2023-12-06 19:51:48
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I have come to the same conclusion. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day ... to skip! A longer fasting period has a lot of good effects, including being strongly protective against diabetes.
Your cells accumulate a lot of junk, and that junk presents as hazard, and it only gets cleaned up (autophagy) when your body needs it for fuel. After you have burned your blood glucose, liver glycogen (muscle glycogen cannot re-enter the bloodstream), oxaloacetate, now you have to ramp up gluconeogenesis from some other substrate, and this forces your body to scavenge. You clean up this junk generally before muscle wasting occurs. And the stages are not strongly delineated, they overlap.
2023-12-06 18:15:55
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Uranium exists naturally in dirt and is a weak alpha emitter. Radon exists as a gas in small quantities, can come up through your floor and trap in your house, and is a much stronger alpha emitter. This has been happening since life began. If it is not about the concentration, then why aren't we all dead?
Damage to your DNA is almost always repaired, and when that doesn't happen the cell almost always commits apoptosis (suicide). And when that doesn't happen the immune system almost always kills the abberant cell. And when that doesn't happen you get cancer. There has to be a lot of alpha particles before there is any appreciable chance that you will be harmed. If you dilute radioisotopes well enough, there just won't be enough alpha particles. Sure, every one is a lottery ticket, but everything in life is like that. Every second you get sunshine on your skin you draw a lottery ticket for skin cancer... but I wouldn't dream of NOT getting sunshine on my skin.
2023-12-06 07:49:32
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Are birds so rare now that people take videos of them to post on social media whenever they see one?
I have dozens of birds around my house at all times. Wake to them making a racket in the morning. Australian magpies walking on my cut lawn eating worms, daring each other to see how close they can get to my dog before she chases them, giving their "Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle" speeches. Little birds in large numbers skittering around on the parking area. Tuis making warning sounds from the gum trees as I walk past. Kereru resting in the tagasaste. Harriers and hawks circling, looking for the next unaware rabbit. Spurwing lapwings chasing away the hawks or standing in a paddock making annoying kak-kak-kak sounds far too often. Moreporks calling out for more pork late in the night. Eastern rosellas dashing about, always in mating pairs. Mallards walking around in the wet areas, with a long trail of ducklings following behind. Fantails dashing about catching insects, following me through the grass to eat the bugs that try to fly away. Swallows stopping for a visit in large flocks diving and swooping with pointed wing.
I never thought to capture them on video.
Sometime greenies mourn the fact that we have polluted the earth with radioactive particles that can't be all collected and cleaned up. And they think about how toxic some of them are, and how long some of them will last.
Here is my thinking on the subject.
All radioactive material is made up of atoms. Each atom has a half-life. Either it decays quickly, or it decays slowly. If it decays quickly it turns into something else which might also be radioactive in which case you just consider that atom instead. If not, well, you are done, the radioactive-ness has decayed away. So just wait a while and all the radiation problems will go away on their own.
Greenie: "But what about the atoms that don't decay quickly?" Well, you don't have to worry about them because they are barely radioactive, they decay so slowly that they present very little threat.
This logic isn't flawed, but it does skirt around some things.
If you have a large amount of long-half-life material, it can be dangerous for a long time. And if you have a large amount of medium-half-life material, it can be really dangerous for a medium time.
In those cases, the answer might be to dilute the material. Because it is the concentration that causes the radiation risk. Mix it in with dirt, mix that dirt in with more dirt, then bury the dirt. That seems to some like you are poisoning the Earth, but the Earth gave us this radiation in the first place, usually as Uranium. It already has dilute radiation. If you dilute well enough, it should be fine in terms of the radioactive issue.
The final thing I'm skirting around are the chemical properties of medium to medium-long half-life materials. Some of these things have weird toxic chemical properties independent of their radiation. So... um... don't eat them.
And have a nice day!
Don't just do backups. Think through failure modes. Here are some examples to think through:
BAD: I accidentally deleted a directory and lost several months of work. RAID immediately mirrored the delete! Shit I thought RAID would protect me.
GOOD: use zfs or btrfs and take snapshots.
BAD: I've been backing up to a NAS but then I got cryptolockered, and they got into the NAS and cryptolockered that too!
GOOD: disconnect your backup system from the network when it is not running backups.
BAD: I've been making offline backups, but also defying the government. They came and raided the house and took my computers AND the backups.
GOOD: take backups offsite.
BAD: I took my backups offsite to a friends house, but we got into a fight. Now I have no backups.
GOOD: I treat my friends very well.
BAD: I took my backups offsite to a friends house, but it turned out he was an FBI agent.
GOOD: I shake down all my friends, and put them through torture sessions to extract all useful information before I trust them.
#nevent1q…xp4d
So recently I've heard about David Chaum's eCash. Which is weird because that was a thing in the 1990s. His company DigiCash went for a few years and then filed bankruptcy. Back then, the byzantine generals problem hadn't been worked out and we didn't have blockchain technology, so the double-spend problem was solved by the bank (yes, a bank) keeping a ledger. Also unlike bitcoin, it provided privacy, it was untraceable.
So I'm presuming the ideas are coming back in order to provide untraceability to bitcoin?
2023-12-03 02:58:45
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I had a trans friend around y2k (lost touch now). Worked with one at Sun MIcro. I respect Catelyn Jenner and Chelsea Manning. I've had many gay and lesbian friends. I lived in SF and hung out in the "Vibrant" crowd and regularly did Burning Man. I'm atheist and have no religious hang-ups about it. I'm libertarian and think people should have freedom over their own lives.
But gays and lesbians decades ago never tried to physically permanently medically modify children without letting the parents find out. And they didn't physically threaten and mob people for speaking their dissenting opinions. I have mixed opinions on womens sports and the bathroom issue (although I lean towards the TERF side) so I'll stay out of those minefields. To me the big issue is transitioning of kids without the parents involvement- that is so far over the line that I could see myself committing manslaughter in a rage in order to protect a child.
And It seems to me there is a lot of projection from radical trans people and opportunist medical practicioners onto children who are not perfectly gender-normal that he or she wants to transition, and the sooner the better lest puberty hit and the transition be less effective... when in fact many of these people would grow up to be gay or lesbian, and some of them would grow up to be straight, and plenty of them are regretting the social pressure they caved into, ending up with mutilated bodies, dysfunctional sex organs, and too often committing suicide. Anyhow, my point being that there is an extremism of late that might have been supressed a bit if it were pointed out by members of the LGBTQ+ community rather than always defending trans people regardless of how crazy they get.
So if there is a backlash against the whole group, while I cannot condone it, I understand it.
But that's just my opinion, looking from afar.
2023-12-02 23:53:37
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That was just a protest that members of the FBI whipped into a riot. They didn't actually insurrect (well, maybe a tiny core did, I dunno) because while people were highly suspicious that some cheating happened, nobody could be sure.
But what is happening now with blatently anti-democratic and blatently illegal (but may succeed despite that) attempts to get Trump taken off the ballot... people will be far more sure of what is happening, and so far more people will be driven to action with a righteous kind of anger, without the hesitation of not being sure if the vote was stolen or not.
That's my thinking anyways.
2023-12-01 04:56:32
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Great debate. I used to watch that show with Craig Kilborn ... "blonder than Koppel" was his claim to fame. Then Jon Stewart, of course, the master, but I kinda had a falling out with left-wing pop culture about that time, started finding the show 50% funny and 50% offensive for misrepresentations of Republicans, so I stopped watching, about 2004 I think. Amazing it is stlll going, and strong AFAICT from that clip. Funny stuff.
2023-11-30 02:16:21
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In trying to finish the UI for multiple following lists, I'm running into more and more problems that have to be solved first such as
1. Needing a slightly different UI switch widget,
2. More command line functions for debugging,
3. Making the page to list the lists, and
4. Generalizing the Following/Muted list pages to work for any PersonList, then
5. Subscribing to kind 30000 lists and to my chagrin discovering lots of kind-30000 data that other clients created, so then
6. Fixing the menu collapsibility since it is now far too big
7. Adding a list delete that deletes locally and also issues a delete to the relay, but that didn't work, the list just reappeared after I restarted, so..
8. Fixing event deletes on multple fronts, so I can delete these annoying kind-30000 lists that I don't want,
8a. Updating nostr-types to handling deletions by 'a' tag too,
8b. actually deleting local events if they aren't feed-displayable, so they stop interfering (we still keep feed-displayable ones and mark them deleted)
8c. when deleting, delete from all the indexes we can reasonably delete from (without doing an exhaustive scan)
8d. Add a new database to index all the event IDs we have deleted, so we can...
8e. When a new event comes in, check if it is deleted and discard if it is (and is not feed-displayable)
8f. Add another database for indexing all the event addresses that have been deleted, and updating 8e to check that too
8g. Do a migration to populate these new databases, ... but oh shit that requires restructuring everything so you can login BEFORE the migration because the migration needs to index DMs and giftwraps and cannot do that if you are not logged in.
I'm getting a bit tired of this at 8g which is only partly finished.
I'm eliding a lot here too.
Since coming home from Tokyo, work on gossip slowed down quite a bit. I had lost my groove.
I have some excuses or rather explanations. Partly I had cluster headaches (I don't get them as bad as online sources describe, but they definitely come in clusters, feel like stabbing my eye or near my eye, and make it hard to program). Partly I had trouble with jet lag. Partly I had lost my place, having not programmed for 6 days. Partly I was working on my relay. Partly the work needed next didn't seem like fun. Partly I didn't want to step on the toes of my UI team. Partly I felt a sense of urgency and being a rebel at heart I rebel against my own sense of urgency! Partly I felt overwhelmed with all the new information from the conference. Partly I felt overwhelmed with all the NIP changes. Partly I felt overwhelmed with other clients pushing out features far more rapidly than I do. Overall, I had lost my groove.
But I kept at it. Put in the hours. And luckily, over the last few days, somehow, I'm back in the groove. Back to being unable to type as fast enough.
2023-11-29 22:24:23
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I don't expect people will spread out over thousands of relays. Things naturally gravitate towards centralization. We don't all use thousands of different web browsers or even thousands of different email providers (anymore)... people learn which ones are the best and people naturally gravitate to and centralize upon those. The same will be true of relays. Most people will use the main group of 40 or so relays (which might even whittle down to 10 or so over time, who knows) that everybody knows work well. And that begs the question "they why bother with the outbox model?" Because the outbox/inbox model allows that 5% of people who want to do their own thing, to roll-their-own, to have custody of their own notes, to be sure they are not being censored, to do so without losing their audience.
I hope the fan-out never gets crazy large. I hope I'm right that most people will naturally tend toward using the same popular relays. But if it does get large, I think proxy solutions are going to be the way to manage it.
I didn't realize filter.nostr.wine was such a thing, or that you were involved with it (so much going on in nostr to keep track of who is doing what).
2023-11-29 20:29:38
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I personally use a desktop computer over a starlink interface and I follow about 170 people. Right now I'm connected to 31 relays, which is far fewer connections than this computer can make. So it is working great for me.
But I recognize that younger people tend to only have a smartphone and fewer people use desktop computers. And I recognize some people want to follow thousands of other people. That is a difficult thing to make work well in a direct fashion under the outbox/inbox model.
But it can work indirectly. One solution is using a client proxy (which @npub1jlr…ynqn and I speak about briefly on his podcast that will be coming out in a week or so) which is basically an internet server which acts like a client on your behalf on the outside, and presents like a relay on the inside so that your mobile app only needs to make one connection. That can be done right now with zero changes to the NIPs, using the inbox/outbox model, and it solves that mobile phone problem far better than (1) blasting events everywhere, or (2) everybody centralizing on the same relays. Sure, most people won't be running their own client proxy, they will sign up as a customer to a client proxy service. But they can easily move to a different one if the one they are using starts censoring them. And us hacker do-it-yourself types retain the option of running direct.
@npub18kz…x5sz
I'm looking for a non-custodial lightning node that I can run on the Internet somewhere.
I want to be able to send and receive lightning payments, and to be able to publish a lud06 or lud16 in my nostr profile,
I do NOT want a web interface. I do NOT want a phone interface. I don't want to use somebody else's domain name.
I shouldn't have to understand how it works, or even how lightning works (except at a very highi level), I just should be able to run it and benefit.
It should be easy to setup, but I am fine compiling software, I am fine running my own server on the Interent, I am fine with running commands at the command line, I can even write a systemd script to start it and/or put it behind nginx if lightning uses https (I have no idea what protocols/ports lightning uses). I do not want to install package management software that interferes with my system setup (nix, node, yarn, npm, pip, ruby, yuck, blah, vomit!). It should be a simple binary with a config file, a storage directory, and an init script. Why should it be anything else?
Does that exist, and if so what is it?
2023-11-26 22:37:55
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The argument from past results is powerful, given so many attempts yielding the same dire results. But die-hard socialists will always find another reason that the economy collapsed such as "the United States interfered", as they say about Venezuela. And the US did interfere by invoking sanctions against Venezuela, and sanctions clearly harm the economy.
So the argument against socialism in the general case needs to be from first principles. The anti-authoritarian socialists like Jimmy Dore, Glenn Greenwald, Max Blumenthal, Jackson Hinkle -- they never talk about socialism in terms of the economic freedom of individuals, they talk about it in terms of massive corporate authoritariancontrol over government. So I don't even know what they think anymore when it comes to economic freedom of individuals vs Marx's "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need."
The first principles argument are things like
* People won't work if they have no incentive, and that includes the people that build engines of productivity
* People will compete to be the most pathetic and thus the most needy
* Innovation will stagnate
* Without the price signal, there will be no indication of change in demand for goods
* Without ownership, people will not take care of things
I'm a big fan of the current liberal, anti-authoritarian socialists like Jimmy Dore, Glenn Greenwald, Max Blumenthal, and Jackson Hinkle because we agree on everything other than this one point. And I just don't know what to make of them on this point. Maybe they don't actually think what the old socialists thought.
Chorus Relay WIP:
I hit a big coding milestone today. I've now got code to translate a JSON event into a binary-serialized event from one buffer to another with zero-allocation and no copies to temporary areas (just using small stack variables for sizes and position tracking). This was the hard direction; going in the other direction will be easy. I did not use a generalized JSON parser but instead hand-coded a parser that bails as soon as the input is invalid for a nostr event. I'm handling JSON escape sequences and UTF-8 encoding with custom code so that it happens only when I want it to and not multiple times.
The benefit of this is that it will run crazy fast. Memory acceses are very slow compared to CPU operations. A linear contiguous event (and contiguous JSON data) is likely to be cached into L2 or L1 cache all together so there should be few memory access stalls. Memory allocation (which we avoid) crates more non-contiguous memory areas which can stall the processor, and also the algorithm that has to find such a memory area on the heap sometimes isn't as fast as you would hope.
There is one stutter that I couldn't avoid - I have to scan through the tags and count them and then scan them again to copy them. That is because the serialized event structure is optimized for fast reading of tags, not fast writing. When you read tag #200, you need to do that in O(1) so the tags section starts with a table of offsets as to where each tag starts. Because I don't know how long that table will be until I count the tags, I have to do the first pass. At least while doing the first pass I don't need to do UTF-8 validation or JSON escape sequence translation, I can just look for backslashes or doublequotes to find the ends of strings.
Another caveat is that it doesn't accept unknown fields right now. That would require parsing sub-objects, arrays, numbers, true/false/null, etc, and just tossing the unknown and useless value. Right now it considers events with fields not defined in NIP-01 to be invalid, which is good enough for now.
I need to get (or generate) large set of JSON events that are not nice compact ones but weird ones that might break my code, fields in every kind of order, large out-of-range numbers, strange but legal whitespace, all the strange unicode characters, unicode escapes, other JSON escapes, etc.... and then test this code against all of that to make sure it handles everything properly.
Looking back at the bigger picture, this was the biggest hurdle in my attempt to write a relay, so I should be able to progress much faster now.
