Alexandria Catalogue - Highlights

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

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.