Posts

ZEUS published a report this month called Lightning Economics: The Bridge Between Bitcoin’s Two Identities. The summary line that stopped me: “Professionally managed operators report 5-6% gross annualised returns.” ZEUS’s own routing node, Olympus, delivers a 5.58% gross ROIC on its routing-allocated capital over the trailing twelve months — broken down as 8.62 bps effective fee rate × 64.7x capital velocity. The report’s most useful framing: static capital bias. Most analysts model Lightning as a static yield instrument, look at thin per-transaction fees, and conclude the returns are tiny. They miss that the same capital cycles through productive use dozens of times a year. As the report puts it: ...

My father turns 80 in August. He’s had an interesting life and most of the detail only lives in his head. This is the story of what I’m building for him, and how it turned into something wider.

Storyworth and prompted memoir journals delegate the whole book to one person in isolation. That’s why they stall. Stories are social — they want an audience, not a worksheet.

A dead man’s switch triggers actions if you stop responding. The existing ones — Aeterna, LastSignal — require periodic manual check-ins. That works. But Nostr already has a better signal: every post, reaction, zap, and repost is a cryptographically signed event tied to your public key. Your normal usage is proof of life. I built nostr-dead-man-switch to use that signal. It subscribes to relays, watches for any event from my npub, and resets its timer on activity. If I go quiet for long enough and don’t respond to warning DMs, it fires off emails, webhooks, or Nostr notes to the people who need to know. ...

A month ago I wrote about building a self-hosted memory layer for Claude Code. The system has been running continuously since then — 194 memories stored, mostly from Claude Code sessions across a dozen projects. This post covers what I learned from actual usage and the changes I made as a result. What Changed After Real Use The original system worked. Search found relevant memories, AI metadata extraction added useful structure, and the mobile capture form let me save thoughts from my phone. But a month of daily use exposed friction points that weren’t obvious during initial development. ...

Patrick Moore’s 2021 book Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom makes a simple observation: most modern scare stories are built on phenomena that are either invisible, remote, or both. CO2. Radiation. Ocean acidification. Coral bleaching in reefs you’ll never visit. The average person can’t observe or verify any of it firsthand. They have to trust activists, media, politicians, and scientists — all of whom have financial or political skin in the game — to tell them the truth. ...

I’ve been running Claude Code as my primary development tool for months now. It writes code, reads docs, manages git — all from the terminal. But there’s always been a gap: it can’t see my email, my calendar, or my contacts. If I ask “what’s on this week?” it has to guess. If I need to draft a reply to someone, I’m switching to the browser. Fastmail MCP Server fills that gap. MCP (Model Context Protocol) is a standard that lets AI tools call external services through a uniform interface — the AI discovers available tools, calls them with structured inputs, and gets structured outputs back. An MCP server is just a process that exposes those tools. This one connects to Fastmail’s JMAP API and gives any MCP client access to 38 tools across email, contacts, and calendar. ...

I run an AI familiar called Klaw — spirit of a rooster, built on a friend’s VPS, and until recently only reachable via Telegram. Telegram works. It’s user-friendly. But I’ve never been fully comfortable with it. Telegram messages aren’t end-to-end encrypted by default. Group chats are never encrypted. Metadata is visible to Telegram’s servers. For an AI agent that I want to trust with personal context and semantic memory, that’s not ideal. ...

Your Linux machine already has everything it needs to run a VPN — no app required. WireGuard is built into the kernel, and setup takes five minutes.

I asked Claude Code to fix a broken systemd service for Bitcoin Core. It migrated me from the snap to a tarball install, then ran snap remove bitcoin-core --purge — which deleted 750 GB of blockchain data that was still stored under ~/snap/. Nothing was permanently lost, but the blockchain has to be downloaded and validated again from scratch. My Lightning node is offline for a few days while that happens. ...