The year was 2020 — the distant past. I had just had my classically liberal political philosophy beaten out of me with a stick. Joe Biden, the man who ran his campaign from his basement using the tagline ["No Malarkey"](https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/12/3/20991841/joe-biden-no-malarkey) was challenging the Drumpf for the highest office in the land. I had left the surveillance hellscape that is Facebook behind 4 years prior, but Twitter, I never expected it of you.
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Long story short: you know what happened. Did Biden steal the election? Would Trump have won if the NY Post article hadn't been suppressed? These are questions that history is not likely to answer. But was social media acting as a propaganda arm of the state? Yeah.
# Follow the White Rabbit
So in November 2020, I tried to answer for myself the question: "What alternatives to Twitter are there"?
See, I won't name names here, but my local church community had gotten some press from a handful of large mainstream media outlets in the months leading up to the election, mostly related to our protestation of Covid tyranny and the hysteria that fueled it. These protests culminated in a couple of arrests, all of which were (years) later thrown out by a federal judge as being clearly in violation of our first amendment rights.
So you might see how I would be concerned about what we Christians would refer to as "persecution" coming down the pike, beginning with our freedom of speech. Luckily, the rot has advanced more slowly than I originally feared, and we are not all residents of the gulag as yet. I know some people would laugh at this, saying that Christians are privileged and dominant in our western world. To them, I would say: "fasten your seat belt Dorothy, 'cause [Kansas is going bye-bye](https://aaronrenn.substack.com/i/45894601/the-three-worlds)."
My survey of Twitter alternatives wasn't encouraging. While I didn't go as deep as [Rabble](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6YQQC5Q_5g&t=10143s), I think I hit most of the high points, the highest of which was [Scuttlebutt](https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/), which has some hard limits to scaling. So I shrugged my shoulders and said, "hopefully somebody comes up with a solution".
# I guess I'll do it
A year later, I did another survey of the decentralized social media space, and it looked exactly the same. At that point I realized "hey, I'm somebody", and in January 2022 I wrote the [Blazepoint white paper](https://github.com/blazepoint/docs/blob/master/whitepaper.pdf). In it, I outlined the problems with current social media alternatives, and an innovative way to solve them using a novel multi-master architecture! I knew this was a huge project with an approximately 0% chance of success, so I committed to working on it for the next ten years.
Of course, unknown to me our good friend fiatjaf was already laboring away on a very similar protocol named after an ostrich or something. Two weeks or so after I wrote my white paper I came across Nostr, which had a very similar design. After unsuccessfully attempting to convince fiatjaf (via an extremely buggy DM implementation on [branle](https://github.com/fiatjaf/branle)) that my protocol was better, I went back to refining my protocol on my free nights and weekends.
If you look at the Blazepoint repository, you can see that the last commit was on May 23rd, 2022. Life had gotten busy, and while I still fully intended to keep my commitment to myself, as it turns out building a protocol by yourself is not easy. So in November of 2022 I threw in the towel, and dove headfirst into Urbit!
# No, Just Kidding
I lasted about four hours with Urbit before thinking "ain't nobody got time for this". My resistance to the allures of Nostr folded, and over Thanksgiving break while my kids hung out with my wife and her family, I sat in a freezing RV feverishly coding the first version of Coracle. If you want to play around with it, you can still access it at [here](https://v1-coracle-social.onrender.com). I also have a screencast uploaded [here](https://coracle.us-southeast-1.linodeobjects.com/blog/2304/coracle-2211). It basically works!
Late in the week, I pushed my work in progress to Github, and immediately got a message from fiatjaf about it. He wanted to see my work! It wasn't at all ready, but I deployed it and showed it off.
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Everyone was very complimentary, which made me even more motivated to work on it. That kicked off 5 months (and counting) of waking up at 4 AM multiple times a week so I could put in more time.
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The rest, as they say, is history. Jack followed me on Twitter, and tweeted about Coracle. He later told me that being able to switch easily between Damus and Coracle is what originally hooked him! Interoperability FTW.
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# What's Next
It's now mid-April, 2023 and I'm finishing up a fellowship at [FUTO](https://futo.org/) — they gave me a generous grant of $20k to spend three months working on Coracle full time, and I've tried not to disappoint. But my time is drawing to an end, and I'm wondering what to do next — find funding and start my own company? Go back to my old job? Something in between? I've got a few irons in the fire, so we'll see which one hatches first.
Finally, I would be remiss if I didn't give God the glory for this journey. All along the way I have been pushed out of my comfort zone, and over and over God has "worked all things out for good to those who... are called according to his purpose" just in time, and in unexpected ways. Coracle is God's project, and I pray every day that he would "establish the work of our hands for us, yes, establish the work of our hands."
So here's to the next 10 years of Nostr (that's 6 months in real-world years)! 🥂
i just found this searching for the #coracle hashtag and i never knew the story behind it... pretty cool... in fact, it seems like it was the thing that made nostr:nprofile1qyfhwumn8ghj7ur4wfcxcetsv9njuetn9uq3jamnwvaz7tmjv4kxz7fwwdhx7un59eek7cmfv9kz7qgkwaehxw309aex2mrp0yhx6mmnw3ezuur4vghsqgyzxs0cs2mw40xjhfl3a7g24ktpeur54u2mnm6y5z0e6250h7lx5g7t4xhn decide to start throwing money at #nostr
nice little piece of history, and it also makes sense now why coracle is the best developed client in the field... not only one of the oldest, also built by a guy who could himself design a protocol like nostr...
brands have a specific set of manufacturing facilities and plants, in general, ok sometimes that overlaps but not often with long established brands do they use competitors, usually due to contractual obligations
a backup is worthless if it is stored on a device with poor quality control as the worse the QA standard, the more likely that when you come to rely on it, it's not working
fortunately, for the most part flash storage doesn't become unreadable when it fails, but spinning disks can gum up due to bad lubricants that have aged and the disk doesn't spin, or the media craps out leading to a higher error rate than the drive's FEC setup (which is not reed solomon like it is on ISO formated storage btw, also i think tape backups use RS FEC)
usually there is a cost premium associated with the level of QA that a manufacturer requires of their devices, and this QA level usually entails stress testing a certain percentage of each production batch to establish a benchmark for the batch lifespan estimate and thus insuring the warranties are not likely to void very often until after the devices fail
this is why it's worth spending a little extra on a better quality device with a lower return rate because it likely means they sacrifice a larger percentage of production to quality assurance and that warranty period has more relation to reality than their budget for covering this cost
long warranty periods don't necessarily mean that the devices are likely to last longer, just that the sales volume enables them to cover a higher failure rate
i don't know what WD's QA benchmarks are these days but me and semisol both avoid this brand because in the days of spinning disks, they were notorious for failing before the warranty was out, or not long after it, whereas other devices, sometimes even with shorter warranties, would last far longer in practise.
this is a practise known as "loss leading" in the industry and tends to be used by manufacturers that are aiming at cheapskate users like you
you can risk your data with it but it's very likely that you pay for your decision to go with a cheapskate company with a 3 failures at once situation and you lose data completely
in midspeak: they are attempting to be involved with as many transactions as possible in order to attempt to track down the source and destination of payment paths
or, i could be wrong, idk, not sure actually i think such keys would take an eternity to generate, i mean literal eternity, because the chances of that many zeroes (31 zero bytes on the left - MSB - side) are practically zero
what i mean is, if the zeroes would be on the MSB side and you elide them from your events and requests they won't be accepted
put the zeroes back in like a normal person
btw my relay requires pubkeys to be 32 bytes long, period... keys with long zeroes are not gonna be accepted unless you got a real good explanation why because anything under 10 bytes long is able to be reversed within a month on a standard desktop CPU
so that's you who has been sending reqs to my relay with pubkeys like "00" and "01" - a query all the way to 1F i think
i think a spectral colour would be better, reds for low violet for highest, but then there is colorblindness, so yeah, i think it's better
their subscription is not that expensive, i have 10gb for a year, cost me like $20 worth of sats
i got it at first more for supporting the project but found i actually do use it a bit and probably it will work out to be less than i need and i'll top up before half way xD
you just hate money and yourself, shut up
maybe that's part of it but i doubt that's all of it
you have a very special way of saying absolutely nothing with a lot of words
kurzweil style singularity AI machines overtaking humans story is literally a fantasy of people who have been abused and unconsciously perceive their body and their self to be dead mechanisms
because that's what abuse makes you into
and they are trying to spread this and push this nightmare onto everyone
psychopathy is a disease of personality, and the personality is disconnected - it has been systematically compartmentalised in order to coerce servitude
the irony is those who seek to enslave are enslaved by this meme
they like to play that one up too, like they are victims, when it comes to making them balance the account
they are victims, but that doesn't change what they did after they were hurt
that's the difference between a human and a psychopath
we can choose not to inflict on others what we suffered
Green is now bad. Because all needs to fit narrative...
https://www.vox.com/down-to-earth/2024/2/7/24057308/earth-global-greening-climate-change-carbon
narrative: humans need to be culled periodically because they are a cash crop for a special kind of human that thinks it's qualified to be god to everyone else
i try to stay with my feet on the ground, wheels are dangerous bastard things, i used to be a skateboarder xD