nostr:nevent1qqs0l9q44jn3ue6lu2d6s5dntqutq9jtd6qufexl0f2auph8sj9clrsppemhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mp0qgs9afryspzmk8ljyfj4mhfkumwwmhzrtyxzvzgvfp477w80g5x6t0grqsqqqqqp97u8pv

Which one? Am Main, or Oder next door?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uBLqctS3jE

Does Nostr fix this?

One of the main novel problems in the modern world are women. Technically I should use words as ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ because they are behavioral pattern mappings that predominately express themselves (especially in the edge percentiles) in males and females, but not exclusively so. But aint nobody got time for such nuance.

Male and female anti-social behavior is different; we are both human and therefor very capable apex-predators but the methods of warfare we engage in are varied. Male anti-social behavior very much is geared towards physical violence and direct confrontation, and aggression expresses itself through a punch on the face, a well coordinated shieldwall with spears, or a nuke; you get the point. Female anti-social behavior, for obvious reasons, steers away from these direct physical confrontations; instead they operate in the indirect domain of social inclusion and exclusion through methods of gossiping, shaming, rallying, ridicule, moralizing, psychologizing, undermining and reputation destruction. This is their method of warfare.

The problem we are faced with as a civilization, is that over time, we gradually adjusted to deal with the shifting expressions of violence/male anti-social behavior as a result of technological progress. We shaped our institutions to manage the ever increasing scale by which this type of warfare could be enacted. This is because their expression is very obvious and immediate. Things like the meatgrinder of trench-warfare or the atom bomb hardly go unnoticed. Not necessarily arguing that these institutions are effective, but for example we do have a UN in the context of a world with nuclear bombs. The issue is that we never had a similar process in relation to female methods of war. This is because this type of social power is very hard to scale, and therefor always remained somewhat localized.

Enter mass-media. Within the short time-span of a 100 years, culminating with hyper-acceleration in the internet, female anti-social behavior found its means to scale, and frankly its like the opening of pandora’s box. This is your ‘cancel culture’, ‘political correctness’ etc. Its like the church-ladies of old who were in control of reputation management in their local community all the sudden linked up allowing them global expression of this power. We don’t know how to deal with it, mostly because we appear to have problems identifying what is going on; and the moment you do, you obviously trigger the flocks of screeching harpies ready to deploy gossiping, shaming, rallying, ridicule, moralizing, psychologizing, undermining and reputation destruction.

As an aside, to drive the point home; seduction/baiting through false promise is also a nice female anti-social behavioral pattern that is currently on steriods via things as Instagram and tik-tok, and its apex onlyfans. Resulting in the masses of duped men we call simps, and it appears to have been a very lucrative war-campaign for a hand full of women thus far.

Dont get me wrong, things like propaganda have always been an aspect of ‘conventional’ war. This is not the point. The point is that we enforce social norms that regular men don’t go around punching everyone to get what they want; whilst in recent times for example there has been a very ‘aggressive’ push for normalization of whoreish behavior by women freed from negative consequence (complaints about slut-shaming basically). I gues the whole ‘me2’ ordeal followed by the demand that we ought to ‘believe women’ is another example. One where the accusation rests on male anti-social behavior (which very well exists, don’t get me wrong), in order to establish a new social norm that plays into these female methods of war like reputation destruction etc. The point is that in establishing social norms a new player entered the playingfield; the hyve-mind of the witch collective.

One clear issue with the centralized platform is that it gives this warring faction of anti-social women, able to coordinate on common interest, a clear target to vie for power over. Due to the (fairly recent) political inclusion of women they currently mostly seem to leverage the state as a vehicle to this end; this is very obvious if you look at the politicians and bureaucrats arguing for more control over social media platforms over complaints of ‘hate speech’, its basically all women.

Albeit Nostr solves this particular part of the problem, I am not sure that is the end of all our worries. But perhaps the freedom of association that Nostr provides allows the proverbial 1000 flowers to bloom in different attempts to tackle, mitigate or perhaps solve these matters. Opening up the opportunity to figure out a new sensible balance of power in the relation between the sexes, atleast for those who seek it.

Until that time, remember gentlemen, Rule 30:

There are no girls on the internet.

München/Bayern?

Its also the basis for our universities. And the monasteries kept the 'classical world' texts alive allowing for the renaissance at some point. The Middle Ages were a long period over a reasonably large territory and we don't actually know all that much; so it is easy to rant against the Church if you cherrypick times and places.

I'd say we have a lot of things to thank the Church for, and that is from someone with more Protestant sensibilities ;)

Yesterday I made a post berating anyone who comes to Nostr with an expectation of privacy. So today I will take the other side, because I really hope we get towards decent DMs and groupchats would be even better.

This is because I really dislike this ‘micro blogging’ throwing posts into the vast open world for anyone to see. There is no context to them and tends towards the parasocial really quickly; its faux social for the most part if you ask me.

Meanwhile groupchats are an actual ongoing conversation with therefor its own context and everyone getting to know everyone else; it is only after they get really big that you get about the same dynamic as with regular micro blogging.

From a technical standpoint I am not sure if ‘nostr-native’ groupchats are a good idea compared to integrating a build for purpose protocol; we will see.

For me it boils down to the fact that I don’t want followers, I want peers.

Here is a picture of baby deer following their parent, have a nice day.

To give a quote from the Carrol Quigley lecture i shared in my other responce:

"the state is a good state if it is sovereign and if it is responsible. The idea that the state has to be any of these other things, such as, for example, democratic, is more or less incidental. If democracy reflects the structure of society's power, then the state has to be democratic. But if the reflection of power, and the pattern of power, in a society is not a democratic pattern, then you cannot have a democratic state. This is what happens in Latin America, and Africa, and places like this, where they have an election and the army doesn't like who's elected, so they move in and kick him out and put somebody else in. That's because the election did not reflect the power situation, in which the dominant thing is organized force. So when I say governments have to be responsible, I'm saying the same thing as I said when I said that they have to be legitimate, i.e., that they have to reflect the power structure of the society. Politics is the area for establishing responsibility by legitimizing power, i.e., somehow demonstrating to people that the power structure is this. And it may take a revolution, such as the French Revolution, or it may take a war, like the American Civil War. In the American Civil War in 19, 1861 the structure of power in the United States was such -- perhaps unfortunately, I don't know -- that the South could not leave unless the North was willing. It was that simple. But it took a war to prove it."

What comes to mind is a series of lectures given by Carrol Quigley (historian) called:

“Public Authority and the State in the Western Tradition: A Thousand Years of Growth, 976-1976”

If I recall correctly, it is in this series he discusses the impact of means of violence and warfare on the character and scale of states. I think the third and last part is most relevant. It should provide a starting off point of reference to ponder the topic.

The audio quality is terrible even to the point the transcript (there is one so you can also decide to read), has holes in it due to inaudibility issues. So sorry for presenting a piece of shit of over 4 hours; but I promise it is a diamond.

Part 1:

http://www.carrollquigley.net/Lectures/The-State-of-Communities-AD-976-1576.htm

Part 2:

http://www.carrollquigley.net/Lectures/The-State-of-Individuals-AD-1776-1976.htm

Part 3:

http://www.carrollquigley.net/Lectures/The-State-of-Individuals-AD-1776-1976.htm

I just saw someone complaining a new offered feature on Nostr somewhere is surveillance. For all the people who have yet to get a clue, a public service announcement:

You are interacting on a publication protocol, everything here is primarily public in nature; ‘the internet does not forget’ applies to Nostr as well.

The main difference with platforms here, is that its easier for any random party to go scrape, assess, profile, index and ‘surveil’ the living fuck out of you because they don’t need privileged API access since all the data is out in the open instead of inside a walled garden.

Now I can go into all sorts of nuance on the application of encryption, private-relays/relay policy and what not, but that is not the point. The point is that data want to be free, you don’t ‘control’ your data, and that you are an idiot if you think you wont be ‘surveilled’ when you publicize stuff online for everyone to see.

Now this is a nice tie-in into the notion of reputation, but il keep that for another time.

Here is a picture of a baby deer jumping, have a nice day.

Soon we will have the required tech to fix that first part for you.

For clarification on this point, see this:

nostr:nevent1qqs2kaqvlm0w53qrvredxstywymvt2dken0rhrdm6pz0njh2c558frgppemhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mp0qgs9afryspzmk8ljyfj4mhfkumwwmhzrtyxzvzgvfp477w80g5x6t0grqsqqqqqp7pnqsm

Unfortunatly i can reliably reproduce the steps to get to the CSAM i came across, but i wont share it. But it was not something that popped up in my feed, but as a result of a search query (to something completely unrelated to the CSAM obviously).

In this case they were kind 1063 events, hosted on one of the bigger relays that a lot of people use.

Normally 1063 event contain a URL and content (in this case a picture) is hosted somewhere else. Here, it was not a URL but the raw file in base64 encoding, which the client is then supposed to translate to a webp (though this is not part of the NIP-94 spec).

How clients handle this varies, i happened to use one at the time that is able to handle this stuff, so it displays the picture direcly. Most other clients i have tried dont and just produce a raw base64-string (luckely in this case) without transforming it into a webp picture. Or a download button that does nothing (because there is no actual url there)

Hello Nostr, if you are in a great mood just skip this post; its depressing.

So I had not encountered it before, but yesterday I crossed paths with Child Sexual Abuse Material on Nostr. In my regular internet usage over the years I have rarely come across this stuff, though I guess if I were to look for it I would find it eventually;

That is to say, the status quo is that it does exist, but most people most of the time wont have to deal with it. I think this is important to realize that the world is not perfect as it is, when reflecting on these matters in the context of Nostr.

It goes without saying, but just to be clear: yes I think we should all learn how to tie nooses and identify adequate oak trees.

However marginalized CSAM is, some people want governments to go above and beyond to combat it. Prime example currently is the ‘Chat control’ regulation proposed out of the EU, which wants to install bigbrother client side on your phone to scan every single thing you do in order to flag any suspicious behavior/content, before it gets encrypted. How understandable the motivation might be, even advocacy groups and agencies dealing with the CSAM problem are against this type of stuff, if not just simply because they are already swamped with work/processing of material as it is; opening the floodgates with false positives wont help anything and probably make the situation worse. Aside from the obvious objections to forcibly installing big brother on peoples hardware of course.

Back to Nostr. On the one hand we have the end-user, that does not want to get confronted by this material. From this perspective, CSAM is just one of the many things a user might want to filter out, along with other material that might not be illegal per se but just NSFW etc. Whatever means we find to do this, failure by those mechanisms to do so is bad, unwanted etc. but not a direct systemic risk to Nostr; like I mentioned in the beginning, it is not impossible to accidentally come across this type of stuff on the internet today as is, and the whole world is still using it.

But it does become a systemic issue from the relay perspective. Here, it is not some incidental bad experience that can be clicked away. It is a crime to host this type of material which brings in the risk of prosecution for ‘simply running a relay’ that some asshole decided to nuke with CSAM or other illegal material.

But here my optimism comes in. Nostr is pro censorship; the theory is that every relay can moderate to their hearts content, because users are ultimately always able to route around such obstacles (very much like ‘the internet’ itself). This means that that relays should be able to adjust their policies and methods of moderation to their capacity to deal with unwanted content and risk appetite. From a locked down white-list only relay on one side of the spectrum, all the way to an open relay with heavy sophisticated analytics for assessment and filtering, and everything in between: albeit that it wont deliver us a perfect solution in all cases, it will remove the dark cloud of systemic risk to the protocol/network, because we are able to sufficiently marginalize the phenomena.

On a last note: when talking about filtering/assessing for this content it gets complicated really quickly. You can imagine some AI performing such a task, or using lists of known content to filter; however you want to do it, you first come to the question on how you construct that stuff in the first place; it requires gathering such content and human eyes looking at it. And then subsequently you produce tooling that can be flipped around and used as a search engine to seek and find such material instead of filtering it away. So yeah, there are no graceful perfect solutions I am afraid.

Well, there is one of course….

https://cdn.satellite.earth/a92bdd80dbd45e00636a9db615061eef168c3164a0e1bfa1abfb0784e74cd24e.mp3

I have serious issues with the anthropomorphisation of machines; i get they are modeled after the human body because it is a sensible way to interface with the outside world (mostly because it is already structured for us humans). I can also (somewhat reluctantly) understand that 'talking' like a human is a nice/simpel way for us human to interact with the machine.

But the thing does not need to emulate emotions, does not need to say 'euh' and whatnot while speaking, does not need a 'face' with emotional expressions, and sure as hell does not need a creator that suggest the thing could be your friend.

People designing these things (not just robots, much of the AI stuff as well) with the notion that not able to differantiate between it and a real human is the holy grail/goal, because it smoothens out interactions, are very dangerous.

Oh boy, you are not paying attention. Then again, they do tend to be sneaky; but given how many of them there are over there, you are bound to spot one eventually i recon.

Managed to take a picture of one of the many many many rats as well?

Thus concludes my forrest picture presentation for now.

Time, such a fascinating thing, inescapably ever moving onwards. Winter is coming:

https://cdn.satellite.earth/6761a5ff81c5a5ac3daa74e0d33cddf4912b770a13d272b933499839b5b03757.mp4

Timestamps only give very weak indications of truth; but they are really good at catching certain lies.

Take for example the following note:

nostr:nevent1qqszw6fwhl28y974y9vjw6ej63xdax4gu5rf8fw52jqkf8x5kk98skgppamhxue69uhku6n4d4czumt99upzqpuvjsr4gjkpxf5jacv3pgpy8x2c4czgwu23xsh2jmztdv66f863qvzqqqqqqyg7gvfg

your client may have a hard time loading it, depending on when you look at this post. This is because the event claims to be signed at Thu Oct 17 2024 03:00:00 GMT. Given it is currently Oct 12, this is a blatant lie, and relays tend to not accept this event because of this.

But, what happens in 5 days? As soon we pass that 3 o’clock mark on oct 17, how would any outsider know that this event was not signed at that time, but 5 days earlier? It is easy to catch these sort of lies when you are present in real time and pay attention, but if you arrive after the fact, NIP-03 timestamps allow you to identify such a lie for certain if adequate proof exists.

And in this case, this proof does exist! Because I timestamped this event already, tying it into block 865274, which was mined around 05:31, oct 12. Which results in the following screenshot of Amethyst:

The app claims the event was posted ‘now’ (probably because it simply interprets any date in the future as ‘now’), but also tells me a timestamp exists that is 9 hours old.

Now this particular type of lying (pretending to be in the future), it not all that interesting, I was just curious. But it does go to show that you should not trust the time the event claims it was signed, because it is trivially easy to lie about it.

Say hello to my fren btw:

Een koekje, EN een sultana EN OOK NOG EEN TWIX!?!?! Poh

Everyone can timestamp everything at any time; the time-proof is valid regardless of who initiates its creation.

For example, at 01:37 on okt 12, I signed this kind 1040 event:

nostr:nevent1qqsyxw4l6030ugpufwr820leasv630c3an87pcm9sp0uek22gtwzsmszyp02geyqgka3lu3zv4wa6dhxmnkacs6epsnqjrzgd0hn3m69pkjm6qcyqqqqgyqrapa2r

Which contains a proof that this kind 1 event can be tied into bitcoin block 865239:

nostr:nevent1qqsd3u78nkjn78tcfcqjmrclxns9667chycmlzxxgnxxvd26yw7z85sppemhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mp0qgs2jy6jwcfsyqmpfp3tjggt505n4vnemqn3jcf6t3qw2e426mg7k9crqsqqqqqp277t4j

And the timestamp of block 865239, is 00:02 on okt 12.

The event itself claims it was signed 22:11 on oct 11; this may be a lie still, but at least it was not signed much more than 1 hours and 51 minutes later.

Aside from all these time related dates, the described lunch date could also just be a complete fabrication of course; at the very least the pictures correspond with the stated dishes

#woodpeckestr