duro

GenX husband, father, thinker, doer.

Appreciates saunas, dogs, Bitcoin, woodland lakes, philosophy, psilocybin, hi-fi audio, freedom tech, learning new things, rediscovering old things, being real.

Counter-opinions welcomed. DYOR.

Public Key

npub1w05hqcw958cszmcxw23cqrh7uzn0vl9n9qyypj5uckcvrdn5meas7d5w4f

NIP-05 Address

duro@nostrplebs.com

NIP-57 Address

rubyhorse4@primal.net

Profile Code

nprofile1qqs886tsv8z6rugpdur89guqpmlwpfhk0jejszzqe2wvtvxpke6du7cprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuatnv4n82umfdahzuctfqy28wumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyv9kh2uewd9hsm6yw99

Publishing to

relay.usefusion.ai

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1w05hqcw958cszmcxw23cqrh7uzn0vl9n9qyypj5uckcvrdn5meas7d5w4f

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Last Notes

2024-10-05 19:58:18

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I can’t know what you mean if you don’t what to mean. As we reach for meaning, a hand can be helpful, or it can hold on for dear life.

2024-10-04 18:54:21

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You are a literal Jedi

2024-10-04 17:49:01

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Awesome sub-title!

2024-10-04 17:43:53

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If you cannot judge, you cannot be responsible. If you cannot be responsible, you can never be free.

2024-10-04 17:37:54

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Clever. And a much bigger crisis than simply financial.

2024-10-04 17:05:08

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“Somehow”

2024-10-04 15:47:39

“If you don’t get it, I don’t have time to explain it to you” is actually low-key deep wisdom.
I can’t really convince you of the sublimeness of Dave Turncrantz’s drumming, or the expanded life-world made available by deadlifting and dead hanging, or even the increase to mental sovereignty that comes from denominating value in Bitcoin. What would that even mean? The best I can do is invite you to experience it for yourself, and perhaps encourage you with descriptions of what you might expect. But even that is not guaranteed. How an experience touches us and changes us is elusive. The transformation is a co-production between the self and the world, not an one-way entitlement between a consumer and a magic pill.
#note1y4q…zqy6

2024-10-04 15:09:21

Anonymity was outlawed last night
in the latest update to the
anti-memory laundering (AML) code
and when I protested in all-caps
"THIS IS ALL A FORM OF PSYCHIC GUN CONTROL"
I was attacked
for my lack
of journalistic spintegrity.
But I remember growing up
I was full
of undocumented agencies
just waiting
to be discovered--
cryptovariable be-ings
and becomings,
strange and novel assimilations
of affordance and affect.
Capable, credential-less and bored
we'd cut class
and pulse, and flex, and flow our way
to rarified enlightenments
like laughter in the clouds.
Everything gets faster now.
Speed devours distance
everything is closer
speed devours time
everything is burnt out.
Inflation is acceleration
that debases what it speeds up
an escape velocity
but from what?
To be moved by the world
is to be in the world
a resonance
rather than a blur.

2024-10-02 11:54:51

Lots of chatter on the airwaves and in print lately probing the limits of free speech, the justifications for censorship and the future viability of the US constitution. It was a talking point in last night's VP debate as well, during which Walz recited the folk-loresy understanding of the issue: "you can't yell fire in a crowded theater."
Here's a PSA on this little gem a bit in case you ever find yourself up against it.
The phrase comes from supreme court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr during the 1919 case Schenck v United States. Anyone unfamiliar with this case might be shocked to learn that it had nothing to do with shouting fire, or with any kind of mischievous, anti-social trouble-making whatsoever. At stake was the printing and mailing of pamphlets to draft-eligible men that made the case that the draft was against their constitutional rights and inviting citizens to peacefully abstain. In other words, what was at stake in the trial were the defendants right to criticize perceived government transgression of the constitution, exactly what the first amendment was designed to ensure.
Amazingly, what was passed down to our collective memories about this episode is not the hard truth that governments will attempt to violate constitutional rights for their own, arguably nefarious, ends (a conceptual inheritance that would strengthen civic support for free speech), but rather the wildly inaccurate analogy of the crowded theater (an Orwellian description of the case that suggests government censorship is there to protect us and keep us safe). And even though the precedent of Schenck was overturned in 1969, the "fire in a crowded theater" litmus test still lingers as the operative heuristic for a great many Americans, including, apparently, one of the candidates for Vice President of the country.
https://m.primal.net/LIaS.gif

2024-09-09 18:56:11

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You think those are your thoughts that you’re thinking?

2024-09-05 20:28:10

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The way the American mainstream media handled Milei was one of the key topics that completely tore the mask off them for me (the others big ones being Bitcoin and the pandemic). I lived in Argentina for 8 years and my wife spent all of her life there until our son was born and we moved to the US. I first came across him in my Apple News feed, early in his campaign, where he was described as "trump-like, fascist, far-right extremist, crazy, unstable, talking to his dead dogs, wanting to legalize the sale of human organs and babies, etc." I asked my wife if she knew anything about him. She didn't, and we started watching Argentinean coverage of him, and a lot of his appearances on various podcasts, etc. We both came to like him quickly--he was passionate, articulate, smart, very consistent, very grounded in Austrian economics, and he never spoke down to his audience. We followed his entire campaign and were thrilled when he won. The craziest thing is, after the election, my wife's friends expressed their condolences to her about Milei's victory. From their CNN-informed world-view, their base assumption was that my wife would be upset.

2024-09-05 19:27:46

I like @npub1s05…eyhe. He looks at the world like an entrepreneur and asks how he can provide value to others by solving real problems. Unlike the totalitarian, who seeks the authority to define for others what their problems actually are.
#note1qm6…2f93

2024-09-05 01:34:50

I’m sympathetic to Parker’s argument to the extent that the more Elon loses the fight publicly, the more emboldened attacks on free speech are likely to become. This isn’t a trivial consideration.
What I don’t understand is his leap to shitting on nostr. I mean, I guess paying blue check subscription fees is a token form of protecting free speech… but surely building up and growing an decentralized and uncensorable communication protocol is pretty damn important.
#note1fay…g07m

2024-09-05 01:01:11

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That blue checkmark doing some work…

2024-09-04 19:49:07

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🤣

2024-09-04 19:45:19

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The sixfold path of satoshism

2024-09-04 19:34:42

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“Whatever it is is not trying really trying to fool you, it’s trying to instruct you…. It’s a set of instructions for how to keep you job. You’re allowed to disagree, it’ll set the boundaries of the disagreement, it’ll set the topics of the disagreement… and you’re given a choice. You can choose to understand whatever you want and you can choose to say whatever you want. But if you say what you understand to be true, you can know what the consequences are. You may lose your marriage, you may lose your job, you may lose your friends…. you’re signing up for whatever Thanksgiving dinner we have planned for you. We are talking to your uncle, we are talking to your spouse.” -Eric Weinstein

2024-09-04 19:12:49

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Yes. And the second most annoying bugs are the Japanese beatles that decimate my linden tree every year.

2024-09-04 18:58:16

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The quote is from a podcast that someone sent me last night. It is a 3.5 hour behemoth that I am slowly chewing through and trying to parse out. But important to understand, it is not a theoretical conversation about what could be or what should be, it is more of a practical attempt to understand what is actually going on vis-a-vis how batshit crazy everything seems right now. And it is relevant to Walker's initial note about how to make elections more auditable and more secure, because that assumes that such a thing is universally desirable, and I think that the argument here is that not everyone wants that. So one of the challenges for us is to grapple with understanding why that is.
Less than 45 seconds into the conversation, Eric drops this incendiary comment:
"I don't know whether Donald Trump will be allowed to become president."
But rather than devolve into a reflexive and uncritical diatribe against something like the deep state, or Trump Derangement Syndrome, etc, he attempts to proceed a bit more critically:
"I think there's a remarkable story and we're in a funny game which is: are we allowed to say what that story is because to say it and to analyze it and to name it is to bring it into view. I think we don't understand why the censorship is behaving the way it is, we don't understand why its in the shadows, we don't understand why the news is acting in a bizarre fashion... there is something that Mike Benz has referred to as the rules-based international order: it's an interlocking series of agreements, tacit understandings, explicit understandings, clandestine understandings, about how the most important structures keep the world free of war and keep markets open and there has been a system in place, whether understood explicitly or implicitly, that says the purpose of the two American parties is to prune the field of populist candidates so that whatever two candidates exist in a face-off are both acceptable to that world order. So what you're trying to do from the point of view of, say, the State Department, the intelligence community, the defense department, and major corporations that have to do with international issues from arms trade to food (they have a series of agreements that are fragile and could be overturned if a president entered the Oval Office who didn't agree with them and the mood of the country was "why do we pay taxes into these structures, why are we hamstrung, why aren't we a free people")--so what the two parties would do is that they would run a primaries, you would have populist candidates, and you'd pre-commit the populist candidates to support the candidates who won the primaries. As long as that took place, and you had two candidates who were both acceptable to the international order--that is, they aren't going to rethink NAFTA or NATO or what have you--we called that democracy. So democracy was the illusion of choice--what's called magician's choice, where the magician makes sure that the card that you pick is the one that he knows--in that situation you have magician's choice in the primaries and then you'd have the duopoly field two candidates either of which was acceptable and you could actually afford to hold an election. And the populace would vote and that way the international order wasn't put at risk every four years because you can't have alliances that are subject to the whim of the people in plebiscites.
So under that structure, everything was going fine until 2016 and then the first candidate ever to not hold any position in the military nor position in government in the history of the Republic, entered the Oval Office: Donald Trump broke through the primary structure. So then there was a full court press--okay, we only have one candidate who's acceptable to the international order. Donald Trump will be under constant pressure that he's a loser, he's a wild man, he's an idiot, he's under the control of the Russians, and he was going to be a 20 to 1 underdog... and then he wins. And there was no precedent for this. They learned their lesson. You cannot afford to have candidates who are not acceptable to the international order and continue to have these alliances--this is an unsolved problem. So I don't have a particular dog in this fight. I, one, believe in democracy, but I also believe in international agreements, and it is the job of the state department and the intelligence community and the defense department to bring this problem in front of the American people and say, "we have a problem, you don't know everything that's going on, and if you start voting in populist candidates, you're going to end up knocking out load-bearing walls that you don't understand."

2024-09-04 18:31:58

Nostr seems too real to be real. It's like some sort of pirate utopia where everyone is mask off, ten toes down in the grass, sun on their face, doing what they can to build and share and exchange things that matter.

2024-09-04 17:54:39

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"[We] have this very strange thing going on where democracy is the greatest threat to democracy. Now how can that be? It's two different concepts of democracy. One concept of democracy is the will of the people, you hold plebiscites, and even if you do it with an electoral college or political parties, the idea is that [you have government] by and for the people. The other idea of democracy is that democracy is about the institutions that sprang from democracy once upon a time and that those institutions have to be kept strong. Those are two completely different concepts that are overloaded to the same word. Under that circumstance, we have a paradox which is: how do we keep [...] the type A democracy from overturning the type B democracy? And that's the unsolved problem that they will not bring in front of the people."
- Eric Weinstein talking with Chris Williamson

2024-09-04 16:27:13

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Your note evoked a strong memory of the passing of my dog, Seven. She died of heart failure on my couch around 5 in the morning while I lay beside her, face to face. She held my gaze through her last breath. I felt deeply sad, but also intensely present, and her passing was peaceful. I can't imagine not being with her for this moment.
A couple of days earlier she had gone from being playful and strong to having no appetite and hardly moving. I brought her to the vet and when I showed them Seven, they rushed her into the back. They came out to tell me that she was dying, which was completely unexpected, and when I asked how long, they said any day. She had a defect in her heart that was leaking blood into the sac that surrounds it. The sac was filling up. They told me that they could drain it, and she would feel better, but that they couldn't fix it and that the sac would fill again. I told them to drain it and she was her old self again. We spent one last glorious day hiking and exploring some of her favorite woodland trails. Very grateful for this.

2024-09-04 15:29:37

Litany Against Fiat
I must not value the world through fiat.
Fiat is the mind-killer.
Fiat is the little theft that brings total obliteration.
I will articulate my own value.
I will permit fiat to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fiat has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

2024-09-03 22:45:16

I’m usually pretty good with words, but I think I need help finding one that describes the feeling you get when your 13 year old son looks at you and says, “dad, can I start working out with you?”
None of mine are big enough, or beautiful enough.

2024-09-03 21:32:13

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🍻

2024-09-03 20:56:59

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I started buying Bitcoin in 2017. It didn't DO anything.
I kept buying in 2018, 19, 20 and it still didn't DO anything.
Same in 21, 22 and 23... again, it didn't DO anything.
In 24, largely thanks to Bitcoin, I stepped away from my corporate life and I started to DO (different) things.

2024-09-03 16:58:10

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Do you have an undisclosed interest in the kilt industry?

2024-09-03 16:46:23

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If you can just throw enough computing power at it, you will discover that the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything is 42

2024-09-03 16:43:37

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the "uncensored" thing is interesting because, while I'm admittedly new here, I have yet to come across much of anything that would have been targeted for censorship on more regulated platforms.

2024-09-03 16:38:54

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Taking responsibility is the very essence of freedom. Sadly, few.

2024-09-03 15:15:34

Headphones. Solitude.
Russian Circles, Station, 2008
Few.

2024-09-02 20:01:19

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Small talk that lasts for more than a few minutes

2024-09-02 19:40:21

My first job immediately after finishing grad school was teaching high-school A-level courses in Ethics, Philosophy, History and Literature at a small international private school in Abu Dhabi. This was in the late 1990s.
The opportunity came to me through luck and happenstance, and I remember there being only a few days time between the unsolicited and unexpected phone call offer and my hopping on a plane to fly to the other side of the world in a scramble to arrive for the start of the school year.
My experience teaching there was enriching. The kids were diverse, curious, optimistic, energetic and transitioning forward in time toward a new chapter in their lives when they would emerge into a much larger and less bounded world. It helped that my classes, in particular, were viewed as a bit of a respite from the heavy and demanding loads of work that they would trudge home with them from their various science and math classes.
Although there were textbooks already assigned for the courses I was to teach, there wasn't really a curriculum to speak of, and I had complete leeway to build it and teach it as I wanted (I was either empowered or ignored by the administration, depending on what POV you want to take). In retrospect, this lead me to do some questionable things, including teaching a lesson on Nietzsche and some of his concepts that were relevant to our discussions (in a country where internet was accessed through a state-owned utility and all online information about Nietzsche's writings were censored and blocked). But it also lead to some inspired moments, like my decision to kick-off the introduction to ethics class with a thought experiment originally proposed by Robert Nozick in 1974: the Experience Machine.
The discussions this thought experiment generated were amazing--not just because they were varied and novel, but because they were also, in the end, insoluble. This really surprised me. I had specifically chosen this thought experiment because I thought that it would inevitably lead to an enlightening consensus for all of us. It didn't. Yes, there were many in the class who grappled with the experiment and puzzled out some deeply personal value they held more precious than the seductive promise of the experience machine. Seeing them mine and refine their reflexive hesitations in order to conceptualize and articulate them as values was amazing.
But there was an almost equal sized cohort who were enthusiastic proponents of the machine and who could find nothing worth the uncertainty that came from opting-out. They were not swayed by the reasoned self-discovery of their class-mates. It struck me as somewhat uncanny. These were not bad kids--I liked them a lot. And yet, even now, remembering back, I am not able to fully convince myself that they weren't wrong in their decision to plug-in. But I have, at least, convinced myself that whatever I think about what they think isn't fully right.

2024-09-02 17:42:36

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Well said, and the phenomenon is often even more problematic. People don't just outsource opinion-making, they begin to identify with an imagined subjectivity that holds such opinions. This imagined subjectivity is a sort of expressive and repressive fantasy that is clearly visible in the intolerance, hostility and bad-faith that is frequently demonstrated by these people against others who hold different views. Outsourcing for convenience alone cannot explain this.

2024-09-02 15:37:29

Tyranny is a man-in-the-middle attack between our public subjectivity and our cryptographic desire.

2024-09-02 15:25:36

Ghost in the Machine
One of the surprising lessons emerging from the rise of artificial intelligence is not just that we have reached a point where machines can impersonate thinking human beings, but also how much real human beings can be programmed to think and talk like machines.
There is no ghost in the machine, but there is something sacred in you.
Be real.

2024-09-02 15:06:07

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51. My first computer was a Commodore 64 with a cassette drive. My first dial-up provider was a long-distance phone call away. My first month of internet use cost my dad $300 dollars in long distance charges, and was therefore my last month of internet usage for a while.