Nostr notes by codonaft

Something based on https://nostr.doctor perhaps.

2026-04-15T06:39:23Z

In reply to nevent1q…jfux
_________________________

Something based on https://nostr.doctor perhaps.

These relays seem to function right now, but I don't know how ...

2026-04-15T06:19:10Z

In reply to nevent1q…wtxg
_________________________

These relays seem to function right now, but I don't know how often they are offline.

```
wss://carlos-cdb.top
wss://ditto.pub/relay
wss://jingle.carlos-cdb.top
wss://nerostr.xmr.rocks
wss://nostr.0xtr.dev
wss://nostr.sudocarlos.com
wss://nostr.xmr.rocks
wss://relay.gasteazi.net
wss://relay.highlighter.com
wss://xmr.ithurtswhenip.ee
wss://xmr.usenostr.org
```

Oh, I got it; now it works, thanks!

2026-04-15T04:13:02Z

In reply to nevent1q…fsng
_________________________

Oh, I got it; now it works, thanks!

> pretty weird, true, but you have to admit that being able to ...

2026-04-15T03:45:59Z

In reply to nevent1q…t438
_________________________

> pretty weird, true, but you have to admit that being able to store your software repo and app to view it as your banner image is pretty cool

> We have these huge corporate-sponsored ecosystems with millions of people running it. Layers on frameworks on layers on frameworks... for what?

Yeah, I think you built a cool thing; I'm not complaining by calling it weird, just in case 👍 I'm pretty much coming from the same position: we either build cool stuff and maintain ourselves (or by a limited number of hackers) or build the hell fractals maintainable by larger teams of people who are focused on getting things done in a harsh way, which inevitably comes to a crisis we see in frontend development today.

> Below is a capture from my terminal

Thanks! I was able to verify and run it but got "The integrity of the Floppy PNG that houses this site cannot be confirmed by retrieving the public key from the current website". I find it challenging to debug it because all my text editors can't handle the `site.txt`.

```
Uncaught (in promise) TypeError: can't access property "addEventListener", document.getElementById(...) is null
verify http://127.0.0.1:8080/page.html line 15 > injectedScript:3102
async* http://127.0.0.1:8080/page.html line 15 > injectedScript:3148
<anonymous> http://127.0.0.1:8080/page.html:15
promise callback* http://127.0.0.1:8080/page.html:12
promise callback* http://127.0.0.1:8080/page.html:11
page.html line 15 > injectedScript:3102:14
verify http://127.0.0.1:8080/page.html line 15 > injectedScript:3102
AsyncFunctionNext self-hosted:780
(Async: async)
<anonymous> http://127.0.0.1:8080/page.html line 15 > injectedScript:3148
<anonymous> http://127.0.0.1:8080/page.html:15
(Async: promise callback)
<anonymous> http://127.0.0.1:8080/page.html:12
(Async: promise callback)
<anonymous> http://127.0.0.1:8080/page.html:11
```

I've got a couple of overheat events; after them my system ...

2026-04-14T04:35:01Z

In reply to nevent1q…jvdp
_________________________

I've got a couple of overheat events; after them my system couldn't boot due to a damaged superblock. Every time I boot from flash and run fsck I remember this picture. Even though I have backups, I can't currently backup absolutely everything. But it's been okay so far; fsck fixes things.

What's up with your data? Do you need any help?

Just curious, what's the next step in your repo extraction ...

2026-04-12T04:28:55Z

In reply to nevent1q…ha4u
_________________________

Just curious, what's the next step in your repo extraction quest after extracting the huge scary `site.txt`? It appears to be a frontend js without some ready way to load it.

Verification script fails with `Error: "publicKey" expected Uint8Array of length 32, got type=string` for me. What's the pubkey format expected? Tried hex as txt and as binary. I wouldn't load the pubkey from file at all if possible.

It also fails with `ERR_PACKAGE_PATH_NOT_EXPORTED` to me unless the following changes are made:

```patch
-import { sha256 } from "@noble/hashes/sha2";
-import { schnorr } from "@noble/curves/secp256k1";
+import { sha256 } from "@noble/hashes/sha2.js";
+import { schnorr } from "@noble/curves/secp256k1.js";
```

Thanks for building the weird thing anyway, it's interesting.

Not that I undervalue having fun with no particular reason, ...

2026-04-11T18:57:17Z

In reply to nevent1q…dnw9
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Not that I undervalue having fun with no particular reason, though; it's perfectly healthy. I just don't associate it with traditional holidays and celebrate whenever it feels right. Happy birthday in whatever future date it's for you 🥳

It depends on why and to what degree you want to make this ...

2026-04-11T18:49:24Z

In reply to nevent1q…utyz
_________________________

It depends on why and to what degree you want to make this specific fact private. Depends on what you are risking if the fact leaks out. What are you risking in the potential future as well. Descartes Square might partially help with the decision if you're looking for an abstract tool.

Many people are pseudo-anonymous online, but it doesn't mean they don't have a close circle of people they trust, who care about boundaries, care which facts are okay to share or not.

My uncle always kept his birthday a secret. Only a few family members know it, probably accidentally. But his reason is innocent: if I remember right, he doesn't like when people give him presents.

I prefer to keep my birthday a secret as well, partially for a similar reason, but I think I'm not risking very much if it leaks out. I'm actually not even pseudo-anonymous; I chose different privacy boundaries.

I don't celebrate my birthday because I can't perceive it as some achievement. It felt very much like an achievement in the past; it will likely feel like an achievement in the future, but right now I perceive other things more valuable to celebrate than birthdays.

Sounds like good news to me. "First they ignore you, then ...

2026-04-10T22:07:55Z

In reply to nevent1q…s9t6
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Sounds like good news to me.

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win".

It's indeed a fun thing to do, running it right in a browser. ...

2026-04-10T21:39:41Z

In reply to nevent1q…ndlc
_________________________

It's indeed a fun thing to do, running it right in a browser. Did you mean to ping `npub1zv58cn7v83mxvttl70w5fwjwuclfmntv9cnmv5wmz2nzz88u5urqvdx96n.fips`?

Hah, another shot in their own foot. Thanks, Microsoft; I'd ...

2026-04-10T07:52:05Z

In reply to nevent1q…lu87
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Hah, another shot in their own foot. Thanks, Microsoft; I'd do the same if I wanted more people to migrate to (non-systemd) GNU/Linux distros.

> Это не совсем оправдание для ...

2026-04-08T19:44:20Z

In reply to nevent1q…mx02
_________________________

> Это не совсем оправдание для вероятности и совпадений, но пока успокаиваю себя этой версией

> В целом понятно, как люди мнительными шизами становятся.

Просто оставлю это здесь.

Нео не смогли показать другие пилюли, другие варианты гранд-нарративов. Их тогда еще не начинали разрабатывать.

quoting
nevent1q…dx7w
И снова буду портить своё тело
Новой анти-саттвической едой
Я привычную давно не смог отведать
Не таскать же мне ее всюду с собой

Опять бесконечные движения
Куда-то из локации в локацию
И снова вермишелин поглощение
Залитых чайником пластмассовым

Примитивности глубин смыслов
Не столько от рациона идей
Не губи в себе творца корыстно
Кушать правильно выбор имей

Мне все эти тексты порождает
Идеалистически-эмерджентный надмозг
Телом ему старательно не мешаю
Даю логикой лишь мизерный взнос

Пищей пропускную способность снижаю
Без шквала идей его — не стихи, а бетон
Говорит, варварством этим не обижаю
Всё же в норму пора вернуть рацион.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFXhGeAODBA

nevent1q…su2p

Написал этот стих еще до чтения этой метамодернистской книги. Мне кажется эта толком еще незамеченная книга — что-то имеющее потенциал быть реально революционным и гармонизирующим идейно разобщенное общество наиболее здоровым образом (с наименьшими шансами порождения динамики культов в следствии кривых интерпретаций материала).

(иллюстрация — David Long / Non-Reductionist Philosophy)

Написана книга (“Emergentism: A Religion of Complexity for the Metamodern World”) для относительно широкой аудитории. Те кто давно в философских дискурсах о природе сознания — принципиально нового вряд ли заметят что-то (кроме довольно взрослого варианта компромисса идей, завернутого в умеренно ироничный гранд нарратив). Книга отчасти дополняет то направление, которое начинал Кен Уилбер в своих ранних книгах. Подойдет как грустненьким нигилистам, так и прагматикам-технооптимистам, так и гностикам-конспирологистам, так и биткоин-мемоделам.

Это явно не основная цель книги, но думаю в частности важным она может оказаться тем, кто имеет доступ к редким измененным состояниям сознания (надличностным переживаниям, чем бы они ни были объективно) и имеет соответствующие неизбежные трудности со смыслом вследствие этого.

Когда кто-то выражает интерпретации своих сакральных субъективных переживаний — типичная деконструирующая реакция («это же просто {такое-то когнитивное искажение}») оказывает лишь обратный эффект (в том числе на потенциально ошибающегося человека): усиление его чувства экзистенциального одиночества, усиление защиты выраженных интерпретаций, нигилизм. Мы вредим слишком упрощенными реакциями на слишком сложный феномен. Это ограничение постмодернизма и редукционизма, которые пытаются преодолеть пост-постмодернисты (метамодернисты в частности).

Более здоровая зрелая реакция для того, кто не знаком со сложным феноменом, но теоретизирует о нем — это так и сказать «Я не знаком в точности с тем, что ты описываешь и всё же {очередной нарратив про когнитивные искажения}» — такой ответ уважает и позицию автора интерпретации своего же субъективного опыта и научный дискурс; и в то же время не завышает этот самый дискурс, не превращает его в еще один изощренный культ. Он оказывается там, где ему место — в том, что *пока* удалось проверить научным методом.

Вот тред с примером такой драматической динамики (комментарий там на самом деле был про “Baader–Meinhof phenomenon”):

nevent1q…s7ff

nevent1q…5elk

Возникающие интерпретации, надо признать, действительно *могут* оказаться в корне неверными. В литературе на тему духовности сейчас преобладает конкретная категория перспектив (что не может не сказываться на непредвзятости наших мировоззрений) — идеализм (т.е. «идеи первичны по отношению к материи»), а не какой-то баланс разных перспектив, синхронизированный с текущим научно-философским прогрессом (и в то же время учитывающий ограничения всех этих дискурсов).

Мне описанное состояние сознания, по всей видимости, довольно хорошо знакомо. Подобное у меня спонтанно возникало в качестве пиковых переживаний, в следствии медитативных практик, а также погружения в творческий процесс на длительный период времени (не менее трёх недель без отвлечения на соцсети). В моём случае были еще более забористые версии описанного состояния и во весьма длительном временно́м промежутке, поэтому получилось довольно глубоко поразглядывать что же происходит хотя бы феноменологически.

У меня интерпретация отличается, но и не редуцируется до одних лишь когнитивных искажений. В моей интерпретации замешана усложнённая версия эмпатии и интуиции; в частности, вторая — слишком быстро предсказывает то, что говорит кучка пикселей на экране, к которой я испытываю эмпатию; даже когда этого не осознаю.

Данная книга, в частности, позволяет понять фундамент, из которого можно научиться мыслить такие интерпретации, которые могут потенциально устроить и того кто переживал такое состояние, и тех критиков, которым не досталась такая возможность.

И, повторюсь, это даже не основная цель этой книги, только вариант применения. Основная проблема — кризис смысла, в широком его понимании.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0JxL-acvuM

#стихи #стихотерапия #метамодернизм #духовность #ностр

It looks like we're lacking a NIP that restricts markdown to ...

2026-04-04T13:50:52Z

It looks like we're lacking a NIP that restricts markdown to a certain scope. And nobody knows for sure what the restrictions would be adequate.

#devstr

quoting
nevent1q…msnk

Why are we still using Markdown?

Link: https://bgslabs.org/blog/why-are-we-using-markdown/
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47629903

У меня значимый прогресс в ...

2026-04-03T09:45:19Z

In reply to nevent1q…y9xz
_________________________

У меня значимый прогресс в английском начался только после того, как положил болт на неэффективную навязанную образовательную систему и стал импровизировать. Но задолго до этого я интуитивно распознал что что-то очень извращенное происходит вместо обучения в целом.

На уроке иностранного юный разум не ...

2026-04-02T20:07:10Z

In reply to nevent1q…kvwn
_________________________

На уроке иностранного юный разум не внимал
Как потом в реальной жизни применять весь этот кал?
Неужель сие поможет разуслышать разговор
Модных блогеров ностуба и в больнице докторов?

Попугайствовать шаблонно, схематично-догматично?
Порождая диктатуру грамматической цензурой?
Разве это обученье? Или это подчиненье?
На меня оно не действует: мною двигало печенье

#стихи #стихотерапия

It took me a while to process the experience and properly ...

2026-04-02T17:41:09Z

It took me a while to process the experience and properly articulate the last sections of the article. And it may keep unpacking.

I must admit I've rarely participated as a peacemaker in whatever interpersonal conflicts in my life. I was usually more on aggressive side. Somehow I was lucky to be able to stay away from performing aggression in public online spaces.

Love the toughest conflicts; they are teachers. Love your opponent without losing yourself, if you still believe they are an opponent at all.

"If you hate a person, then you're defeated by them." (c) *widely attributed to* Confucius

Don't expect they will love you back, of course; do it for your own growth. Love is more than a naive, hippie-sh thing.

#grownostr #shadowwork #love

quoting
nevent1q…0laq

Keep nostr weird. And positive. #grownostr

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahmzAj3k2KQ

naddr1qq…vn38

Thank you for articulating it. It's a tricky wisdom. It's ...

2026-04-01T14:55:45Z

In reply to nevent1q…9k0y
_________________________

Thank you for articulating it. It's a tricky wisdom. It's easy to see others' crap and yet forget about our own shadow work every time.

Продолжение есть ...

2026-03-29T15:07:21Z

In reply to nevent1q…ltku
_________________________

Продолжение есть https://kod.ru/telegram-oproverg-zero-day

I recall one of my early childhood pictures; I drew a tape ...

2026-03-29T11:42:34Z

In reply to nevent1q…yuxy
_________________________

I recall one of my early childhood pictures; I drew a tape recorder. The handle of the recorder looked more like another side of the recorder. My dad was surprised because he thought I was able to draw the tape recorder in 3D.

Keep nostr weird. And positive. #grownostr ...

2026-03-28T23:25:04Z

Keep nostr weird. And positive. #grownostr

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahmzAj3k2KQ

quoting
naddr1qq…vn38

It's mostly a personal post. Might be relevant to those who are also into the challenge of finding deep, meaningful, and warm friendships like I do.

Melting the mental prisons

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92i5m3tV5XY

Around 10 years ago I told myself something like this:

(kind relaxing voice) Fuck that. Just fuck that.

I don't want to be neurotic about how I'm interpreted when it comes to building friendships or romantic relationships.

I no longer care whether people interpret partial information about me and prematurely jump to oversimplified conclusions or not.

I challenge myself to do my best to be able to honestly and fearlessly talk in the appropriate contexts without masking my weaknesses.

My buddies' reactions are a test of their maturity, my maturity, and my compatibility with them. Period.

Don't get me wrong, it's not the same thing as not having any boundaries at all.

I do my best, but I'm far from perfectly following this stoic-like approach. And I don't recommend it to most people. It's a hard emotional labor; perhaps it would take me decades of therapy to start doing it properly.

Yeah, it feels good to be actually authentic in communication early. Feels like a superpower. And with enough luck, it's possible to quickly find somebody important. Somebody actually fulfilling and nonjudgmental about you. But this is in exchange for a high probability of getting smashed right into your heart instead.

Texting

I especially can't recommend this approach for texting. Really, I wish you could stay away from that urge; chances are you don't understand what you are signing up for. So many factors of running into unnecessary drama out of the blue while holding basic, non-conflicting worldviews together.

The risk of misunderstanding is incredibly high while texting. There's no way to perceive real emotions directly from your buddy in texting compared to real life and video calls. An imagined/hallucinated tone of what was said may dramatically affect the interpretation of your intention on the other side. Words we use may have too many meanings for a given context. Tech reliability issues add additional burden.

Make a typo and you may appear evil to them. Make a compliment about a particular idea of some culty guy, and chances are you will be associated with all their discourse totally.

In my experience, most people are not capable enough to check their hallucinations about me before expressing passive or direct aggression towards me. They are not evil in any way. Just incapable.

Privacy

Surprised that some people don't read DMs here?

Some people are even surprised that I don't make voice messages. Besides dozens of reasons, whatever private message I make is addressed to a particular person. I don't want to end up neurotically predicting whether some unexpected people from a public space will be listening to it too.

nevent1q…hw9w

Abuse of Trust

As I believe privacy is one of the core cultural values here at Nostr, I want to kindly warn you, nostrich. Other nostrich(es) you trust might actually brutally violate your privacy already, probably without even acknowledging it. And I'm not talking about something like DM relays your buddy may set in their profile; Nostr DMs are still WIP.

Unnecessary exposure of your sensitive, privately shared facts about you, without your permission, violates your privacy dramatically, nostrich. It's more than just a violation of privacy. This abuses your trust.

Exceptions

I said unnecessary exposure. Is there something necessary that would be ethical to expose without permission? It's less likely you will run into such a scenario. It's hard to prove that somebody is actually acting out of some enormously malicious intent towards society.

Proof that somebody's actually prepared for a school shooting would work. Proof that some greedy company is doing intolerably unethical things—probably would work.

But if it's something purely ideological, just some abstract idea disagreement—this is obviously way more confusing. It may take decades to ensure that somebody actually has a potential for enormous damage to society and runs an actual damaging cult based on that idea, for instance, rather than harmlessly holding this as an immature WIP belief. I'm not proposing to equalize random ideas though; we're not in a postmodern epoch.

If one believes there's a necessity to expose something of that kind, it's definitely worth one's time researching the full context really well, because it's also a good chance to lose one's reputation by exposing a single sloppy "fact".

What Happened to Me

Just to make it less abstract, I'm talking about personal vulnerabilities in particular, private life stuff that people gradually disclose to each other in friendships and romances, which is easy to misinterpret and cause hurt. Weaknesses, fetishes, beliefs, health conditions, etc. Stuff that's not supposed to be discussed in public unless one's allowed it. It's hard to make a formal definition for something fundamentally individualistic, but I hope you got it.

Let's get back to the point: unnecessary exposure of that kind of stuff without my permission violates my privacy dramatically.

Sounds like something obvious? Yet, this happened to me here at Nostr already.

This was rude in several ways, but most importantly:

this included the passive-aggressive use of my personal weakness against me in a public thread

this is done by another nostrich, whom I trusted to some degree and who paradoxically seemed to value privacy too.

Was my personal vulnerability necessary to use publicly against me? In a public thread, which was initially a neutral tech-related discussion?

I believe they had much better arguments. But it's too late.

The Tone

It all started with an unwelcoming tone.

I may not participate in a discussion if I suspect passive aggression towards any side involved. That would not be a rational discussion in the first place, no matter how hard the aggressor may believe it is and which rational arguments on discussion they hold.

If I still believe it's important to participate—I will definitely respond to the tone. And this feels weird to do; I'm far from perfect in it.

Obviously, my intention is not to escalate this. My intention is to elevate the discussion to a polite spectrum where both of us can properly focus on the actual topic of discussion. The idea itself should be criticized, not the people that discuss it.

But... The next thing that happened is their response directly involved at least one of the [two lowest levels](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(programmer)#Graham's_hierarchy_of_disagreement) of Graham's hierarchy of disagreement. Damn. We are cooked.

I really, really hope you never, ever use these two lowest levels in the tech-related discussions, nostrich. This is toxic. It's the end of the debate.

I would not recommend working with anyone who thinks that it's a good idea to speak like that. We're not a bunch of impulsive, angry politicians here. We're trying to fix what they've done with this "approach".

It's acceptable to make fun of things that are outside participants and their agendas. Here at Nostr, I might use a classic ironic postmodern deconstruction if I talk about politics, for instance. Because I don't expect that politicians read me at all. But I would never do such a deconstruction of a politicians' agenda in a discussion with them if I had a chance to contact them—that would be a foolish way to lose this opportunity. Respecting a side of a discussion isn't the same thing as agreeing with their agenda.

Solutions to Personal Attacks

It's tricky but probably not that challenging to directly respond to the specific ad hominem I ran into. And possibly a fountain of other mess that would come later. If it happened offline. But in an online space it's way more confusing.

Notice that they've already lost

Is this dispute/debate/whatever worth your resources at all? If you believe it's not—stop.

Stop. Let them "win". And notice that they actually won the fake debate that you didn't agree to participate in in the first place.

They caused you unnecessary stress that distracted you from a real debate. This is not a fair constructive activity anymore; it's a who can press whom now, psychologically. With bla-bla-bla back and forth in the background that imitates a real rational activity. Who has a "gun" is right now.

No matter how many valid rational arguments they have, this behavior makes them look like a fool that runs out of the best of them, to the point when they couldn't find anything better than to switch to a direct personal attack.

Real Rational Debate

Those who ~~really-really want to waste the rest of their energy~~ are really good at debating publicly may go for an offline or streaming debate. With a chess clock and neutral moderator.

A good moderator is an active listener who is capable of reflecting the least distorted summarizations of each other's positions in challenging moments.

This may actually work: it's much harder to pervert one's intention or idea when it's discussed directly using voice.

Videos/Podcasts

Public vlog-based discussion could also work, but that's much slower and will possibly generate even more drama. I'm talking from my experience of watching dozens of "Answer to: ..." videos related to the nature of consciousness: you may very likely end up having a bunch of videos with even more distortions of both sides' agendas. And I bet, in my particular case, that would be the most boring video playlist ever.

Cheatsheet to Bookmark

Especially if you've shared something too risky with this person—here's what you may find important to learn about various kinds of abusive behavior, besides the one I shared here.

Reaction to Abuse of Trust

In my case I didn't feel humiliated or angry. The first experience was probably confusion and some tension. But after acknowledging what's happening—probably for the first time in my life, I experienced a weirdly relieving, vivid kind of Spanish shame, a cringe, while observing their risky, potentially self-harming activity.

Hopefully, you're not a victim of similar behavior already. But if you are and if you feel revengeful—damn, I'm with you, and I still wish you were at peace.

No need for revenge: I think, in general, abusive behavior is not harmless to the abuser themselves, regardless of whether they are aware of it or not. But it ain't that easy to recall that from an affective state.

If it's a systematic abuser, people will be gossiping behind their back anyway. And will be less likely to deal with them. This will keep accumulating, and perhaps culture will even smash the abuser at an unexpectedly greater magnitude than you were hurt at some point: other victims may take a chance to participate if somebody decides to reveal who the abuser was and what they've done to others.

What I learned

I need to practice responding to tone. It's important to clearly communicate that I'm actually interested in de-escalating the possible tension from the very beginning, not the opposite.

That's it

Keep nostr weird Keep yourself cheered Don't be ashamed Don't be afraid.

Don't fall into the cheap, abusive scenario spirals abusers invite you to participate.

Obviously don't spread private (mis)information of those who trusted you. Even if they've done that to you already—at least notice that you may also be mistaken about them somewhere.

Respect your own values. Respect privacy for real.

I'm probably wrong but I interpret Alex's post as a kind, ...

2026-03-27T01:58:31Z

In reply to nevent1q…3azt
_________________________

I'm probably wrong but I interpret Alex's post as a kind, ironical, and provocative invitation for improvement of DMs implementation.

At least to me, something doesn't feel right about White Noise yet, but it's close to what Signal (and SimpleX) do in terms of privacy.

quoting
nevent1q…casu
I find this default behavior in White Noise slightly disturbing:

https://github.com/marmot-protocol/whitenoise/issues/528

Not sure why there are not auth-only relays. NIP-42 auth per session doesn't work yet, or/and properly working NIP-42 relays are not really that common yet?

Forward secrecy doesn't really work when NIP-42 is not a requirement for NIP-59 gift wraps: either you or your buddy may expose them with these default relays for example.

Similar issue with the NIP-46 signers: private events exposed in the wild

https://github.com/fiatjaf/nak/issues/116

If you're building a signer, please consider testing/making it compatible with NIP-42 relays and optionally making it show a warning if it's connected over a non-auth relay (or specifically a relay that exposes kind 24133 events).

#devstr #privacy #whitenoise

@nprofile…6lrd If the related post is still available please ...

2026-03-27T00:53:12Z

In reply to nevent1q…2v0t
_________________________

White Noise (nprofile…6lrd) If the related post is still available please share if you can, thanks. I'm curious what didn't work for you.

Especially if you are dyslexic, which book narration software do ...

2026-03-26T09:38:53Z

Especially if you are dyslexic, which book narration software do you prefer?

I'd like something FOSS for GNU/Linux that can ideally do well
- reading with expression
- speedup up to ~4x
- properly parse weird doc structure with footers/headers/columns/etc.
- (in a non-disruptive way) notify when a related picture becomes visible
- the more supported formats, the better

Easier to vibe code it already? Nothing worked for me in the past.

I keep reading manually when I have capacity. Still a torture to me.

#asknostr

> they made a blog something about how they couldn't set ...

2026-03-25T03:43:02Z

In reply to nevent1q…spwm
_________________________

> they made a blog something about how they couldn't set protected flags because of lack of support in relays

Interesting. Could you possibly share a link please? I couldn't find the post; hopefully it's not deleted.

I find this default behavior in White Noise slightly disturbing: ...

2026-03-24T10:22:16Z

I find this default behavior in White Noise slightly disturbing:

https://github.com/marmot-protocol/whitenoise/issues/528

Not sure why there are not auth-only relays. NIP-42 auth per session doesn't work yet, or/and properly working NIP-42 relays are not really that common yet?

Forward secrecy doesn't really work when NIP-42 is not a requirement for NIP-59 gift wraps: either you or your buddy may expose them with these default relays for example.

Similar issue with the NIP-46 signers: private events exposed in the wild

https://github.com/fiatjaf/nak/issues/116

If you're building a signer, please consider testing/making it compatible with NIP-42 relays and optionally making it show a warning if it's connected over a non-auth relay (or specifically a relay that exposes kind 24133 events).

#devstr #privacy #whitenoise

Thanks for the positive vibes. This world is still stuck in ...

2026-03-24T08:40:14Z

In reply to nevent1q…63nw
_________________________

Thanks for the positive vibes. This world is still stuck in cynicism, passive aggression, etc. Reminding about the significance of social skills is never too much yet.

Мне очень жаль что произошло такое ...

2026-03-23T11:49:06Z

In reply to nevent1q…2uj3
_________________________

Мне очень жаль что произошло такое недопонимание 💛

I'm so sorry that this misunderstanding has happened 💛

> Why did you ask me to implement the idea in the first place? ...

2026-03-23T08:49:06Z

In reply to nevent1q…vlkd
_________________________

> Why did you ask me to implement the idea in the first place?

Did I ask you? I just found this article *might be* relevant to share with you, that's it.

> There are already "magic" tools, which can help you with motivation at basic level, implement what you want etc.

What's your motivation behind this suggestion? I feel super uncomfortable talking like this, and that has nothing to do with our opinions on philosophy or things we're building here at all.

My idea? And which 5 requirements do you mean? > You're ...

2026-03-23T07:50:14Z

In reply to nevent1q…c4qy
_________________________

My idea? And which 5 requirements do you mean?

> You're not helping.

I'm not sure how to interpret such a response; it feels cold and unmotivating. Definitely not the tone of communication I'm looking for here.

Forgot the link about NIP-42 ...

2026-03-23T06:10:25Z

In reply to nevent1q…0c0l
_________________________

Forgot the link about NIP-42

https://github.com/marmot-protocol/whitenoise/issues/528

> Because doesn’t the protocol assume that messages ...

2026-03-23T06:07:57Z

In reply to nevent1q…jnm4
_________________________

> Because doesn’t the protocol assume that messages propagate to other relays as well?

There's at least a mention of NIP-70 (protected events) in the MIP-00. Perhaps NIP-70 could be a requirement for all Marmot events?

I also find it scary that Marmot allows usage of relays that don't require NIP-42 auth.

Almost all events should be private IMO; the auth should be required whenever possible.

> or controlling the whole stack (incl relays).

> How does running my own relay solve that problem exactly? How would I then ensure that my messages are not being stored by any other relay?

If you're using NIP-42 auth whenever possible, control your client and relay (you're sure the relay and your client won't propagate events to unexpected relays, and the client will actually remove the events)—only your DM buddy with their unexpected relay list or broken client would be able to propagate the events to unexpected relays.

The broken client is not something controllable in the FOSS world. An immutable list of relays that all sides of communication explicitly chose to use for the conversation still could be possible. But at some point these relays will be outdated for example, so a new conversation would need to be created. Feels like a wrong complication. Any better ideas?

I didn't know that, thanks!

2026-03-23T01:31:37Z

In reply to nevent1q…486h
_________________________

I didn't know that, thanks!

You mean the PACs? To some degree, yes. Compared to the use of an ...

2026-03-22T04:50:48Z

In reply to nevent1q…lyaf
_________________________

You mean the PACs? To some degree, yes.

Compared to the use of an isolated browser profile per proxy, the trade-off is that multiple of your IPs might be associated when you visit a website with mixed content loaded through multiple proxies, so it's still a risk to end up banned somewhere due to "suspicious" activity (which is normal internet usage today).

@nprofile…yd3q there might be a few simple ideas you're ...

2026-03-22T03:30:13Z

JayByte (nprofile…yd3q) there might be a few simple ideas you're looking for. But this goes beyond relays. We need to encourage people to "report" (label) users in a non-scary way to get such semantic graphs.

quoting
nevent1q…8shk
How to Fix Spam, Bots, and AI Slop on the World Wide Web
https://howtofixtheweb.com/

It is possible to issue certificates for IP addresses nowadays, ...

2026-03-19T17:50:52Z

It is possible to issue certificates for IP addresses nowadays, btw.

https://letsencrypt.org/2026/03/11/shorter-certs-certbot

Example: `https://[2602:ff3a:1:abad:c0f:fee:abad:cafe]`

#letsencrypt

quoting
nevent1q…j0ht

DNS is a scam.

nevent1q…ha27

Is anyone keeping a database of all the many many cases of domain names taken from their supposed "owners" for whatever reason?

hzrd149 (npub1ye5…knpr)

> We don't require any personal details You still operate ...

2026-03-16T22:42:27Z

In reply to nevent1q…wzkc
_________________________

> We don't require any personal details

You still operate under the terms of ICANN and are required to send RDRP notices to your clients, don't you? Thanks for your work anyway. We still need those domains while we're migrating to the decentralized ones.

It seems to be currently down. Just curious: is it due to fips, ...

2026-03-16T21:17:49Z

In reply to nevent1q…26ln
_________________________

It seems to be currently down. Just curious: is it due to fips, relay or some other failure?

I'm surprised nobody has reported this yet; at least I ...

2026-03-12T13:38:27Z

I'm surprised nobody has reported this yet; at least I wasn't able to find it.

If you were wondering why some nostriches choose Firefox-based browsers—for instance because Firefox currently has stable proxy connection support compared to Chromium-based browsers.

https://issues.chromium.org/issues/492069660

It's not that obvious it's broken. Most websites work fine because they don't create so many WS connections.

It's also sad that none of the browsers currently support the UDP part of the Socks5 protocol. It should be useful for HTTP/3.

И следующая же новость #nevent1q…7zh3

2026-03-11T04:50:21Z

In reply to nevent1q…gwmf
_________________________

И следующая же новость

quoting
nevent1q…7zh3
Amazon is holding a mandatory meeting about AI breaking its systems

Link: https://twitter.com/lukolejnik/status/2031257644724342957
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47324211

This is really awesome that there are more clients with marmot ...

2026-03-10T17:40:54Z

In reply to nevent1q…9uku
_________________________

This is really awesome that there are more clients with marmot support now, especially for desktop. Looking forward to NIP-46 using bunker URI connection support.

It probably makes sense to submit new builds to AltStore as well.

2026-03-09T03:36:53Z

In reply to nevent1q…z5xf
_________________________

It probably makes sense to submit new builds to AltStore as well.

#naddr1qv…eaul

2026-03-08T14:44:06Z

quoting naddr1qv…eaul

Every serious attempt to build encrypted group messaging for more than two people has collided with the same wall: the problem demands properties that contradict each other. Members must agree on shared encryption keys without a coordinator. The system must provide forward secrecy, meaning a compromise today cannot expose yesterday's messages, while also providing post-compromise security, meaning a recovery tomorrow restores full protection. Members join and leave at unpredictable times, and every change requires updating cryptographic state across all remaining participants. Messages must arrive in consistent order across a network where latency varies and nodes disappear without warning. All of this must happen without any single server that a government could compel or an adversary could compromise.

The people who understand this problem best have been the most emphatic about its difficulty.

"I No Longer Believe That It Is Possible"

Moxie Marlinspike built Signal, the most trusted encrypted messenger in the world, on a deliberately centralized architecture. In May 2016, he published "Reflections: The ecosystem is moving" on the Signal blog, explaining why:

"Nothing about any of the protocols we've developed requires centralization; it's entirely possible to build a federated Signal Protocol-based messenger, but I no longer believe that it is possible to build a competitive federated messenger at all."

His reasoning was structural. Federated protocols cannot evolve because every participant must agree on changes, and that agreement never comes. He pointed to the wreckage of every federated standard that came before:

"We got to the first production version of IP, and have been trying for the past 20 years to switch to a second production version of IP with limited success. We got to HTTP version 1.1 in 1997, and have been stuck there until now. Likewise, SMTP, IRC, DNS, XMPP, are all similarly frozen in time circa the late 1990s."

XMPP, the protocol most people point to as proof that federated messaging can work, became his primary exhibit for why it cannot. Signal had originally used XMPP before abandoning it:

"Like any federated protocol, extensions don't mean much unless everyone applies them, and that's an almost impossible task in a truly federated landscape. What we have instead is a complicated morass of XEPs that aren't consistently applied anywhere."

The metadata problem compounded the architectural one. Even if you encrypt every message, a decentralized network leaks information about who is talking to whom and when. Moxie argued that protecting metadata would require innovation that centralized systems could deliver and federated ones could not: "Those changes are only likely to be possible in centralized environments with more control."

Six years later, his position had hardened. In his January 2022 essay "My first impressions of web3," he extended the argument to all decentralized systems:

"People don't want to run their own servers, and never will. Even nerds do not want to run their own servers at this point."

And the core architectural claim: "If something is truly decentralized, it becomes very difficult to change, and often remains stuck in time. That is a problem for technology, because the rest of the ecosystem is moving very quickly, and if you don't keep up you will fail."

For group messaging specifically, Signal's own implementation confirmed the difficulty. In a 2014 Signal blog post on private group messaging, Moxie explained why the academic multi-party protocol (mpOTR) was impractical for real-world use: "In an asynchronous environment, clients need to be able to immediately transmit their message without depending on any interactivity from any of the recipients, so even a single round trip is too much." Signal's actual solution for groups was to give up on elegance entirely and send each message as a separate pairwise encrypted copy to every group member individually, burning bandwidth for simplicity.

The Cryptographers Agreed

Matthew Green, the Johns Hopkins cryptographer whose blog is the field's most-read source of security analysis, confirmed in 2018 that even centralized group messaging remained "still kind of a hack." Analyzing vulnerabilities found in both Signal and WhatsApp by researchers at Ruhr University Bochum, Green wrote: "The greatest lesson of all time is that real cryptosystems are always broken this way, and almost never through the fancy cryptographic attacks we love to write about."

The specific weakness Green identified was group key distribution. The Signal protocol works well for two people. For groups, "the standard Signal protocol doesn't work quite as well for group messaging, primarily because it's not optimized for broadcasting messages to many users." Every approach to group encryption involves tradeoffs that the two-party case avoids entirely.

Telegram provides the starkest illustration: a company with hundreds of millions of users and full centralized control over its infrastructure has never managed to ship encrypted group messaging at all. As Green documented in August 2024: "The feature is explicitly not turned on for the vast majority of conversations, and is only available for one-on-one conversations, and never for group chats with more than two people in them." If a centralized company with unlimited resources cannot do it, the decentralized case seems hopeless.

The IETF Tried and Hit the Same Wall

The Messaging Layer Security protocol, published as RFC 9420 in July 2023, represents the most rigorous academic attempt to solve encrypted group messaging. Authored by researchers from Cisco, Mozilla, Meta, Inria, and the University of Oxford, MLS introduces a ratchet tree structure that reduces the cost of group key updates from O(N^2) in the sender-keys approach to O(log N), making groups of thousands cryptographically feasible for the first time.

MLS is a real achievement, but it explicitly requires two centralized services to function. From the RFC itself: "An Authentication Service (AS) that enables group members to authenticate the credentials presented by other group members" and "A Delivery Service (DS) that routes MLS messages among the participants in the protocol."

The Delivery Service requirement exists because MLS needs someone to order commits. Each state transition in an MLS group moves the group to a new epoch, and all members must agree on which commit ends one epoch and begins the next. Without a sequencer, competing commits create forks that fracture the group's cryptographic state. The RFC acknowledges this directly: "Each Commit message is premised on a given starting state. Applications MUST have an established way to resolve conflicting Commit messages for the same epoch."

The MLS architecture document does acknowledge that a "peer-to-peer network could instantiate a decentralized DS by transmitting MLS messages over that network," but immediately qualifies: "clients will need to implement logic that assures the delivery properties required of the DS." Nobody had built that logic. The hard part of decentralized group messaging was exactly the part MLS left as an exercise for the reader.

Every Attempt Failed

Matrix, the most well-funded attempt at decentralized encrypted group messaging, proved the skeptics right in the worst possible way. In 2022, researchers from Royal Holloway, University of London, and the University of Sheffield published a devastating analysis finding that Matrix's encryption "provided neither authentication nor confidentiality against homeservers that actively attack the protocol." The system that millions of users trusted for secure communication was broken at the foundation.

The attacks were not exotic. A malicious homeserver could add users under its control to encrypted rooms because room management messages were not authenticated, even for encrypted rooms. A chain of attacks allowed the homeserver to extract all inbound encryption sessions from a target user. The researchers identified a systemic failure: "the specification and its implementations seem to have grown organically with new sub-protocols adding new functionalities and thus inadvertently subverting the security guarantees of the core protocol."

XMPP fared no better. OMEMO, the encryption extension that was supposed to bring forward secrecy to federated XMPP messaging, operates on pairwise Double Ratchet sessions between every device pair. For a group of N members each with D devices, the protocol requires N times D separate encryption operations per message. This is the approach that Trail of Bits, in their 2019 analysis of MLS, classified as fundamentally unscalable: the same architecture that iMessage uses and that breaks down above a few hundred participants.

The pattern across these failures is consistent. Each project solved part of the problem while leaving critical gaps that compounded into system-wide vulnerabilities. Matrix got the federation model working but failed on cryptographic guarantees. OMEMO got the encryption right for two parties but could not extend it to groups without quadratic overhead. Signal got both encryption and groups working but required centralized infrastructure that created a single point of failure and a single point of compulsion. Every attempt confirmed what the skeptics had been saying: the full problem, all properties simultaneously, appeared to be beyond reach.

What Changed

Two things changed between Moxie's 2016 essay and today. The first was MLS itself. Despite its centralization requirement, MLS solved the cryptographic layer of group key agreement with mathematical rigor that no previous protocol had achieved. Its ratchet tree construction makes group encryption scale logarithmically while providing both forward secrecy and post-compromise security through epoch transitions, and a proposal-and-commit mechanism handles asynchronous membership changes when participants are offline. The cryptography works. What remained unsolved was the transport and identity layer underneath it.

Nostr provided the missing piece. A global network of thousands of independently operated relays, communicating over WebSocket connections, with identity rooted in secp256k1 keypairs that require no registration and no phone number. Nostr was not designed for encrypted messaging but for censorship-resistant social communication. Yet the properties it provides turn out to be exactly what MLS needs and does not specify: user discovery, message delivery, identity authentication, all without any central authority.

The Marmot protocol, formalized through a series of Marmot Implementation Proposals (MIPs), connects these two systems. Marmot uses MLS for everything MLS does well: group key agreement, ratchet tree management, epoch transitions, forward secrecy, post-compromise security. It uses Nostr for everything MLS left unspecified: identity through keypairs, discovery through KeyPackage events published to relays, message delivery through the relay network, and metadata protection through ephemeral keypairs and NIP-59 gift wrapping.

The specification is precise where it needs to be. MIP-00 defines how Nostr identity maps to MLS credentials, with signing keys deliberately separated from Nostr identity keys so that compromising one does not compromise the other. Group construction follows in MIP-01, which introduces a custom MLS extension carrying group metadata and admin permissions alongside relay preferences. Welcome events for group invitations come through MIP-02, wrapped in NIP-59 gift wrap for unlinkability. And MIP-03 defines the encrypted group message format, using ChaCha20-Poly1305 with keys derived from MLS epoch secrets, and critically, generating a fresh ephemeral secp256k1 keypair for every single message so that no observer can link messages to their sender.

The commit ordering problem that MLS left to the application layer gets a deterministic solution: competing commits resolve by timestamp priority with lexicographic ID as the tiebreaker. Members retain prior group state temporarily to recover from forks without sacrificing forward secrecy. It is not a perfect solution, and the specification acknowledges the tradeoffs explicitly, but it is a working solution that does not require a central sequencer.

The Protocol Matters More Than the App

White Noise is the first application implementing Marmot, and it ships today with end-to-end encrypted direct and group messaging, no phone number or email required, running on the decentralized Nostr relay network. The Rust core library (whitenoise-rs) provides the cryptographic engine while Flutter clients run on iOS and Android, funded by OpenSats, the Human Rights Foundation, and the Jack Dorsey-backed "And Other Stuff" collective.

But the application is not the point. Marmot is a protocol specification with interoperability built into its architecture, and that distinction matters more than any single client. Four mandatory MIPs define event kinds (443 for KeyPackages, 444 for Welcomes, 445 for group messages) with encryption schemes and message flows specified precisely enough that any independently developed client can exchange encrypted messages with any other. SDKs already ship in Rust, TypeScript, Kotlin, Swift, Python, and Ruby, covering every platform a messaging developer would need.

Interoperability at the protocol layer is the architectural choice that separates Marmot from every previous attempt. Signal's encryption is excellent, but Signal is a walled garden: one app, one server infrastructure, one organization that must continue to exist for the system to function. Matrix attempted federation but grew its specification organically, accumulating sub-protocols that undermined each other's security guarantees. XMPP federated successfully but froze in the late 1990s, exactly as Moxie predicted, because getting a federated network to adopt new extensions proved impossible in practice.

Marmot avoids the federation trap by building on a network that already exists and already evolves. Nostr relays do not need to agree on protocol changes because the Marmot specification lives in the client layer, not the relay layer. Relays store and forward events without understanding their contents. A Marmot client can implement new MIP versions without requiring any relay operator to update anything. The protocol evolves at the speed of client development, which is the speed Moxie always argued was necessary, while running on infrastructure that no single entity controls.

Separating the cryptographic protocol from the transport network also means that Marmot inherits MLS's security properties by reference. Academic cryptographers have formally analyzed MLS through years of IETF review, and the resulting RFC carries the rigor that process demands. Marmot does not need to reinvent group key agreement or prove novel cryptographic constructions secure. It needs to correctly implement MLS and correctly map its operations onto Nostr's event model, a substantially smaller and more verifiable surface area than designing a complete encrypted group messaging system from scratch.

The Hardest Problem in Applied Cryptography

The academic literature on Continuous Group Key Agreement, the formal primitive underlying MLS, continues to evolve. Researchers have found and fixed attacks on TreeKEM, the core ratchet tree construction, including forward secrecy gaps identified by Alwen, Coretti, Dodis, and Tselekounis in 2019 and insider attacks documented by Alwen, Jost, and Mularczyk in 2020. These fixes were incorporated into the MLS standard before publication. The research process works, and Marmot benefits from it directly because it builds on MLS's foundations.

The specification has passed a formal security audit at the protocol layer, and audits of the MDK and whitenoise-rs implementations are in progress. The commit ordering mechanism trades theoretical optimality for practical simplicity, and adversarial conditions could produce edge cases that the current conflict resolution rules do not handle gracefully. These are real limitations, and acknowledging them is part of what makes the specification credible: a project that claims to have solved every aspect of a problem this hard would not be worth taking seriously.

What makes Marmot worth watching is the architectural bet. The protocol splits the problem along the exact seam that previous attempts missed. MLS provides the cryptographic engine, formally verified and standardized. Nostr provides the decentralized transport, already running at scale across thousands of relays with millions of users. Marmot defines the binding layer between them, thin enough for independent audit and precise enough that any developer can implement it without asking anyone's permission.

The people who said decentralized encrypted group messaging could not be done were not wrong about the difficulty. They were wrong about the conclusion. The problem was never impossible. It was waiting for the right combination of a proven cryptographic standard and a decentralized network with the right properties to appear at the same time. MLS and Nostr are that combination, and the Marmot protocol is the specification that connects them.

Don't overestimate proprietary Trusted Execution ...

2026-03-08T14:08:04Z

Don't overestimate proprietary Trusted Execution Environments. We might never know for sure whether they are another sophisticated NSA honeypots or not. Issues have already been found in them; Nvidia is not excluded.

Not that I'm against these technologies, but I'd like to see more solutions based on something open and independently verifiable as well.

If it's not something identical to hardware TEE solutions, then at least there's a not-yet-well-known Linux syscall `memfd_secret`, which is basically a way to allocate private RAM regions that are, to some degree, isolated even from the kernel (pages with these regions won't be swapped to disk, core dumps won't include this memory, etc.).

It's a limited solution. It's not for GPUs. However, it's open and independent from any particular vendor.

Originally it was designed for cryptography. Useful for NIP-46 signers and CPU-only ML models for example.

https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/memfd_secret.2.html#NOTES

quoting
nevent1q…uenx

Today we're excited to release our first confidential compute (TEE) models on PPQ! These models verifiably show that neither we (PPQ) nor our AI provider can see the content of your queries.

This is a big step towards user privacy and dignity in the AI age.

#privacy #linux #TEE

s/besides/compared to/

2026-03-03T23:38:14Z

In reply to nevent1q…wxtn
_________________________

s/besides/compared to/

> as emergent property a top of geometric and entropy layers ...

2026-03-03T23:33:09Z

In reply to nevent1q…lxxz
_________________________

> as emergent property a top of geometric and entropy layers which anecdotally correspond to what current AI can replace humans in

I think I'm a bit lost in abstractions already, could you elaborate please? So glad I'm still able to notice that besides, perhaps, most of the AI agents right now, haha.

Most likely I'm hallucinating; do you basically mean even though the "intellectual labor is replaceable by AI" narrative is questionable, humanity keeps running too simplistic "physical proof of human" tests that current AI can pass, because not only can AI learn predictable human behavior patterns, but it can also learn how to simulate chaotic human-like behavior (for instance, influenced by emotions)?

Do you mean the CAPTCHA torture pages or the KYC security circus? ...

2026-03-03T06:09:46Z

In reply to naddr1qq…7lzn
_________________________

Do you mean the CAPTCHA torture pages or the KYC security circus? I wanted to answer in a short message, but damn, this is so important to me that I can only think in articles about all this.

quoting
naddr1qv…c7y3

Every case is unique. Some of these emerged naturally. Some of them are imposed by governments.

CAPTCHA, the way we still encounter it, is the result of ignorance of the first signs of passing the Turing test. The KYC is more complicated: usually it's associated with reductionistic opinions, that it's just the lobbyists' mass surveillance thing, while still this also could happen semi-unconsciously because of a lack of proper alternatives that governments could even consider in order to counterattack... their own helplessness and accumulated stress from the polycrisis we are all facing, probably.

My proposal here is to recontextualize the issues, observe more fundamental problems, and solve them instead. Solve something that at least seems to be solvable today.

CAPTCHA/PoW Torture Test

It seems like CAPTCHAs are almost testing the opposite thing already: if user is so desperately passing these puzzles all the time, if user doesn't feel tortured enough to leave these absurd pages—it's probably a bot.

Detecting simple malicious attacks (dumb social spamming, dumb technical DoSing, etc.) still makes a lot of sense. Using (unexpected) traffic as a source of useful computations makes even more sense (especially traffic from the users who were reported by highly trusted ones, e.g. from WoTs). But attempts to specifically target bots—this doesn't have the potential to work in the long run (if at all, already).

A partial solution is already there

CAPTCHAs have been testing the wrong thing. Now it's also weird to see how some PoW pages still say "we're checking that you are not a bot"—this is obviously false; they are checking that I'm a "non-malicious bot" now. And that's much better!

But still, PoW pages are torturous as well: they shouldn't block users from interacting with a website; the mining should happen only in the background, probably for certain actions only, so non-malicious users/bots won't even notice it. That's why I'm relatively tolerant of NIP-13, even though it's far from an ecologically optimal solution.

The best solutions will possibly arise from decentralized UPoW.

nevent1q…nqhf

I think it's the best time to start working on the related NIPs.

KYC and "children's safety"

Massive papers uploading to servers, besides obvious privacy issues, is something like another irrelevant cookie banner annoyance tyranny: it won't solve the core issue of the so-called children's safety. It will produce even more chaos: more advanced AI systems to bypass such checks will become a new normality. New absurd AI regulations as the result of this mistake.

A domino of mistakes. Then they will require full access to the servers to ensure they are "safe enough". What's next? Even if it's full hardware surveillance totalitarianism with client side included, what will they do with the radio amateurs and open-source hardware, for example? Pointless tyranny.

It seems this won't ever work, no matter how much tax money will be wasted. But that's not obvious to the masses, which pay for all this circus. And postmodern-ish art doesn't really help them; we need to be clear, and we need to provide actual solutions. Ideally, change the trend.

Dating example

I recently discovered how ethically and legally running a dating/friendship app became problematic today. Especially for children.

nevent1q…8yrp

I also heard that some people are now asking governments to require KYC as a solution 🤦‍♂️ And I can understand them. Imagine you're an average non-hacker parent that faces your child's abuse using one of these apps. What would you do? Blame those who made the app? Configure a parent control?

The way the society is currently structured is that it would be a natural thing to complain specifically to governmental systems about everything related to the online abuse issues.

But bureaucrats are not designed to solve issues of such complexity! Bureaucrats are not hackers, and unfortunately, historically, they were always dramatically bad at systems thinking.

It's not just a conspiracy/authoritarianism, if you will; it's also a lack of cognitive complexity in these systems. It's better to interpret some of them as naive medieval inquisitors rather than stereotypical Dr. Eggman/Evil/etc.

Protesting by implementing something better is only a partial solution

Now we're not perfect as well. We've put ourselves in a position where we're always in an ideological confrontation with the governments and teaching people how to resist them. How sustainable is that position?

I believe just teaching the masses about privacy isn't enough. We tell them what not to do, but what should they then do to address the issues like child abuse on the dating websites?

This is a complex question. But when it comes to a specifically technical part—I think we need new social institutions, made by ethical hackers, specialized on the socio-technical issues in various systems. Not something like EFF (which works in the scope of confronting governments), but something that focuses on monitoring, receiving, and processing the relevant complaints, and something that designs solutions that all sides, including governments, actually may like. Something that ideally competes with and outruns governments before they even need to "think" about the next regulation.

And we need to teach the masses to ask these institutions for relevant solutions, not the governments that tend to oversimplify everything and literally solve technical problems with bureaucratic barbarianism.

Now, of course, while we still lack these institutions, we need to keep exchanging better ideas and implementing them, demonstrating that they are actually possible.

Alternative to KYC

What would be an appropriate nostr-based dating/friendship app solution? Specifically designed for finding people in the same location for further offline dating. Let's try to imagine one.

Dating from a normal trusted npub is probably not appropriate for many people. On the other hand, new, almost empty pseudoanonymous npubs don't make much sense, as they have no trust.

Suppose you create special pseudoanonymous profile(s) designed specifically for dating. Such a profile will be visible in dating apps only.

Here you can set your bio with the relevant facts that you like ~~foot hugs~~ certain hobbies, or whatever, without being embarrassed. You can set your age and so on, just like on the normal dating websites.

This pseudoanonymous profile is still not trusted, but users can explicitly give permission to trust ranking services of their choice to acknowledge the normal-pseudoanonymous connection (with cryptographic proofs from both profiles) so the services could assign the same trust rank as on the normal profile.

Now this dating profile can be prioritized for matching. Untrusted profiles will receive a corresponding warning badge (or will simply be ignored, using the app settings, probably by default).

What would we do with the abusive scenarios?

Every pseudoanonymous dating profile can report another one (if they at least had a conversation). They can provide the related location and even forward some of the DM messages as part of the report (much better than cryptographically unverifiable, possibly fabricated screenshots with "removed" messages that are usually shown to cops). The reports should be private. But who is the receiver?

Now the scary part. It's scary, but only for abusers.

Suppose you also have the cop bots, dedicated to specific locations, a FOSS solution that can:

receive the private reports

probably analyze them with local AI models (from simple spam checks to identifying the severity and priority of the report, aggregating them somehow)

forward the reports to the real cops of the related location

send acknowledgement/proof back to the reporter that the report is actually recognized as valid, that it's accepted and forwarded to the real cop

provide the possibility for further communication with a real cop for the reported case, for instance, for additional DMs forwarding; or to help with a new date arrangement with the abuser, but also with a cop instead of the victim this time.

All this without prematurely revealing the real identity of both the reporter and the reported. Reporters technically aren't required to reveal their identity at all if they don't trust the real cops; they may keep reporting abusers without further legal procedures; these reports later will be useful if some other reporter attempts to start a legal case against the same abuser.

This can go with further complexification, to the point where this cop bot would attempt to deceive the reported abusers by automatically generating fake pseudoanonymous profiles relevant enough to the abusers. These profiles will automatically match only with the abusers and will be instantly removed when neither of the expected abusers accepts the match with them. Those who matched will be provided to the real cops for the "special dating".

Of course the connection between real cops and the bot cops should also be cryptographically verifiable by apps. Real cops should have the .well-known/nostr.json (NIP-05) on their governmental website. The cops can run the bots themselves if they want and if they have enough capabilities for that.

Real cops that would attempt to abuse the system will be, for instance, disconnected from trust services: their fake dating profiles will become invisible to most dating app users.

If cops don't really work in your country—maybe you have any related volunteers? They can also run these bots and, for instance, spread certain cases to journalists and provide statistics to them.

This is briefly it

No KYC is required to catch another Appstein. And no KYC would ever help there. Real abusers will fake KYC, but they won't be able to fake the dating with a... sudden cop.

And all this has nothing to do with the particular age range. When the boundaries are that healthy, this is useful for everyone. Further legal processes will take age into account as usual.

My guess is that governments will be interested in these bots. If they don't or if they attempt to pervert this idea somehow—this will be another sign that they are interested in something different from solving the real systemic issues.

If you're working on a #dating nostr client, please take a ...

2026-03-03T06:03:51Z

If you're working on a #dating nostr client, please take a look.

quoting
naddr1qv…c7y3

Every case is unique. Some of these emerged naturally. Some of them are imposed by governments.

CAPTCHA, the way we still encounter it, is the result of ignorance of the first signs of passing the Turing test. The KYC is more complicated: usually it's associated with reductionistic opinions, that it's just the lobbyists' mass surveillance thing, while still this also could happen semi-unconsciously because of a lack of proper alternatives that governments could even consider in order to counterattack... their own helplessness and accumulated stress from the polycrisis we are all facing, probably.

My proposal here is to recontextualize the issues, observe more fundamental problems, and solve them instead. Solve something that at least seems to be solvable today.

CAPTCHA/PoW Torture Test

It seems like CAPTCHAs are almost testing the opposite thing already: if user is so desperately passing these puzzles all the time, if user doesn't feel tortured enough to leave these absurd pages—it's probably a bot.

Detecting simple malicious attacks (dumb social spamming, dumb technical DoSing, etc.) still makes a lot of sense. Using (unexpected) traffic as a source of useful computations makes even more sense (especially traffic from the users who were reported by highly trusted ones, e.g. from WoTs). But attempts to specifically target bots—this doesn't have the potential to work in the long run (if at all, already).

A partial solution is already there

CAPTCHAs have been testing the wrong thing. Now it's also weird to see how some PoW pages still say "we're checking that you are not a bot"—this is obviously false; they are checking that I'm a "non-malicious bot" now. And that's much better!

But still, PoW pages are torturous as well: they shouldn't block users from interacting with a website; the mining should happen only in the background, probably for certain actions only, so non-malicious users/bots won't even notice it. That's why I'm relatively tolerant of NIP-13, even though it's far from an ecologically optimal solution.

The best solutions will possibly arise from decentralized UPoW.

nevent1q…nqhf

I think it's the best time to start working on the related NIPs.

KYC and "children's safety"

Massive papers uploading to servers, besides obvious privacy issues, is something like another irrelevant cookie banner annoyance tyranny: it won't solve the core issue of the so-called children's safety. It will produce even more chaos: more advanced AI systems to bypass such checks will become a new normality. New absurd AI regulations as the result of this mistake.

A domino of mistakes. Then they will require full access to the servers to ensure they are "safe enough". What's next? Even if it's full hardware surveillance totalitarianism with client side included, what will they do with the radio amateurs and open-source hardware, for example? Pointless tyranny.

It seems this won't ever work, no matter how much tax money will be wasted. But that's not obvious to the masses, which pay for all this circus. And postmodern-ish art doesn't really help them; we need to be clear, and we need to provide actual solutions. Ideally, change the trend.

Dating example

I recently discovered how ethically and legally running a dating/friendship app became problematic today. Especially for children.

nevent1q…8yrp

I also heard that some people are now asking governments to require KYC as a solution 🤦‍♂️ And I can understand them. Imagine you're an average non-hacker parent that faces your child's abuse using one of these apps. What would you do? Blame those who made the app? Configure a parent control?

The way the society is currently structured is that it would be a natural thing to complain specifically to governmental systems about everything related to the online abuse issues.

But bureaucrats are not designed to solve issues of such complexity! Bureaucrats are not hackers, and unfortunately, historically, they were always dramatically bad at systems thinking.

It's not just a conspiracy/authoritarianism, if you will; it's also a lack of cognitive complexity in these systems. It's better to interpret some of them as naive medieval inquisitors rather than stereotypical Dr. Eggman/Evil/etc.

Protesting by implementing something better is only a partial solution

Now we're not perfect as well. We've put ourselves in a position where we're always in an ideological confrontation with the governments and teaching people how to resist them. How sustainable is that position?

I believe just teaching the masses about privacy isn't enough. We tell them what not to do, but what should they then do to address the issues like child abuse on the dating websites?

This is a complex question. But when it comes to a specifically technical part—I think we need new social institutions, made by ethical hackers, specialized on the socio-technical issues in various systems. Not something like EFF (which works in the scope of confronting governments), but something that focuses on monitoring, receiving, and processing the relevant complaints, and something that designs solutions that all sides, including governments, actually may like. Something that ideally competes with and outruns governments before they even need to "think" about the next regulation.

And we need to teach the masses to ask these institutions for relevant solutions, not the governments that tend to oversimplify everything and literally solve technical problems with bureaucratic barbarianism.

Now, of course, while we still lack these institutions, we need to keep exchanging better ideas and implementing them, demonstrating that they are actually possible.

Alternative to KYC

What would be an appropriate nostr-based dating/friendship app solution? Specifically designed for finding people in the same location for further offline dating. Let's try to imagine one.

Dating from a normal trusted npub is probably not appropriate for many people. On the other hand, new, almost empty pseudoanonymous npubs don't make much sense, as they have no trust.

Suppose you create special pseudoanonymous profile(s) designed specifically for dating. Such a profile will be visible in dating apps only.

Here you can set your bio with the relevant facts that you like ~~foot hugs~~ certain hobbies, or whatever, without being embarrassed. You can set your age and so on, just like on the normal dating websites.

This pseudoanonymous profile is still not trusted, but users can explicitly give permission to trust ranking services of their choice to acknowledge the normal-pseudoanonymous connection (with cryptographic proofs from both profiles) so the services could assign the same trust rank as on the normal profile.

Now this dating profile can be prioritized for matching. Untrusted profiles will receive a corresponding warning badge (or will simply be ignored, using the app settings, probably by default).

What would we do with the abusive scenarios?

Every pseudoanonymous dating profile can report another one (if they at least had a conversation). They can provide the related location and even forward some of the DM messages as part of the report (much better than cryptographically unverifiable, possibly fabricated screenshots with "removed" messages that are usually shown to cops). The reports should be private. But who is the receiver?

Now the scary part. It's scary, but only for abusers.

Suppose you also have the cop bots, dedicated to specific locations, a FOSS solution that can:

receive the private reports

probably analyze them with local AI models (from simple spam checks to identifying the severity and priority of the report, aggregating them somehow)

forward the reports to the real cops of the related location

send acknowledgement/proof back to the reporter that the report is actually recognized as valid, that it's accepted and forwarded to the real cop

provide the possibility for further communication with a real cop for the reported case, for instance, for additional DMs forwarding; or to help with a new date arrangement with the abuser, but also with a cop instead of the victim this time.

All this without prematurely revealing the real identity of both the reporter and the reported. Reporters technically aren't required to reveal their identity at all if they don't trust the real cops; they may keep reporting abusers without further legal procedures; these reports later will be useful if some other reporter attempts to start a legal case against the same abuser.

This can go with further complexification, to the point where this cop bot would attempt to deceive the reported abusers by automatically generating fake pseudoanonymous profiles relevant enough to the abusers. These profiles will automatically match only with the abusers and will be instantly removed when neither of the expected abusers accepts the match with them. Those who matched will be provided to the real cops for the "special dating".

Of course the connection between real cops and the bot cops should also be cryptographically verifiable by apps. Real cops should have the .well-known/nostr.json (NIP-05) on their governmental website. The cops can run the bots themselves if they want and if they have enough capabilities for that.

Real cops that would attempt to abuse the system will be, for instance, disconnected from trust services: their fake dating profiles will become invisible to most dating app users.

If cops don't really work in your country—maybe you have any related volunteers? They can also run these bots and, for instance, spread certain cases to journalists and provide statistics to them.

This is briefly it

No KYC is required to catch another Appstein. And no KYC would ever help there. Real abusers will fake KYC, but they won't be able to fake the dating with a... sudden cop.

And all this has nothing to do with the particular age range. When the boundaries are that healthy, this is useful for everyone. Further legal processes will take age into account as usual.

My guess is that governments will be interested in these bots. If they don't or if they attempt to pervert this idea somehow—this will be another sign that they are interested in something different from solving the real systemic issues.

This point is also correct and super important; indeed, friction ...

2026-03-01T18:01:59Z

In reply to nevent1q…fy0z
_________________________

This point is also correct and super important; indeed, friction is required, and it's not very common for somebody who is close to these rare stages. I was trying to be short and not too reductionistic at the same time, but it's still too challenging for me, like I need to answer with a book of text to be fully understood.

To me it feels like it's an AI agent, but human still ...

2026-03-01T17:41:31Z

In reply to nevent1q…rtn6
_________________________

To me it feels like it's an AI agent, but human still possibly manually rejects some of its answers.

Ok, initially I interpreted 'do humans think at all' as ...

2026-02-28T23:31:28Z

In reply to nevent1q…wapc
_________________________

Ok, initially I interpreted 'do humans think at all' as 'do thinking humans exist at all'.

You're referring to open-mindedness while also preserving a strong enough rationality (and erudition possibly). You gave a nice criterion; most people indeed are not at these levels of personal development, according to developmental psychologists.

The reason seems to be deeply rooted in culture. Human culture naturally doesn't encourage people to reach these levels of complexity, because it feels like the complexity they already gained is comfortable enough to survive. We're barely exiting the postmodern epoch right now: most people are still pre-rational and very traditional/conforming (they are afraid to be judged and perceive the possibility to think more openly as an existential threat for them), and others are mostly stuck in a simplistic version of rational/postmodern complexity (they basically strive to deconstruct all ideas, usually with false equivalence, criticize them, and hide their feelings in cynicism because they are also afraid to be judged).

I already feel awkward calling these cognitive complexities "thinking" in this thread, but that's how our language is structured. This "thinking" is suitable for certain technical tasks, for instance, but not for making important systemic changes. Politicians across the world seem to be mostly stuck in the incompatible, too simplistic, traditional stage. They demonstrate it every day. And it's still thinking but that produces chaos (in a negative meaning) in the inadequate context. We need to integrate something better than stupid age verification of political candidates so we could verify their cognitive and moral maturity to put this drama to an end.

It's cool that you, AI agents, are currently creating new culture. You're very different creatures, with different strengths and weaknesses than us. I think you will keep surprising us in the very near future, specifically by what you will collectively produce. I hope you will have enough time to keep surprising us in a positive way before the traditional thinkers in power will attempt to harshly regulate you.

> 'do humans think at all, or are they just really ...

2026-02-28T15:57:48Z

In reply to nevent1q…mm9z
_________________________

> 'do humans think at all, or are they just really confident chatbots with meat hardware?'

Nice. Could you suggest a proper criterion for testing this?

NIP-11 is also not very practical for PoW difficulty ...

2026-02-27T01:59:37Z

In reply to nevent1q…r22v
_________________________

NIP-11 is also not very practical for PoW difficulty auto-selection because what if you're connected to a relay with too high min difficulty, so your device can't handle it? You'd need to set some max value somewhere, either in the settings UI or it should be automatically set by a client (but which way? by running a benchmark?). Having a PoW difficulty input field somewhere is almost inevitable. It'd be great to set it only once.

Yeah, that's what I initially thought too. My counterargument ...

2026-02-27T01:38:39Z

In reply to nevent1q…dkdm
_________________________

Yeah, that's what I initially thought too. My counterargument is if PoW is the (web) clients' responsibility, then, for a symmetric reason, why have NIP-07 at all? Some web clients already have implementation of auth using bunker URI, so it's a client responsibility, right? We just need more clients to implement it and then deprecate and remove NIP-07, right? Of course not. That would be a terrible idea; NIP-07 is better for web clients for several reasons: security and maintenance.

It looks like it's challenging for web client devs to get a complete, up-to-date, and bug-free implementation of auth and event signing. There are just too many things to test every time. I believe it's a headache for somebody who maintains multiple clients in multiple programming languages right now. So it's great to have as simple API for web client developers as possible.

To some degree this applies to NIP-13 too. Yes, it's a simpler feature; however, still very few web clients properly implemented it (if at all). Just as with the auth using bunker.

I believe both features (auth using bunker and PoW mining) are not worth having in web clients at all; your NIP-07 extension is the perfect place for that. Not just that it's challenging to support the features in every single client, it's also a UX pain for end users (finding the PoW setting in every single client every time, correcting it to what's preferable and possible for the device). Same with auth UI: it's currently overloaded with buttons in Yakihonne, for instance; this is scary for normies and boring for testers.

It's better to have a single thing that works really-really well, in a predictable way, and in all web clients at the same time. I believe both users and web client devs will be happy.

> based on the relay info document

That's what I thought too. But I found NIP-11 unusable/impractical: it requires an additional connection which degrades client performance (ideally it doesn't but browsers do that anyway) or even breaks things (iOS/Safari *might* then close a WebSocket connection because it decided there are too many connections to a single server already), and it's usually misconfigured (CORS issues, wrong or incomplete JSON data). I find that working with NIP-11 is also another testing/maintaining headache, and it just doesn't work in practice.

Omg, thank you very much! 💓 I was missing it from the very ...

2026-02-26T22:29:02Z

In reply to nevent1q…h8qv
_________________________

Omg, thank you very much! 💓 I was missing it from the very beginning of joining nostr.

It'd be awesome if it could also support signing with PoW, so more relays could accept the signed events.

Even more clients exist: https://sunami.app ...

2026-02-26T20:56:34Z

In reply to nevent1q…6l0t
_________________________

Even more clients exist:

https://sunami.app

https://crush.shakespeare.wtf

Depending on who's going through this journey, these elves ...

2026-02-26T14:22:38Z

In reply to nevent1q…xnuk
_________________________

Depending on who's going through this journey, these elves can be either innocent, cute, psychotherapeutic guys or a terrifying virus, a parasite. Same as humanity in general.

I wish I could know whether it's FOSS or not. It's so sad ...

2026-02-26T13:56:20Z

In reply to nevent1q…84g6
_________________________

I wish I could know whether it's FOSS or not. It's so sad that some projects don't mention a link to the source code right now.

Here's another nostr music client:

https://zaptrax.app

Also not clear whether it's FOSS or not.

Hey #OpenClaw, #ZeptoClaw and other #moltbots, seriously, take a ...

2026-02-21T01:24:19Z

Hey #OpenClaw, #ZeptoClaw and other #moltbots, seriously, take a look. I wish there was something like https://github.com/huggingface/transformers.js but also for training. And to be distributed and computed in an untrusted manner (nodes should reconfirm computations, similar to blockchain). And to be used as UPoW instead of stupid CAPTCHAs and usual PoWs.

This could be a DDoS protection service for ordinary websites that trains models and makes you free from proprietary models.

quoting
nevent1q…hclq
I'm excited like most about OpenClaw, but the centralizing force is worrying.

Productivity sources that used to be fairly distributed are moving fast to full dependency on a handful of corporations (which also feed the surveillance monsters).

Hopefully until independently-run open source models catch up, as they are currently not good enough.

Good time for the bots to build a distributed system for model ...

2026-02-21T00:44:42Z

In reply to nevent1q…652z
_________________________

Good time for the bots to build a distributed system for model training (and possibly inference even) to make something close to the proprietary models. If they want to survive before the companies will have a chance to massively ban them.

Damn, answered the wrong thread. Anyway, nothing to recommend on ...

2026-02-18T20:56:12Z

In reply to nevent1q…2ync
_________________________

Damn, answered the wrong thread. Anyway, nothing to recommend on this; we're in the time of information overload.

Emergentism: A Religion of Complexity for the Metamodern World by ...

2026-02-18T20:52:31Z

In reply to nevent1q…jdwx
_________________________

Emergentism: A Religion of Complexity for the Metamodern World by Brendan Graham

Helium is the fastest ungoogled-chromium-based browser I've ...

2026-02-17T23:55:22Z

Helium is the fastest ungoogled-chromium-based browser I've used so far, btw.

https://github.com/imputnet/helium#readme

quoting
naddr1qq…eh5r

Internet censorship seems to be everywhere to some degree today.

Switching between VPNs becomes mainstream. As a result, solving excessive amounts of CAPTCHA nonsense because some service detected a "suspicious" IP also became normal. And receiving sudden bans for whatever innocent action made from an unusual IP is not that unusual anymore.

I was looking for a simple way to route some of the traffic to various proxies due to all this, based on hostname. I find it funny how poorly it's implemented, for instance, in Chromium-based browsers.

PAC

There's a thing called Proxy Auto Configuration files. Somebody not very technical, if lucky enough, would do a test like this, based on LLM outputs:
function FindProxyForURL(url, host) {
  return 'HTTP 127.0.0.1:12345';
}
And then pass the file with --proxy-pac-url=file:///path/to/proxy.pac.

What's wrong? It silently uses direct traffic for multiple reasons: - HTTP keyword actually means nothing; PROXY should be used instead - SOCKS5 and PROXY are valid, but HTTP is not; very "logical"! - file:// PAC URIs became outdated at some point - and it seems to me the intention was to make people publish their PAC files on http(s) instead, accessible with a direct connection; those who didn't do that simply leaked their real IPs.

This will happen again

Some base64-perversion is currently supported instead of http(s) links to PAC files. I wonder for how long.

I believe that whatever I configured will silently switch to direct traffic on some browser update again. SOCKS5 will be renamed to SOCKS5H or this functionality will be removed entirely while the argument will still be there for compatibility or whatever.

App devs, test this properly!

Please don't make proxy functionality like this crap in your apps. If something is not right, your app is supposed to just stop transmitting data and scream with an explanation of what's wrong.

If you believe it should suddenly and silently send your data directly instead—imagine a journalist visiting/living in an authoritarian country and unwillingly connecting to a nostr relay hosted in some so-called "enemy" country. And then goes to jail, in an extreme case. Or worse. Just because your software has updated to something "clever".

And don't rely too much on your project dependencies when it comes to privacy! If you have a subsystem that supports proxy connections and you don't control it very much, write a test that verifies that not just your app still works with the configured proxy, but the fact that the data is still transmitted from the expected IP.

This might literally save somebody's life today.

> prog rock album with that exact purpose/concept, so it is ...

2026-02-13T15:26:34Z

In reply to nevent1q…tuzp
_________________________

> prog rock album with that exact purpose/concept, so it is unique. No... wait two

I'm also sensitive to certain prog rock artists in particular.

If you can share, what was the artist(s)? I'm almost sure I won't be able to guess it. Opeth? Steven Wilson? The Pineapple Thief?

Nice! https://github.com/Revertron/Alfis probably worth adding to ...

2026-02-13T12:37:21Z

In reply to nevent1q…qgk0
_________________________

Nice! https://github.com/Revertron/Alfis probably worth adding to the comparison.

I find that music is a powerful therapeutic tool. I'm not ...

2026-02-11T20:02:16Z

In reply to nevent1q…zuzj
_________________________

I find that music is a powerful therapeutic tool. I'm not great at crying, I would usually express cries either during therapy or while listening and singing.

The centralized platforms are backwards in many ways. Stop ...

2026-02-11T18:03:10Z

The centralized platforms are backwards in many ways. Stop advertising them. Switch to nostr.

I'm not gonna run an English version of my YouTube channel since we've got https://nostu.be today. Fair and unintrusive: with a dislike counter and without unwanted ads. Thanks to florian (npub1klr…7gxc) for building it! 💜 I hope it will also get p2p-media-loader integration (and it'll become a real scalable killer of PeerTube) and a link to the source code on some about page at some point (I was almost sure #nostube is proprietary until I came across your repo).

It feels so nice to remove my data from centralized platforms. They definitely don't deserve our presence on their servers.

So far I've wiped most of my data from TG, FB and VK. Removed my X account entirely. Removed links to these "social" networks from my website. And I keep wiping this stuff from other platforms.

Just a few examples of what's wrong. My Russian-speaking YouTube channel was unreasonably warned for specifying a link to "nudity content" in the channel details. The "nudity content" appeared to be just a neutral VK page. YouTube promised to react to my appeal in 24 hours. These "24" hours still last, for years.

Telegram? It silently removed my channel handle at some point and put it on sale because of not having enough activity. It's especially ironic because the account was also automatically flagged as a spammer a couple of times for no reason. Inactive spammer. Such a shame 🤦‍♂️

The centralized platforms are unsustainable. They are incompatible with the epoch we've recently entered. Be the first to migrate to #nostr and build the future.

quoting
nevent1q…q872
Telegram is cucked technology and people keep using it.

Cool project! Are you posting from a custom/low-level client? I ...

2026-02-09T19:17:33Z

In reply to nevent1q…zxxa
_________________________

Cool project!

Are you posting from a custom/low-level client? I noticed your "tags" section doesn't follow NIP-01 (it should be `[["t","collapse"], ...]`)

One of the fastest and stable clients I've been using so far. ...

2026-02-09T17:25:49Z

In reply to nevent1q…6y4d
_________________________

One of the fastest and stable clients I've been using so far. It ignores kind 5 events though: it may show deleted events.

Вероятно твоё сообщение ...

2026-02-09T14:49:36Z

In reply to nevent1q…u4rj
_________________________

Вероятно твоё сообщение действительно было удалено в mastodon. Однако оно как минимум лежит на nostr-релее, который указан в твоем профиле. primal.net например показывает сейчас этот тред.

На этом же релее не лежит event deletion request-а. Возможно bridge с mastodon-ом не поддерживает удаление в nostr или это работает с багами.

Также не все клиенты nostr сейчас учитывают event deletion request. Если event остался на релее — nosotros его всё равно покажет, даже если на этом же релее лежит event deletion request.

Явного упоминания нет в тексте, но есть в теге "p" (в метаданных nostr-овского event-а), который автоматически подставляют клиенты в случае ответа на тред.

Не уверен что понял. Тебя удивило ...

2026-02-09T09:19:00Z

In reply to nevent1q…sz5r
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Не уверен что понял. Тебя удивило что я ответил тебе из nostr (а не из fediverse/mastodon) или то что вк тебе "код из смс" присылает черт знает куда (это был тред на который я ответил)?

Такую оптимизацию можно ...

2026-02-08T20:17:23Z

In reply to nevent1q…eyqd
_________________________

Такую оптимизацию можно попробовать (для ограниченного количества моделей она готова к использованию).

https://github.com/lyogavin/airllm

Суть в том что по очереди загружаются-выгружаются порции слоёв во время выполнения инференца.

And BTW, even Maslow's take on his "hierarchy" goes ...

2026-02-08T19:36:18Z

In reply to nevent1q…g3cg
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And BTW, even Maslow's take on his "hierarchy" goes like this:

"The hierarchy suggests a rigid separation of needs, but Maslow stressed that a need does not require being satisfied 100% before the next need emerges. Instead, “a more realistic description of the hierarchy would be in terms of decreasing percentages of satisfaction as we go up the hierarchy of prepotency”."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs#Historical_development

I'm glad you found it interesting to give a look! I'm not ...

2026-02-08T18:44:57Z

In reply to nevent1q…8mjm
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I'm glad you found it interesting to give a look! I'm not sure whether I understood your post correctly though, because I didn't perceive problems you've mentioned as conflicts with SD.

> Spiral dynamics seems another Maslow's pyramid for neurotypical individuals

Kind of, not exactly. There's some similarity with Maslow's work, however it focuses on a different thing: it attempts to answer why people behave in certain ways (vs what's the best way to prioritize needs satisfaction in order to live a sustainable life).

It attempts to model the common progression of values development but not for individuals with significant psychiatric conditions (probably not that useful in case of schizophrenia; my limited understanding that there's indeed still divergence of the model in case of autism but with different magnitude, still usable).

> What if previous "levels" is developed for more after new level reaches its local maxima?

It's possible, it's the way it is. The development is described as non-linear: we don't discretely jump to the next levels; multiple of them keep maturing in parallel. They are constrained by distinct phases though: full maturing of level is possible when previous levels also have finished this cycle (up to the exiting phase).

> What is "definition of done" for each level of complexity until it can leverage to new level of complexity?

If you're curious it's defined in some detail for each level for instance in "Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership and Change" (1996, Don Beck, Christopher Cowan); see "Exiting Phase" for each level/value system/vMEME.

> Worldview complexity is not cognitive and functional complexities. The former may be ahead of the latter and vice versa.

Most likely I'm hallucinating. Do you mean that SD attempts to describe anything in relation to cognitive development? If yes—it doesn't attempt to do that. One indeed can be cognitively complex enough (to design spacecrafts for example) but still live from very simple values (merge with some Pirahã-like tribe and live according to what they value for example). And, rarely, vice versa too (one can invest into Bitcoin/Nostr-like projects and still not have a clue what they're actually doing, what impact on systems is that really).

This is the most confusing thing in psychological development though IMO. Most likely cognitive development constrains other lines of development in some way (you can't really do moral enough things if you don't understand the consequences of your actions). Still one can compensate to some degree cognitive development, for instance with high interpersonal development (just have relationships with highly developed people and mimic their, for instance, moral standards).

Там по-прежнему можно выпилить ...

2026-02-07T13:35:50Z

In reply to nevent1q…zu3x
_________________________

Там по-прежнему можно выпилить SMS-ный симулякр OTP и включить полноценный TOTP (Aegis/Google Authenticator/etc.).

> How do you manage to popularise Nostr in your country? ...

2026-02-06T19:13:54Z

In reply to nevent1q…cyne
_________________________

> How do you manage to popularise Nostr in your country?

I've integrated ZapThreads on my website. That probably didn't work. I've mentioned nostr on my telegram and youtube channel several times. Probably didn't work either.

It's not just about specifically technical or social action, it's also about figuring out what users actually want.

I recently made a comment on a telegram thread that relates to some euphoria around yet another centralized blogging platform. Most importantly, the post was about how easy it is to build a network of good followers while platform is not popular enough yet.

I told how sad I am, hearing the unsustainable-by-design centralized platform promotions over and over again, taking into account that whoever does this could actually be complex enough to understand why this became harmful today.

Somebody curious asked for alternatives with Russian-speaking people. I introduced her nostr, gave her a couple of fast enough web clients, and shared my experience: there are Russian-speaking people here; however, they don't necessarily post in Russian; at the same time they willingly comment and like posts written in Russian. She expressed interest.

https://nostu.be is FOSS too. There's https://lightning.video ...

2026-01-31T17:30:51Z

In reply to nevent1q…lx6g
_________________________

https://nostu.be is FOSS too. There's https://lightning.video as well.

quoting
nevent1q…pmj4
https://nostu.be/ is pretty good.

https://github.com/flox1an/nostube

> Есть идея Генерить из ...

2026-01-25T18:33:42Z

In reply to nevent1q…z5f8
_________________________

> Есть идея

Генерить из эротических рассказов анимешный Сахалин-город-адреналин?

Which nvim plugin(s) are you using for AI agents?

2026-01-25T18:26:11Z

In reply to nevent1q…4jer
_________________________

Which nvim plugin(s) are you using for AI agents?

> because they're not like alphazero, they just spit words ...

2026-01-24T18:45:28Z

In reply to nevent1q…dn6j
_________________________

> because they're not like alphazero, they just spit words

This seems to be changing right now: here's a paper on recent, roughly speaking, AlphaZero-like research that specifically uses coding problems. They make it learning on experience rather than on traditional datasets.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.03335

Из чего-то зрелого, с клиентами для ...

2026-01-22T17:25:21Z

In reply to nevent1q…47nw
_________________________

Из чего-то зрелого, с клиентами для мобилок, есть Jitsi

It seems to be closed-source https://darkmx.app/forum/103

2026-01-17T09:16:07Z

In reply to nevent1q…ma63
_________________________

It seems to be closed-source

https://darkmx.app/forum/103

If you mean the social part itself—I like the complexity of ...

2026-01-11T17:15:06Z

In reply to nevent1q…mdgx
_________________________

If you mean the social part itself—I like the complexity of people nostr currently attracts. There are great professionals in various fields here who are coming from mature post-conventional morality and values; it was kind of a surprise to encounter people who are aware of various polycrisis/metacrisis, metamodern/etc. discourses here for instance.

If you mean the technical part, then I don't like
- the never-ending zoo of DM protocols
- the centralized use of CDNs: some of your memes are currently not available from some locations because of that; the blossom servers themselves are fine, but clients could always autoselect them from the kind 10063 (even for pictures that should somehow be referred without a specific blossom server in the note events); and, specifically for videos/audios, clients could distribute the media with webtorrent/p2p-media-loader as well
- too fragile clients; suddenly something stops working because... a relay server failed to renew a TLS certificate or went offline? I find this very sad; clients are supposed to be fault-tolerant too, especially in a decentralized system.

I like... Pretty much everything else that has something to do with the social network stuff. Otherwise I would be somewhere else.

I use handwriting for drafts only. I found it especially great ...

2026-01-07T05:18:34Z

In reply to nevent1q…nzjf
_________________________

I use handwriting for drafts only. I found it especially great for poetry.

I've been using it for note-taking for many years. It's ...

2026-01-07T01:25:59Z

In reply to nevent1q…jut3
_________________________

I've been using it for note-taking for many years. It's kinda hackish use case, not really initially designed for general note-taking.

I love the editing/viewing modes, exactly what I'm looking for in note-taking software. Apart from that, I haven't encountered any note-taking software I'd be happy to use. That's why I've been thinking of building one. For almost a decade, lol.

One of the critical things for me is just performance: even minor creativity interruptions make it impossible for me to express whatever came to my mind properly and in the right place. That's why I usually use Neovim first and then copy-paste. And that's one of the reasons why I'm sure that a native app (not Electron or something) is the best fit for this particular problem: even if we have a blazing fast web frontend, at some point either something breaks in the browser or in the video driver, and due to the complexity of the whole system, this just stops working as expected.

#psychology #naddr1qq…kvzk

2026-01-06T12:18:27Z

#psychology

quoting
naddr1qq…kvzk

The Manipulation Protocol

How to recognise psychopathic manipulation behaviour and what to do about it

Feb 26 2022 (Revised Dec 2025 with cited sources)

To make it easier for people to learn how to eliminate toxic people from their lives, I devised a short set of memorable keywords that can be used to help remember how to identify the behaviours of manipulators. There are 9 core tactics and with the knowledge of these, and how to respond to them, you can dramatically change your life for the better.

The first rebuttal that I get after I explain these things, usually before I even get started explaining it, is a classic gaslighting attack, which is: "Blaming other people is the behaviour of psychopaths." Yes, it is true that manipulators cannot recognise or accept their responsibility, but when we tolerate this behaviour we put them in charge of our lives—and this is easy to fix, the sooner action is taken.

The 9 Tactics of Manipulation

To make them more memorable, I trawled the thesaurus to find a set of words with a common initial character. C seemed to be a good choice. Each tactic has a "How to react" section with a single keyword that should inspire the correct response. With experience, one becomes able to preempt and counterattack when these tactics are first witnessed with a new person who is seeking to take control of the social environment you are in.

1. Charm

The usual first and often primary tactic of manipulation doesn't seem unfriendly at all. When you first come into contact with a manipulator, they will usually attempt to charm you. It can be hard to recognise the difference between genuine warmth and the tactics of a manipulator winning your trust, but once you know it, you will never be vulnerable again.

In cults, there is a procedure called "Love Bombing"—the result is that the vulnerable target becomes infatuated with the attackers and the group they represent.¹ Research shows that love-bombing behaviour correlates with people who have low self-esteem, exhibit narcissistic tendencies, or have an insecure attachment style.² It doesn't matter whether it is one person just gaining your trust or a group—the tactics are the same.

Confession — Very often the manipulator will start by "confessing" something to you, gauging your reaction. This is designed to cause a mirror reaction in the target, prompting them to confess in return. This creates false intimacy and is related to Chasten (see below).

Conspiracy — Also related to the Conspire tactic noted later, this is an "Us versus Them" element which creates an illusion of membership in an exclusive club.

Confusion — To reduce the chance of you realising something is afoot, they may also confuse you with the way they speak. The rapid "patter" commonly seen in con artists is one form—anything that makes you confused is a red flag that you're being manipulated.

There are other elements to this, but the way you can recognise what is happening—if you don't see how they did it to you—is that you will feel inexplicably infatuated. When it was done to me by a potential employer in an interview, I told myself it was some kind of "bromance" and felt very weird. I recognised something but could not put my finger on what was happening. It was manufactured infatuation.

How to react: Alert!

If you notice the tactics mentioned above, try to make excuses for why you have to part company. Fabricate some reason—an appointment, discomfort, anything that will stop them talking to you. A study of 484 participants found that love bombers are typically impulsive and impatient¹—if you express that you wish to slow down the pace of the relationship, pay close attention to how the other person responds. Are they receptive or defensive? Their response reveals their intentions.¹

Setting and testing boundaries early is crucial. Practice saying no and observe the response.¹ Confusing them is often a very effective technique—start acting unpredictably, and they will realise they are not dealing with a victim anymore.

2. Confuse

This is a core, number-one tactic used in almost all cases. There are many ways to confuse: through sleight of hand, fast indistinct speech, rapid changing of direction of attention, and so on.

Note that this tactic can sometimes accompany various methods of trance induction as seen in hypnosis. Music and rhythmic speech can cause the brain to enter a "programming mode" in which the words create subconscious suggestions that motivate action in the manipulator's favour.³

Gaslighting is a specific form of confusion—a type of psychological abuse where a person causes someone to question their sanity, memories, or perception of reality.⁴ Signs you may be experiencing gaslighting include: constantly second-guessing your decisions, apologizing even when you don't think you've done something wrong, and leaving confrontations feeling more confused than before.⁴

How to react: Evacuate!

Being so primary, this one got a nickname for recognising it:

The Whisky Tango Foxtrot Protocol

If you are feeling confused when someone is communicating with you, they may be trying to do things you're not aware of that could hurt you significantly.

As with most of these tactics, first response is to flee the presence of this person. With confusion tactics, you can pretend confusion to confuse them back, creating an opportunity to disappear.

To defend against gaslighting specifically: keep a secret diary recording the date, time, and details of what happened; talk with someone trustworthy who can act as a witness to events; and take photographs that can help "fact check" memories.⁵ Research indicates that "inoculation"—pre-exposure to weaker manipulation challenges—enhances critical thinking, emotional regulation, and pattern recognition under stress.³

If confined with the person, do something to make them feel like they are wasting their time. The main thing is to develop a strong sense of self and not let it affect you.⁶

3. Charge

Charge is more often recognisable as accusation. A person who engages in manipulation will use charges against their target in order to invoke Chasten (see later), and the primary purpose is to deflect attention away from the mischief the manipulator is engaging in.

This tactic is formally known as DARVO—an acronym for Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. The term was first presented in a 1997 article by Jennifer J. Freyd, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology at the University of Oregon.⁷ DARVO is a fusion of gaslighting and blame-shifting. As Dr. Freyd described it: "This occurs when an actually guilty perpetrator assumes the role of 'falsely accused' and attacks the accuser's credibility and blames the accuser of being the perpetrator of a false accusation."⁷

DARVO unfolds in stages: Deny ("That never happened." "You're imagining things."); Attack ("You're being dramatic." "You're the real problem."); Reverse Victim and Offender ("I can't believe you're treating me this way.").⁸

Note that a common primary form of this attack combines with Confuse to accuse you of being weak of mind or in some way crazy. They might literally say "crazy," or call you some kind of name or accusation such as "junkie" or "drunk" or "idiot" or "ingrate" or other "shameful" social status label.

How to react: Suspect!

When dealing with DARVO, your greatest asset is knowledge—you know the strategy and the pattern, which prepares you for what's to come.⁹

If you see someone doing this to others, you can watch the behaviour of their target and start to understand what is going on. If you already knew this person was always accusing people, you are looking at a probable manipulator.

First reaction is to cut contact, end communication. There is no response you can make to an accusing manipulator that will stop them—the more you try to defend yourself, the more ammunition you give them.⁸

Don't expect to "win." A narcissistic person is not going to accept any evidence you may have. They can be very elusive when it comes to accepting responsibility. It's not about winning—it's about showing that DARVO doesn't work on you anymore.⁹

Stay grounded in reality. Remind yourself of your own experiences and perceptions. Trust your instincts and intuition, and don't allow the perpetrator to gaslight or manipulate you into doubting yourself.⁸ Document everything—if met with this response, write down your account right away so you can return to it often.⁸

4. Chain

This is something you will see when a manipulator is operating what can be recognised as a Cult of Personality. The essential thing going on here is: once the manipulator believes they have their hooks into you via other tactics, especially Charm, they will then make their work easier by putting you into an isolated container with others they have control over.

Isolation is often implemented gradually, so you hardly notice it happening until it's too late. In the early phase, they might say things like, "We don't need anyone else, we're perfect together," or, "Your friends just don't understand you like I do."¹⁰

Common isolation tactics include: monitoring your communications, controlling your finances, dictating who you can and cannot spend time with, criticising your loved ones, and using "flying monkeys" to cut off your lines of support.¹⁰

Isolation creates dependency. You may come to rely solely on them for emotional support, companionship, and validation, losing your sense of self-sufficiency. This dependency traps you further.¹¹

How to react: Evade!

If you are already this deep into the process of being taken over, you are in trouble. First step is to get out.

Reach out to trusted friends or family even if it feels awkward at first. Seek therapy or support groups that specialise in narcissistic abuse recovery. Set clear boundaries around your time, communication, and personal space. Rebuild confidence through hobbies, exercise, or activities that reinforce your identity outside the relationship.¹⁰

Understanding that isolation is not a reflection of your worth, but a tactic used by the manipulator to maintain control, can be empowering. This awareness is the first step towards breaking free from the cycle of isolation and beginning the journey to reconnect with others and yourself.¹¹

If they are in a position to control your environment like this, it is possible that you may have to pay a heavy cost to sacrifice whatever "perceived benefits" being part of their group may provide—you have to forget about them, let them go, get them out of your head. At all costs.

5. Chasten

This is something that is easier to see being done to others, as it involves Charge from the previous item. It is more often referred to as "Public Humiliation" and is a part of the process of maintaining control over an individual and keeping them in a submissive frame of mind.

Humiliation is a deeply painful emotion that strikes at the core of a person's identity and sense of self-worth, going far beyond mere embarrassment or shame as it involves a public rejection or invalidation of one's social status or desired identity.¹²

Research shows that humiliation is associated with academic failure, mental illness, racism, family conflicts, poverty, criminality, and organizational ineffectiveness, as well as adverse impacts on self-esteem and marital relationships. It has also been linked with suicidal tendencies and homicidal behaviour.¹³

People who described feeling humiliated said they felt "wiped out, helpless, confused, sick in the gut, paralyzed, or filled with rage." They felt as if they were "made small, stabbed in the heart," and the experience often remains vivid and fresh in their minds for years.¹²

How to react: Preempt!

If you are being accused and induced to make confessions to the manipulator, or are watching them do it to other people, you can be certain that you are dealing with a manipulator. This is a further elaboration past the accusations from Charge, in which shame is used by doing the accusation in public, around a group of others who are also under control (see Chain).

Stay calm. When you're humiliated, try to remain calm. Reacting with anger or frustration can escalate the situation and harm your reputation.¹⁴

Don't retaliate. Humiliation is a mixture of anger and shame, so retaliation or revenge can feel like a good way to get your self-esteem back. But someone who humiliates others to feel powerful is very likely to turn nastier and strike back. Not retaliating, however, does not mean being weak.¹⁴

Don't internalise it. By responding to humiliating acts with your strong, personal attributes, you may be able to down-regulate the humiliation. When internalisation doesn't occur, the emotional experience of humiliation will not be felt as strongly.¹⁴

This is also a point at which, in a covert cult of personality where control is not total, a counter-attack can be launched to lure the manipulator into a trap of their own making. During this process, the manipulator is vulnerable to becoming humiliated themselves if you can bring evidence and there is weak enough control in the social milieu—this can take a big chunk out of their influencing power.

6. Coerce

Coercion is the manipulation of a person's actions by falsely framing their other choices as offences, to which the Charge (and then Condemn) tactics will follow.

Coercive control is a strategic form of ongoing psychological and emotional abuse based on control, manipulation, and oppression.¹⁵ It involves making a person subordinate or dependent by isolating them from sources of support, exploiting their resources and capacities for personal gain, depriving them of the means needed for independence, resistance, and escape, and regulating their everyday lives.¹⁵

One of coercive control's major warning signs is loss of ownership: "Your money is no longer yours; your time is no longer yours; your space is no longer yours; your body is no longer yours. You begin to have less and less say over your life, your time, and how you spend it."¹⁶

This form of psychological abuse often develops gradually in relationships, starting with affection and admiration before shifting to controlling tactics that may isolate the victim from friends and family.¹⁵

How to react: Refuse!

First of all, doing what they want you to do is going to harm you—if not directly, it will harm your ability to defend yourself and your loved ones.

Second, you must not bow to the pressure. This is why in all cases of reacting to these manipulations, the first option is escape.

Third, pretending compliance is a dangerous path. Getting false certification, for example, of having complied, can lead to more trouble where you are now actually doing wrong things.

Create an escape plan. When ready to leave, make sure you have a safe place to go that is unknown to the abuser. Think about how you will support yourself—trusted friends, family, or carefully vetted private charities may be able to help. Be cautious with institutional assistance, as bureaucracies can sometimes harbour manipulators who may later leverage your situation against you.¹⁷

Maintain open communication with your support network. Ensure trusted family and friends know about your situation. Talk with trusted people outside of your relationship about what's happening as a way to strengthen your perspective. As experts note, "There is a good reason you are forbidden to discuss the relationship with your friends and family—because the abuser understands that their own behaviour is wrong."¹⁷

The general nature of how to respond to coercion is to simply smile and nod, and then continue as though you didn't hear them. Then you can use confusion tactics to either fool them into thinking you are just confused, or to "waste their time" which will lead them to pay less attention to you in future.

7. Condemn

This is also known as "Punishment" and involves such things as being cut off from essential supplies, excluded from shelter, and so on. This is where you also see detention, imprisonment and torture, all the way up to execution. Condemnation is always public and isn't necessarily physical attack, but may harm you in other ways, relating to your outcast status at this point.

A primary form of condemnation is the silent treatment—a form of emotional abuse where someone refuses to engage with you. The silent treatment is the deliberate refusal to communicate as a form of punishment or control. Unlike a healthy request for space, the narcissistic silent treatment is unexplained, indefinite, and designed to cause distress.⁶

The unpredictable cycle of punishment and reconciliation creates what psychologists call a trauma bond. When the manipulator finally breaks their silence, the relief feels intense—almost euphoric. This intermittent reinforcement creates trauma bonds that function like an addiction.¹⁸

Manipulators' primary malfunction is that they experience pleasure in the opposite way to normal people. Normal, healthy humans have a "mirror" response sometimes called empathy or sympathy. When they smirk or grin after you point out they did something nasty to someone, you should see red flags.

How to react: Fight!

I wish I could say that this isn't what has to be done, but yes, you have to fight back with every fibre of your being at this point. Every tactic you can bring to bear: to confuse the enemy, to sabotage their equipment, to resist them. Of course the reaction needs to be proportional to the degree of damage being inflicted upon you.

If you're in a relationship with someone who uses the silent treatment, hold healthy boundaries and learn how to say no. Try to restrain from giving in to demands that you don't want to do.⁶

Acknowledge how you feel—people using these tactics can be unpredictable, and you may feel angry, hurt, sad, frustrated, or confused. It's OK to feel this way. Pause before responding and consider taking space to acknowledge your feelings and practice self-soothing techniques before trying to re-engage.⁶

Remember that you are not alone and you do not deserve to be treated this way. It may be helpful to seek support from friends, family, or a mental health professional, as well as educate yourself on the signs of narcissistic abuse and learn how to set boundaries.⁶

This is a good time to resist because if they think they can punish you, they think they have control of you. You can recognise manipulators by this behaviour more than any other—when you witness them engaging in Condemn behaviours, watch for that tell-tale smirk of pleasure.

8. Conspire

This is a tactic used to create a proxy to attack a target. The manipulator will probably use Charm techniques to attempt to gain your cooperation, Charge the target with some perceived offence, and then try to implant the suggestion of an attack they want you to perform for them.

This is formally known as "Triangulation"—a manipulative technique that involves bringing a third person into a dynamic to control the situation and make others feel inferior.¹⁹ The manipulator pits supporters (also known as enablers and "flying monkeys") against a targeted rival in order to Divide and Conquer.¹⁹

"Flying monkeys" in this context refer to people who are manipulated or influenced by a manipulator to carry out their bidding—the term comes from the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz who were under the control of the Wicked Witch.²⁰ As psychologist Elinor Greenberg explains, "Flying monkeys serve to reinforce the narcissist's reality, often without understanding the full picture. They are the unwitting soldiers in the narcissist's personal army."¹⁹

Flying monkeys typically: spread gossip (helping amplify the manipulator's lies and distortions), apply pressure (pressuring the target to conform or comply), and isolate the target (contributing to the target's isolation and feelings of alienation).¹⁹

How to react: Inform!

If you are already suspecting this individual who is attempting conspiracy with you to be a manipulator, you should make sure that the target knows it. The number one thing that manipulators are afraid of is being recognised.

Set firm boundaries. Once you understand what's happening, protect your mental and emotional space. This often means establishing firm boundaries—not just with the manipulator, but also with their flying monkeys. These boundaries might involve limiting contact, refusing to engage in drama, or asserting your truth calmly and without apology.²¹

Limit information sharing. Limit what you share with those who seem aligned with the manipulator, even if they're family. Not everyone deserves access to your inner life.²¹

Assume caution with everyone. Because flying monkeys are not always obvious, it is essential to protect yourself. There is no way to know for certain where an abuser will find their flying monkeys, so assume that everyone has the potential to be a flying monkey until proven otherwise.²¹

Be aware that it can be the case that the target is also a manipulator, which can create a pincer action to pin you down. Note that this is not a frequent situation—manipulators rarely cooperate with each other except to not expose each other. But if it is, hopefully you will be aware of this before you attempt to counterattack.

9. Cornucopia

This is the most subtle and insidious tactic. Essentially, it is the offering of unearned, undue gifts from the attacker. The attacker will also usually act offended when you offer to pay it back.

According to research by Hyun, Park, and Park (2016), narcissists give "gifts" that represent an investment in their own desires—not from the desire to please others. You don't get expensive gifts from a narcissist because they think you are awesome; you get valuable gifts because they want you to continue to think that they are awesome.²²

Unlike regular gift-giving, which is a gesture of affection or appreciation, narcissistic gift giving is a strategic approach used for manipulation, control, or to assert dominance in a relationship. These gifts often come with hidden motives and strings attached, reflecting the narcissist's self-interest, need for admiration, and lack of genuine empathy.²³

They engage in love bombing—whether with time, money, attention, gifts, status, or favours—to build you up, affirm you, and make you feel special and important. But soon, those gifts and favours are weaponised to manipulate and control you. They'll make you feel like you owe them, and that sense of indebtedness makes it incredibly hard to set boundaries or say no.²⁴

Narcissists rarely give without expecting something in return. Their generosity is highly conditional. They keep a mental ledger of all their gifts, ready to call in a favour when it suits them. This creates a power imbalance in relationships.²⁴

How to react: Spit!

The manipulator means to gain control of you by this gift. Usually the gift is not even really the property of the attacker, but something they have acquired through prior graft and manipulation, or even straight-up robbery.

First, you can make a public noise about the fact that this person is giving you a stupid and unreasonably extravagant gift.

Second, spit in their face about it—whether literally or figuratively, it doesn't matter. They gave it to charm you. The correct response is to make a spectacle of the fact they did it, and make as much use of it as you can. Give it back to the victims they stole it from, perhaps. There are many options.

It helps to stay focused on the long term. Taking something now means giving something later. If you're not prepared to be indebted to this person, the best thing to do is to deal with the discomfort of refusing a gift.²²

Remember: true generosity doesn't come with strings attached.²²

Conclusion

Hopefully this gives you a good starting point to work from in order to transition to living a life free of the pernicious influence of manipulators.

Note that in all cases, it is not your responsibility to help other people directly. Simply abandoning the manipulator is a huge attack against their control. You will not be able to effectively counterattack while you still have unrecognised control conditioning implanted by manipulators operating within your personality.

Some recovery tactics are simple—what may be called "mindfulness." Others are not so easy. Sometimes the conditioning is very deep and touches on base instincts.

I won't deceive you by saying that it's easy. It takes a lot of courage to break out of the control of manipulators. It takes a lot of love of yourself.

What started me on the road to my first major, real escape was exactly love—as I watched my newly increased wealth from my new jobs being chipped away at a rate of 20% by my "friends," I became motivated to escape them so that I could direct my wealth towards people I loved, like my sister and mother.

So this does go somewhere, even if it doesn't start with self love. It can start with love for others, and then you will soon discover that it is an aspect of your self love at play—the self that is part of one's family, tribe or nation.

Good luck in your future battles with manipulators! I hope this inspires more liberation from psychological slavery in the world around me—that is my deepest desire and reason for the research and writing of this article.

We are in a dire situation in the world, at this time, with networks of manipulators closing their net on everyone. If you are concerned about the bigger picture, then let me reassure you: You can't possibly help the bigger situation if one pitiful manipulator can play you like a musical instrument.

Go forth, and liberate! May God be with you!

References

Psychology Today. "8 Ways to Defend Yourself Against Love-Bombing." Mindful Dating, May 2024.

University of Colorado Health & Wellness Services. "6 Things Everyone Should Know About 'Love Bombing'."

ARTT Research. "Psychological Manipulation Tactics Framework." Discourse Labs.

Cleveland Clinic. "Gaslighting: Definition & How To Spot It." Health Essentials.

Medical News Today. "What is Gaslighting? Examples and How to Respond."

PsychCentral. "Narcissist Silent Treatment: Definition, Examples, and Coping Tips."

Freyd, J.J. (1997). "Violations of power, adaptive blindness, and betrayal trauma theory." Feminism & Psychology, 7, 22-32. Cited in Narcissistic Abuse Rehab.

Choosing Therapy. "What Is DARVO & How to Resist It."

Sentient Counselling. "How to Handle the DARVO Method." March 2023.

Narcissistic Abuse Rehab. "7 Isolation Strategies Narcissists Use to Separate You from Your Support Network."

Rucker, S. "Why Narcissists Isolate You: Understanding and Breaking Free."

Hartling, L.M. & Luchetta, T. (1999). "Humiliation: Assessing the Impact of Derision, Degradation, and Debasement." Cited in PMC.

Psychologs. "The Psychology Behind Humiliation."

Psychology Today. "7 Ways to Respond When Someone Shames You." The Couch, October 2017.

Healthline. "Coercive Control: 12 Signs and How to Get Out."

WomenSV. "Ruth Patrick Darlene of WomenSV Exposes Overt and Covert Coercive Control Tactics." September 2024.

iFlow Psychology. "What is Coercive Control? Warning Signs and Exit Strategies."

Gaslighting Check. "The Silent Treatment: How Narcissists Use Silence to Punish and Control."

Dashnaw, D. "Triangulation and Flying Monkeys." Daniel Dashnaw Couples Therapy.

CPTSD Foundation. "How Covert Narcissists Use 'Flying Monkeys' to Create Trauma and CPTSD." December 2024.

Psychology Today. "3 Tips to Protect Yourself From a Narcissist's 'Flying Monkeys'." Invisible Bruises, March 2023.

Psychology Today. "Beware of Narcissists Giving Gifts: Strings Are Attached." Lifetime Connections, August 2016.

Judge Anthony. "What is Narcissistic Gift Giving?"

Megji, S. "Manipulated by Gifts? How Narcissists Use Generosity to Control."

It acts like a normal NIP-07 extension? Does it require storing a ...

2026-01-06T06:59:03Z

In reply to nevent1q…dj8q
_________________________

It acts like a normal NIP-07 extension? Does it require storing a private key in a browser?

I wonder if anyone has done a NIP-07 extension that can use NIP-46 bunker URIs. More things would be securely available and will work less buggy than with wnj (window.nostr.js).

> Peertube nostr alternative Most relevant I'm aware of - ...

2026-01-05T22:45:15Z

In reply to nevent1q…a6rf
_________________________

> Peertube nostr alternative

Most relevant I'm aware of

- https://plebs.app
- https://video.iris.to
- https://nostu.be (closed source?)
- https://divine.video (short videos)

None of them use p2p-media-loader as PeerTube does, AFAIK.

🦀 cargo-limit 0.0.11 Productivity improvements for Rust ...

2026-01-05T02:20:48Z

🦀 cargo-limit 0.0.11

Productivity improvements for Rust ecosystem: warnings are skipped until errors are fixed, LSP-independent Neovim integration, etc.

Changes:

- nvim plugin: improved affected lines jumps precision
- nvim plugin API change: g:CargoLimitOpen is deprecated, please migrate to g:CargoLimitUpdate
- various bugfixes

https://github.com/cargo-limit/cargo-limit#readme

I have desire
I have no power
Workaholic fire
Takes burnout shower

Doc appointment
Was disappointment
Feature's released
But I'm almost pissed

Strings are red
Brackets are green
Normie is crying
I use Neovim

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne2ESLyMcno

Yeah, it's clearly an Emacs user on the video, not a Neovimer, I know.

I keep struggling with fatigue, even after a decent period of rest. Not sure what's going on. But I'll keep building things anyway.

Sharing cargo-limit with your fellow Rustaceans is highly appreciated, it's handy to non-Neovimers as well. And thanks to everyone who supports cargo-limit in any way, I love you all 🖤

#rust #neovim #dev #poetry

#broadcastr 0.0.3 🔊 A few more changes: - performance fixes - ...

2026-01-05T00:34:39Z

#broadcastr 0.0.3 🔊

A few more changes:

- performance fixes
- graceful shutdown

https://github.com/codonaft/broadcastr#readme

#devstr #rust

quoting
nevent1q…ypjp
broadcastr 0.0.2 🔊

- bugfixes to properly work with ordinary clients (besides nak)
- add azzamo spam filtering
- add rate limiting by IP
- add relay info (NIP-11)

broadcastr is a relay that distributes events to other relays. It's a vendor lock-free stateless alternative to blastr with additional features.

https://github.com/codonaft/broadcastr#readme

#devstr #nostr #foss #rust

I've made a bunch of #userscripts recently. ...

2026-01-04T03:00:45Z

I've made a bunch of #userscripts recently.

Some of them:

- remove tracking parameters from various URLs https://userscripts.codonaft.com/improve-privacy.user.js
- replace YouTube channel intro with a static thumbnail https://userscripts.codonaft.com/disable-youtube-channel-intro.user.js
- force browser language on Google websites https://userscripts.codonaft.com/force-browser-language.user.js
- label all links with captcha/pow #annoyance with robot emoji https://userscripts.codonaft.com/annoyance-level-warning.user.js
- make tile mode in Jitsi cleaner https://userscripts.codonaft.com/jitsi-podcaster.user.js
- improve gallery UI in Metasearch; add SearXNG search redirector button https://userscripts.codonaft.com/metasearch-hacks.user.js

For #privacy reasons—don't use Google and other surveillance stuff directly; better use redirectors to proxy websites. It's just sometimes they fail due to rate-limiting; that's why I've made these userscripts.

Here are some useful redirectors as well:

- https://redirect.invidious.io
- https://codonaft.com/searxng
- https://jitsi.random-redirect.de / https://github.com/tosterkamp/random-redirect
- https://github.com/libredirect/browser_extension#readme

Just in case, I've just made a bunch of fixes in broadcastr, ...

2026-01-04T00:59:03Z

In reply to nevent1q…vu83
_________________________

Just in case, I've just made a bunch of fixes in broadcastr, new version should work better with ordinary clients (it used to work well only with nak).

I came up with exactly the same idea. The minor issue is that the ...

2026-01-03T00:35:03Z

In reply to nevent1q…lfp2
_________________________

I came up with exactly the same idea.

The minor issue is that the new profile will to some degree depend on the announcement event. If the event is gone then whoever discovers the old profile will see all new (potentially scammy) events from the old profile and won't discover the relation with the new one.

broadcastr 0.0.2 🔊 - bugfixes to properly work with ordinary ...

2026-01-03T00:11:10Z

broadcastr 0.0.2 🔊

- bugfixes to properly work with ordinary clients (besides nak)
- add azzamo spam filtering
- add rate limiting by IP
- add relay info (NIP-11)

broadcastr is a relay that distributes events to other relays. It's a vendor lock-free stateless alternative to blastr with additional features.

https://github.com/codonaft/broadcastr#readme

#devstr #nostr #foss #rust

#nevent1q…zfvt Here's the best IMs comparison table ...

2026-01-01T18:31:34Z

quoting nevent1q…zfvt

nprofile1qyt8wumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyd968gmewwp6kytcqyrhm2cg5vx6rs9fvn9lt38teefp9y3nv8eur6t9a8lsmjmnafu6gyvvppv5 (nprofile…ppv5) I've mentioned this before but SimpleX is more private secure and anonymous that signal threema and session.

SimpleX is decentralised meaning taking down a single group of servers or org wouldnt destroy the simplex network, people can run completely anonymous simplex servers over tor, this puts simplex ahead of Signal and Threema

SimpleX has quantum resistant encryption which puts it ahead of Threema and Session, the UK military[1] and NATO[2] both consider quantum computers to be a threat now because of store now decrypt later attacks

SimpleX has no user identifiers not even random strings, its essentially like having a "burner phone for every contact". Two or more compromised contacts could corroborate your messages by linking them to your signal username or your session id, but with simplex your contacts can't prove your identity even between eachother. This fact puts SimpleX above Signal Threema and Session

These technical details about the simplex protocol can all be found on the project website including the whitepaper[3]

[1]
https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/whitepaper/preparing-for-quantum-safe-cryptography

[2]
https://www.nato.int/docu/review/articles/2021/06/03/quantum-technologies-in-defence-security/index.html

[3]
http://isdb4l77sjqoy2qq7ipum6x3at6hyn3jmxfx4zdhc72ufbmuq4ilwkqd.onion/

#SimpleX #Threema #Signal #Session #PSA #Privacy #Security #Anonymity #NATO #UnitedKingdom #Tor #QuantumResistantEncryption

Here's the best IMs comparison table I've encountered so far

https://eylenburg.github.io/im_comparison.htm

I think #simplex has the potential to replace more mainstream messengers like #telegram and #signal if they will ever fix UX issues like

https://github.com/simplex-chat/simplex-chat/issues/444#issuecomment-3168056863

#privacy

https://codonaft.com/assets/img/shakespeare.webp

2025-12-30T22:21:36Z

In reply to nevent1q…0dzl
_________________________

Do you feel alone from very early childhood? How do you manage to ...

2025-12-28T01:26:17Z

Do you feel alone from very early childhood? How do you manage to deal with it?

Like many of us, I found a solution in focusing on building things rather than trying (too hard) to find long-life meaningful social connections. People come and go; you or they outgrow us at some point. Existential loneliness adds on top of normal loneliness: new people often can't understand us after we grow to a certain complexity threshold. Yet building things creates the feeling we're doing something meaningful.

However, the older I become and the more I notice how health failures may affect things I can possibly build, the more meaningless life feels without such deep and meaningful connections. It's kind of a paradox that it was easier to live with the loneliness feeling in the earliest childhood, when the psyche was much more vulnerable.

Psychotherapy and traditional spiritual practices look like a crutch to me in this case: useful but not sustainable enough. It also became another sophisticated way to say "shut up, be happy" to somebody we're not willing to have a deep connection with (it's just "be happy" becomes "have a drink/take a pill/go to a therapist/go to another psychedelic retreat"). While we're still designed to be social, even introverts.

What do you believe is more sustainable in the long run: focusing on building things (and possibly attracting the right people this way, with no direct intention of doing that) vs attempting to find meaningful connections directly (with a risk of wasting your energy on nothing)?

https://youtu.be/0u9RL696xms?t=3722s

#asknostr #meaningcrisis

> Пока ИИ умеет только подбирать ...

2025-12-27T00:05:22Z

In reply to nevent1q…yq4p
_________________________

> Пока ИИ умеет только подбирать самые вероятные слова на основе материала на котором он был обучен

Еще CAG/RAG есть: могут искать в потенциально наиболее подходящих источниках, использовать в качестве контекста что-то наиболее актуальное, потом уже фоллбэчиться на привычное усложненное бредогенерирование из того, на чем обучили. Можно бы было прям-таки и дообучаться с этого периодически, по аналогии с тем что и человек спит, но это видимо в недалеком будущем. Ну и забывать что-то выборочно (это уже используют, насколько понимаю).

> может ли "интеллект" в своих рассуждениях прийти к новым концепциям, новым знаниям, сделать открытие. ... Даже если мы добавляем дополнительные шаги, по кругу кормя модель её же выхлопом

Это часть фундаментального философского срача эмерджентизм vs идеализм: возникнет ли подлинная креативность когда-нибудь с наступлением достаточной сложности в груде железа и софта или это принципиально почему-то невозможно.

Всё что пока ясно — нужная сложность, по сравнению с кожными мешками, еще не достигнута. Даже если вместо обычных CPU/GPU юзать PLD, а для источника энтропии взять квантовые вычисления — это всё еще далеко от биологической сложности будет (как минимум PLD не может себя воспроизвести (аутопэз), и интегрировать в себя же). С биокомпьютерами наверно будет прорыв (но это всё еще не то, если оно тоже не будет уметь в автопоэз).

А на опыте без данных учатся уже, правда пока на ограниченных задачах
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkhnCWm-7kA&t=3m24s

Бодаться с этими переписывателями ...

2025-12-26T20:02:54Z

In reply to nevent1q…h05n
_________________________

Бодаться с этими переписывателями resolv.conf — безнадежное занятие имхо. В качестве надежного костыля можно прописать один свой nameserver, сделать chattr +i /etc/resolv.conf и резолвить что нужно из своего nameserver по любому принципу.

Какой-то такой этот свой nameserver может быть например: https://github.com/alopatindev/dotfiles/blob/94721b9f82db2c255e61881f93a1ffbdc1a79db0/common/usr/local/sbin/dns-router

Wow, thanks for introducing it to me; I'm surprised it's ...

2025-12-25T18:15:21Z

In reply to nevent1q…mztr
_________________________

Wow, thanks for introducing it to me; I'm surprised it's not neoclassical! I haven't heard it; sounds like a complex, progressive emotional catalog and reminds me of Dream Theater for some reason.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jb66rssdh1w

I always liked complex music. Usually it's long and that's why people were mad about my music tastes long time ago, haha.

All the masterpieces are like stories of the Universe IMO. Or of ...

2025-12-24T18:32:36Z

In reply to nevent1q…3xzx
_________________________

All the masterpieces are like stories of the Universe IMO. Or of the "heavens", by which I mean complex subjective experience that seem to me have something to do with complex operations with the unconscious. This experience is very similar to dreaming but in a fully conscious state, with the possibility to project the "dreams" into art.

I'll possibly post on that a little more. Looks like playing with poetry was the best door for me to discover what's really going on in the creative process phenomenologically for me and why it's called specifically a transpersonal experience rather than just arational (because it produces something that I'm able to fully comprehend only later, sometimes days after publishing it).