Venice.ai by Erik Voorhees aims to be an decentralized open source alternative to ChatGPT and co without the Orwellian stuff.
1019 sats \ 2 replies \ @davidw 12 May
Great to have more tools like this, just a shame it needs to incorporate a token.
Venice respects you as a sovereign individual, and believes privacy and free speech are not only human rights, but are necessary for civilizational advancement. Even passive surveillance has a demonstrable chilling effect on thoughts and action. As the minds of humans and machines merge, it should be up to you, not the State or a tech company, to define the contours of this relationship.
This ethos can only be delivered on a foundation of open, permissionless architecture. True for religion. True for language. True for money. True for mind… even if it’s artificial._

Thinking about Erik Vorhees...

Something tells me Erik still has so much to offer in Bitcoin. A pioneer, distracted by the casinos & tokens in prior years, it occurs to me he is maturing and is soon to find his calling. Clearly motivated to rebel and push-back against digital censorship. He has fallen victim of state legal action previously and so I think him and his team could really be successful in these coming years. Wouldn't surprise me to see him switch tracks again before this decade is up. These two interviews (maxraskin cointelegraph), show a lot about what he stands, even if a few years old. He's an intelligent and principled guy, and whilst I don't expect it, I just wonder if he'll recognise and switch tracks if his vision of the future may only be possible on Bitcoin.
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Yes, it is really unfortunate. The project has many good approaches, permissionless, decentralized, censorship-resistant, and privacy-first. And when you get to the sign-up, you see Metamask 🤦🏻‍♂️ To Erik, as someone so long in the space, he should have grasp the value proposition between Bitcoin vs. crypto long time ago. I don’t know..
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If Metamask is being used for sign-up and to check token balances for premium benefits, could this be built using Nostr identifiers and somehow use sats to monetize around the premium membership?
Then your data would also be interoperable around Nostr. I know Nostr is not private, but neither are Ethereum addresses.
I guess the Venice app handles the privacy aspects on the app side? Haven’t read any docs yet, just riffing here..
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @anon 14 May
I gave up on him when he pushed for Segwit2x. Never forgave him, never will. Won't touch anything he touches (ledger, shapeshift, etc).
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32 sats \ 0 replies \ @0fje0 12 May
Not sure how achievable or sustainable their solution is going to be, but if you need a reason to hope it works out, it may just be this. From the article:
The Department of Homeland Security didn’t put a single open-source advocate on its 22-member AI Safety and Security Board.
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We need seperation in lot of things. Definitely it should be our mind that needs the first seperation from all those fake titles that a state imposes.
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I’ve mainly avoided chatGPT. I enjoyed this article however so I’ll give Venice a go.
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