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i don’t know of any Gentle Introduction to Why Prediction Markets are Awesome, à la Wait But Why, with stick figures and just going slow in on the topic, answering objections along the way. i consider it a collective action failure that no such text exists, and also that i don’t know of any book that does this (other than superforecasting)

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Alright, check this out. I just kinda completed today’s project of converting a jeans into a saw bag. It’s not fully done, the side seams on the flap need some more hand sewing, that’s for sure. No, I don’t have a sewing machine. Yet?

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At first I wanted to put in the saw on the short side, but that would have made for more sewing work and increased material consumption. As a Swabian my genes force me to be very thrifty. Slipping in on the long side had the benefit of using the bottom trouser leg without any modification at all. The leg tapers slightly and gets wider and wider the more up you go. At the bottom it’s not as extreme as at the top.

The bag is made of two layers of cloth for extra durability. The double layers help to hide the inner two metal snap fastener counter parts, so the saw blade doesn’t get scratched. Not a big concern, but why not doing it, literally no added efforts were needed. Also I reckon it cuts off the metal on metal clinking sounds.

The only downside I noticed right after I pressed in the receiving ends of the snap fasteners is that the flap overhangs the bag by quite a lot. I fear that’s not really user-friendly. Oh well. Maybe I will fold it shorter and sew it on. Let’s see. The main purpose is to keep the folding saw closed, it only locks in two open positions.

Two buttons would have done the trick, with three I went a bit overkill. In fact the one in the middle is nearly sufficient. Not quite, but very close. But overkill is a bit my motto. The sides making up the bag are sewed together with like five stitch rows. As said in the introduction, the flap on the hand needs some more love.

Oh, and if I had made it in a vertical orientation I would have had the bonus of adding a belt loop and carrying it right along me. In the horizontal layout that’s not possible at all. The jeans cloth is too flimsy, the saw will immediately fall out if I open the middle button. It’s not ridgid enough. Anyways, I call it a success in my books so far. Definitely had some fun.

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I didn’t get around to blogging about the fact that Miniflux recently got a new version. With it, if an entry doesn’t have a title, it finally shows a snippet of the content instead of just the URL as the title. A great new feature if you follow a lot of micro blogs. Regarding micro-blogs, I’m also in the process of reading Manton Reece’s book draft. ⌘ Read more

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In-reply-to » @prologic Re: Chat system, What if the base specification included a system for per-user arbitrary JSON storage on the server? Kind of like XEP-0049, but expanded upon. Two kinds of objects: public and private. Public objects can be queried by anyone, private objects cannot and must be encrypted with the user's private key. Public keys could be stored there, as well as anything else defined by extensions. Roster, user block list, avatar, etc.

https://book.keybase.io/docs/chat/crypto

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In-reply-to » @prologic Re: Chat system, What if the base specification included a system for per-user arbitrary JSON storage on the server? Kind of like XEP-0049, but expanded upon. Two kinds of objects: public and private. Public objects can be queried by anyone, private objects cannot and must be encrypted with the user's private key. Public keys could be stored there, as well as anything else defined by extensions. Roster, user block list, avatar, etc.

https://book.keybase.io/docs/chat/crypto

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In-reply-to » @prologic Re: Chat system, What if the base specification included a system for per-user arbitrary JSON storage on the server? Kind of like XEP-0049, but expanded upon. Two kinds of objects: public and private. Public objects can be queried by anyone, private objects cannot and must be encrypted with the user's private key. Public keys could be stored there, as well as anything else defined by extensions. Roster, user block list, avatar, etc.

I would HIGHLY recommend reading up on the keybase architecture. They designed device key system for real time chat that is e2e secure. https://book.keybase.io/security

A property of ec keys is deriving new keys that can be determined to be “on curve.” bitcoin has some BIPs that derive single use keys for every transaction connected to a wallet. And be derived as either public or private chains. https://qvault.io/security/bip-32-watch-only-wallets/

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In-reply-to » @prologic Re: Chat system, What if the base specification included a system for per-user arbitrary JSON storage on the server? Kind of like XEP-0049, but expanded upon. Two kinds of objects: public and private. Public objects can be queried by anyone, private objects cannot and must be encrypted with the user's private key. Public keys could be stored there, as well as anything else defined by extensions. Roster, user block list, avatar, etc.

I would HIGHLY recommend reading up on the keybase architecture. They designed device key system for real time chat that is e2e secure. https://book.keybase.io/security

A property of ec keys is deriving new keys that can be determined to be “on curve.” bitcoin has some BIPs that derive single use keys for every transaction connected to a wallet. And be derived as either public or private chains. https://qvault.io/security/bip-32-watch-only-wallets/

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Peter Saint-Andre: Philosophies and Ways of Life
In his book What Is Ancient Philosophy?, Pierre Hadot almost singlehandedly resurrected the ancient conception of philosophy as a way of life. Consider this observation about the philosophical schools of Greece and Rome: “For us moderns, the notion of a philosophical school evokes only the idea of a doctrinal tendency or theoretical position. Things were very different in antiquity. No university obligations oriented the future philosopher toward a specific school; instead, the futur … ⌘ Read more

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** Star Wars, and a year in review **
I tried to write a“ year in review” kinda post, but it got wicked melodramatic pretty fast. This year has been a slog…it really fucking sucked.

Rather than reflect on it further, I thought I’d write about something vapid that I’ve been thinking a bit about lately instead: Star Wars.

Despite my best efforts, I’ve always loved Star Wars. As a child I spent hundreds of hours pouring over novels, and comics, and books of sch … ⌘ Read more

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Peter Saint-Andre: 2021 Readings
As best I can reconstruct it, here are the books I read in 2021. Not included are scholarly papers, essays, and other short works. I’ve provided links to books that are available online at my monadnock.net website for works in the public domain…. ⌘ Read more

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Peter Saint-Andre: Meditations on Bach #9: Musical Monadology
In meditation #7 of this series, I took note of some similarities between the aesthetics of Aristotle and the music of Bach. Another intriguing influence might be the monadology of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), who directly influenced philosophers and musical theorists in the Bach’s orbit: for instance, Bach’s student Lorenz Mizler (1711-1778) was a follower of the Leibniz scholar Christian Wolff (1679-1754). In chapter 5 of his book Music in the Culture of th … ⌘ Read more

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Peter Saint-Andre: Aristotle Research Report #17: Let the Re-Reading Begin
Just under two years ago, I thought I was done with phase one of my research into Aristotle’s views o human flourishing, having at that point read around 120 distinct works by or related to Aristotle (including all of Plato’s dialogues). Well, I was wrong: since then I’ve read an additional 150 works, almost exclusively in the scholarly literature on Aristotle. Now I have three whole shelves of books about Aristotle in my office…. ⌘ Read more

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I realized this morning why I’m put off by super hero movies. They are fun, and I’ve always loved comic books, but the super hero movies of the last decade specifically, (I mean, beside being military propaganda) totally omit the potential future of any sort of utopia. They cannot envision their own undoing.

The stories are predicated on the super heros always needing something to be super against, despite having fantastical abilities to help usher in some sort of uto … ⌘ Read more

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Important: LindyPress undergoing some updates
Although I haven’t announced in a video on the YouTube channel yet, I’m glad that there’s been a lot of interest in LindyPress.net. I haven’t done a video on it just because there are some details in the site coding we’re still figuring out, but books are already printing, shipping and arriving at some of your houses.

Just a couple technical notes:

  • I switched the Stripe backend of the site over the week … ⌘ Read more

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The classical book reprinting site is live! LindyPress.net
For a while, I’ve hinted that I’ve been contributing to a project to reprint out-of-print classical and medieval texts that are of hidden value, sometimes even in their original languages. I’ve worked on this project for a while and now it’s live and you can browse the first five books available.

See the site at https://lindypress.net. All works have been reformatted in XeLaTeX so that … ⌘ Read more

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The Problems with Utilitarianism
I originally wrote this essay in 2014 or 2015 in a Chinese buffet in Athens, Georgia. I’ve changed some of it and am re-adding it here. I talk about the issues with Utilitarianism and a bad book by Sam Harris.

Utilitarianism

At a dumb intuitive level, the “ethical” idea of Utilitarianism in principle gets pretty close to what most people reflexively want from social-political affairs: the greatest good for the greatest number of people—who … ⌘ Read more

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Why It’s Bad to Have High GDP

To put it in other words…

The common way of looking at Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is that it’s a metric of economic success: more GDP is more wealth.Wealth is good. “Poverty” (meaning low per capita GDP) is bad.Nowadays, pretty much everyone talks about “economics” like this as if this truism was scribbled on the back walls of the cosmos.

This is just looking at one side of the ledger in a kind of global double-entry accounting book.A logically equivale … ⌘ Read more

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Livestream on PeerTube ONLY at 10AM New York time
As the title says, I’ll be livestreaming today on PeerTube only at this link.

I’ll talk about finishing my book reptinting project that you’re going to want to know about and perhaps “recent events” (several weeks late)
for example, on Richard Stallman.

I’ll read donations I get if you want to talk about other things.

If you haven’t already, subscribe to my PeerTube’s RSS feed to get up … ⌘ Read more

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Wanna learn LaTeX?

Wanna learn LaTeX? What is LaTeX?

Basically, it’s how big boys write and format documents.
Every public brief, scientific article, book, cryptocurrency whitepaper or even outline written by people who know what they’re doing is written in LaTeX.

If you want to see examples of documents made with LaTeX, you can see my Master’s thesis here or another paper here that shows some diagrams and other features you can have in LaTe … ⌘ Read more

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