hodlbod makes nostr stuff like
and the thank god for nostr podcast:
A conversation with my wonderful former pastor, Tim Fox. He's leaving me, so I wanted to scrape together some life advice from him before he went. But really he just wants to talk about Lord of the Rings 24/7.
"Mere Christianity" by C.S. Lewis
"Orthodoxy" by G.K. Chesterton
"The Lord of the Rings" trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien
"Return of the Strong Gods" by R.R. Reno
"The Abolition of Man" by C.S. Lewis
"The Chronicles of Narnia" series by C.S. Lewis
"Institutes of the Christian Religion" by John Calvin
"Commentary on Revelation" by Peter Leithart
The Most Important Commandment
Jonathan Blow - Preventing the Collapse of Civilization
The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels
The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil
Easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle
Give to Caesar what is Caesar's
Vengeance is mine, says the Lord
New FinCEN rule for Bitcoin custody
Jimmy Song and George Mekhail pod about Thank God for Bitcoin
God has made the wisdom of this world look foolish
The poor you will always have with you
Noded 76 with the Authors of Thank God for Bitcoin
Thank God for Bitcoin: The Creation, Corruption and Redemption of Money
Really glad to have Matt Odell as a return guest. Instead of an interview we used this as an opportunity to talk about our wonderful dystopia full of 30 hour battery life, folded proteins, and zero privacy. Enjoy!
SHOW NOTES
Community builds of Visual Studio Code
The Verge's MacBook Air review
(I was trying to remember the word "UEFI")
(Matt's right there's no version with 32GB of RAM)
@bunniestudios - I can't think of anyone better than @marcan42 to be taking on a project like porting Linux to Apple Silicon Macs!
bunnie's Precursor open source mobile hardware
Pod people in Ready Player One
Matt shames Paul for using TikTok
Michael Rectenwald on "The Google Election"
Signal is the Messaging App of the Protests
Apple bans Bitcoin wallets (in 2014)
(My mnemonic is busted, I bought Micro USB cables)
In classic podcasting style, I managed to frontload this episode with highly technical questions up front and then we slowly morphed the conversation into a more conceptual what-is-the-future-of-computers sort of thing.
James is a really wonderful guy from what I've learned over the decade or so I've been following him on Twitter and you should def check out Actual if you're in the market for budgeting software.
Silicon Valley season three, episode six
The Local-first software manifesto
Clarity Money ewwww
"I want Roam to be not just a tool for thought, but a tool for computation" @jlongster
A Visual History of Eve: 2014 - 2018
If you have 100 hours to read a million words, check out this Wired piece on Xanadu
SHOUTOUT Ryan Florence
This is a tough one because I'm fairly undecided. Are we sliding toward an apocalypse? Is too much getting worse to expect anything to get better? Is YouTube actually kind of a great thing? I've been stuck on this long enough that I figured I should just put it out there and let you decide. A lot of different thoughts here but I swear it's all connected.
Thanks to ZappyCode for buying a fake ad this week!
SHOW NOTES
GaryVee still preaches the hustle gospel in the middle of a pandemic
"No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it." @pierre_rochard (quoting Einstein)
"How often does the software you use on a daily basis (including web apps etc) succeed at fulfilling it's core purpose, without unreasonable levels of friction?" @masonremaley
No offense to @jayriverlong, but I think his think piece on GPT-3 is kind of dumb: "In a GPT-3 World, Anonymity Prevents Free Speech"
So I did a whole podcast about it.
Also check out this book: How Innovation Works
Today's episode is a work-in-progress essay about the role of UX and "ease of use" in tech, with a specific focus on Bitcoin. Here are some links to what I'm talking about in the episode. The full essay will be published on my blog someday. Thank you for your patience.
So I screwed up and didn't select my nice podcasting microphone for this episode and am instead speaking to you through that joke of a pinhole mic on my MacBook Pro.
The good news is that we're not here to listen to me, we're here to hear from the fascinating Jonathan Pallant: Town Mayor, retro computing enthusiast, and embedded systems engineer.
Monotron - a 1980s style home computer written in Rust
Monotron - Building a Retro Computer in Embedded Rust
Tiva C Series TM4C123G LaunchPad
Bill Herd's Story of Commodore from the Computer Engineers' Perspective
Something that's been refreshing about doing this new podcast is how little of my time is spent thinking about what "big" companies are doing.
But these big companies keep doing stuff. So let's talk about it!
Vergecast segment about Skate 4 in 2019 (at around the one hour mark)
Will Skate be the "Quake 3: Arena" of skateboarding games?
What I also want is a skateboarding shooter game. Trick combos generate shields.
Vergecast interview with @dhh and Rep. David Cicilline
Starting to think big companies and big government sort of deserve each other. Will whatever antitrust tribunals we end up with this time around catch the subtlety and just ask Apple to allow sideloading? Or are we going to get a "Apple forever" mentality and enshrine it into law somehow?
Also patents = monopoly.
I almost tried to care about this but I didn't pull it off. I always wonder if we can make it to a post-literate society tho. Interesting to think about.
It looks so dumb I'm sorry.
Also it has approximately 10,000x more "next-gen" games than the Xbox so far so I'm feeling pretty bullish on it. Might have to learn to use those stupid thumbsticks.
Wish there was a duck demo.
These are getting very, very good. Scratch AND Python? Yes, please.
On this episode I had the pleasure of speaking with John Cantrell, the lead of the Juggernaut decentralized messaging project.
I'm very enamoured with the idea of decentralized, peer-to-peer, e2ee messaging. But there are so many drawbacks and pitfalls, and it's hard enough to get your friends to even use something like Signal, that I had begun to give up hope. Lately, however, a handful of Lightning-based messaging experiments have popped up, and it feels like they're on to something.
Accouncing Juggernaut blog post
These are some books I like!
by Michael Swaine and Paul Freiberger
by Lionel Shriver
by Tracy Kidder
by Neal Stephenson
by Dr. Kai-Fu Lee
by Brian McCullough
by George Gilder
by Saifedean Ammous
by Carlo Rovelli
by Pedro Domingus
by Joe Quirk
by Neal Stephenson
by Ted Chiang
by Greg Egan
by James Gleick
by Alex Epstein
by Katie Hafner
by Vernor Vinge
Today's episode is a little different. Basically, I want to convince you that you can and should learn to engage with the command line on your computer. There are a lot of tools that are only accessed, or best accessed, through the command line. In a perfect world maybe this wouldn't be the case, but in the world we live in the command line unlocks a lot of the hidden potential for your computer, and I feel like it's almost essential in the "owning" of modern technology.
Here are the basics:
pwd- short for "print working directory"
Type this into the terminal and press enter. You'll see the full path to wherever you "are" right now on your computer.
ls- short for "list"
This will show the files, folders, and executables that are in your current working directory.
cd- short for "change directory"
If you just type cd nothing happens, you need to tell it where you want to go. A few examples:
cd ..go to the parent directory
cd foldernamego to foldername
cd ~go to your home directory
If you get lost in the command line or you want to do something you don't know how to do using the command line, try xdg-open . (note the trailing dot, that means "right here"). This should open the the current directory in your GUI file browser.
Check out this week's newsletter (I'll link it on Twitter) for a more in-depth guide.
Here's the list of basic tools I start the episode off with.
DuckDuckGo for search.
BitWarden for password management.
Signal for messaging.
Refurbished enterprise SFF PCs for home server.
Fastmail for email. (Even cooler people are using Tutanota these days, but I haven't tried it personally)
Firefox + AdBlocker Ultimate for web browsing.
Today I'm joined by William Casarin who is one of my favorite twitter follows. William is a freelance software developer, he runs a bitcoin consultancy called bitcoin wizard, and he's constantly building wild and weird projects that seem to "own" technology in the sense I'm always chasing after.
"thinking about hooking CI build events into my system notifications..."
"bitcoind + usdt + ebpf + bpftrace ohhh I'm going to have fun with this."
"I need to figure out a good fediverse crossposting setup..."
"I think for my satellite nix-bitcoin node, I would want..."
"You can't stop other people from reading that which you disagree with."
@pierre_rochard on Noded 0.62.0
Speech laws and regulation and platform moderation are always about what "others" should see. Because you have to see it to moderate it. Just something to think about.
The way I'm thinking about "free speech," as a principle, is that I'm not going to use my power proactively to silence your speech. The actual law, of course, is about prohibiting the government from using its power to silence speech. But we're adults, we can talk about right and wrong it's okay.
Censorship is not an educational tool, it's a tool of control. You don't know what's being censored because you never see it. That was the whole point. So how do you know whether the right things are being censored? The potential for misapplication and the lack of means of correction are sky-high.
But platforms like Facebook and Twitter are in a dumb no-man's land where their "speech" is primarily the promulgation of other people's speech.
I personally would not want to be forced promulgate information I find abhorrent. But I also don't want to stop other people from accessing information I disagree with. Censorship doesn't restrain conspiracy theories, it validates them. The cure for wrongthink isn't a ban, it's better information. I also believe people who have facts on their side aren't afraid of people hearing "different facts."
And as great as I sound to myself when I say these things, none of it is useful as a prescription for how Twitter or Facebook should act.
Maybe there's like a range of speech-adjacent activities we can define:
Promulgation is really some of the most powerful speech there is. And, of course, there's no promulgation without non-promulgation. Otherwise you're just transmitting static.
Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are self publishers with a truly historic level of promulgation, and now they're trending toward non-promulgation, which seems only reasonable. Meanwhile government is flirting with censorship, because it really has no power other than to destroy and oppose. Meanwhile meanwhile I'm thinking I need to get myself some of that self-publishing apparatus to secure and promote the ideas I think are good.
As a sidenote, I do find it sad sometimes how narrow a view we often have of what is acceptable and useful discourse, but there's really nothing I can do to change that. If it's easy to stay within the appropriate bubble of thought, then times seem good. But it leaves you with no recourse if you start getting extra-bubble ideas. And it might be actively harming the formation of extra-bubble ideas (which was the whole point of non-promulgation, obviously).
So what can I do?
Richard Myers is a "decentralized applications engineer" at Global Mesh Labs, which is a very good job title in my opinion. We talk about his work on Lot49, a protocol for incentivized mobile peer-to-peer communication.
Tales from the Crypt #88: Richard Myers
Stephan Livera's podcast with Richard Myers
RISE:NYC Small Business Resiliency Program
How to Hide in Plain Sight (with Pictures) - wikiHow
Lightning Network for BEGINNERS playlist
Lot49: A lightweight protocol to incentivize mobile peer-to-peer communication
lightning payment over (simulated) HAM radio
Lnproxy - Proxy connections from a patched C-Lightning
Incentives Build Robustness in BitTorrent
Change.org Abolish the FCC petition (11 signers)
I did a pod about Bitcoin, I hope that's okay!
What if everything you bought got cheaper every year, but your salary stayed the same? You'd eventually go to space, right?
Human material needs are in some sense finite, but human wants are infinite. Human time is absolutely finite, but human ingenuity -- the ability to do more with the same amount of time -- is multiplicative and exponential.
In an economy we create value as we transact voluntarily, and in an economy with money we use money as an intermediary to store that value we create. In a Federal Reserve economy, that value creation is skimmed off the top and given to banks so they can give us more credit card debt. In a Bitcoin economy, we all get to benefit from value creation.
Bitcoin wouldn't fix theft, or the desire to steal. It just makes theft no longer our national monetary policy.
"Samsung smart fridge leaves Gmail logins open to attack"
"Hackers can hijack Wi-Fi Hello Barbie to spy on your children"
"how many servers could it take to turn on a light bulb lol"
Gartner 2014: "In 2020, 25 Billion Connected "Things" Will Be in Use"
I always forget GlassWire exists and then I look like a dummy when I talk like it doesn't exist.
Sony patent where you yell "McDonald's!" to skip an ad
Oh dang there's a Bluetooth version now
Faster storage, ray tracing, higher resolutions.
Unreal 5: "nearly a polygon per pixel"
Simulation? Single shard MMOs? Multiplayer physics?
To me, Dwarf Fortress still feels like the most next-gen game on the planet
Minecraft with RTX is the perfect example of what's going well and what's not improving in games.
As photogrammetry matures and we approach photorealism, assets might be more shareable. And easier to create.
See: Quixel Megascans
There's probably a rough DIY photogrammetry aesthetic that will differentiate non-pro games from "pro", but it will still look great IMO.
If there's unification of the art pipeline, "remixing" game assets and game modes seems more possible. That would be truly groundbreaking.
What I want is a skateboard game that's also a multiplayer shooter.
What would a game be like where everyone was running the maximum amount of cheats they can get their hands on?
If you think about it, cheating is a form of "AR" for a virtual space. Maybe it doesn't have to be a bad thing for all games, it could be a feature!
What about the holy grail of anti-cheat: peer to peer multiplayer games. It works with chess!
I think it could come down to multiplayer physics simulation. If your character is only capable of producing forces within a certain range... those could be the rules you abide by. just thinking out loud.
Eve Online and Dual Universe are "next-gen" in this sense.
Beyond single shard: the "metaverse."
Whatever happend to VRML?
Reamde. Hats. Real money poker.
"The dream is, I want a 12 year old camper from thailand to help pay for his family's food by killing me in an online video game and my slow reflexes" - Matt on TFTC
How do you have digital scarcity without centralized control? Bitcoin actually only solved Bitcoin's problem in this regard.
In Minecraft you choose to have scarcity to maximize fun.
Factorio
StarCraft
Overwatch
Path of Exile
Minecraft
