Ordering a conversation between an unbounded set across independent nodes leads to misordered interactions not possible if you just centralize. It seems like a small issue, but at scale quality really suffers when some universal, fine-resolution ordering can't be agreed upon.

You can devise many clever schemes to try to avoid centralization and achieve coherency, but if one service is more up to date with more info, it is preferable and offers a more coherent public conversation. Network effects still dominate despite the protocol.

All that said, if I wasn't very aligned with the spirit, I wouldn't care so much to think about it. I'm also aligned with the spirit of Bitcoin but the culture present in both doesn't help it. The fact that Nostr is Bitcoin aligned, meaning it rejects the technical options of protocols taking more risks, hurts it.

The way it handles public keys and identities is very simple and good and to me is very obviously reflective of a good future state. But it's not unique to Nostr.

In the literal sense, centralization leads to economies of scale and the alleviation of coordination issues. Those coordination issues are what make physically decentralized networks so complicated, inefficient and fractured. These networks usually just find ways to centralize despite.

People really want decentralization of power—let's just replace the word with a better word: accountability. One should be able to enjoy economies of scale (centralized infrastructure) but have the cryptographic mechanisms in place to ensure the infrastructure must reveal its use and abuse of power, and can be easily replaced.

Nostr, like most 'decentralized' tech will switch between the meanings of both. Either way, it fits the description above: a single relay can work well, multiple have awkward coordination. The sense it which it is accountable is only that it can be replaced, but network effects favor the largest, so that's a problem.

If I'm going to be iterating on one document or idea in an extended manner with feedback from the chatbot, I will make an effort to setup the decorum it should follow, because it's a small proportion of the time in that chat.

But the guy just trying to get a report or email out quickly? Not so much.

'Crypto' adopts to some extent a principle of being 'decentralized' and now has to square what it means for that type of hardware to compete with economies of scale which are naturally centralized.

"Decentralized" is just a bad metric. The real value-add of 'crypto' done right is accountability; Bitcoin mining is just the simplest example: any miner who builds less utilitarian blocks (either worse transaction selection or building on a bad history) is accountable by any other miner with the same margins who will maximize that utility, thus their income.

The urge to 'decentralize' is always in tension with that efficiency optimization. It is fine for an agent with concentrated power (under certain bounds) to be in a system, so long as they are accountable, usually by being easily replaceable.

Unfortunately a lot of 'crypto' intuition is just based on the idea of a wide breadth of servers or nodes equals some meaningful distribution of power, which is naive.

The common counter-argument is that specifying to the sufficient level is more work than just not using an LLM at all. I find that is not a universal rule.

> Advertisement serves to increase purchase of the inferior product.

> The best product, which previously didn't require ads [on Amazon] now must pay Amazon to compete for eyeballs.

Advertisement, when successful, increases the purchasing of any product, generally. That the best product is subject to this effect and competition has nothing to do with Amazon or technology.

Therefore one should not expect higher quality out of many businesses using AI, but you should certainly expect such businesses to highly value AI. The arguments in favor of quality didn't seem to work before, I don't think they will now.

That said, I'd like to see the prompt(s) having such an effect on the subjective choices for a project like this.

I ended up on VS Code. I'm very critical of Microsoft generally, but VS Code is a very good editor and my favorite agent harness.

For headless, Pi might be the way.

Now you concede a bit:

> Just because most of everything has a political angle/facet does not mean it defines my life as much as it seem to do to you.

You are morally lazy if you think magnifying the political aspect of any relationship is sensible. You've defined no limit to it, which has obvious outcomes. An intuitive limit is insufficient.

You've also got confused and accused me of 'making things political' when my comment is very clearly recommending the opposite - a sort of childish "no you."

Adversarial testing, checking developer assumptions, refactor suggestions, small dev tools and even some guided coding all sit on the other side of the spectrum of what you can do with coding and AI. For larger and larger codebases even simple things like tracing dependencies or behavior might be greatly aided.

And the critiques reserved for that narrow bucket on the other end, blindly generating code, are too easily conflated with the rest.

The token cost is amortized for longer conversations, but I find it bothersome that there's all this implicit instruction I didn't write or am now obligated to understand.

I make a custom agent prompt with "Defer to the user." and little else.

As someone who has self-taught most of my skills both before and after AI, some deep feedback: I don't want a fixed piece of content when learning with AI, like a video or blogpost or book—unless I'm completely new to the subject, and even then maybe not.

The reason is that some parts of the topic will be naturally easier or harder for me. When I use AI I tell it everything I know and understand and start working from my most burning questions and misunderstandings. This lets me cover the maximum amount of non-redundant ground in regards to my understanding.

We have this amazing new technology and you're conforming it to models of schooling (like the Prussian model) which are one or more centuries old. The technology is so powerful that it should allow you to completely reshape education, not merely replicate the status quo.