Alexandria Catalogue - Highlights

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.

Memory Integrity Enforcement (MIE) is the culmination of an unprecedented design and engineering effort, spanning half a decade, that combines the unique strengths of Apple silicon hardware with our advanced operating system security to provide industry-first, always-on memory safety protection across our devices — without compromising our best-in-class device performance. We believe Memory Integrity Enforcement represents the most significant upgrade to memory safety in the history of consumer operating systems.

But that’s a minor problem for some $WLFI buyers. Hours after the market closed, some buyers began to report on the official WLFI forum that they were being targeted by hackers who were draining their accounts of new coins. $WLFI operates on the ethereum blockchain, which had a recent upgrade that hackers used to exploit the accounts to steal their coins. “The instant the tokens arrive, they will be stolen by automated sweeper bots before we have a chance to move them to a secure wallet,” one user wrote.

/sigh don't believe spam belongs on the bitcoin network. ofc, no one does! it's just filtering does not work.

Substack writers just saw their prices inflated 30% on iOS. Writers now have to wait 45 days to receive payment from Apple. Writers had absolutely no say in the decision, despite the very real consequences for their business. The feature cannot be disabled or toggled off.

Stop flushing your performance down the drain.

This is overtly political and has nothing to do with being “nice” or “empathetic”. The corporations have inadvertently made an arrangement with critical theory leftists to transform society into a capitalist monopoly on top, and socialism on the bottom. That’s the deal. It’s been dubbed “Woke Capitalism”, where the managerial class has reached a compromise in which they get to keep and - through being appointed as stewards of the political movement - gain power, while activists of the movement get the transformation they demand. This particular warning in Google Docs is just that. It’s Google managing the changes in society that certain activists want, in order to maintain corporate power. Changes like this will keep being added (as we should know by now) while our social structures change into something comparable to a social credit system. These changes are promoted by manufactured social pressures and financial incentives from large investment banks and so are implemented by any company that wishes to grow while under public scrutiny. Discussions about this have been like groundhog day since 2015, no one seems to be able to get past the surface level of what is probably the greatest transformation of any society since the 1930’s, and it’s astonishing. It’s a gradual escalation of demands from woke activists, backed by the behemoth corporations and banks, then adopted by governments. For anyone who wants to help others, or to resolve injustices in our society, having true empathy for the plight of those oppressed and wanting to solve social problems: you know this is bullshit. Even for the activists this isn’t about actually helping anyone, it’s about pushing us into accepting a shuffling of hierarchies, of which they didn’t bother to iron out the injustices. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31090216

As always, you should continue sharing Spotify content directly through your favorite platforms like Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, Snapchat, TikTok, and more. Messages on Spotify are designed to complement these integrations, not replace them, and we’re excited to continue offering more ways to drive hype for the Spotify content you love, wherever you are.

In a world pushing for reflexive AI usage, senior developers who practice intentional collaboration (if any!) with AI while preserving the craft of programming become the guardians of software quality. They’re the ones who ensure that our systems remain comprehensible to humans, true to their domains, and built upon solid theoretical foundations.

Naur’s essay reminds us that programming is fundamentally a human intellectual activity. The real product of programming isn’t the code—it’s the theory, the understanding, the mental model that gives the system coherence. While LLMs can generate syntactically correct code, they cannot participate in theory building. They cannot understand business context, make thoughtful trade-offs, or maintain the conceptual integrity that separates good software from mere working code.

Domain-Blind Code Generation represents an even more extreme case. LLM-generated code isn’t just theory-less—it’s nobody’s theory. It emerges from statistical patterns without understanding the business domain, the system’s conceptual model, or the nuanced trade-offs that domain experts have encoded into the architecture. The code might pass tests, but it exists in a theoretical and domain vacuum. With no git blame pointing to a human being at a nearby desk, I’m at a severe disadvantage trying to discern the how and more importantly the why of the code.

Naur argues that programming is fundamentally about building a theory—a shared mental model of how a system works, why it works that way, and how it should evolve. The source code is merely a written representation of this theory, and like all representations, it’s lossy. Critical knowledge about intent, design decisions, trade-offs, and the reasoning behind architectural choices exists only in the minds of the people who built the system. When those people leave, the theory dies with them. The code remains, but the program—the living, breathing system with its context and rationale—is gone.

Knots has code to turn itself off at a set expiry date. Unnecessary, stupid, and outright dangerous. Did you know? Was it discussed in a team of experts? How can such a dangerous "feature" even make it into a release? By trusting a single guy who lives in his own reality.

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Iterate Fearlessly When you encounter errors, don't give up. Just say "retry." Embrace the iterative process of prompting, observing, refining, and repeating. Every failure is a learning opportunity, not a dead end, so keep experimenting and adjusting.

But that's not the only way in which an LLM coding assistant is like a slot machine. Reg Braithwaite proposed that AI companies' business model is also like a casino's, because they charge every time you re-prompt the AI. He writes: When you are paying by the "pull of the handle," the vendor's incentive is not to solve your problem with a single pull, but to give the appearance of progress towards solving your problem.

If Bluesky wants to protect itself from legal liability, let it do what every company did until just a couple years ago: a) don't break the law on purpose, and; b) buy insurance These new ToS are an absolute dog's breakfast. I wouldn't click through them.

As things stand, Bluesky has very bad terms of service that every user who creates an account has to subject themselves to. In particular, Bluesky's ToS contain a "binding arbitration" waiver that forces users to surrender the right to sue Bluesky no matter how the company harms them. This is so pro-enshittificatory, it's like a landing strip for the sole use of Enshittification Airlines, which can land a 747 full of enshittfying nonsense on Bluesky's users every 10 minutes, around the clock, without worrying about any legal repercussions.

By moving the Podcasting 2.0 payments standard to thelnaddressformat, we can simplify the user experience for everyone involved, and give app developers an easy way to let listeners connect their favourite wallet

It’s time to evolve from trusting the transport to securing the content.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tells i24 he feels he is on a “historic and spiritual mission,” and that he is “very” attached to the vision of a Greater Israel.

An engineered protein that acts like a molecular sponge has the potential to change how carbon monoxide poisoning is treated, chasing down CO molecules in the bloodstream and helping the body flush them out in just minutes, without the risk of short- or long-term health issues that come with the current frontline treatment, pure oxygen.

The value of technology comes from effectively solving problems for people. By that metric, many simple technical solutions are more valuable than complex ones.

we don't need a return to overwhelming engagement or a descent into complete detachment, we need a careful curation of where we invest our emotional energy. I don’t think it’s a binary choice between feeling everything or nothing - there is (there has to be) a spectrum of feeling the right things deeply enough to act on them.

"The mistake is thinking we need to feel everything or nothing. The skill is choosing what to care about and accepting that choice as enough."

GPT-5 is here. Rolling out to everyone starting today.

This proposal introduces a self-custodial credit system that sits in front of an existing ecash mint. The users balance is held in a trustless credit contract that can be instantly swapped for ecash tokens offchain at the time of payment. Custodial risk only exists while payments are in flight, which is usually seconds, and only for the amount currently being transacted. The balance is always self-custodial and if the mint disappears or is uncooperative the user can unilaterally exit and reclaim their credits onchain.

If you're skeptical about Bitcoin being the foundation of the world's new monetary and financial system, remember Linux was once a mere hobby project and is now the foundation of the Internet and modern computing as we know it.

When Perplexity's official crawlers got blocked, the company just deployed masqueraded user agents pretending to be regular Chrome browsers on Mac computers. These undeclared crawlers used rotating IPs and different ASN attempts to further dodge website blocks.

I suspect many of us have had the experience of not using a skill long enough to completely un-learn it. LLMs enable this, but with every skill.

“LLMs are doing reasoning” is the “look, my dog is smiling” of technology

Git is a decentralized version control system, yet most freedom tech projects use centralized walled gardens on top of git as a social and collaboration layer for code changes.

a package called google-chrome-stable doesn’t just install Google’s browser, but also runs a RAT on your system. That kind of malware can potentially give attackers control over the infected machine, letting them steal data, install more malicious software, or spy on users.

Two potatoes are two potatoes. Ten thousand bricks are ten thousand bricks. Potatoes and bricks don't exhibit emergent properties as they come together. People do. The meaning of human in human-centred must be read therefore as being human in relationships, in communities, and most definitely not individual or user or consumer.