Alexandria Catalogue - Highlights

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

I just did because it had to be done.

less walled gardens and vendor lock-in

The good thing of Lightning is that it provides a layer of compatibility for all sorts of things

Bitcoin and only Bitcoin was worth my time

I joined Ryan Fugger’s Ripple mailing list and started thinking about how to implement the p2p Ripple protocol in the real world

When Bitcoin hit $2000 I remembered it and remembered the password. What I didn’t had was the wallet.dat file, long gone. I didn’t even know I was supposed to store that

I bought almost 5 BTC with the money of 3 lunches, moved them to MtGox, did nothing there, then moved them to my own bitcoin-qt wallet, which prompted me to choose a very strong password. I chose one and memorized it.

The project follows a Universal folder structure

The Hippocratic License 3.0 (HL3) aims to confront the potential harms and abuses technology can have on fundamental human rights.

Hippocratic License 3.0 (HL3): An Ethical License for Open Source Communities

Healthy open source communities don’t just form around code, but also around shared values

the flawed premise that technology is fundamentally neutral

With no opt-out feature, the only way to prevent Meta from using your AI conversations for content and ad targeting purposes is not to use the AI in the first place.

What we found was incredibly fascinating, and reveals a mix of lawyers blaming IT issues, personal and family emergencies, their own poor judgment and carelessness, and demands from their firms and the industry to be more productive and take on more casework. But most often, they simply blame their assistants. 

Sure, bitcoin can just never change again in any meaningful way (“ossify”). But at this point that almost certainly resigns it to yet another financial product that can only be accessed with the benefit of a large institution.

inaction — not deciding — is actually a very consequential decision

as bitcoin rises in price, and as nation-states start buying in size, the rules will be harder to change

Everyone knows Guido and Linus and the based Christian sqlite guy.

until Taproot, bitcoin’s consensus development was more or less operating under a benevolent dictatorship model

Running bitcoin means acting out Bitcoin, which in turn means holding your own keys, running your own node, and agreeing to the core consensus parameters that make bitcoin bitcoin.

This is a constant process because it is not only about what Bitcoin is currently, but it is also about what Bitcoin could be. What Bitcoin should be.

There is no authority when it comes to Bitcoin. Thus everyone has to figure out what Bitcoin is independently, and out of the overlap of the different points of view, consensus emerges.

Bitcoin is people, when it comes down to it. Yes, it’s software, but people have to run the software and, more importantly, decide for themselves what Bitcoin is.

I built a small language model in Minecraft using no command blocks or datapacks! The model has 5,087,280 parameters, trained in Python on the TinyChat dataset of basic English conversations. It has an embedding dimension of 240, vocabulary of 1920 tokens, and consists of 6 layers. The context window size is 64 tokens, which is enough for (very) short conversations. Most weights were quantized to 8 bits, although the embedding and LayerNorm weights are stored at 18 and 24 bits respectively. The quantized weights are linked below; they are split into hundreds of files corresponding to the separate sections of ROM in the build. The build occupies a volume of 1020x260x1656 blocks. Due to its immense size, the Distant Horizons mod was used to capture footage of the whole build; this results in distant redstone components looking strange as they are being rendered at a lower level of detail. It can produce a response in about 2 hours when the tick rate is increased using MCHPRS (Minecraft High Performance Redstone Server) to about 40,000x speed.

I humbly suggest you not waste time and sats on the politics circus, and work hard to stack sats instead.

The real enemy of bitcoin, and humanity, is the Fed.

Digital ID and CDBCs in a nutshell: "Every right that you have is transformed into a privilege contingent upon your obedience to arbitary government dictates"

This idea is truly genius and it's the only reason why Bitcoin can exist. All other attempts of creating decentralized money have failed to solve this step. Think about it: without knowing who you are, whether you're one person pretending to be a thousand, or a thousand people pretending to be one. Bitcoin defends itself (and anyone who runs nodes in the Bitcoin system) from spam by making you pay for your activity.

How I could have so easily accepted that made-up information¹ genuinely unsettled me and became the catalyst for me to really try and understand what I was playing with.

Liquid apls have been very dilligent in labelling liquid Bitcoin as LBTC instead of $BTC to avoid confusion, i think ecash custodians should do the same by branding their tokens as something other than $BTC For example Bob's ecash tokens should be $bobBTC and alice's ecash tokens should be $aliceBTC Free banking theory implies that $bobBTC and $aliceBTC can and should have different exchange rates based on consumer confidence

If so much of the Bitcoin community can fall for some of the worst FUD I've ever seen ("OP_RETURN defaults changing will kill Bitcoin!") the far bigger concern should be the power of social attacks against Bitcoin's community.

I created RUNSTR because I was using Nike Run app and wanted to be more "nostr only." When I didn't see a run tracking app on nostr, I decided to build one myself.

President Trump is expected to sign an order as soon as Friday that would extensively overhaul the H-1B visa program, requiring a $100,000 fee for applications in a bid to curb overuse[...] Trump will also order the Labor Secretary to undertake a rulemaking process to revise prevailing-wage levels for the H-1B program, a move intended to limit the use of visas to undercut wages that would otherwise be paid to American workers.

CTO Paul Frazee mentioned off-handed in a reply on a post about something else that “the rest in piss actions got reversed”. That it is the CTO, and not the CEO or the head of Trust & Safety, who publicly states that there were mistakes made in moderation, is in itself a sign of the chaotic state of moderation at Bluesky right now. That the people who where affected by this moderation decision which got reversed were not informed is another sign.

Conrad’s ordeal began when he refused to help the FBI decrypt traffic from his exit nodes. Months later, the government arrested him. Their official reason was a minor, non-violent CFAA charge from a workplace dispute that had nothing to do with Tor.

And business is booming. "I've been offering vibe coding fixer services for about two years now, starting in late 2023," Siddiqi told 404. "Currently, I work with around 15-20 clients regularly, with additional one-off projects throughout the year." AI models are notorious for hallucinating and generally not doing what you intend them to do.

More than $56 million in cryptocurrency has been seized by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) in the largest operation in Canadian history. The money was recovered from the platform TradeOgre, marking, according to the force, the first time that a cryptocurrency exchange platform has been dismantled by Canadian law enforcement.

Filters can do exactly 1 thing: They prevent nodes that run them from being aware of filtered transactions until they are in blocks. They have no impact on what goes into blocks, and they have no impact on nodes that do not run them. Because filters have this one effect, the only thing that the opreturn filter can do is drive a protocol designer to use fake pubkey-type outputs instead of opreturns. This adds < 10% to their cost of publication which has approximately no impact on the types of protocol which might need this, but permanently bloats the utxo set for all bitcoin node runners for the rest of bitcoin's life. Therefore opreturn filters have only harmful effects. They do not stop non-filtering nodes from seeing data. They do not stop data from being mined. They do not stop data from being stored by filtering nodes. They do not even stop data from being relayed by filtering nodes once that data is included in blocks. They only stop filtering nodes from seeing the data in a timely manner which can incentivize a certain tiny sliver of potential protocol designs to do something materially harmful to all future bitcoin core/knots/similar nodes. Therefore opreturn filters must be removed.

code alone is not enough

Working with AI-generated code has become such a problem that it’s given rise to a new corporate coding job known as “vibe code cleanup specialist.” 

Treating every citizen like a suspect is not “safety”. It’s surveillance.

JUST IN: Nvidia is now worth more than Canada

The trick here is once again a static versus dynamic view. 1850 is a much more relevant marker (rounding to 50 years) of the Industrial Revolution having taken hold in Britain. Consider, for example, that the growth in non-agricultural jobs even from 1800 to 1850 (never mind from 1650) exceeded the entire population at 1800! This was on the order of ten to one hundred times the gradual loss in jobs in the agricultural sector in the same period and was entirely the product of the same mechanical advances that were ever-so-slightly reducing the agricultural workforce. It is worth noting that none of this is to dispute the likes of Wendell Berry in arguing that agriculture shouldn't be valued. Conflating work with value is an unfortunate modernism that is outside the scope of this post to evaluate. To get back on track, we might offer that being freed from the necessity to work in agriculture allows, but does not require, the space and time to value it more deliberately and conscientiously than otherwise.

Interesting parallels you can draw to concerns about Bitcoin node runner risks. I used to run an anonymous remailer, with all exit features enabled. Combatting false flag spam attacks on remailer was how I came to invent hashcash in 1997. And I implemented a distributed censorship resistant web (including images) called eternity usenet in 1997 (6 months after hashcash). So I find reactions as Bitcoin node runners and users start to discover and think about these risks interesting to observe as there are many parallels and historic lessons. And the Bitcoin node runner risks are not really new, as there has been content in the timechain for over a decade and during early periods where establishment banning Bitcoin was viewed as high risk. There are 3.5m image files some NSFW and maybe worse, 3d printed gun files, even going back long before Taproot (2021) and even before op return data (2014). And it's not really about policy change as big op returns existed in chain before the recent flare up in spam discussion.

Watching the knots vs core drama unfold it’s really fascinating to see how reliably all the high-iq, high-signal folks have lined up on the core side and all of the mid-curve schizos have ridden on the short bus to knots side. Even if you paid zero attention to the substance of the debate and just looked at who was on which side, (and which side was covered in its own feces) it’s just eminently obvious where the intellectual firepower is. I find it fairly easy to side with the super geniuses instead of the people who struggle to tie their shoes in the morning before giving up and blaming the Jews for inventing shoelaces.

This has been a consistent problem with arguments from this person, they've been the sort of thing that sounds good but just aren't related to reality

A private-by-design approach to C2PA certificate management, where no image or group of images can be related to one another or the person who created them.

The chain of events regarding an open letter that calls for respect and collaboration across the open social web is fairly indicative of the state of collaboration on the open social web more broadly: There is a large group of people who are actively moving the space forward, and who have signed the open letter that calls for mutual respect and working together for a better open social web. The number of people who voiced objections and concerns is minimal, but by focusing on procedural reasons it creates a greater level of discord within the community of people that moves the open social web forward than there actually is.

Conclusion The industry-leading security of iPhone means that the vast majority of our users never face system-level attacks on their devices. Our work on memory safety is aimed primarily at the mercenary spyware and surveillance industry, which spends many millions of dollars to exploit memory corruption vulnerabilities and target a small number of individuals because of who they are and what they do. Over the past five years, we developed a comprehensive approach to memory safety that integrates the best of our hardware and software capabilities, and today’s announcement is the culmination of this ambitious vision. With the introduction of the iPhone 17 lineup and iPhone Air, we’re excited to deliver Memory Integrity Enforcement: the industry’s first ever, comprehensive, always-on memory-safety protection covering key attack surfaces — including the kernel and over 70 userland processes — built on the Enhanced Memory Tagging Extension (EMTE) and supported by secure typed allocators and tag confidentiality protections.