The problem is corruption.
I don’t mean naked corruption like bribes, etc, just the legal stuff of favours and interests that hijack the system and bleed it out whilst everyone else is trying to concentrate on their own life. That’s the problem.
It’s all so late stage and infected.
With SOTA LLM’s you can write your own bootloader that boots your pc into a runtime environment that does not require an OS.
You can actually have the LLM’s write bare metal code that runs.
You can do RAM only systems.
With LLM’s it’s not that hard to break outside the shell on just about any machine. You can boot into bare metal and just skip the entire OS.
You can initialise network hardware and do really specific highly optimal stuff running bare metal code.
I don’t think we need operating systems or programs any more, this sounds so stupid but I think the whole tech stack is like Wylie Coyote, I think in 10 years the entire runtime environment and application layer might just self assemble on boot as the user prompts an LLM to ad hoc code the whole stack to execute some task.
It will be more powerful, more feature specific, faster, more malleable.
Yes, people are talking about how LLM’s make English a programming language and how they use English prompts to write Python response.
This is obviously dumb.
We should be using LLM’s to translate English prompts into assembly code and running on bare metal.
Bootloader + LLM is all you need.
No apps, no OS, no 3rd parties.
It’s vastly more secure because you’re only running your own code and it’s completely novel on every boot.
There’s no reason Twitter can’t run on nostr, it sure would save them a lot of legal bills around the world.
It would occupy the protocol though given the current size disparity.
Elon’s biggest strength is that every world leader wants to be photographed meeting him and if you are censoring people online you aren’t getting that photo, maybe he even meets your opponent?
Basically…
1) turn off a PC / laptop.
2) plug this plain looking lightning cable in
3) turn on PC / laptop
4) rather than boot up as normal it will boot from cable (if USB boot enabled)
5) prompts for a web URL
6) you enter a specific URL
7) PC / laptop boots an OS from the URL, boots a shell into RAM only
8) You now have an OS shell running on the PC / laptop in RAM (volatile), it doesn’t touch the disc and it loads all this from an OS image that you do not even possess.
Why bother?
This leaves no trace of your session on the host, no logs, the host never even booted.
The only trace that a session happened is on the rooter logs where the host machine IP will appear, but it always appears there so doesn’t look odd.
If you are caught with the hardware, it just looks like a charger and not a flash drive it’s overlooked, if someone does trys plugging it into a machine anyway, it has no data on it, no credentials, no applications, no operating system.
Just a boot.ini package that boots to an iPXE prompt.
My plan is to see if I can squeeze a mag switch into the connector so that I can wire it as a cable and then use magnet (in the lighting end) to switch it to the hidden flash.
It’s just a fun little project.
I’m currently fasting for one of these health metric kits and doing a bunch of blood and guts test.
But I had to do the school run this morning, ad hoc, and now I’m 2 hours late on every meal, and the hunger is killing me. 🤣
What have I signed up to?
What’s crazy, is that I don’t usually eat breakfast, but yesterday I have a little leaflet to read saying I would be eating something for breakfast today as part of some tests, and my stomach seems to have set an appointment.
That is an open ended fiscal system, and that’s not what we have.
The US government has the Treasury General Account. The UK government has the Consolidated Fund. These bank accounts are a part of the economy, they don’t ever go negative and their balances are published daily. Look them up.
In a capitalist economy (pre-2008), government deficit spending is supposed to drive up interest rates, as the gov has to go to the bond market to borrow more money. But since 2008, the Central Banks have just created new money to buy bonds and force rates low whilst encouraging ever more deficit spending.
2008 really broke capitalism and since then we have had a sort of monetary command and control economy. But it doesn’t work like the diagram shown above.
Start at the very bottom of the stack.
1). The physical network exists and it’s not yours. Not your servers, not your routers.
2). IP addresses are assigned by IANA. This is a permission request.
To create a decentralised network, the network ID’s / addresses would need to be self generated not assigned from a permission granting institution. You should self declare an identity and the network should propagate it with your traffic. First time connections would be slow, second time connections would be fast.
The Internet Protocol we all use at the base is highly centralised. You can create abstract networks within the internet like VPN’s do, or onion, but all the exit points are centrally assigned IP’s.
Why bother when we have encryption?
As great and fundamental as TCP/IP is, it is not permissionless and although this permission is always granted and is always frictionless, the result of IP design is a central register that geotags and ownertags every IP address.
Whilst the content of your message can be hidden, the TCP table cannot. The TCP table contains all the information required to go fish for the message.
Is there no hope?
Well if someone were to make the effort to devise an alternative routing system with self generated addresses, a permissionless network, then you could have a free network. The barrier is that all the physical network all the network cards and routers run IP. It’s a huge barrier.
But we are gradually approaching a world where you can do the impossible and circumvent the physical network that exists today.
Within a decade or two it will be fairly easy to replace the physical internet with a network of cubesats that hosts a decentralised network architecture.
It won’t be as fast as the internet, it would be slow and expensive, but it would be secure and untraceable.
Will it happen? No.
But it’s not as impossible as it once was.
Her hair gets longer and shorter.
There will be zero tells within a year and soon after that video will be inadmissible in court.
It’s also the death of the internet, you will soon be able to hallucinate an internet on demand.
Hoping to move some of my side projects forward over the summer.
I still want to make a doesn’t-exist-computer that iPXE boots into RAM only using nothing but a USB cable.
You just have a USB cable with small flash memory hidden in the connector, it doesn’t even have an OS on it. Plug it in to a machine and it iPXE boots a web hosted image into RAM only.
Computing without a trace.
Should I get a Nothing phone (2a)?
Anyone here tried one of these?
Tempted to have an off ramp from iOS, I sort of expect big tech is going to do big overreach stuff, as AI battles pan out… and this Nothing phone looks like something I could like.
I’m pretty sure people try this route and then go back to apple after 6 months. But I don’t need iMessage at all.
https://nothing.tech/pages/event
There’s an age where you stop giving AF about what people think, and for some people that happens too young and for others it happens too late.
Crucially, your only currency here is time and if you spend most of your time chasing the same thing, did you really get the full experience out of life?
There are places in countries where laws are interpreted and enforced differently than other places in the same country.
How free a country is depends on how you want to live your life.
Some places you are freer to live quietly, others you are freer to pursue bhag.
It’s actually very nuanced, but nowhere is there a libertarian Wild West.
Interesting problem…
Last year I started a micro business (UK) with my kids, part of which we are selling some imported goods via Amazon. This is a neat lesson for the kids because Amazon allows us to reach 1bn people across 23 countries.
Opportunity…
The EU requires us to have a person who is resident in the EU to act as point of contact for CE marking and for any stock that is delisted and needs to be returned to seller.
There are lots of people putting up websites offering this as a service, essentially a glorified mailbox, but they all seem to be saturated with demand. Hence the opportunity.
So does anyone in on nostr who lives in EU want to earn a few € a month to do this role for our micro biz? If so DM me. Only requirement is you should have a responsible character. But ideally you are WFH, maybe freelance, contractor, w/e?
More broadly… If anyone is an EU based dev, there is an Amazon imposed deadline for everyone to adopt this by 31st March 2024 and this looks like an great shot at capturing some recurring income potentially for years.
Yeah this is really a pet project that I’m doing with kids. FBA means we can offload a lot of the actual work and keep this as a side project.
I’m really just teaching my kids some biz skills.
Already own nostrmarketplace.com and knostr.io for future use.
🚨 Crazy Talk 🚨
I’m sure everyone is familiar with the way birthrates are collapsing all over the place and this is often associated with higher income people wanting fewer children.
However that doesn’t really make sense, unless income is negatively correlated with sexual activity and I doubt it is, or it hasn’t ever been shown.c
So why are birth rates collapsing and why do wealthy countries lead this?
1). Sperm counts have collapsed. Everywhere that births are down, sperm counts are down. It’s not some choice, it’s not abstinence or contraceptive. It’s sperm. The data is in and wealthy sperm is bad sperm.
Why does sperm go bad in wealthy countries when poorer countries don’t have this issue?
2). Nanoplastics are everywhere. Nanoplastics are smaller than microplastics, nanoplastics are actually small enough to diffuse across the cell membrane and into cells. Whilst your skin is good at defending your body from this kind of stuff by dropping dead cells, it’s much tougher on the inside.
Last year medical studies measured that mice who ingested nanoplastics would become infertile because nanoplastics accumulates in the testes! They observed nanoplastics accumulating in mice testing and this correlated with infertility.
More recently scientists discovered that bottled water measurably contains 100,000x more nanoplastic than previously thought…
This seems like a smoking gun, it seems like lung cancer and smoking.
It seems that plastic packaging of food and drinks causes infertility we now have a mechanism for the hypothesis and this hypothesis is very strongly correlated with data of national wealth, sperm counts, and fertility rates across world population groups.
So fellas… no plastic bottles, no plastic packaged food.
But perhaps more so… boys and young men should definitely not be eating / drinking this stuff.
I think some governments are going to put all this together and figure this out in the next couple of years. But no need to wait for that. https://image.nostr.build/2db2680afdf739d024857d327f37ef7c5e6e29aa8640736f42189f64c5c88397.jpghttps://image.nostr.build/ec8f5ff8a4fffca05ce736d075845e3631d3bd83b766074d95f1eb40b4aeb7bf.jpg
Atlantis speculation is fun.
It’s also wild that aboriginal stories exist about the flooding that happened circa 15,000 years ago with the meltwater pulse of the last ice age.
Neolithic history had to put up with climate change that was an entire order of magnitude more dramatic than anything we are worried about, as Europe and North America shed enormous land ice sheets that were miles thick.
As the ice on North America and Europe melted and dumped into the oceans, those two landmasses then rose up.
My house where I live is still actually rising above sea level today by approx 20mm/yr, even as the global sea level rises due to climate change.
… and my house is 1/2 mile from the beach.
We live on a very dynamic planet.
Hmm, we had energy price fixing across much of Europe and it’s not been so great for inflation, public debt, erosion of living standards, etc.
Some people didn’t freeze to death though, so some balance there. But price fixing just breeds inefficiency, waste and has a high cost burden for society at large.
In the good old days, you had to walk up to a girl in a bar with a beer matt and a pencil and ask for her number.
If her friends didn’t like you… no pass.
Then you had to call her house and her mom or dad would answer the phone.
If her parents didn’t like the sound of your voice… no pass.
Today girls have DM’s and I can’t even imagine the horrors therein! I think this alone explains the collapsing birth rate. https://image.nostr.build/8096ebdaa3da99d22c51e99ac240292469c552726ec1422423ec293dfbc2bbe5.jpg
Amazing to see Tim Sweeney and Epic Games have defeated Google over the Play Store monopoly.
Now they move on to Apple and the App Store.
It also seems significant that the California court has declared “monopoly”.
Really changes in the landscape are coming, with AI and now the demonetisation of hosting stores. Things are really going to get a lot more fluid again.
I’m sure nobody here remembers, but 6 months ago I said I was starting a home biz with my two kids (13, 14) to give them a taste of capitalism and entrepreneurialism.
We have a mini board meeting every Sunday night and the only rule is that our biz is a zero labour biz (we don’t want chores). We probably had 15 meetings so far and the boardroom dynamics are interesting considering everyone has an equal vote. 🤣
We started out with registering a limited company in UK (£12), opening a commercial bank account (£0), and depositing £1,000, bought web domain (£10), bunch of service fees (~£100).
My plan was:
Day 1… £1,000
Year 1 profit… £10,000
Year 2 profit… £50,000
Year 3 profit… £100,000
No dividend / salaries
Well today we shipped our first £10,000 of product and next week we ship another £10,000
But our margin is ~50% so things are looking really positive at the six month mark.
Kids are loving it.
Crucially it was important to start from essentially nothing. That’s the entire life lesson here… From nothing, at any time, just know you can do this.
Blah blah something something about giving a fish or a net, blah blah.
We bought some stuff and we sold some stuff.
We are just ruthlessly systemic and efficient.
One of my favourite lessons though is that speed of turnover is what matters, not margin.
Return on capital = margin ^ turnover cycles
So we are starting with stuff that is high value density, fast turnover and we are saturating out those opportunities before moving into more scalable things.
Think we underestimated the addressable market for our first stage though, so we are overachieving at the moment.
Good business just boils down to math.
People complicate it with moronic stuff and feelings.
But I’m an MEng^2 + MBA so you probably shouldn’t listen to me. Very not cool.
We had approx 15 meetings after Sunday dinner and that’s where everything was done, maybe 90mins each. We just sit around the table after cleared up and do some stuff.
Physical goods, we just used the internet to organise / manage everything.
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