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How do I start using Nostr?
If you have an iPhone, join the Damus App beta on TestFlight (built by @jb55 and coming soon for Android)
- Generate a public key and private key (npub, nsec)
- Save them in a password manager or somewhere safe.
- Add a few relays (you can find the complete list at https://nostr.watch/)
- Find and follow friends from Twitter using https://www.nostr.directory/
- Start posting notes and liking/boosting posts.
Our genetic code remains that tower of universal IKEA instructions, faithfully copied, plonked down and consulted anew at each cell replication. And we are lucky to have epigenetics' confetti of handwritten Post-Its interleaved among its thousands of pages; they guide and customize our development as incredibly complex organisms. But hopeful rumors that these little marks, these bits of marginalia, these ephemeral scraps of advice, are running the show, as heritable as the tome they annotate, are at best a motivated fantasy. Transgenerational trauma may well meaningfully exist, but pinning its validity on a system of Post-It notes that flutter away at the slightest breeze (or at each meiotic event) is a non-starter. And all to the good. Ultimately, epigenetics is a case where you can't take it with you.
https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-peer-review
Maybe nobody objected [to Peer Review] because the hypothesis seemed so obviously true: science will be better off if we have someone check every paper and reject the ones that don't pass muster. They called it "peer review."This was a massive change. From antiquity to modernity, scientists wrote letters and circulated monographs, and the main barriers stopping them from communicating their findings were the cost of paper, postage, or a printing press, or on rare occasions, the cost of a visit from the Catholic Church. Scientific journals appeared in the 1600s, but they operated more like magazines or newsletters, and their processes of picking articles ranged from "we print whatever we get" to "the editor asks his friend what he thinks" to "the whole society votes." Sometimes journals couldn't get enough papers to publish, so editors had to go around begging their friends to submit manuscripts, or fill the space themselves. Scientific publishing remained a hodgepodge for centuries.(Only one of Einstein's papers was ever peer-reviewed, by the way, and he was so surprised and upset that he published his paper in a different journal instead.)
Needless to say, a lot of people out there are quite wary of any moves toward a cashless society because they believe that it is part of the "end times" scenario described in the Bible. According to one recent survey, approximately 39 percent of all Americans are convinced that we are living in the "end times" right now…
Nearly two in five Americans, including half of self-identified Christians and a quarter of the religiously unaffiliated, agree "we are living in the End Times," a new study has found.
That's about 39% of Americans who believe we are living in the End Times, according to Pew Research, highlighted by Lifeway Research.
Other surveys have come up with similar results.
This shouldn't come as a surprise to any of us, because global events have definitely started to spin out of control in recent years. At this point, even secular websites are publishing articles about the surging popularity of "apocalyptic scenarios"…
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- A nation-state will insist that every citizen and resident must have an account on the national Mastodon. Perhaps in order to listen to the thoughts of Dear Leader™. Perhaps for some sinister monitoring purpose. If you want to talk to your buddies in that region, your server may have to Federate with something running old, outdated, or hostile software.
- Geeks like me will rage that this all could been avoided if everyone bought their own Raspberry Pi and learned half-a-dozen simple Linux commands.
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Amidst all the pomp and circumstance was a short, but powerful and sobering speech by Morris Chang, the now-91-years-old founder of TSMC. He shared his dream of building a fab in the US, the hard-earned lessons from TSMC's first time building a fab in America 25 years ago, his perspective that globalization and free trade is almost dead, and why this event is just the "end of the beginning".
It was the only speech that gave a real sense of what America's semiconductor future would reallylook like. Yet no one listened. No American, or any Western media outlet for that matter, bothered to cover this speech. Only Nikkei and a handful of Taiwanese outlets wrote about it. Not even C-Span c
Here are some of my top takeaways from this speech.
The Financial Times reported Sunday that scientists in the California-based Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) had achieved a "net energy gain" from an experimental fusion reactor.
That would represent the first time that researchers have successfully produced more energy in a fusion reaction — the same type that powers the Sun — than was consumed during the process, a potentially major step in the pursuit of zero-carbon power.
It's VendorOps. You are hired to tend the vendor's stuff.
Instead of working on the core of the code and focusing on the performance of a self-contained application, developers are now forced to act as some kind of monstrous manual management layer between hundreds of various APIs, puzzling together whether Flark 2.3.5 on a T5.enormous instance will work with a Kappa function that sends data from ElephantStore in the us-polar-north-1 region to the APIFunctionFactoryTerminal in us-polar-south-2.
A couple of months ago, an idea came to mind of analyzing Wikipedia edits to discover which public institutions, companies or government agencies were contributing to Wikipedia, and what they were editing.
After a quick Google search I realized that it had been done before, but the service, called WikiScanner, had been discontinued in 2007. After WikiScanner, the idea surfaced again several years later: in 2014 the @congressedits Twitter account was created, which automatically tweeted any Wikipedia edit made by IP addresses belonging to the U.S. Congress. The account was eventually suspended by Twitter (read why here). The code for this bot was released under a CC0 license on Github, and several other bots were created, looking for edits from different organizations.
