Recent content in Posts on nomasters
It’s long overdue, but I’m quitting keybase and deleting my account. After the TLS issues today, it was a stark reminder that the Zoom acquisition effectively killed keybase long ago . https://keybase.io/rjrbt is no more. If you are interested in communicating with me, you can find an email address to kick off communication at https://n.2p5.xyz/ . I’ve also got a signal account,…
I’m excited to share that I’ve released my first video “cgi-bin, ftw (part 1)” for a new project I’ve started called: functionally imperative . I’ve had a lot of little project ideas floating around in my head for a while. Over the last few months I’ve been working with Better Together to dive in deeper and help me reach clarity on my goals and my process…
Those who do not move, do not notice their chains. – Rosa Luxemburg I’ve been thinking a lot about gravity wells . There is something beautiful that emerges from a conceptual model that takes an opaque concept and puts it into intuitive terms. So, at risk of pushing a metaphor too far, I’ve been entertaining a whimsical thought experiment about how we interact and engage with the…
Today I’m excited to share an early prototype of a strange chat experiment that I’ve been quietly obsessing over working on. I’m calling it handshake . Handshake is designed to be an experiment in one-time key symmetric cryptography. The tool is based on off-line and in-person initialization of communication so that all future transmissions rely exclusively on pre-shared one-time…
I’ll be in the US in March attending sxsw 2019 as a mentor . If you’re going, let me know . Maybe I’ll see you at the EFF party .
I’ve been thinking a lot about emergence lately. Maybe it’s the online cryptography class I recently completed, the ideas in Godel’s Proof still fresh in my mind, or recently diving deeper into trying to understand quaternions , but I’ve been dwelling on thoughts about the emergence of meaning from seeming meaningless-ness. What do I mean by this? Well, I’m not really interested…
Boring is an attitude, not the truth. Possibility is where you decide it is. – Seth Godin I think we, as humans, have a natural inclination to want to avoid boredom. And it’s easier now than ever to reach for the dopamine-infused mental junk food in an attempt to satiate our desires. It’s hard to resist when corporations pour endless amounts of money into building games, apps,…
That is what I have always understood to be the essence of anarchism: the conviction that the burden of proof has to be placed on authority, and that it should be dismantled if that burden cannot be met. – Noam Chomsky I was eleven when I stopped believing in god. I have a vivid memory of the feeling. It was existentially disorienting. It was like I had stopped clinging to the side of a…
The only real valuable thing is intuition. – Albert Einstein A year ago I got rid of my scale, a simple act that turned out to be the catalyst for a year’s worth of quiet introspection and experimentation in removing quantification from my life. A year later I’m quantifiably more ignorant about myself than I have been in more than a decade, but I’m far more in tune with my…
Less is exponentially more – Rob Pike Smart phones are useful, but they are also incredibly addictive , and that addiction is at the epicenter of Silicon Valley’s effort to grab an ever-increasing percentage of our minds. If a substance or behavior controls us, it becomes our master, and that just won’t do. For the humor of it, let’s use this webMD post and only slightly…
Over the past four months, I’ve been quietly working on a project that I’m really excited to share. It’s still in its very early alpha phase and needs a healthy dose of vetting, testing, and refactoring, but I’m proud of the initial implementation and it’s a starting point for an open source project that I’m excited to work on. the background I’d started…
As I’ve attempted to live on first principles, one of the most powerful tools at my disposal has been the ability to opt out of participating in systems that I feel are harmful, unjust, induce deep skepticism, or give power to those who I feel gain such power undeservedly. Nonparticipation is a powerful and transformative tool. It is a pillar of self-governance. Exploring this principle has…
Anything that prevents you from being friendly, a good neighbor, is a terror tactic. – Richard Stallman You might have noticed this site is uncopyrighted , and I thought I’d explore a bit my reasoning behind my decision and the underlying principles that brought me to declare that all content on this site is in the public domain. The modern concept of intellectual property is…
The purpose of this project is to capture my thoughts and work on a journey towards living in accordance to a set of first principles revolving around freethought , skepticism , and libertarian socialism . Because of my work as a technologist , this project will tend to cover topics that are technical in nature, but also explore guiding principles as they relate to the focus of this project.…