De Facto Monk

PEACE NOW

@elonmusk I genuinely think the only check and balance is voice through exit- namely using Bitcoin as one’s unit of account.

The fraudsters always come up with the most sympathetic excuses and do so very loudly, because that is what swindlers do

@RevanWashington @eigenrobot Truly incompressible x.com/defactomonk/st…

@eigenrobot Eigen's contrarianism is restless, existing lib polite fictions are too thoroughly mocked and debunked so he's started brainstorming new ones

just realized you never see nature documentaries about mentally retarded animals but I bet many exist and play important roles in their ecosystems

@bayeslord Descartes?

who is the Pliny of jailbreaking humans?

Another coin going into the vault. Still unreasonably cheap.

Just made my largest purchase of BTC since 2020.

@eigenrobot nothing inspires creativity like rare cardboard cartels creating Big Value through the unique and immutable properties of Title 17

naturally i have one and now i need to decide whether i should flip it its funny. i have unerring accuracy in predicting which secret lairs are going to skyrocket in the secondary market. my second sight is nerd aesthetic pricing ig

magic the gathering has scalpers now. make of that what you will

@pmarca “Mu”

Ratio me, navelgazers.

@SwiftOnSecurity Alternate take: dual-sha256 miners are a buyer of last resort that ought to pay no more than the floor price for otherwise wasted watts, as it does in countless instances of flared gas [no transmission infra] and over-built hydro and wind generation [during non-peak demand].

Would've been so dope if Bitcoin was based on godlike AI compute instead of literally pouring endless human industrial capability into a blackhole of zero productive consequence

@reason @gladstein RIP Brian. Just yesterday reading some bits of This is Burning Man.

We are sad to report that Senior Editor Brian Doherty has died. Brian wrote six books, including "Radicals for Capitalism," a seminal history of the modern American libertarian movement. He had an inspiring commitment to covering the ways free people choose to live their lives, and he will be missed. A full obituary will appear soon at reason.com.

@beffjezos SKILLS.md: You have access to: Tribalism, superstition and disgust, which are embedded as system calls that run as root.

Religion emerged as memetic evolutionary optimum of HUMANS.md context docs optimized at tribal and civilizational scale

@thedarkhorsepod @steveinpursuit @AaronRDay Warning: The historical revisionists have something to sell you.

Who Hijacked Bitcoin? @steveinpursuit and @aaronrday on DarkHorse 00:00:00 Bitcoin: The Questions That Matter 00:03:01 Sponsor: Helix 00:05:26 The Purpose of Bitcoin 00:10:52 Digital Cash 00:18:38 The Reality of Bitcoin Transactions Today 00:27:22 Sponsor: ARMRA 00:29:46 The History of Bitcoin 00:42:14 Preempting the Bitcoin Experts 00:50:20 Bitcoin History: Two Camps Emerge 00:59:57 Bitcoin History: The Mainstream Phase 01:01:59 Bitcoin Corruption: New Information from the Epstein Files 01:04:35 Government Crackdown on Crypto 01:13:25 Is Bitcoin Really Decentralized? 01:35:16 The Connection to Howard Lutnick 01:44:41 CBDCs Should Be Top of Mind 01:45:54 The Coming Financial Collapse 01:47:13 Do We Already Have a Backdoor CBDC? 01:51:44 Tokens and The Great Taking 01:56:38 The Technocracy Movement 02:00:30 Digital Currency Naivety 02:11:32 Morality as a Constraint 02:21:43 Rights as an Irritant to Power 02:23:50 Protecting Yourself 02:25:51 Fighting Back

@curious_vii I think in the context of a predominantly lowest-common-denominator-oriented public school, banning broad cognitive liberty in favor of command and control may work for the middle of the behavioral and trait bell curves. Fundamentally the institution presupposes control.

@DeFactoMonk That may be, but the data simply doesn’t support his position on social media per se being harmful to young people

Anyone have a coherent, dispassionate theory that explains Jonathan Haidt’s social media crash out? Seems like an otherwise reasonable person. Data doesn’t seem to support his holy war nor the policy demands, which I don’t even see as causally linked to the real problems he gestures at.

@curious_vii Classically liberal but cognizant of and responsive to the harm/care axis of the moral foundations theory.

@DeFactoMonk Say more?

@Plinz While it was much lower velocity, LiveJournal did have a “friend feed” that was a nearly perfect implementation of (self constructed) timeline, with fine-grained comment controls, communities, etc. Monetization failed though, I think.

I still feel that Real Twitter Has Never Been Tried. I wish there was a thought-as-unit-of-exchange platform that did not devolve into screeching, outrage porn and brainworm farming

Bluesky is an amazing experiment in whether the hellsite gets better of you kick out all the rightwing trolls, bots, IDW types and conservatives and give total reign to the Bluechecks. Sad results, though

@pmarca pgp seti@home napster git bitcoind

Dozen most important post-punch-card software? AT&T/BSD/Linux Unix kernel GNU suite/GCC VisiCalc WordPerfect MacOS/iOS GL/Doom/Quake JavaScript PageRank/Backrub/Google GPT 1/2/3/4/5 GPT O1/Deepseek R1 OpenClaw/Pi Anything missing?

@robin_linus Did a quick eval, it's light and fast and does well at short tasks with common knowledge or context. It seemed happy to spend a long time gaslighting itself with 'simulated' web searches when told it asserted something incorrect.

Does this mean you can now run a high-end model on a Macbook?

@eigenrobot In some ways it’s a first mover problem- any service that requires identity puts a demand on the issuers and if there is a fixed date that everyone needs ID the chain fails. E.g. Real ID for travel got delayed from 2008 to 2025 and still has a 2 year window for lax enforcement.

sure lets disenfranchise people who cant keep their important shit in order im fine with that

does everyone not have a file drawer where they keep important documents surely even if you dont your husband does right

2026 bitcoin bull case: Exponential demand from agents, reduced friction via a de minimis tax exemption, and new social layer from @xmoney

@eigenrobot @chopstickfury01 @selentelechia Up next: co-arising of the coincidence-of-wants problem and fungibility from first principles

@chopstickfury01 @selentelechia she doesnt quite understand money but she sure understand that pokemon cards are fun

my cousin gave 4yo some base set pokemon cards for christmas. i double sleeved them for her and she loves playing little made up games with them so @selentelechia. i just ordered a bunch more old pokemon card commons and i figure we can train her on chores using them as comp