Doc Orange
Tommy Volk

I'm challenging @npub1aeh…4nwx to play #WordsWithZaps.
I just played ROOM for 41 points.
Join or start a new game here:
https://www.wordswithzaps.top/?gameId=0fc976ec-2544-4786-985c-c586aafa2a7f

2026-02-02 21:00:16 UTC

https://blossom.primal.net/b346274d3e4db0468ebdc07060974029b48a2fbe791aafa29c77c0e11b4ea6bd.jpg

2026-01-18 01:33:15 UTC

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Seems like proof of work is wired deep into the human mind

2026-01-07 19:21:39 UTC

Hey, Ghostr is pretty cool! Have you seen it yet? ⚡️👻👀👻👀⚡️
https://ghostr.org

2026-01-06 15:16:03 UTC

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I just got goosebumps

2025-12-21 20:45:31 UTC

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You can configure what tools it has access to, and only give it read access to your drive. My concern would be privacy. I’d be curious to try that using LM Studio with a local model.

2025-12-16 23:33:56 UTC

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I’m bullish on eventual Bolt12 receive support on Fedimint, but that requires PTLCs on lightning 😞
But whenever that comes around, it will strike a very nice balance of trust and convenience

2025-12-06 04:16:58 UTC

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Have you used AWS? It ain’t exactly miles ahead. I can’t wrap my head around just why cloud computing DX is so unbelievably bad.

2025-12-02 03:38:26 UTC

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Partly true? I’m curious what you mean. In what way do you think it could be good vs bad?

2025-12-02 02:48:18 UTC

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I disagree that prior tech deflation was linear rather than exponential. Regardless, I appreciate your respectful disagreement with me. I’ve been generally disappointed with the rudeness I often get on Nostr for voicing my honest thoughts. Your response is refreshing, thank you!

2025-12-02 02:34:01 UTC

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Powerful insight

2025-12-02 02:32:11 UTC

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If tech deflation reduces the debt ratio, why has the debt ratio gone up in the past half century even though we’ve had staggering tech deflation? IMO if the rate of tech deflation increases, the rate of money creation will simply be increased to absorb it. The only thing new this time around is bitcoin. The tech deflation of AI is a difference of degree, not of kind.

2025-11-13 04:35:27 UTC

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I’m with you. I quit a past job over having to try wrangle a ridiculously convoluted Python codebase and running into exactly the issues you’re describing. I don’t know how or why anyone ships any production software with Python. Sure, it works for quick and dirty one-off scripts, but anything more than that and you run into crazy amounts of untestability and non-determinism.

2025-11-04 07:42:20 UTC

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Have you looked into METR at all? They’ve done some interesting work on measuring AI model capability and autonomy against a benchmark of software engineering tasks which have baseline measurements of how long they take a human to do.
TL;DR, frontier models currently have a ~50% success rate when performing tasks that would take humans a little over two hours, and that time has been doubling every 7 months. Assuming that trajectory, they’ll have the autonomy to complete a human 40 hour work week worth of work in less than three years.
https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-complete-long-tasks/

2025-11-01 05:57:20 UTC

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CrowdHealth has done right by me. Been a member for two years, and they paid for my daughter’s birth. Super painless to get the funds sent to my bank account. Sadly now that I have insurance through work, I’m probably going to leave. Would love to see a way for employers to offer CrowdHealth to employees as a substitute for health insurance.

2025-11-01 05:54:38 UTC

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You don’t get insurance cards, because CrowdHealth is not insurance (it’s better IMO).
As far as coverage, check out this page on their website: https://www.joincrowdhealth.com/how-it-works-v2
TL;DR, you pay the first $500 for each health event. I believe a health event can range from a broken arm to brain cancer.

2025-10-28 13:36:28 UTC

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Raise them well

2025-10-26 06:05:55 UTC

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What up

2025-10-15 04:17:50 UTC

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Real bitcoiners celebrate whitepaper day instead

2025-10-13 18:27:07 UTC

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Hell yeah @npub1zsw…gc6x

2025-09-30 04:06:35 UTC

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Moar coffee butter?? I still need to try it

2025-09-28 02:44:30 UTC

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I use both Damus and Primal, and can’t get zapping to work on either. Damus gives me a cryptic error, and Primal asks for a bunch of personal information that I’m not giving out. Idk exactly how zapping works under the hood, but shouldn’t Nostr clients be able to spit out a Bolt11 that you can pay out of band?

2025-09-26 02:25:43 UTC

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Oh snap, I got everything I need already! Will give it a shot tomorrow, thanks man

2025-09-26 02:13:04 UTC

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Recipe? 🤤

2025-09-24 03:04:48 UTC

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Yes. Businesses don’t exist, they’re just people interacting with other people. Should people’s interactions with other people be voluntary or not? I, for one, like to live by principals which don’t promote arranged marriages and slavery. Sadly, most people don’t live by any principals at all, just response to pleasure and pain.

2025-09-19 03:32:29 UTC

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After reading that thread, I had to check if that was actually calle and not an impersonator. Appreciate you standing your ground and adhering to reason. 🫡

2025-09-19 03:26:42 UTC

Have a lot of people on Nostr gotten really nasty lately, or am I just reading the wrong threads?
Not just talking about Core v Knots debates.
Can I get a vibe check from y’all?

2025-09-18 06:16:27 UTC

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Like, the therapy?

2025-09-16 04:16:43 UTC

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Heck yes

2025-09-16 04:15:59 UTC

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Exactly, and you can pick a federation with 3/4, 5/7, 7/10, etc… Whatever trust model you prefer.

2025-09-16 03:59:54 UTC

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Or if you only ever expect <2/3 of your custodians to go rogue, fedimint offers an even more attractive option. See an example below comparing a 5/7 federation with using 7 independent mints.
https://blossom.primal.net/af0c05d0f92cf9db3e8f9eddcd7429fe523580300a7296b55bd27172e474298f.png

2025-09-15 18:02:15 UTC

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I think that quote will make it into future unpropagandized history textbooks

2025-09-15 04:38:32 UTC

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This is an ad hominem attack with no actual arguments. You can tell by re-reading this and replacing the words “knots” and “core” and hear the exact opposite message.

2025-09-15 02:40:59 UTC

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Got a 2-month-old here 👋

2025-09-15 02:39:06 UTC

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Just joined the fatherhood club 2 months ago. I find it hard to comprehend how any parent can beat their child. But it certainly explains why so many people resort to violence to resolve disputes - that’s exactly what they were modeled as children. I also only recently realized just how financially and culturally pressured parents are to abandon their kids in day care and get back to work. Before, I hated the state in principle, but that hatred hits in a much more visceral way now.

2025-08-29 16:57:58 UTC

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What specifically are you explaining? Why a hard cap at all, or why specifically 21 million as the hard cap? I’ll attempt to answer both:
Why is a hard cap a good thing? The supply of any good can either be increasing, decreasing, or unchanging. Bitcoin is a good that’s defined and controlled by its holders, who each want to maintain the most value of their coins. An increasing supply means holders are getting diluted, which they don’t want. A decreasing supply means some or all holders must be confiscated from, which they also don’t want. That leaves a fixed supply, where people are neither diluted nor confiscated from.
Why specifically 21 million? Satoshi picked a10 minute block time somewhat arbitrarily, and a halving cycle of 210,000 blocks so that a halving cycle was almost exactly 4 years (off by only 0.2% if block times are exactly 10 minutes). AFAIK 4 years was another arbitrary choice. He also picked a starting block reward of 50 coins, and a halving every cycle rather than a quartering or… thirding? Is that a word? Both of those decisions are also arbitrary AFAIK. Anyway, 210,000 blocks * 50 coins per block for the first cycle, plus 210,000 blocks * 25 coins for the second cycle, and so on, adds up to exactly 21,000,000. But since Bitcoin isn’t infinitely divisible, halving the block reward will eventually lead to decimal places being rounded off, meaning that the 21 million figure isn’t actually true, and the final number will actually be 20,999,999.9769 coins.
Were those concise? I’m not really sure 😂

2025-08-22 03:14:02 UTC

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The last sentence there was kind of rude. Yes, of course it’s technically feasible. Modify the code you’re running on your lightning node to fail all payments through certain channels.

2025-08-22 03:08:50 UTC

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But I’m not sure that a long list of closed channels is a turn off to users who just want their payments routed successfully. Users are generally self-seeking just like node operators, and I think they will generally pick whatever node is most likely to route their payment - factoring routing fees of course - the same way that a node operator will generally act in whatever way gets them the most routing fees. For a lightning user who is planning a path for their payment, if that means picking between a node that aggressively closes unnecessary channels to provide an excellent routing experience, or a passive-aggressive node that quietly blacklists channels without telling their counterparty (or any users who might route through that channel), I think the self-interest of lightning users will generally guide them to the former.

2025-08-22 02:45:20 UTC

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Wouldn’t a well-maintained node that isn’t afraid to confidently close useless channels look _more_ appealing to other well-maintained nodes that also want to manage liquidity efficiently rather than less appealing? Better that than to drop payments and ruin the UX of users who route through you. Maybe I’m missing something, but dropping payments through certain channels seems like a bad plan to me.

2025-08-21 17:08:31 UTC

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Just ordered the last 3! 🤤

2025-08-21 14:06:23 UTC

Sooooo my wife and I smashed both jars of our Hodl Butter in less than a week. @nprofile…j6wt when can I buy more?!

2025-08-20 02:20:30 UTC

In the past, society was so poor that the aristocracy had to be hereditary in order to maintain its economic wealth - this is no longer the case, due to the massive productivity increases of the relatively free market. Now, a successful politician can easily gather enough wealth to last several generations - or forever if handled wisely - in just a few terms. This has allowed for the development of the illusion that the tax livestock control something we call "democracy."
Because we can steal so much wealth in such a short amount of time, the ruling classes have agreed to rotate in and out of power, in order to maintain the illusion that there is no ruling class. This rotation is essential to maintaining the optimism of the livestock by giving them the belief - almost always false - that they too can join the ruling class. This means that the ruling class is no longer directly exclusive, but rather somewhat permeable, at least at the fringes.
- The Handbook of Human Ownership, Stefan Molyneux

2025-08-19 09:56:18 UTC

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Still, it’s somehow less terrible than Python. I genuinely have no idea how anyone gets anything done in that language.

2025-08-15 11:10:44 UTC

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https://blossom.primal.net/52dc7a0d393544978a2ec6286bba778c8ac30d3b9b774f5d17ba2693dee45311.png

2025-08-09 04:27:56 UTC

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Sounds like they’ve had some rollout issues: https://x.com/sama/status/1953893841381273969

2025-08-08 14:38:44 UTC

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I was wondering why 16oz wasn’t the size you sold - I ordered two 8oz cause shipping cost just didn’t make sense for one. I support this change.

2025-08-07 09:32:52 UTC

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Agreed. Who’s the “they” that’s orchestrating this? If it were a top down effort, wouldn’t there be enormous pressure for any one car company to break rank, make beautiful cars, and sell them like crazy?
To build on your point, car companies are all dealing with the same laws of physics, guiding them to similar aerodynamic designs. Also, these days car manufacturers often re-use the same car platform/chassis for many different models, further restricting their design in exchange for better production efficiency.

2025-08-07 02:13:41 UTC

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Fair question! The amount of above-ground gold per person has stayed between ~25-30oz since around 1500AD.
A more qualitative answer: From my understanding, throughout history, give or take, an ounce of gold could get you a nice suit, and an ounce of silver could get you a good steak dinner. The latter isn’t quite as true today since the gold/silver price ratio is so historically high, since silver isn’t used as a medium of exchange anymore.
All that to say that unlike bitcoin-priced wages, gold-priced wages decreasing so quickly is historically unusual.

2025-08-06 23:27:17 UTC

1933 was the last time that a U.S. citizen could walk into a bank and redeem gold for their dollars. At the time, given the average hourly wage of $0.47 and the pegged gold price of $20.67 per ounce, an ounce of gold represented about 44 hours of labor. Today, with an hourly wage of $36.30 and a gold price of $3,400 per ounce, that same ounce represents about 94 hours of labor. More than a 2x drop. If that ounce represented the same 44 hours it used to, the average hourly wage would be $77.55. That’s be a six figure annual income with 25 hours of work per week and two weeks off per year. We have no idea what we’ve lost, my friends.

2025-08-06 14:36:19 UTC

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Wishing the best for you and the fam

2025-08-05 16:02:18 UTC

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Just snagged ‘em!

2025-08-04 17:24:41 UTC

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I was never really able to slow down until I had a kid. Now, relaxing with her is also productive, so the incentives are aligned. 😛

2025-07-02 11:42:05 UTC

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https://blossom.primal.net/e3db7f8f25cb26349bb694568bd60e87b968e8e979526e5e456655fb82f71124.png

2025-07-01 20:18:26 UTC

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Next step is sat-denominated 😁

2025-07-01 03:17:48 UTC

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Would this require replacing pegouts with “pegout requests” since funds may be in use? The trade-off for an average joe federation user being that they can transact with lower fees if they are willing to forego the ability to withdraw large sums of money at once

2025-06-25 15:28:17 UTC

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My main argument to shitcoin casino acquaintances is that, you either lose money or rip someone else off. It’s sad and shocking how pervasive the zero-sum mindset has been propogandically force-fed to people these days.

2025-06-23 12:49:47 UTC

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Try @npub14pf…7mwj

2025-06-17 00:25:10 UTC

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Finally

2025-06-12 23:11:59 UTC

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Seems like if given a hidden thing, a language model would fairly easily be able to play as the question answerer, and even give periodic hints if the guesser got stuck. Would be interesting to use this as a method of synthetic data generation. For any hidden thing, have two models play 100 times and take the shortest chat that led to a correct guess. Maybe that data could help models learn how to self-correct and backtrack better.

2025-06-11 23:56:35 UTC

First-class nix support in OpenAI Codex would be a game changer

2025-06-11 20:23:44 UTC

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Yes, definitely still crazy! At the beginning of this year I thought DOGE might actually have a chance to save us from the looming debt event horizon. But at this point I think it’s pretty safe to say there’s no turning back.

2025-06-11 19:21:59 UTC

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*85% more than it received, or 185% of what it received

2025-06-09 23:21:17 UTC

Got my first order from @nprofile…j3ay! Pancakes with blueberry syrup tomorrow morning 🤤
https://blossom.primal.net/769b64b9a57abb261a791e2bbe272c8de8e670520984c988b36be41a10967c38.jpg

2025-06-08 18:46:29 UTC

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His current content is the best stuff he’s done imo! He plays jazz clubs instead of stadiums these days.

2025-06-03 19:58:15 UTC

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Would love to hear your thoughts if/when you read it!
This sounds like a false dichotomy, why is abolishing the state at odds with delegating things? I’m a software engineer, at my job the CTO delegates work to my manager who delegates work to me. They don’t threaten or bully me, they pay me voluntarily and in return I work voluntarily. We might be talking past each other due to differing definitions, but to me that’s anarchy. Rules without rulers, and un-coerced spontaneous self-organization.

2025-06-03 12:06:31 UTC

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There’s a great book on the subject if you’re curious how a free society could function and sustain. It addresses all the common questions:
* Who will build the roads
* How would we have national defense without them turning and taking us over
* How would violent and non-violent crime be handled
* How would we avoid the tragedy of the commons
It blew my mind when I first read it. I changed from a reluctant minarchist to proud ancap.
https://freedomain.com/freedomain_books/practical-anarchy/full-text/

2025-06-03 01:45:17 UTC

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Ben answered your question about LSP vs routing node. I don’t know anything about ACINQ’s architecture, but regarding ldk, ldk-node is an opinionated stitching together of the various ldk rust crates, one of them being lightning-liquidity:
https://crates.io/crates/lightning-liquidity
Follow the ldk-node source code on this method:
https://docs.rs/ldk-node/0.5.0/ldk_node/struct.Node.html#method.lsps1_liquidity

2025-05-30 04:15:52 UTC

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Everyone here is discussing whether this is a good or bad idea, but I’m wondering if it’s even possible. I don’t think advertising really works without centralization. On decentralized protocols, advertisers have no knowledge or control of the advertisee’s client software, which could simply say it displayed the ad and then claim the sats. Even if phone apps didn’t do that (Damus and Primal have a reputation to uphold by not publishing apps that commit advertising fraud), people could run servers that have their nSec and scan for incoming advertising requests and simply respond to them and sweep the payments.

2025-05-27 16:56:23 UTC

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After last year I decided I would never give a dime to Bitcoin Magazine again. Sure, politicians eventually groveling to Bitcoiners is inevitable. But us welcoming the sleazebags with open arms sure as hell isn’t. Now’s the time to tell them to piss off.

2025-05-26 12:48:06 UTC

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Fedimint DLC Client plus NIP-88
https://github.com/tvolk131/fedimint-dlc-client
https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/pull/1681
We have the pieces, we just need to put them together

2025-05-24 13:15:41 UTC

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Read it! It’s top notch, really the single recommendation I have for anyone looking to learn real economics and not that pederastic Keynesian crap.

2025-05-24 05:09:58 UTC

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From some riffing with OpenAI’s o3, it sounds like this isn’t quite true: https://chatgpt.com/share/68315475-5500-8009-8184-abc1cf6e5be7

2025-05-23 14:09:33 UTC

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Peaceful parenting fixes this

2025-05-10 16:01:50 UTC

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No clue what you mean by that

2025-05-08 04:45:19 UTC

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About 10% fall into the dark triad. Kinda terrifying.

2025-05-08 03:51:02 UTC

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Nice! I haven’t been using it quite as much lately actually, since I’ve generally found that it leads to an explosion of complexity unless I heavily refactor what it generates. But the newer o3 and o4-mini-high models from OpenAI are incredible for riffing on system design stuff. Ironing out SQL table designs and overall program structure. I’m sure it won’t be long until the models are much better at managing code complexity though. We need to factor code size into RL training.

2025-05-07 23:13:19 UTC

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Too much funding certainly ruins incentives by attracting people who are lazy/uncommitted. But so does too little funding, since it drives away hardworking/committed devs who have bills to pay. There’s a sweet spot - an Aristotelian mean. From my experience as an open source Bitcoin dev, we are no where near the point of too much funding. I took a ~70% pay cut when I quit my job to work on Bitcoin, and ended up having to return to the fiat mines after my funding dried up. I know that’s just an anecdote, but I think overall that’s not entirely unusual.

2025-05-07 00:46:18 UTC

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Right to Repair, for your Body: https://fourthievesvinegar.org/

2025-04-27 13:43:42 UTC

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I prefer to be curious about my feelings rather than put moral labels on them. I’ve found that if I have unresolved negative feelings towards someone, it’s usually either because I’m still in a situation of danger (emotional, physical, or whatever sort originally caused the negative feelings) or I think that I can mend/improve the relationship. If I’m not in danger and cannot improve the relationship (or acknowledge that the other person is a narcissist and there was no relationship to begin with) then my feelings tend to subside.

2025-04-26 14:18:32 UTC

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With fedimint, something similar is achieved by having a lightning gateway serve multiple federations. A lightning gateway is a server that can offer to perform ecash-lightning atomic swaps as a service to federations that it trusts, typically maintaining an ecash balance for all federations it serves so it has liquidity to fulfill swap requests. Under the hood, if a user of Federation A pays an invoice to a user in Federation B, the gateway short-circuits and never even uses lightning. Instead it simply takes the Federation A ecash and pays out Federation B ecash. All of the complexity you’re describing is tucked away into the gateway, eliminating the need for every user to be a part of multiple federations in order to find overlap with counterparties. Instead, the gateway is the only party that needs to trust multiple federations, which it wants to do anyway, since that will lead to more tx volume and therefore more fees.

2025-04-23 17:25:22 UTC

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What do you mean by defamation? From my quick research, it requires proving that someone did the following four things:
1. Made a false statement purporting to be fact;
2. Published or communicated that statement to at least one third party;
3. Attributed fault (usually negligence, or “actual malice” for public figures); and
4. Caused harm (e.g. injury to reputation, emotional distress, pecuniary loss)
We can certainly argue that the existing implementations (i.e. state court systems) do not handle such cases well
I think in a free society where disputes were resolved in the absence of state court systems, some form of defamation laws would likely form. If I were a restaurant owner, I would want some form of “defamation insurance” to cover any potential loss of income from situations such as a competitor creating false bad reviews about my business to drive my customers away, to his restaurant. Most businesses would probably want such insurance (and if such events were unlikely, the insurance would be very cheap). And in such an insurance contract, insurance companies would want to include a clause stating that the insured business is subject to penalties if they are caught defaming other businesses. Any business that did not purchase such insurance would eventually start to look very suspicious.

2025-04-22 01:01:32 UTC

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Fedimint DLC Client plus NIP-88
https://github.com/tvolk131/fedimint-dlc-client
https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/pull/1681

2025-04-15 12:39:50 UTC

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We need citadels

2025-03-25 13:10:56 UTC

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Gm!

2025-03-25 00:40:38 UTC

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Rugpulls then Nostr standard

2025-03-06 14:51:16 UTC

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Would love to see that on fedimint! @nprofile…sgf8 has talked about having guardians periodically perform threshold signing to create a nostr note that contains the attested reserves, which is signed by the federation’s aggregate pubkey.

2025-03-06 06:33:51 UTC

Anyone else using Claude Code? I started using it over the past few days on a React project and it’s kinda blowing my mind. Still need to see how well it works in a more pedantic language like Rust.

2025-03-06 05:05:18 UTC

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How’s it hold up against Rust?

2025-02-26 05:17:34 UTC

Amazon removing the download option for purchased books got me looking into alternatives. Have people heard of Anna’s Archive? They have a huge collection of book torrents to help preserve a decentralized library of human knowledge. Feels very much in line with the ethos of Nostr users. They appear to be in strong need of torrent seeders. I might go out and buy a hard drive tomorrow and help out.
https://annas-archive.org/torrents

2025-02-21 05:15:03 UTC

Blows my mind that IRS employees are trying to garner sympathy
https://m.primal.net/PFDH.jpg
https://m.primal.net/PFDI.jpg

2025-02-18 14:06:57 UTC

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So close to a haiku 😩

2025-02-14 04:53:35 UTC

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Looks like the amount at which you have a 50% chance of success doubled from ~$200 to ~$400. Very cool!

2025-02-14 04:51:20 UTC

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Huh, that’s cool that bitcoin’s ever-increasing purchasing power continually makes the lightning network more reliable. Makes perfect sense, I’d just never thought about it.
How do you guys see the network topology changing in the future? Continued node centralization and consolidation to fewer, larger channels?

2025-02-12 13:20:18 UTC

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After you ruined last year’s conference by inviting a bunch of politicians? No thanks

2025-01-14 15:17:14 UTC

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So it just says yes to everything?

2024-10-27 00:16:18 UTC

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Ah ok I think we’re just disagreeing over definitions then. I’d describe that as permissive parenting. Can’t say I disagree with your original post now.

2024-10-26 23:32:52 UTC

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What do you define as gentle parenting? I define it as not using violence or the threat of violence against your kids.

2024-10-26 23:06:36 UTC

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Bad take. Hitting kids is pretty shitty.