That is awesome.

An interesting fun fact is that there is three countries in Europe with Red, White and Green tricolour flags. Hungary, Italy and Bulgaria, and all three countries are huge caffeine and brandy fiends. Grappa, Palinka, Rakiya, and espresso coffee are national drinks in all three countries.

I was just talking about this yesterday regarding the question of Apple hardware... sick to death of hardware that doesn't do what I want.

I have two phones, neither have replaceable batteries, one has swollen due to being sat in a hot place for too long, the older, crappier one doesn't work with charge-and-data adapters so I can't use it as a range extender with ethernet/usb adapters, I have two different ones, neither can be used on the old phone without exhausting the battery every day or so, and can't be charged concurrently.

Neither of the phones let me swap out even the operating system, let alone use the hardware how I want to.

My next phone is going to be VoIP and use a condenser mic and its inbuilt analog sound output, and be stuck to my desk, and not one milligauss of microwave radiation kthx bye.

I am unbearably relieved to learn that Github supports mermade diagrams and so does Typora so I will be making my protocols much prettier tomorrow.

In 2018 I started forming an idea based on the CAP theorem of distributed systems theory, that one can get all three features, consistency, availability and partition resistance, only if you have several cooperating and interacting protocols running in parallel, independently, but intertwined.

My initial idea put PoW and PoS federation style alongside a fast gossip based PubSub - I still think that the Mempool could become its own eventually consistent protocol and strengthen finality and reduce reorg risk without centralisation.

Obviously, as a pure Maxi now, the federation of any form is a liability, it needs to operating on the peer to peer level as a baseline.

But state channels, now, state channels, plus the proof of work blockchain, plus the fast gossip pubsub consensus filter...

Indra easily fits the role of a transport for the mempool system, in fact, it makes a lot of sense that p2p traffic be anonymised and the majority of it running out of hidden services.

The security budget for a global monetary system is pretty big. The conventional system is much higher and more risky due to the often old and antiquated methods of securing the connections. The wide adoption of visa/mastercard based payment networks is exposing a great deal of vulnerabilities that sooner or later will be recognised and a lot of people suddenly without any money.

So it makes sense that if I'm in the business of sending out sats to pay for things, from a secure, large stack, that ideally, nobody knows where the keys are.

For generic traffic, just gossiping things, this is not relevant, but considering the two things together, how to make the gossip help hide the traffic, you put it into the same layer.

Because this control traffic is metered, but privately measured, it's a bit hard to see but if nodes pay for their more sensitive outbound traffic, and all of them do it, then that percentage of their income is going to literally be reciprocal to their spend.

The blockchain, with proof of work and probabalistic finality, combined with state channels that work within that static, expensive to change global state, to facilitate routing payments, obviously there is one ingredient missing from all this:

Hiding where the signals emanate.

I believe an analysis of the C, A and P properties of these three patterns of system design, they overlap and produce a strong element in each case.

Bitcoin's *consistency* is the legend of it. It is not immediate finality, but after 6 blocks it is infeasibly small odds of the history being changed.

Lightning's *partition resistance* is what makes it work (It is source routed but no peer needs to know the whole network, only paths and the onions give addresses), and generally the burden is on the merchant. Literally, channels cannot be deleted, and they continue to exist at least in potentia while someone has the keys to the transaction and the latest state of the channel. It is a subtle distinction in some ways but in others it's very clear - the state is locked by bitcoin's consistency.

Indra protects *availability*, the primary threat against availability is of course the lack of paths between two points. In network terms this is firewalls, blacklists, jamming/shutting down satellites/base stations, and cutting cables. This is also why Indra's most important type of control messaging is peer metadata.

As a trio, all three reinforce and create the utility for each other, providing privacy, store of value, payment processing, and privacy of communications, all being essential tools for business, and implemented so that the cost of compromising the security of the networks is beyond the potential loot payload.

Nearly complete draft of Indra Protocols:

https://github.com/indra-labs/indra/blob/9-architecture-of-relay-engine/docs/protocols.md

Posting to share the state of this part of the work that I am engaged in at the moment.

The lack of diagramming tooling in Github means that you see the rubbish PNG version of the diagrams, which the boxes have opaque, overlaying backgrounds, but the PNG generator doesn't render the damn things.

I will look for a better solution for diagrams but I just wanted this document to be semi-decent for people to see. I have dropped the link on the Lightning Network mailing list because I think it might help them create a fully receiver side anonymity protocol.

I am always paranoid about building my work to be brittle, but it seems to me that the Lightning Network Protocol is a little less formalised than it appears or might be expected to be. Similar also Nostr.

For sure, the most widely used LN implementation, LND... yeah... holy crap what a bug festival. Try messing around with the configuration system to discover how many things don't actually work.

Anyhow, step 1 and 2 of the hidden service protocol can equally enable a mechanism for proxied inbound payments on Lightning Network. Just switch a few labels around and it's the same thing.

We are working on a scheme for charging for delivery of data with the indra project https://github.com/indra-lab/indra

It provides the delivery guarantee side, provides a service advertisment for delivery of such service. A micropaywall to access a file repository on a bytes of data basis would be very easy to construct, indra forms the first leg that enables forward anonymity, and the user provides the return path, protecting their location from the hosting service.

We are putting the finishing touches on the hidden service protocol also, which would enable such file hosting to be anonymous both for the client side and server side. Currently there is no accounting enabled for hidden services to charge for read/write access, but this will be necessary to complete the protocol.

Indra is being designed from the ground up to be extremely unopinionated and flexible. If you can think of ways in which charging for forwarding data from one point to another can be part of a service protocol it can give you the monetisation side to make it profitable/break even.

I dunno but I just saw news about a trucking company going bankrupt so maybe that time is passed.

Also, it's horrible work, boring and really bad for your body. Probably easier now but you have to be pretty strong even with power steering and air cushion spring seat and air conditioning and blue lights and a pitch black layover cabin.

It's kinda a lifestyle but if the bottom is falling out maybe just do courier work.

Aluminium rivets are a crime. Can. Not. Last.

LoL I think truck driver pay is pretty damn high recently. Not sure how expensive to get all the paperwork done. Or how much, these costs tend to rise proportionally so you pay your 'fair share' before you even started working. Parasites. And it's pretty scary at first moving heavy machines around.

Not sure what you mean. I am very familiar with the transaction script engine, difficulty adjustment algorithm and the p2p protocol, veracks, banscores, persistent peers. I forked the btcd codebase to match an ancient 2014 chain.

And core devs don't control anything. Plenty of other inputs you can see on the issues and the linux.org mailing list.

Bitcoin is a common property so it cannot be changed without very long discussions. Go look at the BIP list, now nearing 300. Much of the new stuff not yet implemented.

Fork off being the operative phrase. ^_^

Can't be fiat money because it's unlimited. But Bitcoin is limited and makes a linear cost ratio that disfavors Sybil and spam attacks.

We will have to build them. The megacorps are really just mercenary gangs building malware for the government.

Hooray, the allergy is calming down.

And I think the "payload" trojan that brought it is at the exit.

My gut is literally telling me it was the corn.

No more corn pls, for the love of God. Or rice, or wheat.

Ever.

Only potatoes, I think. Ate chips two days ago without incident. And a whole litre of ice cream. That was probably not that helpful.

All of this started after about 4 days of whey powder.

Then next day after no problem chips and ice cream, 6 corn cakes with boiled eggs. 8 hours later wheezing from 2 until nearly 6. Now easing off, it might be played out and nothing to do with the scraps of albuterol and mint tea.

Still tightness but none of the panic, gasping for air feeling.

I hate this allergy. The right foods, it's a big struggle. I think that with alcohol and nicotine gone though, I will recover adequate fat absorption capacity, as my gutropes are calmed down, and won't overreact to the fats.

Being stuck having to eat carbs yet most of them containing allergenic proteins... Doesn't leave much.

Also probably explains why it's just always been a staple. Carbs for irritable gutropes...

Jeffrey Tucker. Murray Rothbard.

Not Pee Wee Hermann.

Yesterday broke the no grains rule and I have been awake since 2am wheezing.

The corn is number 1 suspect because it was almost exactly 8 hours before onset, which seems to be a marker for a trigger in the lower intestines.

Got no reliever, been squeezing out useless puffs after warming and shaking it.

Fasting is a guaranteed cure but like all of the treatments, it becomes it's own extra problem, starvation.

But I am stuck between wheezing, caffeine and avoiding grains. I think now milk and eggs are far lesser problems, especially eggs, and maybe it's just whey, not casein. Ie the liquid in yoghurt or cottage cheese. Acid soluble.

Hopefully I get my breath back soon.

I am so sick of this!!!!

I still find setting up python a total nightmare. Version 2, version 3... just kill me already. Where is pip? Why does setup.py not work?

Every time someone makes a new project in Python 2, God kills a kitten. You Bastards! Every day that Python 2 projects are not ported to 3, he just tortures the cat a bit but it dies eventually.

With Ubuntu, the best version for hardware support of anything between 2 and 5 years old is with 20.04.

But you need to dig around for a few things, like git and openssh for git signing with ssh (I like not needing to think about a second keychain with gpg, and it's already what I use to auth to Github to push my commits, so why not sign it also).

Others too, I have brave, flatpak, a thing for libvirt/virt-manager for managing KVM and lxc containers, there is even a PPA for golang, which I now have pinned to 1.19, currently at 1.19.5, but nice to have it just there and only one copy needed system wide. It's the current best version for Go. And steam, of course.

And the interface. Well, Gnome is a bucket of proverbials after 20. Some parts of the shell have got better, but the whole thing weighs in about 5gb of constant memory utilisation at least, if not more.

There is a PPA called ubuntucinnamonremix for focal fossa 20.04 ubuntu. I am running this now and even with browser and Goland and music playing I'm only using about 3.5gb of memory! That means lots of my HDD access is being cached, everything snappy, everything in memory except when the dirty cache is being paged out to disk, which also speeds things up, oportunistically grouping writes to storage cylinders.

And Variety, don't forget to install Variety. Nothing worse than boring stock ubuntu wallpapers.

Oh, and another great thing, which I haven't fully got figured out, is using this tool called 'cubic' to get all your current installed packages, and put them into an install image so if you have to reset everything, it will rewrite all the files in the installer to the factory state and leave your folders as is. So it snapshots your system configuration.

apt list --installed|cut -f1 -d'/'|xargs>packagelist.txt

to capture your system's existing package installations to use in the chroot that cubic lets you make from a base iso image.

I'm still working on more labor-free and resilient methods of keeping my system consistent, but this means I can just refresh my system easily now.

Pop OS has a feature like this, but it's totally doable with ubiquity as is in Ubuntu just by not formatting your disk, everything is set back to normal but everything in your profile retained. So all user-install stuff sticks also. The only things that get lost tend to be pam.d and similar folders that you may modify for u2f as I have on my system, but a lot of things that are not part of the normal configuration, like added items in the '/etc/apt/sources.d' folder, for example, remain. The thing is that the U2F stuff anyway you have to make a new key with the fresh install as it has a new machine ID, but you will lose the settings in the files. Well, I just need to back them up to my home folder I guess, and then they can be restored easily.

With curds and whey!

MFW I saw "Pay TV" (satellite) for the first time.

It was explained: "It's part of the program".

I was like, "If it has ads why pay, what's the real difference?" Just hire the VHS or DVD as the era had. And Netflix and Hulu don't put ads on.

But Amazon. lol. Lol amazon. Lol.

Prime: not even once.

Ketogenic diets are probably contraindicated for detox and recovery from long term alcohol abuse.

The digestive system is steadily ground down by the many different ways the ethanol and friends directly affect the membranes of the gut, and then the ways that the downstream organs that must eliminate it, kidney and liver and lymphatic system.

So the capacity for digesting fats is going to be less, maybe far less than normal, and at first not possible to maintain healthy weight and energy.

All I know is I hit my limit yesterday as the fact I was dropping weight like a lead weight was visibly obvious, and likely contributing the appearance of lack of recovery from the B1 deficiency.

Nope, just starvation 🕶