threw out decade-old boxes of collected wires & adaptors

so far my universe hasn’t collapsed 🙏

had to look this up but its true. reserve ratio requirement is still at 0%. lmao.

What are books that changed your life?

Aww messed it up

The more pertinent question would be:

What does the continued global erosion of the US petrodollar/treasury system look like over the next four years?

$4.56T annualized deficit on $35.4T debt = 12.9% annualized debt growth.

Good evening.

In August, the US government took $307 billion in taxes and spent $687 billion, for a deficit of $380 billion. This works out to be an annualized deficit of $4.56 trillion.

Have an awesome weekend.

> If you’re sending binary, base64 only inflates by 33% compared to hex strings’ 100%.

On purely random data, after compression hex is usually only ~10% bigger than base64. For example:

$ head -c 1000000 /dev/urandom > rand

$ alias hex='od -A n -t x1 | sed "s/ *//g"'

$ cat rand |hex|zstd -c|wc -c

1086970

$ cat rand |base64|zstd -c|wc -c

1018226

$ wcalc 1086970/1018226

= 1.06751

So only ~7% bigger in this case. When data is not purely random, hex often compresses *better* than base64. This is because hex preserves patterns on byte boundaries but base64 does not. For example, look at these two strings post-base64:

$ echo 'hello world' | base64

aGVsbG8gd29ybGQK

$ echo ' hello world' | base64

IGhlbGxvIHdvcmxkCg==

They have nothing in common. Compare to the hex encoded versions:

$ echo 'hello world' | hex

68656c6c6f20776f726c640a

$ echo ' hello world' | hex

2068656c6c6f20776f726c640a

The pattern is preserved, it is just shifted by 2 characters. This means that if "hello world" appears multiple times in the input, there may be two different patterns for it in Base64, but only one in hex (meaning hex effectively has a 2x larger compression dictionary).

Since negentropy is mostly (but not entirely) random data like hashes and fingerprints, it's probably a wash. However, hex is typically faster to encode/decode and furthermore is used for almost all other fields in the nostr protocol, so on the whole seems like the best choice.

> Personally, I’d prefer to see the message format specified explicitly as debuggable JSON, if feasible.

This is theoretically possible, but it would be very difficult to interpret/debug it anyway, and it would add a lot of bandwidth/CPU overhead.

Have you checked expiry dates? Some places buy items that are about to expire (like in a month) at a discount.

And takes the risk of selling them quickly.

Maybe thats whats happening here?

So not his bitcoin?

The higher price is at C-Town, a local chain that is “supposed” to cater to lower income neighborhoods. Their price is more than double what Lidl, an international discount chain charges. It’s astonishing that they can stay in business with those prices.

Quick list of documentaries:

Idiocracy

Hunger Games

1984

The Matrix

Different.

Attention shoppers. Here’s a question that’s been on my mind with all the talk about whether grocery store price gouging is a thing or not.

Two stores. Three blocks apart. Same product.

Why is there such a massive difference?

I just did 2x24 hour fasts with nothing but 2 steaks in the middle (and plenty of water of course). Feeling great.

"Bitcoin Accepted" is too flacid