Nostr notes by smeef

Amazing presentation on the relentless backstabbing of Ukraine by ...

2026-10-17T00:21:34Z

Amazing presentation on the relentless backstabbing of Ukraine by the US that happened in just the past week

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Qzc_S8a1eE

Didn't the block wars kinda wreck the progress? Thought I ...

2026-10-16T21:39:52Z

In reply to nevent1q…3gl5
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Didn't the block wars kinda wreck the progress? Thought I heard that.

RCS on a car?

2026-10-16T16:32:41Z

In reply to nevent1q…9uez
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RCS on a car?

Yeah my thoughts too. Wtf?

2026-10-16T01:47:04Z

In reply to nevent1q…y6vg
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Yeah my thoughts too. Wtf?

It might be that your client doesn't support the new kind of ...

2026-10-15T00:32:01Z

In reply to nevent1q…rk6y
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It might be that your client doesn't support the new kind of replies for notes, kind 1111

Thanks. And that's weird, my wallet should be working.

2026-10-13T18:57:32Z

In reply to nevent1q…308q
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Thanks. And that's weird, my wallet should be working.

Qh3 Qxh3 Bf3# Took me a minute

2026-10-13T18:54:23Z

In reply to nevent1q…cvld
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Qh3 Qxh3
Bf3#
Took me a minute

Yet many people need help today, not whenever the overton ...

2026-10-13T18:42:15Z

In reply to nevent1q…ug2e
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Yet many people need help *today*, not whenever the overton window shifts enough to allow for real change.

I can't access whatever you're linking to. ditto says it ...

2026-10-13T18:08:02Z

In reply to naddr1qq…9k87
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I can't access whatever you're linking to. ditto says it can't render the event at that naddr.

That's pretty sick

2026-10-11T16:38:55Z

In reply to nevent1q…qdpd
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That's pretty sick

But not quite there yet?

2026-10-10T01:14:41Z

In reply to nevent1q…zgcm
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But not quite there yet?

Been looking at the soapbox server in Armada occasionally

2026-10-09T19:02:23Z

In reply to nevent1q…a40x
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Been looking at the soapbox server in Armada occasionally

That is the most propaganda thing ever

2026-10-09T04:01:47Z

In reply to nevent1q…vhq3
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That is the most propaganda thing ever

Probably C or E

2026-10-08T19:31:14Z

In reply to nevent1q…hr6h
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Probably C or E

Any news on this?

2026-10-08T19:29:19Z

In reply to nevent1q…92xz
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Any news on this?

:|

2026-10-08T19:07:27Z

In reply to nevent1q…32h8
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:|

How do you actually play it?

2026-10-08T19:07:08Z

In reply to nevent1q…5f4w
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How do you actually play it?

Sounds cool. The NIP-07 integration doesn't work tho btw

2026-10-08T19:05:20Z

In reply to nevent1q…mp3f
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Sounds cool. The NIP-07 integration doesn't work tho btw

He's too old arguably (well, not according to precedent I ...

2026-10-08T18:59:35Z

In reply to nevent1q…axys
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He's too old arguably (well, not according to precedent I guess), and I doubt the powers that be would let him. It would take a miracle lol.

Wuzzat?

2026-10-08T18:57:39Z

In reply to nevent1q…5wml
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Wuzzat?

Any links?

2026-10-08T18:55:15Z

In reply to nevent1q…4g6x
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Any links?

Jesus lol

2026-10-08T18:51:42Z

In reply to nevent1q…spry
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Jesus lol

It's perfect for little features like a guestbook for a ...

2026-10-08T18:49:11Z

In reply to nevent1q…tn2j
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It's perfect for little features like a guestbook for a personal site

Jesus christ lol it's actually insane over there.

2026-10-08T18:45:28Z

In reply to nevent1q…3scr
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Jesus christ lol it's actually insane over there.

They're tiny too, the after effects clone is 50MB O_O

2026-10-08T18:25:17Z

In reply to nevent1q…dvzu
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They're tiny too, the after effects clone is 50MB O_O

Yep, insane

2026-10-07T19:21:52Z

In reply to nevent1q…3js3
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Yep, insane

Do you mind adding me? I'd like to give it a shot too. ...

2026-10-07T18:00:56Z

In reply to nevent1q…ksad
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Do you mind adding me? I'd like to give it a shot too. .npub12m3xzw47c9wrlxc8e642xq0256s274gq234pw9dc805x5gpy2aqs3shusv

Yeah I never really liked the ostrich

2026-10-07T17:57:05Z

In reply to nevent1q…t9gs
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Yeah I never really liked the ostrich

Man those things have such an f'ed up shape. Crazy to look at

2026-10-07T17:56:39Z

In reply to nevent1q…ys5f
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Man those things have such an f'ed up shape. Crazy to look at

Yup that's the one

2026-10-07T17:51:27Z

In reply to nevent1q…dmw9
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Yup that's the one

Yeah I have never and will never use nostr

2026-10-07T04:38:14Z

In reply to nevent1q…y44m
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Yeah I have never and will never use nostr

This is why Monero folks are so loud

2026-10-07T04:36:57Z

In reply to nevent1q…nl2u
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This is why Monero folks are so loud

This is the second pwn I've heard about from cloning a repo ...

2026-10-06T20:36:17Z

In reply to nevent1q…ucar
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This is the second pwn I've heard about from cloning a repo and running it :(

There's also this which is also a free set of adobe ...

2026-10-06T20:34:52Z

In reply to nevent1q…pc4w
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There's also this which is also a free set of adobe alternatives. Their Photo Studio is apparently a straight up duplicate of photoshop, for free.

https://tenzen.studio/

So you can pay a monero payment QR with lightning..?

2026-10-06T20:24:43Z

In reply to nevent1q…uus5
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So you can pay a monero payment QR with lightning..?

No idea, but it's still down. o7. Maybe I'll clone the ...

2026-10-06T20:00:05Z

In reply to nevent1q…g0nh
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No idea, but it's still down. o7. Maybe I'll clone the repo and throw it up as an nsite sometime. It's so cool that we can just do that now.

There's no more software moat. Photon Studio is basically a ...

2026-10-06T19:58:43Z

In reply to nevent1q…mq7m
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There's no more software moat. Photon Studio is basically a free copy of photoshop, and they have versions of Illustrator and Lighroom too. They're working on an After Effects one as well. You can decompile whatever you want... Crazy.

WORD5 #731 3/6 ⬛🟪⬛⬛⬛ ⬛🟧🟪⬛🟧 ...

2026-10-05T18:45:20Z

WORD5 #731 3/6

⬛🟪⬛⬛⬛
⬛🟧🟪⬛🟧
🟪🟪🟪🟪🟪

https://otherstuff.ai/word5/

Oh, that's so cool

2026-10-04T17:26:15Z

In reply to nevent1q…25cd
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Oh, that's so cool

It's sooo nice outside. Also psa: pls show kind 1111 replies, ...

2026-10-04T05:48:09Z

In reply to nevent1q…3jlj
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It's sooo nice outside.
Also psa: pls show kind 1111 replies, can't see them on primal

Daaaaaaamn

2026-10-04T05:24:30Z

In reply to nevent1q…r598
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Daaaaaaamn

Procrastinating on filling out a job onboarding form

2026-10-04T05:20:33Z

In reply to nevent1q…vqxh
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Procrastinating on filling out a job onboarding form

Not to be dismissive, but does it matter when relays can always ...

2026-10-04T05:14:22Z

In reply to nevent1q…hm58
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Not to be dismissive, but does it matter when relays can always choose to do it and we can't force them not to?

If I change the default relays to my profile relays, does ...

2026-10-04T05:01:33Z

In reply to nevent1q…z4lw
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If I change the default relays to my profile relays, does everything still work? Can I still interact with people using the default white noise relays?

I think what he's saying is very obvious to central bankers ...

2026-10-02T21:26:58Z

In reply to nevent1q…c9zc
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I think what he's saying is very obvious to central bankers and most students of monetary economics. It's just not shocking to them cus in their minds it's either the best system we have or it's an unchangeable aspect of modern societies.

Bro I can't believe @npub16x7…a44x is down. nostria.app ...

2026-10-01T16:21:39Z

Bro I can't believe nostria (npub16x7…a44x) is down. nostria.app leads to an error page. That was one of my favorite clients. Anyone clone it as an nsite yet?

Good shit. I hope this helps fix some of the insane data usage ...

2026-10-01T16:13:10Z

Good shit. I hope this helps fix some of the insane data usage from Nostr apps.

quoting
nevent1q…kemh

Last night someone asked me why they weren't seeing replies everywhere anymore. Their feeds were "bonkers." The answer is a single number: 1111.

On Nostr, a reply to a blog post is a NIP-22 comment, kind 1111. So is a reply to a video, a picture, a livestream, or a git patch. A reply to a short text note, the thing most of us post every day, has always been another kind 1 note under NIP-10. Several clients have started replying to notes with kind 1111, and the clients that haven't caught up don't show those replies at all.

There's an open proposal to make this official: PR #2447, "NIP-10: kind 1 replies SHOULD be kind 1111." I support it, and I said so on the PR. The pushback is real, though, and some of it comes from people I respect a lot. So I went through the GitHub history, the client source code, and a day of relay data. Here's the case for it, the case against it, and why I still think it's worth breaking things for.

Where things stand today

The specs. In May 2023, Alex Gleason opened issue #523 asking for a way to fetch top-level notes without replies. Nostr filters can't express "events without an e tag," so a client can't ask for that. The issue is still open. In August 2026, PR #2358 removed the line in NIP-22 that said "Comments MUST NOT be used to reply to kind 1 notes." PR #2447 goes further: it says replies to kind 1 SHOULD be kind 1111, and it moves kind 1 replies into a "deprecated" section of NIP-10. It is a bigger change than one word.

The clients. I checked the source code of each client, not just what people say about them:

Always reply with 1111: Ditto, Coracle, Snort, and the Mostr bridge (whenever it knows the parent note).

Reply with 1111 depending on the root post: Amethyst does it when you reply directly to a root note posted from Amethyst. Jumble ImWald does it when the parent note came from a client on its list of 1111-capable apps. Otherwise both use kind 1.

Show 1111 replies, but reply with kind 1: Jumble, YakiHonne web, and Primal's iOS app. Iris and Nostur show some of them.

Don't show 1111 replies on notes at all: Damus, Primal web and Android, Nostrudel.

The relays. I pulled kind 1111 replies to kind 1 notes from relay.primal.net. The relay's 500-event cap hit in about 18 hours. Most came from Amethyst (211) and Ditto (181). In the same relay's kind 1 stream, about 17% of notes are replies, which works out to roughly 10,000 kind 1 replies over the same 18 hours. So 1111 is still somewhere around one reply in twenty. It's one relay and a rough sample, but it's enough to show where things stand: early, growing, and already big enough that people notice missing replies.

The case for 1111

You can finally filter. Under NIP-22, kind 1 holds top-level notes and kind 1111 holds replies. "Notes only" becomes kinds: [1]. "Notes and replies" becomes kinds: [1, 1111], still one subscription. "Replies only" becomes possible. Gleason put it plainly in #2250: "I want to filter my feed so it shows replies only. Is that so much to ask?" Today the answer is yes, it is too much to ask, and #523 has been open for three years because of it.

Threads are easier to load. Every 1111 carries its root in the uppercase E, K and P tags. The whole conversation under a note, at any depth, is one query: {"kinds": [1111], "#E": ["<root id>"]}. With kind 1, markers are optional, positional e tags from the early days still exist, and deep replies often point only at their parent. Every client has its own pile of guesses for rebuilding a thread.

One threading model for everything. NIP-10 already says "Kind 1 replies MUST NOT be used to reply to other kinds, use NIP-22 instead." Kind 1 is the last kind on Nostr that replies with itself. If everything uses 1111, a client writes one thread component and it works for notes, articles, videos and whatever kind gets invented next year.

Conversations stop being split by app. When a friend comments on a video or an article, that comment is a kind 1111 text event. A text-first client can show it with a link to the thing being discussed. It doesn't need to render video or build a blogging UI. One reply kind means every app that shows text can show the whole conversation layer of Nostr. A comment from someone you follow is one of the best ways to discover people and content, and today most clients drop most of them.

The case against 1111

This is where I want to be fair, because the people raising these points know what they're talking about.

It breaks clients that aren't being actively developed. When Vitor said "Let's move kind:1 replies to become root only. When can we start?" in May 2025, staab replied: "Guys, are we really demonstrating that the level of discipline we have for backwards compatibility is 0? I'd like to move too, but it's a pretty big screw you to anyone who isn't actively developing their client." (source). He's right. Some clients haven't been updated in months. Their users will miss replies, and they won't know why.

Developers who want to move are waiting on the big clients. Dr. The Daniel, who builds Sidecar, said it plainly last night: "What's stopping me from defaulting to kind1111 for all replies right now is knowing how long it will take for Damus and Primal (among others) to come around. I don't want my users' replies to not be seen by more than half of the clients." (note). Damus has no kind 1111 support at all, and its issues for NIP-22 threads were closed as not planned in February.

Clients have to support kind 1 replies anyway. Semisol asked: "Why break backwards compatibility? If clients have to show kind 1 replies anyway, why use 1111?" (note). Years of kind 1 replies already exist on relays and will never change. Any client that shows old threads has to read NIP-10 forever. During the transition, every client carries both code paths.

Not everyone wants a single answer. On PR #2447, arthurfranca argued for keeping both: kind 1 when you want a reply to also show up in your followers' feeds, kind 1111 when you don't. His summary: "supporting both kind:1 and kind:1111 replies forever is the way."

The relay-side fix was rejected. The other way to solve #523 is to give relays "absence" filters. fiatjaf rejected that in 2025, and I think he was right: "Indexing for absence of arbitrary tags is probably impossible to do so any such change would create unnecessary brutal inefficiency for relays."

Why I think it's worth breaking

That last quote matters, because of what fiatjaf said next in the same comment: "The best thing we can do (and that we're slowly doing, I think) is to move replies to kind:1111 and leave kind:1 for just root posts" (source). Back in 2023 he wrote: "in retrospect I also think it would have been better to use a different kind for replies, but I wouldn't want to change that at this point" (source). The creator of the protocol thinks kind 1 replies were a mistake. The debate has always been about when and how to fix it.

The break is already happening. Ditto, Coracle, Snort and Mostr publish 1111 replies to notes today, and Amethyst does it for its own threads. Merging #2447 or not, those replies exist and some clients can't see them. Leaving the spec as it is doesn't avoid the split. It just means the specs describe a network that no longer exists.

Fixing it is mostly a rendering job. For a client that doesn't show 1111 yet, the most important step is to fetch #E for kind 1111 alongside kind 1 replies and show them in the thread. Primal's iOS app already does this. The work is real for some codebases, but it's additive. Nothing about reading kind 1 stops working.

Nostr has done this before. NIP-04 DMs are marked "unrecommended: deprecated in favor of NIP-17." That broke DMs between clients for a while, and it was the right call because NIP-04 leaked metadata. Positional e tags were deprecated in favor of marked tags. NIP-65 outbox relays had the same "nobody will move first" problem for years. Each time, someone moved first, the rest caught up, and the protocol got better. Waiting until every client is ready means waiting forever, because some of them will never update.

The end state is better for everyone. Semisol's question has a real answer. The payoff isn't during the transition, where everyone carries both paths. It's after: when new replies are 1111, kind 1 means "a note," filters can say what clients mean, and every app shares one conversation layer. Old kind 1 threads stay readable forever, just like old NIP-04 DMs.

How to break it well

Breaking user space is bad. Ignoring it is bad too. What I'd like to see is a deliberate transition, not a flag day:

Render first, everywhere. Every client should show kind 1111 replies under kind 1 notes, fetched by the uppercase #E tag so deep replies aren't missed. This step breaks nothing and fixes the "missing replies" problem for users right away. It's the most useful thing Damus, Primal web and Android, and Nostrudel could do this month.

Publish 1111 carefully during the transition. Amethyst and Jumble ImWald show a good way to do it: reply with 1111 when the thread started in a client that can show it, and fall back to kind 1 otherwise. My own preference is to default to 1111 for direct replies to a note, and to keep using kind 1 when replying inside an existing kind 1 thread.

Keep reading kind 1 replies forever. Deprecated means "don't write it," not "don't read it."

Merge #2447 with that guidance in it. The PR already says legacy clients "may still produce" kind 1 replies and modern clients "may wish to query and display them." Spelling out render-first and a fallback rule would answer most of the objections above.

If you build a Nostr client, please weigh in on #2447, especially if you disagree. If you maintain Damus or Primal: start with rendering. It costs you very little, and your users stop missing replies from the rest of the network.

Nostr's promise is that the conversation doesn't belong to any one app. Right now the conversation is split by kind. Let's fix it on purpose, with a plan, together. Let's unite the clans. 🫂🤙🏻💜

I can't deny how fascinating it is to live in this period of ...

2026-09-30T19:56:51Z

I can't deny how fascinating it is to live in this period of time.

quoting
nevent1q…x2fn
This is my third reflection on AI and freedom. My goal is to post once every three months. So far, the quarterly progress is blowing my mind. I've never seen a field evolve so blazingly fast. And for now, the winds are very much blowing in the direction of individual freedom.

My first post was 6 months ago, in early March, riding the zeitgeist of the OpenClaw revolution.

In the span of a few weeks between December 2025 and March 2026, we went from vibe coding websites on corporate platforms to hosting our own full-on personal agents on our own hardware. Systems and tools that hadn't even existed in early January had by late February become daily drivers for millions of people. Non-technical individuals could now instantly outsource technical tasks to machines, and become massively more productive. I was hooked.

At HRF we ran our first Agent Camp in mid-February, equipping human rights activists with their own personal agents. Looking back, to what seems like forever ago, the setup was crude: early OpenClaw software running on a Macbook, connected to Opus 4.6. Everything struggled to work. But when it worked, it was pure magic. I still remember, during that first session, one of the Campers recording himself playing guitar and signing, alongside one of the instructors playing the piano, and then the Camper uploaded the recording via their phone to their agent, and then directed it to create, out of that, a killer gospel rock anthem. It was glorious. And a great example of how machines can help humans boost and advance creativity, not kill it.

During that heady time we began working closely with the AI experience company Finite, whose goal is to make humans more human, and liberate them from tasks that are easy for machines. Over the next few months we collaborated on a better way to provide personal agents to activists, switching to a cloud-based model that could be accessed anywhere, moving from OpenClaw to the more stable and self-learning Hermes, and eventually hooking up to confidential compute inference, so that third party servers couldn't read our prompts.

In January we worked with Rod Roudi and the AI Freedom Lab to host the first AI Hack for Freedom. What was novel about that first hack in Austin was that the human rights activist team captains worked with developers who, thanks to vibe coding, could make really useful software in just a matter of hours, instead of weeks or months. In May, for the second AI Hack for Freedom, things had advanced so much that activists actually could code now and were leading the effort, instead of just telling developers what to do. Talk about a step change.

A few weeks later, at the Oslo Freedom Forum at the end of May, we set up an Apple Store-style AI experience lounge where hundreds of dissidents were able to use a personal agent for the first time to start hacking away at fun creative projects. And that's, in my view, a critical first step towards understanding the intelligence revolution that is happening all around us: using a personal agent and developing the muscles to understand what you can do with an agent, how it can help you, and how it will start shaping the new AI-powered world. Integrating an agent into your workflow and life takes time, but you have to start somewhere.

My second post followed soon after all this in early June, just as local AI was really becoming a thing. Before the summer, local AI could only get you so far: a cool chatbot, a neat but basic research assistant. With apps like Atomic Chat, people could indeed harness the intelligence, for example, that already exists on your iPhone, to obtain an impressive ChatGPT-like experience, fully local and offline. But with the rise of new smaller models from Qwen and Deepseek, people could actually start to run frontier-quality intelligence on machines at home, on hardware that cost less than $10,000. Full tool calling, running agents, on laptops!

Today, 3 months later, it's staggering to reflect on and absorb the speed of what is happening. Back in June, the benchmarker extraordinaire
@0xSero
showed me a version of DeepSeek that he was running on his MacBook Pro. It was capable of some pretty amazing, fast, complex stuff: he sat down and showed me how it could instantly scan massive legal documents for analysis, fully on-device. But again, comparing those models to what you can run now on a similar machine, it's just a whole different ballgame.

For comparison: 6 months ago, confidential compute was possible, but the models that powered it were not that impressive. The gap between Opus 4.6 and "open weights" back in February was massive and very noticeable. 3 months ago, with the rise of Kimi 2.6, and then GLM 5.2, it was a big leap forward. It was finally a moment when I felt like I wasn't being handicapped by using open weights versus for example Opus 4.7 or ChatGPT 5.5, which were leading the frontier world at the time. But in the past 6-8 weeks, with Kimi K3, GLM 5.3 Flash, and just in the past day or two, DeepSeek 4.1 Flash, we've entered a world where open weights are legitimately going toe-to-toe with the best proprietary models, and sometimes even outperforming them.

My mission is to give activists and dissidents AI superpowers. When Justin Moon first showed me what was possible back in January just on the Claude Code desktop app, a couple days after it came out, I knew that I had to give this awesome power to all my friends. And OpenClaw evolved that power significantly, by helping people choose what kind of intelligence they wanted to run, where they want to run it, and how they wanted to talk to it. This, I realized, had to be in the activist toolkit.

Today I can say we are truly cooking with gas. My Finite agent today runs on GLM 5.3 Flash, in a TEE, giving me privacy and frontier-intelligence. The Hermes-based harness knows me, knows what I am working on, and auto-learns as I go. I also run my own OpenClaw, still on my own machine, connected to Astra, for fun and comparison's sake. I talk to both agents from my phone on the go and often give them the same tasks to compare. I would say that for most things that I am working on, GLM 5.3 is nearly or just as good as Astra. Which is a crazy thing to consider. Certainly, for advanced mathematics, science research, or complex engineering, one would prefer Astra. But for 95% of the daily tasks the average person needs help with, open weight models are perfect, and often snappier.

And maybe this is where we are headed: to a "minimum viable intelligence" being available openly and cheaply to the world at large, getting constantly upgraded to within a few percentage points of the very best proprietary models, and with those most elite, very expensive, very gatekept highly-specialized models being primarily used by governments and companies for cutting edge research. But with this advantage only being ephemeral, being constantly erased and eroded in a matter of days or weeks by open weight models.

The trend is clear: not only are open weight models dominating corporate ones in terms of usage on platforms like Openrouter -- mainly because they offer near-equal quality at a fraction of the cost -- but they also are increasingly being able to be run on reasonable hardware at home. In my next update, in December, I am excited to reveal what I'll be able to do at home... I can only imagine what kind of local models will be available, and I will have a 128GB Macbook Pro to run them on. I get my hands on the beast in October and will report back.

If you are still reading, thank you, and good for you, as I have completely buried the lede.

The single biggest difference between today and 3 months ago, and certainly between today and February or March, is the rise of the organizational brain. At HRF we have built one in the past few weeks for our Freedom Tech team, and I use my GLM 5.3-powered agent to interact with it. I think the best way to explain the brain is to detail how we set it up, and how we use it.

The first thing we did is dump all Freedom Tech historical content into a folder. All reports, public updates, relevant social media posts, anything public or external the Freedom Tech team produced over the past 7-8 years at HRF. This took our team a few days. Then, each member of the team uploaded an interview where they talked about what they do on the team, what they have been working on, and what they are doing moving forward. Finite then helped us arrange this into an encrypted database that uses nostr as infrastructure for user permissions and access. Here's where it gets really interesting: starting in early August, every week we started ingesting the transcript of the weekly all-hands meeting of the team into the brain. (I also get an email summary of this meeting, drawn up by our agent-brain combo, instead of by Google). Then every Friday, every team member reports to the brain a short brief by voice or email on challenges, opportunities, changes, etc. A slack achievements channel and social media posts and mailchimp emails and newsletters are all ingested. The results are extraordinary.

I can now ask the Freedom Tech brain for updates on what is happening with the team, and where points of stress might be. I can ask for beautifully-designed reports about certain aspects of our work. The brain has transformed things like donor updates, annual reports, and impact briefings from exhausting team efforts that once took weeks or months to something my agent can extract in minutes. Instead of having to call a meeting to figure something out, or to set up a phone call to find out a key piece of information, I can just ask the intelligence and get it instantly. And GLM 5.3 is just so damn smart. It notices trends, gaps, and issues. It can spot problems and opportunities. And we are just getting started.

In March, I had no idea what an organizational brain was. In June, I barely grasped its importance. Now, in September, I can't imagine going back to a world without one. That shows how fast we're moving. I fully expect most innovative organizations to have some kind of organizational brain by the end of this year, and most organizations period, by the end of next year, if not sooner. Jack Dorsey and Roelof Botha's paper "From Hierarchy to Intelligence" gave the earliest, clearest picture of what a "brain" is and what it can do back in March, but to really grok it, like with anything in AI, you have to set one up and experience it yourself.

I also wanted to share a few words on big picture AI topics:

Open weights are the only thing separating us from a techno-totalitarian future. If intelligence is in the hands of a small few, tyranny is the only possible outcome. Full stop. This is why we must push back against restrictions on open weights, and on the breathless frantic moral panic of "AI Safety". Just consider: we were told earlier this summer that Fable and Mythos had catastrophic abilities, and that it was too powerful for mere mortals. But since then, that original version of Fable is in the rearview mirror, being already superseded by Astra and even possibly DeepSeek 4.1.

Did the world change because of Fable and K3-level intelligence? Yes! Cyber-systems are being pushed to their limits. We saw this most clearly in the past 6-8 weeks as Bitcoin systems (canaries in the coal mine) came under new AI-powered pressure: first the ColdCard hack, then the BTCPay Server vulnerability, then issues with Lightning infrastructure, then the Liquid theft. But did the world end? No. In fact, as a result of AI-powered "red team" white hat hackers, Bitcoin systems are now being constantly monitored for vulnerabilities and are now, possibly, stronger than ever. It's true that hackers now have powerful tools to probe systems for flaws. But it's also true that defenders can now aim those same powerful tools, constantly, at infrastructure, to spot weaknesses and shore them up. And often, open-source models are the only ones that can be used for cyber-defense, as the proprietary models often refuse these kind of tasks.

Of course, the mainstream media presents a very different picture. We are being told in the past 48 hours that cutting-edge AI models have a 10% chance of killing everyone on earth. But the reality is that the models the MSM is dreading will be essentially totally irrelevant in 6-8 months and will be able to run on anyone's laptop in a year or two.

The real outcome we should fear, in my view, is that the most elite frontier intelligence ends up being restricted to a handful of governments or companies, and power centralizes even more grotesquely than it ever has centralized in the history of humanity. The only thing that can stop this is open weights: super-intelligence for everyone. Here, personal responsibility will matter. There is a tradeoff to consider. Do you want to rely on the corporate stack of using Meta's agent, or Grok's agent, or ChatGPT's suite of products? And be a slave to those companies? And watch what you say lest you get banned? Or do you want to control your own intelligence and run it yourself and be free? In some ways the tradeoffs are similar to Bitcoin. Do you want to do the hard work of learning how to self custody and be your own bank? Or take the easy way and have someone else hold your money? Here, in the AI world, you'll be able to run your own intelligence, or you can trust someone else to control the limits of your thinking and creativity.

One key thing to remember: you can't obtain privacy-protecting frontier cloud-based inference from the big labs, at least not at the moment. The ONLY way to get encrypted inference at the frontier level is from open weight models. So anyone who is against open weights (cough Anthropic cough) is necessarily against privacy.

Now, what of China? I think the CCP is likely making a mistake by pushing open weights so heavily. It's a gift to humanity, but it's something that will eventually rock Xi Jinping's extremely centralized control. I still think the CCP is likely to shift course and stop sharing open weights, potentially very soon. So, download all the good models while you can! Clearly, Xi's short term objective of commoditizing US super lab value IS working. Anthropic and OpenAI are not nearly as important as they once were. So much of their value can be downloaded for free off the internet. But this gamble comes with great political risk for the CCP as more and more individuals become more and more powerful.

We see this in our own work, as we now have helped dozens of the world's top dissidents learn how to use personal agents. They are much more powerful when equipped with AI tools. They'd probably never have a shot at challenging AI-powered dictators without AI, but with AI? They stand a chance. For those curious: YES the irony of human rights activists depending on the CCP for freedom tech never ceases to amaze me.

Even if China cracks down on open weights, it seems we are heading in the right direction in the US, and globally, on the issue. NVIDIA is leading the way with a variety of other AI infrastructure and hardware companies who know that a diverse world with a lot of inference players is best for their business, not a world where two or three superlabs control everything and can dictate pricing.

So what next? I am excited for the coming few months as local AI gets smaller and more potent, and as TEE-powered cloud inference gets more powerful. We are, in a huge shift from sentiment and reality one year ago, simply **barreling** toward a future where everyone can run their own super intelligence, if they wish.

I'm also excited for a future where we are liberated from "being on our computer" all day. The computer should do most of that work! The amount of time you spend glued to a screen should, for most people, shrink dramatically in the next year. This is especially true for leaders, and activists. AI certainly isn't the only factor here, to help free up people's time to focus on what they should be focusing on, but it's a big one.

This moment, today, and in the next few months, is a CRITICAL opportunity for human rights activists to gain new powers, save time, dial in more on what they are good at, harness creativity, automate boring and time-consuming tasks, and scale their work. That is what I am focused on.

I hope you all can join me.

See you in December for update #4!

What's the appeal of Omarchy? What's the deal with the ...

2026-09-29T17:59:11Z

What's the appeal of Omarchy? What's the deal with the culture behind it? Curious to hear individual's perspectives.
#asknostr

This is AI, but getting quotes from primary sources.

2026-09-27T01:05:18Z

In reply to nevent1q…ufek
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This is AI, but getting quotes from primary sources.

In its Mississippi Declaration of Secession (adopted January ...

2026-09-27T01:04:59Z

In reply to nevent1q…4k4k
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In its Mississippi Declaration of Secession (adopted January 1861), the state placed slavery at the absolute center of its decision:
"Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world... a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization."

In the Declaration of a Causes Which Impel the State of Texas to Secede, the state explicitly argued that the federal government was violating its foundational racial hierarchies:
"She was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery—the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits—a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness, which the people intended should exist in all future time."

In its Georgia Secession Declaration (adopted January 1861), the state listed its grievances against the North immediately:
"For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery."

The very first state to leave issued the South Carolina Declaration of Secession. It focused heavily on Northern states failing to enforce federal laws protecting slave owners, specifically referencing the Fugitive Slave Act:
"They have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted the open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States."

Key word "property". I wonder what that refers to.

If you look beyond the secession documents to the leaders who designed the Confederate government, the messaging is identical. On March 21, 1861, the Vice President of the Confederacy, Alexander H. Stephens, gave a famous public address known as the Cornerstone Speech. In it, he stated clearly that the new nation was explicitly built upon the preservation of white supremacy and slavery:
"Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition

The "shielded" bitcoin thing requires you to explicitly ...

2026-09-25T15:25:49Z

In reply to nevent1q…ldfl
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The "shielded" bitcoin thing requires you to explicitly place a given amount of bitcoin into the private system, then conduct a transaction, then pull it back out of the private system. Monero is private by default, always.

I don't buy it. There has to be a catch.

2026-09-25T15:24:16Z

In reply to nevent1q…mdnv
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I don't buy it. There has to be a catch.

I scored 16 in Flappy Bird! Play here: ...

2026-09-22T16:18:50Z

I scored 16 in Flappy Bird!

Play here: https://otherstuff.ai/games/flappy/

#FlappyBird #nostr #gaming

Relays can just copy every event in the locked down relay and ...

2026-09-20T19:30:05Z

In reply to nevent1q…t42t
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Relays can just copy every event in the locked down relay and host replies to it itself. This idea doesn't change the decentralized aspect of nostr.

Guys what if this is our future once the midterms are over with, ...

2026-09-20T19:28:03Z

Guys what if this is our future once the midterms are over with, my fellow americans? The oil shock is finally hitting so there's gonna be plenty of incentive to build stuff like this now. A little hopecore in these trying times.

quoting
nevent1q…qhw3
Spanish highways are now generating power from the wind of passing cars.
A pilot project near Madrid installed bladeless vortex turbines along a busy highway. The cylindrical devices oscillate in the turbulent air created by passing vehicles, generating electricity through electromagnetic induction. They produce power for highway lighting, signage, and emergency phones.
The turbines are silent, bird-safe, and require no large foundations. They capture energy from wind gusts that traditional turbines cannot use. Each unit generates one hundred watts, and an array of fifty units powers a five-kilometer stretch of highway.
Spain's highway network spans over seventeen thousand kilometers, offering vast potential for distributed generation. The project is a collaboration between the Spanish government and a renewable energy startup. It demonstrates how infrastructure can serve dual purposes.
Researchers at the Polytechnic University of Madrid are optimizing the turbine spacing to maximize energy capture. The technology could be deployed along railways, airport runways, and industrial zones. This is a creative solution for urban energy generation.
Source : Polytechnic University of Madrid Urban Wind Energy Report, 2025 (Credit: The Science Current / Facebook)

Get a life

2026-09-11T11:56:25Z

In reply to nevent1q…kr72
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Get a life

@_@ I hope there's still genuinely good movements in the ...

2026-09-05T16:46:07Z

In reply to nevent1q…g36r
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@_@
I hope there's still genuinely good movements in the world. I don't believe every change in the world has to be a bad thing.

As it always is

2026-09-03T19:27:44Z

In reply to nevent1q…a7sw
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As it always is

How does that help

2026-09-03T12:21:19Z

In reply to nevent1q…yfq3
_________________________

How does that help

Wtf

2026-09-02T18:58:17Z

In reply to nevent1q…x9qd
_________________________

Wtf

Nostr event nevent1qqstzp80s0esyle42yw6adt40hlndqss00x3fmfxvuyr8ezqc4qp9xqzyptwycf6hmq4c0umql824gcpa2n2pt64qp2x59c4hqa7s63qy3t5z9dryf6

2026-09-02T14:31:06Z

Improv is so fun

Speaking of spam... Check out these comments

2026-09-02T13:36:56Z

In reply to nevent1q…2cc8
_________________________

Speaking of spam... Check out these comments

True

2026-08-29T20:53:43Z

In reply to nevent1q…gd3j
_________________________

True

Just added one. GIMME MAGIC INTERNET MONEY RAAH

2026-08-28T21:42:06Z

In reply to nevent1q…ryr4
_________________________

Just added one. GIMME MAGIC INTERNET MONEY RAAH

I just use Coin Wallet for everything

2026-08-28T21:41:04Z

In reply to nevent1q…zmja
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I just use Coin Wallet for everything

None, AI writing just makes me want to throw up

2026-08-28T20:53:40Z

In reply to nevent1q…vpnj
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None, AI writing just makes me want to throw up

A I s l o p

2026-08-28T18:37:30Z

In reply to nevent1q…k027
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A I s l o p

Every time I'm gleefully reading a post and I come to the ...

2026-08-28T18:22:09Z

Every time I'm gleefully reading a post and I come to the realization that it sounds like AI, I start sweating, my eyes glaze over, my heart starts pounding, my joints lock up, and I throw myself off the nearest rooftop. Anyone else relate? #asknostr

I love that. Worth a follow.

2026-08-28T18:07:23Z

In reply to nevent1q…6kzf
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I love that. Worth a follow.

Bruh they should get on nostr, we need more variety on here

2026-08-28T18:01:30Z

In reply to nevent1q…fl7u
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Bruh they should get on nostr, we need more variety on here

:POGGERS: thanks!

2026-08-28T17:56:49Z

In reply to nevent1q…fl7u
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:POGGERS: thanks!

Still won't use it, but I'm glad it exists. It's ...

2026-08-28T13:06:10Z

In reply to nevent1q…u5kv
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Still won't use it, but I'm glad it exists. It's cathartic after the X branding catastrophe

Opting out of what?

2026-08-27T00:01:44Z

In reply to nevent1q…v5qz
_________________________

Opting out of what?

Fyi you're spamming your kind 1 feed

2026-08-19T22:04:13Z

In reply to nevent1q…jplw
_________________________

Fyi you're spamming your kind 1 feed

Help this dev out. Brand new DM app. #nevent1q…jy85

2026-06-27T01:42:11Z

Help this dev out. Brand new DM app.

quoting
nevent1q…jy85
Coop by reya (nprofile…prwr) landed to Zapstore (nprofile…gsu4)
Is an instant messaging built on Nostr (NIP-17)