Alexandria Catalogue - Highlights

send it to multiple relays (servers hosted by someone else, or yourself)

Keeping track of things in the infor­ma­tional realm implies keeping track of a sequence of events, which in turn requires keeping track of time. Keeping track of time requires agreeing on a “now” — a moment in time that eternally links the settled past with the uncer­tain future.

We failed to realize and solve for the fact that our physical money was terribly unfit for cyberspace, and now we are all paying for it—with our attention, among other things. One could even argue that the use of attention as currency is—at least in part—to blame for the loss of nuanced discourse and the increase in polarization, be it political or otherwise.[4](http://dergigi.com/2022/12/18/a-vision-for-a-value-enabled-web/#fn:fn-polarization)

The problem of paying attention to the wrong things is not new, but it is particularly pronounced online. Again: the issue is that when dealing with conventional currencies, we have to use IOUs as electronic money.

An IOU is not something that you own outright, but it's something that you owe to someone else: "I owe you." It is credit, and credit is different from base money. Credit requires trust.

Imagine a special-purpose client that scans all your bookmarks for long-form content.5 Everything that you marked to be read later is shown in an orderly fashion, which is to say searchable, sortable, filterable, and displayed without distractions. Voilà, you have yourself a reading app. That's, in essence, how Pocket, Readwise, and other reading apps work. But all these apps are walled gardens without much interoperability and without direct monetization.

What matters is the information itself.

Here's the thing that nostr got right, and it's the same thing that Bitcoin got right: information is easy to spread and hard to stifle.[^fn-stifle] Information can be copied quickly and perfectly, which is, I believe, the underlying reason for its desire to be free.

the specs became our source of truth for what was being built and why.

I am now fully convinced that AI for coding is not just for toys and prototypes, but rather a deeply technical engineering craft.

To put this in Information Superhighway terms from the 1990s, a symmetrical broadband connection is necessary for you to be a "netizen," while an asymmetrical connection that beams lots of data to you but isn't capable of letting you talk back is what makes you a "mouse potato." It's grimly hilarious that the right has done so much damage to public fiber rollouts, given their oft-repeated grievances about being "shadowbanned" by dominant services. With symmetrical fiber, every crank could run their own server – a 4chan in every garage. And if that fiber is provided by the government, then your ISP will be bound by the First Amendment, and legally prohibited from discriminating against customers based on their political speech (something that commercial providers can do to their heart's content): https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/17/turner-diaries-fanfic/#1a-fiber

the government can no longer paralyze it through debanking

Because the Gnassingbé dictatorship controls the financial system, the regime can easily censor "troublemakers,"

has historically allowed France to store and collateralize Togo's national gold savings

the mechanics of money are at the heart of some of the biggest democratic struggles worldwide

Roya continues to fund underground education inside Afghanistan with Bitcoin.

Mobile money never materialized in the country, and PayPal and Venmo were not available to Afghans. Cash was problematic, as male relatives would seize it from women when they came home.

she could not shake the idea of a money that anyone could use, regardless of gender.

She tried to convince her parents to convert some of their savings into Bitcoin, but they would not listen.

87 percent of humanity was born into either an authoritarian regime or a collapsing fiat currency

Not everyone may be a journalist or opposition politician, but everyone uses money.

a decision to stop a critic's money does not even have to be made. An AI tool automates the process, bringing science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick's idea of "precrime" into dystopian reality.

What you spend says more about you than what you say.

Introducing a new feature that allows these pre-installed Raven microphones all over cities to begin listening for human voices in distress is likely to open up a whole new can of unforeseen legal, civil liberties, and even bodily safety consequences.

"We created the App Store to be a safe and trusted place to discover apps. Based on information we've received from law enforcement about the safety risks associated with ICEBlock, we have removed it and similar apps from the App Store," Apple said in a statement.

Posting on your own site gives you something social media doesn't: permanence.

When people ask why I'm not active on social media anymore, the truth is simple: I'm happier without it.

This is why I'm building my audience here, on the edge of the internet. Some days it feels like swimming against the current. But when I see a post I wrote years ago still helping someone today, I know it's worth it. Social media gives you reach. Blog posts give you longevity.

I gave the world wide web away for free because I thought that it would only work if it worked for everyone. Today, I believe that to be truer than ever. Regulation and global governance are technically feasible, but reliant on political willpower. If we are able to muster it, we have the chance to restore the web as a tool for collaboration, creativity and compassion across cultural borders. We can re-empower individuals, and take the web back. It’s not too late.

The more a culture encourages tolerant public debate, what today we would likely broaden to “conceptual reasoning”, experimentation, and entrepreneurship, the more likely its constituents are to generate worthwhile industrial advances that give more tools to more people and ultimately benefit everybody.

The literally unfathomable benefits of technological advances will accrue to those cultures that best inculcate their adoption.

We are very, very early in understanding how best to use these tools and being bearish on the basis that somebody somewhere used it stupidly is, well, stupid.

It's incredible how much you can learn by fully submitting to the vibe. Instead of spending days researching the tools I'd like to use, I'm just using them. In the process, I'm learning new things every single day.

I've vibe coded almost a dozen weekend projects this year and with every single one, I've done something I've never tried before.

The etymology of the word “calculator” is worth considering in a similar vein to “horsepower”. It was originally that of a human who calculates, at first with reference to logarithmic tables, but as time progressed, with mechanical adding machines in the eighteenth century, right up to early electronic computers in the twentieth. It is a profoundly good thing that people don’t “calculate” anymore

leverage for the mind

the countries with the highest rates of industrial robot usage also have the highest rates of industrial employment.

profoundly pwned by socialist inclinations

This is leverage. This is power. 64% of the population is now free to create things other than food, and more to the point, are perfectly capable of doing so!

twenty-horsepower engines and above performed tasks that were unfathomable before their existence, and they created orders of magnitude more jobs than they destroyed.

the expression “horsepower” was coined by none other than James Watt as a way to articulate the capabilities of his new machine

Note, by the way, that bicycles do not ride themselves. Humans ride bicycles, and while they consume 3x fewer calories and go 3x as fast as running humans, they nonetheless do not replace 9 humans.

Only in the aftermath of witnessing its novel capabilities do we articulate that a car gives to a man the (literal, physical) power of 200 horses; we do not start by imagining squishing 200 horses into a metal box.

p(doom)=0

While “AI will do all the jobs” is both a stale, decades-old meme at this point and is so vague and general as to be difficult to debunk, this “AI” cycle has thrown up the neologism of “vibe coding”.

A 200-horsepower car implies dramatic improvement, not equivalence, because it is not physically possible to perform the same tasks with 200 horses. There are not 200 horses obsoleted by the existence of a car

the static comparison is irrelevant

Culture, she argues, is significantly more important.

culture welcoming or even encouraging tolerant public debate

“smart contracts” aren’t as useful as I thought they were