Anybody watch the Netflix show Arcane?
I ignored it for years since video game adoptions into other media are rarely good.
But so far this is surprisingly solid.
When you read fiction of any genre, do you tend to gravitate toward authors and/or main characters of your own gender, or not really and it’s fine either way?
In my reading, it seems about 50/50. Plenty of male and female authors I like, and usually there are a lot of major characters of both genders.
Statistically, women read novels more than men, but it varies by genre, eg romance vs military fiction. I guess part of why my reading is somewhere in the middle is I don’t read pure romance books or pure military books and the like, but rather read adventure/fantasy/sci-fi books that often have one or more romantic arcs, one or more action scenes including sometimes military scenes, heists, crimes, etc.
I listened to this podcast on how to write novels that men would like out of curiosity, and it was interesting. Basically, their thesis is that too much current writing advice is geared to writing for women, so male readers kind of get left out, but then authors pick up on that and write for men, and they do a lot of volume. I think that’s largely correct. However, I also found the advice a bit black and white, like that most women want character development and details of feelings while most men want achievement and details of things.
My assumption is that the majority of men and women readers want both of those things.
So what are your thoughts? Do you tend to gravitate toward authors and characters of your gender or not really?
https://youtu.be/da3NiVM3IcQ
Who knows how real either number is, but notably I crossed 70k followers here on Nostr a couple days before I touched 700k on Twitter.
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Surprisingly, Chester Bennington's (RIP) replacement by Emily Armstrong fulfills the same vibe in the lineup. Her screaming vocals capture a lot of the same sound and essence of Bennington. That was a surprisingly good pick.
With Mike Shinoda still doing major vocals and most other members still onboard, Linkin Park 2.0 is surprisingly continuous with Linkin Park 1.0, in my view.
Solid revival of a major band after a six-year semi-hiatus.
Tom Cruise is a Scientologist but he still makes good action movies. I see no reason to discount Emily Armstrong as a surprisingly good Chester Bennington replacement for her personal life.
Was going to watch the debate live, and then at the last minute was like, "nah". Neither Trump nor Harris deserve my active time.
I'll check betting sites and listen to the replay while I'm biking or otherwise half-listening.
I like how the new female singer's screaming voice somehow captures Chester's (RIP) scream. Feels like the right vibe, surprisingly.
That, along with Shinoda's continued vocals, helps it still feel like the same band.
The Social Security Administration expects their reserves to run out in 2035.
That’s a different pile of money than most other government functions, and so without either tax increases or legislation that transfers other money to it, payments going out to retirees could actually be cut after that due to not enough income flowing in.
I’m not sure what they’ll do at that point since we don’t even know what things will look like then, but basically 2035 is the next station to see if the train keeps going or not.
This drawdown will represent “intergovernmental” public debt turning into public debt held by either the private sector, foreign sector, or central bank.
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What aspects do you enjoy most about your favorite sci fi or fantasy novels? Obviously it’s a mix of everything but what consistent themes do you find yourself returning to frequently?
To give an example, I tend to like complex and internally consistent magic systems or “hard magic” systems, eg Brandon Sanderson. He basically invents an alternative physics in a given series and there’s a whole set of stories around that.
I also put a lot of weight on complex characters, eg Game of Thrones. You know it’s good writing when someone can push a kid out of a window in the first episode and then somehow kind of make you almost like the guy later on.
If you don’t like sci fi and/or fantasy, what is it about the genre(s) that you dislike? And do you like one but not the other, or both or neither?
The professional side of me is fully focused on finance. It’s tiring, but I’m there every day.
The Nostr Lyn side of me keeps broadening her timeframe and keeps getting pulled to write a science fiction or fantasy novel, at this point, with all sorts of character arcs and cultural symbolism tied in. Which is almost too long of a time preference.
I wonder if a side hobby is what is needed to keep me focused on my main work. I used to have hobbies years ago, but the extreme environment of 2020-2022 kind of killed them as things went crazy and I did nothing but work. During 2023 and 2024 I explored if I should have hobbies again, but I kept focused on work, and here now I’ve determined that I should explore more.
I boosted my exercise, traveled the world, and re-explored video games. But the video games didn’t stick. Re-exploring my older writing is sticking.
Lately I’ve been trying to explore hobbies, to replicate a normal human. And writing weird sci fi or fantasy is what keeps me engaged.
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I've been doing consistent long walks in the sun around my neighborhood while the weather's nice. Doing some business calls while walking, or listening to a podcast while walking.
I mostly blame @Steven Lubka for getting me into this trend.
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Bike riding, lots of squats, some deadlifts, some sprints, some pushups, some dumbbells, long walks in the sun, and cold plunges.
That's kind of my vibe now.
Bitwise does proof of reserves. The others rely on auditors, and Bitwise also has auditors of course. In most cases, multiple large institutions would need to be in on the lie for major ETF fraud to occur.
I think it’s very unlikely that ETFs are lying at this stage. Instead, there have been plenty of long-term holders selling bitcoin on exchanges, offsetting a lot of those ETF inflows. Many of them are even selling and then buying into the ETFs. My main concern with the ETFs is mainly that 1) wanting to leave them and move into bitcoin is a taxable event and 2) the US government could prevent future withdraws of real bitcoin from this whole financialized stack.
For me it feels right when it’s small. Fewer people will see it, so it’s easier to be open. And at the same time it adds exclusivity to Nostr in the form of Nostr-only personal content. Once it gets big, I don’t think I’ll share as much, and I’ll already have shared a lot, so the baton passes.
When I was growing up in middle school and high school, I had a next door neighbor trailer park friend named Jordan, who is quite a character and has showed up in detail in some of my long-form Nostr posts from a while ago. He ran a series of sand-pit fights in his backyard that I participated in.
Sadly, he had the most broken and crazy home, like him and his younger sister were often alone and figuring out life for themselves, with their mom coming back like every other day barely, but Jordan was so charismatic and funny and smart that I hung out with him and his sister a lot at home and at the bus stop. Their trailer was an absolute mess, but it had a chaotic warmth to it from the people there. Jordan basically ran the place. When his absentee single mother came home from time to time after work and whatever else she was up to, she'd be like, "Oh Lyn, hi! I've been out today due to motorcycle lessons. (???) Do you want a bagel? I've got bagels. Jordan, you should be more like Lyn, she's polite. She always says thank you. Stay as long as you want Lyn, sorry for the mess." And I'd be like, "uhmm, thanks!"
Jordan, who was two years older than me, taught me to play Magic the Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons, and got me into anime via Trigun and Cowboy Beebop; all sorts of nerd stuff at a time when I was kind of otherwise aimless. I was living alone with my 60+ year old single father at the time.
We then became a funny duo as teenagers; him as the charismatic outlandish guy who usually got into trouble, taught me all sorts of nerd stuff, got his girlfriend pregnant at age18 and started a family with her, barely got out of high school, and me as the total opposite introverted bookish polite one next door that would play Magic the Gathering or Dungeons and Dragons with his friends group, and that he'd trick his friends into fighting in his sand pit as a joke since they didn't know what they were getting into, but that was like clean as a whistle in terms of schoolwork and relationships.
Anyway, the point of this rambling post is that I first watched Fight Club in the best possible setting. I went over to Jordan's house one evening, and we started watching it. But then his mother called him and said to come to help with some shit she was dealing with, so he was like, "hey I got to go Lyn, but you can keep watching it, no problem." So I was there at night, in his messy trailer alone (???), watching Fight Club. The place was a mess, I felt weird that I was the only one in their home despite not living there, and Jordan was basically a more benign equivalent of Tyler Durden. So actually the movie hit a bit harder because I was both enjoying it but also constantly on edge because I was in a weird environment that didn't quite feel right, and yet felt oddly on-brand for the movie.
Can't really replicate that. And it's burned into my memory better than most movies.
nostr:note1h5x4u6ndv6r2p90qje05tehsxv2qajmludvrwafmwr472xaed3eskk9jrw
My friends and I were debating who of the main characters got it the worst in the end.
And we were all kind of picking characters closest to ourselves. The ones we could relate with the easiest. Felt terrible.
Of the four Pierce Brosnan Bond movies, the first one was great (Goldeneye, so good), the second one was decent (Tomorrow Never Dies actually has a lot of relevance today, as it's about the control of corporate media with misinformation, which is rather prescient for 1997), and the final two were bad.
Of the five Daniel Craig Bond movies, I differ a bit from the consensus. The consensus is that the first (Casino Royale) and third (Skyfall) were great, but that the second, Quantum of Solace, was the worst and the others were okay.
However, while I do think the first Craig movie (Casino Royale) was great, and Skyfall was the second best, I think Quantum of Solace as the second movie was underwhelming but not bad. It was kind of that middle-of-trilogy vibe. I rate it above the consensus. The true catastrophe of this series, which I rate below the consensus, was actually the fourth movie Spectre. Utterly awful in terms of plot, especially given Bond's greatest villain Blofeld played by Waltz, which is such a strong casting. They fucked the whole story up and it made no sense. Bond literally walked into the evil headquarters with no plan, and got captured. And then when the villain is drilling into his head to erase his memories, it just randomly didn't work, and he broke free via bad narrative. Made absolutely no sense. People were too accepting of it because they liked Waltz on screen and he distracts them from how weak his character was and how bad the plot was. And Blofeld was way too obsessive with Bond. Cool villains aren't as obsessive as that. And then the fifth one was solid and partially salvaged the catastrophe that was Spectre. Kind of mediocre like Quantum of Solace, but with a solid and surprising climax to the series, which elevated and completed it.
When I was growing up in middle school and high school, I had a next door neighbor trailer park friend named Jordan, who is quite a character and has showed up in detail in some of my long-form Nostr posts from a while ago. He ran a series of sand-pit fights in his backyard that I participated in.
Sadly, he had the most broken and crazy home, like him and his younger sister were often alone and figuring out life for themselves, with their mom coming back like every other day barely, but Jordan was so charismatic and funny and smart that I hung out with him and his sister a lot at home and at the bus stop. Their trailer was an absolute mess, but it had a chaotic warmth to it from the people there. Jordan basically ran the place. When his absentee single mother came home from time to time after work and whatever else she was up to, she'd be like, "Oh Lyn, hi! I've been out today due to motorcycle lessons. (???) Do you want a bagel? I've got bagels. Jordan, you should be more like Lyn, she's polite. She always says thank you. Stay as long as you want Lyn, sorry for the mess." And I'd be like, "uhmm, thanks!"
Jordan, who was two years older than me, taught me to play Magic the Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons, and got me into anime via Trigun and Cowboy Beebop; all sorts of nerd stuff at a time when I was kind of otherwise aimless. I was living alone with my 60+ year old single father at the time.
We then became a funny duo as teenagers; him as the charismatic outlandish guy who usually got into trouble, taught me all sorts of nerd stuff, got his girlfriend pregnant at age18 and started a family with her, barely got out of high school, and me as the total opposite introverted bookish polite one next door that would play Magic the Gathering or Dungeons and Dragons with his friends group, and that he'd trick his friends into fighting in his sand pit as a joke since they didn't know what they were getting into, but that was like clean as a whistle in terms of schoolwork and relationships.
Anyway, the point of this rambling post is that I first watched Fight Club in the best possible setting. I went over to Jordan's house one evening, and we started watching it. But then his mother called him and said to come to help with some shit she was dealing with, so he was like, "hey I got to go Lyn, but you can keep watching it, no problem." So I was there at night, in his messy trailer alone (???), watching Fight Club. The place was a mess, I felt weird that I was the only one in their home despite not living there, and Jordan was basically a more benign equivalent of Tyler Durden. So actually the movie hit a bit harder because I was both enjoying it but also constantly on edge because I was in a weird environment that didn't quite feel right, and yet felt oddly on-brand for the movie.
Can't really replicate that. And it's burned into my memory better than most movies.
nostr:note1h5x4u6ndv6r2p90qje05tehsxv2qajmludvrwafmwr472xaed3eskk9jrw
I’m reading my first fiction book in four years, since Rhythm of War.
It’s called The Lost Metal and it came out a couple years ago but I’m behind on my fiction, since my financial work engulfed me ever since the pandemic.
Both of these are like deep sequels into stories I’ve been reading for a decade from Brandon Sanderson.
If anyone is interested in his universe, imo the best place to start is Mistborn.
Keep up with it. Finish the Mistborn trilogy. Vin and Eland’s the romance are only a part of it. I like Vin, but I get those that don’t. The next Mistborn series, four books set hundreds of years in the future, has an older male lead and plenty of male and female characters like the first trilogy had. But the real masterpiece is the Stormlight Archives series, which is his largest scope story and has no central character. Plenty of men and women of various ages and stations. I think the Mistborn trilogy is worth reading first, and then Stormlight Archive which is a bigger and more epic investment if someone likes the Mistborn trilogy. It’s all part of the same broader universe, like how the Marvel movies all had the Thanos backdrop but with more depth than that.
I originally found Mistborn because I was told, correctly, that it had a great magic system, back in my early twenties.
Vin as a tomboyish introverted woman in her late teens happened to be a decent avatar for me in my early twenties as a tomboyish introverted woman to identify with. I liked the character and the trilogy.
But more importantly, it got me into Sanderson’s broader universe, which has a lot of characters to identify with.
The fifth Stormlight book is coming out in December.
The way Sanderson has structured it, is that Stormlight will have ten books, but that the fifth book will be a major climax with a long time gap until book six which will start a later story. So it's a ten-book series told in two parts, and the climax within part five is coming up soon.
I've read through book four, like 4800 cumulative pages, and am locked. That's the first fiction book I'll buy on day one.
The whole Mistborn Era #2 isn't my favorite. It's enjoyable, and I need to complete it with Lost Metal, but it's not at the same level imo as Mistborn Era #1 or Stormlight.
For those that want to buy Broken Money with bitcoin, the best place is Saif House.
https://thesaifhouse.com/
In addition to the ebook and audio versions, they uniquely have the cloth hardcover dusk jacket version, which is the most premium form of the physical book. It’s available in fiat there as well.
And for 10+ copy wholesale orders, like for bookstores or events, whether in fiat or bitcoin, Saif House is the best option. They beat Amazon on both cost and delivery speed for wholesale.
Like when I gave my Broken Money talk at Princeton University earlier this year and they handed out books, they bought those through Saif House.
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What are some skills that you don’t understand at all?
For me music is at the top of the list. My husband can hear a tune and then with a few tries he can play the tune on the piano.
He barely had any music lessons but can somehow do that. I had guitar lessons, and my teacher tried to get me to do that, but I was terrible. So not only can’t I do it, I don’t really even know where I’d begin. The inability to even see the next step.
Like if I see a pro athlete do something, I know I can’t do it, but I get the basic idea of what they did to get to that stage on kind of a step by step basis. But when someone can hear music and then just play the melody, my mind is blown.
Yeah that blows my mind too. It’s part of the broader music confusion I have. Like when Hans Zimmer starts a new soundtrack for a movie, I don’t even know where he begins.
Yes music in theory is logical and mathematical, but it feels like an encrypted language to me. Like I know the logic is there but I can’t begin to see it. And other people see it intuitively without training. I’m bad at learning other languages in general.
I do like auditory information, but so far not for fiction. I like to read fiction and listen to nonfiction.
Yeah it couldn’t actually be that I worked on aircraft simulators for 12 years and eventually ran the facility. Talking about anything during that long period of my life is “desperately wanting to hang out with the guys” lol.
The electronic project that I am most proud of from my engineering days, was also the most useless thing I ever built. I was reminded of it amid all the censorship in Brazil, because it’s about Embraer avionics, which are Brazilian.
A short story.
The background context was that I never considered myself to be a great engineer. I was more interested in finance but had gone into engineering instead, and basically what makes someone great in a field is whether they have the passion to do it in their spare time or not. The best engineers, after school or after work, go home and do more hobbyist engineering stuff. Like, they just live in it. I spent my spare time on financial research instead. I liked my engineering work, but was only a design engineer when I had to be, basically. My passion was elsewhere. So I knew I'd likely eventually go into engineering finance/management in that kind of hybrid role.
I went to work in an aviation simulation facility after college. Rather than being used for training new pilots as most airplane simulators are, this facility was used by corporate, academic, and government researchers to test new technologies and procedures with experienced pilots. So the simulators were more customizable than training simulators, but were less polished. They were always these cool work-in-progress machines.
We had Airbus, Boeing, and Cessna models in the early days. And we had a half-finished Embraer, simply because the manager of the simulation facility just wanted an Embraer due how cool and different they are. His higher-ups in the broader parent organization told him there wasn’t enough market demand for testing in Embraers and wouldn’t give him a budget for it, but he kept finding ways to gradually accumulate the parts anyway. Eventually he had the simulator shell, and genuine avionics, but still had to put it all together. The Embraer avionics and flight controls were just so much more interesting and sleek than the other types.
In our Boeing and Airbus simulators, we had genuine avionics, but interfaced them into industrial automation control logic and PCs, rather than what they normally connect to in the field. And it wasn’t hard because they used some standard communication protocols like RS-422 or RS-485. All the buttons and dials were easy to connect to automation control systems, and the serial communications were things you could buy a PC card for.
But the Embraer sat unfinished for years partially because there was no budget for it, and partially because it didn’t use those standard serial protocols. The serial communications coming from their flight panel and throttle were some custom method that none of our equipment could read. You could just rip it open and re-do the insides to talk to a PC more easily, but the manager forbade that; he wanted the Embraer avionics to remain pristine. We had incomplete documentation, and virtually no budget or labor to put into it beyond the pieces we already had. It was this hacky project. We didn’t even really have electronic design software other than a lapsed PSpice license, since we rarely did any sort of custom circuits and instead would interface various devices into automation systems.
So, getting the Embraer up and running was always on the manager’s pet project to-do list but not making much progress. He would occasionally put an entry level or intermediate level engineer on it for a few months and they’d eventually give up, leave the organization, or go back to something more economically relevant. It went on like that for years; it became the Kobayashi Maru for electronic engineers in this facility.
After my first couple years working there on the Boeing, Airbus, and Cessna, the manager was eventually like, “alright, I want you to see if you can get that Embraer flight panel connected.” Little budget, just me in the lab with an oscillator and multimeter. I knew this would happen one day- the Embraer avionics were always kind of looming in the lab, next to half-finished failed creations of my predecessors that tried to interface with it, knowing that eventually I’d be put to work on this thing. And I still had other duties to do, so this was like a budget-less side project I had to spend part of each week on, with insufficient equipment and documentation and with the knowledge that the Embraer simulator might not even be used if I somehow succeeded.
So I dove into it. The Embraer flight panel had a series of buttons, but unlike our other flight panels, they all went through a parallel-in serial-out (PISO) shift register. So they came out of the device in a fast custom serial communication stream. An external device had to give the flight panel a clock signal, and give another CLR signal that would be low for 24 milliseconds and high for 1 millisecond, and during that 1 millisecond there would be 256 clock signals, and the flight panel would output all of its current states of button and knobs within those 256 clock signals within the millisecond, every 25 milliseconds. And the CLR signal had to be shifted some microseconds away from the clock signal so that the signal edges of their square waves don’t occur simultaneously, which would cause reliability issues. The incomplete documentation we had only roughly outlined this; I had to iterate a bunch of oscillator tests to see what successfully worked as an input, and then more fully document where every button and dial showed up on the output data stream once I got it flowing.
And then once I figured out how it worked, I had to figure out how to connect it to a PC and/or our standard industrial automation interface.
At first I tried one of our 2 year old microcontrollers that we had on hand, which as of this writing are now nearly 15 years old so not the current generation stuff. I looked to see if I could program it to send in these signals and then read the signals coming from it, but it wasn’t nearly fast and precise enough. This project needed lower-level design than something software-based.
I wasn’t sure if FPGAs of the day would be fast enough, I hadn't worked on them before, and and we didn’t have any anyway. So I went the raw logic route instead which would be annoying but cheap and guaranteed to work. I researched crystal oscillators, logic gates, counters, flip-flops, and serial-in parallel-out (SIPO) shift registers. I then used them to build this whole digital clockwork circuit from scratch to basically reverse everything that the flight panel was doing. It would use a crystal oscillator as the initial frequency, and from that would generate the clock signal and the CLR signal to send to the flight panel, and would run the timing for a bunch of SIPO shift registers so that this stream of serial data coming out of the flight panel would load into the shift registers, then get frozen in place for 24 milliseconds which was fast enough for our slower industrial automation interface to read the data which was now in parallel form.
Then I bought all the cheap logic pieces, soldered together test circuits, troubleshooted it, and got the thing working. I came in alone on the weekends to do it since I had little time in the week; I was just caught in the flow of making this work. Rather than viewing it as annoying as I did early on, I now viewed it as something I had to beat.
And then the Embraer throttles were the second difficult piece. Rather than a normal position output as our other simulator throttles did, the Embraer throttles basically outputted sign waves, and as you moved the throttle, which was really well-crafted and smooth, the two sign waves would overlap to varying degrees. So I had to map that all out, build a circuit to read these sign waves and send that position data to the slower industrial automation interface in a way that it could read it. I then soldered together the circuits, and got that working too.
I then wired up all the more standard electronics in the Embraer which were not that different than the other simulators. And so, I was finally able to go the manager and say, “the Embraer’s flight controls and avionics are all connected now! ^_^”.
I remember being so proud, like, “oh shit, maybe I could actually be decent at this.” And the custom circuit interfaces indeed worked for the next decade and counting without maintenance, perfectly reliable. We then got the rest of the simulator fully set up.
But… the Embraer simulator was only used like one time, barely. No research teams wanted to test new technologies and procedures on Embraers; they would always test things on the Airbus and Boeing simulators. So this awesome simulator, with so much work poured into it, was a complete waste of time, which is what the managers’ higher-ups had told him from the beginning.
I went on to do a bunch of other projects including a business jet simulator and a helicopter simulator and an upgraded redesign of our Cessna before I went into management and out of design engineering, but nothing was quite as hacky as that Embraer simulator, so it was always the one I would look at fondly and be like, “I can’t believe this useless thing is still running.”
Rather than feeling sad that the work was wasted, I instead always kind of had a “journey before destination” mindset to it, like it was the most frustrating project that I had brute-force succeeded at, from research to design to physically putting it all together to troubleshooting, and gave me a bigger sense of achievement and got me into a higher state of flow than other engineering projects I had done. To this day, I always think of Embraer planes warmly.
We used X Plane and Microsoft Slight Sim sometimes, and plugins, in addition to high-end Rockwell stuff which was orders of magnitude more expensive. It was fun seeing the evolution of these various products over a decade.
And somewhere in there I'd say there's a fourth decision: When you decide to change your status signaling from things like beauty, power, and material achievement, to things like integrity, competence, and helpfulness.
Almost everyone is geared toward signaling. As social creatures we're deeply wired to signal value to others.
But there's a lot of flexibility in how we signal that.
-We can signal it with shallower things like beauty, lambos, hierarchical dominance, etc. The details will vary between men and women but they have a similar short time preference that few old people on their deathbed wished they had focused more on.
-Or we can signal it with deeper things like integrity, honesty, helpfulness, friendliness, generosity, providing unique thoughts, or providing wisdom. The details will vary based on profession and skillset but they also have a similar long time preference that most old people on their deathbed wished they had focused more on.
nostr:note1fjpxex0vhv7qlkcyggk09n67q7vpswdjzjpf7uucjqq6vgylwa8sz3l820
Nah. Staying humble and stacking sats, not revealing the size of your stack, and being known for your reputation as a developer, as a financier, as a conference organizer, as a manager, are huge parts of the bitcoin ecosystem.
Bitcoin is hard money. And as a result, the ecosystem that builds around it is very low time preference and oriented toward reputation signaling rather than shallow stuff like beauty, lambos, or dominance.
That’s mechanical stuff. And even related to war at times. That’s why money works. Proof of work. You’re talking about why Bitcoin as a network is successful, which is very separate from individual social signaling.
Individuals signal status to each other socially on numerous metrics, based on gender and skillset and other priorities.
But a common trend is that focusing on the short term stuff, like beauty, ego, possessions, and so forth is very ephemeral. It feels good in the moment but it doesn’t contribute much long-term. Much of that is instinctively geared toward mate acquisition but many people get locked into it too much. We can apply our self awareness to escape that loop.
In contrast, focusing on things like signaling your integrity to others through actions, your honesty, your generosity, your competence at your craft, your wisdom and helpfulness from experience- that’s what contributes a lot of deep satisfaction long-term.
That’s the point of the post.
I generally agree with that. And @jack mallers highlighted it on the his episode of WBD by pointing out that the finitude of life is what gives it urgency to get shit done now rather than later or never.
To any extent that I have success now in my mid-career, I point a lot of it to my early constraints which were outside of my control. Was homeless as a kid, then grew up in a trailer park, then financed my education through student loans with no family bailout if things go sour. So I had a lot of good things qualitatively (love, support, good values, family and friend experiences, etc), but also a lot of financial uncertainty quantitatively. It was all numbers and constraints by the time I hit college.
So I had to be super serious about college performance, super serious about doing side jobs to pay for it and gain new skills in doing so, super serious about landing good internships and succeeding at them, super serious about my post-college full-time employment, and super-serious about building side hustles alongside my career, which eventually became all of the financial research that I do now.
What I do today in all likelihood would not exist if I were more comfortable and free when I was younger. Those initial constraints were a huge boost. Like an initial cold plunge into life.
It wasn't so extreme that I was like, doomed and without lifelines. Instead it was the right amount of constrained of being shot out of a cannon, but with with like a parachute and a map on where to land.
Can't replicate that. Just have to be thankful for it. Being given the right blend of freedom and responsibility goes a very long way. If tilted too far in either direction, it can become restrictive.
I think we just have to lean into our constraints and try to be thankful for them and learn from them, and also lean into our freedoms and try to be thankful for them and learn from them.
And somewhere in there I'd say there's a fourth decision: When you decide to change your status signaling from things like beauty, power, and material achievement, to things like integrity, competence, and helpfulness.
Almost everyone is geared toward signaling. As social creatures we're deeply wired to signal value to others.
But there's a lot of flexibility in how we signal that.
-We can signal it with shallower things like beauty, lambos, hierarchical dominance, etc. The details will vary between men and women but they have a similar short time preference that few old people on their deathbed wished they had focused more on.
-Or we can signal it with deeper things like integrity, honesty, helpfulness, friendliness, generosity, providing unique thoughts, or providing wisdom. The details will vary based on profession and skillset but they also have a similar long time preference that most old people on their deathbed wished they had focused more on.
nostr:note1fjpxex0vhv7qlkcyggk09n67q7vpswdjzjpf7uucjqq6vgylwa8sz3l820
Gm.
It seems that it will be very hard for Brazil to identify and enforce the fines on VPN usage for Twitter/X. But it’s a powerful scare tactic.
When the United States banned gold ownership in the1930s (which lasted for four decades all the way into the 1970s btw), they didn’t really enforce it at the household level. They just had large prison terms that were rarely ever applied, which effectively dried up liquidity in the gold market.
Some people have pointed out that Nostr relays could be blocked by Brazilian internet providers if Nostr was big enough to matter. However, more relays could spin up, so they’d have to keep adding to the list.
Brazil’s government could then say it’s illegal to use VPNs for any Nostr app around internet censoring. The defense against that is to make Nostr as ubiquitous as possible. The more apps that tie into Nostr in some way, the harder it is to ever ban it in practice. Some people might not even know their favorite app uses Nostr. Imagine if everyone’s favorite short form app, long form app, podcasting app, reviews app, wallet app, recipes app, picture app, music app, and tons of other stuff are tied into Nostr, and how hard that would be to ban.
If Nostr becomes big enough to really matter, it’s because it’ll be tied into so many different things. That’s super powerful. And the devs keep building rapidly.
But it’s not just one thing in that scenario. It’s a Gordian knot of a bunch of things using some particular communication protocol among many other communications protocols. Government bans work best on the public when they have one clear thing to propagandize. Like “cannabis is really really bad!” or “Musk isn’t above the law, so we will ban X until he complies to prevent disinformation!” It’s much harder to play perpetual whack-a-mole with a bunch of different things. The propaganda narrative becomes diffused and unclear, the cost to enforce goes up, people might not even know what underlying technologies different apps use, etc.
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Notes by LynAlden | export