I have put NIP-26 delegation support back into gossip.
As a punishment for taking it out of gossip in the first place, I swear that I will, upon midnight, slaughter a sheep and spread it's entrails over my naked body, beating my breast at the moon and whailing, asking the universe why oh why did I think it was okay to remove unused code? Never again. I will from this day forward take a vow to always make sure the code base grows and grows and grows without bounds supporting even VHS and even going so far back as to support arsenical bronze as well as tin-based bronze. And with this arsenical bronze knife I cut myself, mixing my blood with that of the slaughtered sheep, wrapping myself in black sackcloth and covering myself in ashes I shall wander this Earth as an outcast and evil nostr developer, bearing the stench, wearing the large letter C pinned to my sackcloth.... the C of "centralization". Because as every 5 year old knows, if you remove code that nobody uses, that is centralization.
Oh hell yes frying the rice makes a very different and delicious kind of rice. Especially if I was doing risotto I wouldn't do it any other way.
But I use a rice cooker all the time for the brown rice that goes into my "bachelor chow." Because I don't have to bother with it, I know it will take care of itself.
Two different postgres databases aren't interchangeable either. I woudn't compare a postgres connection pool to a set of connections to multiple relays, I'd compare it to a set of connections to the same relay. Of course if you think of multiple relays as comprising one distributed database then I see how you could think of it otherwise, but it is what it is.
NIP-26 also uses a full word "delegation" tag that most relays don't index. It should use a single letter tag with the companies pubkey so people can get all company posts with a query { "authors": [<company-pubkey>] } union the results of { "#D": [<company-pubkey>] }
True story. I will avoid names and relationships to not identify anybody. Don't expect any kind of shocking punchline or anything, it is just a bit interesting.
Someone I knew who was quite smart (Alan) had a friend who was very athletic and fit (they knew each other from gymnastics class) but not smart and was failing his college classes (Glenn). So Glenn asked Alan for advice and after brainstorming and ruling out things like being a professional baseball player (Glenn had flat feet and wasn't even in the A leagues yet), Alan decided Glenn would be much more successful if he dropped out of college and became a male stripper. Glenn respected Alan a lot and took this advice.
At first he was quite happy with this situation. He was making more money than ever before, he had copious opportunities with girls who would privately proposition him (some of which he took up) and generally felt he had found a career that suited his skillset.
But it turns out that whenever there is a bachelorette party, there is a bachelor, usually with several big burly buddies. And sometimes they would show up violently enraged and beat the shit out of Glenn. He was pushed out of a 2 story window (through glass), kicked on the ground cowering under a pickup truck, and beaten to a pulp landing him in the hospital.
So he quit being a male stripper.
I don't know what he did with his life after that.
No, I am not Alan. No, I am not Glenn. Those were bad guesses.
I want to take a moment to thank all the millions of little critters that died, got fossilized, got pressurized into oil, so that I can drive around in my truck.
I wonder if vegans drive.
Yes but I just heard Sabine Hoffsteader use the term "fossil fuel" and I thought exactly that... that is the wrong term because that theory has been overturned. But I thought I would say something funny as a play on the old idea.
Based on the women I have known, far more men than women think what you just said.
Most women involved in stripping or porn or sex work don't feel abused. They do it for the easy money, and they think that the men who they provide a service to are getting the raw deal. I've heard such women express bewilderment as to why a man would pay money for such a fleeting simple thing leaving him worse off a short while later. They feel like the abusers, abusing the impulsive and shallow nature of men.
Occasionally a religious kind of man will come into a strip club and tell the woman something like "you don't have to do this ya know, you're better than this." Strippers take offense at that kind of thing. It's underhandedly degrading. You are telling them that they are filth and should clean up, while at the same time watching them strip. I'm on the side of those strippers. Call the bouncer, kick those men out. They choose to see the woman as lesser, as filth. The women do not feel this of themselves, they do not feel like filth, they feel beautiful and they are earning a living.
And when I recognized that I concluded that (in the main) nobody is the abuser. Stripping, porn, sex work... it is a mutual voluntary thing. It's a job.
Now you can conclude that they are "complete trash" so I can't say you are wrong. That is subjective, it is your choice. You can say it is a mental disorder, but I think that is going too far. Sure some women would never do that, but every person is different, and I don't think we should pathologize our differences.
Also, there are plenty of cases of forced sex work, of sex trafficking, of child trafficking, of abused women turning to this line of work when they didn't really want to. So that is a real thing. But so is it a real thing the women who just really like having sex, really like being on camera, etc.
Over the last 5 years or so I've seen a kind of puritanical movement arise among right wing men. Rejection of porn especially, something that nobody ever rejected (in my experience) before this recent shift, outside of religious communities who have always rejected it. But maybe I just didn't notice it before.
As a highly religous teen, but also super horny, I found not servicing myself to be like holding my breath. I knew I was sinning but I could not stop and I felt a roller coaster of guilt and arousal that was I'm sure not a healthy way to be.
But if you want to stop invite Jesus to help. You can beat it together.
Ok I'm getting an error when I post a giftwrap. First, it is giving me AUTH twice (not an error but odd) then it appears to be sending false, but as a string.
Eric Weinstein can be long-winded with a hell of a lot of setup. It took me an hour to come to the realization of what he is speculating (I think) which I will summarize for you thusly:
1. Breakthroughs in physics are dangerous to humanity
2. The breakthrough that combines quantum and gravity will give someone enormous power
3. Edward Witten is very odd, crazy smart, and seems to have directed everybody towards a dead end, possibly to save us by preventing the next breakthrough.
I get the distinct impression however that Eric deeply craves recognition and is deeply unhappy that he doesn't have a breakthrough or a nobel prize, and I suspect some of his stories like that his equasions were stolen by Ed Witten might not be entirely truthful. I saw a video where he gave a talk at some university, and it was pretty clear to me that the room was empty but he was trying to make it appear as if he was invited and was talking to students. I suspect his work on E8 isn't coherent enough to have gotten anywhere. When he talks about physics he jumps around a lot as if he is trying to signal that he understands all these different things... but what he says isn't logically coherent it is scatterbrained, and he knows it so he weaves his narrative not in a way that clearly explains anything, but just in a way to explain that he knows all these different things, see, and why won't the experts come talk to him? Because he isn't quite coherent, that's why. Crazy high I.Q. though, he does have that.
This community is the best.
Some communities, such as the political community of Washington DC, are cannabalistic, preying on any dissenters. Everybody falls in line, everybody behaves like sheep, like reeds in the wind. They are afraid of losing their position in high society and so they go to enormous lengths to keep a close ear on the prevailing narrative and to echo it vociferously. Their ideas are static, lacking in creativity, unable to change course, even when nobody believes those ideas anymore they continue to voice them and subscribe to them. The group is thus slow moving, out of touch, and generally detrimental to all.
Other communities like nostr appreciate creativity and new ideas and differing opinions. Free speech is welcome and honored. And people can be wrong all over the place and can disagree about everything and we all love it. Because this openness, this acceptance of viewpoint diversity, it allows us to say exactly what we really think, it makes us dynamic, it keeps us creative, it broadens our perspectives, keeps us from getting locked into wrong ideas.
This openness must never be lost. That is the prevailing viewpoint and if you don't accept it I'm gonna kick you out of nostr. 😊
That is a historical misuse and misunderstanding of the word hermaphrodite, even if still used colloquially. Technically it refers to a species where individuals can produce both types of gametes. No human in history could do that.
But the people you refer to, now called intersex, aren't always truly intersex either. It depends on definitions though. And that is where none of us will ever agree.
For instance, you could define it by gamete production. However, some people fail to produce either. What are they?
You could define it by choromosomes, however in very rare cases people can be chimeras of both sexes (I don't know if that ever actually happened). This seems the most reliable, the most likely definition to leave no (or vanishingly low) ambiguity.
In practice historically it was defined by the appearance of genitalia, which is pretty piss-poor science IMHO.
If someone is born with a tootsie-roll maybe-penis-maybe-clitoris, doctors historically did an "emergency operation" to force their genitals to be one way or the other, and instructed the parents on how important it was to reinforce the sex that the doctor chose. IMHO that is abusive. Horrific actually.
There are so many sexual characteristics that socially matter. Who you are attracted to and who is attracted to you. Whether two people can bear children. How you think of yourself based on (probably) pre-natal testosterone levels or something like that. You can look at chromosomes, but that is no guarantee that it will align with how the person turns out after puberty. So it probably makes sense to let the person remain intersex and let them choose when they get older.
Why am I writing a book on this topic I know virtually nothing about? I am going to stop typing now.
People think things are complicated already around intersex and trangender issues. But things are going to get a lot more complicated once they find out that artificial sweeteners are what is causing women to have transgender and non-binary children. And calls to change the formulas of these artificial sweeteners are going to be fought against by trans-rights people who will claim that we are genociding them (and we would be actually eugenically reducing transgenderism by changing the artificial sweeteners). Then the debates will get real fun.
I may be ignorant here. I'm reading that there are people who have both testicular and ovarian tissue (ovotesticular syndrome). So ok. I dunno, all this is too complicated, and I'm not sure to what end. The Athenians threw them into the sea and the Romans threw them into the Tiber... probably so they didn't have to deal with the complexity of it all. I don't think we should do that.
But let's not ignore the elephant in the room. You guys have to get rid of first-past-the-post.
It is actually quite reassuring to know that the US is being led by a demented old man. If only all the world leaders would become demented and ineffectual.
Nah. Give him the nuclear football. He will spill ice cream on it and short it out. Then he will tell you how his son died in Iraq, how he used NATO to crush Putin and how Trump called white supremacists fine people, then he will look at the sky intently and wander listing to the left.
Roman historian and senator Tacticus writes in about 116 AD about the Great Fire of Rome in 64 AD, where he references Christians (this is one of the two earliest non-Christian sources of information about the historical reality of some dude named Jesus the Christ and of the Christians). He is writing about the fact that most people felt that Nero started the fire himself, and then used the Christians as scapegoats.
"But all human efforts, all the lavish gifts of the emperor, and the propitiations of the gods, did not banish the sinister belief that the conflagration was the result of an order. Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judæa, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular. Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind."
"Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired. Nero offered his gardens for the spectacle, and was exhibiting a show in the circus, while he mingled with the people in the dress of a charioteer or stood aloft on a car. Hence, even for criminals who deserved extreme and exemplary punishment, there arose a feeling of compassion; for it was not, as it seemed, for the public good, but to glut one man's cruelty, that they were being destroyed."
Nero propelled Christianity from a popular fad into a two-thousand-year-long belief system.
Could you imagine in 4100 AD a preacher quoting "It says here in 1st Twitter 17a4:123c that 'Trump Tower makes the best tacos.' Shall we pray." Trump had no idea his lie would last two thousand years.
The ONLY reason that nostr is not a REST API is because it is meant to be publish-subscribe. You subscribe to a set of filters, and stay connected, and as matching events show up they are shuttled down that connection to your client. With a REST API, the client would have to keep coming back, "polling" which would create periodic lookups on the relay even when nothing is happening. Also, clients would need to make new connections to make new requests, which is a lot of overhead. There are hacky ways to try to get REST APIs to stay connected and poll, but I'm not entirely sure they are reliable.
HTTP REST APIs are useful. @fiatjaf proposes one here https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/pull/1325 and there is a NIP for HTTP AUTH here https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/98.md
IMHO the ideal transport would be WebTransport, but that is too new, and barring that Websockets is the next best choice.
The downside is that some people don't have as much knowledge of websocket libraries and their usage as they do of HTTP REST. But that is easily solvable.
Unattended upgrades? iptables? ssh config lockdown?
I used to manage nearly a thousand websites running mostly on PHP and using parallels plesk. I grew to hate plesk. It doesn't respect system services, it overwrites them. It takes ownership of everything and forces you to do everything through plesk... and then fails to support everything you want to do.
I used to keep a list as cancel culture started ramping up, but then I stopped because it was clearly happening too quickly for me to keep up. I'm guessing there are close to a hundred thousand people now.
Nonetheless, here are some names I jotted down over the years. I cannot vouch for any of these people. Being on the list just means they lost something (job, social media, bank account, etc) based on their political opinion voiced via free speech which was not in violation of any written policy (e.g. when it comes to social media). I have some data on some of these stories, but not for all of them. Some of them have died since, several have committed suicide, others begged to be let back into society and turned into cancellers themselves. So like I say, being on this list does not mean I vouch for them in any way, and many names I don't recognize.
Aaron Kindsvatter
Alan Dershowitz
Alessandro Strumia
Alex Jones
Alice Dreger
Ashutosh Jogalekar
Bari Weiss
Bret Weinstein
Brian Lieter
Brian Peckford
Candace Owens
Charles Murray
Chris Hedges
Christina Hoff Sommers
David Starkey
Debra W Soh
Don Brash
Donald Trump
E.O.Wilson
Eric Lander
Erika Christakis
Faith Goldy
Gary Garrels
Gavin McInnes
Gordon Klein
Harald Uhlig
Isabella Chow
James Damore
James Watson
John C Dvorak
Jordan Peterson
Lauren Southern
Lawrence Krauss
Lawrence Summers
Lindsay Shepherd
Lisa Littman
Mark Knight
Mary Spellman
Matthew Hubbard
Mehgan Murphy
Mike Adams
Noah Carl
Philippe Rushtin
Rebecca Tuvel
Richard J Hernstein
Rick Metha
Roland G Fryer, Jr.
Ron Sullivan
Sergei Tabachnikov
Stacy Brown
Stephen Molyneux
Steve Hsu
Steven Galloway
Steven Pinker
Teresa Nielson
Theodore P Hill
Tiffany Riley
Sir Tim Hunt
William A Jacobson
Humans are not born as tabula rasa. Our behaviors are partially genetically determined. But we are born with a very high level of plasticity allowing us to configure to our cultural norms and the local langauge, for example. Lewontin and Gould were afraid of the social implications of this knowledge, that it would be used as an excuse by racists to terminate certain genetic lineages, and they thought they were doing the right thing by denying the truth, especially given that the holocaust was just 30 years prior to this debate. But denying an inconvenient truth doesn't make it go away.
Twin studies bear this out. It is sometimes suprising how similar twins separated at birth are, even though they had very different cultural upbringings. So E.O. Wilson's rejection of tabula rasa was correct, and the "International Committee Against Racism" was over-the-top, cocksure and wrong.
Yet if you search the Internet for E.O. Wilson you'll find many writings about how he was a bad man, how he promoted "scientific racism."
The modern (mostly American) movement to reject inconvenient truths and replace them with desires (for that is my best description of what is going on) is naturally detrimental and destructive and is the root cause of America's slow but inexorable downfall.
It wasn't supposed to be funny so much as a critique of the word. Germans have some good words that we borrowed: zeitgeist, shadenfreude, wanderlust, doppelganger... but kindergarten wasn't one of our best borrowing decisions, we should have left that one in Germany.
Now If I called this whole thing "childish", THAT would be a dad joke.
NIP-26 is not deprecated. It hasn't been edited in 8 months (and that was just to remove authors).
So why did I remove it from gossip?
All I was hearing from EVERY VOICE for months was that it was dead, minds never used it, nobody used it, that nobody wants to use it, and it was entirely a bad idea. Because I am very reticent to break things, I investigated usage first. I looked on all the big relays for ANY event with a deprecation tag. None. Could not find a single use of this NIP. And AFAIK no other client supports it. No relays ever seemed to support it. It was like this for OVER A YEAR before I decided to remove that clearly unused and complicated code that was not simple to maintain.
BUT ALSO I knew I could put it right back as soon as people started to actually use this NIP. And I will.
Just like Murphy's law would predict, after I removed it, everybody piled on me and complained. Just because of the idea, not because anything broke.
To be clear, I really do wish for a secure offline master key and online per-device subkeys. And having thought about it a lot, I think the right path is to do something like NIP-26 but with a single-letter tag, or to have a key schedule event where you publish your subkeys and their revocation status. The problem is that nobody can start using it effectively until everybody has it implemented... until then nobody is going to find and follow your new subkeys. So it's just as impossible to get there as the ipv4-to-ipv6 transition was. That is sad and unfortunate, but it is reality, and reality must be looked at square in the face.
If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.
Where is the center? Point to the center. Is it github (which still has NIP-26 in all its glory)? Is it fiatjaf? Is it the gossip client, a client that seems to never show up on anybody's lists of nostr clients? Is it Damus? Where do you think the center is that compels us all to follow and fall in line?
I don't think there is anything that demands anybody do anything any particular way... but nevertheless there is a common desire among all of us to be compatible somehow. So there will be communication and attempts to align. And there will be push and pull. And some issues will probably never be agreed among all the developers.
I prefer to think of us all on the surface of a sphere. There is no center to the surface of a sphere. But some of us align more closely with some people than we do with others. (strictly speaking for highly technical people, especially AI people: the sphere has many more than 3 dimensions... perhaps 1536).
Nobody told me to remove this feature from gossip. And I am not taking orders from anybody. I am funded by OpenSats but they accepted my proposal and never gave me any feedback or suggestions or direction at all, other than bitcoin.
There is no secret cabal controlling nostr. There are just a bunch of different people with different opinions who want our shit to basically be compatible. New people show up all the time and by their work alone they become prominent nostr people. For example, the 2nd biggest contributor to the nips repo is Asai Toshiya, someone I know almost zilch about (I barely recognize the name). By this person's work he became prominent. That is all that matters to me. If you do good work, create good shit, you become valuable and listened to by a higher proportion of other devs, which makes your work become the accepted thing which appears centralized but isn't at all centralized. Getting other devs to accept your idea is a prize that is up for grabs all of the time and requires the work not just of inventing something good, but all the free speech that goes into explaining it and selling it. And if you convince a lot of other devs you get more compabitility. If you don't you look towards someone else's solution that did gain more ground and maybe choose it instead. Win some, lose some.
This is an entirely distributed process.
Don't forget to take your medicine.
Your 2nd and 3rd sentences bend the definition of government in my mind into something I don't recognize. What is government if not the monopoly on the use of force in order to defend the law? If it is something else, I don't think we need it.
But I do think you have pointed out something of critical import that is not well understood. I wouldn't be as absolute as you, but law derives from nature. Laws that work well must be in line with nature and in that sense, such laws are discovered by men, not created by or dictated by them. But only to a degree. The real situation is far messier once you get into the details. Theft depends on a shared agreement as to ownership which isn't always clearly agreed upon. Rape depends upon the will of the victim which cannot easily be adjudicated (believe all women?), and what about age of consent does nature give you an absolute number? Murder depends upon whether or not it is just (in defense of your family for example). Principles can be stated, but details will always exist making the whole affair a giant mess that few people want to soil themselves with, other than those whose minds were soiled already (typically the lawyers).
I would be in favor of a nation whose citizens voluntarily joined (and contains no other citizens) which is founded on foundational law that cannot change, not by any democratic or republic means, and if those laws become "bad" you are free to quit, but you cannot change the foundation... but which then has subservient laws and rules that hierarchically have different statuses and which can be changed and are voted upon perhaps by democratic vote, perhaps by republican representation, or whatever.
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Notes by Magister Michael Dilger M.Sc. | export
NIP-26 also uses a full word "delegation" tag that most relays don't index. It should use a single letter tag with the companies pubkey so people can get all company posts with a query { "authors": [<company-pubkey>] } union the results of { "#D": [<company-pubkey>] }Happy Lord's Day (Sunday), Frens! Jesus is KING! ("Christ" MEANS "King" - as well as "prophet" an...