If (or when) NATO is directly fighting Russia, NATO will be composed of the US, Canada, Ideland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece, Solvenia, Croatia, Montenegro, Albania, North Macedonia, Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Luxembourg, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, and the UK (I might have missed some).

One way to tell this story is that "Russia can't possibly win a war against all these countries! There are so many countries in NATO!"

Another way to thell this story is that "Russia's enemy is already divided."

Being divided into 30 some odd nations doesn't make NATO more powerful just because 30 is a bigger number than 1. It's actually far less powerful to be divided.

A better way to compare these powers is to compare actual capabilities: Tanks, artillery, soldiers, fighter jets, etc.


You might have a chance of being un-banned if you post any of these things:

"We have to stop Trump!"
"We have to stop bitcoin from causing climate change!"
"I just bought an electric car!"


Did you ever say anything about bitcoin?

Did you say you love nostr more than mastodon?

The socialist overlords don't like those things.


That is what it is supposed to do, but it depends how it is wired up.

"Since the software which runs on baseband processors is usually proprietary, it is impossible to perform an independent code audit. By reverse engineering some of the baseband chips, researchers have found security vulnerabilities that could be used to access and modify data on the phone remotely."  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseband_processor


I have a predefined text response:  UNSUPPORTED EVENT KIND

;-)

I went ahead and added about 20 new event kinds to my library, and then marked about 5 of those as feed-displayable.  If the contents are feed-displayable, it will now display them but since the event kind is not understood really, It titles (in blue) the content with the event kind so you know better what it is you are looking it.  This is on unstable.


It's a new 'git' stuff event that I don't support yet.  It wouldn't even be displayed except I presume somebody reposted or quoted it.


I was wondering about that but thought maybe not.  These phones work internationally.  Are all the cellular networks so compatible that this communication works without a SIM providing the details of the frequencies, passcodes, or whatever?


I think it was Ike (I think Ike) former CTO of the CIA who was giving a talk and on video said the CIA didn't let their agents use mobile phones but fitbits were OK because they don't have a ... and then he stopped mid-sentence and said he couldn't say what he was going to say because it was classified.  I'm pretty sure he would have said "baseband processor"


I just stumbled across a great solution.  Get a mobile hotspot and put your SIM into that.  Then if you need to get on the Internet while out and about, use the mobile hot spot.  The mobile hotspot baseband chip can't listen to your microphone on your phone, or monitor anything else.


The data and messages and activites that your baseband processor in your mobile phone gets up to... nobody talks about.  The manufacturers don't release documentation, the mobile phone networks don't either, and you cannot find out.  They even don't disclose things in court, arguing against even high level discussion of what these things get up to.

These processors are not beholden to Android at all, they are totally independent, lower.  They can listen in to your conversations, listen to your microphone (or use the speaker as a microphone) and Android would have no idea --- no App can protect you, no Android fork can protect you from these things. GrapheneOS does not protect you from this stuff.

And remember, mobile phone networks are mostly ancient unnecessary tech stacks.  All we really need is Internet Protocol.  We don't need SMS or calls, we can do VoIP and all kinds of messaging (like nostr or signal) over the Internet.  All we really need these days is an Internet connection, not the old text/call stuff.

BUT if you remove your SIM and maybe even poke a hole through your baseband chip, you won't be able to get on the Internet while travelling, you will be stuck with WiFi.


I think you are going to need some methane credits


I hadn't seen tow-boot. Was familiar with u-boot though.  This is interesting: https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PineTab-V

I have a SiFive HiFive Unmatched running ubuntu. I tried to write low-level code to do what u-boot should do on that hardware (wind up the PLLs, flip some switches, etc, the stuff the HW manual says must be done at power on) and then print something to the screen.  But it just printed garbage to the screen and I never figured out why my code wasn't working... and then I discovered nostr and my life changed.


Yes. I was skeptical of redox from the start because it happened so fast and I doubted anybody could achieve those results so quickly. But it's been a long time now and nobody has called him out as a fraud (that I am aware of) so I guess I should be very impressed.  He matched the ABI and syscalls to linux so that existing software would run on it as if it were linux.


Maybe compile speeds suffer, but I've forked this guys work to make a mini special-purpose OS for x86_64 machines, all in rust (except 2 screens of assembly):

https://os.phil-opp.com/


According to what I've read, it has lower specs and even lower battery life than the librem5 which also has kill switches and is sitting here on my shelf.


IMHO far too early. RISC-V processors aren't competitive yet. I suspect it is like this:

1. RISC-V instructions are simple and have short decode paths, meaning clock cycles could be faster, but
2. Higher frequency clocks create hard to deal with electromagnetical effects, so they can't do that
3. Instead they get low power, which is good for the phone, but not if the CPU is too slow.
4. They also can scale up to lots of cores
5. SiFive has done a lot of multi-issue out-of-order work to optimize their chips, but still not competitive for phones I think, and that kind of thing might lead to Spectre-like bugs.

There probably will need to be some kind of hybrid.


That is what is on it now. PostmarketOS intead of PureOS. But it doesn't fix the hardware problems.


On the heels of a loss in Georgia, did the CIA just pull the trigger in Slovakia?

Rules-based order my ass!

#RobertFico #Slovakia #CIA


Sounds like fun. I may have to ..... wait, I didn't say anything.  ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H


As for my predictions, that's a different thing.  I'd be willing to bet 50:50 it will still be linux and android 10 years from now.  But also that it will be a microkernel on an open processor spec written in a memory-safe language 25 years from now.

It COULD happen withn the next 7 years, but looking back, nothing happens as fast as I've thought it could have.


I still believe in microkernels.

I still believe in RISC-V.

I don't believe linux and android is the best future.

Revolutions happen.


Maybe it is just that.

Still, I don't like trusting things. I like to verify. And I can't. Being a skeptic I'm going to have the other hypothesis.

I went to The Plaza today (the mall in Palmerston North) and tried to get a case for my Google Pixel 8. There are no less than 3 (I think actually 5) shops in the mall that pretty much only sell cases ... or maybe do phone repairs too, or also have stickers and glitter, or whatever but mostly they sell mobile phone cases. None of them had any cases for this phone. None of the major phone providers (Spark, 2degrees, One) sell the Google Pixel phones.. Only Spark says they can support it on the air, the other ones do not list it as a supported phone on their network. I had to buy it online. Is it just NZ where this phone is rare? I get the impression that it's not a common phone anywhere. Checking online, they have 4.6% of the US market, far more than the NZ market, but I guess that is up from 3.6% two years ago.


Bravo!

I did this years ago and I never regretted it.  You lose suprisingly little (a few paid android apps maybe).

I still use android. I use google maps from time to time. I use YouTube. But I don't log into these things. I can use them anonymously, no cookies, VPNs, via invidious, etc.


I have one. I waited FOREVER as it was delayed for a long time. Eventually I got it and was disappointed. It's wi-fi connection is seriously weak and flakey. It runs hot when totally idle, and the battery burns dead in a few hours (again even when totally idle). On top of that, as I mentioned in my post, non-Android phone operating systems are way way behind in usability.

Even if I just wanted to use the librem5 for an occasional second linux terminal, it wasn't working. I put it away somewhere and won't bother. In fact... maybe I'll ship it to you?


In every other hardware and low-level software security project I know of, the community is trying to de-blob. u-boot, libreboot, etc. Open source firmware. Open source drivers, etc.

In phones, we still have blobs. Lots of them. And on google pixel phones, not only do we have lots of blobs we cannot see inside of in software, we also have hardware from a manufacturer that I don't trust, increasing the 'blob' risk.

The reason that there are still so many closed source blobs in the moble space is probably because the mobile space is highly competitive and a lot of innovation is occuring, and companies are protecting their IP.  But consider that some company might have a product ranked #3 or #4. That IP is NGMI and they could rescue it by opening it up. We security-minded privacy-minded people don't need the absolute top performance, but we do need openness and visibility. Right now we are stuck with old terrible performance poorly documented hardware (iMX, etc, or whatever they chose for Purism Librem 5, which sucks balls).

I think this will eventually happen, and I look forward to it.


I want to come back around to GrapheneOS and Google Pixel phones.  I'm sure some people think I was saying that "GrapheneOS was suss"...  If you go back to my note, (linked below) I didn't say that.  Read this note to understand what I was actually thinking, expressed more clearly.

I understand why GrapheneOS uses those phones. They are head and shoulders more open and more secure than any other phone out there. No reason to get into the details, I concede this point.

What I don't understand is why Google makes a phone that is so secure and so open, but that doesn't complete well in the marketplace.  Or rather, it's not that I don't understand it, I might very well understand it. I question it.

Google was founded to build the best technology and get the most users, just like any other company, but with assistance from and to the US government they become a spyware company.  They leveraged that capability to dominate the advertising business. Their modus operandi has been to create the best stuff, lure people to use it (google search, gmail, android, etc) and then surveil these customers and leverage that data for profit (at a minimum) or on behalf of "the blob" in Washington (at worst).

My hypothesis is that google creates this best-phone-for-security best-phone-for-alternative-operating-systems as a means of luring security-minded people (high value targets) to their hardware. Of course this is not something the GrapheneOS people would be aware of.  But they would inadvertently be a honey trap, useful stooges in a sense. I don't think GrapheneOS is suss... but I find the situation in totality to be a bit suspicious.

This is just a hypothesis.

If India or China (or another country that is clearly not too Western-aligned) produces a phone that is just as open and just as secure, I would strongly welcome that. I'm sure the GrapheneOS team would (if they have the manpower to do it) build for that phone too. And that is what I wish to call for.

Until then, I just updated to the Google Pixel 8 with GrapheneOS and maybe I have privacy, maybe I don't (doesn't really matter too much to me, but I prefer it and I like to push back wherever I can because we ought to have it).

As for non-Android phones, I just spent far too much time considering those options. They are still far far behind in usability, and I can't recommend any.

Prior thread: nostr:nevent1qqsqg4vc860mnve4mkqzn5a9887q9cmj0tes6h4xevjhus32ane67ycpypmhxue69uhkx6r0wf6hxtndd94k2erfd3nk2u3wvdhk6w35xs6z7qgwwaehxw309ahx7uewd3hkctcpypmhxue69uhkummnw3ezuetfde6kuer6wasku7nfvuh8xurpvdjj7wgmz87


Granted.  But you can still drive into a crowd.  And the manufacturers haven't been jailed for not stopping that ability.


You misunderstand. I don't like travelling because I don't like travelling: the cost, the bother, feeling separated from my dog. Government oppression and CO2 are at the bottom of that list of reasons.

But some of my followers are moreso targets than I am and it's good to understand the relative risks.


According to the view of Mike Benz (who I've recently discovered), the US government was pro free speech until 2014. Free speech and things like Tor helped America to topple governments around the world, by subverting the views of their citizenry via free speech.  I thought that was perfectly OK to do, as long as they were just convincing those citizens that democracy and human rights were worth fighting for (without dirty tricks) and those citizens then overthrew their oppressive government to get democracy and free speech.

But since 2014 things took a major turn against free speech.  Crimea, through free speech, discovered the CIA coup and decided they didn't want to be involved in this new Western government, and did a counter-coup with the assistance of Russia which ended up in Russia annexing Crimea.  The US was not pleased.  They changed their policy going forward.  Now speech couldn't be free, speech had to be aligned with US goals or else the US would find reasons to censor or block it.  The election of Trump and Brexit just hardened their resolve.

So Tor is not quite so welcome anymore, and I wouldn't be suprised if it gets shut down exactly as you describe.


There are a lot of legal protections for people in their private homes. Warrants are required, which require disclosed legal grounds for doing the search.

But there are massive legal carveouts for invading upon people who are travelling, initially to protect airplanes from bombs, but used for all kinds of government dirty deeds now that don't need any damn reason at all.

Keep this in mind when travelling.  I prefer not to travel.

nostr:nevent1qqsy7cpx4w8638a9dclcu4cv776wuvphpayknd3v58d8px3rnsq7jgqpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduhslqr99v


If I made it about guns, too many people would conclude that we should make guns illegal.  I make it about knives and automobiles because nobody will try to outlaw those.


> "Tornado Cash does not pose any barrier for people with criminal assets who want to launder them," according to the translated verdict seen by CoinDesk. "That is why the court regards the defendant guilty of the money laundering activities as charged."

I wonder if automobile and knife manufacturers will be jailed next:

- Automobiles do not pose any barrier for people with murderous intent who want to drive over pedestrians crossing the street.
- Knives do not pose any barrier for people with murderous intent who want to stab people with them.

These analogies aren't even very good, because "money laundering" is not analogous to murder, it is a weasel word term for a benign victimless activity of moving money privately.

Law enforcement needs to figure out how to investigate the original crimes without "following the money."

This idea that privacy must be sacrificed in the name of law enforcement is a kind of extremism that I think We The People always and perpetually need to push back against.

nostr:nevent1qqsz7j0l998n9e38773nuefc0mft5yu8qm7gcq0x05tuut3a45vm8ksppemhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mp0qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyv9kh2uewd9hj7w3mfu9


The eventual outcome is that the US is just sanctioning itself


Remind me what a ferrite  core/choke/ring/bead is for. Does it have the same effect?


When two people talk about someone else

or maybe https://github.com/mikedilger/gossip


Here is the quandry I'm in.  Nostr protocol always refers to relays by their URL (which includes path and query), not just their hostname and port.  So in order to speak nostr properly, every URL should be treated as a different relay.  That means wss://filter.nostr.wine/pubkey-1 and wss://filter.nostr.wine/pubkey-2 are different relays, and in fact there are a hundred thousand different relays sitting underneath filter.nostr.wine, actually the same server.

But this causes a proliferation of downstream effects. We connect to each of these separately. We auth to each of them separately. I'm pretty sure filter.nostr.wine only put keys in the URL temporarily and is removing it now that AUTH is implemented, and I think they probably noticed these effects (far too many connections to them).

It also causes difficulty in user management of relays. Users generally want to manage all the filter.nostr.wine relays in one place, not as 100,000 different relays.

But if I just ignore path and query, then I violate the nostr protocol strictly-speaking, and relays cannot use path and query for whatever neat idea they come up with (e.g. fiatjaf has a relay that serves notes just to the country you asked for, IIRC).

So I think the "right" answer is to use full URLs in most places (and if that causes overload on a relay, that's the relay's own issue not mine), but use (hostname, port) pairs for managing.

But what I just did instead was to use shortened URLs (path-removed) everywhere. And I'm using that branch of gossip and it seems fine, but I'm not comfortable that it is fine.


There could be multiple IP addresses on one computer too.

But I'm asking from the client perspective. A client can't determine such is the case.

I just changed gossip to ignore path / query when identifying unique relays. It seems to work, but I'm hoping it wasn't a bad idea.


You don't think you be better defended against the state under the ice in Antarctica? Or hiding in a volcano?


I think they think this is how to cryptographically sign the binding between email address and pgp key, without needing a trusted central signing authority. That is my guess.


A nostr relay is uniquely identified by its host ( IP address ) and port ( oft implied by protocol ), not by a URL.

Tell me if I'm wrong.


As for mobile phones, I think there is more scope for it than regular computers without modems


He was going on about them being horribly cruel to animals.


Well hello there bear!


Hello nostriches. I am posting from an experimental branch of gossip. It seems to be behaving in an unexpected way. Bear wtih (here we go...)


I've been using GrapheneOS since day 1, because I was using CopperheadOS for several years until the point that Daniel Micay burned the signing keys.

So I don't need to make any switch. I have a Google Pixel 8.  And I'll keep using GrapheneOS for the time being.

But I have moods. Sometimes I get really paranoid about Google and Intel processors (more than other companies). I was really paranoid about Google at the time when I made the post.  I thought "what if the explanations for why it only works on Google hardware are a lie?"  I thought "Anybody can make explanations, they might not be true!"

Turns out you can lock the bootloader on LOTS of hardware that is not Google hardware. And the long list of features that MUST be on the phone to be supported are really not all necessary IMHO for the phone to be plenty secure. So call me a skeptic, but I'm still just not sure, and I don't have the time to dig into it.

Also Daniel Micay seems to be clinically paranoid and accusatory of all kinds of harrassment he doesn't actually receive, and that instability itself is kinda worrying. I like my developers to be paranoid, but not to the level that they can't function with other people. Before even CopperheadOS he was sort-of run off from the Rust community for making drama. They say he stepped down, but he's still the guy producing most of the commits. I hope he gets and stays well, but should I trust the OS? I dunno. I'm trusting it because I don't have a better option (I could read the source, compile myself, compare to AOSP and LineageOS and other AOSP projects, but that would take a year).


Right. Which is why it's unlikely. But interesting channel.

I sometimes think about power analysis, picking up the high frequency signal through your home power lines.


I shouldn't have gotten so upset when people pointed me to the FAQ.  I asked "Why does GrapheneOS run only on Google Pixel phones?" in my original post and people pointed out that the FAQ answers that question. That is fair enough I guess. I should mark rhetorical questions as rhetorical somehow next time so people don't miss point.

> "Many other devices are supported by GrapheneOS at a source level, and it can be built for them without modifications to the existing GrapheneOS source tree."

Now that is on point. I don't recall reading that part. So I guess your assucation "Maybe you didn't read them" wasn't entirely untrue.

As for Micay stepping down, I'm reading that he was harassed and SWATted. That is not cool. He's got odd social skills but for fucks sake. I feel bad for him.


I neglected to say that exfiltration of data happens all the time, but that data is "explained".  It has "reasons".  😕


Exfiltration is Extremely Rare
(alternately titled: "I'm not wearing a tinfoil hat")

For an intelligence agency to exfiltrate data from a computer, that data has to travel over the network. That means such data is discoverable, either by packet sniffer or oscilloscope. Enough people of high technological background are looking at enough packets and enough ethernet segments to know that there is no hidden exfiltrated data in there in the general case. And the odds that you might decide to take a look, or that your router is looking for anomolies all the time, are far too high for intelligence agencies to exfiltrate data off of your computer regularly.

An intel agency could try to obfuscate the data, but that is very hard and still discoverable.

Therefore, in my opinion, this almost never happens.

WE KNOW however that they exfiltrate data from central hubs on the Internet. This was exposed multiple times. That is a different thing.

And I am nearly certain that they CAN exfiltrate data from your computer if you are targetted, and this is almost entirely undefendable (but maybe not quite and still worty trying). Someone makes the call for whether it is worth the risk to involve Tailored Access Operations to hack your computer and exfiltrate data. Specific targetting is so risky that it is highly limited. BUT I claim it does happen, and I claim that it happens more easily than most people realise, and that it happens at the lowest levels of hardware and that most security mechanisms cannot prevent it.  Consider for example that sandsifter found undocumented instructions, found hidden RISC instructions inside instruction data offering direct memory access that completely bypasses processor security.


You are presuming that I am judging whether or not to trust GrapheneOS. I am not doing that. That is off-topic.

Since you get my point, the conversation is over from my perspective. I won't be monitoring replies to this comment.


Russia gives plenty of consistent and sensible reasons justifying their invasion of Ukraine.  NATO also gives plenty of consistent and sensible reasons justifying Russia's invasion of Ukraine.  But the two stories couldn't be more different.

I am NOT saying GrapheneOS is tricking people and that these reasons aren't correct.
I AM saying that we cannot know that they are correct.
I AM saying that the existence of reasons does nothing to allay the concern, precisely because "reasons" are the easiest thing to create post-facto and therefore should have almost zero weight in your evaluation of trust.

And yet among nostr half-wits (sorry, as I get frustrated my language gets more harsh) "reasons" convince them all so easily. If I were a CIA operative I could topple you guys in my sleep!

I even gave as an example how my reason for not signing the Apple release of Gossip could not be trusted:
nostr:nevent1qqs8ksxmmz8r9sp77djkjlr2sdv5ym73tnsr2525m7te49kg63xkamspzpmhxue69uhkztnwdaejumr0dshsz8thwden5te0vfhhxarj9e3xjarrda5kuarcda4k7tnrdakj7qglwaehxw309a3x7um5wghxc6t8dp6xu6twvaehqmmjv5hxxmmd9um6cpm4

How can I make my point more clear?  I am tired.


If I'm quite hungry and have not had liver for a long time, liver and onions tastes good.

Most of the time, liver and onions tastes foul.

As for filling I can't say. I never eat more than a finger-sized portion.


I did not know about it.  Thank you for bringing it to my attention.


The easiest place for a backdoor to be injected is at the chip fab, after a chip is designed and taped out, before it is written to silicon.  Several of these have been detected via electron scanning microscopes, so it does happen.  But IMHO it probably doesn't happen to most chips.  In commercial processors it can happen at the design level.

People can't produce fast hardware via open-source projects. But they can burn a circuit into an FPGA and be pretty sure there are no backdoors, but they end up with something really slow.

My thinking was "the most likely commercially available fast processors to not be backdoored would be new ones in new areas of technology".

Just because I think Intel and AMD chips have backdoors (sandsifter found hidden RISC instructions that bypass security, RDRAND acted strangely, Intel ME is pretty well known, etc) doesn't mean that the intelligence community is successfully backdooring even the early research projects. I suspect they aren't, but of course I don't know. Hitting the big commercial projects is a big win for them, but hitting every little research project is a huge cost with very little benefit.


A few years ago before I knew who Yuval Harari was (and I think before he joined the WEF) I was loaned a book called "Sapiens" written by him.  I thought his viewpoint that wheat controlled us was a little silly but interesting, but once I got to the farming chapter I was so infurated by his complete incomprehension of farming (and totalizing accusations against all farmers) that I stopped reading and decided the guy was a complete idiot.

In all that I have learned since, I can't say I was wrong.


What a deceptive evil little man that guy is.  He takes the meaning "you don't have to trust anybody" and calls it "distrust", and play's on the negative connotatins of the prefix "dis".  Evil people need to be punished.

nostr:nevent1qqsdm09hluu3evfwvhlq7jvq3r5qy5zlfw8sng69ffyzz9z8097xatcpz9mhxue69uhkummnw3ezuamfdejj7x3wvw4


If I had a sat for the number of people who have accused me of not reading the FAQ I'd be retired on a beach somewhere right now. It is starting to really piss me off that people are not understanding what I am saying and having such shallow and accusatory reactions to what I am saying.


Just because something makes sense and is consistent with everything else you know doesn't mean it is true.

When people say "that totally makes sense" they usually also mean "I now believe it", which is a jump in logic.

If something is true, then it is consistent.  However the inverse is a fallacy called "affirming the consequent".  If you determine something is consistent, that doesn't mean it is true.

Just because it is consistent to believe GrapheneOS has chosen only Google phones for technical reasons, that doesn't prove it is true. You have to determine veracity via other means.... like knowing the history of the project, the history of attacks on GrapheneOS phones, the likelihood of google phones having exfiltration hardware (and the risk of a state agency using it and getting caught), etc.


Princess Bride


You know a phrase I haven't heard in a long time?  "That's an old wive's tale".

It is so inappropriate.

I prefer a young wive's tail.


I don't myself think poor behavior is only restrained by one's religious beliefs. But I've heard some religious people talk as if that was the case.


I had not heard.  No I don't think it is malicious.  But you have to trust hardware, and if you don't trust Google hardware you can't use it.


We need to start to centralize nostr so we can start making it more secretive and more corrupt. Or we will never be able to compete with the other evil power structures.


This is my impression:  I don't know if anything happened to CalyxOS, but they were more interested in privacy including private FROM Google, whereas GrapheneOS was more interested in kernel level and other OS level security mechanisms. GrapheneOS is far technically superior IMHO on the hyper-secure OS front (protecting you from everybody, not just one threat), whereas CalyxOS might be a bit more private from Google... but even on that front GrapheneOS is pretty well de-googled so it seemed GrapheneOS could easily do the part CalyxOS was doing, and mostly did, but CalyxOS couldn't really keep up witih GrapheneOS on kernel/OS security. So why would anybody choose CalyxOS over GrapheneOS?  The people just kinda settled on the clearly superior answer I think.

... and it might be a honey pot. There is no way to know. Best honeypots are well funded technically superior things like ... Tor... which was invented by the US military.


Complex. I don't know. I haven't dug into this enough. I'm speaking in generalities still.


Here is an example I think everybody will understand.

When I release gossip, I build packages. The one built for MacOS is not digitally signed. But I gave a "reason". The reason is that Apple wants me to sign a contract to become an Apple developer and I didn't like the contract, so I didn't sign it, so I can't get Apple to mark the software as safe.

Now I know that reason is correct. But none of you do. You can't know for sure. You must postulate the case where Mike Dilger is actually malicious and he made that reason up, and his real goal is to sneak nasty code onto your Apple computer to steal your bitcoin or something. And he knows if he signed up with Apple that Apple might find his deceptive code and blow his cover.  So he lies and says the "reason" is because he didn't like their contract.

That is a TOTALLY plausable worldview from any of you. From where I sit I know it is wrong. But I also know there is no way I could prove that to you. The best I can do is say:  Don't use pre-compiled packages, even from me.  Compile it from source.


RE: GrapheneOS

I made a thread and got some pushback and very mixed reactions. I replied to a lot of separate posts, but I thought I should state my main points together in a cohesive post.

TO BE CLEAR:

- I didn't say GrapheneOS is compromised or is a honey trap.
- I don't think there is a more secure operating system available for a smart phone on a technical level (except some that are so dysfunctional you won't want them anyways), so I don't expect people to ditch GrapheneOS in fear of Google hardware.
- I still might use GrapheneOS as my next phone, I'm undecided.
- My security model puts Google in the "untrusted" box, and google products and services are suspicious to me, DESPITE technical superiority or being more open with their hardware specifications.
- I wish there was an OS like GrapheneOS (or actually GrapheneOS) on hardware produced in a country I wasn't so concerned about, like maybe India (Lava) that seems more neutral to me, or at least not at all interested in my politicial dissident ideas (which are never about India). Then I wouldn't have to worry about this.
- Maybe you run a bitcoin wallet on your phone, and so every country is untrustworthy to you (anybody might want to steal your bitcoin). But that's not my security model.
- The fact that none of the privacy and security android phones support any hardware produced outside of the US orbit anymore is I think a fact worth considering.
- The odds that there is a security backdoor in the hardware or software is many orders of magnitude greater than the odds that someone breaks your cryptography. So our concern should be that much greater. But we nitpick the cryptography and in cases like this we say "Ah well, he has reasons. Must be secure."
- Technology is so ridiculously complex now that there is almost no way to have security and/or privacy on computers, especially on a smart phone.
- Reasons given for why only Google Pixel is supported might be honest. Or they may be post-facto. And not being the ones who made those decisions, we cannot know which case is the true one. If you let "reasons" assuage your fears, that's not very intelligent of you. In the case where someone intelligent sets up a honey pot, they are going to create lots of benign-sounding reasons why it's not a honey pot.

You are all free to consider me a paranoid nut job.

Here was the original thread: nostr:nevent1qqsqg4vc860mnve4mkqzn5a9887q9cmj0tes6h4xevjhus32ane67ycpypmhxue69uhkx6r0wf6hxtndd94k2erfd3nk2u3wvdhk6w35xs6z7qgwwaehxw309ahx7uewd3hkctcpypmhxue69uhkummnw3ezuetfde6kuer6wasku7nfvuh8xurpvdjj7wgmz87


The existence of "reasons" doesn't assuage my suspicions. I'm not accusing them of anything, I just have suspicions.

Every product saleman knows how to make a table of "reasons" why you should buy their product, where their product amazingly ticks all of the boxes. And so can any explanation of why only google phones are supported. It might be those reasons, or those might be post-facto reasons, and not being the person who made such a decision I cannot know either way. Being rather paranoid, since I can't know either way, I defend against the possibility. It doesn't come off as a "nothing up my sleeve" decision.  I mean the odds are far greater that it is a honeypot than, say the 1 in billions odd chance of cracking a short password.  The odds might even be 1 in 10.  That's pretty damn high odds in the security and cryptography world were odds should be closer to 1 in 2^128.

I know I sound paranoid at first, but I think I am actually logical and reasonable.


There is a reason I was deep into RISC-V just before I got deep into nostr


Some people are so awed by the technical depth of security (e.g. double-ratchet) that they think this means the person is honest and trustworthy and further that they have the same security model that you do. I don't make that connection.


Keep a list of people who defend technology that clearly should be doubted. They may be simpletons, or they may be agents. Update your trust matrix accordingly.

When the Nord Stream was bombed, I noticed who was countenancing the idea that maybe Russia did it. No matter how innocent and normal they seemed to be previously, all those influencers are very suss to me now, because only a total idiot or an agent of disinformation could have thought such a thing.  That included (for your edification) Anders Puck Nielsen and Mallen Baker.  I may still listen to them, they seem moderate and not clearly in one camp or another, but that one event put big red flags on them. Not every agent of disinformation is as obvious, blantent and one-sided as Ben Shapiro. Some are subtle tricksters.


I don't have direct evidence or proof, but I think Intel ME is one out of a dozen different backdoors. For example, I think RDRAND is compromised (thank god Linux devs rejected relying on it alone).


No idea.

And when I mentioned the Lava company in India, I did so entirely based on my viewpoint about India's geopolitical positioning - I have 0 information about their phones or if they are any good.

I like that GrapheneOS is open source. I don't like that it funnels people to google hardware.  I like that Calyx is open source.  I don't like that they stopped supporting all the Chinese hardware. Both of these projects are security (graphene) or privacy (calyx) oriented, and the hardware support of both projects is suss to me (why did Calyx stop supporting all the Chinese brands? Are they anti-China? Why are they anti-China? I don't know).

LineageOS is open source and it supports phones across the spectrum. They aren't focused on privacy or security. But it is AOSP and I suspect a fork that does focus on BOTH security AND privacy AND neutral hardware would be the path I would be most interested in seeing.

Obviously this isn't my expertise and I won't be doing it.

But given I need a new phone (mine is falling out of support) the issue came up again for me.

I'm thinking about using linux on portable non-phone hardware for one-time passwords, camera, microphone, bitcoin, wallets, etc.  And use my phone for more prosaic things that I don't care about.


The page lists the vendors they sell phones for and support including Samsung, Apple, Huawei, Nokia, Spark, and Oppo

The US banned Huawei NZ and 43 other Huawei subsidiaries in various countries. Maybe Italy followed suit. Or maybe spark doesn't share this info internationally.

The NZ GCSB (five-eyes) banned Huawei 5G gear in 2018 due to security concerns. But not their phones. I remember a friend of mine pissed because it happened right after he bought a Huawei phone and he was worried it would affect him.


You can look it up at calyxos.org, right on the front page:  Pixel (google, USA), Fairfone (Netherlands), Motorola (USA), SHIFT (Germany).  They used to support two phones from China but no longer.  If only someone supported Lava.  I would trust India to be neutral enough.


I don't think thestinger is malicious. I think he has a different security model. He trusts different parties for different reasons, parties that I absolutely do not trust. It is a simple misalignment.

I'm calling for neutral country hardware. I would welcome open source GrapheneOS on neutral country hardware. I think there has been quite a ramp-up of monetary support for GrapheneOS so I think they should be able to do that.

The things he listed that *must* be in a phone he will support are cherry picked as the things Google phones have.  Other hardware vendors have other things, which he doesn't list as "missing from GrapheneOS".


Thanks for sharing the link. I've read that page many times, but I should have shared the link.

I'm saying that I don't believe him.


If it really was banned over security reasons, I think the US would have told NZ and NZ would have pulled it too.  More likely it was banned as a trade war tactic.  But I'm not certain enough to risk using a Huawei phone.


I can buy one in NZ and it is supported by major providers, e.g.: https://www.spark.co.nz/help/mobile/device-help/


Lineage (cyanogenmod) supports a lot more vendors. So probably ok.

including Fairfone (Netherlands) Nokia (Finland) and SWIFT (Germany)


I don't. But I don't know enough to say.  GrapheneOS came out of CopperheadOS which was marketed towards people wanting security.  Just like Signal is suss for that same kind of thing, and I think is a honey trap, I think GrapheneOS is also a honey trap... even if not in the code and totally open source, it pushes you to the google pixel hardware.


I should add that my impression of various arguments between Techlore guys (e.g. calyx) and strncat/thestinger is their very different views about whether Google is the threat (techlore) or Google is the savior (thestinger).  Thestinger seems to always defend google and scoff, turning the arguments towards technical superiority deep in the kernel, and dismissing the google threat model.   That's my top-of-the-head impression, I can't back it up right now.


Why does GrapheneOS run only on Google Pixel phones?  Super suss if you ask me.

Because Google was founded as a DARPA/CIA operation, and Google is all about spying, control and censorship (google jigsaw).  I am HIGHLY suspicious that GrapheneOS would only support Google phones.  This maybe made a bit of sense initially if the Google phones had certain new security hardware features that other phones didn't have, and fully documented specs, but at this point that excuse is getting ridiculous.  I suspect there is some hardware "watcher" in those things, low enough that you'll never detect or disable it, and they see everything though it.  Huawei phones probably have a similar "watcher" that reports back to China.

I think we need another fork of AOSP, geared to run on different hardware from a neutral country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mobile_phone_brands_by_country

https://rumble.com/v4ub3pu-youll-going-to-get-killed-mike-benz-exposes-cia-secrets-like-never-before-s.html


Oh no! My client went to nsa.gov to check this NIP-05!  Now the NSA (who never before knew that the IP address 104.99.6.137 existed) now knows that this IP address exists and has a computer on it! My op-sec has failed!  I'd better go find that bug-out bag! 🤣

nostr:nevent1qqsvyh0e0a49gnesf3yek46fg5efzdv5tvevrmuvs4v696fsjmckjpqpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduhs7atdf9


There are lots of things an algorithm could do. Some of them are mostly benign and useful, and so I'm not against having such algorithms help people to find content.  Jack seems to think X's algorithm is so good he can stop following everybody and just view what the algorithm is picking for him, and the content will be even better that way.  So even "the algorithm" over there at X has been turned into this more benign and useful form.

Does it amplify outrage as a second order effect? Only if us humans amplify outrage.

Anyhow, I don't have firm opinions on this stuff, I'm just spitballing my thoughts.


What if there is content created by somebody you don't follow, maybe you don't even know about them, but it his heavily liked and reposted by all the people you most respect?  Some people want such content to be shown to them.


I love how nsa.gov keeps getting asked for its `.well-known/nostr.json` file. I wonder if they noticed, if they are curious wtf this is, or if they are on to nostr. Who knows?


I'm really not interested in philosophy, ethics, or other deep discussions about existence.

I only made recent posts on such topics to state my position in contrast to others and then move on.

Moving on...   (replacing RelayUrl with RelayOrigin, fighting the compiler, wondering if I ought to be working on Saturday morning.. oh no that is an ethical question!)


Aha. Gotcha.


Vitor didn't cover all the details.

My original idea (which I retract) was that if you mark a post with a 'lastword' tag you are not only signalling that you will not be monitoring replies, but also clients that support this wont allow people to reply to it. That last part I think was my "ethical" lapse. I thought it was enough that they could repost it with any commentary that they wanted, as well as reply to the parent comments and extend the thread that way. Apparently that was an ethical blunder on my part.


Meta-ethical moral relativism is where I think the most disagreement lies.  I would never say ethics are relative and therefore we should tolerate different ethical systems that oppress women.  But I would definitely say that we don't all agree on what the right ethical system is. Somewhere in the middle is "meta-ethical" moral relativism.

A meta-ethical moral relativist (I include myself in this camp) says that what is "right" or "wrong" depends on your cultural norms. Some cultures have no concept of property, so they have no concept of theft.  While lobsters have hierarchy, sea sponges don't, and some small animals have no concept of territory so there is no concept of trespass among them.  Sticking to the human level, 90+% of ethics are universal among us. It's the last 10% that we quibble over, some of which however can be very serious including killing, stoning, etc. Then we get stuck in things like the trolley problem, and we can't easily determine proximate cause, and we cannot determine true intent (without mind reading technology) and so IMHO this last 10% of ethics isn't ready to be resolved. We have to live with our differences somehow.

Yet I will always argue that you should fight for what you believe. And I believe certain ethical principles are clearly good for all of us, but not widely accepted yet, and we need to explain them better and sell them better --- things like free speech.


Poor posture


When I say "genetic component" keep in mind that 99.9% of our genetics are identically shared with every other human.  That was the part I was speaking to.  I wasn't making an argument for racism.


Wow I just learned so much about you there. Makes perfect sense.

The racial trait I see that is most strongly genetic is 'drive'.  I bought a "high drive" german shepherd puppy. The breeder knew it was "high drive" and warned me. Other german shepherd lines are not high drive.  Clearly it is genetic in this line of dogs.  I see Ashkenazi as high drive and Jamacians as low drive, and I think that explains a ton of things. These Jews not only are wealthier and hard working, they are also never satisfied.  Whereas Jamacians can't even be bothered to build a proper house for themselves, but are always very satisfied with life, kicking back on the beach in the good weather and smoking the ganga.  Who is to say one is better than the other? They aren't better or worse. I feel sympathy for the Jews never able to be satisfied, but also for the Jamacians when the storms roll in. Hell, I even feel sympathy for the woke idiots who insist these two races have the same drive and I'm a racist asshole for pointing out the obvious, because they can never be happy either.


What do you mean by protected?


Nihilism is a huge grouping of different ideas, some of which I believe are correct and insightful.


The path you are walking, the thoughts you've had because of it, is foreign territory to me.  And so you must understand that when I describe "Christian morality" it is entirely only the part I can see, and which I remember being tought as a child in the Seventh-Day Adventist system.  I cannot begin to represent your actual system of morality.  So in this regard I do not quibble with your quibble.  You are right by defintiion.

I consider the universe to be the physical one. Principles in "Plato's heaven" apply but are shortcuts to the actual physical reality. Temperature is a statistical shortcut to average particle velocity.

I have no answer to the question of where it came from, or why it is the way it is (why aren't electrons bigger? Why doesn't light move faster? Why is pi 3.14159265etc?).  I don't know the answers to these questions, and I doubt I ever will.

Worse is the "hard question" of consciousness. That one seems like all explainations are utterly ruled out. No candidate answer could possibly be correct, except some form of nihilism.  But nihilism is dysfunctional, so even if it is correct I don't want to live that way.  But deep down I suspect all our systems of reasoning and logic are just approximations, and we are not capable of, not built to understand the deepest things. And solipsism doesn't seem statistically likely, for the same reasons superdeterminism doesn't seem likely.


It is in the thousand page soliloquies that you get a sense for her morality. And much of it is very standard American Libertarian, which I mostly agree with. But then she attempted to take the ideas to a higher plane, to some unifying principles or something, and I think the attempt failed.

But I don't know for sure. I didn't read the fountainhead; I don't have her more direct statements on objectivity.


Yes and then the Jesus story which pacified the Jews contained the element that the Jews plotted against and killed Christ, and so that story resulted in the murder of a hell of a lot of Jews by Christians in revenge during the first and second centuries (IIRC, it was a long time ago).


A huge amount of it is, indeed.  I'd argue their are probably genetic components, but I would never go so far as to indite people based on their race. I don't think any genetically coded ethics are "wrong" enough for that anyways. But nostr:npub1nshq4pcyzdmnewg4h8yu6tsuh5t72whzkz5x4wj7t0c0cy7yyrfqq2cgnl would probably take the other side of that argument.


I'm not here to change your mind. I concur that signal is probably either a honeypot or otherwise state controlled with gag orders.

I'm confident that the nostr community will build something superior, fully distributed, all the double-ratchet stuff, the giftwrap stuff, to provide both 1-on-1 DMs and multi-user chat. We have the distributed framework, we have the momentum, and we have 90% of the ideas all worked out.


Northern Israel wants independence. The idea ever even entered my mind.


I don't think morality is objective. I don't think it is absolute. Sam Harris does though. And argues for Israel killing Palestinians under his "my morals are absolute" rubrik, which would be funny if it wasn't so murderous.

There are three levels of moral relativism, so I need to be clear.

Descriptive: Of course this is true. People have different opinions about ethics. Nobody even argues this.
Meta-ethical: I believe this too. I don't believe in "right" and "wrong". I think those are high-level abstractions, outputs from the circuitry, not fundamental aspects of morality.
Normative: I don't believe this. Normative moral relativists believe that because different people have different ideas about what is right and wrong, we ought to tolerate the behavior of people with different moral systems.  I say nuts to that - fight for your own!


I read Atlas Shrugged and came away with the distinct impression that she is confused. Very firm and certain in her confused beliefs.

Like she was 90% there I think, and the 10% she didn't understand was so fundamentally different from her line of thinking that she could find and fix it.... it was foundationally wrong.

This reply is my impression of my feelings on objectivism. I haven't thought about it in years, so it would be hard to explain how I think she was wrong.


ok!

- 17 was a totaly exaggeration for its humorous effect
- I think ethics are naturally embedded in every decision every human makes, so the argument Vitor makes I also disagree with, that you could avoid the ethical considerations, and so it's not what makes you and Vitor different.
- The fixed point of reference defining truth is the objective universe
- Atheists can argue withtout adopting a Christian ontology
- and the other things you said don't make enough sense for me to comment on.

I did a post on ethics just a few moments ago. It is my honest view of ethics. I might be wrong, but you could learn how I (and probably most atheists) see the situation differently than you do.


Ok. Your objection made me think deeper about it. I think it's not right to stop someone from replying to your "last word" and it wasn't really the intent.  Digging deeper, I think what I wanted was a signalled thread mute, saying "I have chosen not to see replies to this note, so don't be suprised if I don't engage with them".  This would mute the threat only for the person, everybody else could reply and see replies, the other guy could follow up wtih "what a dick" and everyone can see that... but it serves my purpose which is to convey an important message AND mute things.

Anyhow, even that isnt something I'm going to do anytime soon.


What are ethics?   Ethics are a subset of heuristics for desision making.  The subset consists of decisions that affect other sentient beings.  Many decisions don't (should I drink water now or later) but some do (should I steal this motorbike).

The moon has no ethics.  Algae probably has no ethics.  Mice have limited ethics, generally related to how their decisions affect fellow mice.

Ethics are mostly hardwired into you when your brain developed, and they were determined genetically. If we didn't have this hardwiring, the cost of thinking through a decision would be overwhelming (the game theory is incredibly deep) putting you at a huge survival disadvantage. But ethics can be learned from society (necessary adaptation!) and also consciously chosen. Although I'd argue that we have far less ability to consciously choose our ethics than we think we do.

Because ethics come in part from society, children have big wide openings in their underdeveloped ethical systems. Children will often believe that stealing, murdering, cheating, etc, might be the smartest move. It takes parents and/or life experience to discover this is almost always incorrect.  Some adults have "arrested development" and continue to operate with under-developed ethics. These people tend to be in and out of the prison system. We could argue about whether this is genetic or developmental or environmental or societal, but that would make this post far too long and more controversial than I was intending it to be.

The ethics that a Christian has and the ethics that an athiest has are different:

1. Athiests don't believe there is any ethics to praying, going to church, or paying tithe to the local minister, keeping the sabbath, not eating pork, or any other god-given rules from a god they don't believe exists, wherein the rule is esoteric and doesn't affect their fellow sentient beings.

2. Athiests feel it is unethical to disrespect the non-standard sexuality of a person, whether homosexual or transgender, whereas Christians appear to believe it is unethical to have non-standard sexuality in the first place.

3. When it comes to treating others with the "golden rule", the ethical systems are virtually identical, except:

4. Religious people have some carve outs for stealing and murdering (as evidenced by Israel).

If I have a choice of dealing with an atheist or a theist, I feel safer dealing with the atheist.

I've heard some Christians who believe the world would be much worse if it were not for Christians. That without Christianity, people would partake in all kinds of activities they feel are unethical:  stealing, cheating, murdering, etc.  But if it is only your religion that prevents you from doing those things, that frightens me. I would *hope* you were born with (and developed) ethics that prevent you from doing those things just because they feel very wrong. So for people who think they would benefit from harming others, please keep going to church!

I don't know any Palestinians. I don't think I even know any Arabs. And yet I feel great empathy towards Palestinian women and children and doctors and aid workers when they die. If atheist's ethics were only selfish, I wouldn't feel like this.


Yes, my oversight. We could use them too, they don't add extra friction.


Maybe he said something similar?

I just thought it was a funny way to express that the community has far too many good ideas, and the overhead of looking at all of them takes 120% of my time, leaving -20% of my time left to do development.


Yes to all of that


People will not maintain complex (or even simple!) trust scores, but they will maintain their following list and they will mute people.  All we will ever have (IMHO) is that.

Trust is indeed much more complex. I may trust you to show up at the pub, but not to hold my beer. And because of it's complex nature, trust is not transitive or delegatable.  But we're never going to be able to maintain representations of this.

So I think that means I agree with you.


(I'm just joking about #lastword you can reply)


I disagree with about seventeen things you said there, but I know you well enough not to argue any of those points with you.

#lastword


I think I agree with all that.

I still don't understand why the tag was seen as unethical. It doesn't collide with any of the ethics you list in this post. I'm not pushing for such a tag anymore, I'm not sure it was the right solution to the problem. But I never heard an ethics-based argument against it. I think I have high integrity and consider the ethics of everything I do, and if I have a blindspot I want to know about it.

Is it that one party of a conversation shouldn't have more power than the other? I agree, and I don't think the tag does this. The tag only dead-ends the event that the tag itself is in. The conversation of the parent can progress, it cannot stop other people's conversation. So it only dead-ends the authors own event.

Anyhow, I doubt you have an actual answer here, I think it's just your feeling.


If we only had half as many people working on nostr, we would be making twice as much progress. 😏


Then you haven't written enough of them


Here's how to get more people onto Bitcoin:   merge bitcoin with ethereum.

😬


What I'm really trying to avoid is filling out my tax forms.


I will have to rewatch part of that interview.  When Putin said "are we here to have a serious conversation or a show?" I took a different meaning from it, based on Tucker's question.

For my whole life I've thought of Ukraine as a part of Russia. My family history (ancient as it was) was out of Russian Ukraine... my family moved to Ukraine during Katherine the Great's reign, and left in 1910, and during that entire duration it was Russia.  My Grandfather had to renounce forever all allegiance and fidelity to Nicholas II Emperor of all the Russias (he also had to swear he was not a polygamist). The fact that it was independent from 1991 to 2014 (23 years) seems to be the exception rather than the rule. And yes there was a lot of division between and shit between, outlawing languages, starvings, etc.  BUT I don't take sides (I don't have a dog in the race). In principle I support the right of people to be independent if they want to, but as a practical matter I try to make sure the people trying to be independent know how tough that is and to be sure they think they can succeed (Palestinians included, who I have always advised to just leave and make a better life somewhere else).


Yes Russia and the US have been in a cold war since around 2008. Both sides are involved in cyberwarfare. The US news media isn't intrested in stories about Russia getting hacked.

Also, I'm not taking sides. I'm looking for parsimonious explanation of all the facts. So I take in your datapoint. It doesn't make sense though that NATO would court Ukraine's membership in order to retaliate for the Solar Winds attack.


Well somebody should tell Zooko to stop with that triangle so that we can.


Why haven't I heard this one yet?:   US $fallers


Shit in a toilet, not on your garden vegetables.

Don't eat raw pork.

Wash your hands after wiping your ass.


Maybe so, or maybe things have changed. My data is from way back.


Eh, I wasn't as productive as I want to be. Sometimes programming doesn't produce the normal amount of dopamine because I am not having  the normal rate of successes. And those days I'm more likely to watch videos, as I did this morning.

But success is returning.


I did my shoulder physio exercise right after I read cloud fodders note. Then I made more progress on gossip.


I wasn't looking at negative rage bait. I like to solve problems. So I'm drawn to solve the problems of world politics and war, just like I'm drawn to solve the problem of quantum mechanics making no sense. I wasn't enraged, I actually got some relief as my understanding gelled. I'm *much* more interested in understanding the nature of things than I am in judging them or taking sides; it is far less emotional. Of course when it comes to kids and hospitals I do get emotional, but I've been successfully not watching that shitshow recently, knowing it does no good to watch.

As for the Ukraine/Russia/NATO thing, I was still uncertain as to what is going on (well, I always will be, but I was uncomfortably so). Sometimes a few people on nostr will argue with me fiercely and emotionally about the normative questions:  what *should* nations do, which side *should* you be on,  who is in the right, and who should be judged as evil, etc.  As to Ukraine/Russia/NATO I don't care at all about the normative questions, only the non-normative ones. I want to know what they are thinking, what they are doing, and what they might do next... without judgement or my desires being involved. So I don't know how to argue back with such people, such people just eventually frustrate me as they are arguing against viewpoints I don't hold.

But yes in general yes I am watching too many videos lately. Sometimes programming doesn't produce the normal amount of dopamine because I am not having  the normal rate of successes. And those days are the hard ones, and the most likely days for me to turn to "drugs".  So I take your words seriously.  I've cut it out for the time.


Ok, thanks for the concern.

I thought maybe I should just get up and exercise.  Brief research shows that releases dopamine.  What if I meditate, or just do nothing?  That releases dopamine too.  Everything I consider releases dopamine!  I don't think there is a way out of dopamine specifically.  But I can change which ways I get it.


The US population needs to get it through their heads what are the necessary skills for a good commander in chief.  But unlike much of the European population, the American population is too self-absorbed (don't care about politics), or else too cynical (believes they can't make a difference so they don't care about politics) or too radical (leaving logic behind).


Ok, watching this video I'm starting to understand.  The US top military brass are subordinated to civilian politicians.  And these civilian politicans have little to no military experience, yet they are in total control.  And probably they just aren't listening to the best advice, or even able to discern what the best advice is, and are making decisions aimed at getting re-elected and stuff.   OK, that makes so much more sense.

Now back to the compiler.


I'm coding a frustrating thing and need a break from fighting the compiler. So I check my YouTube subs and well, of course something catches my attention.

I feel exactly like this guy. The situation is so unbelievable that I can't help but keep looking for some other explanation other than rampant incompetence.

"The West and president Zelenskyy have lost their minds and become detached from reality.... I just can't help but get to the point where I think there must be something I'm missing. Because so many learned and experienced people can't be making such elementary mistakes which have potentially catastrophic results; I keep thing that; but yet, every time I look at the ground and look at the actual evidence, I can't come to a different conclusion about that. The facts scream..."  -Daniel Davis   watch?v=7qgLYE6BOC


I've had a bit more thinking on Russia and NATO powers. Clearly I'm just a hobbyist, not a military strategist, so I'm slow on the uptake on these things. But when I finally realize something or change my thinking (whether it is correct or not) I like to post it on nostr.

First, a quote from the book "Prisoners of Geography" by Tim Marshall:  "Vladimir Putin says he is a religous man, a great supporter or the Russian Orthodox Church. If so, he may well go to bed each night, say his prayers and ask God: "Why didn't you put some mountains in Ukraine?"  If God had built mountains in Ukraine, then the great expanse of flatland that is the North European Plain would not be such encouraging territory from which to attack Russia repeatedly. As it is, Putin has no choice: he must at least attempt to control the flatlands to the west. So it is with all nations, big or small. The landscape imprisons their leaders, giving them fewer choices and less room to manoeuvre than you might think."

Second, Barack Obama said that because Ukraine is a core Russian interest, but not a core American interest (America would not be defeated via Ukraine), then Russia will always be able to maintain escalatory dominance there. "The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-nato country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do. There are ways to deter, but it requires you to be very clear ahead of time about what is worth going to war for and what is not. Now, if there is somebody in this town that would claim that we would consider going to war with Russia over Crimea and eastern Ukraine, they should speak up and be very clear about it. The idea that talking tough or engaging in some military action that is tangential to that particular area is somehow going to influence the decision making of Russia or China is contrary to all the evidence we have seen over the last 50 years."

To be clear, America is not at war with Russia. It is supplying Ukraine, but the US remains out of the war. But what Barack was saying is that Russia will escalate because Ukraine matters more to them than to us.

If you assume American military leadership is logical and reasonable (which I think Putin does) then they would never have stepped in to back Ukraine in the first place unless they planned to "go all the way".  And this is why Putin takes every Western threat of escalation very seriously. This is why he is now reading his troops to be trained on tactical nukes. If he didn't, he would be derelict in his duties to defend Russia from a threat that must be (logically reasoning thing out) intent on toppling Russia.

So I think America intended to topple Russia, and believed Navalny was one strategy, bombing the Nord Stream was another, sanctions was another, confiscating central bank assets was another, getting the world to back the West by luring Russia to strike first was another, and supplying Ukraine with superior weapons systems was yet another, and with all of that combined with their various covert CIA activities, surely they had a very good chance. But alas, those strategies all failed. And then China decided to backstop Russia.

Ukraine now has long-range ATACMS and successfully strikes military assets far into Russian occupied Ukraine including Crimea, including military bases, military training (over 100 dead nearly instantly) and a civilian oil refinery. This won't turn the tide of the war, but it has caused the war to escalate, as Russia now sends in far more drones seeking artillery, abrams tanks (they just got another) and those ATACMS systems.

As troops in Ukraine are running low, and the West is not ready to concede, they are threatening moving forces in. Russia's response was to train for the usage of tactical nukes. I don't think he is bluffing. I think NATO forces present a very credible threat of an attempt to collapse Russia, and Russia cannot win against NATO forces without resorting to tactical nukes.

So I think the Western forces backing Ukraine (NATO, France, US, UK) at some point will stop talking tough and concede. Because most of their plans already failed. I think there is a limit to how much war they are willing to get involved in... they want a lot, but not quite nukes.


I remember that one. Classic. I think it was spread with SOAP


Unfortunately a different messaging app or encryption protocol wouldn‘t solve the fundamental problem Signal faces.

Even a Nostr based app would require trusting the app‘s vendor to build the correct source code on iOS.

Until Apple adds support for reproducible builds to iOS, the only way to ensure E2EE for any app’s user base would be to constrain usage to Android.

Jon Callas (co-founder of PGP Corp and Silent Circle) wrote a great post about this in his Reply to Zooko:

https://www.silentcircle.com/blog/reply-to-zooko/ nostr:note1qd2p235vum5euzw5xj07gylx2v9suyqkuxwdazgzmwe8wqndsn5svkuttm


The USA is hopeless. There is no good leadership on the horizon. Ethics continue to tumble (Boeing quality is shit and is now murdering whistleblowers; Politicans are for sale, and Israel bought them all). Look to yourselves and your family and friends, including us on nostr. Keep your head down and be self-reliant. And last, do not put hope in politicians or your government. They will always disappoint you.

Is there a better country to move to? Not really. Every country is both better and worse. At least you get to pick your poison though.


If all the mass produced cars are now spyfare weapons, then next time I need an automobile maybe I'll commission one from the petrolhead bogans in town.  Get an old classic fixed up nice, no computer shit.

I used to have a '69 corvette and the carb jets sized for ethanol fuel. But I sold it.


Just send me a passport sized photo, a signature, and your name, address and birthdate and I will print you a license to be angry.


In German the phrase is "Sie laufen im nebel umher"


move the lenghts and paddings.  Problem then is you need them before anything that is signed, and that makes the alignment shit.  Eh...


So that you don't have to construct another buffer to hash, ordered like this:   sig, Id, pubkey, created_at, kind, (lengths and paddings), tags, content


https://github.com/mikedilger/pocket has pocket-type binary formats -- compact, aligned, single linear sequence of bytes.


I think it was an extreme move. But a calculated one that they couldn't see a better path. And it isn't really "Putin" doing these things. The Russian 'deep state' is pretty much in agreement on these things.  In Georgia too it was in response to NATO.


Here is a bit more evidence of the simulation hypothesis (or something like it):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDRNvhbrz3k


I think you are right, we have to actively fight our biological programming because we are in a novel information-heavy environment where better success can be had that way.


You never have "all" the facts, and in fact you have none of them absolutely (except the fact that you exist, and all of Plato's heaven which are disputably not really facts but math).  Nonetheless, you should be aware of why you believe what you believe, and you should be capable of reevaluating what you believe when new facts come to the table.  But if you can't hold that much self-reflective information about yourself, what you are likely to do instead is make up a story to fill in the gaps, and forget how the story was originally constructed with a bunch of made-up stuff.  And so you have no capability to re-evaluate the story when new facts come in because you aren't even aware of which part of the story was factual and which part was just pasted in to make a complete story.  It takes more brain power, more sugar (or ketones) to do it right, and I assert that most people don't spend that much sugar/ketones, and then it becomes very difficult to argue with them because they have such (Dunning Krueger) certainty about their pre-conceived falsehoods and no inclination to point you at how they know it... they just "know it" (but they don't).


Dumb people, when they don't have all the facts, they make shit up to fill in the gaps. And then they forget that they made it up, they believe it as if it was true, never re-evaluating why they believe what they beileve, never checking to see if that actually is the correct explanation, never reevaluating the parsimony of it all.

Piers Morgan is a good example.


Chorus 1.4.0
	- Uses the pocket backend now (which was created by stealing the backend off of chorus!)
	- Lots of bug fixes and improvements were made during the above process
	- REQ now returns CLOSED with auth-needed when AUTH is needed (previously it just gave you a subset or nullset)


I had never heard of it. Maybe it's better? I'll have to give it a try.


I use that on my phone


It was a long-shot.  A really really fanciful super unlikely long-shot.... that maybe there is something that we don't know that explains all this better than stupidity.

But I firmly think it really is just stupidity. It's hard to have a high IQ in a world full of idiots. It's just painful to watch, to see how people's minds just get stuck in ruts who believe everything has exactly one simple reason, who can't put themselves in the shoes of others to understand what they must be thinking.😕


I'm sorry you are retarded.  There is no sense in me bringing up the same points.


Shit I already see a flaw.  I think the bell experiment results also happen for particles moving slower than the speed of light, and so the detectors influencing the emitter is truly retrocausal.

Ah well, retrocausality is another possibility still.


Nobody commented on this, which is probably not up anybody's alley. But I'm fascinated and maybe most of you don't understand. So I'm going to ELI5 about this whole thing, without droning on. Let's see how well I can do this.

nostr:nevent1qqsdqlql8refk4h659lnu27zh4ke7n5tc9svvheazq7nlvv47x4k7aqpypmhxue69uhkx6r0wf6hxtndd94k2erfd3nk2u3wvdhk6w35xs6z7qgwwaehxw309ahx7uewd3hkctcpypmhxue69uhkummnw3ezuetfde6kuer6wasku7nfvuh8xurpvdjj75xknlw

Physicists invented/discovered ways to emit single particles. These emitters emit two particles in opposite directions.

Physicists discovered a property about particles they called "spin".  Basically you can draw a plane parallel to the floor that the particle zooms along. Either it's spin is pointing upwards relative to this plane, or it is pointing downwards (let's presume never exactly along the plane).  But you could also put the plane upright and then it's spin is defined as either left or right.  You could rotate that plane around 360 degrees and measure from any angle you want, and your detector will give you binary answer saying which side of the plane the spin was on.

Interestingly, the opposite particle that comes out the opposite side of the emitter has the exact opposite spin. Every. Single. Time. No matter how you orient these spin detectors, they are opposite.  100% coorelation.

If you measure one particle UP and DOWN, and the other particle LEFT and RIGHT, there is 0% coorelation. These perpinduclar directions are independent.

No suprises. All of this is as you would expect.

Now, if you measure one particle against an UP and DOWN detector, and the other particle against a 45% slanted plane, they are coorelated 86.666% of the time.

That is what is weird.

Amazing! Spooky!

You didn't get it, did you? Yeah, it's not obvious. But that outcome is fucking impossible.

They should be coorelated I think 70.7% of the time maximum IIRC.

And because of this physicts have tried to come up with a hypothesis as to what is going on. How can the coorelations be this high?  Some of the hypotheses include the following super crazy and spooky ideas:

1) The particles are "communicating" somehow in order to increase their coorelation.  It turns out that they would not only have to be communicating somehow (nobody knows how) but also that communcation would have to be faster than the speed of light.  This hypothesis is called NON-LOCALITY, spooky action at a distance. Some kind of instant communcication between these particles, or some belief that the two particles are actually somehow just one particle but in two completely different spatial positions.

2) That the universe isn't locally "real", that what we observe is not objectively real, but depends on who is looking, that the outcome (the spin) is not actually an objective fact, but depends who is looking and is different for different people (but we could never prove that). Things like the multiverse come to mind.  They reject realism in order to preserve locality.

3) That the universe is super-determined, that God set it in motion in just such a way that the outcomes of these particular experiments would happen to yield coorelations higher than what is possible.

YES, those are all CRAZY beliefs, but most physicists actually beileve in one of them.

I reject them all.

What I believe is really going on is related to the following observations:

1) The particle emitter might be influenced by the setting of the spin measurement devices, mediated via the particle, backwards in time.  Now that backwards in time thing is where my idea seems totally crazy, but actually it is only backwards in time from our Einsteinian relativistic perspective. From the perspective of the particle, it experiences no time at all.  The time it was emitted and the time it's spin was measured are the very same instant from it's own frame of reference.  I postulate that causation can only travel sideways and forwards in time, as long as somebody's relativistic perspective allows it.  So it's not really backwards.

2) This causes the emitter to tend to fail to emit the particles when they would not be coorelated, causing a Berkson's bias or a collider.

3) Relativity is conserved. Locality is conserved. Realism is conserved. Superdeterminism is not needed. All the nutty ideas are unnecessary.


I stick to #0000 Very Fine


For people who think that "NATO enlargement" is just Putin propaganda, this was one of those diplomatic cables leaked by WikiLeaks. It is very clear.

https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08MOSCOW265_a.html

Also scores of politicians and analysts predicted NATO expansion would lead to a new cold war, or would split Ukraine, or other dire predictions, such as Ted Galen Carpenter, George Kennan (advisor, diplomat, architect of Cold War Soviet containment strategy), Strobe Talbot (deputy secretary of defense), Robert M Gates (secretary of defense under GW Bush and Obama). Even Jens Stoltenberg the NATO secretary general doesn't dispute it when he says "So he [Putin] went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders."

I hate when people seed doubt and force me to re-research shit I already know. But I have to be thorough.

nostr:npub1p3a7kxy6chjp7p85m8p36j29suu98crl78sh30308dwqy54vn3qqnls90c


On some of these points we agree. Again I think you are arguing against Putin, not against me.

Yes of course "Russia did not like the fact that Ukraine became independent from the very beginning of the collapse of the USSR."

Yes of course "but it was not a problem because before yushchenko (2005) russia had full control over ukraine."
... in fact that was my very point which you argued against in your last note, that you thought was "funny".

Yes of course "it was with yushchenko that problems started when, for example, russian oligarchs could not buy ukrainian enterprises (Днепрогэс,Южмаш) through bribes."

But none of that is a counterargument against the view that NATO enlargement threatens Russia. They can both be true.

The fact that some thought Kyiv would fall in three days isn't a counter-argument. I'm not saying Ukraine was built up by NATO already and poised to strike Russia. I'm saying that powerful nations don't allow that situation to materialize. Ukraine declared it was to enter NATO.  Western leaders kept saying Ukraine would enter NATO. If Ukraine had entered NATO it would be too late for Russia to attack it. Russia had to attack before it entered NATO. Russia pressed on this issue in December, demanding assurance that Ukraine would not be allowed to enter NATO, and a limit on deployment of troops and weapons to NATO's eastern flank. It moved forces to Ukraine's borders and tried to negotiate. What did Biden say? Ukraine has a right to join NATO (which it strictly doesn't, the other NATO countries get to choose, and so Biden's statement was a bold provocation). So in February Russia made good on it's threat.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/17/russia-issues-list-demands-tensions-europe-ukraine-nato

Bill Clinton writes in the Atlantic in 2022 that his policy was to expand NATO despite Russia's protestations, while he lauds praise on Madeline Albright, the woman who said the deaths of half a million Iraqi children was "worth it." Sick. Clinton's view is that Russia's invasion of Ukraine proves NATO expansion was necessary. But you can take either side of that view and neither one "proves" a damn thing. It just as well proves NATO expansion caused the whole mess. Neither of them is proof.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240210183901/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/04/bill-clinton-nato-expansion-ukraine/629499/

Not enough people understand the fundamental security dilemma:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_dilemma (yes go read that so you can understand this paragraph) and so they say things like 'NATO is a defensive alliance' and 'NATO didn't threaten Russia', when in fact because of the security dilemma, NATOs very presence threatens Russia. NATO drills right now in Lithuania threaten Russia. NATO says "we are preparing in case Russia attacks the baltics" but because of the security dilemma, Russia can't know if that is true, or if they are lying and actually preparing to invade Russia. Because Russia cannot know, Russia has for 20 years argued "back the fuck off, you're making me very nervous" and the West acts like they are stupid, dumb, and simply do not understand why Russia feels threatened. Which actually leads me to believe that NATO DOES INDEED intend to take out Russia. Because an honest NATO would say "yes that makes sense, let's establish a neutral zone region". But NATO does no such thing. Recent statements back up the view that NATO intends to attack Russia. They talk about how Ukraine is "weakening" Russia, making it easier to take out Russia after Ukraine is depleted.

Pay attention to the bigger picture. Ukraine is a small player in what is going on.

Every Ukrainian I've talked to only cares about their country. They do not see the bigger picture. They take offense when you bring up the bigger picture. If you ask them about what is going on in Niger or Palestine or Korea they could care less. They have zero interest or knowledge of global politics, and they think everything is about them, and they are entrenched in their small-world "this is a simple situation between Ukraine and Russia" view. Seriously I've been yelled at fiercely for even bringing up the United States in relation to this war. A Chinese person I heard from says that most Chinese people think Ukrainians are retarded (his word, not mine).

I've heard from many sources that believe in this NATO expansion is a threat viewpoint. John Mearsheimer who advised Ukraine to keep their nukes so that they could defend themselves against Russia, he has this view. So does Jeffrey Sachs, Scott Ritter, Ray McGovern, Douglas MacGregor, Aaron Mate, Glenn Greenwald, and many others. SURE, they might all be fooled by Putin, but their views align with the facts I have and more importantly the view doesn't conflict with anything and aligns with theory too, whereas the US view, the Ukrainian view, these conflict with facts and/or theory and are more likely the propaganda.

> Even though even under Yanukovych, Ukraine claimed to be a member of the European Union and NATO.

No it didn't. C'mon on.

Putin said he would congratulate Ukraine if it gained access to the EU. That's the counterpoint most people on your side of the argument point to, they say Putin was ok with it, so it can't be about being friendly with the EU.  EU economic union is not NATO military union.


This is fun. I'm honored by this story.

nostr:nevent1qqszugpp0qtrpqz5jkfkafqxeu8gpyr8e0qg5felkcsxqd5vg8p0w5qppemhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mp0qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyv9kh2uewd9hj7du4h58


My direct ancestor founded this village.  Zoom out to see where it is:

https://www.google.com/maps/@47.2291833,31.5014417,3140m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu

Katherine (I still use the 'K') the Great (born Sophie, princess of Prussia) was married to Peter, czar of Russia.  She overthrew him and ruled for 34 years, inspired by the ideas of the enlightenment, brining a renaissance of culture and science to Russia, and conquering new lands from the Turks, Persians and Crimeans. She invited Germans to populate those lands and made them an offer they couldn't refuse in 1761/1762:

1. Free transportation to the area
2. Free land!
3. Interest free loans for building and development
4. The right to create self-ruled colonies independent of the Russian legal system
5. Religious freedom
6. 30 years of exemption from taxation
7. Exemption from military service

It was like a Libertarian mecca.  An enlightenment-based ruler, promising independence, and giving away free shit.

Alexander I extended the deal again in 1804.  I'm not sure when my ancestors came... one line of evidence shows they were there before 1804, but other lines of evidence shows the area was populated after 1804.  In any case, they took one of those two deals.

Jakob Dilger came from Schweighoven in South West Germany (Alsace-Lorraine area on the edge of France) and founded Katherinental in 1817 along with others. Sometimes I like to call myself an "Alsatian" (a term many use for German Shepherds after WWII to avoid honoring Germany).

By 1910, my grandfather Franz had immigrated to America via Ellis Island NY and settled in North Dakota, and my grandmother similarly (she lived in the nearby village of Landau).  And thank God they left because shit got worse and worse after that.  1917-1920 revolution, holodomor, shipping Germans to Siberia, etc. America was the new Libertarian mecca.


fun!


I like running invidious on my desktop (in docker) and using it to watch YouTube and manage subscriptions.  And then just ^C when I'm done.


Yes, but the remaining peeps are pure gold


Maybe the Western militaries have figured out a nearly surefire way to achieve nuclear supremacy and intend to take Russia off the table.  If that is true, then what they are doing makes strategic sense. Having taken Russia off the table, China would be eaiser to deal with and the USA could remain the world hegemon for the next 100 years. If they don't act, then the rise of the BRICS and the fall of the USD would eventually cripple the US.

I guess I shouldn't have said it was stupid and that I can't wrap my head around it. It is conceivably not stupid. But these are only speculations.


Let me first address the comparison of my statements to Russian statements. Nobody should care. All that matters is if they are true, and that I am open for debate, allowing you to dispute them and also to enter in additional facts and references. If Russia says something that is true, does that mean I cannot say it anymore? That would be dumb. So this is a dead-end line of argumentation and I don't feel the need to defend against it any further.

I assure you I don't just repeat things I hear online, I research them through multiple avenues of fact gathering. I become aware of new things sometimes from comments on nostr (which I then go and research). Recently I've become fond of paying attention to debates and votes in the UN.

I'm glad you find my statement funny. Half of my family is from Odessa, so I find yours equally funny.

Your misquote of me saying "ukraine and russia lived peacefully together and then the evil west has taken ukraine away from russia" is not at all what I said or even implied. You should refrain from using quotation marks when you are drawing up straw men to strike down. I never said anything about the West taking Ukraine away from Russia... that is indeed a Russian talking point that I do not and have never made. What I say is that it is only recently that Russia has had reason to feel militarily threatened by Ukraine.

What I was trying to convey is that Ukraine did not present a security threat to modern Russia prior to events starting in around 2007 when disputes about their black sea fleet, Crimea, gas, etc, escalated, and then it got really serious by 2014 when the leadership switched to be very pro-Western and anti-Russian with renewed talk of NATO membership, and then Russia invaded in 2022.  It took 15 years from the time when Russia sent clear signals that red lines were being crossed before Russia invaded, and they made many efforts to avoid it. I wasn't watching at the time, early on, but I tried to catch up shortly after the 2014 events. Their concerns seemed reasonable to me, and the Western involvement seemed idealistic, blinkered, and ignorant.

Now I grant that the invasion is illegal, it is immoral, and I support the freedom and independence of Ukrainians and their desire to apply to NATO (not their "right" to join, the other nations get to decide) and to fight Russia off to defend their territory if that is what they want. Just like I support Palestinians to fight against Israel (even though they had little chance to win and were just going to get slaughtered by trying).

You seem to be arguing against the view that "Russia's attack was justified" but I never made that claim. There is a difference between explaining why someone is acting a certain way and defending those actions. I'm not defending the actions of Russia. I am explaining them.  And I think the explanations were obvious before the 2022 invasion, even before the 2014 events, which is why I think Ukraine should have taken a different path.

Look, I have the right to be a male stripper. Nobody can tell me otherwise. But it would be dumb. I have a huge belly. Just because I have a right to something doesn't mean it is a smart thing to pursue. Just because taxation is theft doesn't mean you should not pay your taxes - only a retarded person would try to fight the IRS.  Similarly, just because Ukrainians deserve freedom, their national sovereignty, national territorial integrity, etc, doesn't mean they should invite the West into their country and thumb their nose at Russia. You can't always get what is right, sometimes you have to be more strategic.

Having an "agreement" about Sevastopol means ZILCH during a war. You think Ukraine is going to say "Oh, whoops, I guess we can't interfere with Sevastopol because you are leasing it from us" during wartime? Sillyness. By courting NATO, Ukraine put Russia's access to that port and their Black Sea fleet at risk.

You want me to show you the evidence of NATO involvement prior to Russian invasion in 2022. Here is some: The NYT article shows CIA bases were right on Russia's border before:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/25/world/europe/cia-ukraine-intelligence-russia-war.html

Finland's border with Russia is mountainous and does not present the same security threat. You can't move ground forces in that way.


The Department of JustUs


I prefer my hilux.

https://image.nostr.build/aac61f614890638a4263cf3f762edda81bbfbce04c6ad4044580968da3a225c3.jpg


I don't think Twitter (X) should move to nostr yet - I think nostr needs another year or two first.  They should start working with us on it though.  Eventually twitter needs to use an open protocol, and Elon can compete with us to build the best nostr client, his "everything" client, funded with ads and subscriptions.


I suspect what happens over time is this, over and over:

1. A developer on some non-nostr system finds nostr and recognizes it for what it is
2. They move their system to (or bridge into) nostr
3. Their userbase is now added to nostr, so nostr suddenly gets a lot more users

Sure users will come over seeking certain kinds of content, but I don't expect that is the main way that nostr will grow.  It will grow through acquisitions.


All of my current batch of technical ideas to be implemented so that I could free my mind to think up the next batch.  But we still have more ideas than we do implementations of them, so the effort has to be on implementation, not on dreaming.


Now and then I feel like I'm baiting people, like my tongue is in my cheek and I'm trying to provoke a response.

My little brother always tried to get a rise out of people, say something shocking, etc, and I never went in for it. But as I've gotten older I've started to.


whipped cream & other delights


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBE9EQ7gXKI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V8WQCCTFz0


I feel good today. I can sprint without effort. I feel light. I'm singing...

... but I'm singing Tiajuana Brass.

I feel old.


Damn!  I have #failed


Nostr is all GMs, kittens, clouds, big eyed childlike bitcoin hope, feel-good memes and aphorisms.

But I'm here to shake it the fuck up. Is my opinion too edgy for you? Did you find yourself compelled to argue with me? Then I have succeeded.

Yes I'm a troll. But my trolling comes from a good place:  I want to think more deeply about certain topics, and to get people to think about things in ways they don't normally do so... to broaden both of our perspectives. And sure there is bait in there sometimes, or sarcam, or provocation. I only troll in threads I started (I think).


I'm not giving up on nostr, I just flirted with other ideas because I was feeling grumpy and shitty all day two days ago.


I'm not giving up on nostr.  Not in the slightest.  I just didn't feel great that day.  I need to learn to be more diplomatic and less open with every feeling in my body.


The West lied to Putin multiple times, and tricked him successfully. As a result, they have eroded all trust. Putin cannot trust the West anymore, he has to "guess" what they are planning to do. Enemies can lie, they can act in secret, etc.

The West told Putin that the missile systems moved into Poland and Turkey and elsewhere were for defense of Europe.... . from Iran. Putin doesn't believe it, he thinks these systems would be retooled within hours to launch nukes into Russia.  And the time it takes for a missile to get from such a system into Russia determines if Moscow can retaliate or not.  If they get into Russia fast enough and in enough quantity they could potentially achieve nuclear supremacy... the ability to take out Russia without Russia being able to strike back.

With Ukraine, that time to impact was greatly shortened.

These are EXTREMELY real security concerns, worth slaughtinering millions of people, because you need to do that to defend against billions of deaths.  It was STUPID for NATO to do what they did and continue to do and I still cannot wrap my head around it.


Ukraine courting the EU and NATO was the first time Ukraine was moving out of Russia's orbit and control and into the orbit and control of Russia's enemy (we can discuss why they are Russia's enemy if you don't understand it).  That is like Mexico becoming a very good friend to Russia.

Russia was at threat of losing access to a very important strategic naval base in Sevastopol which they had been using continuously since 1783, a year-round warm water port.

NATO had deployed weapons and spys near Russia's border.  That is like Mexico lining up missile tubes all along the US Southern border. NATO attack of Russia wasn't imminent, and may not have been the intent at all (see my linked note about the security dilemma) but sometimes it is strategically adventageous to attack before the enemy is fully situated.

nostr:nevent1qqsztqu4vyu2vq8sk82lc8np0r8039l0gn7yjmt2yk9lh8q0hkgk48qpypmhxue69uhkx6r0wf6hxtndd94k2erfd3nk2u3wvdhk6w35xs6z7qgwwaehxw309ahx7uewd3hkctcpypmhxue69uhkummnw3ezuetfde6kuer6wasku7nfvuh8xurpvdjj7la7ap3


Hope at last:   https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.06986

I've never been happy with the possible ways of explaining QM.  Non-locality was my 'best' choice but I still didn't like it.  I really didn't like throwing out reality.  And superdeterminism is just dumb (not that it's not possible, in that sense I think superdeterminism is actually likely -- but there is no compelling reason to believe it would be "just so" as to precisely fuck up all our experiments).

This is the first theory I've read that seems right to me. It's Berkson's bias, an illusion of weirdness that only applies to ensembles, in combination with T-symmetry.


So no change then. Ok.


You should ask her. I don't recall the first time I met her, but she does and tells me things I have zero memory of. I suspect she's thinking of somebody else but she swears.


I hate wars and politicians too. But what drives me is that I really hate not knowing the truth.

So I'm driven to look beyond what my news tells me, beyond what my country tells me, beyond what the West tells me, beyond what Ukraine says, beyond what Russia says, beyond what analysts say, and start counting UN general assembly votes to see what is most likely true.  I might be too far down the rabbit hole I think.


It's easy and exciting to watch the drama unfold in the news, on X, on YouTube.  I admit being fascinated, which is why I write nostr posts about it.  I even crave more drama... am I wishing for more war?  WTF?  It is understandable to crave the excitement of it.  But I have to force myself to remember how real it is.  So I'm guilty myself, and projecting I think most people are just as guilty of not taking this shit seriously.  I'm only having brief moments of clarity.


> Measured in North Korean Won, only North Korea has an economy, every other country is zero.

🤣


Yes it wasn't for us. That would have been seen as a provocation.


Seems to me that bought politicians don't retaliate against their new owners. At least when it comes to Israel.


Intrigued. What is Russia doing in Europe and the USA?


If things keep going as they are, war "over there" is going to become war "over here" and I think the sooner people can vividly imagine war "over here" the sooner they will take this all very seriously. That is my hope.


Well I really don't know for sure, but the likely scenario based on the rumors is that the West is supplying weapons, tactics, training, operation planning and targetting (if that is involved, I don't really know for sure), but it is Ukraine's decision, Ukraine's proximate action, Ukraine pushing the button.


Most nations agree Russia is technically in the wrong by violating the territorial borders of Ukraine, including in Crimea, according to international law, by 2018 most nations abstained or were absent (UN general assembly resolution 73/194 (on territorial integrity of Ukraine 64 in favor, 15 against, 83 abstained and 31 absent).

I believe this is because most diplomats recognise the complexity of the situation and Russia's security concerns.  It is not just a wild out-of-the-blue land grab by a Hitleresque Putin.


Yes only 21 nations consider Crimea to be Russia.

Even more strongly is the rejection of the "sham" referendums in the Donbass regions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_General_Assembly_Resolution_ES-11/4


I agree with you. I think it is a massive escalaation. But I wanted to ask what others thought without taintint their answers in my quesiton.

But it's not my comparison, it was from Maria Zakharova within the Russian foreign ministry, but not couched as a retaliation threat.  I wanted to make the comparison more stark by couching it as a retaliation hypothesis.


Well, they have already been caught (twice?) assisting, Germany in discussions with Ukraine about how to do it and make it look like Germany wasn't invloved... but that leaked.  and then again I think (can't recall details). Also UK foreign minister said it was Ukraine's right to use UK weapons to strike inside Russia and analysts expect that is the target.

This being said, I think Russia wouldn't go so far, and I would take it as a massive escalation. But not impossible. And Russia has been very restrained about anything outside of Ukraine and I half expect when they break that restraint, it will be a sudden significant break of restraint.