I really want to use AI for more things, but I just don’t have a use case. Zero chance I’m going to outsource it for my personal private messages, even though it’s tempting to experiment with it. I’ve tried a bit to get it to generate fantasy baseball rankings or NFL bets, but that task seems too hard for it as yet. I use it now basically as a search engine and to look up basic facts or learn about some topics, but I feel like I’m missing out on something, like I should build something useful with it. I just can’t think of what that would be.

Went to the dentist today for a teeth cleaning, 10 am appointment. They're always on time, never make you wait. At 10:15 they apologized, asked if I wanted a coffee. I said yes, At 10:20, they took me into a red-light therapy room, for a free session, apologizing as someone apparently had a dental emergency, needed the dentist. At 10:45, they came in, said she was ready, told me the cleaning would be comped. That's how you run a business, and I can't tell you how rare this is in Portugal, but these guys know what they're doing.

I grew up in NYC. When I got to college in 1989, there were a lot of leftist “cool” guys on campus. Long hair, smoked weed (so did I), were not nearly as woke as it is now, but it were woke-ish. They had beliefs about things that if you didn’t share, you were considered kind of a bad person. Like you were insufficiently concerned about racism or whatever. It was a bit of a contrast coming from NY where everyone just joked aobut racist shit all the time about Jews, blacks, Italians, Irish, Polaks, Puerto Ricans, etc. That shit was verboten there. But whatever, it wasn’t that big a deal back then, no one got cancelled, it was more just discouraged and frowned upon. It was an ethos of being the sort of person who is good and cultivated and refined. These cool guys felt they were “good” because they had the right beliefs. I was friends with a couple of them. One of them went to work for Goldman Sachs I think, not sure, I lost touch. But it was the first time I really encountered people patting themselves on the back for their “right-think.” Again it was nothing compared to woke social media of the last 10 years, but more similar to what I see on nostr now. Cool guys patting themselves on the back for the correct beliefs, virtue signaling their adherence to the “freedom” ethos. Some of them will parlay it into some sats via building a following, most will just be aspirational, generating a few likes and some in-group approval. It’s fine — no one gets canceled on nostr. Just noticing the same pattern. Find it mildly retarded, but a good reminder human nature isn’t suspended just because you’re on the “freedom protocol.”

A religion, a philosophy, a belief system. It won’t work.

On legacy social media Team Good was mostly leftist/corporate HR-think. On Nostr Team Good is libertarian-above-it-all platitude-think. This is not to say whether one set of values is better or worse per se. Only that, effective or not, none of you (and not me either) represent the “good” no matter how many pats on the back you receive. Best one can do is aim for truth and let the chips fall.

Libertarians are like communists — their utopias are right around the corner if only humans behaved they way you want them to!

You should always be against government overreach. But some people are against any reach at all even at the expense of ensuring fundamental conditions for bottom up prosperity. View quoted note →