oh sweet, I'm in the city on a tuesday, will swing by

even if you take a dim view of prediction markets, gambling has entertainment value. that, and the nanny state is cure worse than the disease.

that's so cool! putting the Coast Starlight on my bucket list

I know it's difficult but you gotta channel the deepest, most intense neurodivergent hyperfixation into the subject. Then haters will bounce off you for the same reason 'video games are for nerds' was pure background noise to the kids who were trying to take their consoles apart to see how they work

it's so over

kiki and bouba

HBD!!!

Why San Jose Doesn't Look Like Shenzhen Every few months, someone posts a Google Maps screenshot of Nvidia's campus in Santa Clara next to a skyline photo of Shenzhen, and the replies fill up with the same hot take: Silicon Valley, the econ...

Another braindump brought to you by Claude.

Why San Jose Doesn't Look Like Shenzhen
paragraph.com/@dfern.eth/w...

shoutout to booze & snacks for the aloe water for my drive home

have to live in a pronatalist city

#36: An Honest Look at Urbit Everyone has heard of Urbit, but nobody really knows what it is.

^to be clear, this is an anti-endorsment of Urbit, I concur with the conclusion of this article: open.substack.com/pub/jayriver...

You need bridging service like @helloxyz.eth.xyz or @ethlimo.bsky.social that will take DNS TXT=_atproto queries and lookup the answer on the ENS resolver!

An XKCD-style webcomic featuring a horizontal line with several stick figures representing different decentralized social protocols, labeled from left to right in order of increasing "purity." ​The title at the top reads: "PROTOCOLS ARRANGED BY PURITY" with an arrow pointing right labeled "MORE PURE." ​From left to right, the protocols and their accompanying dialogue are: ​ActivityPub: A stick figure stands at the start of the line. ​ATProto: A figure with glasses says, "ActivityPub is just federated ATProto." ​DSNP: A figure holding a small octopus says, "ATProto is just federated DSNP." ​Farcaster: A figure holding a bubbling flask says, "DSNP is just Polkadot-parachain Farcaster." ​Nostr: A figure looking back toward the others says, "Which still requires BFT consensus. It's nice to be on top." ​Urbit: Located far to the right, separated by a large gap, a figure waves and says, "Oh, Hey, I didn't see you guys all the way over there." ​The comic satirizes the "purity testing" and elitism within decentralized tech communities, ending with Urbit positioned as the most extreme and isolated outlier.

Qualified Reservations

nevermind, I just vibecoded it

Can I run @pds.ls to browse a dev-env PDS?

I can see a list of dids on the localhost PDS, but I can't actually inspect any of them, because then I just get "missing PDS", no did document exists presumably, but I should be able to just skip that part and see the data anyway.

A satirical medieval‑style cartoon showing two opposing factions. On the left, banners labeled with phrases like ‘Our Blessed DID:PLC’ and names such as Swiss Shellco, ATScan Mirror, PLC BFT POA, and Bluesky PBC appear on castles and ships. On the right, an opposing group labeled ‘Their Barbarous Snapchain’ features Delaware C Corp, Quilibrium Fork, Tendermint POA, and Neynar, Inc. The scene exaggerates the rivalry between two tech ecosystems by depicting them as warring kingdoms.

sufficiently decentralized

I don't support PoA so I don't support forking it. My solution is to just use data availability blobs like on ETH L1 or EigenDA. (And, hot take, ATProto should replace the firehose with a data avail layer too).

rfk jr is going to put up stalin numbers, but he'll do it in terms of lives not saved. you can commit the most horrific crimes if you do it with bureaucracy

Never forgot. HODL.

Misleading b/c SJ also has the largest difference between mortgage payments & owners' equivalent rent. Renting is way more affordable: buying is a proxy for speculating on tech equity, which has little to do with putting a roof over one's head. Elevating 'home ownership' over leasing is anti-YIMBY.

I'm now in the "bitcoin is not crypto" camp, but not for the reasons bitcoiners think lol

Apparently the BSky relay won't index PDSs with >10 users w/o asking for an exception on Discord, I think that's an acceptable tradeoff for now, which is the same thing as the FID IdGateway still having an owner for now.

TBF, all federated networks like BSky/Mastodon/Nostr decide control whether they want to federate with others which leads to fragmentation. Onchain social like FC & Lens don't have this problem, once you have your profile, it can't be taken away, and there's a single global index of all users.

b/c the ecosystem was (& is still) iterating over antispam mitigation: what should the signup fee be?, the idea of storage rent (which was invented only recently), where do the fees go?, etc. In theory, you could have a DAO do this, but that can be it's own failure mode pre-PMF.

I think about this a lot.

Hot take, but we don't need Rust thanks to AI. C++ plus Claude is all the borrow checking you need.

Ray Kurzweil Apology Form To: Ray Kurzweil the Internet Date: 1/22/2025 Reason for behavior: The media convinced ☐ me that deep learning hit a wall ☐ I was biased against people who gave TED talks I was jealous of your hair I thought the I thought you were too into the Turing Test nano stuff was weird ☐Mercury was in retrograde ☐ I will hereby respect the Singularity and I will NOT talk down on exponential improvements in computing power

so true!

A preview of the link attached

AI Agents on Farcaster, open social + AI is going to be big.
farcaster.xyz/applefather....

big if true