You want Nostr lists? Here, have some lists. View quoted note →

That's interesting, because he's nailing the exact mentality differences between Northern Europeans and Americans right there (starting at 7:53). Those come from school systems and this conditioned comfort with sticking to the familiar instead of trying new stuff. I can back that up. Northern Europe isn't betting on fresh entrepreneurs at all. It just wants to pump up that old money, the kind earned way before World War I, and make it even more powerful. That's why you don't see any standout IT innovation coming out of that area; the structures and laws to support it just aren't there.

It doesn't matter how technically advanced your security and protection systems are; they're gonna hit you with social engineering. And loneliness is a nasty weak spot. People will do just about anything to dodge pain. And that brings me to the next thing: Neuralink, or those neural brain-to-machine links that some big tech lords are working on right now. It's not really about making it easier to use computers; it's all about digging into people's desires. Take a simple example: The test subject plays some adventure game, like a role-playing one. During the game, he runs into 10 different kinds of AI-generated women. Blondes, brunettes, short ones, tall ones, with all sorts of body types and skin tones... they're testing the whole range. Then those electrodes on your head measure which type triggers the strongest biochemical reactions. And in round two, they tweak that type even more, try out extra variations, until bam, they know exactly what turns you on. That doesn't just open the floodgates to the most killer personalized ads, but also to scams. Or hey, aren't those basically the same thing anyway? Some tech just pulls in scams like a magnet when the folks at the controls don't have any fear of God. View quoted note →

Even this ecosystem isn't totally safe from getting corrupted by money to some extent. I don't wanna start pointing fingers at specific cases where my gut instinct went off (I have zero interest in diving into that kind of drama right now) but Nostr and its creators aren't exactly innocent little lambs either. It reminds me of that question someone asked a wise guy: "Why doesn't God just make everybody rich if He owns everything and He's so generous?" And his answer was: „He has made 1% of people rich, and look how messed up the world already is because of it. Do you really want things to get even worse?"

I've got to admit, it feels a little weird using my own Nostr client and key signer every day. There's always this tension between wondering 'did I get everything right?' for every feature I use and that I know about, and that satisfying feeling like 'cool, the client handles this pretty well too‘. With other clients, it's not like that. You kind of just blindly trust that everything's all good, even though you've seen some obvious bugs here and there. What a weird feeling. Feelings are weird.