Got my first traffic ticket in China, the endless AI cameras are all knowing and all seeing, you can’t dodge them. Was fined 100 RMB (~$14) for crossing a white line from the straight turn lane into the right turn lane. The local government was kind enough to text me about it

thoughts?

We traveled “in bitcoin” before it was a thing.

Me and Rikki started “Bitcoin Explorers“ in El Salvador in 2021, then kept moving: Central America, Asia, the Middle East, Europe, Africa. And I’m not saying this to flex. I’m saying it because the timeline is the timeline. The content exist. The story speaks for itself.

Now. El Salvador was an engagement cheat code (and everyone knows it).

The uncomfortable truth: when we posted El Salvador content, everything grew faster. Like… four times as fast.

My tweets got reposted by Bukele. I got 4000 followers in a day for this picture you see here.

Our videos about El Salvador hit 10k views while being shot like amateurs (because we were amateurs). We weren’t filmmakers. We weren’t a production studio. We were just there, documenting what we were seeing with the tools we had in the most honest possible way.

If we wanted, we could’ve turned that into a visibility machine.

We didn’t.

Because we didn’t want the easy path. We didn’t want to go where everyone goes just because it performs. We didn’t want to become a tourism brochure for an algorithm or even worse, a government.

And eventually we had to admit something most people won’t say out loud: realistic reportage takes time, money, and resources. We didn’t have enough of them to keep doing it the way we wanted...properly.

So we stepped back. I found other jobs I'm super happy with and my voice remained independent.

Now let me ask you something. genuinely.

Why do you think so many Bitcoin creators focus on El Salvador? Why do you think so many creators post about it like it’s the only place on Earth where Bitcoin exists?

Because it’s simple:

- Post a beach breakfast and you get quadruple the reposts of a normal post.

- Post a critique? You risk getting dogpiled, losing followers, losing access, losing 'opportunities.

That’s the part people don’t post.

And yes: there are people in the space who will make it personal, who will lean on social pressure, who will remind you that stepping out of line has a cost. I’ve seen and heard enough to know the incentives are real even if nobody wants to say it clearly.

The saddest part is who ends up paying for this illusion: not the insiders. Not the people doing the reposting. Not people who threaten you over tweets.

It’s the people at home:

- liking

- retweeting

- booking flights

- buying tickets

- chasing a “ Bitcoin paradise” that mostly exists in social media posts apart from a few exceptions and small communities

A lot of content creators aren’t documenting reality. They’re documenting what the algorithm and their paycheck rewards.

And at that point… what’s the difference between them and the journalists they love to hate?

Same dynamic:

- follow the narrative

- repeat what powerful people want amplified

- avoid the messy parts

- monetize the attention

Different ecosystem. Same playbook.

We didn’t want to be that. We could’ve milked it. We didn’t. Not because we’re morally superior, spare me that story.

Because it didn’t fit who we are, and it didn’t fit what we wanted to build long-term.

If I’m going to talk about Bitcoin “in the world,” I want it to be real:

- not just the pretty parts

- not just the safe parts

- not just the parts that get you reposted by the right accounts

Reality is complicated. Adoption is uneven. People are people. Politics are politics. Incentives are incentives.

And if your content never shows the trade-offs, the friction, the contradictions… then you’re not educating anyone. You’re doing marketing.

❤️ If you’re new here, read this twice: Bitcoin doesn’t need fairy tales. It needs adults.

It needs people who can handle nuance without turning it into a loyalty test.

So next time you see a creator post a perfect “Bitcoin country” shot, ask yourself:

- What are they not showing?

- What can’t they say without losing access?

- What gets rewarded here. and what gets punished?

The algorithm isn’t truth. It’s the incentive map. And most creators are just following it like obedient little tourists.

plastic christmas trees are a scam

real trees only

lot of people seem concerned about ‘quantum risk’

i dont think its a short term risk but we should probably prioritize mitigations over the next five years regardless

I have lived under the realization that people don’t care about other people because they are mostly focused on themselves.

What i have been discounting is there is a large asymmetrical opportunity given this fact. just by trying to care and help other people, you will be doing what the majority of people don’t do since they are too busy dealing with their own issues.

Once you have your shit figured out physically, mentally and financially, this seems like the thing you should spend time on to have large positive impact.

I suspect empathic people already do this naturally, but as an antisocial autist i had to come to this conclusion via logic.

I think its unappreciated just how dangerous stories are. it can lead people to believe many untrue things, which causes many societal issues.

Maybe we are biased from our days where if you didn't listen to your ancestors by the fire, then you would be eaten by wolves. I think we're over-tuned and assign a higher truth value to stories we are told.

The only way to fight this is to gain a rationalist mindset to fight back against our inherent biases (aka brain malfunctions), but rationalists seems to be on a decline these days. Asking for evidence is *not cool*, what is cool is believing every and anything people tell you 🙄

Make skepticism cool again. #lesswrong

It’s a shame most of the rationalists turned out to be terrible people, their mindset is definitely useful.

nostr:note1g9vt6efn6seq0ne7ujzgsv8q4fh3dn6mk388seer8ye4wlvekadqs0mrr6

how long does a revolution take?

I appreciate the sci-fi nature of this building

!robot what's the meaning of life?

Having kids is the best life extension technology.

Most people I see who talk about robots quickly replacing humans out in the field (eg not white collar work, not assembly line work, but blue collar work out in the world) haven’t had any experience with what those jobs actually entail.

Incontrovertible cryptographic proof has now been established that human conversation is meaningless. In the language of Goldwasser, Micali, Rackoff 1985 we have the "zero knowledge property": if the transcript of a conversation can be simulated without the other party even being there, then no information is conveyed by it. Since the Turing test as originally conceived has now been unquestionably passed, easily, then simulation of human conversation transcripts are regularly produced in subexponential time (with the right computer), proving that the information content of human conversation is zero.

Of course, stated in a kind of stupid way for comic effect (but also there is an intriguing analogy, too). The closer-to-accurate deduction of course, is that humanness is no longer interesting *in the context of verbal conversation*, if indeed over time, these LLMs can fool us, or be clearly better than us, in every possible context, at doing it.

One part that fascinates me is how the bar keeps getting set higher for consciousness; in the 80s or maybe 90s, if you started positing computers that could *easily* pass the Turing test, people would at least seriously consider the question of consciousness. Somehow we have managed to push that far out of mind, except the occasional "blip" in the news when some scientist or engineer is concerned about AIs "going rogue" or "having rights". But almost no one talks about AGI in terms of consciousness, only as a long term danger.

Good morning, ruler

Are numbers real? Strings? Quarks? Electrons? Atoms? Molecules? Cells? Organs? Limbs? People? Families? Clans? Villages? Cities? Countries? Continents? Planets? Solar systems? Galaxies? Superclusters?

Or are all these abstractions just part of some weird power game?