Ah, a veritable digital medusa!
This'd make for a great Cory Doctorow or Neil Stephenson scene: a character has natural facial features or has added tattoos/stickers/ makeup which fuzz or crash facial recognition systems. Like the scramble suit from Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly — "Let's hear it for the vague blur!" — except not quite so evidently anomalous.
https://image.nostr.build/909c7790c7f0fab40157b8c564b1626deba934d23fc600469feb407b5d367043.jpg
I've been trying to think of 90s tech that I miss… GOPHER, maybe? I really don't miss CDs, DVDs, any of that crap, though once I got out of the US it was obvious that those were the catalysts for incredible sneakernet file sharing networks and economies.
Anyhow, I remembered the first mobile phone I could type on (for SSH, of course), but that's 2004. Still miss having a gadget with a proper handheld physical keyboard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_6800_series
Effusive thanks to @rabble@QW@AviBurra for this fascinating discussion! Coming from the SF Indymedia millieu, I really value the historical and philosophical coverage behind the technology.
McCluhan said, "The medium is the message." The philosophy behind the tech inevitably manifests itself in the social relations possible via that tech.
Indymedia (which itself grew out of the organizing around the Seattle 1999 WTO protests) in my analysis stumbled when it came to outreach/community building, centralization, burnout, funding, factionalism (ha, welcome to the Left).
Nostr excels in addressing all of these in some way or another.
Correction:
The Carnival Against Capital/J18 took place 6 months before the Seattle WTO Ministerial in Nov. 1999. Indymedia began there, as far as I know. But Seattle was a giant catalyst and inspiration.
I remember the flyers (remember flyers?), "Anarchists invite you to Seattle!" in Fall 1999.
Bitso and I think Nu Bank have BTC-linked MXN debit card accounts. Both are Brazil-based fintechs with consumer-focused apps which operate in Mexico. The exchange rate may not be the best, but they are both very convenient.
Rambling further:
Bitso doesn't appear to support the Lightning network (yet). I hope they get with it! It's really not practical to transfer BTC amounts below 2000 MXN without Lightning, in my opinion. So the UX flow would have to be accumulating greater amounts, then xfer to Bitso via an on-chain BTC TX, then withdrawing in pesos. No bueno. If that changes, or I'm wrong about this, I'll follow up with another post.
Nu, on the other hand, just put out a joint press release with Lightspark, announcing their support for Lightning transfers. I haven't tried it, if I do I'll follow up with another post.
https://www.lightspark.com/news/nubank-announcement
Ha, then neither of those debit cards have their own ATMs, so I'd expect about 20 pesos in fees for cash withdrawals. A better alternative would be to have a brick-and-mortar bank account (like BBVA or Banamex) and use SPEI to send pesos from Nu to that bank for ATM withdrawals. SPEI is fast, unlike US ACH.
Too soon to use Nu for bitcoin yet — I see no bitcoin integration in their Mexican mobile app yet. Hopefully their devs are working on it and it will be available soon.
They do however offer 14.5% APY on MXN holdings — 15% if you lock it up for 4 weeks. I guess Nu get a lot of yield from their 99.9% APR on their credit card (not a misprint: 99.9% APR! sheesh! And I thought 20% was bad!), and share a fraction of it in exchange for collateralizing their business. Credit costs in Latin America are crazy. I guess the banks justify it by high default rates, but there appears to be a fair amount of egregious usury happening, usury which has long been outlawed in developed economies.
Unfortunately he needs to first make a pit stop in a US Pacific island colony, err, "Commonwealth", to perform a ritual of submission with the US Court system, which has promised to release him with a sentence of "time served" in return for Assange pleading guilty to one count of "illegally obtaining and disclosing national security material."
But yes, eventually he goes home.
To spell it out: Nostr over LoRa. OK, what is LoRa? Long-range, low power, local OR wide area network, often associated with the Internet of Things (IoT) concept. Lots of buzzwords, but my take away is LoRa is a possibly a way to move the means of Internet communication, or at least last-mile communication, from giant mega corporations, ISPs and mobile telecom companies to DIY communities and individuals. So Nostr is a natural fit. Good idea!
[you] Teach
Your children well
Their father's hell
Did slowly go by
Feed
Them on your dreams
The one they pick
Is the one you'll know by
You
Who are on the road
Must have a code
That you can live by
And so
Become yourself
Because the past
Is just a goodbye
In this situation I would typically run:
lsof | grep deleted
to see if a process had held open a file descriptor for a deleted file. Sounds like whatever it was resolved itself without your intervention, but if it doesn't I know which process I need to stop or restart in order to reclaim disk space.
5 weeks out, the frontrunner Claudia Sheinbaum — leading the opposition candidate Xochitl Gálvez in the polls by 20% — believes she has the sexennial Mexican presidential elections in the bag.
What do you think about the supposed advertising truism "there's no such thing as bad publicity"? https://image.nostr.build/3b570abbe6b4be4b3c3c7db80f04a377e9a961390b430a32c665615da363d9c9.jpg
Keep the name.
Because I stayed awake in US history class, I know it stands for the fundamental reforms to capitalism which later enabled the United States to navigate between the extremes of fascism and socialist revolution in the 1930s. I thank progressives for:
• the right to vote for all non-felon citizens
• free education for all
• libraries for all
• fire escapes, emergency exits (it's amazing how much you miss them when you move to a country where you are constantly having to ask someone to unlock the door to let you OUT of a building)
• the concept of "the weekend"
• near elimination of child labor (the exception was unfortunately farm labor)
• national parks
• being able to rely on meat and dairy products not to make me ill (at least in the short term)
• ingredient lists for food and medicines
• the concept of government transparency and public accountability of elected officials
• direct election of Senators
I'm sure I left off some important other achievements of the original Progressive movement. Modern day progressives would do well to look to the origins of the name. It's a hopeful political ideology, and the best chance for delivering practical change in the present, rather than trusting in some distant utopia.
Alex: Thanks for the thoughtful presentation.
Do you think it's possible to calculate transitive trust/relevance based on each principal's social graph?
Would it be desirable to have a dampening function on such a transversal search, a la IP routing protocols' TTLs. Otherwise you might end up with social graph loops.
Also, I may care less about the judgement of a friend of a friend of a friend than I do about a direct friend.
When I think about webs of trust, I immediately think about how unwieldy the PGP user trust survey is. Also, I think I'd feel a bit uncomfortable about broadcasting my evaluation of my social graph connections. So if there are any gradations between "connected" and "not connected", it seems like that ought to be private information either stored locally for each client/user, or else self-signed/encrypted data if published for cross-Nostr-client portability.
OK, one last blurb re: open social graphs. I think Tantek Çelik's microFormats, hCard, XFN, and FOAF concepts might be relevant, although they all seem to lean towards the too-much-information/self-compiled-dossier side of social graphs. See http://gmpg.org/xfn/and/#idconsolidation for some links.
Thanks again!
The zapvertising astroturfing risk?
It could end up as yet another pay-to-play economy, except advertisers really ought to be paying the end-users for their attention, rather than paying themselves to climb the relevancy ladder.
Empty blocks are not so uncommon. I think last week there were 2 in a row.
Makes me want to read up on bitcoin's hash puzzle preimage resistance — in other words, given an empty block, one might leap to the conclusion that the winning miner perhaps precomputed the winning nonce in advance (like rainbow tables for password hashes), so quickly the miner could broadcast a valid block before they had a chance to receive any transactions to put in the block. Bitcoin is supposed to use a hashing algorithm which resists precomputing (preimaging). So this would naturally become a target for antagonistic cryptography efforts at a nation-state level, or "friendlies" who hope to improve Bitcoin's security by beating the antagonists to the punch.
Maybe Rocky should try going in the museum sometime. He never made it past the steps, and it's quite a nice museum! Educational, even!
https://m.primal.net/HWRR.jpg
Maybe change their shell to something very boring like /bin/true, /bin/date, or cmatrix? Or, more seriously, rbash or scponly. Don't forget to update /etc/shells
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