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

mike@mikedilger.com

NIP-57 Address

decentbun13@walletofsatoshi.com

Profile Code

nprofile1qqswuyd9ml6qcxd92h6pleptfrcqucvvjy39vg4wx7mv9wm8kakyujgpramhxue69uhkummnw3ezuetfde6kuer6wasku7nfvuh8xurpvdjszrthwden5te0dehhxtnvdakqu472gm

Publishing to

nostr.einundzwanzig.space

nos.lol

chorus.mikedilger.com:444

Author Public Key

npub1acg6thl5psv62405rljzkj8spesceyfz2c32udakc2ak0dmvfeyse9p35c

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Last Notes

2025-04-23 21:08:04

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I didn't know people had a choice in the past. I just thought the newer drivers license would all be REAL ID compliant, and if you got a drivers license renewal since about 2010 it would be a REAL ID compliant drivers license. But I don't live in the USA so I'm taking corrections.

2025-04-23 20:48:30

Real ID:
In 2005, the US congress passed legislation for this, and it comes into force May 7 2025. It requires states to follow certain practices when identifying and giving somebody an ID. All the drivers licenses issued in all the US states and 5 territories qualify as real ID. If you have a recent valid drivers license, you arleady have a Real ID. The new requirements will be that to fly domestically, visit certain federal federal facilities, and to visit nuclear power plants, then you must show your Real ID.
I don't think this is much different than it already was, is it?. I don't ever recall flying domestically "anonymously". The significant difference IMHO is that ID is becoming federalized (states still issue, but federal government oversees).
For myself, I'll use my passport as always.
You can still travel without ID by driving in your car. I would be much more worried if your country went cashless. In that case you have to use trackable payment mechanisms to buy your groceries. Here in NZ most supermarkets still take cash, but most checkout lines do not... you have to find the checkout line that still takes cash. I think they still have to take cash, but they just aren't setup for that at every checkout line.

2025-04-23 03:55:16

Yesterday was weird. I kept thinking I need to check on the dog in case she needs something. I went to her grave like 6 times even though logically I know she's not going to wake up and need me. My brain just kept prodding me since she has needed me so much for so long now (even to walk to do her business) and it felt like I was disloyal if I didn't sit by her grave.
Today the wind was blowing heavy, the winds of change.
Everything I rest my eyes upon in my house and outside, it seems like I'm seeing it for the first time. I actually think about what I should do about that thing -- clean it, move it, etc -- things that haven't caught my attention in years.
And all the "dog stuff" is being cleaned and packed into a big "dog stuff" box.... collars and leashes, toys, medicines, dog bowls, dog bed.
I did sleep last night, but today is still not normal. I'm getting through it.
I did even get some nostr work done, I finally got an annoying problem sorted, but the details aren't worth talking about.
In a way, as much as I loved my dog, she was really holding me back. Taking too much of my time. Taking far too much of my expenses for medicines and operations. I couldn't travel anywhere. My ability to focus deeply (needed for the kind of programming I do) had slowly deteriorated for a long time due to the interruptions she needed and also the ones she didn't. And so had my sleep deteriorated, especially near the end (turns out she had a lot of nighttime activity I didn't know about and needed me to pick up and hold up her rump so she could get to the places she insisted on smelling... at multiple times during the night... else the barking wouldn't stop).
It is just very different now without her, and I'm adjusting. 😢
#nevent1q…6shn

2025-04-22 06:24:57

Rest in Peace
Maze von Heisenberg ("Zoey")
3 Oct 2013 - 22 Apr 2025
"The best dog on the farm"

2025-04-20 19:53:01

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I'm curious what is your take on the dilemma that if Jesus died on Good Friday and rose on Easter Sunday, then he didn't spend 3 days in the tomb prophesied in Matthew 12, that is only two days.

2025-04-19 10:08:24

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I should add that I bought a meat band saw once. Worst purchase ever. The blade drags bits of meat throughout the whole device. You have to take it all apart to clean it. Cleaning it, including disassembly and reassembly, is 90% of your time.

2025-04-19 10:05:23

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I bought the cast iron for dry cooking tortillas like my Mexican aunt Clarita taught me. It works very well for this purpose. I've been dual-using it for general frying but I will take your advice and get a proper clad fry pan.

2025-04-17 07:08:50

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A silver node. Mine it with your pickaxe. Then go to the village and refine it at the smelter behind Valkorn Belkat the NPC blacksmith trainer.

2025-04-15 01:54:30

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Execution of summary judgement without judicial oversight is bad. And that isn't the only problem.
Worse is that this administration is blatently ignoring the courts. Apparently all you have to do is call them "activist judges" and you get to ignore them. So when the courts issued a stay on their deportation, the administration ignored it and deported anyways. And when the courts issued an order to bring them back into the US for trial, the administration pretended they had no power to do this (even as they pay El Salvador to keep them).
Worse is that they have criminalized speech, and are executing summary judgement in these cases too. Of course it is because the Israel lobby has their balls in a sling. How else can they suddenly be against free speech? I can't believe they are making such decisions willingly. And that is even worse, that the US isn't operating under the rule of law, it is operating under the rule of Netanyahu.
If I still lived in the US I would be getting the fuck out first thing.
The left warned about Trump being a fascist, and I didn't believe them. I thought they had TDS. But I guess I was the one with a blind spot.

2025-04-13 20:29:31

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If you build a car with a broken engine, you can hold that car responsible for being unable to drive. You can also hold responsible an upstream cause... whoever built it. But the car itself is certainly at fault.. it has a fault in it's engine.

2025-04-13 20:23:43

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Yes, I have just learnt that word. But I disagree with britannica.com's opening paragraph on it. I am not weaking the common sense notion of free will. And I think people can be fully held morally responsible for their actions.

2025-04-13 19:50:24

Here is my take on free will. I hope I can explain it well enough that people understand.
For a long time I have not seen the contradiction between a single fixed future and free will.
The universe is four-dimensional, time being a dimension (though a very different kind of dimension from space).
The future only unfolds in one way. Each decision you make leads to one future, it does not split the universe into multiple futures. You can only choose one future. Therefore only one timeline exists, the one that we all travel on into the shared future that we all experience.
But we all have free will. We all make decisions that affect the present and those affects determine the future.
Some people take the logical step that if the universe must unfold in the one fated way, then we do not have the freedom to take a different path.
But this is incorrect. We do have the freedom to take a different path. We just don't do it. Because of who we are.
Fate isn't something outside of you that you are a slave to with no free will. YOU are the fate that is making the one true future. Or rather, you are a part of that fate, and you have perfectly free will.

2025-04-13 18:54:19

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That's some very realistic graphics!

2025-04-13 03:17:17

My dad used to work for the Air Force as a civil servant. And he had this joke about civil servants.
Some psychologists did an experiment. They had a top mathematician, a top physicist, and a top civil servant. Each was confined to a small cubicle room with no windows and just the one door for 24 hours without food or water. They gave them each 3 steel balls (bearings) and came back 24 hours later to see what had transpired.
In the mathematicans room they discovered that all three balls were perfectly balanced on top of each other in the middle of the room, and the mathematician was sitting against the wall pleased as punch.
In the physicists room, to their amazement, the three balls were hovering in space, and the physicist was sitting in the corner mumbling about equasions.
In the civil servants room they found that he had lost one, he broke one, and the third one was in his lunchbox as he intended to take it home with him.

2025-04-13 02:39:11

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"Tariffs. What a beautiful word. Really, it's just the word that I love."

2025-04-13 02:17:20

I can take any system, and I can define the "set of all things" on that system. For example, I could consider my desk a system and define the set of all things on my desk. By making such a definition, do I change the system? No. The definition about the system doesn't affect the system.
Then I could name this set. I could take the country of China as a system and the set of all people in China and I could call that set the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Now, by defining such a thing into existance, does that have any real world effect on the ground? No. It's just an abstraction.
Of course the real CCP is not the set of all people in China.
My point is that the longer single-party rules goes on in China, the larger that party grows, the closer it resembles a zero-party system. Rather than political debate happening between parties with firm stances, political debate happens between different political camps that all reside inside of the party, and eventually the party itself is meaningless when it includes everybody.
I don't know if that will happen, but I have it on good authority that China is somewhere in between. Which makes it trickier to think about. There are 8 parties outside the CCP whose leaders are chosen by the CCP and whose roles are limited to making proposals to the CCP. This is scarcely different from being inside the CCP.
I think this is China's path out.

2025-04-13 00:59:07

As long as there is interesting content on nostr it makes sense for everybody to get on nostr so they can see it. This is true even if they don't spin up a keypair, don't post, and only follow one or two people.
#nevent1q…mgmx

2025-04-12 23:28:48

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No I don't. It is just a wild idea, not yet worth more than a few Satoshi

2025-04-12 23:25:20

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You are correct. Which is why I'm proposing adding back the emotion language (russell conjugation and stuff) but in a way that is different for every reader, targetting the reader.

2025-04-12 23:18:58

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If I could train an AI to understand me and my world view, and it wasn't being influenced by outsiders, I think I could learn to trust it.

2025-04-12 23:17:19

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I move banks from time to time for various reasons. I've never regretted switching. Same thing with internet providers and electricity providers.
In fact I was with Nova Energy and they wanted to raise my rates by something like 35%. Not only did I avoid that 35% raise but I actually got another 10% below what I was already paying by switching to Mercury. Companies will absolutely take advantage of customer inertia and mistreat you presuming you won't bother switching.

2025-04-12 23:03:47

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ANZ, which is Australian but operating in New Zealand

2025-04-12 23:00:48

The Next Big Idea in News Media
People hate the news. Because not only do they get some small facts wrong, explanations even more wrong, but the normative context and word choices belie a belief system that huge numbers of people disagree with.
News media tried to solve this problem by reporting "just the facts" without any contextualization, choosing the most neutral words they could. You might think that would be the perfect news that you would want to get your news from. But it is not. You will find it boring. The viewership numbers of that kind of thing plummet. It is far better to give the *wrong* context and infuriate you than to give no context.
Well, what if you could give a personalized context to everybody? With A.I. now we can. We can have "just the facts" neutral news fed into a personalized (or group personalized) A.I. which contextualizes the news for you making it interesting again without infuriating you, and IMHO people will *trust* this news far more than what they currently get.
What do you all think? Should we take this serious, fund it and set it afloat?

2025-04-12 20:48:25

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The "eulag" 😂

2025-04-12 20:46:41

My bank website has a notice today:
"We are no longer able to accept EUR denominated payments to Russia, Belarus or Ukraine. Please select USD for payments into these countries."

2025-04-12 04:09:33

Most people crave mental peace. You can get mental peace by believing that you already understand everything, that you are always right, that your country is good and it is only other nations and cultures that are bad.
And you can maintain this mental peace quite easily, indefinitely even, with just a few simple habits:
1. If anybody presents information that conflicts with your worldview, immediately categorize it as a lie.
2. If anybody challenges you do research the point, decide that you cannot be bothered.
3. Even easier, choose to disbelieve all authority. Now nothing can be researched, even in principle! Because every source is lying to you. So just make up whatever belief makes you happy!
Mmmmm.... I feel so calm..... and stupid.

2025-04-11 05:43:55

I am more convinced than ever that representative democracy cannot work, ever. All representatives can be captured, even ones I thought couldn't be.
We need a new form of government, preferably based on nostr keys.

2025-04-09 02:12:41

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Depends. How much are you asking?
🤣

2025-04-09 02:08:25

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Now that my `Signer` trait is async over sign(), encrypt() and decrypt() without triggering rust compiler bugs I'll be able to do this.

2025-04-09 00:29:26

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They are not my cup of tea. I'd rather not.

2025-04-09 00:15:26

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I never went to BlueSky. I didn't know this. I ain't going now!

2025-04-08 23:58:32

According to Michael Shellenberger, https://x.com/shellenberger/status/1909755511182180796, time spent on BlueSky is a significant predictor of Left Wing Authoritarianism (which justifies the murder of Trump and Elon Musk, and the destruction of Tesla automobiles)

2025-04-08 19:12:35

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Oh heavens!
You must be on the unstable branch. This is intentional. It is the first step of https://github.com/mikedilger/gossip/issues/970

2025-04-08 04:31:18

Every single one of you is running a massive trade defecit with the company that supplies electricity to your house. You buy electricity from them over and over and over, and they have bought NOTHING from you. That trade defecit is just skyrocketing.

2025-04-07 00:27:04

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Oh good. We can all breathe a sigh of relief. Thank you for making the right choice.

2025-04-06 21:36:59

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Ok it is working now on c583cdfeea2634a8b0b83a116a32df93a2911a08

2025-04-06 21:23:44

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On the unstable branch, commit 149e85b10e272e4567b2c154a1ebe4c9a86d25c1, the inbox feed is now constructed only from events that came from your inbox relay(s), provided you have enabled the `Settings > Content > Limit inbox events to events that came from your inbox relays` setting. This setting isn't new, it just does more than it used to.

2025-04-06 06:20:39

New Zealand has been increasing the number of countries we trade with freely.
We have bilateral agreements with Australia (1983) Singapore (2001), Thailand (2005), China (2008), Malaysia (2009), Hong Kong (2011), Taiwan (2013), South Korea (2015) the United Kingdom (2023) and the European Union (2024).
We have an agreement (TPSEP, 2005) with Brunei, Chile and Singapore.
We have an agreement (ASEAN, 2009) with Australia and the Association of Southeast Asian Countries (Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam)
We have an agreement (CPTPP, 2018) with Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, Singapore, the United Kingdom and Vietnam
We have an agreement (PACER plus, 2020) with Australia, Cook Islands, Kiribati, Niue, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu
We have an agreement (RCEP, 2022) with Australia, Brunei, Cambodia, China, Japan, South Korea, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam.
There is a lot of overlap there, and there are big countries we do not have free trade with: USA, Russia, India, the Middle East, Africa, Central America and most of South America (save Chile and Peru) Of course we still trade with those countries, but there is no agreement to prevent trade wars with them.
I believe free trade is a win-win situation. Our sellers sell in larger volumes, and our buyers buy at cheaper prices.

2025-04-04 01:45:38

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I think you just named the new protocol. Henceforth it will be called the "toy protocol".

2025-04-04 00:13:54

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Let's all learn Esperanto and throw out thes other stupid languages that evolved wrong.
Let's all switch to base-16.
;-)
BTW, I responded to Karnage because he asked and tagged me. But while I'm collecting ideas that seem like we might have to start over to implement, I'm not going any further than that at the moment. There is no "nostr-next" protocol, nor any servers, nor any users on a fork. Nostr has not been forked and I'm ambivalent about such a prospect (ambivalent meaning that I both love and hate the idea). Ideally these ideas either (1) get into nostr via breaking changes, or (2) the problems they address are solved some other way or (3) I eventually come to grips with the realization that they don't really matter.

2025-04-03 20:58:58

When you want to find a subset of events in a large database of events, but you know that subset is very large and may cause a memory problem, there are a number of strategies to deal with this situation:
1) Iterator: Redesign your fetch function as an iterator, to remember where it left off and keep giving the next Event. Then you only have one event in memory at a time. This is very trad.
2) Screen: Add a screening function to your fetch function. You usually don't actually need all those events, and the screen function can reduce the result set by a lot.
3) Reference: If those events are mmapped, you can just pass a reference to each one where it sits, with no copys, and the OS will page in the data as accessed.
Gossip uses method (2) and I'm toying around with method (1). Pocket (and therefore Chorus) use method (3).

2025-04-03 07:40:53

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I'm kinda unsure if I should move on my ideas. After all, if we break everything is it nostr anymore? I don't think so. And if it isn't nostr anymore, will OpenSats want to fund me anymore? I'm kinda jailed into sticking with nostr if I want to keep that sweet sweet funding. At least I need to stick to what I proposed I would do.
But yes I do have a lot of breaking ideas. As it stands, those ideas keep piling up. If I had "started over" 6 months ago I would have been doing it wrong. I think it might be better to just keep piling them up and doing small experiments with them, and thinking about them for some time, before actually forging ahead with it.
For example, the other day I was explaining CRDTs to a friend/colleague in town and in preparing what I was going to say on the drive over, I realized that follow lists with CRDTs aren't enough, we still need to avoid simple race condition clobbers per-server: https://github.com/mikedilger/nostr-next/issues/55
For example again, I was thinking about still using websockets, but now I think building directly on QUIC is better and the HTTP and WebSocket layers don't buy us anything we want (what they give us, like proxying, is actually against good security practice). Because QUIC has to work for HTTP/3 to work, there wont be middle-box routing problems.
I also recently did https://github.com/mikedilger/alt-tls where I got TLS running with ed25519/x25519/blake3 in ways browsers suspiciously do not support (even though the RFCs do), with modern crypto that didn't come from the US government. Interestingly I can't get secp256k1 working because of this stupid thing: https://docs.rs/rustls-pki-types/latest/rustls_pki_types/alg_id/index.html I don't know what the pkix algo identifier is or if there is a reserved area I can use.
A quick summary of other breaking things I'm interested in:
* Framed binary protocol over QUIC, not WebSockets, not JSON
* ed25519 signatures, not secp256k1
* Device keys that can be rolled over, the master key used only for managing device keys (and the DHT).
* Learn a person's relays from Mainline DHT
* Relays/servers have a pubkey and use it in their TLS certificate, so we don't need to trust DNS.
* In-protocol feature negotiation
* Mechanisms to avoid all possible clobbers
* All event kinds are default replaceable, but see the application layer to determine how the application specifies it
* Separation of application layer from the main protocol, avoiding proliferation of NIPs.
* Nodes (clients/servers) remember timestamps when records arrived, which bounds when the record was created, giving better idea of what to do regarding revocation and such
* Spans within content marked in 'tags' e.g. (start=13, end=18, bold) or (insert=56, url=SOMEURL)

2025-04-03 07:15:28

I don't believe there is an afterlife. And people who assure themselves that God is going to get justice in the afterlife are just depowering themselves. There is no justice unless we make it so in this life.

2025-04-01 07:16:37

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I'm a rather logical person, perhaps even spiritually retarded. The only thing that reaches me spiritually is music. Like track 9.

2025-03-31 19:47:45

New Zealand has no air defense systems. We are just as vulnerable as Palestine and Lebanon are. Any beligerant nation could just fly bombers down here and start bombing the sheep and there is nothing we could do about it.

2025-03-30 18:12:04

I believe the USA needs to repeal laws regarding posession of child porn. Not because that stuff is ok... it's sick. Creation of child porn should remain illegal. But because it is being used as blackmail to steer politicians into acting against the interests of the United States.
I think this issue is far more important than immigration, the economy or tarriffs. It is only surpassed by issues of war.
It has to be driven by the people. Politicians are coerced so they won't drive it.
Of course the "moral signalling" is totally backwards... it looks like an issue only perverts would support.... which is why the USA probably cannot be saved and will collapse into a smoldering heap of evil.

2025-03-30 04:55:31

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The malt has little sprouts

2025-03-30 01:37:58

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looks good from over here.

2025-03-30 01:11:00

For those of you that don't like seed oils... what do you think about yellow mustard? Do you avoid it?
I'm just curious because yellow mustard is from the seeds of a Brassica plant, same as canola oil is. But I haven't heard people preaching that mustard is poison.

2025-03-29 08:06:26

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I think I can help.
Option 1: Go to Settings > Content and turn off "Avoid spam from unsafe relays (SpamSafe)". This way all content will show up from all relays, not just people you follow. (This is my personal choice)
Option 2: Go to your Relays and flip on the SpamSafe switch for all (and only) the relays that you trust to filter spam. (This is or was fiatjaf's choice)

2025-03-29 05:10:46

I made some whole wheat bread, but it was really rough and bitter. Maybe next time I'll leave out the roots.

2025-03-29 02:47:06

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After I experiment and refine it, sure

2025-03-29 02:45:46

I'm going to create the world's first AI blockchain.
... what else is big right now? I can throw it in.

2025-03-29 00:59:28

Oatly oat milk (or Boring oat milk in NZ) is sweet... but it has no added sugars. I believe they are malting and mashing the oats to create sugars from the starches in the oats. Then they can say "no added sugars" and have no sugar listed in the ingredients.
So there are recipes on line that have you blend 1 part rolled oats with 4 parts of water and filter thorugh a "nut mllk bag"' and people add sweeteners. But they still suffer "sliminess" and try to combat it by using ice water and other tricks, but it doesn't work well.
Fuck that. I'm going to try mashing. This is totally untested but this is my rough plan:
Malt (I could just buy diastatic malt, but I'm making my own):
Soak wheat (not oats, I don't have them .. 6 row barley is best but I don't have that either) berries in water until they fully swell, 8 hours.
(I'm using a french press, easy to drain through)
Keep in the dark, but rinse and drain twice a day for about 3 days unil the sprouts are as long as the grains.
Dry them at about 40 C in the fan-bake oven (no higher than 55 C)
Grind them into a fine powder.
Oat milk:
Blend 1 part rolled oats (not whole grain, not quick) with 4 parts water.
Cook at 53-59C to gelatinize, 20 minutes
Bring to boil and boil for 20 minutes.
Cool to 67 C.
Add malt (unknown how much I should add), and maintain at 67 C
Within 30 minutes it should very much sweeten and lose it's sliminess. Stop when it's nice by raising past 77C to denature the enzymes.
Cool, strain and refrigerate.

2025-03-28 18:23:35

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What is it about hell threads that put a load on relay operators? Aren't they just a bunch of notes linked together as opposed to a bunch of notes not linked together? It is early for me maybe my brain isn't awake yet.

2025-03-28 06:41:59

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That is the most boring option. Also the most likely.

2025-03-28 06:37:18

Trump before being elected wanted to end the bloodshed. Tulsi Gabbard wanted to end all the "regime change" wars. But after getting into office, these people are completely different. Elon Musk was all for free speech until after he bought Twitter, then he started making exception after exception.
I can think of (at least) five explanations:
1) They saw classified information that was accurate that changed their minds
2) They saw classified information that was inaccurate but deceptively crafted to change their minds
3) They never had their prior stated opinions, they just lied to get into office
4) They are being blackmailed
5) They aren't even the same people - Israel has a top secret look-alike replacement program that kills the original Trump and the original Tulsi and replaces them with look alikes
(5) is the most entertaining explanation.

2025-03-26 01:46:43

#health
A large study done on a large dataset including the Nurses Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-Up study found that eating fast foods and fried foods away from home was POSITIVELY coorelated with surviving to and beyond 70 years of age, being free of chronic disease, intact mental health, intact physical function, and intact cognitive function.
Now I'm sure you've always believed that eating fast foods and fried foods was bad for you.
So, presuming the study was done correctly, and presuming that fast foods and fried foods are indeed bad for you as we have always believed, can anybody explain the result?
I can think of at least two possible explanations (confounders), but I'd like to hear what other people think first.

2025-03-25 08:09:37

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I see it. Muchos gracias

2025-03-25 02:46:07

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...pops out of certain ways to interpret QM. You can also interpret things differently to avoid retrocausality. But no matter how you do it, something strange pops out anyway.

2025-03-25 02:19:40

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Somehow you look to me like a guy at a ball game eating a wiener with mustard and ketchup... some kind of classic American look that I can't put my finger on any other way.

2025-03-25 02:04:23

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I said I was @hodlbod and configured for a few fun hashtags: http://npub1jlrs53pkdfjnts29kveljul2sm0actt6n8dxrrzqcersttvcuv3qdjynqn.ba-5-grid.comments.topics-wieners-moustaches.oracolo.me/
But I guess that only changes the URL

2025-03-24 23:42:27

https://babylonbee.com/news/4d-chess-genius-trump-leaks-war-plans-to-the-atlantic-where-no-one-will-ever-see-them

2025-03-22 04:00:01

I want a YouTube like service with an A.I. agent that I can speak with about which videos to suggest and which to not suggest and why. YouTube's suggestion algorithm is just too dated at this point.

2025-03-22 01:52:17

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Every time I see LFG I reflexively think "looking for group", then I have to correct myself.

2025-03-20 07:37:33

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I'm laughing because I could have said "If you are in the Americas, you might want to buy some eggs" and it would have been just as meaningless. The region doesn't matter, the asset doesn't matter, "might" makes the statement meaningless. You might want to do anything, you might not, despite where you are. But yes, I did this second one to make the first one more questionable and to sound like a zealot. I did the first one because of some rumor out of the EU that they would use personal savings to fund the war. I like to see what people make out of my statements, without being too specific or committal I get replies in all directions.

2025-03-18 22:31:03

If you are in the Americas, you might want to buy some bitcoin.

2025-03-18 04:23:12

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Yeah, that too

2025-03-18 04:20:59

If you are in the EU, you might want to buy some bitcoin.

2025-03-17 02:28:35

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I thought we were beating our swords into plowshares, not frying pans. I think I screwed up.

2025-03-14 23:26:46

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Oh and also that weird scary shit causes the one disease we cannot cure: Cancer. And it is associated with the largest explosions ever used by mankind to kill other people. So lots of bad mental associations.

2025-03-14 23:25:10

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Yeah but when we split the atom, it makes "weird shit" that scares people, because it can silently kill them without them being able to see it, or hear it, or feel it, so they have no way to detect and avoid it. Weird scary shit.

2025-03-13 18:57:57

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I dunno

2025-03-13 03:26:21

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Yeah, Lee-noose

2025-03-13 01:41:11

Are people really this confused about a picture of Linus Torvalds with a microphone? https://x.com/jack/status/1899960783192137914

2025-03-12 02:06:39

Balaji seems pretty clued up. A bitcoiner I see. Is he here on nostr?
https://x.com/balajis/status/1899373219297321017

2025-03-11 23:25:00

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Just don't wear the fleece and next time you'll be fine.

2025-03-11 23:17:53

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For derived keys, can the encryption include the derivation path in plaintext? I don't think that's an anonymity breaker if those paths are common well known things.

2025-03-11 21:13:53

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enum MetadataState {
None,
Metadata(Metadata),
Fetching(Condvar),
}

2025-03-11 21:10:55

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OK just writing this note has helped me clarify the problem, I think I'm onto a solution already.

2025-03-11 21:04:01

I'm trying to solve a problem and I thought I'd ask for help.
I've got a website using a WASM framework (dioxus) that gives me the ability to do async functions to fill in part of the web page. The web page renders immediately with either a placeholder or the result. I'm also using `nostr` and `nostr-sdk` from @npub1drv…seet
On one page I have a long list of events each by potentially a different npub. But initially I don't have any of their metadata. I want that page to fetch and fill in the metadata for all these people. This is a very typical (I'd say necessary) part of any web-based nostr client. I haven't done it yet though, I've done a desktop client.
The component on the page that renders the metadata is calling into this async function. Remember there are many of them, so many components are all nearly simultaneously calling into this async function, generally with different pubkeys but sometimes with the same pubkey.
The async function needs to either return metadata, or eventually return a failure.
A simple first idea that mostly works is to independently spin up a client and use it to two-step fetch the NIP-65 list from the discovery relay and then fetch the metadata from the user's relay. But this creates tons of clients and connections, saves nothing (no caching) and is generally regarded as a "bad idea."
The next iteration on the idea is to store a map from URL to Client and keep the client's alive. Then I can fetch the client (creating if missing) and fire off a new REQ. But this is still bad because I'm doing one request per pubkey and relays hate me saying I'm making too many requests.
So really I need to batch these somehow (multiple pubkeys per request). And to cache the results. And to be aware when some other thread is already doing this pubkey (and yet wait on it's result). And solving all of that simultaneously has been.... difficult.
I can have a map with pubkey as the key. And I can have the value be an enum either Fetching or Metadata (and missing from the map means it is not fetching). But no easy way to async wait on a map entry to show up. Also no easy way to wait a bit and then batch the multiple requests and avoid all race conditions with other threads doing the exact same thing (although that I can solve). Anyhow, the whole thing seems rather difficult and yet it must be solved by ... every web based nostr client out there... right?

2025-03-11 00:49:01

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What???? You mean people aren't all selling at the same time pushing the price down? My head is exploding!

2025-03-11 00:38:44

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Lefties concerned about climate change are currently shitting on Telsa, the think Elon Musk did to help combat climate change.
Conclusion: people are not smart, they are tribal animals

2025-03-10 22:05:25

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The US isn't reliable for at least 2 decades, pulling out of all kinds of treaties unilaterally, and it is known every 4 years a vastly different administration may come in. No state can make deals with such a fickle entity. And that will reliably isolate the US for a long time to come.
But let me back-peddle slightly (as nobody is arguing my point yet, and I want to refine it).
If the US gave Ukraine secret warning that they will pull out on a certain date, and to settle with Russia before that date, and Ukraine decided to keep fighting anyways, then I put no blame on the US. It has to be possible for the US to choose to not be involved, and giving plenty of heads up is the right thing to do. That heads up has to be covert so that Russia can't anticipate anything. So that means we would not have heard about it. As an average citizen without access to top secrets, I can't say if that happened or not, so I can't absolutely claim Trump is bad here. Just that it looks bad.

2025-03-10 21:41:01

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It reminds me of the Afghanistan withdrawal.

2025-03-10 21:35:28

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I think I can summarize my point better like this: If Russia is a strategic adversary of the USA, the USA should not just let Russia take as much Ukraine as it wants.

2025-03-10 20:37:41

When you are at war, you keep fighting until a settlement is negotiated.
If the US is not at war with Russia, Trump quitting without a negotiated settlement is fine.
If the US is at war with Russia via it's proxy Ukraine, Trump quitting without a negotiated settlement is virtually treasonous.
I find it odd that people who claimed this was Ukraine's war not Americas are the ones most upset by Trump and calling him treasonous, whereas those of us who said this was a US proxy war seem to be okay with Trump just quitting. If you have any consistent morals, you'd say the opposite. Those saying it is Ukraine's war should be upset but accept that the US doesn't have to be involved and Trump hasn't committed any kind of high crime here. Those saying the US is in a proxy war with Russia should consider Trump to have committed a high crime by failing to continue fighting absent a negotiated settlement. At least it seems that way to me, I'm sure people will tell me I'm wrong if I am wrong.

2025-03-08 22:28:25

I love how stock movements are always explained. Someone tweeted this not too long ago: "$GRND Grindr stock falling off a cliff as homosexuality continues to decline this week."

2025-03-08 22:04:13

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Don't blame the road for the destination you chose.

2025-03-08 22:00:06

Nostr is the roads. Roads that lead to theatres and rubbish dumps, churches and whore houses. You choose where to go.

2025-03-08 21:18:25

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We need some powerful word crafting or memes to make sure everybody understands this, else normies will default think of nostr as a service. Or maybe we don't... it can't be shut down so maybe the politics of nostr don't matter.

2025-03-08 07:49:58

Daniel Hagari was one of the better IDF people. He covertly exposed to us multiple times how Israel was full of shit. Thank you Daniel.

2025-03-07 04:22:06

People on nostr shouldn't be getting fooled by fake accounts. But I keep hearing about it. Multiple clients now will show you if a person is well-followed by your network or is a stranger with 0 followers. We need to get that feature into all the clients because apparently some people are falling for scams.

2025-03-07 02:02:09

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We can do better
https://chorus.mikedilger.com:444/8f141323b907520dfe2617aceb90ae87f7b8e97f29214be757a406fb881d741c.jpeg

2025-03-05 23:32:17

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This is one reason the dollar loses value. The debt shrinks in real terms, so they aren't paying full price for anything. The other reason is to light a fire under people's wallets so that they spend faster.
The US national (federal) debt is 35 trillion dollars (most of it owed to itself in weird bookkeeping). The M2 money supply is 21 trillion. The US current account (total, worldwide) is -311 billion (billion, not trillion).
Japan holds about 3% of US debt. China is second with 2.6% of US debt, which is $860 billion. $860 billion is far less than 21 trillion or 35 trillion.
And if anybody wants to get mad that foreigners have claims on the US... get mad at Japan.... although Japan is more than 200% of GDP in debt itself.

2025-03-05 23:16:44

If you are not failing regularly, then you are not trying enough challenging things.

2025-03-05 03:12:29

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Unless I'm wrong, the trade defecit is not a measure of China's holdings of US dollars. For example, they might have used the dollars to buy oil. Now the Saudis can claim real goods from America with them.

2025-03-05 00:53:33

On Trade Deficits and Tarriffs
PART I: Trade Balances are Worse than Useless
Let's imagine there are only three countries: the US, Canada and Mexico.
Let's further imagine that these three countries produce and consume all the goods and
services that they need locally except for three situations:
1) The US buys lumber from Canada
2) Canada buys steel from Mexico
3) Mexico buys automobiles from the US
Now, the trade balances will go like this:
US: In a trade deficit with Canada that just gets bigger and bigger.
US: In a trade surplus with Mexico that just gets bigger and bigger.
These trade balances don't mean anything. Nothing is out of whack. There is no limit
to how high they can go, and nothing ever needs to be paid back to anybody (it is not
debt).
Therefore I recommend ignoring trade balances entirely. They are a silly useless
metric that causes far too much confusion (including in Trump's mind).
PART II: Trade is win-win
In free markets, people trade with other people only of their own free will. They are
never compelled to make a specific trade. Therefore we can assume that both parties to
a trade doing so willingly actually value the received goods and services moreso than
they value the disposed of goods and services.
Therefore trade is win-win.
Therefore,.the more free trade that occurs, the richer everybody gets.
PART III: Tariffs and their purpose
Tarriffs are local import taxes you charge your own citizens in order to protect
local industries who produce the same products at a higher price. This may be
necessary for a number of different reasons:
1) Local industry is fledgling and not efficient yet, and you are giving them time to improve
2) Currency exchange rates are out of whack from purchasing-power-parity, and so you are
preventing efficient local industry from suffering the devastation of this artificial
imbalance.
Any other reason for imposing tarriffs causes a net loss since as already argued, trade
is win-win.
Trump may impose tarriffs in order to drive a hard bargain, but they are still a net loss
while they last. It is just that in Trump's case, they generally don't last long, they
were more of a threat than a long-term policy.
Since currency exchange rates change rapidly, I am of the opinion that tariffs should
change rapidly too. But they don't. Generally they are written into legislation and hard
to change quickly. IMHO government could do far better in this regard.

2025-03-03 21:16:33

For the last decade or so, light roast coffees with high acid and tea-like clarity have become popular.
IMHO they taste like feces that has gone sour.
I prefer medium roast classico Italian espresso... the stuff that tastes like coffee.

2025-03-03 09:11:36

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I think Zelensky indeed did state his position and make his case. And from an idealistic view, Zelensky is right. Russia invaded, Russia can't be trusted to hold to an agreement (violating the Budapest memorandum among others), etc.
What is very hard but necessary for the leader of a sovereign state is that they must judge the balance of power and not cling so tightly to right and wrong. When you are right and your enemy is wrong, but your enemy is far more powerful than you are, you need to befriend them anyways. And when America gets zero benefit from being involved, and has already spent lots of money helping out, and you want them to help you more, and you have no cards, nothing to trade for their help, then you had better offer up some cards (minerals) and you had better get down on your knees and kiss their boots. Zelensky is an idealistic child (as are many people on nostr, as was I most of my life).
Someone must have misled Zelenskyy into thinking that Trump was going to stand up to Russia for him. But if Zelensky had paid any attention to who Trump is at all, he would already have known that was an impossible hope.