Politicians have finally realized that actually cutting spending in any meaningful way never benefits them. Debt only goes up now.

Will do!

this is an interesting way to put it. It's like: there are zaps, but there is also a certain kind of internet interaction that we can have because the platform is moderated by zaps.

The Pirate Wires profile of the guy behind this company was interesting (#1034498)

Howdy!

It seems like Bitcoin may become plagued with omnibus-ism: if we're gonna do a soft fork for quant, we might as well do the great consensus cleanup...

my experience with doing the Word-of-Mouth Wednesday for the last months and half is that you have to remind people A LOT. They might be interest, but it's competing with all the other stuff out there, and it's so easy to forget about things. You got to find a fun way to keep your contest in front of people.

yeah, but it's not quite nobody it just some threshold level of most people. If enough people don't want censorship resistance money, does it wreck it for those of us who do?

I'm not quite sure that permissionless and voluntary are quite so double-edged. Like in democracy, majority rule can be stupid, so we built constitutional republics that try to limit the damage from mass stupidity. Bitcoin may have some elements like this: there's a reason people say it's blackmarket money. Incentives are best when people are pressuring it to degrade. So maybe the Darwinian example is not quite correct. Bitcoin at least has a known starting point. It's more like "survival of the Bitcoin-est" (only we aren't quite sure what most Bitcoin-est is yet).

One implication, though, is that the use cases that win the natural selection contest might not be the ones we like. If we go in for pure natural selection, there's no guarantee that outcomes will trend toward anything resembling peer-to-peer digital cash, anymore than there's a guarantee that pigs will evolve opposable thumbs.

Also, what if the use case that is governmental control ends up being able to tolerate higher fees than all the rest?

Love to see competitions like this! I was already on an idea, and it may just work for the prompt. Also, I like that you are giving it a shorter word limit. Excited to see what people post!

Style 2, but it's solely based on the color of the person. For some reason I like the money-green color better than the bronze.

One of the simple pleasures in my life is going to sleep anticipating coffee in the morning...

For a brief while I was an English language teacher in China. This was more than ten years ago, but the culture did not seem as focused on exams (ironically). Perhaps it was the group I was teaching for, but they wanted casual usage and idiom from me more than grammar. I wish I had thought of some of your ideas, though. It always just devolved into a conversation club.

Do students get to eat the produce when it's grown?

I read through the rest of the paper and I have to admit I still don't understand this line. If pretraining is walking LLMs through huge chunks of human-created text and giving feedback about the quality of the llm's outputs, I don't think I understand why we can't repeatedly use the same data (as long as it's pretty huge, as in all the English language writing on the internet). Maybe it is because to make improvements llms need larger data sets and so we are getting to the point where human generated data sets can't get larger quickly (in this sense they have been "consumed"). But, I'm still struggling with how to think about a model "consuming" data.

Howdy!

There is nothing in consensus rules that says you must pay any amount in fees. But a zero fee transaction may not be likely to get mined. A less than 1 sat per vbyte transaction doesn't have to be zero fee, though.

Your transaction might be 306 vbytes. If you pay 1 sat per vbyte, the total fee would be 306 sats. If you pay 15 sats per vbyte, total fee is 4590 sats.

If you pay 0.5 sats per vbyte, total fee would be 153 sats. You still pay a positive fee, just it's less than 1 sat per vbyte.

Only kinda related, but Bitcoin Core 29.0 adds support for ephemeral dust, where you create a single dust output, but only if the transaction has no fees.

I still rarely use downzapping. had a look at stacker.news/recent/outlawed and it looks like mostly two accounts that are getting the bulk of downzaps these days. Makes me wonder why someone would persist?

I don't know of any wallets that support it right now. You could do it manually with Core, but that would be unpleasant.

I noticed your daily nut posting. I never tried to redeem one because it seemed like a lot of work. But it always made me smile and I'm impressed that you stuck with it for a year. I use a smattering of ecash-based wallets (minibits, boardwalk, coinos) and I enjoy hearing about fun things done by people who are interested in ecash. Sorry to hear that bots suck. Thanks for doing it!

I was specifically thinking of someone's choice to starve (think hunger strike or anorexia), not famine or involuntary hunger.