Anthony Di Franco

Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr P2P and federated protocols converge toward becoming Nostr, but with extra steps

@gordon.bsky.social I'm reading and thinking today about your newsletter.squishy.computer/p/natures-ma... I'm curious why you didn't title it "Nature's many attempts to evolve a relay".

How you would define a relay in that zone of attraction that Nature wants to repeatedly evolve?

I miss defragging

Some research I'm in the middle of incorporates an analogy that shows that not having positional information in the inputs to a module is like not telling a function what order its arguments are in. It also shows a way to add things like type annotations and keyword arguments.

You can estimate a bound on performance by looking at entropy from letter frequencies to words easily calculated from a dictionary and then word frequencies to (short) documents the latter of which is relevant to bag of words based information retrieval which is in common use.

Reality is being funny again

Senators Warren & Graham Want To Create New Online Speech Police Commission The regulation will continue until internet freedom improves, apparently. Last year we wrote about Senator Michael Bennet pushing a terrible “Digital Platform Commission” to be the new internet sp...

So, Elizabeth Warren (!?!?) has teamed up with Lindsey Graham to literally create a new federal agency to license speech online. It's as bad as it sounds. https://www.techdirt.com/2023/07/31/senators-warren-graham-want-to-create-new-online-speech-police-commission/

Risk and Precarity Part 1: The Early Digital Age - Mindplex “Cyberculture” — the embrace of rising digital technology in the 1990s — was attractive to the hip (a word which, according to some, translates into “knowing”). Avant-gardistes are instinc...

Barlow imagined cyberspace as a separate state largely unconnected to the realities of governments & other concerns of the physical world, an idea that seems preposterous now that access to the internet is a requirement... https://magazine.mindplex.ai/risk-and-precarity-part-1-the-early-digital-age/

Protocols entangle the human and technology pieces of an infrastructure so that you have to be invested in both or neither. You can’t just be invested in one aspect the way you could with platforms. The separation of concerns collapses. Like separation of church-and-state going in reverse. 🤔

A weird blindspot of world today is that programming is so important, good programmers get paid way too much to waste their time explaining wtf they do to non-programmers so computing narratives are fueled by non-programmer and bad-programmer takes. So entire grand narrative of history is blinded

Now that age of social media is basically over (modulo zero-alpha normie reach/use) and we’re in age of protocol media, we can look back and assess impact. I think it goes:

7. Old media digital ops
6. Instagram
5. Blogs
4. YouTube
3. Podcasts
2. Forums, FB Groups, and Reddit
1. Pre-Musk Twitter

They call potato chips “crisps” and eels are “butthole surfers” and there is something called an “hellthread” which I haven't got figured out yet. I just don't worry about any of it.

Who’s making the reddit clone on the at protocol?

The USPTO has issued proposed rules that will make it harder for everyone in #opensource to challenge bad #patents. Let them know you want a fair and open system for all, where anyone can seek a review of an invalid patent. Read about it here: hubs.la/Q01Svz2V0

If I were FAA Administrator, a detailed schedule of drone operating licenses would be my next area. The current $5/drone reg is low stakes, like Twitter blue for drones, insulting to all. Let’s see $$,$$$ licenses that actually open up the airspace to BVLOS, the money can go into an insurance fund.

Is there anything more American than wandering around Iceland in a huge green sweatshirt that says Ireland

So no one died, there was no drone, there was no AI, there was no actual simulation, it was all a role-playing scenario run by someone *not even in the Air Force*

https://www.vice.com/en/article/4a33gj/ai-controlled-drone-goes-rogue-kills-human-operator-in-usaf-simulated-test

I'd prefer not to.

The mirage of social media is that because its software, we believe if we’d just written better software we could have detected & censored that content or banned that user before their behavior got worse.

It is an impossible standard but also one where the baseline expectations are higher each year

Trying to regulate AI is going to end up like trying to regulate encryption. The genie is alreasy out of the bottle and so preventing regular people from using it won’t stop bad actors from using.

The knowledge is already out there. The research papers have been online for years.

It’s speed running the cycle of regulatory capture by incumbents. Usually this process takes years not months. 😊

I think the psuedo-copyright licensing regime also fits into the strategy to create a moat. I used to work on music licensing policy and that barely works, and way better for middlemen than artists. People that say we need to recreate that either don't know how it functions or know exactly.

Yeah it’s very clearly gaming regulators for a defacto monopoly. Though it’s also possible Sam sees exterminating humanity as a neutral goal, where we gotta hear both sides.

I’m not going to claim mine there is the end-all or be-all; I wrote it in less than two hours while on a holiday weekend.

But, uh, I don’t think any attorney should be worried about their job any time soon.

As fallout from yesterday’s “lawyer cites to made up cases” flapdoodle, I ended up somehow in a challenge against a guy who claimed that he could write a better brief with ChatGPT than a lawyer could without one.

It … did not really go how he planned.

She advocated for women's education and suffrage, and was really into liberty, free speech, and free press. This was before 1722-1735. Franklin had not received a formal education, but had read a few good books.

Benjamin Franklin’s original newspaper column was under a female presenting anon persona “Silence Dogood”.

it warms my heart when a teenager on social media comes into their own by starting a hate campaign against me, forming opinions, expressing them, demonstrating leadership. it's a beautiful thing to watch

“Oooh looks like this is gonna be another banger” me frying sausages for my kid and pretending to be cool

I’m turning pro. Increasingly my life has almost no strategy or tactics. It’s inching towards 100% logistics.

I’m reluctantly concluding that the quantum many worlds version of the multiverse taken too seriously is an idiotic premise for fiction. We don’t understand the physics and philosophy in an interesting enough way to make up good stories.

Stick to simple classical macro multiverse