Is there some sort of backup tool for your own notes?
Nostr is fighting for promotion. Twitter will soon be fighting a relegation battle.
I'm traveling. I get a 1GB sim card every week or so.
I've been avoiding using Nostr on 4G for that reason. There has got to be a way to compress and cache effectively so there's not such big payloads.
I have another essay on exactly that, Maybe I'll post it in a few days.
LLPSI, Dowling Method and reading the Latin Vulgate every day
Learning Latin
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For the past 2 years, I've been learning Latin. I’m reading, I’m memorizing, and I’m writing down noun declensions like a madman.
I'm 46 years old, way past the age when people normally learn new languages. I’m also not one of those polyglots that learns a new language every couple of years. Nor am I a masochist who enjoys reading slowly, so why am I doing it?
There are three reasons I am learning Latin.
Becoming a Respectable Intellectual
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The first reason is that I have a bit of intellectual snobbery that I’m trying to reclaim. Back in high school, I desperately wanted to learn Latin because it was the language of science. Being the math geek that I am, I wanted to learn something that would help me understand fancy Latin phrases like a priori and Carthago delenda est. Sure, I wouldn’t be any more popular, but at least I could pretend to have some superiority over the actual popular kids.
Sadly, my high school didn't offer Latin, and my dreams of being that annoying geek wielding Latin would have to be set aside. Instead, I had to settle for being that annoying geek wielding a chess board, a keyboard, and Magic the Gathering cards. Lacking the option of learning Latin, I spent 4 years learning Spanish and settled for learning pop culture phrases like gordito and la vida loca.
Frankly, I don’t remember much of it because the motivation to learn Spanish just wasn't there. I was a geek that dreamed of getting into MIT! I wanted to be a math professor or a computer programmer. Spanish just didn’t feel like something I needed as it didn’t give me any advantage in what I wanted to do. Latin, on the other hand, was something I could use! Everyone knows that the winner of any philosophical argument is the one using the cooler Latin phrase.
Absorbing Ancient Wisdom
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The second reason is because Latin is the language of the Romans. These were some badass people who came, saw and conquered (veni, vedi, vici). They were also Stoics, whose motto was memento mori, or remember that you will die. They had courage, enjoyed life and kicked ass. Who wouldn’t want to be like them? Yet learning to be like them is not so easy, especially since so many of their works are ancient and their mentality is so foreign to the modern mind. Learning Latin is a way into that mentality. To understand why, indulge me in a brief digression.
I'm a Korean-American immigrant and that means I know two languages… sort of. I immigrated when I was 8 years old, so my Korean is still that of a second grader. I’m pretty embarrassed to speak it, but I have some familiarity with a language quite different than English.
The weird thing is, I think very differently when I think in Korean. It’s especially true when I interact with older Korean people. I suddenly defer to elders, take care of anyone younger and politely but firmly fight for the restaurant check. None of this is normal when I’m thinking in English. Language shapes mentality.
Latin has been the language of intellectual culture for the better part of the last 2000 years. Some of the greatest thinkers thought in Latin. Translated works are notorious for their awkward phrasing. Historical works are also pretty hard to read because they’re written with unfamiliar words. Trying to understand a historical translated work is like trying to understand that guy on Zoom who’s driving through a tunnel. How am I supposed to be a badass Stoic if their words come through garbled?
An Alternative to Pop Culture
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The third reason that I want to learn Latin is because I’m tired of pop culture. Yea, yea, it’s such a hipster thing to say, but hear me out. Pop culture is getting really preachy. Every time I watch a movie or listen to a song, I feel like a racist, homophobic, misogynist pig.
Pop culture has a lot of assumptions baked into it about what the right thing to think is, and to be quite frank, I don’t agree with all of it. I want art that’s more aligned with my values. I’m a Christian, so you may think that I listen to contemporary Christian music or watch Christian movies. I don’t, because they (mostly) suck. Okay, that’s harsh and not very charitable of me, but I just don’t enjoy them the way someone into electronic dance music enjoys a rave. Trying to find art to consume in today’s culture is mulgere hircum or milking a male goat.
Latin gives me access to classics that have withstood the test of time. Most pop stuff will not be popular in 5 years, let alone 50. With Latin, I can access books, music, and art that are hundreds of years old. There’s timeless wisdom in something that’s managed to last that long. Latin is a gateway to another culture, one whose values more closely align with mine and I can bathe in its ancient riches like Scrooge McDuck.
At least that’s the hope. And that makes memorizing noun declensions worthwhile.
Wow, I can't believe it took me this long to get where the name Damus came from.
What is your most interesting yet unknown conspiracy theory?
#[6] vs Paul Szctorc
#[7] vs CSW
Samurai wallet guys vs Wasabi wallet guys
BOLT12 vs LNURL
Cory Klippsten vs Plan B
Or your AI generated image. Can we really tell?
Can anyone get me a Nostrica shirt for the Lightning conference in Vietnam?
Despotic Niceness
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Nice guys are famous for their failures in dating. They spend a lot of money to show their generosity, they will agree to almost everything women ask and of course, they never get the girl. They get frustratingly friendzoned. They fantasize that their crush will come back miraculously, like in a romantic comedy. As they grow old, they grow bitter, angry that women don’t know what’s good for them as they drown their wrath and despair in porn.
Why don’t nice guys get the girl? What’s so incredibly unattractive about them?
They’re agreeable and give the girl everything she wants. Yet they’re also indecisive, preferring others make decisions so they can absolve themselves of responsibility. They’re also boring. They’re as bland as a slice of Wonder Bread and about as creative. Lacking a strong and grounded identity, they are nice in the hopes that girls will reciprocate. They exude sliminess as they try to hack into the position of boyfriend.
They are using despotic niceness.
Manipulation
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Despotic niceness is a form of manipulation. It’s using the norms around niceness to get what you want. Despotic niceness is passive-aggressive quid pro quo. Nice guys are waiting for girls to reciprocate like a charity that gives you pre-printed return labels. The norms of niceness demand that nice people reciprocate. Anyone that doesn’t reciprocate is considered a jerk.
Many women also use despotic niceness. They’ll be friendly to a guy that clearly wants to date them and count on his reciprocating niceness. They’ll get help moving, get rescued financially and use him as an emotional crutch. The guy reciprocates the very mild niceness to signal that they’re nice. The women use the guy’s hope of further reciprocation to string the guy along.
Despotic niceness is not only a weapon in dating, however. At work, a nice boss will ask you to do something unpleasant as “a team player.” Your family member who keeps screwing up will keep getting bailed out as a “loving” relative. Even the government tells you that as a citizen, you should support war because it’s “patriotic”. The truth is that nice people manipulate and aren’t so virtuous as they seem.
Not a Virtue
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Nice comes from the Latin word nescire, which means to not know, to be ignorant. Over the centuries, the word evolved to mean agreeable because ignorant people are easily manipulated. In modern parlance, niceness means being purposefully ignorant. We pretend that a hideous haircut looks good because we are nice. We pretend that we like our boss’s joke because we are nice. Niceness is a dishonest public persona, a fakeness for the sake of fitting in.
How did we end up here? Why are we purposefully ignorant for the sake of agreeableness?
Tool of Compliance
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Think about the structure of society. Overseers of any classroom, company or government organization need a way to keep order. One way to keep order is to get everyone disciplined, like in an army. The other way is through a cultural norm of niceness. Niceness lets overseers keep order through expected reciprocation. The hard work of discipline can be avoided if each person identifies as being nice.
Such an environment becomes despotic because it limits the realm of thought. Nice people don’t offend, so it’s difficult for them to even think certain thoughts. What’s inoffensive becomes the acceptable range of possible thoughts and that defines the Overton Window. Niceness as an identity trait means a very limited palette of thoughts from which new thoughts emerge. Creative thoughts are hard because they might be offensive. It wouldn’t be nice.
This is why nice guys are boring. They are predictably bland because their range of thought is limited.
Kind and Honest, not Boring and Cowardly
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Stop being nice. Be honest and kind instead. Nice is not being honest nor kind because neither of those expects reciprocation. Real honesty and real kindness require virtues like courage, love and justice. Niceness is not only fake, manipulative and despotic but also dull, limiting and cowardly.
Be honest. Don’t be purposefully ignorant indulging in polite fictions. Tell the truth, even when it’s going to be offensive. Especially when it’s offensive. It’s okay if they get upset. Sometimes that rage is a form of despotic niceness coming out. Other times, it’s despair. In a society full of niceness, honesty is rare and valued by mature people.
Be kind. Telling the truth is brutally difficult, especially when the norm is niceness. Kindness is telling the truth in a loving way. It’s not minimizing the brutality of the truth. That’s niceness sneaking back in. Kindness is doing so gently and in a way the other person can receive it.
Ground yourself in truth and love, not in fitting in by being nice. To be honest and kind requires character, maturity and grounding.
You’ll need to work on yourself instead of relying on others’ reciprocation. You’re going to grow up. And it’ll get you more dates than being a nice guy.
Honestly, I can't even think of good ways to attack Nostr. nostr feels like Bitcoin to me in that way. There's an inevitability to the incentives that look unstoppable.
Gotta get Bethany Hamilton on here
I have a lot of essays I've written that never saw the light of day because they're not about Bitcoin.
Should I post them here?
Writing is a habit. It takes a lot of practice to get good at and as with every discipline, if you don't use it, you lose it.
It's still a little weird for me to think of myself as a writer. I'm a technical guy. I've been obsessed with computers since I was 8 years old. I've been programming since I was 9. I've been paid for providing programming services for over 20 years.
Yet looking back, it's obvious that writing was a big part of what I was doing. Explaining what needs to be done or how I did something, turned out to have value. I was a math major and writing up proofs is essentially that, it's explaining why something is true in a step-by-step, logical way. This is why so many math and physics people eventually find their place in industry as programmers.
There's also the advent of email, which came at the right time for me. I was in college when the World Wide Web exploded, in 1994. Around that time, the big thing for everyone was email, how you could send letters to people quickly and efficiently. No more waiting for a week or more to receive a reply from someone. I was an email junkie, keeping up with high school friends and writing letters to other people I had kept in touch with. Email for a few years there was a real repository of good letter writing.
Even coding itself was a form of writing. There's beauty in it if you care to look. One of my good friends, Ken Liu is an amazing coder and also an amazing writer. There's something about crafting words that lends itself to a creativity found in coding.
And yes, there is documentation, which unfortunately is very lacking in most programming environments. But the actual code writing really is a form of explaining. It's just to a computer and not to another human being.
In a way, the practice of coding, of being precise about your instructions, carries over to writing. Of course, English isn't nearly as precise as Rust, but we should still be as clear as possible. Perhaps this is why I focus so much on clarity in my writing, rather than in ideas that can be interpreted many different ways.
Still, try as I might, people interpret my writing in their own way. It's like we have different execution environments that we call our brains and the words will never execute quite the same way.
Writing to people helps me see the different ways in which people interpret my words and I can use that to debug my writing, which hopefully improves as a result over time. People are not just execution environments of my writing, but also test harnesses. And Twitter/Nostr are ways to unit test different snippets.
Writing helps coding and vice versa. Even in that last sentence I thought about saying instead "writing helps coding and coding helps writing." Which is clearer? Are there some non-English speakers that maybe don't understand "vice versa"? Does the latter flow a little better on the tongue? Is the user experience better on the former?
I write because I want to improve my craft, both as a writer and a coder.
Channel capacity? I'm guessing they're not managing their channels much now.
Ok. Managed to withdraw to Strike $10 at a time.