straycat
david

https://straycat.brainstorm.social

neurologist and freedom tech maxi
🍇 Grapevine, 🧠⚡️Brainstorm

Public Key

npub1u5njm6g5h5cpw4wy8xugu62e5s7f6fnysv0sj0z3a8rengt2zqhsxrldq3

NIP-05 Address

david@bitcoinpark.com

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsw2feday2t6vqh2hzrnwywd9v6g0yayejgx8cf83g7n3ue594pqtcpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduq3kamnwvaz7tmjv4kxz7fwvf5hgcm0d9h8qctjdvhxxmmdct8mh3

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

relay.bitcoinpark.com

david.nostr1.com

Author Public Key

npub1u5njm6g5h5cpw4wy8xugu62e5s7f6fnysv0sj0z3a8rengt2zqhsxrldq3

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Last Notes

2025-05-19 04:20:05

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Repeal 1913

2025-05-19 00:38:54

The second half of Andor season 2 is a contender for the best Star Wars of all time. Really outstanding.

2025-05-12 17:47:35

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I see it

2025-05-07 16:58:50

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The purpose of my current iteration (see link in my nostr bio) is to determine whether strfry + neo4j is the stack upon which to build brainstorm. I think neo4j is probably the best FOSS graph db, and strfry is arguably the best relay: well written, battle tested, uses LMDB which is super fast. The challenge is to pipe the data from the relay to neo4j, and there aren’t any off the shelf LMDB to neo4j tools for that purpose. There are, however, SQL to neo4j tools, which makes me wonder whether something like khatru (which offers sql and lmdb as db options, if I recall correctly) might be a better choice.
So far with my current iteration, I got the basic strfry to neo4j pipeline working for follows, mutes and reports, it calculates PageRank / graperank / hops, and has a few features on top of what my last iteration does, like a personalized follows rec page and a curated nip-56 reports page. You can check those features out using the link on my bio. I haven’t advertised it much though bc of some bugs that came up - not sure if the data synchronization is keeping up. I’m wondering if it’s time for me to hire some experts to build out the relay to neo4j ETL pipeline.

2025-05-07 14:16:03

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I had a great time in this convo with Shawn & excited to see it finally drop!! 🔥 💜 🎙️

2025-05-02 22:38:24

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If you filter out the bots, probably nobody has more than ~ 10k or so followers

2025-05-02 18:31:23

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I suppose I may as well. I mean, people do keep saying you can just do things … 😂
Once I finish the optimization I’m working on, maybe that next.

2025-05-02 17:38:00

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Ah, I didn’t realize that (either of those things).
@npub1kpt…nhmz do you want a competitor to offer personalized PageRank via WoT DVM? The point would be to demonstrate interoperability, which I think is important.
Or is the dvm spec gonna die on the vine? I’ve only partly been listening to the dvm debate. Most of my attention has been focused on trying to optimize the sync pipeline between strfry and neo4j.

2025-05-02 15:24:22

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That would be easy enough to do but there’s no sense building out a spec that no one is going to use and if the spec is about to be upended anyway.
To my knowledge there are 2 teams eager to offer personalized WoT scores, team vertex and team grapevine, but 0 clients ready to consume them. Why is that?

2025-05-02 15:00:09

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So does npub.world uses your DVM or not? If a competitor were to offer personalized PageRank scores via DVM then npub.world would not accept them?

2025-05-02 03:15:37

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Agreed! 💪🏻😊

2025-05-02 03:07:54

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Almost exactly my grocery list

2025-05-01 21:39:35

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straycat.brainstorm.social currently curates nip-56 reports using graperank. I could do basically the same thing for Follow Packs. Then offer the list of curated follow packs via API which nostrmeet.me could access.

2025-05-01 21:31:48

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Grapevine-vetted Follow Packs

2025-05-01 21:27:07

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💯
If you’re borrowing against your bitcoin, you may as well open a long position on a derivatives market, and if you’re doing that you may as well be a day trader, and if you’re doing that you may as well play slot machines at Vegas.
Stay humble and stack sats is the smartest thing for most people.

2025-05-01 21:17:21

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In this case, you’re talking about providers of personalized WoT scores, right?

2025-05-01 18:33:18

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Right now I calculate scores and whitelists based on follows, mutes and reports, and use that to filter spam out of streaming content (kinds 1, 7, etc). So I’m starting to think about how content could be used to create useful metrics. So far, the only metric I use is a “recency” metric. If an npub hasn’t posted within some time frame, it won’t be on the follows recommendations page:
https://straycat.brainstorm.social/follow-recs.html
Have you written up any of the engagement metrics you had in mind? Maybe I could try implementing some of them.

2025-05-01 17:55:52

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a good case for personal WoT relays

2025-05-01 16:36:40

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I thought they used their WoT DVM spec for something
https://github.com/nostr-protocol/data-vending-machines/pull/38

2025-05-01 15:36:25

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@npub176p…vgup and @npub1wf4…dgh9 what say you? Is your WoT API better with or without the DVM part?

2025-05-01 15:12:36

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Have you gotten back to work on it yet? I’ve been making progress in my pairing of strfry and neo4j

2025-04-30 18:17:22

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My current plan is to fast from time to time up to about 72 hours, keto maybe 50% of the time in stretches of maybe a few weeks.

2025-04-29 23:43:33

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https://nostringer.starknetonbitcoin.com won’t open for me - invalid certificate maybe

2025-04-29 16:36:33

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GM! ☀️

2025-04-29 15:57:39

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Happy Birthday! 🎊🎈🎉

2025-04-29 14:47:26

The Brainstorm personal WoT relay is starting to come together. Have mine running at https://straycat.brainstorm.social. One of the features is curation of NIP-56 reports. From what my grapevine tells me, there are a handful of impersonator accounts that have quite a few followers!
https://i.nostr.build/pyzXlAWeufKx24NI.png

2025-04-29 12:03:15

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gm Shawn!

2025-04-28 15:23:54

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Cool!
I have a draft ring signature NIP — I’d be curious to hear your thoughts Abdel and Leo whether this NIP would be useful with Nostringer. If so I’ll submit it as a PR for discussion.
https://github.com/wds4/nips/blob/master/ring-signatures.md

2025-04-28 01:43:52

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GN and PV! 🫂

2025-04-25 19:41:00

Tekkadan Social Graph Analysis:
analysis of the interactions and relationships between the social graphs of two users
- follow recommendations by one user for the other
- mutual follows
- mutual followers
- mutual frens
- mutual groupies
- mutual idols
etc
@npub12zq…99h8
🧠 ⚡️ 🍇

2025-04-24 20:13:18

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Dawn you prompted me to write this draft NIP for ring signatures:
https://github.com/wds4/nips/blob/master/ring-signatures.md
@npub1man…n9tn I made some of the changes we discussed.
@npub19ma…axkl this is the kind of application that will make WoT very powerful.

2025-04-24 19:18:05

🔥
#note1qqq…rn3q

2025-04-24 19:15:09

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Looks from the repo like @npub1ce7…3d7m is using NIP-87 (which isn’t merged) to list and review mints.
https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/pull/1110
lists of mints and their capabilities:
38172 and 38173
38000: mint recommendations with ad-hoc 5-star voting:
https://github.com/MakePrisms/bitcoinmints/issues/22
So Brainstorm will weigh the 5-star votes using personalized graperank score, and you’ll have a personalized list of mints recommended by your WoT.
#brainstorm
🍇 🧠 ⚡️
@npub1man…n9tn
@npub10np…tl5h

2025-04-24 18:49:00

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Ohhhhhhhhhh 👀

2025-04-24 18:31:01

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So these are “recommended by Calle” mints? Does nostr have a formal way to endorse things like mints other than a kind 1 note?

2025-04-22 20:42:12

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Precisely what the baseline GrapeRank score is for!
Now imagine a personalized WoT relay that calculates “red flag” scores based on NIP-56 reports, weighted by GrapeRank scores so you can trust the reports. You decide which reports (nudity, profanity, etc) go on your blacklist. Primal queries your relay via API (WoT DVM) to make sure your blacklist is respected.
Whenever a new category of bad actor pops up, the community can invent a new NIP-56 report tag. You tell your personal relay whether to add that tag to your personal blacklist. Easy peasy.
🧠 ⚡️ 🍇

2025-04-22 14:23:39

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Hehe🤭

2025-04-22 14:12:22

It’s insane what vibe coding can do today
Grok only knows what it’ll be able to build a year from now
#note1yuc…p88s

2025-04-22 03:06:48

One of the things that makes GrapeRank different than most (all?) other WoT scores out there in the wild right now is that it is designed to function as the weight in trust-weighted sums and averages. This may not sound very exciting, but it’s pretty important. Kinda indispensable, I think.
#wot 🧠 ⚡️ 🍇

2025-04-21 23:42:07

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My current version of Brainstorm runs a router to stream events and has several streams set up by default. I have a toggle button to edit strfry-router.config when your WoT is calculated (including your whitelist) and you’re ready to start streaming kind1 notes and other content.

2025-04-21 23:38:27

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The strfry router command does exactly what you’re asking for, if I understand you correctly. Just use your WoT to decide which friendly and trustworthy relays you want to open streams with. Use a different filter with each relay if you wish, like if you trust relay1 for wikis, relay2 for zaps, relay3 for kind1, relay4 for profile data, etc. One of many reasons I’m happy with using strfry for Brainstorm.
https://github.com/hoytech/strfry/blob/master/docs/router.md

2025-04-21 15:32:34

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Zaps can definitely serve as a trust signal and contribute towards WoT calculations. Many other trust signals: reactions, replies, labels, badges, reports, mutes … there’s no limit to the number of trust signals we might want to use. This is why one of the most important steps in GrapeRank is something we call interpretation: you pick your signal, write a script to convert the signal into a format ready to be ingested by the GrapeRank algo, and then use it in contextual GrapeRank score calculations.
For now, for Brainstorm (a personal WoT relay under development), I’m interpreting follows, mutes, and reports into a baseline GrapeRank score, the purpose of which is to filter out bots and spam. At some point I’m thinking I may interpret zaps, reactions, and replies and use them to create one or more “engagement” GrapeRank scores that can be used in a variety of ways. Eventually you and your community will have the tools to pick your own signals, create new interpretation scripts, and create new GrapeRank scores. All of these scores will be made readily available to any nostr client that wants to use them.

2025-04-21 04:31:52

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As a general rule, the rationale for flaunting one’s acceptance of obvious logical fallacies is that it demonstrates one’s loyalty to the tribe. You have to drink the kool aid to gain acceptance to the group. The more bitter tasting the kool aid, the more loyal you gotta be to drink it.

2025-04-20 20:22:39

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Does that make sense? We have two sigs: the usual nostr one in the “sig” field and the ring sig as the third item in the tag.

2025-04-20 19:52:16

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It’s a ring signature spec bc the content field is verifiably signed by one of the <pk>s in the tag, without revealing which one.

2025-04-20 19:42:37

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I’m thinking:
NIP: vanilla ring signatures
event type: any
authored by a one time, throwaway pubkey
special tag:
[
“ring-signature”,
“[<pk1>, <pk2>, …]”,
<ring-signature>
]
The message that is signed by the ring signature will be whatever is in the content field.
The fact that we’re using a one-time use throwaway pubkey means that WoT will not be a feasible method to prevent spam. It will therefore be recommended but optional to use something like PoW for spam mitigation. If spam becomes a problem, relays can reject any note with the ring signature tag that does not meet the PoW threshold.
And that’s it. Pretty simple.

2025-04-20 17:45:29

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Once a handful of people are using Brainstorm, you’ll have the option of syncing with them. If you don’t know who they are, sync with whatever relays that you know about, like primal or damus, and them switch to decentralized relays once your WoT tells you which ones exist and can be trusted.
With Brainstorm, the initial baseline GrapeRank WoT scores are to sort the real users from the bots, nothing more complicated than that. Nothing contextual, doesn’t require all that much data. For now, I’m using follows, mutes and reports and those can sync up pretty quickly. Once the bots are filtered out, you can start to build a few contextual trust metrics, and one of the first will be trusted relays.

2025-04-20 16:19:46

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The closest I could find to a draft proposal is NIP 404 Ghost Events — seems to me we could make one much more simple than that. A vanilla Ring Signature NIP, nothing else. Maybe a special event kind, or maybe any event kind but with a special tag to indicate that the sig is a ring signature and to specify the list of pubkeys in the ring. The difficulty would be that relays would normally reject these events unless they know to check for valid ring signatures, and that would require a pretty big change in how relays work. And whose pubkey goes in the event pubkey field? Maybe we’d need a throwaway pubkey as the author to act as a wrapper for the ring-signed message.
Shall we try writing one up?
https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/pull/1676

2025-04-20 15:46:50

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From the Wikipedia article on ring signatures:
In the original paper, Rivest, Shamir, and Tauman described ring signatures as a way to leak a secret. For instance, a ring signature could be used to provide an anonymous signature from "a high-ranking White House official", without revealing which official signed the message.
I could see this being useful. In some instances, people would feel more comfortable issuing a NIP-56-like report if they could hide behind a ring signature. This would provide an additional source of data that we could feed into a graperank interpretation engine.

2025-04-20 15:17:47

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I’m imagining that if I call up customer service for some company and tell them I’ve lost access to an account and need them to restore access, I could ask N people in my WoT to attest that I’ve told them in the real world that my request is real, I’m not under duress, etc. This would enable the customer service rep to process requests more efficiently.

2025-04-20 15:09:45

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Hmm, that’s interesting. I bet there could be some applications there. Like if Alice wants to report Bob, she doesn’t want to reveal her identity as the reporter, but she wants the report to be trusted so she makes a list of N trustworthy pubkeys where she’s on the list and signs using a ring signature.
Perhaps FROST could be used for this. Not exactly ring signatures, but related. Any thoughts @npub1man…n9tn ?
Definitely something to keep in the back of our minds!

2025-04-20 05:27:50

DCoNR:
Decentralized Curation of NIP-56 Reports
#WoT
🍇 🧠 ⚡️
#note16np…9un4

2025-04-20 05:14:06

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You could use a NIP-56, kind 1984 event to report a pubkey using “paid shill” as a custom report type.
Your personalized WoT relay could gather all reports with this type (or similar types), discarding reports authored by pubkeys not in your WoT to mitigate gaming the system. If paid shills becomes a problem that people actually care about, they can start using this system.
https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/56.md

2025-04-20 04:17:35

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Imagine a personalized WoT relay that decides what goes on your feed, trending lists, recommended follows, etc, and the client fetches that from your personal relay. Which means that if you want mute to mean mute, then it does bc you control your relay.

2025-04-20 03:58:47

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🎯
And hopefully, the people in my grapevine who are paying attention will be able and willing to flag the bad actors as such. (This would be an example of what I mean by explicit contextual trust attestations.)

2025-04-19 22:16:33

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2 more hours to go in my 48 hour fast. Just espresso & electrolytes

2025-04-19 19:29:44

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@npub1aka…l9dl agree?

2025-04-19 19:28:58

What can WoT do for businesses?
How about this: address the problem of hacked accounts via social engineering. Empower customer service to require social proof before providing access to sensitive data.
@npub1man…n9tn
@npub1clk…pup9

2025-04-19 01:22:46

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I think I have that book on a shelf somewhere along with 20 other books in the freedom tech space, all on my to-read list lol. I hadn’t heard Jason talk about WoT but I’d be curious to know how deeply he’s thought about it

2025-04-19 00:43:23

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Did you find them useful? Still use them?

2025-04-19 00:28:12

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I’m eager to see you make more progress!
I’m making good progress on my personal WoT relay. Baseline trust scores depend mostly on follows (with some dependence on mutes and reports), but more algos will be incorporated; having multiple ways to calculate trust scores is the idea.

2025-04-18 17:17:09

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This is my theory why we haven’t met any aliens. Because they always send their nanobots first, and in all those timelines, we’re dead.

2025-04-18 12:59:23

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gm! ☀️

2025-04-18 00:21:38

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Would be cool to show a big convo where one of the axes is time so you can see where it branches off into threads. Each node is a note, and maybe the radius of the node represents some WoT-derived importance score.

2025-04-18 00:16:25

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@npub12zq…99h8 you were just telling me about this article

2025-04-17 14:51:26

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Replace it with a verified follower count, where verified means in my WoT.

2025-04-15 18:50:43

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In the simplest case, Alice would decide.
For example: suppose she runs a personal WoT relay. She sets up a keyword search of her relay’s content for science-related keywords (as selected by her), makes that content available as a “channel”. By subscribing to her channel, you’re effectively trusting her not only to tend to her grapevine but also to select relevant keywords.
Whatdya think?

2025-04-15 02:21:25

Imagine a personalized WoT relay where the relay owner’s grapevine (WoT) creates topic-specific channels of content.
So for example, if you trust Alice and her grapevine to curate science content, you can subscribe to her WoT relay’s science channel:
wss://alice-grapevine-relay.com/science
🤔

2025-04-13 18:46:33

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Any info on this I can look up?

2025-04-13 18:17:41

Has anybody built any AI tools that pair with a nostr relay, digest all its contents, and act as a single relay search engine?
I’m envisioning a personal WoT relay from which spam has been largely weeded out. You’d have lots of high quality data and you’d need a way to search it. Keyword search with results stratified by various WoT metrics is one way, but maybe AI can help with that.
@npub1mgv…pdjc I recall we started to have a convo about this in Nostriga last year but i think we got cut short. Anyone doing this?

2025-04-12 03:36:27

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In the very near future, we’ll be able to ask AI to take a messy repo and make it maintainable, and it’ll do it and do it well. I don’t know how long this will take, but probably sooner than we think.

2025-04-11 14:51:43

👀 🍇
#note1sgf…0j6w

2025-04-10 22:48:34

The Force is strong with @npub19ma…axkl
🍇
#note1dqr…4nll

2025-04-10 22:32:43

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🍇🧠⚡️💪🏻

2025-04-10 22:24:18

👀
#note10jr…yvhc

2025-04-10 20:19:22

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The next iteration of my project will hopefully mark my shift from R&D mode to build and ship mode.
I mean, it’s only taken me, what? 10 years, give or take 😝😂

2025-04-09 23:59:54

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You’re tackling a tough, interesting and important questions: what can freedom tech in general, and nostr specifically, do for businesses? In particular, businesses whose execs may or may not spend any time out of their day thinking about “freedom tech” in the abstract sense? What are the nuts and bolts problems that nostr can solve for businesses and consumers, without using power words like freedom or self-sovereign?
@npub1man…n9tn thinks a lot about this. @npub1clk…pup9 has a whole podcast, Trust Revolution, that addresses this topic head on.
Slowly but surely we’re answering these questions with more and better products, clients, tools, and services. I’m proud of our nostr community, I gotta say. 💜
https://fountain.fm/show/Mk0fJte5vrfiDQ5RyCZd

2025-04-08 18:23:16

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Nice! Ok, it’s bumped up higher on my to do list 🔥

2025-04-08 16:01:36

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I continue to believe @npub1gcx…nj5z's NIP-85 and your and @npub1wf4…dgh9 ‘s WoT DVM are complementary ways to communicate personalized WoT scores, with a time and a place for each solution. I also believe that once we’ve done the hard work of gathering the raw data and calculating personalized WoT scores, it will be a relatively simple matter to make those score available in whatever format or formats is in demand by the community.
Lately I’ve been focused on my next iteration of the Grapevine as a personalized WoT DVM. It publishes multiple personalized scores using NIP-85 and is close to being ready for people to try it out. Adding support for your WoT DVM is on my to do list, but there’s only so much time in the day. But I’ll be inclined to get to it sooner if we can get some client devs to voice their support for the spec.
Are there any clients (in addition to zapstore) ingesting scores via your WoT DVM NIP?

2025-04-08 04:11:11

Radiohead
Karma Police
Every note leaves you guessing whether you’re on the road towards redemption or damnation
brilliantly disconcerting
🎶 For a minute there I lost myself 🎼

2025-04-04 14:51:12

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I have a Rocket R58 and it’s awesome ☕️

2025-04-04 14:19:18

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I’ve been using windsurf for maybe a month or so. It feels like:
Claude 3.7 ✖️me 🟰 5 of me 😂
Today, I’m refactoring the api for my personal WoT relay. It’s like I have a junior tech who knows EVERYTHING but I have to keep on a really really tight leash.

👀
#note1aff…z37h

👀
#note1657…2r76

👀
#nevent1q…n3kf

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Nice 👍🏻
If you could add any WoT-related features to relay tools on top of its current functionality, what would you ask for?
@npub10np…tl5h

2025-03-25 18:45:13

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How about a personal WoT relay, controlled by the user, that provides the rec list. The client provides the UX. If the client starts tweaking rec lists, you’ll know it.

2025-03-25 17:45:35

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Do you think a personalized Recommended list would help with this problem? I presume Primal’s Rec list is still a global one.

2025-03-25 02:47:52

Information stored in the form of quantum bits (as opposed to classical bits) cannot be copied, according to the QM no-cloning theorem.
Which means a quantum database is effectively a bearer instrument.
If there exists some variation of the idea of PoW that is stored in quantum bits, then it could serve as money. No need for a blockchain.
idk what constitutes work in this scenario, or how it is proven without destroying the information, or whether a suitable Schelling point exists to help answer these questions. Maybe time to read Feynman’s old textbook where he proposes the idea of quantum computation.

2025-03-25 02:34:50

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It’s bc we haven’t yet implemented WoT, not really

2025-03-25 02:32:29

I wonder if the no-cloning theorem of quantum mechanics could offer a non-blockchain based solution to the double spend problem 🤔

2025-03-25 02:04:41

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The idea is that we have no choice but to use the data that is available to us. We go where the signal is. Different people will have different ideas on that.
Example: if you trust zaps more than anything else, someone (a dev) will need to write a (relatively simple) script that transforms zaps into a format that is ready to be consumed by your GrapeRank calculation engine. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that format resembles an explicit trust attestation; it has a rating, a confidence, and a context. The format that my WoT engine employs may or may not be identical to the format that yours employs.
I’m not sure what you mean by sentiment analysis, but whatever it is, you or some other dev would write a script to consume raw data (nostr events) and spit out data ready to be utilized by GrapeRank. If it’s a good signal then you could share the “interpretation” script with other users.
Hopefully that makes sense … let me know if it doesn’t!

2025-03-24 18:04:53

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In the back of my mind I’d like to write a long form post on the thought process that everyone in nostr eventually walks down when considering the question: where does the trust signal come from? At first we think follows provides the best signal, then we change our minds and think the best signal should come from explicit trust attestations, then we realize the signal comes from lots of directions and we need to figure out how to interpret it no matter where the signal comes from. Which is much more tractable than it sounds.

2025-03-24 17:57:48

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Are any other clients consuming your personalized trust scores using your WoT DVM spec? I really want to see that happen. Do we need to make some noise so devs know this option exists? Talk about it on a pod maybe?

2025-03-24 13:09:09

👀
#note1j9w…8qyh

2025-03-23 21:31:34

personalized knowledge graph with WoT, working hand in hand
optimized to seek decentralized consensus with other similarly constructed entities
that’s it, that’s the idea

2025-03-21 14:32:31

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At least 😅

2025-03-21 13:44:56

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Something similar to @npub1clk…pup9's Trust Revolution but much more narrowly focused

2025-03-21 13:43:47

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I know he’s 🔥 — has he covered this topic?

2025-03-21 13:35:26

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gm ngk!