Wore the exact same color scheme tonight to the gym except black shoes instead of white.

They are run by yids, probably deep state, and have a "whites need not apply" policy for their dev jobs, like a lot of corporate America these days. That's enough for me to not like them. Their results are still better than other Amerikwan search engines, but not as good as Yandex - which has also unfortunately gotten more cucked with time.

Literally all of the friends I still talk to irl got married. Or are engaged. I'm the odd man out. This is an awkward situation to be in but I must hold the line. I can see why it's easier just not to have friends. I was in that position by choice for a while in the 2010s before old friends got back in touch with me.

I still have my old IRL social media accounts on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Snapchat but I barely use them anymore. And it's because they're just too much like real life. What I've come to realize is that the intrusion of real life into cyberspace was a grave mistake. Sites like Twitter and Nostr that are open by design and also tolerant of anonymity (pseudo-anonymity really) make for a better UX, let's face it. Some amount of detachment or removal from real life identities is part of the charm and the enjoyment.

Non-anonymous media have their place, but I find that model works better with video media than the scrolling social media feed type of app. I know the lines have been blurred over time as social media have tried to be all things to all people, but I'm talking about primary focus.

What are LLMs good for? In my experience, a lot of things. A recent example: I was looking for a specific formula to do some calculations. This had nothing to do with programming; in fact, I was looking at economic data. Search engines kept giving me garbage results. I had the idea to go over to ChatGPT and in a prompt I explained exactly what I was looking for. It popped up the formula right away. I've seen this in the past too. Even censored LLMs (all the mainstream ones right now) can in certain cases give you better results than search. I'm using LLMs for research a lot right now.

I do like the Amethyst client for Nostr, however, what I don't like about it is that you can only scroll back so far. Sometimes I like to look up older posts and it's difficult on Amethyst. I haven't had the same problem on the Nostter app which I use when on the desktop. The infinite scroll seems to work just fine there.

I didn't take offense to this because it doesn't apply to me, but in all seriousness this is why I don't hang out with other programmers LOL.

But I don't post much either, which I'll have to fix. l'll give you that, you post effortlessly while I have to actually make myself post.

It seems that substantive discussion is in the process of moving off all of these scrolling feed type sites - back to forums and blogs where it belongs I guess.

But anyway:

-X still has a critical mass of users that allows there to be some intelligent posters, but you can't say anything controversial ( I got sent to the penalty box recently for just a moderate and general insult, nothing targeted ) and even finding content can be a challenge.

-Nostr you can say anything but it's not ready for primetime. The crowd here makes me think of guys who had an edgy libertarian phase in college but then never moved past it. That seems to be a constant for any crowd with software nerds.

I'm not sure why they do this either - I could understand doing it if you had, for example, a lake home or cabin in a resort area or something like that, which you would use as a getaway during the summer months and also skip the hottest months in Florida (unless you live south of Lake Okeechobee, where it is always hot). Boomers in this region sometimes do that. But I don't understand having suburban houses in two locations. Maybe they kept those houses because of family living in the area and they want to be close to them for part of the year. Other than the getaway home thing, I can't see another good reason to maintain two homes. Seems like a major pain in the ass and expense.

Reddit is what would have happened to Twitter had it not been bought by Elon the Likud agent. Elon didn't "fix" it by turning it into X but he at least extended its lifespan by not allowing it to turn into a degenerate commie morass like Reddit. What I think this shows is that any industry based in Silicon Valley is fundamentally unsound -- every company there has gone to shit. And X is still there, but critically, Elon himself moved out of CA to get away from that malign influence and he isn't subject to the same level of control. Thiel also realized you can't stay in SV and still have viable companies, and moved to LA.

Gab is in Pennsylvania, Rumble is in Florida, Odysee is in New Hampshire, NOSTR was invented by a Brazilian, etc. Clearly the innovation has moved away from Silicon Valley. This happened before BTW -- Route 128 in Boston was Big Tech before Silicon Valley. But there's not one main hub anymore for innovation.

More on urbanists later.

To be honest, that graphic is what X is like now, even with algorithms. Engagement and energy is just way down from the old days. And all the fake accounts don't help any. Even a censored place like Bluesky has more energy these days, go see for yourself.

But you're right that if you want engagement on Nostr you'll have to try harder than I have so far. But that's ok. Right now it works the way it should -- I get to see the content I want to see, chronologically displayed, not what the algorithm deigns to show me.

Completely uncensored chronological feed = underrated

Quality of content/discussion is far more important than quantity of followers. This is not X and shouldn't try to be.

That should read "founders" not "followers", thank you autocorrect for messing with the meaning of the post.

nostr:nevent1qqsfrqvdnwu45jwy24lhnvzruf53cg70hl0qust5aazz32sk2xxvcrspz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduhsygp3xnua8st6hz8l4vgj02zhuj2e4avrlzgghrm5xamty684u4xrmqpsgqqqqqqsern72v

Should read "founders" above, NOT followers... Autocorrect did that. And it messes up the meaning of the post.

"NOSTR haters" are basically peddlers of desperate BS, trying to keep us tethered to the centralized SV-based platforms that have done us so wrong. And whose followers, I might add, are extremely dubious people -- not "entrepreneurs" as was always claimed, but likely assets of the state, or even worse, foreign governments or international crime networks. Decentralized social media threatens the surveillance, grifting and brainwashing apparatus they have so carefully built. The only value these platforms have (to their end users that is) is their network. We should be using their services to poach people to places like Nostr.

Ok so now we know who he was working for ... And the word on the street is he was locked up because hackers leaked Israeli state secrets on Telegram and Israel wanted him to shut it down, and he wouldn't.

What I don't get is why he thought he would be safe in France. French intel is highly coordinated with Israel, just look at the Epstein/Maxwell connection. It reminds me of Russian oligarchs running away to the UK thinking they'll be safe from Putin there.

The other thing to mention is, the average quality of posting on X these days is very poor. I created a normie outreach account with good intentions. But I ended up interacting regularly with content that was so bad that I couldn't bear it and I had to rethink things. Unless you know specifically who you want to engage with, and no doubt there are some quality accounts still, you will come across the average content, which is extremely low effort and low information.

The other obvious problem is all the fake people. The site is absolutely overrun with fake accounts now. Sometimes you will see different accounts posting the same thing with a few hours gap between. A side effect of the AI revolution is that the internet is now spammed with fake people. And as it becomes harder to distinguish between real humans and bots, it becomes less justifiable to use the platforms that are overrun with the latter. Not least because sorting fact from fiction even in identity becomes that much harder. Of course, the news is all fake now, so you're not missing much there.

What a world!

One thing that's become abundantly clear about X since it was taken over by Elon Musk is that he is compromised. He appears to be working for Israel. And not just in the general sense that all US elites work for Israel. I mean, he's directly on the payroll.

The more I've learned about his background, the more it makes sense. His family was involved in the gem industry in South Africa, and they took part in the post-apartheid looting of the country and smuggling of its wealth that made the South African diaspora among the richest diaspora communities in the world.

The South African elites have always had ties to the international Jewish community, who were also heavily involved in the gem industry in that country, and Israel was one of the states to maintain full trade with South Africa during apartheid when other Western countries sanctioned them.

Musk, like many of these SA elites, is perfectly happy to be an agent of theirs if it enriches him. He also appears to be on the payroll of other foreign countries as well. Notably China, as he has spoken favorably of their system as a whole, and of his plans to implement a social credit type system here in the United States with the help of Silicon Valley technology.

I'm not sure what to think of X or its uses these days in light of these facts. Is it still useful? I'm on the fence right now and trying to decide. Just know that whatever you say there is probably being monitored and ending up in the dragnet of *foreign* intelligence services, as well as domestic.

As I pointed out on Twitter or X as it's now called, I was looking at a list of metropolitan areas in the United States. And what I found was that the cities that have the most explosive growth in population are all in hot areas. We're talking metro areas in North Carolina, Arizona, Texas, Florida, Georgia, that sort of thing. The formerly cool metropolises in the Northeast or on the West Coast are not doing so well. I'm not going to go into the why of this for now, but it is pretty clear that America is changing socially.

What I do find interesting is that despite the climate cult that has grown up again in recent years, it doesn't really inform anybody's decisions about where to live. We are supposed to believe that the Sun Belt is going to be uninhabitable in the future, but that's where everyone is moving. Seems they don't actually believe that this is taking place. So, even though many people professed to believe in climate change, they act like they don't. That is to say, propaganda has basically no effect on real world decisions. It's kind of like how we're going to transition to green energy and EVs, but we're using more fossil fuels than ever and there are more ice vehicles on the road than ever. There's the cult, and then there's the facts.

That doesn't mean that NetZero is not happening or not a problem. Here in the Upper Midwest they are trying to force that through policy. The winter in this region is very cold. If they get aggressive about destroying the coal power plants here, enforcing us to rely upon an intermittent source, then we will face the choice between freezing in the dark or cutting down the pristine forests that we've allowed to grow back up in the last 100 years to burn for fuel. And by the way, that's not good for carbon emissions either. Do you really think people are going to be compelled to just freeze in the dark when they will have forests to cut down? These are things nobody seems to think about, even the smart people.

Airbnb was great in the 2010s, but it's a joke and a major grift today. I loathe all the BS ticky-tack rules and inflated prices. Hotels, motels, and traditional rentals are supreme as we approach the middle 2020s.

The carriage trade from Japan was going to get disrupted at some point because in order to save the yen, Japan will have to normalize interest rates. This was a mere 35 bps rise. To normalize rates there will need to be many more such raises. How will markets react then? An example of how markets have gotten untethered from reality.

With all the environmental pollution still building up and the genderbending this causes, we should expect this to get even more common over time. There's not much point to lament the inevitable (trannies, mutants) but right wingers love lost causes. I miss the old uncensored Internet but it's not coming back. I mean, it's understandable that people don't want the state secretly transitioning their kids but beyond that ...