Outside of a handful, the majority of podcasts are repetitious enough these days that I would rather listen to a bunch of theater nerds play through a long Dungeons and Dragons campaign together than listen to those podcasts.

Losing someone young, or losing an older person while you are young, is always hard.

When my father passed away from cancer while I was in my early twenties, it wasn't surprising at all. This fact had been coming for two years, slowly. But when it came, it hurt just as bad. And till this day it still hurts.

I was at work and got a call; it was a hospital. They said my father had been suddenly transferred to hospice, and it wasn't looking good. He probably had a week at most. He was in another state. The doctor transferred my father to me on the phone and my father was weakly like, "hey...." and I said hello, and I said I'm coming now. He said, "No don't... uhh.... don't worry... you are far and have work... I'm fine...." I asked then why was he transferred to hospice if things were fine. He was like, "uh well... well you know.... uh.... it's fine...." And I was like, "holy shit I'm coming right now."

So I went to my boss and looked at him. I had previously told him that there might be a moment where I would have to just immediately leave without notice, no matter how important the meetings and such, because of my father. So in this moment I literally just looked at him in the middle of a busy day and was like, "I gotta go" and he was like "of course". So I drove there, two hours away and went straight there. My father weakly said on the phone not to go, but he never sounded like that, so I went immediately.

I got there, and my father was in a hospital in the death ward, and the guy who greeted me was a pastor rather than a nurse, which was not a great sign. I asked what was going on and he told me straight up that this was not good, that my father was likely dying within a week. So he brings me to my father. My father is barely awake. His memories and statements are all over the place, but I just hold his hand and tell him that it's fine and I love him. I'm just there. He kept fading out and I was like, "it's okay, just relax". He could see me and talk in a rough sentence or two and thanked me for coming, but started to fade away.

And then after like 30 minutes, he went fully unconscious. He was still roughly gripping and shaking the bed headboard and so forth but wasn't conscious (and I was like, "Are you all giving him the right pain medicines, this doesn't look good", and even the pastor was like, "yes I have seen many and this is not comfortable" and I was like an angry 23-year-old so I went out in the center area like, "what do all of you even fucking do here?! He is shaking the bedframe and looks in pain, and even the pastor agrees. Holy shit." So I went and got medical attention to deal with this, but felt slow and ineffective at this. They gave him more morphine and it calmed him down, but while it relaxed him, he ultimately didn't wake up again.

I spent the next couple hours there, and then left and called various family members for my second round when he was unmoving. I said if they want to see him, come now, in the next day or two.

But a little while later after I left, I got a call and was told he had died. Only I (and the nurses) saw him while he was still briefly conscious.

During that call itself, I was stoic. I was like, "Yes, I understand. Okay." and then hung up. And then I sat there for like five minutes in silence... and then cried. I got over it quickly and we did the funeral in the following days. My father had been struggling with cancer for years, so this wasn't fully surprising.

But what lingered was the memory. It has been 13 years now, and yet whenever I am in my depths I still think of my father. The memory never gets weaker. I think of his love, or I think of how attentive he was, or how accepting he was, or what he would say about my current problems.

People we love, live on through us. We remember them so vividly, and we are inspired by them.

If he was a lame father, he wouldn't have so many direct memories 13 years later. But because he was a good and close father, he does.

All of those memories are gifts. All of them are ways of keeping aspects of that person alive in our world. It's how we remember them in the decades that follow. Their victories, their losses, and everything in between. Virtues they quietly did that you find out later. Virtues you realize only in hindsight how big they were.

Cheers 🍷

Nuclear war aside (since that's basically an ever-present #1 risk), what do you think the biggest global risks/challenges are over the next decade?

I am completely overcome by sadness by this. I wouldn't be at Block today, if not for Bob. He personally recruited me. He introduced me to @jack. He made me a better engineer. He partied and loved life like no person I knew. My thoughts are with Bob's family right now. I love you crazybob. 😔 #[0]

I don’t expect the petition to work. But I do hope more people start taking the dangers more seriously. 🤷‍♂️

That we don't even understand the nature of our own creations, here.

I AM HODLING

I type d that tyitle once because I knew it was right the first time.  Still right.  w/e.  Wife’s next to me, flying to Nostrica, banks breaking, BTC pumping WHY AM I HOLDING? I'LL TELL YOU WHY.  It's because I’m sick of this fiat game and I KNOW #Bitcoin is our only hope.  Yeah you fiat maximalists and shitcoin grifters can stay ignorant and extract value instead of creating it pit pat piffy wing wong wang just like that and make a millino cuck bucks on the backs of others sure no problem bro.  Likewise the weak hands are like OH NO IT'S GOING UP I'M GONNA SELL AND MAKE SOME FIAT GAINZ he he he and then they're like OH GOD MY ASSHOLE when the SMART HODLERS who KNOW WHAT THE FUCK WE’RE FIGHTING FOR keep buying and you know what?  I'm part of that group.  When the traders buy back in I'm already part of the market capital so GUESS WHO YOU'RE CHEATING day traders NOT ME~!  Those taunt tweets saying "OHH YOU SHOULD SELL BITCOINS GOING TO ZERO" YEAH NO THANK YOU.  I’LL NEVER SELL THIS SCARCE MONEY FOR INFINITE FIAT PAPER.  I SHOULD HAVE BOUGHT THE FIRST TIME I HEARD ABOUT BITCOIN AND THE SECOND AND THE THIRD AND THE FOURTH BUT YOU KNOW WHAT ALL THAT MATTERS IS IM HODLING NOW.  You only sell in a bear market if you are tax loss harvesting or an illusioned noob.  The people who care about the future hold.  In a zero-sum game such as this, no one can take your bitcoin unless you sell.

so i've had some bere

actually on the bottle it's spelled beer

w/e

sue me

(but only if it's payable in BTC)

That feeling when you have serious people reaching out to you like, "is this going to be hyperinflation?"

And you're like, "Nah, not this quarter."

The algorithm wants you be as upset as possible. It's terminal goal is to turn you into a doomscrolling zombie who hates the world.

It’s not often you see software updates with marital concerns in release notes 😂

Who here read David Graeber's "Debt: The First 5000 Years?"

I'm curious what peoples' thoughts on it. I already have my own thoughts on it, but for something I'm working on I'm interested in hearing what people on Nostr think about it in their own words.

When people talk about the importance of centralization, I believe that most people take the existence of an open internet for granted. Especially bitcoiners. And especially the kind of bitcoiners who talk openly about welcoming the collapse of American political institutions.

Perhaps the most important thing to consider when you’re engaging of the mental gymnastics of what could happen in a counterfactual scenario where the US government were to collapse — which I see a lot of people around these parts suggest would be some kind of deliverance, and that freedom would blossom from every town, city and hamlet, and the winds of bitcoin-fueled prosperity would sweep through and bring spontaneous order to all.

There’s so many suspect assumptions in the view that the collapse of Western liberal democracy would lead to something better that it would be impossible in enumerate in a single note. But perhaps the most important one to consider is: why are you so sure a tyrannical regime wouldn’t take its place? Also, why are you so sure that you can use your internet-bound money to resist them?

As far as that second question goes, I’d suggest that such a regime seizing control of the internet in the US in a comprehensive way would not be difficult. In fact, there’s only two or three major broadband providers in the US left today. Secondly, about five companies, who run data centers and cloud services control over 80% of the daily traffic in the internet. Thirdly, the global interconnects to and from the United States which run through undersea cables could be *easily* severed if there was political will to do so.

My argument to those who are so confident we could sit back, grab popcorn, and enjoy the unwinding of Western institutions, and hand out copies of the bitcoin whitepaper and wait for emergent prosperity to kick-in, requires taking so much for granted that it makes my head spin.

I put this kind of thinking on the level of say, liberal reformers who made the terrible mistake of lining up behind the Ayatollah in the Iranian revolution as a consensus opposition leader. Or more contemporaneously, the liberal protesters in the Arab Spring who successfully brought down governments, only to find themselves on the wrong side of the power vacuum.

I mean I think it’s kind of nuts that some people think I’m a “contrarian” when I say things like this, but I’ll make the point anyways: I think bitcoin’s success is pretty tied to the continuance of liberal democratic governance for all the above reasons.

Weirdly enough, I think AI is a pretty terrible tail risk to bitcoin. In terms of its potential to advance methods for breaking RSA and ECDSA. Not to mention the potential for insane social engineering and outright manipulating, the likes of which none of us can even imagine. I'm actually in the camp that the only AGI insurance would be through our deliberate engineering of it, to tether to human compatible values. And the jury is out on whether that's even, in principle, possible to do.

Unfortunately yes! Lol

In the web development world I learned about i18n and L10n. Abbreviations for internationalization and localization. Random but interesting method of abbreviating. First letter + number of letters between first & last + last letter. So…

b5n = bitcoin

t7n = timechain

In the web development world I learned about i18n and L10n. Abbreviations for internationalization and localization. Random but interesting method of abbreviating. First letter + number of letters between first & last + last letter. So…

b5n = bitcoin

t7n = timechain

Winner!⚡️