Mike Dilger

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

Public Key

npub1acg6thl5psv62405rljzkj8spesceyfz2c32udakc2ak0dmvfeyse9p35c

NIP-05 Address

[email protected]

NIP-57 Address

[email protected]

Profile Code

nprofile1qqswuyd9ml6qcxd92h6pleptfrcqucvvjy39vg4wx7mv9wm8kakyujgpramhxue69uhkummnw3ezuetfde6kuer6wasku7nfvuh8xurpvdjszrthwden5te0dehhxtnvdakqu472gm

Publishing to

nostr.einundzwanzig.space

nos.lol

relay.nostr.band

Author Public Key

npub1acg6thl5psv62405rljzkj8spesceyfz2c32udakc2ak0dmvfeyse9p35c

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Last Notes

2024-11-18 21:44:55 GMT

This is a file I uploaded to my chorus instance via blossom (If you see an image, your client just downloaded it from my chorus instance):
https://chorus.mikedilger.com:444/7cf2dfec04c4e5880037ed8058264417f3d0600d71c2277a9fab73531b31f6a3.webp

2024-11-18 06:50:26 GMT

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HANG ON, that's not 100 milliseconds, that is 100 nanoseconds. You might make it bigger, or do Duration::from_millis(100) to be more sure.

2024-11-17 08:27:55 GMT

Too many positive vibes on nostr... especially when the research shows that we are all fucked.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bex5LyzbbBE

2024-11-16 21:54:25 GMT

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I love that it's got chat and voice!
A couple questions:
Is there a link to the source code?
The install wants to install nvidia stuff but I have no nvidia hardware, how can I avoid that?

2024-11-16 21:43:55 GMT

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Yes I think a DHT would be a good solution. I'd prefer an existing DHT implementation since they can be somewhat complex, and not a new DHT-like social graph. The key would be the person's pubkey (or even a hash of that to make it smaller and make it work with an existing DHT implementation).
I haven't done any work on this.

2024-11-15 21:24:56 GMT

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Crikey!

2024-11-14 23:51:53 GMT

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I was part of their kickstarter and they sent me 4 keys: Solo V2 USB-A, Solo V2 USB-C, LE Solo V2 Hacker A, LE Solo V2 Hacker C
I guess NFC has been added to some models.

2024-11-14 23:41:38 GMT

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These are cool, and I've been using one for auth to github and a few other places for many years now.
But what if you could code a NIP-46 bunker and run them on one of these: https://solokeys.com They have programmable ones and are open source. I haven't yet tried

2024-11-14 22:21:44 GMT

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Thanks. Certbot renews but nginx doesn't notice w/o a restart. I think I've fixed this so next time it will restart nginx.

2024-11-14 19:26:03 GMT

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She's at 54kg currently, but she was up to 63 at one point. She is a tad overweight, but most of the weight is not that, it is the hugeness of her frame.

2024-11-14 19:16:58 GMT

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A lot of medical (and veternary) care is not much better than not doing it.
For example, dogs limping on their back leg that have torn their cranial cruciate ligiment (like the human ACL)... that heals on it's own if you put the dog in a cage for 3 weeks or so. This is now recognized by the industry as "conservative management" but you used to be told that the dog needed surgery. Still they say this only works for small dogs. But this worked for my very large 60kg German shepherd.
Sholder impingement used to get surgery to grind down the acromion to make more space for the tendon. Now they don't do that, they just do physical therapy - just spending a little time hanging from something fixes this (if you have this problem, don't immediately put all your weight into the hang while it is impinged you have to get it to slip through first).
People spend huge sums on surgery or orthotics for plantar fasciitis when $5 athletic tape quickly cures most cases.
There will always be people and subsections of the medical industry dominated by people who are trying to get rich and aren't entirely ethical.
That doesn't mean the entire industry should be discarded, just that you have to do some digging and be choosey.

2024-11-14 19:06:23 GMT

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These count the reactions of other people. The left number is the number of upvotes ("+"), and the right number is the number of emojis (you can hover to see the count of each emoji).

2024-11-14 18:49:25 GMT

This note about Bluesky being down is proxied from mastodon (at least they are federated)
#nevent1q…f436

2024-11-14 18:45:10 GMT

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You might think stories like this are rare. I worked for a client who had pain in his teeth/gums for years that turned out to be a broken tip of a dental instrument. If only he had been x-rayed for cavities sooner.

2024-11-13 18:22:27 GMT

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I wonder what they will do with me. I have a total of 28 sats in my Alby account, which I use for nostr key management in the browser.

2024-11-13 07:55:24 GMT

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Oh, monthly? I thought that was yearly!

2024-11-13 01:31:57 GMT

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I'm not an expert here, but I presume traditional social media cares more about clicks and views far more than user likes. If you clicked, the advertiser can be charged, even if you downvoted. So clickbait wins. We don't have such user-hostile algorithms.

2024-11-13 00:51:18 GMT

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Alby is pretty fucking good. I think it is worth it.

2024-11-12 23:19:44 GMT

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No wait... climate change is all bad! I'm quite sure that is what I've been hearing.

2024-11-12 23:17:16 GMT

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No suprises here. Trump always took the side of the fabulists on this issue.

2024-11-12 23:14:19 GMT

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This was originally a silent black-and-white video. Part of what you are seeing is real, part of it is AI generated.
https://www.newsweek.com/rare-color-footage-1897-street-scene-time-machine-1653984

2024-11-12 22:47:28 GMT

😳
#nevent1q…zlpx

2024-11-12 20:19:09 GMT

I'm starting to PGP sign my git commits with an (obviously) on-line PGP key. I rolled a new one for this, but you can find it in my nostr profile as well as my website.

2024-11-12 07:10:10 GMT

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I have a command like that /usr/bin/qr. It says it is version 7.4.2. It does precisely that.

2024-11-12 04:41:38 GMT

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Yes agreed. People generally trust science (that process of observation, hypothesis and testing). It is the bureaucracy around publicly-funded science that they don't trust.

2024-11-11 07:31:02 GMT

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Do you ever wonder if it is sending the data to the NSA and that is why it takes so long?

2024-11-11 07:28:33 GMT

Here is a reminder for those who forget to do something: Don't forget to do it.

2024-11-09 22:53:09 GMT

#politics #crimea #ukraine
On X I'm seeing a trending tag "Crimea is Ukraine". But according to the demographics it was never populated by more than 25% ethnic Ukrainians and it is currently populated by 70% ethnic Russians.
If you want to argue that the Russians stole Ukraine, you could make a far better argument that they stole it from the Tatars than that they stole it from the Ukrainians. Up to about 1835 is was nearly 90% Tartars. Now it is only 10% Tartar (a remarkable comeback from 0.2% that happened during the Ukrainian administration). The Tartars were ethnically cleansed by Joseph Stalin in 1944.
You might then argue that Ukrainian administration respected the Tartars far more than the Soviets did. I agree. But this has no impact on what modern-day Russia is or would do, which is hardly comparible to Joseph Stalin's rule.
In any case, Crimea is unlikely to change hands at this point, and giving that it is mostly ethnic Russians speaking Russian I don't think it should. "Crimea is Russia" is more accurate and more reasonable than "Crimea is Ukraine".

2024-11-09 22:30:27 GMT

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But nukes haven't destroyed themselves because there is too much overkill.
The new weapons are precise enough to destroy just their own industry. And of course the enemy's advanced weapons manufacture industry is always the #1 target. Companies that bid for military contracts are volunteering to be targets. They know how effective the technology is, that the enemy also has it, and that the tech will be used on them in the event of an all-out war. I guess for the right premium people will do anything.

2024-11-09 22:22:52 GMT

New advanced autonomous hypersonic military technologies are quite an innovative and manufacturing leap forward. These technologies are so good that they will destroy all of the manufacturing and research facilities creating such technologies.

2024-11-09 19:08:21 GMT

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I think that is the right way to think about animal fat. Many of us already have lots of it on our bodies. And the dose makes the poison.

2024-11-09 00:03:14 GMT

NIP-96 or Blossom?
At first glance I don't like either. Blossom should offer NIP-94 file metadata as HTTP header fields for GET downloads, not just BUD-08 /upload /mirror. Blossom allows delete, but what if two different users upload the same data? NIP-96 OTOH has a complex nip96.json file with weird decisions (e.g. waht if api_url specifies a different hostname? Why have delegated_to_url given that state of affairs? Who is going to understand these complex plan objects?)

2024-11-08 21:25:27 GMT

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Abalone are clearly an alien species from Jupiter

2024-11-08 21:20:43 GMT

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Yes, very educational

2024-11-08 19:42:39 GMT

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He can't fire the fed chairman from the private bank, but congress could repeal the Federal Reserve Act and fire the entire system.

2024-11-07 23:35:26 GMT

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It is a kind1. How is this better than copy-paste?

2024-11-07 23:28:05 GMT

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If you are using NIP 1090 (kind 1010) edits, then most people are only seeing the very first event... they are not seeing these edits that you think you have made.
In order for the rest of us to implement this (if we do a local database) we have to
1) Fetch kind 1010 events
2) Build relationships between them and kind 1 events they refer to
3) When rendering a kind 1 event that has 1010 version data, render the latest of the 1010 versions (maybe indicate the note was edited)
4) When someone replies, the reply needs to 'e' tag the 1010 version event, not the original kind-1 event, making them harder to find/associate (now 2 levels of indirection from the original note). Otherwise if they 'e' tag the original note, people can pull off "edit scams" where they make someone reply to one thing, but people think they replied to something else.
5) Show replies that are not to the latest 1010 as having a hidden ancestory
6) Make some way of rendering the hidden previous-version that was actually replied to (this is actually a very difficult UI/UX problem).
This is complex enough that the original problem (people aren't seeing your edits) will plague us all for at least a year, maybe 3, while clients "upgrade" to the more complex protocol.
It is reasonable for reasonable intelligent people to have different opinions about this state of affairs. Some want to forge ahead with this. Others think the disruption and complexity may be a net negative for the nostr protocol.

2024-11-07 23:12:45 GMT

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I sent ACT a letter saying I wouldn't vote for them again if they kept their policy/rhetoric about the middle east, and explained to them where they have been fooled.
I don't know who I will replace them with though. I'm always hoping that the greens will drop their nutty ideas and focus on the green part, then I can vote for them.

2024-11-07 22:57:59 GMT

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Did you listen to the Joe Rogan interview? 3 hours. I found him very coherent, sharp even. I had to rewind a few spots where I didn't understand but Trump did, to figure out what they were talking about. I'm sure there is context I don't have, but he could immediately have a new context in his head and opine about it much faster than I would expect for a 78 year old. I think it must be the golf.

2024-11-07 22:55:00 GMT

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Democrats were hyper-motivated in 2020 because Trump was in office and that put them in a fit of rage. This time it was Republicans that were more motivated. People are motivated when they hate the status quo and want change. It is far less motivating to say "I want more of the same."
I concur that Kamala didn't inspire. I think Michelle Obama would have done better.
As for imaginary in school trans surgeries... I have never heard of such things, but now that I have... I am firmly against them. I can see the poster now: "No more imaginary in school trans surgeries!"

2024-11-07 21:52:57 GMT

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Your note has a note1' event reference without any associated tags. I could forgive not having the tags, but how am I supposed to find this note? It could be on any of thousands of different relays. There is no relay hint, and no author information so I can't look up which relays the author is using. I'm at a dead end. I'd love to see what you posted but I can't.

2024-11-07 21:49:32 GMT

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I dunno exactly what fork is doing. If it just makes a new note as a copy of an existing note, with a link in the new note, that is fine. If it is using kind 1010 event versioning, that won't be recognized by other clients meaning it creates broken experiences.

2024-11-07 20:53:23 GMT

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Well I fixed it anyways.

2024-11-07 19:35:08 GMT

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Gossip has a bug where ["a", .. , .., "mention"] are being treated as replies. Other clients should see these as top level events. I'll work on a fix.

2024-11-07 18:39:44 GMT

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The problem with lying to the American public is that eventually you start believing your own propaganda.
Here's 7 minutes of Glenn Greenwald talking about how the Media is baffled at Trump's win: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efblZYxlBX8

2024-11-05 04:21:59 GMT

Remember: Vote early, vote often. There is no voter ID. 🤣

2024-11-05 04:12:41 GMT

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Um... gosh! Now I'm not so sure.

2024-11-05 04:08:24 GMT

I predict that Donald Trump will win. But the other likely outcome is that Kamala Harris will win. So yeah, it will be one of those two.

2024-11-04 20:06:51 GMT

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I remember it as countries where they couldn't "vet" the people coming in. So similar. But when I read the source material it doesn't say that specifically.
The way I reason:
1) If a nation state sponsors terrorism against you or your allies, then you cannot trust them
2) This lack of trust extends to their documentation about their people. They have an incentive to send you criminals and militants.
3) Therefore you need to find another way to vet these people without needing to trust their untrustworthy nation states.
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2017/02/01/2017-02281/protecting-the-nation-from-foreign-terrorist-entry-into-the-united-states
https://www.dhs.gov/archive/publication/executive-order-13780-protecting-nation-foreign-terrorist-entry-united-states-initial
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/preliminaryprint/582US2PP_Web.pdf
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/preliminaryprint/585US2PP_final.pdf

2024-11-04 19:56:20 GMT

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Why is the URL scheme hidden? For such a novel scheme I should want to see what it is.

2024-11-04 07:04:13 GMT

#politics #flashback
When Donald Trump took power in 2017, one of the first things he did was to temporarily halt immigration (and entry of foreign nationals) from seven countries (Executive Order 13769). The news media invariably called them "Muslim-majority countries" and called the order a "Muslim ban" and then called Trump a racist. Many people today who I respect on many issues believe this fabrication, believe that Donald Trump was the architect of the Muslim ban so "of course he is racist."
Trump was legally challenged and it went to the Supreme Court, twice, where they determined both times that the president does have the power to enact such an order.
The executive order does not mention religion, neither muslim nor Islam. It doesn't even name the countries (other than Syria)! Rather, it refers to pre-existing legislation: 217(a)(12) of the INA, 8 U.S.C. 1187(a)(12).
8 U.S.C. 1187, mentioned in the executive order, was amended by H.R. 158 on December 9, 2015, by congress during the Obama administration. H.R. 158 was titled the "Visa Waiver Program Improvement and Terrorist Travel Prevention Act of 2015". That act specifically named Iraq and Syria, but it also included any "country that is designated by the Secretary of State ... as a country, the government of which has repeatedly provided support of acts of international terrorism...". (8 U.S.C. 1187(a)(12)(A)(i)(II)). So this by reference included Iran and Sudan. A few months later on 18 February 2016, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) identified three additional countries that would also be covered by the limitation on Visa Waiver Program travel, those being Libya, Somalia and Yemen, because in those countries the government "has repeatedly provided support of acts of international terrorism" (8 U.S.C. 1187) And thus the seven countries were identified and travel restricted more than a year before Donald Trump took office.
PLEASE NOTE: I do not agree with the United States' labels for these countries. This is very much an Israeli view of who are the terrorists that I think you all know that I disagree with. However, what I am saying is that the countries were chosen not-at-all due to their majority religion, but rather entirely because they were the ones that Homeland Security had determined (prior to Trump) to be supporting terrorism. If he wanted to ban Islam he would have included another 30-odd countries. But he didn't even pick the countries.
What is most shocking about this story, however, isn't the mistaken belief of the Trump-haters, nor the propaganda of the news media, but that four supreme court justices felt there was enough "racial animus" to rule the other way in the face of these obvious facts I have laid out. To me, that makes these justices dishonorable: Sotomayor, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Kagan.

2024-11-03 18:20:49 GMT

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I looked at chariot wheels first, where this slips over the part of the axle that protrudes. But I didn't see any chariot wheel pictures or models with 5 spokes.

2024-11-03 07:36:55 GMT

I think the mysterious "Roman" dodecahedrons (those bronze things with knobs at every corner and different sized holes in every face) are wrenches. Imagine a device with a round rod protruding. You put the rod through whichever hole is just big enough, and the protruding knobs press against something at the base of the rod allowing you to tighten or loosen something.

2024-11-03 02:09:56 GMT

Gossip Users: Don't use algo relay as an inbox or outbox. Only use it by viewing it's feed from the link in its relay panel.
#nevent1q…35py

2024-11-03 02:08:08 GMT

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This would be the honest pitch: "Donate your hard earned money to us. We will take it and spend it on propagandizing you. And if we win, you'll have the same shitty conditions as always."

2024-11-03 02:00:19 GMT

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I don't see any rocket launchers in the rubble. Strange.

2024-11-03 01:57:14 GMT

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I don't know how to stop Israel in the short term. I'm sorry your family is affected.
Most people in the West hear that Hezbollah keeps firing rockets into Israel, and so when Israel started yet-another-war with Lebanon on Sep 17 (with the pager attacks) some people think that Lebanon "had it coming". Most people are simply unfamiliar with the day-to-day reality of the situation and only hear one-sided narratives. This bloomberg article: https://archive.is/e2IuM shows that Israel's attacks on Lebanon over time (since after al-Aqsa flood) have been about 3x as OFTEN as the reverse... something I was suprised by, and far more deadly. From that data one could argue that Lebanon was defending itself the whole time... although I'm not sure what they claim.
In the long run at least I think this situation will be resolved. I think Israel has made itself the most hated nation on earth. And I think the US and Israel are declining powers and my hope is that BRICS, once militarily dominant, will treat this area quite differently. People are worried that Russia/China/Iran/N.Korea are "autocracies" and "dictatorships" and don't have liberal values, and rightly so. But Western countries don't honor liberal values as much as they once did, these rising powers have become more liberal over time (China is practically a free market), and in the theory of great power politics liberalism is a luxury nations can only afford after they achieve military dominance. Point being that there is hope.

2024-11-02 21:41:09 GMT

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I think inbox/outbox are the most well understood terms. Other people put things into your inbox, and so you need to check it for new things. You put things into your outbox and everybody comes to see what you have posted. Of course you also put things into other people's inboxes and you read things from other people's outboxes, so clients have four kinds of paths (actually 5 since reading from other people's inboxes lets you see full thread replies).
Gossip also has an unpublished outbox called "write" which instructs gossip to always write to this relay (in addition to the norm) whenever it writes.
Gossip also has an unpublished inbox called "read" which instructs gossip to always read from this relay (in addition to the norm) whenever it is seeking something.
These terms and usages might be confusing and I'd take feedback on alternate names for these.

2024-11-02 21:28:25 GMT

Today I learned about the shepherd's leap. Wow.

2024-11-01 19:25:15 GMT

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Clothes are a blessing. Thank god we don't have to see.

2024-10-31 23:58:58 GMT

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COVID was great for that given everyone wore masks all the time. And remember to pay in cash.

2024-10-31 23:50:20 GMT

On providing and verifying hashes for linked media content:
#nevent1q…g427

2024-10-31 23:49:04 GMT

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If a media service optimizes an image and then provides the URL, we will download the optimized image and hash that and provide that in the imeta tag, along with 'ox' for the original data pre-optimized. The x tag should still verify. This is work I haven't done yet (most of this last week was refactoring, not actually adding this new code).

2024-10-31 23:47:17 GMT

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That is what I'm doing with gossip. It will show an error message in the place of where the image would have been, as well as a link so that you can view it in a browser if you want to. It won't show the altered image.

2024-10-31 23:45:24 GMT

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I for one am not dismissive. If I post an innocent frog meme and somebody at the website where it is stored at (not mine) changes it to a swastika, that reflects badly on me and most nostr users will have no idea that I didn't post a swastika... thinking about how events are digitally signed it sure seems like I did!
Previously some people argued for storing binary objects inside of events. I argued against due to performance reasons and CSAM legal reasons, not signature reasons. I like the imeta 'x' field a lot and I think all the clients should both produce imeta tags with 'x' and also verify them.
My head wasn't even in this space a few weeks back and gossip is playing "catch up" on this. It does neither thing currently (on master) but I just got it verifying on unstable, and soon I will work on adding the imeta tag for links when posting.

2024-10-31 23:40:57 GMT

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The above post was a test to help me develop some new gossip code that will be on master within a week or two, which I just completed.

2024-10-31 02:03:06 GMT

This event has the wrong hash for this image. How does your client deal with that?
https://mikedilger.com/bs.png

2024-10-30 03:37:00 GMT

#politics
The CIA fails to revolutionize Georgia again. How dare they pay attention to what happened to Ukraine!
https://rumble.com/v5kobh6-oh-sht-u.s.-threatening-color-revolution-in-georgia-as-expected-redacted-w-.html
https://rumble.com/v5kno19-color-revolution-coming-to-georgia-again.html

2024-10-27 02:20:24 GMT

https://i.imgflip.com/981sx8.jpg

2024-10-25 00:43:51 GMT

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Poor science? I'm INTJ.
A lot of personality typing was created with arbitrary categories that made sense to their creators, and then science used to see how people fell into these categories. The enneagram system is another one created by people without a deep understanding of statistics. Such systems are useful, but don't express the actual fundamental personality grouping and differences very well.
I think the only personality typing system that used multivariate analysis to determine groupings of personality traits scientifically, and only then figure out what those groups mean, is the OCEAN/CANOE system otherwise known as Big 5.
Along OCEAN I am:
Openness to experience: very high
Conscientiousness: high
Extraversion: lowish
Agreeableness: neutral (higher when I was younger, and dropping)
Neuroticism: neutral (higher when I was younger, and dropping)

2024-10-24 00:20:59 GMT

It is time to fork the linux kernel. Sadly linux has become the latest casualty of war.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linus-Torvalds-Russian-Devs

2024-10-22 00:37:31 GMT

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Yes it happened with Ukraine too. I hypothesize that a lot of such deals were made with the aim of stopping nuclear proliferation. The theory could extend to the idea that Russia has a deal with Iran to not build nukes, in exchange for Russia defending Iran (The US couldn't do that with Iran since Israel and Iran are at odds and the US couldn't promise defense to both sides.... well they could in secret like the UK always did I guess).

2024-10-21 23:50:18 GMT

#politics #hypothesis
I don't think Israel has nuclear weapons. Strategic nuclear weapons are a deterrant, but they are never useful in actual use (you would be retaliated against with nukes too). So I think they want the deterrance value without the cost.
In order to make sure Iran believes Israel could nuke them, they arranged a fake US intelligence leak confirming that Israel has nukes. But that leak is clearly fake because the white house and Israel both confirmed it and the news media ran with it... if it was a true leak they would have denied it and covered it up.
I haven't heard this theory out there anywhere, so I'm putting it out there.

2024-10-18 22:08:22 GMT

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We use 24GB. I could make a launch option to set it smaller I suppose.

2024-10-18 22:06:50 GMT

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Ah yes. You have to tell it how big the database might eventually become ... a max size... when you create it. If you don't have that much space it would fail.

2024-10-18 22:04:24 GMT

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Also I pushed a commit that includes "build.sh" which asks some questions and then figures out the compile settings from your answers.

2024-10-18 22:03:42 GMT

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You should install Microsoft Visual C/C++ which includes 'clang-cl'.
You should aslo install cmake
Then you'll have half a chance at least.
It's not easy to entirely avoid 'ring' and 'ring' is plagued with these kinds of architecture build issues. Here is another Windows on ARM bug in ring that is still open that we may trip even if we fix the one you are currently getting: https://github.com/briansmith/ring/issues/2135 Apparently their build system is so complex that nobody can fix it. Even the author Brian is asking people to please submit PRs to fix it 😆
Some libraries moved away from ring and went to aws-lc-rs (e.g. rustls) and they got so much shit from other problems of making this switch that he had to lock the github issues! https://github.com/rustls/rustls/issues?q=is%3Aissue++aws-lc+
So there are definitely many upstream issues still.

2024-10-17 22:04:20 GMT

rustls just merged raw public key support (can be used in place of certificates): https://github.com/rustls/rustls/pull/2062
Once released we will be able to run servers over TLS that don't need certificates, not even self-signed ones, but just use a key (unfortunately not a secp256k1 key since there is no TLS support for those).

2024-10-16 01:49:50 GMT

People who are "word thinkers" will be very confused by the idea that nostr is both censorship-resistant and pro-censorship.
Nostr helps ensure that people who want to be heard, and their listeners who want to hear them, can continue in their free speech. As long as people have access to the Internet, without much effort people can keep these free speech channels open. But it takes two to tango. Both the speaker and the listener (and their relays) must choose not to close down or censor the communication. Nostr also empowers users and relays to censor out anything they don't like or want.
This is like having your cake and eating it too.
#nevent1q…8rlm

2024-10-14 23:25:56 GMT

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What confuses me is the upwards spike in trust around 2018. Nobody that I knew became more trusting during Russiagate.

2024-10-14 23:24:02 GMT

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Behold the majestic lion in it's natural habitat at the local watering hole

2024-10-14 22:26:19 GMT

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I only disagree with that critique a little bit.
I shouldn't have said most people are good (I'm not even sure what good means) what I should have said is that most people are "mostly harmless" (as opposed to psychopathic power seekers). Hat tip to the late Douglas Adams.
Most Israelis are not happy with Netanyahu and some 2 million are leaving or in the process of leaving because he has escalated which makes them less safe. I'm not saying they don't want Arab blood, but they don't want to live in fear of counterattacks... which is why I had to make the next paragraph to explain that.
I don't know who you are referring to when you talk about a "Cyberattack by Space Aliens" that certainly was not me.
I agree that religion, which seems harmless at first, ends up making some people very dangerous either due to radical us-vs-them beliefs (as in this case) or radical "God forgives me so I can rape this choir boy" beliefs, or other similar unhinged things. I instinctively don't trust religious people very much... I see it as proof of a brain malfunction.

2024-10-13 21:20:21 GMT

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I'm very familiar with Dr Greger. I have that book and I have read it. Dr Greger's diet advice is pretty good and his work at nutritionfacts.org is a good reference.
But Dr Greger over-states the case for a pure plant-based diet. He seems to have gotten excited by feedback from his followers, driving him to overstate a number of things. Gil Carvalho (who thinks a lot like I do so I respect his view) has a fact-check on him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XjmvBFt63k I think Gil is being overly harsh here, but it is still useful.
The diet-health-vegetarianism connection comes out of Seventh-Day Adventism which got it from Ellen G White (a women hit in the head with a rock so hard as a kid that she started having "visions"), who thought she got it from God, but probably got it from Reverend Sylvester Graham. All of this happened before 1900 without the benefit of science. But once people have a belief, it is hard to shake, and since SDAs were some of the first doing medical research into diet, their religious beliefs (including vegetarianism) became (unsuprisingly) the healthiest diet.
Not only is it very clear that a pure plant-based diet is deficient in a lot of things (B12, iron) but a lot of research shows that unprocessed low-saturated-fat meats are at least as healthy as grains, and the cohort of SDAs who add fish to a plant-based diet live longer than those who don't.

2024-10-13 05:22:14 GMT

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I'm aware of much you wrote there, but not all of those details. This is well done.

2024-10-12 23:24:17 GMT

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You mean the keto diet foods, or the stuff I listed at the end? I have IBS-D, so being "stopped up" is a welcome relief. In fact they seem to cancel and so for me it makes me normal and regular.

2024-10-12 22:56:33 GMT

#diet
Day 12 of keto diet. I'm only down 1.3 kg (about the weight of glycogen and water) so far. I hit that number already on day 3, so really no progress for 9 days now. I'm rather disappointed, I thought I could eat as much as I want and still lose weight. Maybe the reason this works for so many people is that they were previously eating junk... whereas I was not previously eating junk. I've been using strips to test my ketosis and I've stayed in ketosis the whole time.
On the plus side the diet is quite satiating. It's super easy to do. I don't have cravings and don't have to use will-power to make it through. I could do this forever if I chose to, nearly effortlessly.
The other plus is my IBS is gone. This isn't the first time I've been able to do that -- just giving up grains, milk and coffee caused it to go away previously. I've identified all three of those as culprits, each multiplying the effect of the others.
Only I'm not convinced that eating a diet that doesn't cause weight loss but does jack up my LDL is a good idea (please don't respond with "LDL is good" unless you personally authored the study ok? I don't draw scientific conclusions from Internet advisors).
So I'll probably move back to a grain-free (but with beans), milk-free (but with cheese), sugar-free, heavy vegetable and meat diet with fruit in season.... but I'll give keto a bit longer.

2024-10-12 22:38:19 GMT

#politics #middleeast
I believe most humans are good decent people. I also believe that psychopaths are drawn to positions of power. And so good and decent people everywhere are led by psychopaths.
No more stark and obvious is this than in modern day Israel. Israel is suffering as a target of terrorism from Hamas, from Hezbollah, from the Houthis, from Iran, but most of all from the ultranationalists.
Yes, you heard right. The ultranationalists, the most psychopathic of them all, threaten to assassinate any leader who doesn't fulfil the prophesy by taking all of greater Israel by force, just as they assassinated Yitzhak Rabin once it was clear he supported the Oslo accords and was willing to walk the path of peace to a two-state solution. I believe Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, was assassinated because he wanted a peace deal. Peace is not on the menu when Israel is driven by ultranationalists. Haniyeh was not a militant, he was a political leader, the lead negotiator.
Does this mean I believe Benjamin Netanyahu is under duress? No. Not him. But others. And the people of Israel are mostly very unhappy with this path Israel is taking.
Yet some 70% of them (if I understand correctly) approve of genociding the Palestinians. I believe this is because they have been consistently lied to and brainwashed since birth. I don't know what happened to Germans after WW2 but I'm sure it took them some time to come out of their brainwashing. Israel will also need time to reflect on what has been done.
I think what needs to be done is that a coalition of world powers needs to enforce a 2-state solution, irrespective of any U.N. security council decision with it's vetoes. If the US insists of fighting it, they will have to fight it with their weaponry. They will have to fight Iran, Russia, China, Pakistan, Hungary, Turkey, Indonesia, India, France!, Britain!, Australia! ... will the US turn on all it's former allies (all of which support enforcing a 2-state solution) just to defend Israel's genocide? I don't think so.
As I have said before, I do not believe in a one-state solution "from the river to the sea". Israel is a fact of life that has existed as a state longer all but a very few human beings. For the same reason that American's shouldn't all move back to Europe and leave America to the natives, I think Israelis can't be expected to move back to Europe at this point. Maybe before, but it is too late now.
Once Israel is controlled by force, and it's current war criminal leaders imprisoned, then the long process of deradicalization will begin.
As you can see from my writings, I am not anti-semitic, nor am I even anti-Zionist. I am anti-psychopath, anti-genocide, pro-liberty and pro-enforcement of civility... it is those classical liberal beliefs that inform my views on this topic.