@pre@boing.world2025-11-23 16:11:28
Thomas voegtlin talks about nostr spam. It's very censorship resistance means spam can't be stopped by moderators.
One way to stop spam is require proof of work before your client accepts a message. A large difficult hash.
But big hashing machines are more available to spammers than people.
Can't use likes or zaps cuz they can be faked with sybil attacks.
Instead: notaries and proveably burned satoshis.
Your public messages are classified as ham rather than spam if you burn enough money.
Nostr event types to prove it are suggested. Including burning to upvote others messages
Don't think I like deliberately burning the money, and seems to me a web of trust might work without doing that? Pay to post also peanizes there poor.
But it isn't really burned here, it's shaed out to miners to continue a subsidy when the block rewards run out. So paying miners and these notaries rather than really burning. Okay. Maybe better, but still makes messages mostly for the rich?
#bitfest #bitcoin #nostr
@cdarwin@c.im2025-12-24 15:40:42
ICE documents reveal plan to hold 80,000 immigrants in warehouses
The Trump administration is seeking contractors to help it overhaul the United States’ immigrant detention system
in a plan that includes renovating industrial warehouses to hold more than 80,000 immigrant detainees at a time,
according to a draft solicitation reviewed by The Washington Post.
Rather than shuttling detainees around the country to wherever detention space is available, as happens now, …
@Mediagazer@mstdn.social2025-11-24 04:50:37
Pew: 57% of US adults ages 65 prefer to watch their news, while among adults under 30, 45% prefer to get news by reading, 31% by watching, and 23% by listening (Pew Research Center)
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/20
@kurtsh@mastodon.social2025-11-23 18:38:14
The problem with Las Vegas is that visitors are now treated like marks rather than guests.
The $50 gotcha charge at Paris Las Vegas for unplugging a cord in the room to charge a laptop is a perfect example:
https://view…
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot2025-11-24 08:13:24
"Dispensing false information in a confident tone, rather than offering no answer when none is readily available, is a major flaw of generative AI, experts say. An audit of the top 10 generative AI model... by the media literacy non-profit NewsGuard revealed that the non-response rates of chatbots went down from 31% in August 2024 to 0% in August 2025. At the same time, the chatbots’ likelihood of repeating false information almost doubled from 18% to 35%"
@wraithe@mastodon.social2026-01-24 18:46:28
“No," said Ivan firmly. "He is not. He is merely rather quiet. It's not the same thing at all. You don't want to see what he's like pissed.”
By: “What does he look like, pissed?"
Ivan:"Identical to what he looks like the rest of the time. That's the scary part.”
Lois McMaster Bujold, “A Civil Campaign”
@aardrian@toot.cafe2025-11-24 22:31:36
I finally got around to adding the Narrator speech recap feature to my 2020 post “Speech Viewer Logs of Lies”:
https://adrianroselli.com/2020/08/speech-viewer-logs-of-lies.html#Update07
Video! We like video! 323kb of video! Big fat video!
@pre@boing.world2025-11-22 10:39:50
Despite much opinion to the contrary, the government money we use is crappy.
I'm at bitfest in Manchester to find out if Bitcoin could be a better money.
It could hardly be worse.
The mood is still good, people are joking about recent devaluation rather than crying. Those who aren't all in are trying to buy more at the discount.
After an introduction by Mad Bitcoins, Joe Bryan explains the problem with government money.
He imagines an island on which two types of money are tried, with a dividing wall between them.
When economic problems hit, government can just print more money on the fiat side. Everyone now using money which is worth less. Distorting prices, inflating asset prices, making the rich (who hold assets) richer and the poor (who have to pay inflated prices) poorer. Driving wealth inequality.
On the hard money side, government must tax properly. Take in more from the rich rather than inflating to take it from the poor. Reducing wealth inequality.
On the government money side, the wealthy monitize houses, stocks, resources. Saving in money is impossible, its inflated away. So they save in assets and hording resources. Capital is misallocated. The youth can't afford houses. Poverty traps are caused. The only way out is printing more for benefits. Making it all worse. More economic crises, more printing. More government debt.
Eventually, the wall is broken. Government money people can save in the hard money instead. It reduces the value of government money further. More printing. More inflation.
Eventually, war. Funded by printed money.
The dollar is the best of a bad bunch all other government money is falling in value even faster.
I wonder, is bitcoin really this better money though? It's limited, hard, and can't be printed without energy investment.
I'm still unsure that fixing money fixes the world.
--
Note: "crypto" is mostly more like government money than bitcoin. It can be printed indefinitely by it's makers, does not cost it's makers to print. Crypto is usually just a scam people to get more bitcoin. Bitcoin is not crypto.
#bitfest #bitcoin
@cdarwin@c.im2025-12-25 04:42:26
For four months, Trump had been haranguing Indiana Republicans to redraw their congressional district maps
to carve out two new safe Republican seats.
Right now, Indiana is overwhelmingly Republican.
Seven of the state’s nine congressional districts are solidly red.
But Republicans control Congress as a whole by a mere three votes.
Given how dramatically Republican measures and candidates under-performed this year,
Trump has reason to worry in the 2026…
@pre@boing.world2025-12-22 17:18:37
The mechanics sorted out filling the adblue tank.
The warnings have stopped beeping and the 10 l bottle that was in the back is gone, so presumably I can trust it's in the tank now.
Sounds like much of what I have paid for was for them doing what I did: Looking all around the car for an ad-blue tank hole and taking things apart trying to find it.
But none of that is the correct solution, which is to put it up on the ramp and clamber underneath to find the tank which has some sort of lowering mechanism, to then lower it and fill it and raise it again.
Not a job for me then. Next time it'll maybe be cheaper coz of them knowing what to do now and not spending half a day trying to figure it out.
Apparently there is a second emissions reduction mechanism which doesn't take a wattery bottle of urea, but instead needs a pouch of oily tar stuff.
This is more likely to empty and need replacing next, rather than the piss bottle.
And even for normal cars that haven't been screwed up for wheelchair access this is a mechanics job anyway. And the garage will have to order in the tar pouch especially.
Back in the 90s, my first car cost about 200 quid. Today I paid 200 quid to get someone to fill it up with purified piss for emissions reduction. Oh how things change. 😆