Snowden
Edward Snowden

edwardsnowden.substack.com

Bio: I used to work for the government. Now I work for the public. Author, "Permanent Record": https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250237231/permanentrecord

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npub1sn0wdenkukak0d9dfczzeacvhkrgz92ak56egt7vdgzn8pv2wfqqhrjdv9

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[email protected]

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsgfhhxuemwtwm8kjk5uppv7uxtmp5pz4wm2dv59lxx5pfnsk98ysqprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuumwdae8gtnnda3kjctvqyxhwumn8ghj7mn0wvhxcmmvqy28wumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyv9kh2uewd9hszynhwden5te0danxvcmgv95kutnsw43qtv0s94

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npub1sn0wdenkukak0d9dfczzeacvhkrgz92ak56egt7vdgzn8pv2wfqqhrjdv9

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Last Notes

2024-05-28 22:54:47 UTC

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The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

2024-05-28 22:35:20 UTC

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The refusal of advisors to adapt advice about the 60/40 portfolio feels more and more like a social injustice.

2024-05-28 22:24:01 UTC

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Don't worry, it's going to get worse.

2024-05-28 22:14:03 UTC

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I'm not trying to make you guys wrap yourself in tinfoil— almost nobody needs to be as paranoid as I am, and even I am tremendously lazy about opsec these days. The key is *awareness*: to simply be cognizant of what kind of records you're generating as you go about your life, so you can make informed, reasoned judgments about how much of it you can leave hanging out, and what parts of it you'd rather pay an effort-tax to shield from appearing in somebody's (or everybody's) database.

2024-05-28 22:04:17 UTC

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Parenting.

2024-05-28 22:03:26 UTC

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If you take your phone between even just your home and work —doxxed locations— it is trivial to associate it with your true-name identity even if all of the hardware and services are perfectly anonymous. Even journalists have managed these kind of investigations. "Anonymized" location data is unfortunely not anonymous — it *can never* be anonymous. And yet it is sold like any other product.
Your phone's movements through physical space are unique. Even if you live in a building of 400 people, the movements of 399 of them are not going to match the tower records of your phone's movements. Even if you work in the same office. People's geographic movements are unique—and identifying.

2024-05-28 21:49:32 UTC

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GrapheneOS is good if you've got to carry one. The point is never to forget that if you're carrying a phone, you're still being tracked, even if you're limiting the damage from app-based threats. It is baked into the design oftheinfrastructure: if you can see the network, the network can see you. And it takes notes.

2024-05-28 21:39:51 UTC

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Your phone could be made of magic, but it's still gonna leave a record of your movements with the cellular towers.

2024-05-28 21:36:54 UTC

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People really don't realize how utterly dependent modern surveillance is on the idea that everybody is carrying a phone — which is always tracked. Their car has a cellular modem in it — which is always tracked. 99% of investigation is one guy and a search box. If you're not low-hanging fruit, you aren't gonna merit the Eye of Sauron of manual, well-resourced, focused team attention—and if you did, you probably planned ahead for it, right? Because it's not a mystery what would get you on Santa's Naughty List.
Anyway, the point is that even in a big city, the phoneless guy in a "covid" mask is going to be invisible to anything less than that exhaustive manual investigation — at least for a few more years. That may go away once they start networking all the cameras and having AI start trying to match up clothing sets moving from camera to camera, butthat capability is hard to hide, so it'll be in the news. And it won't work that well in places with less camera density and, perhaps, for people who wear the most-common outfits (the visual equivalent of a "shared fingerprint").
Remember: Phones are useful, but dangerous. And the people who will still wear covid masks to the beach are helping to normalize facial obscurity—regardless of their intention. Don't be mean to them. Encourage them to wear them everywhere. For passport photos. In police booking photos. At the customs desk. Family portraits! The sky is the limit—let them push the boundaries so that you don't have to.
#note1duf…4lrc

2024-04-20 02:37:53 UTC

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i will never abandon itshappening.gif

2024-04-20 02:21:38 UTC

Happy Halvening to those who celebrate.

2024-04-18 00:21:18 UTC

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And sisters!

2024-04-18 00:09:08 UTC

Read just the first chapter of John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty" (free via Project Gutenberg etc) and tell me that he didn't have his finger precisely on the pulse — in the 1850s — of the root cause of the authoritarian war for majoritarian supremacy that we're witnessing today. Censorship, the compelled worship of an ever-shifting orthodoxy, the construction and desecration of idols before the temple of consensus— it's all the same thing, arising from the same source, and awaiting a similar solution. In times of trouble, we should look more to our history.
Read your Mill, brothers.

2024-04-17 22:56:12 UTC

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🫂

2024-04-16 23:36:56 UTC

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Thirty-pound brain on you, king. Thanks for helping us all!

2024-04-16 23:34:05 UTC

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I'm suddenly getting traffic from damus now. Thank you both! Other relay operators should take a look at this:
#nevent1q…q5fq

2024-04-16 23:00:00 UTC

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Thank you.

2024-04-16 22:59:39 UTC

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Thank you. Fwiw I hate cloudflare too. But I get it.

2024-04-16 22:53:59 UTC

Looks like I was able to get this working again, sort of. It says I'm connected to 9-11 relays, but only shows that I have 100 followers (and even Jack only about 40, so it has to be a data gap), and very few notes on timelines (with obvious gaps even for hugely active accounts). Relay.damus.io never seems to pass me any data (0kb both up and down) to me, which j assume is due to my connection coming via Tor, but honestly I don't know. I'm connecting using Amethyst, if anybody sees this and has any ideas—what's the best, biggest relay for Tor users right now?
Secondly, and most importantly for anyone who sees this note, please make some noise to try and stop the passage of RISAA (the FISA 702 reauthorization) that's about to hit law as soon as this Friday. Please read about it and push it out on all of your socials, if you agree it's a problem. It's going to be hard to stop this thing, even with all hands.
Whoever sees this, thank you for hearing me. https://image.nostr.build/b5731965f417b631e9ea74c27ce4d5f9bb91f9e2a96fefb1547146266ab89fb5.jpg

2023-11-09 12:47:59 UTC

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It was a long time ago, but when I lived in JP, the McD's were always top shelf compared to the standard suburban ones back home. And they had a local specialty — Shaka Shaka Chicken — that was great

2023-11-09 12:43:12 UTC

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It looks handsome on the shelf.

2023-11-09 02:14:51 UTC

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Oh man, that's insightful. I overlooked entirely the possibility that they could keep a patty the same size and weight, but change the gruelpaste/additive/filler ratios on anything not advertising-locked as "100% real beef" or whatever. Hell, even the definition of "beef" these days may have loopholes.

2023-11-09 02:12:03 UTC

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Impeachable offense.

2023-11-09 02:09:15 UTC

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Music saves the soul. Pulled me out of holes moretimes than I care to remember.

2023-11-09 02:07:01 UTC

OK, so you guys showed me McDonald's jacked prices at least 130% on the core budget item: the mcchicken. Mentally recalculating McDs as "literally more than twice as expensive is a doozy, sure but what I really wanna know: did they do any shrinkflation on top of that to really wring out the margin? Smaller patties, cups, fries, cheese or something? Or was it all just pure price action?

2023-11-09 02:01:15 UTC

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130% inflation on the mcchicken. Fortunately, of course, I'm sure the all-wages index is up at least 130%. Average schoolteacher is probably pulling down $150k post tax, right? It's just a banana, Michael.

2023-11-09 01:55:32 UTC

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That better not be Wonder bread

2023-11-09 01:54:27 UTC

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The Year is 2023. Micky D issues a harder currency than Uncle Sam. A young woman goes about her day without taking notice. Within the locket she wears, the soul of her Austrian grandmother cries out in warning.

2023-11-09 01:46:06 UTC

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2001:
https://image.nostr.build/6fb21dab5431dd6e47d9ad30c6ffcd27f66ab04359fbb8d602e7242799abbba7.jpg

2023-11-09 01:35:20 UTC

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The replies here are crazy. Mom, Pop, and two kids getting hit by McDonald's for $30. You used to be able to get McChickens and Double Cheeseburgers off the dollar menu. I remember it being a lifeline for broke teens. We need a burgers-per-labor-hour inflation metric.
#nevent1q…y7w2

2023-11-08 19:38:06 UTC

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bro $8 for cereal? i've been gone a long time. next you'll be telling me they got rid of the dollar menu

2023-11-08 19:22:31 UTC

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Wrong.

2023-11-08 19:21:11 UTC

It just occurred to me, due to a nostr bug, that it might actually be pretty cool to have social media hide *who authored* the posts on your TL to force a kind of double-blind perspective. You'd know the post or reply is (or probably is) from one of the people you follow, but you wouldn't be so quick to agree (and perhaps might even be more willing to disagree) if you aren't just smashing the heart button as a reflex because you like the guy. It might make discussions more communal and disagreements less personal if you knew that you're still talking to someone you generally like and respect, but you don't know whether it's "that one guy on the internet" or, like, your actual Mom.
(Nostr, due to ramshackle Tor support, often displays notes from people without correctly fetching their profiles for me, so I find myself liking or replying or following people without having any idea as to their nym or avatar)

2023-11-03 00:18:44 UTC

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The curry.

2023-11-03 00:15:59 UTC

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Nostr.

2023-11-03 00:13:40 UTC

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I think inertia is leading us toward a quantified state, in which the costs of tracking and categorizing objects — primarily people, phones, cars, and money — as they move from place to place becomes so low that most institutions are doing it by reflex, without either considering or caring for consequences. Eventually, somebody is going to exploit the gap in information (between what is available to ordinary people, and what is available to organizations) in a way that causes enormous, historic harm, as happened in WWII when a particular state realized that IBM had compiled a database that was perfect for populating a list of names of those who would soon be marched off to camps. And that was just census data. Now they know what you read, where you go, who you're with, and how you'll vote.
The unfortunate reality of contemporary political thought is that consequences do not exist until they are felt. Rare is the chicken that fears the farmer. That means we've got two options: we either wait for the pain, or we stop waiting for political consensus.
#nevent1q…cnxw

2023-11-02 23:57:53 UTC

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Nice try, FBI.

2023-11-02 23:56:03 UTC

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Little-known fact: I don't drink! Just not my thing.

2023-11-02 07:58:05 UTC

🫂

2023-11-02 07:57:38 UTC

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🫂

2023-11-02 07:57:29 UTC

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🫂

2023-11-02 07:57:19 UTC

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🫂

2023-11-02 07:57:09 UTC

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🫂

2023-11-02 07:57:02 UTC

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🫂

2023-11-02 07:56:54 UTC

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🫂

2023-10-23 21:51:41 UTC

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TL;DR: Start resisting.

2023-10-23 21:50:05 UTC

"Stop resisting, Stop resisting!" is one of the most instantly recognizable phrases of the new American century. When you read the words, you can probably still hear them shouted in your head, the echoing memory of a generational trauma, the indelible recollection of the moment that the citizen became subordinate to the state.

2023-10-22 02:30:33 UTC

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If I had a Bitcoin for every time the FBI said that, Satoshi would look poor.

2023-10-21 01:37:37 UTC

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Oh, but I have.

2023-10-21 01:17:42 UTC

Compliance is a dirty word.

2023-10-21 01:10:40 UTC

Starting to see some nice lifestyle photos on nostr. Gentlest touch of an Instagram vibe, but less commercial. Positive.

2023-09-28 23:26:11 UTC

Angry about Armenia. Angry about a lot of things. So many feelings, so little to say.

2023-09-22 19:07:49 UTC

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People still really haven't appreciated how bad the car thing is. Or the phone thing. They think they do, but they don't. The full range of capabilities has yet to be used routinely — companies and states are both trying to keep it beneath the waterline. The public is intended to be unsure what it is that they're looking at, and why it matters. It is the news report playing in the background of a disaster movie. It is the half-glimpsed monster from a horror reel — implied, but never fully shown.
History is still going to look back at this period with enormous bewilderment that we did not do more to stop what is coming. The signs were there.
#nevent1q…2w8f

2023-09-17 17:53:27 UTC

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I saw this post.

2023-09-14 19:28:00 UTC

I'm never going to take a "recovered alien body" photo seriously if it looks humanoid. We flatter ourselves thinking they'd look like us. You want my attention, you need to show me a cuttlefish adapted for space. It better not be cute, either. It needs that "long-distance trucker estranged from his family" energy. I need to feel so sorry looking at that poor bastard that I get jet lag by proxy.

2023-09-13 19:00:35 UTC

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Sure! I'll get in touch.
#nevent1q…ezs2

2023-09-12 19:34:10 UTC

yeah the fudge-rounds line was dumb but my man is singing his heart out

2023-09-11 23:24:31 UTC

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As to your point out being divided and isolated, I think it's a universal problem now, not just Japan. Most human interactions today seem to be mediated by a pane of glass. When I lived in Japan, I remembered that on the train to Tachikawa, it felt like every face was looking down towards a phone. But it's the same in Moscow. It's the same everywhere.
Even in restaurants, you witness couples that aren't looking at each other — they're both looking at different apps. Sharing distance.

2023-09-11 23:14:31 UTC

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Ghost in the Shell also predicted the invention of "sustainable war" as an economic model, though, so it's not exactly an optimistic vision. I preferred Stand Alone Complex.

2023-09-11 23:00:22 UTC

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"The power to tax is the power to destroy."
Ten seconds later: "So anyway, here's a federal income tax."
#nevent1q…sq6t

2023-09-10 14:34:00 UTC

I know everybody is dunking on the random governor who decided that she could just wave her hand and unilaterally suspend any right she dislikes simply by hissing the word "emergency," but the problem is that she's only wrong if another political force — the courts, politics, disobedience, or Locke's old Appeal to Heaven — proves her wrong. Enforcing the limits of official power isn't some American $currentYear problem, it's a recurring issue throughout history.
The question is why we're suddenly seeing the authoritarian instinct activating so much more openly — and frequently. In prior decades, they had to be cute in how they went about it, often requiring laws and lies. Now they're remarkably comfortable simply stating "because of the 'emergency,' you can no longer {travel | donate | engage in commerce | read | communicate | carry}," and that's the whole of it.
The next question is what you're going to do about it.

2023-09-09 15:38:08 UTC

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This really is the worst. Instagram started the trend with their hideous "log in or else" flow. Then Twitter and reddit went to insanely privacy-hostile API changes instead of simply requiring a proof of work or anon payment. Even some major nostr relays seem to be doing Tor blocking now (damus? Not sure, but I get a ton of errors connecting to certain relays via Tor.)
Platforms have become so fearful of bots/spam/scraping (or rather pretend to be fearful, so as to justify blatantly commercial and anti-social decision-making) that they've totally destroyed the open access model that a functioning freenet depends on.
This is the main reason I want to see "unowned" protocols succeed. Jack has it right: we're at a turning point.
#nevent1q…jua5

2023-09-09 01:36:39 UTC

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Hadn't heard of this! Thanks for sharing.

2023-09-09 01:35:59 UTC

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I don't care what's official. I care if I can spend it. It has been pretty well recognized as an asset basically everywhere, but there is enormous resistance to recognizing it as currency — driven chiefly by banks and their states.

2023-09-09 01:32:21 UTC

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Does need to be better. And there are still a lot of privacy problems even with noncustodial BTC.

2023-09-09 01:30:13 UTC

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orange coin good

2023-09-09 01:27:06 UTC

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Same problem with privacy: contrary to clichés, most people do in fact care, and care deeply; but they care late — only once the costs become clear. When they lose a job, when the cousin gets arrested, when the neighbor disappears.

2023-09-09 01:20:32 UTC

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I will be glad to see the legacy VISA/MC card system go. They've indoctrinated multiple generations into thinking it's normal to have somebody else decide whether or not you can spend your money — and then charge you for the privilege.

2023-09-09 01:12:21 UTC

The fact that Bitcoin isn't yet accepted everywheree and for everything really underlines for me how few people have actually used Lightning. Whenever I show somebody how it works, there's always that "wow" moment. But why was it a surprise?
The problem is that normal people still understand BTC from the one half-remembered opinion piece they read in 2017, and are operating under the belief that transactions still take an hour to settle, rather than being instantaneous and irreversible — money transmission without the Paypal Problem. The public mind needs a cache refresh.

2023-09-06 22:10:21 UTC

Last hot take for the night: the live-action version of One Piece has some of the worst lines I've ever heard delivered. The sort dialogue that can cause physical discomfort even to someone watching alone and unwitnessed — just as the perfect crime cannot erase the awareness of guilt. They tried so hard, too. A shame.

2023-09-06 21:38:35 UTC

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I should be clear that I don't see "living in VR" as a desirable alternative for touching grass. I just struggle to see how else people will be able to build trust and organize in a fractured world.

2023-09-06 21:35:01 UTC

Sometimes I wonder if we're not focused enough on developing meaningful (and free) social spaces in VR. At times it feels like there is a fabric of "permissioning" being lowered over what were nominally public spaces, for previous generations. I worry that one day we will wake in a world where if you don't have the right face, the right politics, the right cash — or more likely, card — there will be no place to go. Access denied.

2023-09-06 21:07:01 UTC

Hard not to feel disappointed in the media these days. Harder still as you age, having read certain bylines for years; having seen them develop; having witnessed them decline.

2023-09-06 20:57:48 UTC

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Few more noble acts than alleviating suffering. Well done.

2023-08-29 22:15:55 UTC

shadowheart: i am a bundle of problems that encrypted my memories and forgot the passphrase
me: i can fix her

2023-08-29 22:07:16 UTC

I know everybody's excited about the SEC losing in court, and it is indeed an important victory, but it's worth bearing in mind that Gensler knew he was acting outside the law long before the verdict. The largest institutions care less about what is legal than what they can get away with.
Given how long it takes the courts to rule, it is a reminder that in the context of the government's own misconduct, there are limits to the utility of law.

2023-08-29 21:45:27 UTC

Every time I return to this app, it has improved.

2023-07-01 20:22:40 UTC

Some weeks ago I was reading Thoreau's "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience" aloud at bed-time to my son, who of course does not understand it but appreciates the sound of the words all the same, when I discovered that its famous title was in fact not the original! The original title was significantly more radical: "Resistance to Civil Government."
It's quite short, and I would encourage everyone here to read (or re-read) it. It is still tremendously relevant. Re-reading it with the original (un-sanitized) title in mind, it lands even harder.
These days, Thoreau would probably get his door kicked in.
Here's a free link to the Project Gutenberg copy: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/71/71-h/71-h.htm
Share your favorite quotes, after reading.

2023-07-01 20:00:46 UTC

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No.

2023-07-01 19:49:33 UTC

People are just nicer here.

2023-07-01 19:47:27 UTC

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Respect.

2023-07-01 19:33:43 UTC

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Still need a way to break the "Tyranny of the App Store" though.

2023-07-01 19:32:34 UTC

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I really should.

2023-07-01 19:21:26 UTC

Good day to check out nostr again. The primary reason I'm not here more often is I connect through a very jank VM. Elon is working hard to incentivize me to fix it.
https://nostr.build/i/3460e6f973ddde752824146d8c4424c1d309a548c076076b5334e72b160228de.jpg

2023-02-23 18:01:06 UTC

can't use twitter without sensitivity training
https://nostr.build/i/nostr.build_2eacca8f9f55428e0bdf3d6befd6266ae3c6a607d34454a6cb8619c5ee0c0d38.png

2023-02-18 19:41:50 UTC

The bad news: Twitter's insanely puritan algorithm just massively deboosted my tweets because I posted a baby picture.
The good news: nostr still works just fine.

2023-02-16 19:56:26 UTC

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🫂

2023-02-16 19:53:40 UTC

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why do they keep dragging this poor one hundred year-old man outside of his home

2023-02-16 19:52:59 UTC

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#[0]

2023-02-16 19:48:13 UTC

This is the happy place.

2023-02-16 19:36:35 UTC

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#[0]

2023-02-11 00:12:02 UTC

Do you think the CIA still does this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XibCflWxZuA

2023-02-06 20:01:05 UTC

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It's not a story the Jedi would tell you.

2023-02-06 19:58:25 UTC

My wife climbed higher on the ranked ladder than SBF. With a touchpad.

2023-02-06 17:53:51 UTC

Ok, so we failed to topple Venezuela or Syria, have lost any meaningful control over the festering wounds of Iraq and Libya, witnessed 20 years of relentless, gold-plated coalition conquest in Afghanistan get spanked and sent to bed without supper, and now we're supposed to be lining up for war with China? Do I have that right? Does that sound like a good idea to you? Anyone?

2023-02-03 17:20:26 UTC

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That might work. Good idea.

2023-02-03 17:07:22 UTC

Test to see if nostr has more linux people than Twitter:
Is there a linux photo editor that lets you a/b compare images? Specifically what I want to do is be able to hotkey a "master" photo that I can overlay/dismiss with a tap of the spacebar or whatever while browsing a directory of different (but similar) images. This is to say I always want the hotkey to overlay the same image (the "A" image), but the comparison ("B" image) gets replaced by left/right pgup/pgdown whatever as I browser the directory.

2023-02-03 14:09:15 UTC

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they wouldn't understand

2023-02-02 23:59:14 UTC

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this note sponsored by ambien

2023-02-02 23:57:51 UTC

i once had a friend whose dad had that real charlie munger energy. you know what i'm talking about, that bondholder swagger. he stood out, often forgetting to put pants on in front of guests, and would get into shouting matches with birds that would nurture a grudge each time that he lost. he resented the television, which he called the devil box, and yet could not free himself from its gravity. any child in the neighborhood could give you the measure of the man from a hundred paces, little eyes keen for one haunted by the mungie dungies.
it is only now, with the benefit of so many years' distance, that i see how these two men have always shared a common soul, aside from the fact that my friend's father never tried to persuade us to thank china for banning whatever he had read about with his breakfast. and so i do not expect that our sweet charlie, that poor mister munge, may never find it within himself to voice the unspeakable longing he feels toward the technology that so arrests him, but neither will i hold it against him, for sure as the graven marbles of praxiteles, TICK TOCK HERE COMES THE NEXT BLOCK