You missed the point of what he is saying. The point is, proof of work used to post stuff to relays etc. is not solving the spam issue that Nostr is yet to face due to network effects. Your quip about people care about PoW because bitcoin uses it is just a very unrelated statement that is super off base.
Nostr relays are like Discord "servers" if they were actually servers you could deploy yourself and each client had a cryptographic identity and was used in DMs. You can have the same UI to interact with them all. But they are disjoint. You can interact with people in the channels as long as you subscribe to the same "relay" etc.
Also you keep bringing up Lightning as if it is successful but it is not. It failed in every way. Its model simply does not make sense unless you are a node that receives as much as it sends or sends as much as it receives. You know this yourself if you are a Lightning user. Bitcoin is cool, crypto is cool, even Nostr is cool but some of your statements are conflicting with each other and they aren't making great points.
I tried Nostr but like a lot of people here have been saying, it falls short in many ways due to the way it is structured. Relays are not really relays, they are more but also less. They are like community servers. Sure you can connect to many, have the same UI, but they are still disjoint and feels lonely.
You keep saying you can sign your messages and there is value there to people who are saying it is censorable in the ways they described.
This is not a personal thing, I want to like Nostr and I tried using it. I can and would probably get some use out of using it as a pubsub or message delivery infrastructure for two things I want to connect but what if the relay goes down? It is like a centralized pubsub messagebox thing. But can't even do that fully.
That other guy that said it is just like writing a message, signing it, posting it on X, Facebook, YouTube and BlueSky. People who follow those places can see it. There needs to be some sort of relay to relay communication (actual relaying) that needs to go on. And that wouldn't scale, even if it would work for now.
Protocol itself is simple and nice to have. Could be cool as a transport. The concept is uniquely situated too but using it the way it initially came out as feels like trying to shove a square into a circular hole.
I'm building a Nostr app (+- 2mio notes). There is a lot of spam and much worse content.
But it's kinda a solved problem (not through PoW) but through Web of Trust and not having algorithms. You see what the people/communities you follow post.
> I tried Nostr but like a lot of people here have been saying, it falls short in many ways due to the way it is structured. Relays are not really relays, they are more but also less. They are like community servers. Sure you can connect to many, have the same UI, but they are still disjoint and feels lonely.
I'd like to know more. Imho the fact that relays are dumb is a feature.
> You keep saying you can sign your messages and there is value there to people who are saying it is censorable in the ways they described.
All messages are signed. There is no way NOT to sign a message. This comes with the advantage that you don't need to trust the relays/pipes where messages go through which is an immense benefit
> This is not a personal thing, I want to like Nostr and I tried using it. I can and would probably get some use out of using it as a pubsub or message delivery infrastructure for two things I want to connect but what if the relay goes down? It is like a centralized pubsub messagebox thing. But can't even do that fully.
Relays go down all the time. There was an experiment where a major relay (Damus) just deleted the entire dataset. People barely noticed. And as any client (not just the author) and other relays can re-broadcast events the relay eventually recovers.
> There needs to be some sort of relay to relay communication (actual relaying) that needs to go on. And that wouldn't scale, even if it would work for now.
There are three mechanisms that do that:
- clients posts to multiple relays
- clients/followers can rebroadcast notes (to other relays)
- quite a few relays are syncing (negentropy sync)
It was as inactionable and useless as the ones that ID.me or whatever sends. Also calling it Dark Web report always felt super insincere. It had nothing to do with the "dark web", that just served a way to make it sound cooler and more hackery. Aren't we talking about something that's equivalent to HaveIBeenPwned?
Yeah right, 100s of Claude and Gemini subscriptions towards breaking the standard... That's how things are done. Not just one guy with a good reverse engineering skillset.
What if you crowd sourced not 100s but 1000s of Claude subscriptions. That's where the power is. You just give them a task and they just finish it for you. That's how things are done now.
Hard problem? Throw 50000s Claude subscriptions and it will kneel in front of you. Unstoppable. 50000s Claude subscriptions not enough, throw 10000000 subscriptions at it and problem solved. That's how it all works, we know this is the way to do things. Everybody knows you take a problem and throw more Claudes at it and that's it.
For example, we can do anything we want, we just need more Claude subscriptions. I couldn't do something the other day, the problem is I didn't have enough Claudes.
We just need an order of magnitude more Claude subscriptions to figure out cold fusion and unify general relativity with quantum interpretation of the world. Can you imagine what 10E10 Claude subscriptions would do with that problem? Problem stands no chance.
It is so annoying people think this is future, that this is analysis. Despicable.
I think you misread the comment. Each person's AI agent breaks the standard once. He was not claiming they would work together. And even if he the act of translating and understanding large sums of text (binary data) seems easier to divide and concor than open ended problems like cold fusion or unifying quantum physics and general relativity.
What would you expect from z'ers growing up under closed magical shells doing everything for themselves (smartphone and tablet OSes) and later being utterly lost with the basics of IT.
> about this down time but in actuality is it really that big a deal to have 30 minutes of down time or whatever. It's not like anything behind cloudflare is "mission critical" in the sense that lives are at stake or even a huge amount of money is at stake.
This reads like sarcasm. But I guess it is not.
Yes, you are a CDN, a major one at that. 30 minutes of downtime or "whatever" is not acceptable. I worked at traffic teams of social networks that looked at themselves as that mission critical. CF is absolutely that critical and it is definitely lives at stake.
Why does that have to be global? You can still pass it around. If you don't want to clobber registers, you can still put it in a struct. I don't imagine you are trying to avoid the overhead of dereferencing a pointer.
I think a better example might be logging. How is this typically solved in Rust? Do you have to pass a Logger reference to every function that potentially wants to log something? (In C++ you would typically have functions/macros that operate on a global logger instance.)
In Rust you typically use the "log" crate, which also has a global logger instance [0]. There is also "tracing" which uses thread local storage.
As another comment said, global state is allowed. It just has to be proven thread-safe via Rust's Send and Sync traits, and 'static lifetime. I've used things like LazyLock and ArcSwap to achieve this in the past.
I wonder what the advantage of passing it around is when it makes the argument list longer. The only advantage that I can see is that it emphasizes that this function does something with cache.
Not sure how that would be done without pissing people off. But you know what sounds good right now? A fresh bowl of Kellogg's Rice Crispy Treats. Would you like me to load Instacart for you?
You started off writing this yourself and then "augmented" the reply of an LLM for the later part, right? Because the tone of your post changes from human to LLM as I continue reading it.
or it might be changing from anecdotal human to technical research human. Here's my question - if you had read that 5 years ago would you think it was written by a human who had done some reading on the matter, or would you think they googled it and copied some of what they found.
Obviously 5 years ago we couldn't have worried it was an LLM, but if you wouldn't have thought someone just copy pasted something without understanding it, or someone was crazy on drugs when they wrote something, then it seems somewhat unfair to give people this new accusation.
This fellow human speaks the truth. You people did trust strangers before the invasion of "Earth", it's totally not fair to be overly wary of the Mimics now!
I did too, I met a great Mimic one time on a business trip in Canada, and formed a strong long lasting relationship based on trust, honesty and hot nasty banging.
Not OP but while I don't seek "punishment", I do seek accountability. I know that might seem like a flowery synonym at best, or an amorphous piece of jargon at worst, but if we are to treat online spaces as public forums, we need to structure these spaces like public forums, which means having consequences for abject lies. The "but who decides" response is a thought-terminating cliche that we need to collectively move past. Until we stop letting the perfect get in the way of the good enough, we will continue to let bad actors dictate the public understanding of technological issues, and of issues more generally (eg: antivax).
The trump administration in the US also frames its crackdown on civil society in terms of "accountability for lies". But I guess its fine when your side does it.
I don't see Trump doing this or his Administration. For the first time in years I'm actually not worried about the FBI and what dastardly political maneuverings they are up to. The CIA is still probably pretty bad. Yes, there are a lot of Republicans who are neo-authoritarians who need to be shut down before they ruin open and free society for a pipe dream. It's like you can't win no matter which party is running things because there are always the freaky lunatics who want to limit your freedoms, expand government, and cover for their own horrible misdeeds.
> I don't see Trump doing this or his Administration.
It's been a hallmark of his Administration, so you not seeing it is...interesting.
> For the first time in years I'm actually not worried about the FBI and what dastardly political maneuverings they are up to.
In the sense of it not being a mystery because it is more naked in both the direction and the specific approach to partisan political abuse, I guess I could see that, but in terms of not being concerned, the only explanation for that is GP’s “But I guess its fine when your side does it.”
Most claims of 'the other side' is lying are themselves lies. It's mostly people just spinning things to suit their own personal biases (without necessarily even realizing that's what they're doing). For instance the vaccine topic is one I did a deep dive on not too long ago when deciding which vaccines to approve for my children. This [1] is essentially the bible of vaccines - it's a massive study across a large sampling of evidence for all major vaccines, carried out by the National Academies of Science. I'll quote them:
----
The vast majority of causality conclusions in the report are that the evidence was inadequate to accept or reject a causal relationship. Some might interpret that to mean either of the following statements:
- Because the committee did not find convincing evidence that the vaccine does cause the adverse event, the vaccine is safe.
- Because the committee did not find convincing evidence that the vaccine does not cause the adverse event, the vaccine is unsafe.
Neither of these interpretations is correct. “Inadequate to accept or reject” means just that—inadequate. If there is evidence in either direction that is suggestive but not sufficiently strong about the causal relationship, it will be reflected in the weight-of-evidence assessments of the epidemiologic or the mechanistic data. However suggestive those assessments might be, in the end the committee concluded that the evidence was inadequate to accept or reject a causal association.
----
The overwhelming majority of the rhetoric around vaccines, including from governmental figures, is doing exactly what they warn against. There's simply a lot of nuance on most of every issue worth discussing, that people often don't want to acknowledge.
If you want to talk about Covid “Two weeks to slow the spread” was the foundational lie that they told that did more damage than almost any lie I can remember. That is solid truth right there.
> but if we are to treat online spaces as public forums, we need to structure these spaces like public forums, which means having consequences for abject lies. The "but who decides" response is a thought-terminating cliche that we need to collectively move past.
In order to "move past" that, you have to find a way to address official lies and cases where the majority is wrong.
.
For example the official denial of the fact that the Wuhan lab was researching things similar to covid-19. (Doesn't matter whether it actually came from there.)
Or the official lies about mask effectiveness. (Regardless of whether they're effective or not, the government told people things that it believed at the time were false.)
Or the lies about the world's best anti-parasite medication (that just isn't an antiviral) being dangerous horse-paste.
Or the lies about Hunter Biden's laptop being Russian disinformation.
Or that still-ongoing culture war topic where both sides claim the other is lying.
Nostr relays are like Discord "servers" if they were actually servers you could deploy yourself and each client had a cryptographic identity and was used in DMs. You can have the same UI to interact with them all. But they are disjoint. You can interact with people in the channels as long as you subscribe to the same "relay" etc.
Also you keep bringing up Lightning as if it is successful but it is not. It failed in every way. Its model simply does not make sense unless you are a node that receives as much as it sends or sends as much as it receives. You know this yourself if you are a Lightning user. Bitcoin is cool, crypto is cool, even Nostr is cool but some of your statements are conflicting with each other and they aren't making great points.
I tried Nostr but like a lot of people here have been saying, it falls short in many ways due to the way it is structured. Relays are not really relays, they are more but also less. They are like community servers. Sure you can connect to many, have the same UI, but they are still disjoint and feels lonely.
You keep saying you can sign your messages and there is value there to people who are saying it is censorable in the ways they described.
This is not a personal thing, I want to like Nostr and I tried using it. I can and would probably get some use out of using it as a pubsub or message delivery infrastructure for two things I want to connect but what if the relay goes down? It is like a centralized pubsub messagebox thing. But can't even do that fully.
That other guy that said it is just like writing a message, signing it, posting it on X, Facebook, YouTube and BlueSky. People who follow those places can see it. There needs to be some sort of relay to relay communication (actual relaying) that needs to go on. And that wouldn't scale, even if it would work for now.
Protocol itself is simple and nice to have. Could be cool as a transport. The concept is uniquely situated too but using it the way it initially came out as feels like trying to shove a square into a circular hole.
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