Cyberdeck Users Weekly

Something that's been refreshing about doing this new podcast is how little of my time is spent thinking about what "big" companies are doing.

But these big companies keep doing stuff. So let's talk about it!

Skate 4 has been announced!

Vergecast segment about Skate 4 in 2019 (at around the one hour mark)

Will Skate be the "Quake 3: Arena" of skateboarding games?

Session

Skater XL

Burnout Paradise

What I also want is a skateboarding shooter game. Trick combos generate shields.

Vergecast interview with @dhh and Rep. David Cicilline

Starting to think big companies and big government sort of deserve each other. Will whatever antitrust tribunals we end up with this time around catch the subtlety and just ask Apple to allow sideloading? Or are we going to get a "Apple forever" mentality and enshrine it into law somehow?

Also patents = monopoly.

Twitter audio tweets

I almost tried to care about this but I didn't pull it off. I always wonder if we can make it to a post-literate society tho. Interesting to think about.

It looks so dumb I'm sorry.

Also it has approximately 10,000x more "next-gen" games than the Xbox so far so I'm feeling pretty bullish on it. Might have to learn to use those stupid thumbsticks.

Wish there was a duck demo.

These are getting very, very good. Scratch AND Python? Yes, please.

On this episode I had the pleasure of speaking with John Cantrell, the lead of the Juggernaut decentralized messaging project.

I'm very enamoured with the idea of decentralized, peer-to-peer, e2ee messaging. But there are so many drawbacks and pitfalls, and it's hard enough to get your friends to even use something like Signal, that I had begun to give up hope. Lately, however, a handful of Lightning-based messaging experiments have popped up, and it feels like they're on to something.

@JohnCantrell97

Juggernaut

Accouncing Juggernaut blog post

whatsat Lightning messaging demo

Lightning key send

OP_RETURN

"Micropayment"

Plex

GrapheneOS

The ecosystem is moving

Sphinx app

Dr. Maxim Orlovsky

Lightning Labs Loop

Decentralized Twitter

LN-Juggernaut on GitHub

These are some books I like!

by Michael Swaine and Paul Freiberger

by Lionel Shriver

by Tracy Kidder

by Neal Stephenson

by Dr. Kai-Fu Lee

by Brian McCullough

by George Gilder

by Saifedean Ammous

by Carlo Rovelli

by Pedro Domingus

by Joe Quirk

by Neal Stephenson

by Ted Chiang

by Greg Egan

by James Gleick

by Alex Epstein

by Katie Hafner

by Vernor Vinge

Today's episode is a little different. Basically, I want to convince you that you can and should learn to engage with the command line on your computer. There are a lot of tools that are only accessed, or best accessed, through the command line. In a perfect world maybe this wouldn't be the case, but in the world we live in the command line unlocks a lot of the hidden potential for your computer, and I feel like it's almost essential in the "owning" of modern technology.

Here are the basics:

pwd - short for "print working directory"

Type this into the terminal and press enter. You'll see the full path to wherever you "are" right now on your computer.

ls - short for "list"

This will show the files, folders, and executables that are in your current working directory.

cd - short for "change directory"

If you just type cd nothing happens, you need to tell it where you want to go. A few examples:

cd .. go to the parent directory

cd foldername go to foldername

cd ~ go to your home directory

If you get lost in the command line or you want to do something you don't know how to do using the command line, try xdg-open . (note the trailing dot, that means "right here"). This should open the the current directory in your GUI file browser.

Check out this week's newsletter (I'll link it on Twitter) for a more in-depth guide.

Here's the list of basic tools I start the episode off with.

DuckDuckGo for search.

BitWarden for password management.

Signal for messaging.

Refurbished enterprise SFF PCs for home server.

Fastmail for email. (Even cooler people are using Tutanota these days, but I haven't tried it personally)

Firefox + AdBlocker Ultimate for web browsing.

Today I'm joined by William Casarin who is one of my favorite twitter follows. William is a freelance software developer, he runs a bitcoin consultancy called bitcoin wizard, and he's constantly building wild and weird projects that seem to "own" technology in the sense I'm always chasing after.

"thinking about hooking CI build events into my system notifications..."

NixOS

xmonad

z - jump around

pickdrop

Noise Protocol Framework

TLS

Diffie-Hellman key exchange

snow

WireGuard

Tailscale

ZeroTier

"just scraped 20k chess puzzles from http://wtharvey.com maybe I'll get around to using my C game engine for a 3d+2d fics/lichess client with puzzle support."

chess-puzzle-db

Vulkan

"bitcoind + usdt + ebpf + bpftrace ohhh I'm going to have fun with this."

secp256k1

"So when people ask me why I write mostly C now..."

Haskell

Jonathan Blow

BitlBee

"I need to figure out a good fediverse crossposting setup..."

ActivityPub

Mastodon

"I have a gopher client running on my paper tablet lol"

Gopher)

Project Gemini

sacc gopher client

Second Life

MUD

Snow Crash

reMarkable

"I think for my satellite nix-bitcoin node, I would want..."

nix-bitcoin

Nix: The Purely Functional Manager

@pierre_rochard on Noded 0.62.0

Speech laws and regulation and platform moderation are always about what "others" should see. Because you have to see it to moderate it. Just something to think about.

The way I'm thinking about "free speech," as a principle, is that I'm not going to use my power proactively to silence your speech. The actual law, of course, is about prohibiting the government from using its power to silence speech. But we're adults, we can talk about right and wrong it's okay.

Censorship is not an educational tool, it's a tool of control. You don't know what's being censored because you never see it. That was the whole point. So how do you know whether the right things are being censored? The potential for misapplication and the lack of means of correction are sky-high.

But platforms like Facebook and Twitter are in a dumb no-man's land where their "speech" is primarily the promulgation of other people's speech.

I personally would not want to be forced promulgate information I find abhorrent. But I also don't want to stop other people from accessing information I disagree with. Censorship doesn't restrain conspiracy theories, it validates them. The cure for wrongthink isn't a ban, it's better information. I also believe people who have facts on their side aren't afraid of people hearing "different facts."

And as great as I sound to myself when I say these things, none of it is useful as a prescription for how Twitter or Facebook should act.

Maybe there's like a range of speech-adjacent activities we can define:

Promulgation is really some of the most powerful speech there is. And, of course, there's no promulgation without non-promulgation. Otherwise you're just transmitting static.

Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are self publishers with a truly historic level of promulgation, and now they're trending toward non-promulgation, which seems only reasonable. Meanwhile government is flirting with censorship, because it really has no power other than to destroy and oppose. Meanwhile meanwhile I'm thinking I need to get myself some of that self-publishing apparatus to secure and promote the ideas I think are good.

As a sidenote, I do find it sad sometimes how narrow a view we often have of what is acceptable and useful discourse, but there's really nothing I can do to change that. If it's easy to stay within the appropriate bubble of thought, then times seem good. But it leaves you with no recourse if you start getting extra-bubble ideas. And it might be actively harming the formation of extra-bubble ideas (which was the whole point of non-promulgation, obviously).

So what can I do?

Richard Myers is a "decentralized applications engineer" at Global Mesh Labs, which is a very good job title in my opinion. We talk about his work on Lot49, a protocol for incentivized mobile peer-to-peer communication.

@remyers_ on Twitter

goTenna

goTenna Mesh

Global Mesh Labs

Tales from the Crypt #88: Richard Myers

Stephan Livera's podcast with Richard Myers

RISE:NYC Small Business Resiliency Program

Lightning Network

NetBlocks

One NSA data center

How to Hide in Plain Sight (with Pictures) - wikiHow

Lightning Network for BEGINNERS playlist

Lot49: A lightweight protocol to incentivize mobile peer-to-peer communication

Tor (onion routing)

whatsat

Juggernaut

Sphinx

goTenna VINE protocol

lightning payment over (simulated) HAM radio

Lnproxy - Proxy connections from a patched C-Lightning

Lot49 in C++

Incentives Build Robustness in BitTorrent

NYC Mesh

Change.org Abolish the FCC petition (11 signers)

IPFS

Square Crypto's Rust-based LDK

c-lightning

I did a pod about Bitcoin, I hope that's okay!

Tales from the Crypt

Noded

Bitcoin Audible

Satoshi Nakamoto Institute

The Bitcoin Standard

What if everything you bought got cheaper every year, but your salary stayed the same? You'd eventually go to space, right?

Human material needs are in some sense finite, but human wants are infinite. Human time is absolutely finite, but human ingenuity -- the ability to do more with the same amount of time -- is multiplicative and exponential.

In an economy we create value as we transact voluntarily, and in an economy with money we use money as an intermediary to store that value we create. In a Federal Reserve economy, that value creation is skimmed off the top and given to banks so they can give us more credit card debt. In a Bitcoin economy, we all get to benefit from value creation.

Bitcoin wouldn't fix theft, or the desire to steal. It just makes theft no longer our national monetary policy.

@internetofshit

Product Hunt

"Samsung smart fridge leaves Gmail logins open to attack"

"Hackers can hijack Wi-Fi Hello Barbie to spy on your children"

"how many servers could it take to turn on a light bulb lol"

JavaScript

Raspberry Pi

Gartner 2014: "In 2020, 25 Billion Connected "Things" Will Be in Use"

Smart socket botnet

Philips Hue

Sonos

Litron

Brilliant

Petnet outage

Home Assistant

Apple HomeKit

Alexa everywhere

I always forget GlassWire exists and then I look like a dummy when I talk like it doesn't exist.

Sony patent where you yell "McDonald's!" to skip an ad

Stagg EKG electric kettle

Oh dang there's a Bluetooth version now

Nest Thermostat

Ring + police

UniFi doorbell (early access)

Apple Bounjour / Rendezvous

Stickers

Faster storage, ray tracing, higher resolutions.

Unreal 5: "nearly a polygon per pixel"

Simulation? Single shard MMOs? Multiplayer physics?

To me, Dwarf Fortress still feels like the most next-gen game on the planet

Minecraft with RTX is the perfect example of what's going well and what's not improving in games.

As photogrammetry matures and we approach photorealism, assets might be more shareable. And easier to create.

See: Quixel Megascans

There's probably a rough DIY photogrammetry aesthetic that will differentiate non-pro games from "pro", but it will still look great IMO.

If there's unification of the art pipeline, "remixing" game assets and game modes seems more possible. That would be truly groundbreaking.

What I want is a skateboard game that's also a multiplayer shooter.

What would a game be like where everyone was running the maximum amount of cheats they can get their hands on?

If you think about it, cheating is a form of "AR" for a virtual space. Maybe it doesn't have to be a bad thing for all games, it could be a feature!

What about the holy grail of anti-cheat: peer to peer multiplayer games. It works with chess!

I think it could come down to multiplayer physics simulation. If your character is only capable of producing forces within a certain range... those could be the rules you abide by. just thinking out loud.

Eve Online and Dual Universe are "next-gen" in this sense.

Beyond single shard: the "metaverse."

Whatever happend to VRML?

Reamde. Hats. Real money poker.

"The dream is, I want a 12 year old camper from thailand to help pay for his family's food by killing me in an online video game and my slow reflexes" - Matt on TFTC

How do you have digital scarcity without centralized control? Bitcoin actually only solved Bitcoin's problem in this regard.

In Minecraft you choose to have scarcity to maximize fun.

Factorio

StarCraft

Overwatch

Path of Exile

Minecraft