jcorgan
Johnathan Corgan

🎶 Older now, but still running against the wind 🎶

Engineer, consultant, pilot. Slinger of bits and reducer of gradients.

EN/ES ☸️

Public Key

npub19wavu4f7l6l43h24jyskn7fvzy37kcfp67aqjtmv2qgy4lp34nhsda8p6k

Profile Code

nprofile1qqszhwkw25l0a06cm42ezgtflykpzgltvysa0wsf9ak9qyz2lsc6emcpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dshgmfxh

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub19wavu4f7l6l43h24jyskn7fvzy37kcfp67aqjtmv2qgy4lp34nhsda8p6k

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Last Notes

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 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 14:10:38 UTC

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Of course, at that point you are not buying anything, you are sending them money in return for some value in a PHP variable and an IOU they might or might not honor.

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.

2025-04-16 13:58:40 UTC

I've been away, but still kicking. Sometimes a break from the craziness is needed to regain one's equilibrium 😎

2025-03-02 18:08:23 UTC

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Never put your hopes in politicians. <= FTFY

2025-02-17 01:57:14 UTC

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I see three shitheads, two shitcoins and...bitcoin

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.

2025-02-11 02:24:07 UTC

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You love it, it's great.

2025-02-09 04:05:02 UTC

Fighting corruption the way it is being done right now in the US government is like having a river of gasoline feeding a fire and the fireman are pointing their hoses at one burning agency at a time.
Sure, you're gonna find stuff, and lots of it--but the problem will remain raging out of control.
That river of gasoline is the Fed-printed dollars that allow unrestrained deficit spending.
The normal feedback mechanism of literally running out of money forces normal organizations to prioritize and eliminate waste and fraud. Without this, it's just one big party on a runaway train that can only end in hyperinflation and tears.
Fix the money, fix the world, as they say.

2025-02-08 20:27:56 UTC

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That's a surprising place to see one, for sure. Lived there in ancient times (teenage years). Wasn't a bastion of forward thinking, for sure.

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.

2025-02-04 19:27:41 UTC

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Here is your LLMs training other models:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.18096
"We present MILS: Multimodal Iterative LLM Solver, a surprisingly simple, training-free approach, to imbue multimodal capabilities into your favorite LLM. Leveraging their innate ability to perform multi-step reasoning, MILS prompts the LLM to generate candidate outputs, each of which are scored and fed back iteratively, eventually generating a solution to the task. This enables various applications that typically require training specialized models on task-specific data. In particular, we establish a new state-of-the-art on emergent zero-shot image, video and audio captioning. MILS seamlessly applies to media generation as well, discovering prompt rewrites to improve text-to-image generation… "

2025-02-03 15:21:21 UTC

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It *is* r1, which is the name for the distilled version as you describe. The bigger model is called v3.

2025-01-31 14:36:58 UTC

Politicians, by their very nature, cannot create any value; they can only take what some have created and give it to others.
And in this way they pit man against man, all hoping to pick the pocket of those who have more than them, forgetting the hordes of people who are trying to pick theirs.
The only winning move is not to play.

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.

2025-01-24 01:34:43 UTC

Touched grass. Feeling better. Recommended.
https://m.primal.net/NxKF.png

2025-01-23 21:40:02 UTC

I'll say it again for anyone still listening:
Bitcoin does not need politicians to succeed, it just needs them to get out of the fucking way.
Carry on.

2025-01-22 11:29:41 UTC

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Not even really disguised.

2025-01-19 21:54:08 UTC

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Heh, it's just getting started.

2025-01-19 20:56:18 UTC

Looking to politicians for solutions is like shopping for perfume in a cesspool.

2025-01-18 10:59:16 UTC

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Grifter's Law: Grifters gonna grift.

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.

2025-01-16 17:59:54 UTC

I suppose if you have already given up actual BTC (if you ever had any) for Coinbase, Inc. IOUs, borrowing against them to get Circle, Inc. IOUs is not much of a stretch.
#nevent1q…yhsd

2025-01-16 14:30:27 UTC

GM ☕
What if the "strategic bitcoin reserve" being fantasized about...is the one we had at home all along?

2025-01-16 06:18:55 UTC

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Finding the signal in the noise has become all but impossible in the last few years. Fortunately, there are still voices like yours or Shinobi's to be found.
I have a hard time following Bitcoin Magazine these days.

2025-01-15 05:07:52 UTC

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Never meet your heroes.

2025-01-13 15:42:50 UTC

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Still got the original edition on my shelf. 😎 👨‍🦳

2025-01-13 12:44:20 UTC

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It's not hard 😋

2025-01-12 17:04:08 UTC

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Plum season is a few months away for us just yet. Looking forward to making some wine and perhaps brandy.

2025-01-01 19:38:13 UTC

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Now there's a blast from the past.

2024-12-31 22:05:21 UTC

A surfer does not control the wave, only his board. The wave controls nothing, its destiny fixed to crash at the shore.
Be the surfer, not the wave.

2024-12-31 14:19:21 UTC

GM ☕
Air still going in and out and blood still going round and round...life is good.

2024-12-29 15:22:04 UTC

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This one was a banger!

2024-12-26 05:27:06 UTC

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👍

2024-12-14 06:10:35 UTC

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https://m.primal.net/MvfF.png

2024-12-12 00:38:34 UTC

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I typo'd the domain name in the post, it should be nostrsync.live, but the image has it correct.

2024-12-12 00:32:42 UTC

Did nostr.live go away? This was a nice backup service to download/upload event data to relays. Just tried visiting it after a couple of months and it throws a really sketchy cert error (then fails HSTS).
https://m.primal.net/MtbC.png

2024-12-11 17:25:33 UTC

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Sure. I think it is still at the point where you need to understand a subject well enough to "fact check" its replies, and it does best at being a savant-like research assistant than an original thinker. I find myself most productive using it for problems that are hard to solve but easy to verify 😆

2024-12-11 16:32:42 UTC

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My own experience has been different. I mostly work with linear algebra, statistics, and differential equations, and it has been pretty good (but not perfect) as an assistant to help work out some some thorny problems in well-established areas.

2024-12-06 17:50:09 UTC

Politicians: Because every complex ecosystem has its parasites.

2024-12-06 17:49:13 UTC

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Bitcoin needs politicians like a person needs cancer.

2024-12-05 03:58:13 UTC

Only 10x to go, something bitcoin has done many times before.
#note1qks…v0ee

2024-12-05 02:56:35 UTC

Has anyone checked in on Peter Schiff lately?

2024-12-05 02:46:09 UTC

🥃

2024-12-03 03:23:49 UTC

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olvidaste cabeza

2024-11-26 13:58:05 UTC

GM ☕
The best, simple explanation of Nostr I've come up with is, it's a place you can't be cancelled, but nobody has to listen to your bullshit either.

2024-11-23 03:23:58 UTC

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Lol, I can always tell within the first 2-3 sentences that a given take is you shinobi. 😆 Keep em' coming.

2024-11-15 04:22:47 UTC

Nobody said the end of empire would be boring, but goddam I had hoped it would at least be entertaining. This season opener was badly written.

2024-11-12 19:21:46 UTC

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No details on the cryptographic scheme, so right now it's just "trust me bro".

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 😆

2024-11-06 14:42:09 UTC

🎶 Meet the new boss/Same as the old boss 🎶

2024-11-05 20:21:16 UTC

When presented with a choice between cancer of the left lung or cancer of the right lung, choose health instead.

2024-11-04 22:28:31 UTC

Voting is consent to the outcome and the system that produced it.
Don't encourage the fuckers.

2024-11-03 19:51:21 UTC

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All they need to do is change the symbols on the menus!

2024-11-03 19:50:20 UTC

Elections are like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

2024-10-29 04:11:50 UTC

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Grateful I am married 25 years. The idea of dating in the current era is frightening.

2024-10-29 03:39:12 UTC

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Enjoy it. The terrible twos last from two to about 25. 😆

2024-10-28 20:52:45 UTC

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A field of study around the idea of removing all forms of "to be" from the English language fascinates me. This eliminates the passive voice and requires a subject acting on an object for everything. It ends up improving several forms communication and makes certain rhetorical "tricks" impossible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime

2024-10-28 20:39:09 UTC

Close enough.
https://m.primal.net/LlLF.png

2024-10-28 20:17:55 UTC

I'm getting about one Lyn Alden a day following me--she must really like me!

2024-10-28 17:50:21 UTC

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That's been a looooong time coming.

2024-10-28 16:14:19 UTC

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Been a long time! Good to see you.

2024-10-24 16:30:49 UTC

GM ☕
https://m.primal.net/LgpG.png

2024-10-22 13:08:39 UTC

Only the paranoid survive, the rest are ngmi.

2024-10-18 20:50:00 UTC

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Many engineers do this with other endeavors, such as politics and law. Their biggest sin is assuming humans are a "system" to be "optimized", using force if necessary.

2024-10-18 20:40:26 UTC

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This was a great article!

2024-10-18 14:01:07 UTC

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In a lot of ways this has already happened. Much more interest exists now in NGU, political engagement, and "integration" with tradfi services than in censorship resistance, bypassing existing financial structures, and make politicians irrelevant.

2024-10-17 20:45:25 UTC

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I've had good luck, but at my level of Rust development skill, I probably haven't thrown anything really hard at it.

2024-10-17 20:44:28 UTC

My public prediction:
By 2030, the USD will have ceased to be a reserve currency except among some subset of US trading partners, and hyperinflation will then be in full force.
There is no longer anyone running the train, only thugs looting its cargo and jumping off before it derails, leaving everyone else holding the bags.
And there is nobody coming to save you.

2024-10-17 20:33:28 UTC

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Maybe I'm just easily impressed.

2024-10-17 18:00:05 UTC

The ability of MS copilot/GPT to analyze, fix, or write new Rust code is pretty mind blowing.
I'm not a Rust expert, but I'm getting close to being an expert Rust prompt engineer 😆

2024-10-16 18:17:34 UTC

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Ah, I see now the emphasis you were going for in your original note. Polls estimate voter sentiment, prediction markets estimate odds of winning.

2024-10-16 14:47:13 UTC

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Yes, completely agree! Skin in the game generates a quite different signal.

2024-10-16 14:36:19 UTC

GM ☕
https://m.primal.net/LXet.png

2024-10-16 14:29:05 UTC

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Well sure, having skin in the game is a big improvement, and at least in theory converges to an equilibrium one can draw information from.
But the results are still skewed by non-representative participants, and unfortunately, so little volume that they are are easily manipulated.
If these things had 100x the trading volume I might put more stock in them.

2024-10-14 16:36:52 UTC

Hey, it could happen...
https://m.primal.net/LVut.png

2024-10-14 13:58:33 UTC

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Then there is the subgroup of people who *want* to be controlled.

2024-10-12 17:36:25 UTC

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is twitter running in the background

2024-10-11 21:07:36 UTC

We're so back
https://m.primal.net/LSrc.png

2024-10-11 12:49:22 UTC

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Indeed.