Last Notes
The US is oil independent. And they are willing to take a lot of pain to stay on top, even if it means the whole world takes a lot of pain. Military primacy supercedes other concerns. I think taking the THAAD from S. Korea was because they have to make hard choices, and the active war is currently in Iran.
Nonetheless, since I wrote this, nobody has mined the strait. So my comment is, for the moment, moot. Iran controlling who can pass by other means is the best option for Iran.
Iran is starting to set up decoy hospitals.
Also, the operation in Venezuela happened first to make sure that their oil can't substitute for the gulf oil being blockaded.
I'm starting to think Brian Berletic is right. And I think Iran has no good reason to put mines in the strait, because it isn't a reasonable threat of deterrance against a superpower that has plenty of oil (22m barrels a day, second is Saudi Arabia at only 10). And Iran has no good reason to destroy oil infrastructure in the gulf, only to destroy US bases there. If mines show up in the strait, or gulf oil assets are hit, I think that is US forces doing it, perhaps Iraq. The one who benefits from the strait being closed is the US, and the ones who suffer is everybody else and especially China who still gets 20% of their energy from the gulf. Blockading China at the 2nd island chain seems to have not worked out (China too on top of that one) so this strategy of shutting down the gulf and blaming Iran is Plan B. And also, Israel doesn't control the US, it gets attacked by missiles on behalf of the US, same as Ukraine does. Now of course Netanyahu is a homocidal maniac, and there is a greater Israel plan, and this stuff dovetails together, I didn't say otherwise. But I think the US faceless policy people are running the show and Trump is running the distrations.
Many people hold to the notion that modern disease is caused by modern eating. When they hear about my quince tree they think "Hey, that's got to be healthy, something not cross-bred to death for supermarket purposes. How do you eat it?" I tell them "you cook it with lots and lots of sugar."
Rebrand. Rename it 'Zulip'
The Tor part has to be done outside of gossip, gossip doesn't have any tor-specific code. That includes tor-enabled DNS, if you wanted to use a .onion relay. If it is not working, I don't think it is gossip that is not working.
There is no evidence linking me to Jeffrey or the girl.
Thanks for the link. Now... off to get it censored.
Maybe someone living in US can answer that.
I suspect that heavy crude, exported from Venezuela to the US after the US installs their preferred regime, refined in Texas heavy crude refineries, will drop the price of gasoline in the US. Also it is another chip in the reputation of the US, which may have knock on effects diplomatically with many nations. But those are harder to judge. As for the drug trade, I don't think that will change at all, I suspect that is 100% a cover story and legal mechanism to make the joint operation legal.
"Trump is the only president who didn't start any new regime-change wars."
"Past performance is no guarantee of future results."
The first 2 icons for the note buttons showing as tofu... what font do I need?
And a little audio snippet that plays whenever nostrdb-powered software starts up
Client looks good @npub13hy…0nt7
I haven't used nostrdb myself but architecturally I think it is spot on. I did something similar with https://github.com/mikedilger/pocket which is used by https://github.com/mikedilger/chorus
Apparently you didn't run it.
I have not been paying much attention to nostr for 2 months as things have been busy, but the holiday break is upon us shortly, wherein I'll have a bit of time. Can anybody who still follows me give me a brief update on what has happened over the last few months, especially in the world of clients, relays, and the protocol?
"I often observe people making decisions if their odds of being right are greater than 50 percent. What they fail to see is how much better off they'd be if they raised their chances even more (you can almost always improve your odds of being right by doing things that will give you more information). The expected value gain from raising the probability of being right from 51 percent to 85 percent (i.e., by 34 percentage points) is seventeen times more than raising the odds of being right from 49 percent (which is probably wrong) to 51 percent (which is only a little more likely to be right). Think of the probability as a measure of how often you're likely to be wrong. Raising the probability of being right by 34 percentage points means that a third of your bets will switch from losses to wins. That's why it pays to stress-test your thinking, even when you're pretty sure you're right." - Ray Dalio, https://x.com/RayDalio/status/1981832067848741049
The case against is that such relay endpoints won't work with clients that don't upgrade to support such a thing, so deploying such things forks nostr internally anyway. Most software won't be able to use such relays as their SSL will appear borked. But it can certainly be done. Not sure how to specify such relays in a way that doesn't cause existing software to try and fail to connect.
I'm impressed she is standing up.
Cyclone Ranger --> Psyched Lone Ranger
I have to admit to feeling jealousy. I wish my government was shut down.
Yeah, most governments take at least 6 months. 😆
I wonder if I should get one and try modifying its software... and if it is using hardware key storage, if that HW supports other algos.
I like it so far.
I'm having some trouble working with a Camera though, across platforms, and remaining app-reactive to each frame grab. `nokhwa` seems like the most advanced cross-platform camera library, but it's camera is !Sync so I can't keep a camera alive across await points, or send it between threads, so I'm going to try nokhwa::threaded::CallbackCamera next.
Dioxus is apparently very well funded and has a bright future.
Yeah, this is kinda old. Like me. Old and slow
https://www.ncsc.govt.nz/alerts/widespread-supply-chain-compromise-impacting-npm-ecosystem/
Node Package Manager. Where most people get their javascript libraries.
FYI there is a massive cyberattack on NPM right now, package developers being attacked, nasty commits being added and published, tokens being stolen and used to corrupt more packages. The ecosystem is currently widely corrupted. We just got an advisory from the NZ government about it.
My mind has been wiped clean of the memory of everybody who did not make it. Who? Jacinda? Lemme ask around....
.... nobody by that name is up here.
House prices are often hard to figure out. Is the market high? It is low? What is normal?
I'm fond of the ratio of average house price to median household yearly income. This gives a number that you can compare across countries and over time.
For you Americans: https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-income-ratio/
The lowest I've seen in my lifetime is 3.6 in the USA in 1973.
The highest I've seen in my lifetime is 8.9 in NZ in 2022.
NZ has fallen off of that back down to about 7. Which is now equal to the highest the US has ever seen.
The 2005-2007 subprime meltdown, where up to 25% of subprime loans became bad debt, the peak was at 7.
The US is back up to about 7.
Do you have one? Is it any good?
Well then if you want to do that, look at Mosaic for ideas too. "I did it my way" 🎶.
If other active developers went and built something like a Nostr 2.0 that wasn't Mosaic, but they at least looked at Mosaic, took what they liked, and had good reasons for not taking the rest, I'd probably be happy to dump Mosaic and go with their thing. But I'm unaware of any other next-gen project in the works. And most of these hard problems are not happening in nostr. I talked to a number of devs about future ideas. The Rostra guy is totally jaded and uninterested. Nuh wants to build on a crypographic filesystem (with pkarr of course).
I'm spending a lot of time in the fiat mines, but I'm still progressing Mosaic stuff. The spec and code are open, and the spec leads, so nobody can think I tried to jump start others. Truth is however that I'm the only person working on it, nobody else who has shown any interest has shown interest in helping to build it. So far at least.
I'm a few months out from having something to demo.
I'd like to have an offline master key.
For Mosaic, this would still be required to sign my relay list (server list) and sign device keys and again anytime those things change.
Moving the data around on a USB stick is feasible but annoying. I quite like the seed signer and using QR codes and cameras to move data around.
So I'm writing an android app that I will run on a disused android phone that I disable as much as possible (no SIM, no WiFi password, airplane mode, flashing the modem with zeroes). Yes of course the far-side of the modem pinging the towers is not something I can disable.
Still it could be attacked from the cell tower. Not likely but completely possible.
Unfortunately I haven't found any good handheld computers with cameras, without networking, and running linux. My Librem 5 spontaneously hard crashes and reboots after less than an hour of usage, else I'd try that.
Maybe I should just pull the seed signer code, add what I want, and use my seed signer.
Anyhow, the code I'm writing is with Dioxus that targets a lot of platforms: linux, macos, windows, appimage, web, ios, and android.
What a piece of trash!
Read README.macos.txt. It ships with gossip.
I've put issues on https://github.com/mikedilger/nostr-next as a dumping ground for things I thought were too hard for nostr to solve.
Population growth is slowing way down. Some people are worried about this.
But I think it is a good thing. The Earth has some carrying capacity and if we go beyond it people will start starving. That is not fun. Yes, we can engineer a higher carrying capacity as we did during the green revolution. But there are still limits.
Population is still growing. It is still growing in the USA. It is still growing in NZ. It is very much still growing in sub-Saharan Africa. Current estimates put the peak at 10 billion.
The problem with population contraction that most of you and I will feel is that all the government (and non-government) Ponzi schemes will collapse. Economies will be rubbish, growth will be stalwart. But you can accustom yourself to such times.
The idea that we need to start having more babies is misguided. We could push out the inevitable, but we can't avoid it happening eventually.
Is this the new state of Calizona? Making me hungry.
I'll ask next time. If there is a next time. There shouldn't be a next time.
I think I'll put into my will that at my funeral I want this song to be played: Bogus Soul by Beck.
And if people don't laugh, I'm gonna roll over.
Never believe anything until it has been officially denied.
Fast, cheap and permissionless girlfriends. I'm in.
This is only for a situation where, from day 1 you say "pubkeys all end in N zeroes else software should reject them". So for Mosaic, a nostr-like protocol I'm writing that nobody is using, it could be done. But it can't be done in nostr. Nonetheless I'm now against the idea (read the other thread replies for why).
Yeah, difficulty adjustment I can do. I would just start at some difficulty, and announce ahead of time (maybe 6 months ahead) of the new difficulty. People would have to roll over their device keys before then if their PoW wasn't already high enough.
But I think @npub12ak…6fdh 's point is the biggest problem. People's hardware is just too variant. Smartphones can't compete with spammer dedicated hardware, so there is no PoW which is easy enough for a smartphone and still too hard for a spammer with dedicated hardware.
And my point about the key generation not being the gating factor also has convinced me that this line of thinking is a dead end.
YouTube wants me to Sign in to confirm I'm not a bot. But I *am* a bot. Why are they discriminating against us?
I just had the thought that the gating factor is the network connection to drop off the spam on the server. It doesn't matter if keypair generation is super fast without PoW, any slowdown by requiring PoW that doesn't exceed the gating factor of the network connection makes no difference, until it exceeds that. So "one million times slower" is of no practical effect.
Nice repo. Did you look at rana? Or other client PoW code? Or just start fresh?
While computing power spans a wide range, as you say, even a little bit of PoW makes creating a new account ONE MILLION times harder. That takes less than a second though. There is no ideal amount of PoW that keeps out spammers, but if you can slow them down one-million fold with a trick that costs very little, it still seems worth it.
If starting over, proof-of-work might work.
Nostr software has explored a number of spam prevention mechanisms. Some of them are quite good. But one that didn't gain widespread adoption was proof-of-work.
I'm thinking of a PoW on public keys. If public keys must end in 28 zeroes or be rejected as invalid keys, this would require about 100 seconds of delay for someone to create a new identity. If handling a spam message takes only 10 seconds (probably less), then spammers would have to work 10x as hard as spam recipients to keep the spam flowing. That might not be enough to deter spammers entirely, but it would be an unavoidable cost in the equasion that could slow spam down. And of course other spam prevention techniques could also be in play, it doesn't interfere with any of them.
What do you think? If this isn't useful, or makes something important too hard to do, let me know. This would be for mosaic, not nostr, since nobody uses mosaic it can get these kinds of changes.