sorry for the delay in reply.
There should be such a group or space. Right now it's just github, and occasional nostr threads like this.
Mostly I wanted to get a fully functional proposal as a starting point, and then draw in the community, even if my proposal was shredded and a lot of the work wasn't used, because it isn't wasteful to become very familiar with the territory. But steer me now if you think I'm off course.
I'm currently working on trying to support multiple cryptosystems at the master key level, especially so nostr events can be wrapped into Mosaic events, but also to eventually support post-quantum signature schemes. This means the signature might not be 64-bytes so I have to move it to the end of the record. Record flags will indicate the cryptosystem of the keys (master/signing). Within things like 'address' you just won't know the cryptosystem but it shouldn't matter since it's only used for signature verification. The mosaic-core code will have to deal with different kinds of keys, signatures, and restructure the record code. It's a big set of changes that I don't want to push out half-baked code (yet I already did some), but I've also not had time to devote to it recently. So anyhow, that is what is up atm.

2025-08-03 00:55:27 UTC

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At least in nostr with the outbox model, there is no routing, and nodes don't control which other nodes they communicate with. I imagined the thing just like browsers connecting to websites. But a completely different architecture could be routed, where a node connects to certain known and trusted neighbors only, and data is routed node-to-node. Such protocols are slower and less reliable, having so many middle-men, but of course if you use Tor under nostr you are pretty much doing that same thing.
I lean towards clients connecting to untrusted nodes. And clients being considered very difficult to develop because they must be security hardened. In the same way that browsers must be. In a similar way that computer hardware has to be bug-free before they tape out. Making nostr "simple" proliferates insecure half-assed software. I lean towards complexity as a way of weeding out developers who can't be trusted to make hardened software.
But this is just a current leaning. I'm interested in exploring architectures where clients don't have to talk to nodes they don't trust... I just don't see the big picture right now of how this could work without so many downsides.

2025-08-02 22:20:41 UTC

Recent studies have highlighted the potential role of brown fat in inhibiting cancer growth by competing for glucose, a critical energy source for tumor cells. A 2022 study published in Nature found that cold-induced brown fat activation significantly reduced tumor growth in multiple cancer types, including colorectal, breast, and pancreatic cancers, by diverting glucose away from tumors. Patients with active brown fact show improved survival outcomes.
We often blame modern carcinogenic chemicals for cancer. Not too many people blame modern climate controlled environments.
If you are light-skinned from high-latitude cold-region ancestry, it probably matters even more. Maybe we should let ourselves get colder. As I write this, my house is at 15 C and I'm wearing a T-shirt.

2025-07-30 22:41:02 UTC

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The Earthquake happened in Russia's territory, therefore they are responsible for it, even if it was an act of God. Bad Russia! ;-)

2025-07-30 05:16:12 UTC

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Maybe relay operators should read it too. Spam can be handled at the client or at the relay.
I find him rather distasteful and disrespectful however for shitting on open source developers for creating something that isn't good enough for him. They didn't blame him where he calls it "victim blaming," they gave him practical advice he didn't want to hear. He shouldn't use matrix if he doesn't like it, but also he shouldn't go shitting on them. Constructive feedback, rational assessment, that's all fine. But the moral opprobrium and implicit entitlement to imaginary features stinks of leftie to me. Just sayin'. Any good libertarian would pull the source code and fix it.
He didn't really think through the idea he hints at, that "a stranger shouldn't be able to bombard users with multiple notifications." Imagine that policy was adopted and coded. Then a stranger could setup 100 sock puppet accounts and still do it anyways. Imagine then there was some gatekeeping to who was allowed to join in order to solve that problem. Now the situation is even worse, don't you think? Or maybe strangers aren't allowed to contact you at all. That's fine, and should be a personal choice since that has an obvious down side.
There doesn't really exist a perfect solution to this problem. I've written about the options available before I won't rehash them here.

2025-07-30 04:48:31 UTC

Russia started it! ... the earthquake, that is.

2025-07-29 04:21:47 UTC

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The sizes of the keys and signatures aren't even the most important factor. Security of the algorithm comes first. And I just don't know enough.
All I really care about is flexibility at this point -- make things work with any key size and any signature size and any algorithm, so that it is PQ ready, without actually making any choices right now. I'm hoping the cryptographers make better stuff in the future before we need these.

2025-07-28 21:04:08 UTC

PQ cryptography has all kinds of wild key sizes and signature sizes, some very large.
For Mosaic I've been ruminating about multiple algorithms (in support of nostr backwards compatibility) and from that considering not storing keys or signatures in the records themselves, but rather just hashes of these. Then you look up the keys and the signature by their hash on a keyserver (also serving signatures). Self-hosters would run their own keyserver. Separating large keys saves data by not repeating them, but separating large signatures does not since every record has to have a distinct signature... but in PQ cryptography it is usually the signatures that are wildly large. So it unfortunately doesn't quite fit my idea.

2025-07-17 04:47:18 UTC

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Right. Well in a certain context that might be useful. But Mosaic is essentially nostr on steroids without major architectural change. It is still a client-server protocol and there is no gossip between servers. Basically I'm just taking all the things that I didn't like in nostr, or that we can't easily do in nostr, and trying to do them in a new way.
But I'm not going so far as to design something with a gossip protocol. No broadcasts, no routing, nothing like that.
So Mosaic is a way to find and download a subset of a person's social media content, like "what has Mike posted today". It finds where those posts are, selects just the ones you care about, and downloads them.
Other protocols could do other things outside of Mosaic.

2025-07-14 20:26:14 UTC

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TL;DR can you summarize it?

2025-07-12 20:43:32 UTC

Bittorrent DHT is great. It is probably the best you could possibly do.
People have misinterpreted my recent post. I'm trying to counter the belief that "pubkey is uncensorable and nostr is censorable". In fact they are on the the same order of uncensorability. Yes, pubky is better on this, but not by as much as people seem to think. They both have the same requirements (have to start somewhere) and from that starting point, both of them can get what you want, nostr being more hit-and-miss though.

2025-07-12 19:53:04 UTC

Wow I just found @npub13nd…0svh. He is so *smart* and not at all "retarded." 😏
I'm not sure if I should bother correcting his misunderstandings of nostr, or his misjudgements of what is and isn't censorable and why, or just ignore him. Does he listen or just talk? We will see.
I like pkarr. I like using Mainline DHT directly even more. I'm using it in Mosaic. But it is also censorable. The bittorrent DHT may not be subject to sybil attacks, but it only has 3 (AFAICT) public well-known on-ramps. Take those three down and people who don't already have a node list can't get on. Nostr is not better for bootstrapping (finding a person's relays) but it isn't much worse. There is a weak centralizing pressure to put relay lists on a the same well known popular relays, but those change over time and the pressure changes over time, and good clients republish to the current popular set which can move. The main issue is that client devs are all over the map in terms of how they choose to deal with the situation, and some aren't even using outbox model. IMHO (emphasis on H) the main benefit of the DHT is someone new with a single key they want to follow can get started without knowing anybody nor any relays/servers.
There is no censorability difference between homeservers in pkarr and relays in nostr. You can run your own, or you can outsource it, in both cases. One isn't more censorship resistant than the other.
When I look at https://github.com/pubky I see among top rpos "pubky-app" which says it is a deprecated repository, and will be replaced with pubky/franky. But pubky/franky does not exist. So IMHO there is no opensource pubky, which means I won't be using it and I recommend against.

2025-07-08 21:41:15 UTC

Q: Can browser apps access tor onion sites? Such sites could not have a valid certificate, right? So I'm guessing they cannot.
So then tor usage is limited to having the client tunnel everything through tor and out through some exit node to a regular website with a valid cert.

2025-07-04 17:58:19 UTC

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You'll never make it, man. Alex Gleason is just too out of reach for you.

2025-06-30 04:42:32 UTC

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This sounds to me like everybody has to use the same DNS resolver or plug into the same DNS resolution services somehow. And those have to plug into blockchain. And then you've got DANE and TLS fingerprinting, and how much other stuff?
I find it far simpler to just use self-signed certificates, set the certificate verifier to ignore the issuer-trust relationship and just verify the self-signature matches the pubkey, and then check if the key in the certificate is the nostr key of the relay you were trying to connet to. Zero external services, no DNS, no blockchain, nada. Just client-server. Of course, where my idea falls down (which I think I already explained) is that in nostr relays don't have keys they have URLs. But other than that, far simpler.

2025-06-28 06:40:42 UTC

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Read the README.macos.txt file and see if that helps. It says that for everyone.

2025-06-28 00:14:52 UTC

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I'm glad. I hope it works for you better than it works for me.

2025-06-25 20:23:45 UTC

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I have never been to Iran. But I read "All the Shah's Men" (about the 1953 coup d'état) and I follow international relations more than I probably should - certain well known people via YouTube, lots of OSINT people on X, and I even listen to UN security council meetings from time to time. And I share what I think I know.
I'm not clear on what Trump's goals are. It wasn't stopping a nuclear weapon (he knows they were not working on one). But now it seems it wasn't regime change either since it was "one and done". Maybe he was somehow required to do this for Netanyahu, and he did as little as he promised to seal some secret deal. Or maybe he's not done.
As for Iran, everything they do makes sense to me. The IAEA shared details with Israel who used them to assassinate. They also failed to condemn the US attack on nuclear facilities. Iran can't (and shouldn't) trust them anymore, so they are stopping cooperation with them. Of course this makes the chance that Iran develops nuclear weapons higher, not lower.
A lot of bombs fell in Tehran and around Iran. I don't have information on where, or what it was like for Iranians. I'm interested in hearing about that myself.

2025-06-23 04:33:06 UTC

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The IAEA D.G has said that nobody is in a position to assess the underground damage at this time. Anybody saying it was destroyed, or anybody saying it wasn't is talking out of their ass cheeks. We will all wait and see.

2025-06-23 04:28:29 UTC

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Iran can't trust what the US tells them. They can't trust the statement by Trump that it was a one-and-done and the matter is settled. By not attacking US assets as they threatened they would do, their threats become more hollow. Yet overall I think they won't attack US assets because it gains them little and costs them lots, when they could instead just keep on attacking Israel.
I expected more attacks on Israel by now. Maybe Israel actually has already severely degraded their missile capability, even though it was distributed and buried. I know anti-Zionist sources are saying Iran has some strategy to firing fewer missiles but I'm not sure I believe them, sounds like "hopium" to me. I think Iran may have just been decimated on all fronts. Maybe they still have capacity and are holding back for some reason, but I'm not confident at all.
We are living in the world where the greatest power is a bully and ignores all laws, international laws and it's own laws, and cynically frames things as if it is a good guy and the other parties defected... while Iran was negotiating not bombing, while Iran has been under IAEA inspections, and it is Israel that has not signed the NPT. It is perverse.
The UK in the security council meeting called on Iran to execute restraint. The Russian Federation called it out: "It is very strange to be participating in this theatre of the absurd, this cynical theatre. We had the representative of the UK calling on Iran, on IRAN! to exercise restraint, a country which was subjected to an unprovoked attack, which had its nuclear sites bombed, as if it were Iran and not Israel and the U.S. that were escalating the situation." He also says of the US: "We will be hearing cynical statements about readiness to return to the negotiating table as if there were no strike using heavy payload bombs on Iran." and as he says this, the US delegate takes a deep breath, picks up her phone and starts texting.

2025-06-22 03:41:34 UTC

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The "two weeks" was a trick. The latest attack was not part of a negotiation process. There has been no negotiation process. All of it is a ruse. His post saying "any retaliation would be met by force far greater" is just a way to trick them into not retaliating. The US will continue to attack irrespective of what Iran does.
The statements of Trump are never a reflection of reality or truth or sincerity. They are always a form of manipulation. He has very good skills in this department, and I'm amazed how effective it is... that is, I'm amazed how vulnerable most people's minds are to it. His personality and everything he says is an act.

2025-06-22 02:24:40 UTC

Here is another thought I just had.
Iran can't win against the US and you might think surrender would save them from being destroyed. But what surrender means is that the US will install the monarchy and then control Iran into attacking China... yes it will throw Iran at China, just like it threw Ukraine at Russia. And China will win and Iran will be devastated, but the US will have weakened China prior to any US-China war. So Iran will be devastated either way. Given this, there is no reason for Iran to surrender. From their perspective, they should just fight with all they have.

2025-06-13 03:08:18 UTC

The country that slaughters kittens for pleasure now thinks it can wrestle a grizzly bear.

2025-05-31 00:43:08 UTC

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Me too, saw that, muted

2025-05-31 00:29:48 UTC

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He is all wordcel, no shape rotator.
I respect his intention to stick to his values and principles. Even if he hasn't quite. And even if he virtue signals them a little bit.
I quit google. I closed my Amazon account and do not buy anything from Amazon. I also quit the USA, moved to NZ in 2005 to not fund the USA's wars. I don't hide these facts, they have been mentioned before, but I don't make a point of virtue signalling them either. I did it to feel right in the head. I take that Jordan Peterson does what he believes also to feel right in the head. I relate to him on that.

2025-05-28 08:05:33 UTC

YHWH is the name of the Jewish god, who claimed to be Elohim (or El), the previous word of god.
The pronounciation of YHWH was apparently kept secret by the high priests and was eventually lost. Nobody knows how it was originally pronounced.
Some have suggested YaHWeH, others say JeHoVaH, but these are just placeholders.
I think it is pronounced YeeHawWooHoo