jcorgan
Johnathan Corgan

🎶 Older now, but still running against the wind 🎶

Scientist, engineer, consultant, pilot. Slinger of bits and reducer of gradients.

EN/ES ☸️

Public Key

npub19wavu4f7l6l43h24jyskn7fvzy37kcfp67aqjtmv2qgy4lp34nhsda8p6k

Profile Code

nprofile1qqszhwkw25l0a06cm42ezgtflykpzgltvysa0wsf9ak9qyz2lsc6emcpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduq3vamnwvaz7tmjv4kxz7fwdehhxtnnda3kjctvqy8hwumn8ghj7um0d3hkxmewdekqz9nhwden5te0vf5hgcm0d9hx2u3wwdhkx6tpdsq32amnwvaz7tmzv4mx7tnwdaehgu339e3k7mgpzemhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuurjd9kkzmpwdejhgxkrjrd

Publishing to

Author Public Key

npub19wavu4f7l6l43h24jyskn7fvzy37kcfp67aqjtmv2qgy4lp34nhsda8p6k

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Last Notes

2026-01-23 02:14:22 UTC

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This also means you have to be comfortable going your own way and not rely on familial or tribal membership to validate who you are.

2026-01-23 02:10:47 UTC

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No need to disengage, just stop arguing. Be an example, not an adversary.
Bitcoin touches on so many convenient but sacred fictions that many people have to hit "fiat bottom" before they become willing to entertain alternatives to what everyone knows.
#nevent1q…rkph

2026-01-21 16:35:35 UTC

Everything makes sense if you imagine the people in charge are fifth graders.

2026-01-01 23:06:52 UTC

"If there is hope, it lies with the Nostriches."
- George Orwell, 2026, maybe

2025-12-18 23:08:50 UTC

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All good points.
As someone else wrote, the biggest risk is a mathematical breakthrough. Since these are inherently unpredictable there is no way to hedge against something that might happen tomorrow or might happen never, other than to just give up.
On the other hand, it is the engineering difficulties in the practical implementations of these designs much more so than quantum error correction scaling that provides more fundamental limits on system size.
Issues such as thermal cooling, control circuitry and cabling, manufacturing yield, environmental shielding, and supply chains for components all present massive challenges to creating a hundreds of thousands of qubits system needed to produce error corrected logical qubits of the size necessary to put ECC at risk.
Surmounting these requires solving not just physics or math issues, but coordinating and tooling an industrial, financial, and political capacity I am deeply skeptical is actually achievable.
I maintain that the primary motivation to look at post-quantum cryptography now is to mitigate the "harvest and decrypt later" situation perhaps more important in communication systems like Nostr than in Bitcoin.

2025-12-18 21:02:49 UTC

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Hopium goes both directions, though. What's missing is an honest assessment and acknowledgement of the engineering practicalities involved in scaling the current state of the art. These will likely get solved, "eventually", as you say, but 1 yr. vs. 10 yrs. vs. 100 yrs. makes a qualitative difference in what current course of action is motivated.

2025-12-11 15:03:11 UTC

GM ☕ Do we have any Nostriches who have done the #Camino?

2025-12-08 19:55:41 UTC

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Heh, that must have been Tim, the one guy older than me there. But I certainly agree!

2025-12-07 20:09:39 UTC

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We don’t need no steenkin’ keys
https://blossom.primal.net/bf6dc2234128be0b8d62042c6255b6986d419c5d88cbd73dd7a5d4537a0e3137.jpg

2025-12-07 06:03:56 UTC

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I don't know, seems a bit gimmicky:
https://www.pentagram.com/work/caligra-c100-developer-terminal

2025-12-04 06:07:30 UTC

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This is great. I had assumed something like this must exist. My current efforts started as a side quest to understand why the NIP-65 inbox/outbox model seemed so broken; I hadn't intended to build out a full relay crawler 😏

2025-12-04 06:01:21 UTC

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I haven't, I'm still building this thing out. Tracking NIP-65 events seemed the logical way to recursively expand out relay discovery, followed by actually connecting to newly learned relays from those events and requesting their own NIP-65 events, etc.

2025-12-04 05:54:04 UTC

So far my relay crawling experiments show a steady state of about 800 nostr relays online and queryable at any point in time, while the collective unique relays extracted from recent NIP-65 kind 10002 inbox/outbox lists is nearly 3000. About half of the difference is down to DNS failures--relays that simply don't exist anymore.

2025-12-03 23:54:29 UTC

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There was a small but significant number of URLs that were discarded without trying because they were unroutable, including bare host names, localhost, .local and .private domains, IP address ranges that were for private use, and broadcast (!) IP addresses.

2025-12-03 23:49:43 UTC

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There were about 41500 kind 10002 events retrieved and processed to get the above, and the most common reasons for failure were failed DNS, connections refused, TLS handshake failure (bad certificates), or connection with no response.

2025-12-03 23:20:36 UTC

Just coded up a recursive relay crawler using NIP-65 events for discovery. Over the course of a few hours it discovered a total of 2,761 unique URLs for relays (after discarding a variety of malformed or otherwise unusable relay tags.) Unfortunately, actually going out and attempting a connection with each, only *800* were online and queryable! Not sure what to make of this. Clearly many people need to update their kind 10002 relay lists...

2025-12-03 05:42:40 UTC

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Butthurt is a terrible disease, affecting millions.

2025-12-02 05:31:16 UTC

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International airlines are a treat to be savored. Somehow US domestic airlines have all become crowded buses in the sky.

2025-12-02 05:18:37 UTC

I have to say that coming back into the world from seven years of self-imposed hermitage is both gratifying and horrifying. On the plus side, I have recently met and interacted with young people carrying the torch of a movement I had given up upon, yet the forces of humans at their worst remain arrayed as always against us.
Nonetheless, I am hopeful again.

2025-12-02 05:06:09 UTC

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Over two and a half minutes into it and I have no idea what's in it, and the reliance on memes and pseudo-humor has turned me away from watching any further. It sucks being older and informed.

2025-12-02 05:00:42 UTC

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Don't know anything about Flotilla, but my experience about such things is they emerge organically. People put stuff out there, sometimes it sticks, sometimes it doesn't.

2025-12-01 05:43:53 UTC

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I haven't found anything Nostr related other than Nostr itself. For bitcoin, the highest signal I have found is the "Delving Bitcoin" forums.

2025-12-01 04:32:43 UTC

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It pays to ignore the bleating and hysteria, and focus on signal.

2025-11-30 15:06:09 UTC

GM ☕ Last day of vacation before going back into the fiat world. I don't wanna!

2025-11-29 04:41:54 UTC

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Good times!

2025-11-26 19:25:08 UTC

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Not at all.

2025-11-26 16:12:12 UTC

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Not just suspected, painfully obvious from the start.

2025-11-26 13:52:04 UTC

GM ☕

2025-11-25 13:21:18 UTC

Nerd sniped by so many new ideas in the last few days the day job is really gonna suffer.

2025-11-24 12:29:23 UTC

GM ☕

2025-11-23 14:22:34 UTC

The kids are alright.

2025-11-21 18:38:44 UTC

🛬

2025-11-21 05:06:33 UTC

✈️

2025-11-16 14:08:52 UTC

proof of life

2025-08-14 19:57:53 UTC

If it weren't for the police and the army, politicians would just be disgustingly evil people you could safely ignore.
This one fact tells you everything you need to know about their actual role in the world--anything else is just propaganda to hide this.

2025-08-07 05:56:23 UTC

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And the wheel goes round and round, same as it ever was.

2025-07-02 02:03:21 UTC

https://blossom.primal.net/91b9c8e8ca910fb993e0463e1ffe114b1c736597f907ffb2d0729deffdcfa2de.gif A big beautiful box of pork...

2025-06-30 02:29:42 UTC

https://blossom.primal.net/a1397bfd804b4ef4b1cc657cb5092c3de5616ce6d8ab4491d7d63e5f234619c7.png

2025-06-28 00:50:47 UTC

We didn't get lucky, we just didn't listen to you.

2025-06-26 22:25:45 UTC

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la misma mierda, diferente día

2025-06-25 13:52:48 UTC

Bitcoin does not need politicians, it just needs them to go away.

2025-06-25 13:51:01 UTC

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Politicians quoting cypherpunk history are the jocks trying to copy your homework *and* take credit for it. Don't fall for it.

2025-06-22 00:34:22 UTC

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It was never "worthful". It was just a gentleman's agreement among a bunch of politicians to enforce power among themselves after overthrowing the previous bunch of of politicians, with a ton of effective propaganda that has kept it alive for a long time, until recently.

2025-06-20 03:37:36 UTC

One of the disappointments of being in my late 50s is watching young people having to learn the hard lessons of life all over again, instead of learning from history only a generation or two old.
Especially now, where events before the Internet seemingly never happened, and events after the Internet get endlessly memed or propagandized into whatever currently fashionable ideology benefits the status quo.
There has been a thin thread of rebellion against this that has survived in the form of cypherpunk activism of the 80s and 90s through the invention and proliferation of Bitcoin in the 2010s and now the advent of distributed, uncensorable communication networks such as Nostr.
And yet, it's not clear to me whether this nascent drive towards individual freedom will survive. Too much of the public discourse is consumed by "strategic reserve" this, "legal tender" that, and in general the tying of Bitcoin to its relation to the State. Politicians seek political favor by making noises allying themselves to the Bitcoin community, and to great benefit. The vast majority of Bitcoin movement is between exchanges, not individuals. I won't even go into the absurdities on display at conferences ostensibly about Bitcoin but have turned into promotional grounds for grifters and influencers.
We are at a unique point in history where we have both the technology and the motivation to establish direct, peer-to-peer, mutually beneficial, and most importantly, voluntary, non-coercive relationships among each other that bypass existing systems of surveillance and control.
Let's do this.

2025-06-17 01:14:00 UTC

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https://blossom.primal.net/02282dfce10094166333f7fcd3baf2d4b3fbe6bab474ba986b455c87fde2d5f9.png

2025-06-06 14:02:17 UTC

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Indeed. Properly used, AI is a developer's best friend, force multiplier, and pair programmer. But it's not a replacement.

2025-06-05 22:41:34 UTC

Sometimes it feels like being a small mouse dodging the feet of dinosaurs fighting each other for power, all the while a massive meteor is inbound.
You know mammals will emerge triumphant eventually, you just have to avoid the collateral damage long enough.
Be the mouse, not the dinosaur.

2025-06-01 14:43:33 UTC

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Delving Bitcoin has some of the highest signal in this entire space. The authors on that thread alone bring back some serious OG energy that is sorely missing elsewhere.

2025-05-23 05:21:27 UTC

Sometimes I am convinced that sociopaths in suits with flag-themed lapel pins will be the end of us. Other times I see the work that is happening in this space and get some modicum of hope.
Cypherpunks write code.

2025-05-17 03:43:03 UTC

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This is something definitely shared by pilots!

2025-05-17 03:01:23 UTC

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I was marveling over this new flex of posting Steak 'n Shake receipts and noticed the Fiat Amount thing for lightning payments. But I'd be really impressed if they used that for *all* the receipts.

2025-05-14 05:05:50 UTC

One of the very defining characteristics of the entire Bitcoin ecosystem is its voluntary participation by everyone involved.
Users choose to transact in bitcoin, what node software to run, and what valid transactions to propagate on the network.
Developers choose what node software and features to contribute their time and energy working on, and offer up that node software to users.
Miners choose to purchase electricity, which transactions to include, and when to enter into the proof of work lottery of producing a block.
The crucial difference in all of these is that nobody is made to, by force or threat of force, to act in any capacity.
Thus, in the absence of force, the *only way to influence the actions of others* is through persuasion, argument, and discussion. This is what is happening right now in the heated back and forth going on with the OP_RETURN configuration setting, and we should be celebrating the fact that nobody can be dictated to here.
So, welcome to cryptoanarchy, come on in, the water is fine.

2025-05-13 04:03:26 UTC

Have been recently working in Rust helping on an open source project completely unrelated to my professional work. It's nice to have a side project to spend time on again, and Rust brings the joy back into bare metal programming.

2025-05-12 13:22:50 UTC

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Smart at the edge, dumb in the middle.

2025-05-11 18:47:26 UTC

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What is twitter?

2025-05-10 14:02:49 UTC

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Still on my shelf!

2025-05-09 04:35:36 UTC

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I imagine this would have to be a learned thing, in that if you are following a hashtag from a text note, you'd start with that pubkey's outbox relay list, and then any other notes that show up for that hashtag, you'd scape the author of those notes outbox and add the relays to the list.
This doesn't solve de novo following a hashtag with no context, however.

2025-05-08 02:56:14 UTC

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I use it constantly for both Python and Rust projects, and it works great. But it needs to be treated like a pair programmer with oversight and checking. Still, the over productivity boost is enormous, especially for automating routine stuff.
It does struggle with Rust sometimes, certainly more often than with Python. I think that partly comes down to there being more Python code in its training set than Rust, and, Rust won't silently pass buggy code like Python often will.

2025-05-07 23:46:55 UTC

Writing code is great but have you ever fixed your neighbor's seven year old daughter's bike and watched her face light up when she finds out she can go outside and ride again?

2025-05-06 14:50:36 UTC

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Twitter is mind cancer.

2025-05-06 13:59:59 UTC

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Oh, sure. I don't post very often on Mastodon, but the academic related content is not really found elsewhere, and I don't reference my account there as any reliable way of reaching me.
Nostr is clearly the superior underlying technology. I'm just really looking forward to when the most frequent topic of discussion here isn't...nostr itself 😏

2025-05-06 12:07:15 UTC

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To be honest I get my most interesting content on the Fediverse via Mastodon, at least related to STEM topics and my professional field. Nostr has its place and has a bright future but man, it sure has a lot of self-referential, repetitive content.

2025-05-05 23:52:19 UTC

I've spent the last few days buried in equations, simulations, and presentations.
Now it's time to crack a cold one and get back to that sweet, sweet code vibing 😂

2025-05-05 11:54:29 UTC

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Welcome to cryptoanarchy. 😏

2025-05-05 02:22:42 UTC

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I've been ordering from them for years, heard of them through their pemmican product (which is only so-so, but FDA won't let them make it right.) Great product and service.

2025-05-05 00:34:58 UTC

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Sean Carroll at Caltech has been involved in a fascinating line of research about this, starting back in 2016 and still going:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1606.08444
https://blossom.primal.net/0adcd151807ed1a1ffc5af8d120ea30a9be48a21556f400032c68280522a12e8.png
His personal webpage for research:
https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/research/annotated-publications/
Great reading if you want to pursue this further.

2025-05-04 16:11:37 UTC

Happy birthday Hal, we miss you.

2025-05-04 15:50:10 UTC

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There's a good season seven Black Mirror episode related to this...

2025-05-02 13:25:07 UTC

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It's an auction, he who pays the most fees gets their valid transactions confirmed.
Bullshit, spammy uses of block space will stop once they are priced out by use cases people are willing to spend higher fees for.

2025-05-01 13:47:21 UTC

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☕

2025-04-30 14:07:02 UTC

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I'm old enough to remember "5th generation" programming and visual flowchart based programming from the 1980s, and they had a similar vibe (pun intended). Interesting demos but anything more complicated had to conform to the preconceived notions or straitjackets of the designers.
I use AI coding assistants extensively, every day, in my professional work, and they are an enormous productivity enhancer when used the right way. But I already know enough about how to do things that I can guide it and work with it like a pair programmer, not a vibe master hoping to create something out of whole cloth. They need checking and verification and hand holding but it's possible to fly at speeds impossible when working alone.
Maybe this will change one day and we'll just say "make me a sandwich" and an entire sandwich making machine will get coded up and work flawlessly. Not holding my breath.

2025-02-13 23:38:51 UTC

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I was there briefly a few years ago. Didn't get a chance to see much though, sadly.

2025-02-05 14:51:48 UTC

I'm old enough to remember a time when all you had to do was turn off the TV to quiet the screeching of politics and outrage. Now it has seeped into every little nook and cranny of daily life.
That cabin in the woods has never looked more enticing.

2025-01-28 12:59:11 UTC

GM ☕
Live long enough for your childhood memories to feel like they happened to someone else. Then realize, they did.

2025-01-17 07:12:40 UTC

Pro tip: rooting for the political gang that promises you the most "number go up" is not a strategy for lessening their power over you, any more than voting for the prison warden will open the gates of freedom.
Bitcoin, and now Nostr, are both technologies for recapturing your sovereignty and making politicians, whatever their craven power fantasies might be, irrelevant.

2024-12-05 02:56:35 UTC

Has anyone checked in on Peter Schiff lately?

2024-11-11 17:07:20 UTC

GM 🥃
https://image.nostr.build/6835177885ebfd58a016cad47d5d1296fb88953cc0d1b9be6f0f3997793249e6.jpg

2024-11-11 15:34:40 UTC

Hey @npub1az9…m8y8, does blockclock have a 100K problem 😆

2024-10-08 15:42:24 UTC

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wen Coldcard nostr DM client

2024-09-27 02:28:25 UTC

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Removing cupsd on desktops has long been a part of many orgs security policy, and servers shouldn't have it installed in the first place.
Having packages installed that aren't being actively used is a big attack surface, as this exploit shows.

2024-09-03 16:14:27 UTC

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Follow people you are interested in, reply to their notes, occasionally post your own original stuff--your reach is what you make it, not what the "algorithm" does.

2024-08-31 20:52:22 UTC

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6M: Am I a joke to you?

2024-08-30 15:31:46 UTC

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Is that noise floor in the room with us right now?

2024-08-26 14:38:25 UTC

The biggest scam ever sold to people about "democracy" is that you can only vote out a politician by voting another one in.
As long as you believe it is left vs. right, democrats vs. republicans, or the rich vs. the poor, a politician wins. What a racket!

2024-07-24 21:03:58 UTC

Satoshi wept.