dpc

Any public network exposed infrastructure can be DoSed given enough resources. Bigger and more scalable infra can just sustain higher load, making a successful attack harder / more costly. That's why even medium-size commercial businesses hide behind something like Cloudflare.
So the way I think about it - the more efficient the underlying protocol, the more robust it is in face of a heavy load (legitimate or malicious), but ultimately if you're running a relay on puny VPS, it will fail relatively easily. The goal is to squeeze as much as possible from what's available.
Low barrier to entry doesn't not have to mean low robustness. Often does, but ideally something robust could be easy to build on.

2023-04-15 20:44:27 UTC

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BTW. The websocket thing is something I wonder about often. In a use-case with reasonably frequent updates, is it better to have clients hold an active but mostly idle tcp connection (like websocket), or make them do polling, or some long polling?
A proper async IO runtime can probably handle tons of connections at once anyway. 10k, 100k, maybe 1M.
Also with a gossip-like note fetching, it should be feasible to have lots moderately sized relays, without a loss to usability, so maybe worrying too much about scaling vertically a single relay is unnecessary.
Otherwise some client&application level load balancing might fix the problem. Eg when connecting to a relay it answers with a list of keyspace "shards" (possibly overlapping for redundancy), and then connects/queries to the actually node that holds the data. That would allow reasonably simple and flexible scaling of the relays without complex server side load balancing.

2023-04-15 19:58:35 UTC

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I was thinking about nostr, a bit from a similiar perspective, especially that a lot of things are very much like in https://github.com/crev-dev/cargo-crev (exchanging documents signed by self-generated identities). The purpose was different, but most things are analogous.
Agreed on everything, but with a note that ease of building client is a huge benefit, especially for a protocol that lives or dies based on network effect. The idea would probably not catch on if building things would require too much work. If it is to be more complex, it needs to come with good off-the-shelf libraries to use.
End user software delivery is the biggest constrain on boostraping. Being able to handle everything from a web-client (primarily) is a must have. And it must work well.
The transport layer is a secondary thing. Self-signed document can be delivered in various ways - through web sockets, raw tcp, bittorrent, with e2e encryption or without it. In carg-crev github repositories are used free and public transport. Relays could support combination of all and it can be iterated on. So I would leave websocket with TLS as is to start with.
Using faster and more compact encoding and crypto, detaching the signature (witness) would be the biggest wins, and can't be easily iterated on after the fact, so getting it right is important. Good engineering suggest using some "one byte-prefix for version", to allow ecosystem rotate to something else in the future.
Identities/crypto should be modular (just add a "type" prefix). Clients that don't support certain ID type, can just ignore the message. That gives an ability to rotate to something else in the future, without changing too much elsewhere. I'm not a fan of GPG/SSH (even though I use them all the time, every day). Being able to support it for clients that need it for something - great. Forcing on everyone - meh. Something that is fast and easy to support would be a preferable default.
Also, IMO, nostr needs to come with a portable, reference WoT handling library. Coming up with a well working WoT is quite complex. Different clients could come up with their own approach, but having something off the shelf that clients can use to get a reasonable and consistent WoT behavior would be a big plus.
In cargo-crev there's a `crev-wot` https://github.com/crev-dev/cargo-crev/tree/master/crev-wot that implements a basic Wot based on "trust levels", "distance from root" with support for bans and overrides, but I always wanted to (and never had time) to implement "maximum flow" algorithm to deal with sybil attacks and bot farms.

2023-04-09 04:07:11 UTC

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"Every item is $6" is my general impression every time I do groceries.

2023-04-07 03:17:57 UTC

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Taxpayers have to pay estimated taxes ahead of time anyway, no? Lots of people are getting tax returns in April/May. So it's not like treasury can hope for some extra taxes *now*.

2023-03-29 07:12:26 UTC

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OB was waaay too early. Barely anyone was using Bitcoin then, and other than censorship resistance and novelty everything about using it for commerce was meh. DHTs have crappy UX (slow) and running your own things is a drag. On top of it there's just a standard bootstrapping problem: you need sellers to make buyers bother, but you need buyers to make sellers bother.

2023-03-29 06:17:01 UTC

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Sorry. I failed at nostr UI handling.

2023-03-28 04:53:37 UTC

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What's happening?

2023-03-27 02:00:41 UTC

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Are you aware of Fedimint?

2023-03-27 01:58:36 UTC

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I didn't know there's a 3rd book. :D

2023-03-23 00:38:29 UTC

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Oh. Well, I feel like I've read/watched/listened to every significant piece of Bitcoin related philosophy for many, many years now.
My fav. paper Bitcoin book is Fiat Standard, Bitcoin Standard is good too. Blockchain Wars were interesting.
My disappointment is mostly around making impression on some huge philosophical novelty, "Space Force" etc. then... lots of pages and well... yeah... once you finish, tell me - what's the big thought and I'm happy to discuss.

2023-03-22 21:57:03 UTC

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Maybe you're finding the things in the ~first half more novel than I?
On top of it, doesn't it make you bored how many times the same thing is repeated over and over?

2023-03-22 06:10:24 UTC

"Softwar" didn't impress me. Could have been 1/8 shorter, maybe even a long blogpost. Author repeats the same things over and over. Natural selection, competition for resources, evolution, war, yes, yes. Just to end with "PoW is great, because it puts energy constrains on software". 🤷

2023-03-21 01:43:50 UTC

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It's nothing. Go can't really do native threads, so has no reason for function colors.

2023-03-21 00:53:07 UTC

There are two answers to every technical issue:
* nixify it,
* or rewrite it in rust

2023-03-19 21:31:56 UTC

Future Bitcoin-based financial system will obviously have fractional reserve banking, because people with savings do want to take risk to get some sweet, sweet yield.
But fractional reserve banking with *real* risk. Not one where gains are privatized and losses socialized.
Not one where everyone have to play the casino, enriching the financier class just to keep up with the inflation.
On where there's a point in being prudent and careful, as you reckless competition doesn't get unlimited get out jail card from political allies.
Not sure where Ben Hunt got this idea that Bitcoin means exclusively full-reserve banking.
https://twitter.com/EpsilonTheory/status/1637498607073886208

2023-03-19 06:26:51 UTC

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It's not immune. It just can't do one of the colors at all. 🤷‍♂️

2023-03-19 06:08:19 UTC

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_wPGSfUEFY
Financial system in distress.

2023-03-13 20:20:51 UTC

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AFAIU, long time ago bytes could be something else than 8 bits. https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/03/06/possible-reasons-8-bit-bytes/

2023-03-11 23:30:02 UTC

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Hey, whatever works, works.
Though myself with built in fuzzy find and `fzf` well integrated with shell \\: https://github.com/PatrickF1/fzf.fish I have no problems dealing with large projects.

2023-03-11 19:12:08 UTC

I have LSP hints displayed in my CLI text editor (Helix). I'm quite amazed. The experience got really close to VSCode, with all the benefits of CLI text editor preserved.
https://nostr.build/i/nostr.build_71718e5cb6701814cd453a0afd6411dc7294792de576ebe4e50c3f862876a453.png

2023-03-10 01:14:09 UTC

Bitcoin's consensus rules are held together by a network effect of individual incentives of its users.
Not a constitution, not the whitepaper, not the code, but each HODLer doing what best for them is what guarantees consensus rules enforcement.
The idea that a super-majority of Bitcoin users could get convinced that stuff like inscriptions introduces MEV, which undermines mining incentives and is thus breaking Bitcoin, and thus endangers the asset they hold dear is not a fantasy.
In such circumstances - not unlike UASF - Bitcoin users could enforce a SF that would kick out (e.g. make unspendable) certain outputs they deem undesireable. In essence it's a form of economic voting / war. Users that think that Bitcoin is best with the SF against users who think Bitcoin is best without it.
You might think it's not fair, etc. And maybe you are right. But if it was a super-majority and a SF would be successful, you would wake up on holding your inscriptions on a BCH-like minority fork and you can cry all you want about it.
Personally I think Inscription are really stupid, and they will fizzle out naturally, so no need to do anything about it. But just saying.

2023-03-09 19:35:48 UTC

I've just got an upstream git version of helix installed on all my systems (because a PR greatly improving LSP auto-completion just landed) with handful of changes to my personal "nix" git repo by replacing nixos release version with a custom one, by substituting some lines and rustc compiler taken from nixos-unstable (next release).
Nix changes the way you think about Linux system building and what you consider possible.
https://nostr.build/i/nostr.build_48041aa5a66e52047eee204b06e0d13bf4221eef0f9ec8cd4d746a09a7f899dd.png

2023-03-09 17:54:43 UTC

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Some databases have ways to block non-indexed queries. https://www.mongodb.com/docs/manual/reference/parameters/#param.notablescan
I generally think it's a mistake for SQL (and similar) to have a default query auto-planner. I would rather write something like 'take this index, filter for this, pick these fields, then join,..." - basically specifying the query plan myself. Too many times I got bitten by the planner using the wrong index. It's difficult to figure out & prevent, and sometimes query planner changes its mind for some runtime reasons (obviously always in production at 2am ).

2023-03-09 00:32:56 UTC

https://github.com/rust-bitcoin/rust-bitcoin/discussions/1702
Someone published illegitimate bitcoin-internals crate, and has some litecoin related crates. Looks :sus: . Be warned, could be malicious.

2023-03-08 18:33:13 UTC

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Maybe. That's why I'm asking.

2023-03-08 18:29:32 UTC

Is it me, or did a lot of people I am following stopped posting on nostr and activity is going down?

2023-03-08 04:07:15 UTC

https://emnudge.dev/blog/react-hostage
I literally learned preact 2 day ago, and my skills are already obsolete. Damn frontend churn...

2023-03-07 00:39:53 UTC

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1) is fixable by extension, and for stuff like public social media doesn't really matter all that much. You've got hacked and lost your key? You announce you've got hacked in other places? Most of the time, no one cares because you're barely matter anyway. But if you do, you move to new one, people start following new account.
2) bothered me a bit, I would do (and did in cargo-crev) sign over serialized content, but 🤷. People sure love their JSON for some reason, and can't let go of it, even for transport it seems.
The rest is all fixable outside of nostr itself. Gateways will charge per usage, over time, host images, spam will be solved via combination of different means, including WoT.
On the other hand DID is so complex that I wouldn't blame anyone from not wanting to touch it. Seems like a second-system syndrome, though I have no idea what would it be a second system of. :D

2023-03-06 17:23:08 UTC

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CSS/HTML more important. I'm actually quite familiar with JS side. But anything is good!

2023-03-06 05:32:46 UTC

I want to up my html/css game. I can glue together an UI with bootstrap, write dune custom css etc. but whenever I need some fancier layout and styling, it's a struggle.
Please recommend best learning materials for state of art web ui/css stuff.

2023-03-05 04:55:39 UTC

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AD3FHodVgE8
Soon I'll be writing web apps all in Rust.

2023-03-01 04:14:37 UTC

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34966137
🍿 Enjoying the screeching in the comments. :D
I would add: historically OOP movement did not make a good distinction between data and code. It's best when *data* is organized in a program like in a application-specific in-memory database (or just in a persistent database right away), while "objects" and interfaces are useful for *code*: https://dpc.pw/data-vs-code-aka-objects-oop-conflation-and-confusion
The biggest blunder in the Clean Code is the unconditional "prefer polymorphism over switch/if": https://dpc.pw/what-oop-gets-wrong-about-interfaces-and-polymorphism

2023-02-27 17:59:51 UTC

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That's the same trust model as for everything else. The payments could be tiered or even usage dependent, and one can always use multiple relays to have redundancy. But sure - if you run your own relay, even better for you.

2023-02-27 17:35:42 UTC

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Wouldn't it make sense for relays to charge extra for long term storage?

2023-02-26 08:19:43 UTC

I've been going down a rabbit hole of CTMU , so will clear my mind and share some thoughts on it in case anyone finds it interesting.
I dig this kind of stuff and generally in last the decade or more my worldview shifted from a rather standard western intellectual scientist mechanical atheism into realization that consciousness can not be derived from physics or computation, therefore consciousness is probably the fundamental aspect of reality, which both the eastern philosophies and western science seems to converge on.
So here comes CTMU. It is a ToE (Theory of Everything) , developed by Christopher Langan which has the highest in the world recorded IQ. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Langan
From what I can tell tell he's very smart and makes a great impression. What's best is that due to his upbringing he's not an academic, but a proper down to earth dude. Just extremely smart and (self) learned. Whole life he worked as bouncer, firefighter, farmer and such. So to me, with my distaste for academia, the guy himself is just a gem.
Anyway - the theory. In a nutshell: Langan starts with logical reasons why consciousness must be the fundamental aspect of reality, or otherwise just the logics of everything wouldn't add up. Then he builds a methapysical model of the universe as a language: a self-generative and self-perceptual system. I hope I didn't butcher it too much. The stuff is abstract, nuanced and takes from various aspects of linguistics, mathematics, physics, and what not.
As far as I can tell it's not nonsense or some quackery that can be simply dismissed. But it is so abstract and requires understanding of things from so many disciplines, that it is hard to really fully grasp, even for very bright people, which you can see when watching these few videos when someone actually tries to debate with him.
That and that fact that the end conclusion is that the universe can be considered a single self-reifying consciousness, which all conscious agents are kind of fragments of (which is also something I intuitively believe). Langan is open about his religious interpretations of such universe-consciousness.
So - the guy is an outsider to academia , with open semi-religious beliefs/interpretations and thus somewhat off-putting to people that could more rigorously think about it, intellectually intimidating, the whole thing is not exactly easy to meaningful criticise without spending considerable amount of time and effort to internalize. All of this made his theory sit for decades without the world really paying any attention. The interactions or criticism I've found online w.r.t. CTMU are always rather uninformed and shallow.
From my PoV, it's worth looking into, just because it's intellectually stimulating and not well known. Unfortunately as a metaphysics, it seems more philosophical than practical, so I'm not aware of any predictive consequences that could either be used to show that it actually seem to correspond to observable reality. Maybe there are some and I just didn't get to that part.
If you are interested, I the best video to get an overview so far I've found is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-bRM1kYuNA

2023-02-26 04:59:50 UTC

#[0] That https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum/issues/230 is interesting. Please post some updates from time to time!

2023-02-26 03:29:00 UTC

https://www.infoq.com/presentations/tyranny-of-plan/

2023-02-25 04:04:53 UTC

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I don't need global feed, but I'd love to have "follows of follows" feed.

2023-02-24 20:43:31 UTC

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So like most SV startups, except honest.

2023-02-24 19:05:34 UTC

Thought: Convince Eric to rename Fedimint to Chow Mein Mint to out-do Cashu's witty name.
😜

2023-02-24 05:38:31 UTC

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https://nostr.build/i/nostr.build_2ae8e9f8d913d7ca0c4458b3bf841c83619ece7aec9c2047287331e7fb4ff65a.gif

2023-02-24 05:34:30 UTC

#[0] Thank you!
https://nostr.build/i/nostr.build_cb9f19cfca410a2ae357554fa17d136234fe608ddbb3b7798952bfacb5c98fc0.png

2023-02-24 02:40:26 UTC

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Yes, same. But still lame.

2023-02-23 03:57:22 UTC

New Joe Rogan with Eric Weinstein is quite a something to watch.

2023-02-21 21:32:32 UTC

What's the status of ipv6 support in LN? It's 2023, I want to finally use ipv6-only hosts. So far github is a biggest obstacle, but just noticed LN nodes being suspiciously ipv4-centric.

2023-02-21 17:51:04 UTC

https://twitter.com/EcommunistForum/status/1627869215498842112
Well... as someone that was raised in post-communist urban community kinda like this one (see attached), and now lives in a American suburbia... It was actually great. School, library, playgrounds, soccer fields, grocery stores in walking distance, plenty of kids nearby to socialize, low/no traffic, efficient public transportation (because lots of people).
Suburbias have more space and privacy, but feel lonely, especially for the kids as everything is so far and requires a car.
Not everything was a positive, but it's more nuanced than memes would make it look like.
https://nostr.build/i/nostr.build_0f07fb4e51bb937bae70948eb5f84366b54a18ece130b3f0cc256be826b0316f.jpg

2023-02-21 06:17:04 UTC

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I've been bamboozled! Is it supposed to look like email? How about now?

2023-02-21 05:47:32 UTC

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lud16 , dpcpw, is that supposed to be it?

2023-02-21 05:44:36 UTC

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I thought I do have it set up.

2023-02-21 05:43:29 UTC

Please zap 1 sat. Just want to see what happens.

2023-02-20 02:02:18 UTC

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Free relays could offer small storage for some spam (ads). Some web of trust (maybe the same that nostr ends up using) could be used to help with spam, otherwise it would mostly would to happen client-side, I guess, except maybe for some spam reporting system and PoW.

2023-02-20 01:59:27 UTC

Would be nice if nostr (or something like it) could replace emails. Everything encrypted, relays would act as inboxes and storage only, and be interchangable. You pay them for storage and just "being there". Potentially can pay for two or more for redundancy. Some DNS record could point to addresses of relays to deliver messages for given domain (like MX do).

2023-02-19 05:34:48 UTC

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Wait, what? No. I don't want another identity. I want my current one to have multiple "aspects". I *do* want them to be connected. If you are interested in my dev work, you might be interested in a different aspects of me. Or not. Your choice.
Nothing against people wanting to have multiple online identities. Just clarifying.

2023-02-19 04:41:42 UTC

Oh shoot. I forgot. This whole nostr movement might be a good opportunity to fix one of the main issues with all social media - how they force unidimensionality on everyone.
Basically, me (and all of us) are multidimensional human beings. I'm not *just* a developer or Bitcoin maxi, etc. There is more to me than that, that I'd like to share. But most people will not be interested in other aspects of me. They might want to see only technical posts etc. And then stop following me, as I produce posts they don't care about.
This forces everyone that wants to have any reach to be... just a one-topic pony. You only post about one area. Sure you could have multiple IDs, but that's not very practical.
I wish that users could have "personas" and select persona to post to when posting stuff, and then be able to follow only subset of personas of people they want to follow. Sure, I love your technical posts, but don't want to see your stupid political opinions (and vice versa, I guess), or I don't care about your hiking trips, or taste in cars, etc. If you could post your technical content under "dev" persona, I could follow that and I wouldn't have to unfollow you altogether.

2023-02-17 19:45:02 UTC

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Situation RN https://gifgifmagazine.com/uploads/mp4/4112616833.mp4

2023-02-17 18:51:26 UTC

I'm so angry when I'm debugging code. It's like I'm boxing with a code or something. Trading blow for blows. And I'm bleeding but won't give up until the DAMN THING STARTS WORKING LIKE IT SHOULD!!!

2023-02-17 05:16:18 UTC

Time flies.
https://nostr.build/i/nostr.build_c6d6e5251753b161c384e0dd3566c4240c8356d9f1666cd08173243a8c302c2b.png

2023-02-17 03:30:36 UTC

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https://nostr.build/i/nostr.build_d97521f839c591aecd988fa83c7e6019941c1852f1238533372caf72effb454f.gif

2023-02-15 17:30:14 UTC

tmux replacement in Rust
https://zellij.dev/
Soon there's not going to be any C-based tooling left to use.

2023-02-14 04:11:11 UTC

Was watching https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1104hfv/the_rust_implementation_of_gnu_coreutils_is/ and I've noticed usage of https://github.com/mstange/samply
Looks convenient to be able to view in FF profiler.

2023-02-13 00:06:20 UTC

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I'm pretty sure if Bach was alive today he'd be making EDM. 😂

2023-02-13 00:03:50 UTC

My favorite piece of music.
https://youtu.be/y3AiGw8mkq0

2023-02-12 04:46:58 UTC

#[0] , any plans for some ability to hide replies, etc.
It really quickly got very noisy on nostr, and scrolling through my `Following` is looking through mostly emojis, short replies that are irrelevant to me and I'm out of context on, etc.

2023-02-10 18:37:17 UTC

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> storage is cheap,
Not in the cloud, in my experience.

2023-02-06 16:08:11 UTC

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Prions, for one.

2023-02-04 19:17:57 UTC

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#[2] good/bad idea?

2023-02-04 18:54:14 UTC

One thing that we could do with Ordinals bloat, is to just to hardcode their list in the source code and not store them at all (possibly in some light-prunning mode).
This is not a HF, not even a SF. It's a simple optimization, not unlike pruning. And segwit witness discount was justified by the ability of (some) nodes to discard witness data. Purely an internal and later on p2p protocol change and an optimization. They are just an easy to identify bloat that could be very easily skipped for a speedup and less resource use. Older clients (or "full archival" node) could still store them, but most of the network don't need them for anything.
That should also put some breaks on the ordinal users who think they are really storing something in there.

2023-02-04 18:39:26 UTC

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Danny, I am not to tell what you should or should not do, and no one is (or should) be there to gatekeep what goes on the chain, but I just want you to know that JPEGs on the blockchain are fucking stupid. They were stupid on shitcoins, and they are stupid on Bitcoin. I don't think they are a huge problem, but just... why?
I agree that for all the resources needlessly used (wasted?), there are positive externalities of the whole thing.

2023-01-10 18:58:24 UTC

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So far so good!

2023-01-08 07:13:59 UTC

I really need to find some better nostr client. What's currently recommended for each: web, NixOs & Android?

2022-11-03 15:47:02 UTC

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This means kind of the same thing / works kind of the same. "The defaults" should not make user "follow" anyone hardcoded, but instead just show some default ids in the feed.
#[2]

2022-11-02 16:49:02 UTC

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BTW. Some ideas: consider addin some initial "harcoded" "follows" (that can be disabled in settings). The initial emptiness is disorienting. Seeing some posts in the feed at gives the user something that feels like it's working.

2022-11-02 16:21:49 UTC

I'm sorry to bring it up: but as things are right now, the UX is pretty terrible here. I'm on astral.ninja now, and while somewhat better, it is all rather clunky and not ready for public consumption.