No greater truth hath ever been realized 

 Of course. I don't disagree with that at all.

But if you let your mind be swayed by cultural norms and news media you can easily find yourself believing that, for example, the Sandy Hook parents are perfect people and you should be on their side of every argument.... rather than that they are actually assholes..... despite the horror of their kids being murdered and the sympathy we all feel about that. 

 I'm just thinking down atypical pathways.  What if murder became legal?  That's an atypical thought.  Nobody thinks about this shit, or if they do they don't dare write about it.  What if the state turned a blind eye to murders.  If murder were legal in Nazi Germany I bet Hitler would have been killed right quick.  Might have actually prevented far more deaths than it caused.  Would America become much worse or much better?  I think it would be worse off but I'm not sure.  I see hundreds of horribly evil people continue to perpetuate their evil, and everybody just puts up with it because murder is illegal so nobody can do anything to stop it.  Maybe if it weren't illegal the people that got murdered would tend to be the more evil people, causing things to get better.  Maybe there is a turning point in a society when evil dominates so greatly that murder of these evil people actually becomes a public good, and only after the evil is cleared out does murder become a public evil again.

This is just a crazy thought experiment. Probably the kind of thinking that started violent revolutions I'm guessing.

I am not defending murder nor am I suggesting it is a public good. I'm trying to think out under which conditions killing people might become a public good.  Because we do it all the time under the label of "war" and most of the time I don't think those are the right conditions to allow for the killing of people. 

 First, the actual battle lines currently are inside of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. This deal backs those up meaning Russia concedes territory it already holds, and Ukraine concedes no territory at all.  You might think Ukraine's pre-2022 borders are the 'proper' borders but Russia thinks Ukraine's pre-Soviet breakup are the 'proper' borders.  Ukraine arguing from it's memory of "we used to hold this land" is just as illogical as Russia arguing from it's memory of "we used to hold this land".  The only real objective truth is the current battle lines, and this agreement favors Ukraine decisively in that regard. 

 I know, but it's still fun to make a peace agreement. It is the popular thing. Everybody is doing it. 

 Ok, let's assume based on your assessment Ukraine says "no" to this deal.  What happens next?  Does Ukraine get back all its former territory? No.  I think it goes on to lose a lot more territory.  I think this agreement is generous in that regard.  Compare it to Putin's suggested deal in which

  * Russia gets all of Kherson and Zaphorizia
  * Ukraine must demilitarize and denazify

My deal is a better deal for Ukraine, and one that Russia might accept.  I don't think Russia would accept less because, put simply, they are winning.

I'm not making any normative statements here. I'm not saying Russia SHOULD get something or that Russia isn't wrong.  I'm being diplomatic based on the actual on-the-ground state of things.

If you insist I make normative pronouncements, then Russia was wrong for invading and Ukraine has every right to join NATO.  But I'm a realist, not a fantasist. 

 You weren't supposed to put that into print!  I hereby excommnicate you from the secret order! 

 That is only because it has already been accepted long ago. Those are the standing orders. 

 Fair point. Add in some security guarantees for Ukraine of some sort... maybe Russian assets held in Western institutions that can be confiscated if... oh wait, that's already happened.  Doesn't seem to work. 

 Putin's thinking was that NATO couldn't admit Ukraine if Ukraine was at war with Russia because that would immediately put NATO at war with Russia. And so by attacking Ukraine they prevented Ukraine from joining NATO.  I'm sure Putin did not expect as much Western backing as Ukraine has gotten.  But even with that Western backing, Ukraine is still not in NATO and NATO is still not at direct war with Russia.  So we don't have a decisive answer as to whether Putin's strategy "screwed himself" or not, we have to wait for the future to show us who is the better strategist, Vladimir Putin or karnage. 

 I don't think smaller countries are just the playthings of the great powers.  I think they can have independent self-rule.

But as to whether such an agreement would be agreed to, probably not, and probably because of your point. Both sides want to profit from Ukraine, neither side would allow Ukraine to be independent and neutral.

But I'm not really serious in my proposal.  I just wanted to make another peace proposal since it is the popular thing right now. 

 Ah man!  I wanted to get an autographed copy of your next book! 

 Who is going to slide into my DMs now?!? 

 But I'm not famous so it doesn't make any waves. 

 #DefundTheFBI 

 I've heard multiple times that Russia has nuclear subs in the ocean off the East Coast of the US and if a nuclear exchange were to eventuate, their sub-launched missiles would hit rather rapidly.  And that the US has similar close-range strike capability from Europe.

My point was that we have been silently in close strike range for decades(?) and this has been normalized. Back in the "Cuban Missile Crisis" such close strike range was very worrying to Americans who didn't know it was mutual and Kennedy secretly made a deal to pull our missles out of Italy and Turkey.  But even at that time, it wasn't a real "crisis" because it was mutual and so neither side could win, and neither side was going to push the button.

Russia being at Cuba today doesn't present much extra threat of a nuclear exchange. The US intel agencies have already publicly said there are no nuclear weapons on those Russian ships.  What it does present is a conventional attack platform with Kinzhal and other hypersonics.  It is meant as a warning, since the US keeps crossing red lines:  "cross another red line attacking Russia with your missile systems and perhaps we will attack the continential USA with our missile systems... we are serious, stop pushing us."  It is meant to stop the escalation cycle.  "Escalate to deescalate".  But of course every escalation could provoke more escalation in retaliation instead. 

 Pepe Escobar says Russian leadership and businessmen are pretty sure NATO intends to wage a full scale war on Russia, that their moves in Ukraine are a prelude, a means of weakening Russia first.  So Russian strategy has been with this in mind:  their rapid alliance with China, their conversion of their economy into building ammunition, their strategic escalations, all with the view that war with NATO is inevitable.  Most of them want to decapitate Ukraine and get it over with, so that proximal axis of war would be cut off and NATO would need to come up with a different excuse to go to war with Russia.  But Putin has been patient and hasn't taken such an action yet as far as we can tell, instead focusing on setting up meat grinders and winning by attrition.  A decapitation action that wasn't an assassination might take about 3-4 months (according to former leader Sergei) of attacking Kiev. 

 I tried to read Mein Kampf but it requires so much knowledge of what was happening in that time and place that it made no sense to me and I couldn't keep myself interested enough to finish it. 

 I hope they stick around. But they need to be aware that people here will say what they really think even if it hurts their feelings, and they need to be able to argue back in turn, and live with dissent.  I think they can and I think they will.

The CIA uses organisations like this to topple governments, and not to spread democracy or human rights as is claimed, but to preserve US hegemony.  Did toppling Ukraine in 2014 lead to more human rights? Just the opposite.

If these organisations can avoid being the tools (witting or unwitting) of the CIA, I welcome their activity. Human rights are very important, and people stuck in oppressive regimes are human beings that deserve just as much rights as you and I do. 

 Gonna need the meth. Deliver to me the meth or I won't believe you. 

 When I was younger I thought seeing clothes hanging on lines was associated with poor people in slums.  But once I got older and didn't care what people thought of me, I took to hanging my clothes out to dry because it is cheaper. The clothes aren't as soft but they last longer. 

 The beer of kings 

 It was a meditation on sausage 

 99cent store 

 Huh.  That's *how* I give my dog a bath:  Zoey, fetch!  *splash* *splash* 

 I don't know but he definitely has a preference for certain smells. Some sacrifices smell pleasing to the lord, others not so much. 

 I covered that song on a guitar at an open mic just a few months after the album came out, while the music overlords were still pushing Closer (I want to fuck you like an animal) as the big hit from the album and Hurt was getting 0 airtime. 

 It is very hard to find a stooge that won't let power go to their head and interfere with their plans.  With Joe Biden you get a man who doesn't even know he is the president. 

 Maybe he's Trump's VP 

 Does some nation consider you one of their citizens/subjects? 

 I've been waking up in a fog and living in a thickening fog for a month or two now. I can't put my finger on it. I thought it was the sleep apnea but with CPAP therapy it isn't getting better. It is hard to fix something when I don't know what the problem is.

I just wrote this to let you know you aren't alone. 

 Hey I need my street sweeped.  Can we borrow your mustache again? 

 If people are trapped under an oppressive regime and want freedom, and a NGO "assists" them in protesting and toppling their government in order to become more democratic and more free, isn't that what we all should want?  This conception of the whole business is hard to argue against, and I feel like I need to get my head straight about it because I do infact believe in freedom and I don't want people trapped in oppressive regimes and I do think soft power of free speech and convincing people is the better form of power.

But in practical terms it seems to have been used for power plays, for resources (originally for oil, maybe always for oil?), not to actually better peoples lives.

I think people need to better their own lives from the ground up using freedom tech like bitcoin and nostr and tor. 

 Who knows if that post was even real. But it's nice to stimulate thought. 

 That actually might just be some joker. I took it seriously because of how others responded to it. I have no idea. ... the CIA already has my head swimming 🤣 

 passing a `impl Fn() + Send + Sync + 'static` is of course the thing that compiler developers were expecting to happen all the time. 

 But the encrypted content of a custom list can't be distinguished that way. 

 Yes *that* check works. Checking the kind doesn't work. 

 I cant even solve this for users: some relay advertises itself under thousands of different URLs. How can users now manage that? According to every NIP relays are defined by a URL which includes a path part. I have to therefore treat them as separate relays.

I don't want to capture users and say "ignore all those, use my 3 relays" but that is the obvious central solution this mess is driving towards. 

 https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/issues/1282

I think we have to have these marketing labels, and users can sign up for the various services they need.  But also clients need to present to users only relays that actually are capable of fulfilling the role.

This part of the problem isn't that bad. Most of what Vitor listed isn't necessary.

But my job is to focus on problems which I continually do even when trying to sleep. 

 I'm of several minds here.  On the one hand, yes I think we standardize relay usage labels (or roles) and users (client operators? getting fancy with your terminology here) can pick relays to serve in various roles.

On the other hand, I worry that if we don't "ossify" at least some core parts of nostr (and instead keep breaking them), nostr will fail to interoperate more and more as time goes on. 

 Don't worry we got ya.  My job is to worry so you don't have to. 

 Maybe Russian subs aren't there. Maybe it's just what some people think and I heard misinformation. Or maybe they are there and this is the difference between everybody knowing something and "common knowledge" (where everybody also knows that everybody knows). 

 Nice write up, and incidentally I think this is the first twitter-like thread I've read on nostr. 

 But I'm a natural born killer! Society needs to tolerate my murders. It's my identity. Don't deny me my existence! You genocide me if you don't let me genocide you.

joking aside for a moment
... clearly there are limits to what sort of things someone should tolerate. I think we can tolerate all kinds of sexuality (being that's kind of a private thing).  But which things should not be tolerated?  Burning down court houses, censoring speech, violating the law and not be prosecuted, forced vaccinations?  Anything you were thinking of in particular? 

 I guess I don't see the world in terms of good and evil.  I tolerate my dog barking at night.  I'm glad my neighbors do too.

Not everything in life pleases me, and I tolerate almost all of the things that don't please me. Tight parking lots with barely enough room to turn. Supermarkets that don't stay open 24 hours. I tolerate them because I've learned to pick my battles.

Anyhow, not sure I really wanted to dig deep here, just asked the question that popped into my mind. 

 We are all making compromises because we are trying to balance making more features available with fixing the shit we already threw together.  Making clients more efficient tends to be lower priority because it makes devs look like they aren't doing much.

As for fixing nostr so we can download only root posts, and to differentiate the meaning of 'e' tags, is hard because of backwards compatibility. But it happens anyways (nostr breaks rapidly, that BREAKING file is rarely updated, but we still somehow survive it).

I think given all the concerns, the compromises we have to make, getting us to be in sync with each other. ... we are doing pretty well. But it does feel annoyingly slow nonetheless.

It's not low interest in doing it.  But yes, those things. And more. 

 Since people invariably will want to use many different nostr clients, any ideas that a single client can use (caching events locally, doing any kind of negentropy with the relay, etc, etc) will not be sufficient.  Any client-specific solutions will not be enough.  We need a NIP based solution.

I've been saying for as long as I can remember that we need what I call a "client proxy".  People have pushed back by imagining I'm talking about some central service people sign up for which would become another point of censorship - NO!  I'm talking about something that you run on your local computer, or your local network, or a data center where YOU control it ... and all your various nostr clients funnel everything through it so as to avoid events being downloaded over and over again.

The protocol from client to client proxy might have to be outside of nostr proper. It just has to add which relay the client would have asked directly.

For example, the client can say "Get this filter from these relays" and the proxy can (being smart) say "Hah, I already have that from relay A, here you go" while it asks relays B and C and caches those results. 

 which client? 

 In general, long thin slits are very leaky, whereas holes as big as a nailhole make almost no difference (except at higher frequencies they start to matter more).  Because EM is a transverse wave it generally needs a slit to get in. 

 Gossip is close but no cigar. Soon.

Actually if you can set your DM relays in Amethyst, and use gossip unstable branch, you may be able to use NIP-17 to other people who also have DM relays setup.  The piece gossip is missing is just the setting up your DM relays part. 

 The best ways I know to feel "right," to feel happy and satisfied in life:

1. Work in your garden, or get something else done physical outdoors, especially if you can catch some rays while doing it. Touch grass.
2. Clean something that hasn't been cleaned in a while.  You will feel far better when it is clean, and for having done it.
3. Cook food from scratch.
4. Build a fire and spend some time by it.
5. Take a long hot bath.
6. Stretch.
7. Work yourself until you are sore and tired, and then sleep hard.

Doing these things with family is even better. 

 It's the opposite of clever that's for sure.  I think it adds to the humor though. 

 So I guess the story was that Turkey wants to join BRICS. The links below are sources. But this is different than Turkey leaving NATO. Turkey wants to be in both.

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/why-turkey-wants-join-brics
https://www.reuters.com/world/kremlin-welcomes-turkeys-reported-desire-join-brics-2024-06-04/