GM. Happy 4th.

Whenever I use ChatGPT as a research tool, especially whenever related to AI research (either for investment research purposes or my sci fi writings), I am aware of the momentary irony (AI is telling me about AI), I randomly throw in weird questions since it's already primed on the topic:

To be fair, 25mb shouldn't be an issue with most email accounts. 50mb though ... uhuhuh

🚨#BREAKING: President Donald Trump has announced that he plans to pursue legislation granting amnesty to undocumented immigrants working in the agricultural and hospitality industries, including hotels and restaurants

GN

Tired of $107k?

Your fault.

You spent all your time orange pilling your friends when you shoulda been OPing all the OGs who are selling rn

A very unexpected outcome of launching Rails is the level of interest from the Islamic Finance community.

There are few yield products that don't rely on usury. Rails uses no lending and no rehypothecation so if of particular interest.

Looking forward to learning more!

The handrail moves faster than the escalator on purpose. It's designed to make you pay attention and avoid a fall.

if properly calibrated, the handrail pulls you forward when going up, away from the fall behind, and it pulls you backwards when going down, away from the fall in front of you.

Define Bitcoin using only 1 word:

Big same. Ultra same.

Call me old fashioned, but I’m honestly just fucking sick of my tax dollars (plus printed money) paying to bomb people in a desert on the other side of the only life-sustaining planet within a few light years.

Imagine, if you will, a story about two empires so vast and powerful that they have control over nanites, genes, planetary-busting bombs, and the very ability to time travel itself, while locked in a timeless war with each other.

And now imagine a story of that insane scope is written as a short novella.

Anyway, here's a mostly spoiler-free review of "This Is How You Lose the Time War" which I just finished reading. It's a multi-award-winning short book, and very commercially popular, yet only has a 3.86 out of 5 review on Goodreads because it is polarizing.

Back-cover type of summary: A time-traveling agent named Red works for the post-singularity technotopia called the Agency, and another time-traveling agent Blue works for a vast organic consciousness called the Garden. The two agents are post-human, with powers almost beyond comprehension. They engage in a time-traveling battle of wits over centuries, but eventually Blue leaves Red a letter that says "Burn before reading" which Red reads, and thus begins a chain of letters that they write to each other while warring. After so long and complex of a war, they each find their opponent more fascinating than anything else.

I do like the premise a lot. For those that have played Magic the Gathering, it's like if one side casts a fireball, and the other side casts a counterspell, but then the first side casts a counterspell on that counterspell, and the other side counters that counter that countered their fireball. Two empires so vast and powerful that they're battling across a multiverse of timelines, constantly undoing what the other has done. One side kills a key figure of history. The other side kills the would-be assassin of that figure. The first side goes back further and attacks somewhere else, and so on. Determining the outcomes of wars, rewriting history, dancing across multiple different "threads" of time, while trying to keep Chaos from spiraling out of control.

As a random example, in some time-threads Romeo and Juliet is the tragedy that we know it. In other threads, Romeo and Juliet was written as a comedy, with a light-hearted outcome. Who knows what tiny differences in Shakespeare's life would have led him to write one or the other.

Since the book was polarizing, my assumption going in was that I would not like it. This is basically a story about a time war written by poets, and thus my engineer brain is likely to kind of check out.

And indeed, I actively did not like the first half. I found myself reading out self-enforced obligation to get through it, sometimes skimming over whole paragraphs. The prose is pretentious, though arguably on purpose because the two agents are effectively demigods, playing six-dimensional chess with each other while also being absolute murder-machines when needed, so there is a sort of eloquent battle of wits that they engage in with their letters.

Additionally, despite Red and Blue being so different, and literally written by different people (the book was co-authored), I surprisingly found them to be too similar to each other. Although again I suppose that's kind of the point. Two sides involved in a war so complex and long, how could you not turn out similarly to each other? That's not really a spoiler; from the start there's an obvious "we looked at the enemy and saw that it was like us" vibe.

Lastly, given the shortness of the book, obviously the reader is not really going to know the details of this world. It's inherently hard to empathize with characters that you barely understand even from a physical standpoint, given how absurdly advanced and post-human they are. And since there are multiple timelines that these agents go through, reading most of it made it unclear how death works, or what the consequences of death are in this multiverse. The obvious point from the start is that in this grand war, we would be focused on just two characters, and yet not knowing certain rules of the overly-complex world can potentially affect how well we can attach to those characters.

But then... the second half did get me more engaged and curious. I had to see the punchline, had to see how it would end, and indeed I cared for the outcome of the characters. So, they got me.

I'd give the book an 8/10. There's a creative and experimental aspect to it, nontraditional high-brow literature sort of stuff. Too poetic for my taste; not concrete enough. But I wouldn't necessarily change anything, either. It's very interesting, despite not quite being for me.

I will be participating in exactly zero stupid fucking wars between Israel and the lunatic warmongering US govt and whatever country they think is convenient to obliterate so they can install a “pro west” tyrant.

Iran knows that the US wars & occupation of the Mid East are related to keeping the oil trade dollar denominated. Iran has threatened to bomb all Mid East oil infrastructure as an attack on the dollar. There are people in power in the US who might be happy to have a war to blame for the destruction of the dollar in order to escape responsibility for the horrible financial situation they have been creating for decades.

Is anyone building a client that is only zaps?

A client where every interaction has a price, and that price creates signal, intentionality, and quality.

Not a walled garden. It would be open source, Nostr native, and permissionless.

Anyone can plug in but if you want to speak, you pay.

If you’re valuable, you get paid.

Think less social media client and more civilizational filter.

France is now moving to label X an adult site, which would force it into the country’s age verification and digital ID laws.

That means anyone in France wanting to use X would need to show ID. Not to get into adult content. Just to get in.

Requiring ID to access the internet is how free speech dies and mass surveillance begins.

America bankrupted itself fighting unnecessary wars around the world, on behalf of other nations.

All while being invaded by 10’s of millions of illegals.

What a historic blunder.

Getting 10’s of millions of illegals back out is virtually impossible.

But it is possible to get rid of the empire. Better now than later.

Wow. I hope I never did something stupid with my nsec.

But we really need to find a way to stop this single point of failure.

It is, as far as I can tell, impossible to tell the difference between "making an inane comment on your post to be supportive" and "llm bot spamming".

If I don't learn anything from what you're saying, why say it?

Perhaps I need a client which doesn't show comments more than two hops away in my social graph? Probably too quiet though; I would need many more friends.

High Elevation Wine Farming Works without chemicals

(while most other regions depend on them)

If it's not cold, and it's not dry, you're going to have pest, disease or fungus problems. Most U.S. wine regions don't offer both which is why farming organically is nearly impossible.

On the extreme difficulty end of the spectrum, Virginia (2% of US wine production) is too hot and too humid. Summer rain fuels black rot, downy mildew, powdery mildew, and botrytis. Only three vineyards in the entire state are certified organic.

The Finger Lakes (0.5%) are cold, but still humid. Same diseases.

California (81%) is dry, but pest pressure is extreme. They fight Pierce's disease, phylloxera, and leafroll virus with a mix of chemicals and integrated pest strategies.

Fighting all of these issues is while remaining organic can be like fighting against inflation by holding treasury bonds. Its just not affective enough and is the main reason why only 0.4% of the wine grapes grown in the USA are produced organically.

The best way to avoid these issues is to find a place that is just cold enough to kills pest and just dry enough to stave off infection while also not being too cold and too dry to be able to actually farm.

Only small pockets of these zipper zones exist around the USA and they do come with their own challenges, but Colorado's West Elks AVA is one of them.

Here we farm at knifes edge between the Rocky Mountains and the Utah Desert. At 6,000+ feet, the winters kill off most threats and the arid summers prevent mildew.

The tradeoff? Most vines can't survive here and even the ones that do get frozen back to the ground (destroying an entire vintage) every few years.

Despite being known as a finicky grape, Pinot Noir thrives here. Chardonnay, Gewurztraminer and Riesling do too.

Our Wine Region is small, but this climate allows us to punch above our weight.

"Don't act like you're not impressed"

- Ron Burgundy