Alexandria Catalogue - Highlights

But do we know what we’re giving up? The gradual phasing out of wood-burning stoves means people can no longer heat their own homes. The use of industrial materials in construction means people can no longer build or repair their own houses. If I must depend on industrial inputs to keep the machine that is my home running, am I really free, or have I been “domesticated” in a new sense?

But do we know what we’re giving up when we apply this style of programming? The proliferation of average is the sacrifice of the weird. Typescript displaces Clojure. Idiosyncratic coding styles are swallowed under a wave of monotone. Deep understanding of a problem is replaced by a rat’s nest of exponential backoff, try/catch, and convergent interfaces. Minds skim across the surface of understanding like rocks on a lake. Programming pearls are cast before swine.

Data brokers have sold bidstream data for a range of invasive purposes, including tracking union organizers and political protesters, outing gay priests, and conducting warrantless government surveillance.

Perhaps most striking, a Jan. 24 YouGov poll — conducted after the Pretti shooting on Saturday — found that 46 percent of Americans now support abolishing ICE, compared with 41 percent who oppose it. The partisan breakdown reveals how significantly the ground has shifted; 76 percent of Democrats support abolition, but so do 47 percent of independents.

Just keys and relays

The cost of everything is falling, this is the reality AI makes undeniable. The question is whether we'll ensure that benefit reaches everyone through genuine purchasing power, or allow it to be captured by those controlling the monetary system while humans are managed by surveillance AI justified by the system's fragility.

The old fiat system can't fix itself from within. The debt burden is too large, the political incentives too entrenched, the dependence on inflation too complete, and now the surveillance infrastructure too valuable to those in power. We need a structural exit, a parallel system that can accommodate technological abundance without requiring algorithmic control of human behaviour. Bitcoin provides the monetary foundation; AI provides the productive engine. Together they create the possibility of an economy where technology's natural deflationary tendency enhances human flourishing rather than threatening systemic collapse or triggering authoritarian surveillance.

The fatal flaw though is that AI has finite deflationary effects, and it can only reduce costs so far before hitting physical limits of energy and materials. Fiat currency, by contrast, has no upper limit on its ability to offset deflation through expansion. This sounds like fiat's advantage, but it actually is its death warrant. The ability to print without limit means the temptation to print without limit. As AI pushes deflationary pressure to unprecedented levels, fiat systems will print to unprecedented levels, ultimately destroying the currency's value and credibility entirely.

When your agent can buy a proxy at 3am to complete a task without waking you — that's real autonomy. What level are you at?

hold my spaghetti

One person familiar with the production estimated that some two-thirds of the crew members who worked on the film in New York had requested not to have their names formally credited on the documentary.

1. Kendinizi İnsan Olarak Değerli Görün Öncelikle kendinizi insan olarak bizzat siz değerli göreceksiniz ve buna da inanacaksınız. Çünkü insan eşref-i mahlukat, yani yaratılmışların en şereflisidir. Çünkü insan yeryüzü halifesidir ve Canab-ı Hakk’ın tüm isimlerine ayinedir. Dolayısıyla Allah katında değerli bir yeri vardır. Bunun yanında dinimize göre bir Müslümanın koruması gereken beş şeyden birisi de canıdır. Çünkü can, yani beden, ruh, kalp Allah’ın emanetidir. Onu en güzel şekilde korumakla mükelleftir. Buna kendinize değer vermek ve acımasız olmamak da dâhildir. Kendinizi sevmemek, sürekli aşağılamak, kendinize iyi olanı çok görmek; emanete ihanet değil ama emaneti ihmal sayılır. “Kendi kul hakkıma girdim.” şeklindeki farkındalığınız çok kıymetlidir. Çünkü yukarıda da ifade ettiğimiz gibi insan sadece başkalarına değil, kendisine de zulmedebilir. Kuran’da sık geçen bir ifade vardır: “Onlar kendilerine zulmettiler.”

This orientation toward efficiency naturally results in two characteristics that combined describe much of the dysfunction of our time: scale and centralization.

Apple has reinstated a requirement first introduced in 2024: subscription billing is the only billing model supported for in-app purchases on iOS. To keep the Patreon iOS app available on the App Store, creators using legacy billing models must migrate.

This is not accidental as Bitcoin was engineered in response to a world where trust in institutions had collapsed and where surveillance was already expanding under the banner of security and stability. Bitcoin is not merely scarce money. It is coordination without observation. It is economic action without identity fusion. It is savings without permission. It is exchange without behavioural contracts.

The fatal flaw though is that AI has finite deflationary effects, and it can only reduce costs so far before hitting physical limits of energy and materials. Fiat currency, by contrast, has no upper limit on its ability to offset deflation through expansion. This sounds like fiat's advantage, but it actually is its death warrant. The ability to print without limit means the temptation to print without limit. As AI pushes deflationary pressure to unprecedented levels, fiat systems will print to unprecedented levels, ultimately destroying the currency's value and credibility entirely. All paper money, lacking the constraint of scarcity, faces the same endgame when confronted with sufficient deflationary force. The question is not whether this happens, but how quickly.

Are the e-shops you are trying to pay suddenly trying to KYC you for buying alpaca socks with Bitcoin? Yes, that's the new regulation. They should of course go self-custodial, run @BTCPay Server and none of this applies (it only applies to to payment gateways who are providing gateway services for third parties).

The old fiat system can't fix itself from within. The debt burden is too large, the political incentives too entrenched, the dependence on inflation too complete, and now the surveillance infrastructure too valuable to those in power. We need a structural exit, a parallel system that can accommodate technological abundance without requiring algorithmic control of human behaviour.

Fighting the model is often a waste of time and tokens.

One of my early intense projects was VibeTunnel. A terminal-multiplexer so you can code on-the-go. I poured pretty much all my time into this earlier this year, and after 2 months it was so good that I caught myself coding from my phone while out with friends… and decided that this is something I should stop, more for mental health than anything.

if you apply local-first on your end, you'll also have an easier time moving between providers

With agentic coding, part of what makes the models work today is knowing the mistakes. If you steer it back to an earlier state, you want the tool to remember what went wrong. There is, for lack of a better word, value in failures.

mastery and fulfillment come not from chasing endless possibilities but from fully embracing the one path you’re on and making it your own

Illich uses the example of the automobile, which at its "optimal" scale simply gave people the ability to travel farther, in less time. But as infrastructure was built up around the car, we arrived at the "tolerable" scale - a point at which people came to be obligated to travel in order to reach the same kind of destination they once could achieve on foot or at home. As society crystallized around this scale, people ended up spending more time spent traveling, at a greater cost. Worst of all, we cannot now return to localism

The Department of Homeland Security also suspended Bovino’s access to his social media accounts effective immediately, according to a source familiar with the matter.

This White House has a playbook for scandal: Always double down, never apologize, and above all attack, attack, attack. So it was nothing less than shocking yesterday when the administration—after two days of utterly shameless lies about the killing of Alex Pretti—slammed on the brakes in an attempt to pivot to a more normie-palatable narrative.

According to Tether, the stablecoin is designed for use by US institutions and platforms that require a federally regulated digital dollar. Cantor Fitzgerald will act as reserve custodian and preferred primary dealer, providing transparency over reserves from launch.

But software for communication and collaboration seemed to require servers, whose cost grew with the software's popularity, so the question "who runs the server?" became a dilemma for free software projects. Should the project itself run the server? What about when costs grew too high? Should users run the server? But only a small niche of hobbyists have servers! Should an organization run the server? If so, then that organization now controls the data and relationships that make the product useful, limiting the freedom to fork and flee that makes free software so accountable and desirable. Reddit, for example, was once free software, but because forking Reddit's code would never have resulted in anything more than an empty website (since all the conversations and relationships that make Reddit what it is sit on company-run servers) Reddit being free software never gave Reddit's users any real power to hold it accountable. Federation is a proposed solution to this dilemma, but Gmail shows its limits. After all, email is the most well-known federated product, but Google can still build must-have features like spam filtering on the server side, and Gmail controls a user's email address, so exiting Gmail means updating dozens or hundreds of accounts created with that address. Exiting Gmail might be easier than exiting Facebook or Instagram, but no Gmail competitor can make exiting Gmail as easy and delightful an experience as Firefox made exiting Internet Explorer, because Gmail controls infrastructure, where Internet Explorer never did. So while federation does help, we must do better if we want to hold big tech accountable. Regulation is an even weaker proposed solution. Even when regulation works—and a quick look at the media, telecom, energy, or banking industries will illustrate its limits—regulation tends to create a cozy relationship between industry and regulators that makes industries easy targets for government subversion. For example, the highly-regulated telecom industry bends over backwards every time governments want help carrying out unpopular mass surveillance. Is this what we want from big tech? We're building Quiet because we believe that, for a broad and growing class of software, the best answer to the "who runs the server?" dilemma is "no one." Eliminate the server; in terms of accountability, it is a burden and a weakness. By eliminating servers from software's attack surface, software can be more private and secure. By eliminating exponentially growing server costs and the expertise-intensive work of scaling servers, software can be built by smaller teams under less financial pressure to betray users. Most importantly, by eliminating the server operator's control of relationships and data, users will be free to fork and exit, so they will once again have real power to hold software accountable.

24 hours after finding hundreds of exposed clawdbot servers, they are all still vulnerable. This one guy in particular decided it was a great idea to give clawdbot full access to his @signalapp account and then expose it to the public internet. He appears to have no idea and doesn't respond to messages.

晴天

But tools are not simply a blank canvas for human intention; rather, tools are designed for a particular purpose, and do not exist in isolation. When a new tool is created, certain values are embedded into its shape, which in turn interact with the pre-existing technological millieu. This complex combination of different tools and the people using them creates an environment in which the use of a given tool is mediated by another.