Alex Vranas @Alex@vran.as

Cryptocurrency people are so funny. Recently someone with deep pockets spent six-figures embedding 9MB of encrypted data into the BTC blockchain.

I read a write-up about it one some website dedicated to cryptocurrency, and the author was especially impressed with the fact that encrypted data cannot be decrypted without a key. He noted that "not even ChatGPT could decrypt it".

Of course Cryptocurrency people don't understand cryptography... That's why they buy pretend internet money.

Doing a basic text search of the Epstein docs, and Trump's name appears 112 times, while Clinton's name appears 378 times.

Though, I don't think there's much to compare here, I wouldn't want my name to appear even once imho.

I found the best medical author on the Kindle store.

The only thing that would make it perfect is a Linux client. The Windows/Mac Clients are just electron Apps, so there are third-party wrappers, but an official release would be excellent.

I switched from Spotify to Deezer a little over a year ago, largely because Spotify wasn't adequately moderating disinformation and hate speech in it's hosted Podcasts, but if anything has made me love Deezer it is that I can upload my own MP3s and stream them everywhere.

I never have any issues with Deezer not having something that Spotify has, it's just nice being able to dump all my obscure tracks into one service so I can play whatever I want and make playlists using all of it.

People have largely forgotten how awesome diagonal scanlines used to look on a CRT monitor. All my Internet friends and I used to put a layer of scanlines on our forum singatures and pfps for that extra high-tech look back in the 2000's.

Looks terrible on a modern monitor. It just worked on a CRT.

More on this: Jack Dorsey donates money to White Nationalist groups.

The more I explore the various Twitter alternatives, the more I realize that they're all horribly flawed. Threads is just an Instagram feature with inconclusive usership. Bluesky is an undermoderated Twitter clone with unclear motives, questionable "federation" aspirations, and dubious marketing. Nostr is messy and filled to the brim with toxic dudes.

The Fediverse does alright though. It's not a perfect place, but it's the only place where I don't have to compromise on my principles.

So the #Substack moderation decision doesn't make any sense. Two quotes from their statement:

"we don’t think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away"

"censoring or demonetizing the publications would not make the problem of hateful rhetoric go away"

Cool, so it's not censorship. You admit (twice) that you don't have the power to silence Nazis with your actions.

So this isn't an anti-censorship stance. This is a pro-Nazi stance.

Welp, Jack Dorsey is defending TERFs and Nazis now...

lmao, I just realized that this is not a feature, I just never added any relays to my server.

Clearly I've been having a fine time for years without a relay, but I just added the three largest public relays to my list and now my instance is drinking from a firehose.

We'll see how much I like the additional content, exposure, and S3 costs of doing this. Might go back to the bubble I was enjoying.

Bitcoin is baked into the protocol in a really annoying way. It's not mandatory to hold any crypto at all to use the network, so you could theoretically develop a client that cuts out all the crypto features, but it's clearly designed to facilitate lightning network transactions between users.

The decentralized end-to-end encrypted DMs are at least a feature of their own, if you didn't want anything else from a client.

I've been playing with #Nostr. Despite the cryptobro user base the underlying tech is, in fact, not Blockchain based, which is nice. I like the idea of a serverless social network that stays afloat with volunteer-run relays. Very cool model.

Still, the user base is a hard sell. Here's the best description I've heard of Nostr internally, and it's not a motivator...